So we didn't have a discussion as we usually do in the morning, so I'd like to have some discussion about our morning and our time with Brother David. So we didn't have a discussion as we usually do in the morning, so I'd like to have some discussion about what I said in the morning and about our time with Brother David. You talked in the morning about the first Buddhist monks who practiced in the desert. No, Catholic monks practiced in the desert. Buddhist monks probably in the desert too, but that wasn't a classic practice. iconic example. In caves, Usually man-made caves, not natural caves.

[01:18]

And I had the idea that, yes, I'm also practicing in the desert. So and I had this idea that I'm practicing the desert and my desert is the city life and my job and the kind of life you're living when you have a job and a family and that's a quite different kind of desert but it's still a desert. Then I was thinking, why do I think that this is a desert, and what is the connection between me and these desert people?

[02:28]

And I think the connecting point is the intention which is either carried into the desert or in the desert of the city life. And I don't have the choice whether I go into the desert or join a monastery, but I live my family life. And I like the circumstances of of my desert and I think they are supporting, they are a challenge, but they are also supporting my practice.

[03:49]

And I would like to know in this seminar from others what they consider as supporting in their practice, whether it's the desert or whether it's the normal city life. In other words, you're describing your work and life and so forth as a desert, you mean it's good conditions for practice. So you're saying that some people might think that city life is not a good condition for practice. Not you, but some. I would like to examine whether sick life is a good condition or a good place for practice and I would like to find out how you can practice that it turns into a good condition for practice when you don't have the possibility to make a choice between monastic or lay practice.

[05:44]

Because desert probably is also not only comfortable. Yes. Okay. I mean, we need to have the spirit. So someone else has something to say. Yes. I think that people who live in the desert, like Bedouins, they like to live in the desert. They accommodate it and they use what is available. They build their monasteries in the jungle actually. They live in the desert, they build their monasteries in the jungle, dripping with water.

[06:58]

I think the most important component for me is that I live and practice in the desert of the city. So for me the most important element for me who is living in the city and practices is that there are also other people who practice but these people I practice with they also have monastic experience And this is also a shared experience that, even if you were in a monastery, in a Sesshin or a practice period, whatever, And this is a shared experience that people who are participating in a practice period are seeing that there is a kind of experience which permeates or which continues

[08:05]

during the practice in town and I think the practice is not so much it's not a question whether the practice works in this condition or that condition it should work everywhere it's not some other place out there that I have to get to practice. We need that spirit too. Okay, someone else. Yes. So for me it's less the question whether city life is good or supportive for practice but rather, what do I do with it?

[09:23]

How do I take it that I am in the city, and how do I deal with it, and what do I develop to keep my spirit? But it's more a question of how do I make use of or how can I make use of city life and it's a kind of mental attitude like a point of view you are taking. And I think that nevertheless, city gives the opportunity to take a certain perspective, which you can take on after some time. So it can be a very fertile or fruitful challenge.

[10:26]

So that after some time you can develop an attitude and conviction that practice is possible everywhere. And nevertheless I would say that the city basically or easily is by itself is not naturally a good condition for practice. And nevertheless, I think that it is important to have monastic practice and that we as a Sangha find each other there and also define ourselves as Sangha at that place.

[11:45]

Okay? When I listened to you, David and you I got this image or picture of the monastery of human conditioning conditioning But I was very much drawn to what you said because the monasteries somehow provided an image where a kind of deconditioning or reconditioning would be possible to occur.

[13:01]

No. It is a question of whether it is effective. and I don't have any experience of Johannes or monastic experience but from the people I know who have been there I can feel that it works that something is happening there in people For me, on the one hand, desert is a form of separation from the concept. For myself, this term of desert, it means something like non-existence of concepts.

[14:10]

I think that the problem lies in When in a lay life you are very much in the society or in daily life, not only in the social life, but also in the society, the concepts are interwoven and intertwined and must also be intertwined again and again in these concepts of communication and contact. And there's the problem, because if you are living in society, you are not only constantly connected with the concepts of society and also are embedded in and interwoven into them, but you are also asked constantly to reconnect to these concepts and to answer these concepts, and that's where the basic problem lies. That's true. And in a monastic practice I have the possibility to step out of that and

[15:12]

the desert then is a kind of possibility to be void of this concept. Ich versuche, es ist auch möglich im Alltag aus Konzepten herauszustellen, solange man nicht direkt sozusagen in einem Zwang der Handlung in einer gesellschaftlichen Rechnung steht. And I think that also in lay practice you can step out of this conventional life and move around or live in this monastic practice. to perceive both in parallel, so to speak.

