Religion, the usual idea of religion, always involves something going beyond boundaries. The idea of heaven or God or something of that kind. Although Zen doesn't have the idea of heaven or God, it also is involved in a very similar, basically similar way of going beyond boundaries. And in fact, we can say Zen is ecstatic religion. Usually, ecstatic religion is

[01:05]

limited to repressed minorities and women, according to anthropological studies. People get themselves in some frenzy, get possessed, stentified with being outside yourself and outside your culture. Zen is also outside your culture, but a form is not so… it's not such visible, you know, so visibly possessed. That's all. And anthropologists also, when they tried to explain religion and its origins, primitive They talk about feeling of awe or how to explain thunderstorms, something, some aspect of the world which you can't explain, so you create religion. The idea, feeling is, as we get more and more, become more and more able to

[02:39]

explain everything, we don't need religion. And yet, if you find out just how you think or how you exist, you can't explain anything. And although we talk about holistic medicine or health or everything is one, we don't have any mechanism to perceive holistically. Conceptually, already is, of course, divided. So how to perceive?

[03:46]

Perceive means to grasp thoroughly. How to not grasp thoroughly? How to not grasp with the senses? Obviously, to conceptualize divides. Whole being perception would be to perceive non-conceptually. Intellectually, we can understand that much, but doing it, is something else. Last time I was here, I talked about the emotion of inquiry and the woman from Iowa who counted her breaths. Remember? How we use counting as a conceptual trick to jog us into doing something. Like jogging is a concept which allows us to run nowhere. Counting your breaths is a concept which allows you to do something in which there's no subject and object.

[05:08]

There's no subject and object when you're counting. It's all the same person doing it, number and breath and breathing. But we can distinguish, you know, the counting that adds, which you think you're counting something real, and then the counting when you just count, because your mind won't function without content. You don't have consciousness or contact separate from control. Daoji is a rather well-known Chinese painter. In one of his paintings, it's wintry Wintry sky, very wintry sky, kind of lustry looking, Wisconsin, Minnesota, someplace like that sky, over a lake, a wintry sky and weeds and wintry trees and wild geese flying.

[06:44]

And sense in that kind of painting, which has become for people a Zen painting, a religious painting, is that the ink is actually put on the paper with the feeling that the trees and the sky and the birds are all the same ink. I remember Nakamura Sensei the other day doing tea ceremony and at the end she was removing the kama. Kama is the cast iron, I guess cast iron, anyway, iron metal thing that you heat the water in. And I don't know anything about kamas, you know. I've never studied them or bought one or anything. They're also very, very expensive. And so I don't have any idea what is a good kamma and not-so-good kamma. But some make a different sound.

[08:18]

You're supposed to make, better ones, make the sound of the wind in pines and the water bubbles. Anyway, she was taking, explaining to somebody how to take care of the kama as she was going into the city with me. And what struck me was not, was on the one hand that I couldn't tell whether this was you know, especially a good one or an ordinary one, but that they're all made of this iron which requires the same kind of care. Whether it's a good one or a bad one, you have to dry it out a certain way, and you have to do it a certain way so the coating that gets on the inside from the water is not disturbed. Anyway, the material itself requires you to take care of it a certain way. Whether it's good, bad, or indifferent, that material itself requires you to treat it a certain way. And people are like that. We have various differences.

[09:37]

Essentially, we need to be treated the same way. And I want to mention again, as I said, that Buddhism isn't involved in original sin or guilt, but that the ability to feel blame or shame, gratitude and respect are characteristics of being a human being. And unless you can feel those things, You're not exactly human. You're not a person who can practice. So, you know, I mention it because so many of us try to protect ourselves from, in the past a lot, you know, even clinically, pathology is someone who doesn't feel such things. So often we don't want to feel such things and we keep them away, you know. But it's the first way, our ordinary way, we are in contact. And this Zen practice, Buddhist practice, is involved with contact, with meeting.

