I guess tea break went on a little long. Is that right? Fifteen minutes. It was fifteen minutes longer? No, it was just fifteen minutes. Oh. You're in charge of the schedule, then how come we're not starting at 3.35? I mean, did the tea break have the same cookies I had? I don't know. Well, they would alter almost anybody's sense of time. Yeah. It altered my sense of time. I saved one for later. I want to alter my sense of time later on at another time. Yeah. But that's what, that's actually, you know, I don't know why it's, anyway. That's the way it is in monasteries. We could call it performative time. But time is performed.

[01:07]

And that's why there's two schedules, one for the abbot and one for everyone else. Although if we have a Godo, then the Godo, which is something like an assistant abbot, then the Godo has a different schedule too. But like if the Eno takes us on a walk or does Kinyin and makes Kinyin longer than the ten minutes the Doan doesn't rush over to the bell. The Doan still leaves the same space as usual after Kinhinden. Because we're in charge of the time here. And we have all the time in the world, at least for seven days. We can pretty much do what we want, actually. Or if I happen to be speaking in...

[02:13]

For example, Randy was speaking during a period of zazen. If I speak or Randy spoke up close to the end of the period, you wouldn't end the period right on time. You'd let some time pass and then end the period. And we have these radio-controlled clocks, which I got us, so that we can have more exact way of coordinating all our different clocks. But it even is performative time because it's based on the planet and the sun and some performance somewhere. And if we, maybe someday we'll be able to have it, if... Zen Center, we had it to some extent, which is that different buildings have different drums and different bells. And then you have a time drum, which you hit.

[03:21]

And the time drum is hit for the hour. And then the densho, you have a... So every building would then, or the buildings where you have a time drum, has to have one densho and one drum, because every 20 minutes is hit on the bell. So like three, what is it, three? Fifty or so now, something like that, would be, you know, boom. Boom. Like that, three times. And then you'd hear it, dong. And you know, oh, the first dong. Then the third dong would mean, oh, it's somewhere between twenty to three and four. It's rather nice, because, you know, there's a nice feeling, and then you can tell what building, like at Eiji, you can tell which building, and all the sounds overlap.

[04:22]

So while one event is going on in one building, you can begin to hear something starting to happen in another building, because particular drums or bells. So this is rather ancient custom. of performative time. Each building and activity of the day and rituals of that time have a different sound, different cadence, and so forth. So it immerses you in time in a different way. So it's the custom, for instance, to have, as we've discussed before, the So that we can all do things together, we have the first two rounds of the Densho or the Han. Pretty much 12 minutes. So that, again, it's not a sharp ring. It's a series of time, seven minutes and then five minutes.

[05:26]

And then three minutes, but then the three minutes is left for whoever the Doshi is. to come, and that's expandable or contractible. So built into the schedule is this, a counter-puntal rhythm. Now I've been, some of those of you, I welcome those of you who have just come for the Sesshin, and I hope it's not too difficult to fit into the ongoing practice period. But I hope there's not too much confusion because naturally the lectures will be a continuation of what we've been discussing. But I'll try to, to some extent, summarize and I'll try to also make these lectures if I can, complete in themselves.

[06:29]

But still, you've come into the middle of something. So we've been speaking about, I'd say most simply, signless states of mind and the skill, meditative skill of signless states of mind, and we've been speaking about breathing quite a bit. But maybe I can put this in more Buddhist terms. That's a starting point in our Sashin lectures. So let me summarize a little bit. in this yogic world, yogic culture, we don't have, in the beginning there was the word, spoken by someone outside our system, or spoken, which is not from animals.

[07:48]

If you say in the beginning there was the word, you immediately exclude animals, plants, things like that. So Buddhism... As part of yoga culture says, in the beginning there seems to have been, there seems to be order. And what is this order? Now scientists are also asking the same question. What is this order? And of course, when people made Stonehenge and things like that, they're trying to find out what this order is, or astrology or astronomy. But yoga culture makes the assumption that we are also the same order, and we need to study our own order. And the problem is, you know, like how does the eye see the eye? If this is a universe, and the word universe means one turn, uni-verse is one turn, but this universe is always playing hide and seek with itself.