[16:35]

So if I act in society, I perceive the concepts that function in society, just as I myself am involved in the concepts, and on the other hand I also perceive how I So in a certain way you can live it parallel or you can live both, you can be within the concepts but at the same time you can see or feel how you can be without concepts. Richard already said a few things I would like to mention, but there are still some aspects I would like to add. In Die Wüste gehen brachte für die Menschen, die es getan haben, eine Art physische Umgebung,

[17:38]

To enter the desert or to live into the desert meant for those people that they were faced with a physical environment which supported certain things. And in the same way this is kind of allegorical for certain things. So to leave behind us all this sample of or this huge amount of conventional ideas which are created and supported in our society and which we also adhere to. And in this sense, I cannot perceive of the city, and I'm living not in a huge city, but still a city, and I cannot perceive it as a desert.

[18:52]

Because something decisive doesn't happen in a city, which happens in the desert. in our usual environment, in our everyday environment and not in the desert, with each and any social contact we have and with each interaction we have, The usual societal context is strengthened and reinvigorated. And that's quite the opposite of to live into the desert. And what... and the opportunities that it has to do with me.

[20:08]

And I see enough opportunities to practice in everyday life and that's also quite thrilling. But this context doesn't support practice. And practice would be able to do it. Would be able to. What did I say? I'm sorry. That would support it more. Tara? Yes. So I clang to this... Kling? Kling? Kling? Kling, yeah. Kling is to ring a bell. Remain? Yeah. Kling is... To see this idea of inseparable.

[21:13]

Yeah. Yeah. And already in February you started to talk about that and talking about water, you add to water, you pour into water. And when I want to practice with this in my everyday life, then this is very hard for me. There I think the space of the monastery is very useful. I really tried to get in. And I think for this kind of practice, a monastery is very useful and very helpful because it provides certain opportunities which are not available in everyday life and they provide the opportunity that I can let myself into this kind of practice more easily.

[22:30]

Yes. Because I can see a certain discrepancy here. Yeah, discrepancy. Yeah. Because when I enter into this experience at the same time it's very hard for me to function as a normal person. I guess so, whatever you say. Regina? Recently I was thinking about how practice would have looked like actually looked like thousands or two thousand years ago.

[23:44]

And I tried to get a feeling for this question. What kind of idea or what kind of intent these people were committed to? And then I tried to understand for myself what it looks like today and also to think about what could it look like in the future. I came to the conclusion that it needs a radical decision to understand and to see what kind of

[25:04]

What kind of structure one is committed to? So what kind of, which form this structure should have? ... And a basic characteristic which I found everywhere was compassion. So for myself, monastery or lay practice or monastery and lay life, that's not the question for myself.

[26:18]

So what was beautiful for me was when Brother David Steindl-Rast said that each of us whether in lay practice or in monastic practice, should have this revolutionary attitude? The word is very beautiful, but what does it mean? For me it means So this word sounds very beautiful, but what do they actually mean? And for me they mean what already

[27:28]

Gerhard Enrichert said that you cut yourself free from that you don't define yourself or you don't yourself be defined by the experiences you have. Can we wait a minute? So I think I should make some comments at this point. Brother David, by the way, I had this kind of, I didn't finish this story that I told him, this kind of half-waking teaching from Brother David. And he'd given a, is that a person in the wind? He'd given a Buddha to the monastery, where he's staying now.

[29:00]

That someone had given him. And it's a figure with a teaching mudra and there's various teaching mudras. And he was illustrating it. As dinner last night. And in my reviewing while I was sleeping the seminar And while I was thinking about this seminar, The phrase that kept coming up was something like Brother David's room. I had to understand Brother David's room.

[30:03]

And I concluded during the night that he was describing his room, his cell. So then I concluded that he carries his cell in his heart. So I told Brother David this. And he said there's an expression in Catholicism, Catholic monasticism, that you should carry yourself in your heart. Because he really does go off, he's very peripatetic.

[31:04]

Wonderful, yeah. Peripatetic? I mean, I get an email from him, he's in Thailand, and then a few months later I get an email, he's in Guatemala, and then a few months later he's in Korea. It's for him an inexpensive place to stay all over the world. Anyway. And I think that, you know, I've been practicing with Eric and Michael and Christina since 1988. So the Vienna Band.