[11:14]

We could talk about waking consciousness and dreaming consciousness and dreamless consciousness. I think sometimes we make those distinctions in Buddhism. And then there's the fourth, which you can call meeting consciousness. Meeting and overlapping consciousness. So, this painting. feeling of the ink of the sky and wintry trees and weeds, water, birds, all the same ink. And in fact, probably, Daoji painted them with the feeling of his breath in the ink, and the same breath in each. Someone told me once, you can tell a good painting, painted from a a bad painter, average painter, because a good painter always uses the same strokes, no matter what they're painting. And the kind of painter you find exhibited in hotel rooms paints, you know, a house, one kind of stroke, and sky, another kind of stroke. Whether that's true exactly or not, it is characteristic of practice. It is a kind of consistency.

[12:46]

moment after moment, found first in our breathing. Counting your breathing seems so boring, but it's a very neat trick. So he has, Daoji has in his painting, written on the side, he's written a poem of Du Fu, which goes, Wild geese fly in pairs, wild geese fly in pairs, and the veterans finally return from the northern campaign. I guess Tu Fu was rather anti-war, and some Chinese poets always were saying, let's go fight for the glory of China, but Tu Fu was one of the ones saying, it's terrible and you just waste your way out there in the frontiers, and it separates people, it separates friends. So to

[14:17]

carried this feeling of contact further. Daoji put this poem on his. Wild geese fly in pairs, and finally the veterans return from the northern campaign. There's a story from rather jumpy 18th century Japanese daimyo, or lord, they call him in the translation Lord Mihara. And he, it's a rather funny story, he asked someone to do a painting for him, asked an artist to do a painting for him, and the artist did, and came back with a painting of a wild goose. And he got very excited. This is a symbol of revolt! Wild geese always fly in pairs, single wild goose. So he was throwing a little tantrum about it, like off with his head or something. And they called in a Zen teacher named Motsugai, and he came in, he immediately took his brush and wrote on it, the first wild goose.

[15:41]

another and another in endless succession. Everyone felt better. But that's a kooky story, but also rather interesting, that he would, the Zen teacher, so quickly know that if nothing exists separately, The highest form of consciousness most people feel is when they're in love, which is obviously meeting, overlapping. And our practice is first meeting yourself.

[16:47]

taking some inventory of yourself. And most of us, again, are so, even after years of practice, are so involved with our thought structure and so little see any possibility of getting out of it. You know, we all know the words of a poem. But we don't know the poem. Has that ever struck you? If you write a poem, before you wrote the poem, you know all the words. After you wrote it, you know the words. But the poem itself, some elusive combination that depends on your state of mind or freedom from, actually freedom from usual thought constructs. That kind of pattern has a lot to do with what we mean by emptiness. Another state of mind.

[18:03]

So I guess what I'm pointing out here is that we confuse the poem or the details, the tracings of our life, with more tracings. And we don't know where the poem really comes from. So anyway, we are so involved in the constructs, our mental constructs, our thought constructions, that even after some years of practice, most of us don't have much sense of the consciousness of our body. And people who don't practice have very little at all. Occasionally, I meet somebody who does, who hasn't practiced, but most people don't have any sense of the difference of, say, contact, which is control, trying to grasp with your senses, and contact without control. And I think most of us, when we first contact contact without control, encounter contact without control, are a little frightened. If you're standing in front of somebody,

[19:49]

and you have no ability to control what they think of you, or what you say next even, I think it's a little frightening. And fear is so ingrained in us, you know. A lot of what we do is really fear, and we don't even see it anymore as fear. Or consciousness of your… There's consciousness, there's unconscious breathing, and then there's conscious breathing, in which your breathing is affected by your consciousness. And then there's conscious or aware breathing, in which your breathing is not affected by your consciousness. So you can begin to distinguish three kinds of breathing there – breathing that you're and breathing that you're conscious of and that you begin to learn how your consciousness affects your breathing. And then how your consciousness can... your breathing can be unaffected by your consciousness. And as I said,

