A mondo is not a lecture. It is the old form in which disciples put their questions directly to the master and the master answers on the spot, often bluntly, sometimes with a joke. This recording captures one such session at La Gendronnière, the temple in the Loir-et-Cher that Deshimaru founded and where his sangha still gathers.
The questions are the ones practitioners actually have. Someone describes what happens in their head during zazen, a sensation of the skull filling and expanding as though it were about to burst. Deshimaru's answer is characteristic: do not become nostalgic about it, do not chase it, do not attach yourself to sensations. When a thought or an image takes hold, turn the mind, correct the posture, come back to the breath. He points out how often the spine quietly collapses at the waist the moment attention wanders, and how much of the work is simply noticing that and straightening up again.
There is practical instruction throughout: concentration on the exhalation, attention returning to the thumbs, the fatigue and blockage that gather in the neck, how to carry the same concentration into the morning's work. And there is a memorable explanation of why sitting still produces energy at all. Everyday life is movement, so zazen is the opposite attitude, and it is precisely the stopping that restores what activity spends.
The longest exchange begins with a woman's question about love and death. Deshimaru answers with an image rather than a doctrine. We are bubbles carried on the same current of water, some large, some small, some eager to grow larger, and when the bubble breaks it returns to the water it was always made of. From there the conversation moves to reincarnation and transmigration, and to nirvana, which he insists is not a reward waiting after death but a state available in this life, during zazen itself. Nobody has come back from death to report on it, he observes; what people describe is imagination. His own view of paradise is delivered with a grin. He has no particular wish to sit next to the Buddha, and would rather be somewhere he can put up a fight.
In its final stretch the recording turns to a broader interview. Asked what he came to France to do, he answers that the seed came from India, flowered in China, bore fruit in Japan, and that he has brought that fruit to Europe for people to eat. Europe long believed it alone held the truth and that other cultures were without value, he says; the time has come to open to every civilisation and build a new one. Socialism has its merits, capitalism has its merits, but the moment calls for a new picture of the world. Asked about Christ, he calls him the greatest of the Buddhas, then asks what is actually left of him now. What he teaches in his dojo, he says, is learning to live again, and that begins with a little austerity: holding yourself upright, chin drawn in, which modern people find surprisingly hard. Every phenomenon is the essence of Zen, he concludes. Zen is practice.
The session shows Deshimaru's teaching manner as clearly as its content. Impatient with theory, quick to laugh, constantly pulling abstract questions back to posture, breathing and the present moment. For anyone who knows him only through his books, this is a chance to hear how he actually worked with the people in front of him.