[32:04]

So you're a very special kind of lay person. And I would hope that you were able to bring practice after all these years into your daily life. And I would hope that after all these years it will be possible for you to integrate your practice into your everyday life. So at least that should bring you together. Now, there were monasteries, I believe, in Europe that had as many as 30,000 monks. And in Asia, I don't know of any monasteries that were that big in Asia, but there were monasteries with 2,000 or 3,000. Now I don't think that's an indication that there were so many more sincere practitioners then than now.

[33:10]

I think probably it was that being a lay person was a hell of a lot worse than now. And living in the monastery for many was just simply a lot better than being a farmer or whatever. Okay. I don't think, there's no question in my mind that you can practice anywhere. I think we can just take that for granted.

[34:11]

But you can play tennis anywhere too. But if you have a talented tennis player, a kid, if you send them to a place where they get a lot of practice, and especially with an outstanding tennis player, they end up to be better players. It's just the way it is. But if you give him the opportunity to play somewhere else and send him there, where he can play with an outstanding tennis player and where the conditions for playing tennis are available, And I spent a lot of my life in the art worlds of New York and San Francisco and to some extent Los Angeles.

[35:19]

And it's always struck me you have these talented people in all three cities. But the art is very different in each of the three cities. And the big difference in New York is how fast history runs. In other words, in New York, I don't know exactly, but there's 20 or 30 thousand painters, let's say. And there's a thousand who are pretty good, and there are 200 who are quite good, and then there's

[36:29]

30 or 50, they were really good. But the 20 or 30,000 participate in how the best ones are extremely good. And a visual idea, let's just keep it simple, a visual idea gets developed, passed around and you know, in weeks, hundreds of versions have been developed. In San Francisco, somebody comes up with a new idea of doing cross-hatching. Cross-hatching is... And four years later, someone's noticed it.

[37:36]

In Los Angeles, two or three months later, someone's noticed it. Yeah, but in New York... Jasper Johns has just made paintings which are only cross-hatching and they sell for $4 million. Now, there's some wonderful thing that happens in San Francisco when something develops slowly. But it's also extraordinary when something is refined and refined.

[38:39]

Okay, so if I come up with a way to look at, using English unfortunately, I'm sorry, If I come up... Yeah, yeah, I was waiting. Sorry. No problem. I'm waiting. No problem. Defined his theme recently. No problem. No, I lost. No problem. Fine. I come up with a way to look at the first skanda form. As a... In terms of thinking about it as sensation only. Nur erfahren, nur fühlen.

[39:50]

Before there's perception or cognition. Und zwar bevor Wahrnehmung ist und bevor Denken ist. How useful that is to a lay practitioner, I don't know. Wie nützlich das jetzt für einen Laien ist an... Ich habe keine Ahnung. How useful that is to a monastic practitioner, I don't know. Wie nützlich das ist für einen... But I do know that if I can speak about it in two Boulder seminars and during the practice period at Creston and listen to Christian and Nicole and others practice with it The way it can be practiced with and presented as a methodology develops much more thoroughly than than a seminar I go to once a year.

[41:04]

So here I am definitely trying to develop practice. And I spoke with a few people a few weeks ago and I said, you should be able to distinguish between what's new in the way I teach in comparison to traditional Buddhism. What's new and should then be continued by our lineage and developed more. And what's new and yet probably we should discard.

[42:15]

I can only do that kind of research with people I practice with pretty regularly. So we have a responsibility as a Sangha, which is different than your responsibility to your own practice. Okay, so I started practicing with Suzuki Roshi. And of course I had a responsibility to my own practice. But I really felt, I mean, the dire description, dire? No. Very bad.

[43:15]

Okay. It's a dire situation. It means it's very, very bad. The dire description of our world that Brother David gave us. I felt very strongly back in the 60s. And in one hand I fully gave up, there's no hope. At the same time I fully acted as if there were only hope. So I had to look. Suzuki Yoshi was very critical of Japanese Zen monasticism. Suzuki Roshi was extremely critical of the Japanese Zen spiritual life.

[44:24]

But it produced him. And somehow I decided in my life I'm going to try to produce Suzuki Roshi. If I can't be it, I can at least create the conditions for someone else to do it. So one of the things they recognized, or people brought up at this new Pioneers and Teachers meeting, Excuse me for saying so. good Zen practice places or Buddhist practice places than any other person in my generation.