[08:55]

kid's favorite game, infant's favorite game. The universe always seems to be going around the corner, making at least one turn around the corner. It's always revealing or concealing itself. So when you see order, what you see are boundaries, and boundaries both connect and separate. day and night and so forth. And also there's a boundary of order and disorder. And too much order is no freedom and too much disorder is chaos. So somehow order and disorder need to be brought together. But this is again a boundary, order, disorder, upward, downward, heaven and earth.

[10:01]

But if the universe can observe itself and say, hey, there's order here, then we are part of this. It has to separate itself into parts. And we're one part observing what we see, what's in front of us. But if we're one part of this observing another part, we can't see everything. So yoga culture says you have to turn back toward yourself and observe yourself. Turning around inside yourself. Now, as you all know, the basic ideas of dualism, good and evil, mind and matter, body and mind, God and people, etc., obscure for us how the world is folded. Now when we talk about form and emptiness, we're really saying the world is folded, but one fold is not visible to us.

[11:11]

So this In the sense that there's order and a higher order, or heaven and earth, as it's conceptualized. This is also a boundary, that the world is folded, turned at least once upon itself, or many times upon itself. So practice, or this direction of practice, is to discover how we're ordered. And clearly this order has some kind of background to it, or a larger field. And what is that? Not just the particulars you see, but there's some interrelationship of those particulars and some overall condition in which things happen.

[12:28]

And again, in yoga culture, we assume that we are also this order and as we are alive, this has to be our experience. Or in its absence, we experience it. I mean, its absence is also an experience. So anyway, the basic assumption is, we are it. I've often spoken about immediate consciousness, borrowed consciousness, secondary consciousness, immediate consciousness. And immediate consciousness is, in a simple sense, just I'm looking at you now and I'm not thinking about you, just see you.

[13:40]

I'm not forming any concepts. I just see you. Now, one of the things Chinese Buddhism emphasized was what was called one-mark samadhi, and a whole tradition of the one practice. But the root of all these one practices, just chanting, just, you know, etc., is this one-mark samadhi, which means not to be caught by marks. One-mark samadhi means a signless state of mind, to be able to hold a signless state of mind, to be able to hold this immediate consciousness before it turns into thoughts. Sukhya always spoke about the first principle. Which means emptiness, but it doesn't exactly mean emptiness. It means holding in view emptiness as an experience.

[14:42]

Or one mark samadhi. And this is also called access by principle. And sometimes the word access is used instead of enlightenment in Chinese sense. how to access the path, how to have access to this folded world, how to have access to yourself. This access is also turning back to observe yourself. Now we can think of Dharma as the banks of a river. Dharma is form, the banks of the river, which give form to the water. And then there's the flow of the water. And you can mark a place where you want to swim. So you can come back. I used to swim in the Yuba River sometimes. It was quite tricky. You had to figure out how to get out and where the rocks were.

[15:45]

So you could go out and mark the place so you could get back up onto the shore. So we could maybe think of this nendo as your cushion is where you've decided to swim. You go off the tan. Maybe the tan is a pier. Our meditation platforms are a pier. And when you do zazen, it looks like you're all sitting there, but sometimes if I look real carefully, I can see that you're actually all swimming in the middle of the room. And you're just, the shape is there. And you're swimming, but you need to come back up into the end of the period. The Doan rings the Densho, you have to come back up and get on the pier and back into your place. So zazen, in a way, we could say is a place where you mark the place on the bank of a river from which you go swimming and to which you return.

[17:04]

And we could understand the river as the flow of form and emptiness. In a very simple sense, the basic practice is first of all to get free of enmity, to get free of disliking other people, to get free of having grudges and all that stuff. And that doesn't mean you have to psychologically change particularly, necessarily, or that you have to become a really good person. a saint or something, but rather you find a way of relating to people in which enmity is not something that comes up. Or if you do have part of your personality involved with you, like your prefer this, well yes, but it's not where you live, as I say. For example, if I look at you again now in immediate consciousness, you're all appearing in my mind, or in mind.

