Given outdoors during our recent Open Sky Practice, this talk takes up the Buddhist approach to the senses. Where we usually count five, Buddhism counts six, treating mind as a sense alongside seeing, hearing, tasting, smelling, and touch, and understanding each as a field that arises when a sense organ meets its object. The visual field we take for reality is itself the seeing mind; what appears belongs neither to the world outside nor to the self within; it simply arises, relationally. The body too is a sense organ, with a distinction between the skin feeling what touches it and the body sensing itself. What cannot be externalized, bodily sensation or thought, we tend to take as self; the work is to notice that appropriation and loosen it, letting thoughts and body sensations pass like clouds. From this come three practices: (1) move through the sense fields one at a time, letting each be its own world, then let them dissolve into the seemingly seamless field that holds them all; (2) within each sense, notice the distinction between focus and field, the object attended to and the open ground from which it arises, as sound arises from silence; and (3) notice that the senses are surrounded by mystery, that there is always more than they can perceive.

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Zenki Christian Dillo Roshi is the the guiding teacher at the Boulder Zen Center in Colorado, USA. This podcast shares the regular dharma talks given at the center. Zenki Roshi approaches Zen practice as a craft of transformation, liberation, wisdom and compassionate action. His interest is to bring Buddhism alive within the Western cultural context, while staying committed to the traditional emphasis on embodiment.