[21:17]

about counting. There's the counting which is adding, and there's the counting which is just counting, because we find out that way we can pay attention to our breathing without subject-object. And then there's the third, we can call it, the returning to zero. That you count to ten, but you return to zero. And the fourth would be remaining at zero. that consciousness which doesn't track anymore. But really, from the point of view of insight, two and four are the same, so fifth is two plus four, because the second one is you count and you know you're just counting. So it also means you know zero, but to remain at zero. There's some difference, there's some real shift when you go from just knowing your counting is based on zero and your consciousness remaining at zero. But to jump off the flagpole, to get to the top of the flagpole and jump

[22:41]

It doesn't mean you're going to… I think when we hear that koan, we think, you get to the top of the dragon and jump, and because of your great Zen practice, you fly. It doesn't mean that at all, it means you crash straight down. Boom. Back into two. Where you are involved in the world. So, in this way, you begin to be familiar with your breathing and the pathways of your breathing. But the next, we can talk about the wind or pathways of your organs. And this is something I've not talked with you about in lecture, I don't think. Though some of you, when you come and ask me about breathing,

[23:46]

Some of you explore breathing enough. Some people ask me about breathing in the beginning. They don't know anything about it, so there isn't much I can say. It's better after you're quite familiar and you've come up against some problem, like the problem presented by the effect of consciousness on your breathing. But a way I've told many of you, about one way I've told you how to adjust your posture with your breath is to inhale, you know, by little drops of air, like you were taking in water, inflating a balloon or something, and pushing down. That will open up your lungs and posture. Really, we straighten ourselves from within, like that. And then, when you are pretty full, you push down, which lowers your breathing. And then, if you want, as you're holding it, you can contract your anus, your sphincter muscles.

[25:17]

And I think you'll find something shoots to the crown of your head. So we may not be interested in chakras, or you may believe in chakras, sort of nice flowery things appearing at various points in the body, and you think it's great, you know. Or you may think, that doesn't… there's no such pathway, you know, there's no such thing, there's just intestines and lungs and stuff, and that's just some medieval superstition. But without either of those two, if you're practicing, just the simple thing I just said, when you do that and you contract your sphincter muscles, something goes up your body to the top of your head. And it didn't go around through your intestine, like that, and up through your lungs and up your throat. So a pathway is something along which something travels, right? So there's some pathway there. And what's also interesting to note

[26:48]

is that it starts at an opening, is that the way in, in this sense, is the way out, is an opening of your body which you reverse or close, and you have this new pathway, not so familiar to us in the West, opened up, in which you feel something pass. from your sphincter muscles, from your anus, up through your back, not exactly your back, somehow to the top of your head, to the crown of your head. This is also considered an opening. So as you get to become familiar with the consciousness of breathing, and the way your own attitudes and state of mind affect your breathing,

[28:09]

As you become familiar with that, you can then start being familiar with… We don't have a language for it, but a consciousness of your stomach and lungs and the identifiable things we know about from Western medicine, autopsies, and then you can become conscious of a kind of wind in your body. Because we say wind, you know, partly we have no word for it. You know, what I'm talking about, there's no language for it, particularly in the West. For instance, I'd like to talk about in-consciousness, like inartistic. You know, there's artistic and un-artistic, somebody who has no talent, and in-artistic, somebody who, it's, you know, attempted art, but it's a mess. So we have unconscious and conscious, but we don't have in-conscious. And most of us suffer from a kind of primitive consciousness, a kind of in-artistic or ineffectual, in-conscious.

[29:39]

We're just not, even though we're walking around sort of conscious all the time, we are first with such a simple thing as breathing, where your life will change simply because you become more and more familiar and spend more and more time. This isn't having to do with satori or insight or anything. Just you are like a craft, spending more and more time doing something in which there's no real subject-object distinction. And that begins to affect how you do other things. Sesshin means, the word means something like mind gatherer. To find the contact of your mind with everything. And I think that's our experience when we do sesshin. We begin to feel a kind of elastic consciousness, all the sounds around and so forth, feel like they're in a substance, one with us. And as a blind and deaf person would have very, pretty hard, you can imagine, it'd be pretty hard for a blind or deaf person to imagine what