[45:27]

And it hasn't happened that I thought I'm going to do this in any big... It just happened. To the extent that it's true at least. Okay, so we have a responsibility to our own practice. and that means we need to practice make our circumstances our practice as fully as possible but we may want to like proud parents support some of us to really research how we can develop this practice in English and Deutsch.

[46:37]

Because the language a practice is expressed in and the culture a practice is expressed in even if you are freeing yourself from your language from the assumptions of your language and you're freeing yourself from the assumptions of your culture that very process of freeing yourself Transforms practice. Practice is developed in India and China and Japan just because of that. They didn't just continue their ancestors' practice.

[47:54]

They developed ways to practice to free themselves from their particular circumstances. So some of it is just simply doing more of it. So einiges davon besteht darin, einfach mehr zu tun, which you can do by going to a monastery, or like Anne Ross does at Creston, wie zum Beispiel in ein Kloster zu gehen oder ein Kloster zu besuchen, oder auch wie es Anne Ross tut in Creston, who is a very developed practitioner, die eine sehr entwickelte Übende ist, who is willing to accept monastic life, but she's developed her practice primarily through personal retreats of a week or two at a time, several times a year, by herself.

[48:56]

Yeah, okay. So, So we can say that our Sangha, how we're going to support this practice in our culture, it's helpful if some people can do more. Now, one of the advantages we have Zen monasticism is not seen as the ideal way of life. Zen monasticism is not seen as the ideal way of life.

[49:58]

It's seen as a way of practice. Lay life is seen as the ideal way of life. So we can assume that there's some advantage to do more of it And there's some advantage in some of us being involved in its development, research and evolution. But I don't think it helps. We just think it's all the same. Lay practice and monastic practice and all kinds of other gradations are different.

[51:18]

Now, for the individual practitioner the differences probably aren't very important. You just practice as fully as you can in your circumstances. But if you think of yourself as also a member of the Sangha, you have your practices developed through my practice developing and so forth. And practicing in Europe and America and in this culture, etc. That we have a responsibility to... to develop not only our individual practice, but to develop our Sangha's practice.

[52:44]

That's my experience. If I only was responsible to my own practice, I wouldn't be here practicing with you. It's because I love you. That I want to practice with you. Not just alone. Das ist der Grund, warum ich mit euch üben möchte und nicht nur einfach entwickeln. Okay. So, I think, if then we really recognize that any person in any circumstance with enough background, wenn wir dann anerkennen, dass jede Person in allen Umständen mit genug

[53:47]

Can practice fully. And that's wonderful. But that's not the same as recognizing that different is different. Aber das ist nicht das Gleiche wie anzuerkennen und zu erkennen, dass ein Unterschied einen Unterschied macht. Not better, but different. Nicht besser, aber unterschiedlich. And if we recognize that it's different. Und wenn wir erkennen, dass es unterschiedlich ist. And we understand what that difference is. Und wir verstehen gleichzeitig, was diesen Unterschied ausmacht. by some of us concentrating on doing it more, doing research, etc. ? That way, every individual's lay practice or monastic will develop. Yeah, because if we can understand what, in this hand, what is the, as I said this morning, the essence of monastic practice that is beneficial.

[55:03]

And it's not trapped in some idea that this is the ideal way of life. But rather we see it as a way of practice and now we have a condition where lay life is much more satisfying than it was in the past and we have a kind of leisure that lay people didn't have in the past And we have a way of being with each other through transportation and communication technologies. I think we have an obligation as a sun

[56:14]

To explore ways in which the essence of monastic life can be brought into lay practice. And to see what essentials, perhaps, essences of monastic life cannot be brought into lay practice. And of course some qualities or essences of lay practice which are not available to monastics. So just because wonderfully we can practice anywhere in any circumstances, ideally, individually. I think as a Sangha we have a responsibility to explore, practice,

[57:38]

for the development of both lay and monastic practice. Because the fact still remains that for 2500 years No lay lineage has ever transmitted the teaching for more than a few decades. We're here because of monastic lineage. And I think it's a new situation that hasn't existed before in history. So we want to find out what secret the monastics had. And find out how we can have lay lineages which transmit the teachings. Okay?

[59:03]

Let's go.

[59:04]

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