[18:32]

Hmm. Not so bad. You know? And I happen to like my own mind. It's quite nice. I'm used to it. And you're appearing in my mind, so I like you. Because when I'm looking at you, what I'm seeing is my own mind seeing you. Isn't that true? I mean, you're there, yes, but everything I know of you is my own mind, and my own mind is something I really like, and so I like you. So I'm free of enmity. Does that make sense? So I've changed how I see you because I see you, but I'm so aware now that I'm seeing you in my visiones, in my skandhas.

[19:37]

So the first is to free yourself from enmity. As long as you have a mind of enmity, your practice is, It's like practicing a mixture of mud and molasses. And second is you free yourself from caring very much about what's good or bad. You become indifferent to whether things are particularly good or bad. You begin to emphasize or feel sameness. And third, you come into a mind of non-seeking. Sukhya Rishi always emphasized, no gaining idea. And again, this isn't some kind of psychological revolution. You begin to sense already present in yourself is this capacity of non-seeking.

[20:42]

of knowing this is all our time. You're not in time, you are time. So discovering this non-seeking mind as a practice, I'm not saying you have to get scared that you're gonna now fail at every career because you have no ambition or I don't know what. If you wanna, you know, you can have a career, but also somewhere we need the taste of timelessness. Every day, I think. We need the taste of non-seeking mind. It's the only time you're really deeply relaxed So non-seeking mind, the third of these four I'm mentioning, is the condition for living in accord with the Dharma.

[22:05]

The cadence, the inflection of the Dharma. or swimming easily in the river. Now, let's go back to this mind of immediate consciousness, or this mind in which everything appears. So the causation is not just your karma bringing you here, but the causation also arises from my mind. The mind. And you're all appearing in my mind individually and simultaneously. And already that's a boundary. Your individual appearance and your simultaneous appearance. Because simultaneously we also create some kind of presence. our presence. Now, at that moment, by definition of Buddhism, not by definition of your ideas of some kind of higher being or lower being or god or something, by the definition of Buddha, at that moment when I am looking at you,

[23:34]

or when there is looking at you, and you have appeared in this mind, at that moment I'm a Buddha. Or at that moment, that moment, that's Buddha's mind. Now, what happens the next moment determines whether you continue to be a Buddha or not. And what happens the next moment is usually all kinds of dislikes and dislikes and confusion, etc. But at that moment, This is Buddha-mind. So it means you all possess Buddha-mind. But the next moment, most of us, all of us, it's not the case. We are involved in comparisons and likes and dislikes, etc. But I think it's really important to know that at that moment, it's Buddha-mind. By definition and fact. and experience. But everything is so quick we don't have, we're not performing our own time and we're carried along by our narrative time.

[24:47]

So you do rituals to kind of, a ritual attempts to move you out of narrative time into another kind of narration or into performative time. This is actually playing with order. Playing with order. So ritual is, in a Buddhist sense, is playing with order itself. So we'll have an ordination of mark, and Russell and after the Sashin and we've organized it, ordered it to be on the 13th and maybe a couple lay ordinations and those ordinations will be our playing with time to

[25:59]

in a sense, seal something in the narrative time of both Russell and Mark, Molly, will it be lay ordained. So it's a ritual performative time. And so I think if you understand the sense, you get the feeling of performative time, you can understand better why sometimes time goes very slowly or time goes very quickly, because you are performing it differently. The reality is the performance of time, not the clock time. Clock time is only one performance based on the planets and blah, blah, blah. But we have our own freedom to perform time. Swimming, swimming off the pier of the meditation platform.

[27:03]

Okay, so now the yogic Buddhist practice of looking at order and seeing both higher order and an overall ordering process. Let's just keep it simple. That overall ordering process we can call this, at your experience, your experiential level, this mind, before it takes, before it has marks, this one-mark samadhi that's called, as a practice, the first principle. This mind I said is Buddha mind. When we think of it,

[28:14]

now this is sort of just Buddhism, when we think of it as the performance of everything all at once, having intelligence or a kind of intelligence by our measure, we call it the Dharmakaya. When it's our functioning in the immediate situation, letting everything happen through us, we call it the Sambhogakaya. Or the Tathagatagarbha. And Tathagatagarbha means the womb embryo coming and going. The coming and going womb embryo. So it means to find yourself in a situation as if it were a womb. And as if you were an embryo. And it means opening yourself, not to your usual narrative time, but opening yourself, swimming in this amniotic fluid.