[31:08]

what contact by seeing is, or contact by hearing is. And we tend to take such contact for granted. The fact that we can, from a distance, see something. But, as you may know, blind people sometimes have a remarkable ability to feel objects away from what they can't see. And we are blinded by our five senses. But you can imagine, if there was some sense, just as a blind person couldn't imagine what it's like to see,

[32:10]

may be that it's possible. But other than the five senses, there's something we can't imagine. Some whole being contact, some contact that's there. So Sashin gives us some taste of that, this mind-gathering of practice. So when we sit, we are gathering, too. You are stopping your openings. And strangely, again, your access to yourself is through the openings that lead out, is the access to yourself, the openings that lead in. And as you become more conscious, you'll become aware that there's some difference of your neck and chest and navel and genitals, even legs and shoulders, forehead, every pore.

[33:32]

It's pretty hard to become all of one piece outside, but you can become all of one piece inside. And then openings or sharing or overlapping meeting, all of one breath, like Daoji's painting, your organs all of one breath, your activity all at one breath. In each successive moment, another and another and another, we can disappear. Not tracking. You know, in between, when you're... Dogen says, think non-thinking.

[34:49]

How do we exist between thoughts? Suzuki Roshi taught us between thoughts. When Toksan, you know, carted the Diamond Sutra on his back south to challenge the Zen teachers, it wasn't much different from one of you coming in who's new at serving. And you have the idea in your mind, I'm supposed to bow at a certain time. And so you get here and I hold my bowl out and you fill it and then no matter what I do, you bow. You don't wait for me to bow or to put the spoon in. You just, now I'm supposed to bow, so you bow and you go on down and I'm still... You don't, aren't there in just in that simple sense in contact with me. But that's the same as Tokson carrying Diamond Sutra with so many things. So as you know the story, but you should know the story as if it were, I want you to know the story as if it were you. He goes and meets that woman

[36:16]

in the tea shop. She sees him with all the books and recognizes him as an alert person. Says, what's there? And he says, a diamond sutra. He's ordered a cake. She says, well, doesn't the diamond sutra say, past mind is ungraspable, present mind is ungraspable, and future mind is ungraspable? And he says, yes. And she says, with what mind would you take the cake? And he, you know, he was smart enough to know he'd been had. But he wasn't smart enough to realize she was a good Zen teacher. Because she was a woman, I suppose, he couldn't see her. We'll change that in a century. And, I hope. And, so he said, is there any good Zen master around here? She, having to be very subtle the way women seem to be, said, oh yes, a few miles away. They'll see the, you know,

[37:45]

press release, the front man. So she sends him to Ryutang. And you know the story. He comes in, and Ryutang means dragon lake. So he comes in, being a little bit Zen, you know, says, I don't see any dragon or lake. And it's kind of like saying emptiness. I don't see it. And Rutan appears suddenly and says, you are meeting Rutan in person. So, anyway, they talk for quite a while. And as he's leaving, it's quite dark, so Toksang goes outside. He says, really, it's very dark out here, I can't see anything. So Rutan hands him a candle. And as he takes it, you know, he blows it out. And so Toksan at that moment understood the world between thoughts, between dark and light, neither dark nor light, a consciousness which isn't involved in control, the contact which isn't dependent on form and emptiness.

[39:14]

where Suzuki Roshi taught and where Zen is taught and where transmission occurs. At first, just become more conscious. Be aware of consciousness of mouth and stomach and so forth. And movement or aliveness of your consciousness, of your body's consciousness, or wind, we say sometimes. You can purify, clean out your body. Thoroughly relax your body.

[40:52]

On the one hand, we're talking about consciousness. On the other hand, kind of trackless consciousness, consciousness which you don't track, you don't know where you are. Where are you right now? You say, I'm here, in this new Zenda. But where is this new Zenda? Oh, it's at Tassajar Valley. Where is Tassajara Valley? Your friend may be sitting in Zendo in San Francisco or in an office. Where are they right now in this endless succession?

[41:57]

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