[29:34]

Coming and going. This is tathagata. So the biggest name for the Buddha is the tathagata, one that comes and goes, and coming and going, that which comes and goes, and garbha is womb embryo. So, in one sense, we call it dharmakaya. In the way we function in realization, we call it sagatagarbha. And this is the central organizing idea of Buddha nature in Chinese, where Chinese Zen, how Chinese Zen enters the Indian Buddhism and brings it together is primarily through this idea of Tathagatagarbha. And the practice of Tathagatagarbha is this one-mark samadhi. And then there's marks. But you hold in view this one-mark samadhi.

[30:38]

And the more you can hold that one mark samadhi in view, so this is that one practice, it begins a kind of contrapuntal relationship with everything. Something begins to seed itself. And when we speak of it as our personal experience, we call it original mind. So original mind, tathagatagarbha, is the interaction of that with your friends and immediate situation. And dharmakaya is the name for it when it's everything all at once. And you are part of everything all at once and you are part of this immediate interaction called the bliss body. Because you can only have this immediate interaction when you're free of enmity and free of being attached to good and bad. And then this kind of tasty good feeling, blissful feeling comes up, grateful feeling comes up.

[31:54]

And then we know we're in this womb embryo relationship to things. to each other, to the presence of each other, to our own presence. And we can begin to find our cadence, our accord with the Dharma. As if interior consciousness becomes a multi-dimensional mirror, not just one surface. And you feel interpenetrated without obstruction by everything. Okay, so what I've tried to do today is put what I've been speaking about more in a kind of traditional language of Dharmakaya, Sambhogakaya, Nirmanakaya, and Tathagatagarbha, and so forth.

[33:19]

And the big emphasis throughout Chinese and then Japanese Buddhism of this single practice, one which is rooted in One mark samadhi. The idea is that in the world of so many differences, you can keep doing one thing, one koan, one phrase, etc. It opens you to this one mark samadhi, which then you take away and you find yourself in accord with the Dharma, in accord with the truth. So, you know, then there's quite a lot of, within Buddhism, whether this is actualized or whether it's a gradual actualization or whether it's a sudden enlightenment or whether it's a realization of an original enlightenment.

[34:25]

And I asked you all to have the practice period of us to have a to recognize that the root of our existence is imagination. And that imagination, when your mind becomes more refined and your body more refined, that imagination itself will be rooted in truth. So, again, I can ask you, and now those of you in the Sushin, or say, we need to imagine the world. Imagine the world that you want, but also imagine what kind of world you actually think this is from your own experience. We have no revelation here. We have your own experience and your imagination from this experience. Now what I've shared with you today is some of the way Buddhism has imagined the world.

[35:33]

has folded on itself so that it's playing hide and seek with itself. So it's very difficult to see around the fold. Now do you kind of burst straight through between the two folds or many folds? That would be sudden enlightenment. Do you slowly actualize yourself and gradually go around the corner? That would be gradual. Or do you recognize that all of this fold is actually like a Mobius strip or something? Everything is really already unitary. Not one, but unitary, we could say, maybe. You're already these folds. That's the idea of original enlightenment. And which of these images you have has to do with how you practice. And our lineage is strongly in original enlightenment.

[36:39]

And One Mark Samadhi is strongly in original enlightenment. That if you hold to this realization, not that, oh, I'm going to be enlightened someday, or I'm not, or I'm not, you know, this is too psychological for most of us. But hold to somehow there is already this original enlightenment. Just as I pointed out, already when the mind which is seeing all of you, or in which your mind now, in which everything appears, before you act in that through desire and into your habits or karma, that mind is Buddha mind. So you know already this is original enlightenment or innate enlightenment. Must be so. It's all folded. We're all part of these folds.

[37:41]

Now, this holdingness can precipitate an enlightenment experience. And it can also precipitate the many tiny realizations that are the ongoing. I mean, yet, as Sukhriya used to say, yesterday's enlightenment is an antique. What good is old enlightenment? You want every day this recognition. of how we actually exist. And you forget, but you hold this understanding, taste this understanding. This is one-mark samadhi. May our intentions equally penetrate.

[38:55]

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