Carl, how the heck did you transubstantiate? I don't know. He just appeared out of the floor or somewhere. Out of the mountains. It's nice to see you. All of Buddhism is, or all of our life is mediated by, we could say, two questions. What kind of person do you want to be? What kind of person do you need to be? And what kind of person does the world need you to be? These two questions ought to always be in the background of our practice and our living and our thinking, etc. What kind of person do you need to be? And what kind of person does the world need you to be? What kind of person does the world need?

[01:02]

Now, we can't just automatically become the kind of person the world needs. Maybe the kind of person the world needs is the kind of person we want to be, you know, can say. However, there's a power in those two questions. And discovering if the kind of person we want to be somehow is also the kind of person, well, I mean, the world needs all of us. How can you say anything? But still, we do want, as you know, we feel, we'd like the world to be populated with certain kinds of people. Do you want to be one of those persons? Can you be? Well, that's really also, in a very basic way, what's behind the six paramitas.

[02:09]

That's the incubatory practice of the bodhisattva. The bodhisattva practice of the six paramitas gives us a chance to look at this question or imagine what this could be in the terms of 2,500 years or so of Buddhist practice. history and teaching. Now, from the Buddhist point of view, the world is a single interdependent continuum. The world is a single interdependent continuum, always approaching and arriving at the new, at the unexpected even. You know, how does one enter into such a world? Again, we can imagine the six paramitas as a kind, as a way to enter into this single interdependent continuum.

[03:12]

Now when you approach, I believe you spoke about I know you spoke about the six paramitas yesterday in the seminar. And I hear the seminar was quite good. But when we approach such a list, and there's so many lists in Buddhism, but this is one of the most fundamental, Mahayana Buddhism, we need to, I mean, I think, We have to, first of all, see it as a list and discover the dynamic of the list. It's not just like, well, you have to have good manners, money, and makeup to go to a restaurant or something like that. I mean, at least a woman does. It's not just a list of things that are unrelated but sort of good to do. And you have to be hungry.

[04:21]

I mean, it works better at a restaurant if you're hungry. So you want to see if you can find, feel the dynamic of the list. And you also want to see if you can enact the list. Or live within the list or define yourself through the list. Yeah, you have to kind of fool around with the list. Maybe you could, you approach it aporetically. Aporetic or aporia means, I like the word so I'm using it. It means impassable, aporia, aporia is passage, impassable. It's used in philosophy, and I think Plato's dialogues are often considered aporetic because at the end of the dialogue, the poor monk or whoever it is, is shown that he doesn't really understand the term, the word, the idea.

[05:33]

So aporia as a philosophical idea is that, you know, when you really explore any word or term, you don't really in the end quite understand it. So you want to find an aporetic, operatic, some of us would find an operatic, but an aporetic lotus, locus, focus or locus in the koan, or in this case the list of the six paramitas. And you want to kind of turn the list around and kind of just go over it and see what the words Call up for you bring to you etc and what their relationship brings I mean if you look at a list like this you want to say cheese that starts with Generosity and ends with wisdom. What's the relationship between generosity and wisdom? And you want to kind of fool around with that for what generosity wisdom can you imagine wisdom without generosity and

[06:44]

Is generosity somehow the unhindering openness or something like that to wisdom? Yeah. I sometimes think it's useful to work with insight, samadhi, and wisdom. You know, to just take these three words and see if you can feel your way into them. And what you're doing, you know, in a way, if you can feel your way into words, you're embodying the words. And if you can embody the words, then the words become the medium, a kind of medium or a medium of thinking and action. It mediates.

[07:46]

It's a medium and mediates thinking and action. So when I work with this experiment, sometimes I find myself with a kind of Dharani. Now I'm trying to use various Buddhist approaches here to work with a list. Now in the list, there's dharani or dharani, dharani possibilities. Dharani is related to the word dharma, obviously, something that you hold or repeat. And it's, nobody knows really what the difference between a dharani and a mantra is. But in general, I would say a dharani is a way to, it's sometimes considered a form of memory, to bring memory, to bring a wisdom phrase into a situation is a kind of dharani. You're a visitor, I mean. Because you want to find a way not to displace actuality with an interpretation.

[08:51]

So how to be in the... The... how to be within the components of the moment. Now, something like that requires discipline. Now I'm sort of trying to work with the word discipline. We have, again, the more traditional translation, generosity, discipline, patience. energy, again that's the problem. Let's call it presence maybe. And meditation, but here we also have samadhi and concentration and wisdom. What's going on when Buddhism makes a list like this?

[09:57]

I think you have to ask yourself the question, what's going on when a list like this is made? What do you do with it? Maybe the Ten Commandments in the West tell you how to be a good person in the West. You could ask, what's the dynamic of the Ten Commandments? Or is it just ten different ways of being? Is there a dynamic to it? But in the case of Buddhist lists, there's a dynamic to it. How do you locate the dynamic of the list? Why are they together? And really, the main thing is your own inventory, your own... I mean, we can bring Buddhism into it, and we ought to bring Buddhism into it, but the first is you just... Well, it's a Buddhist lesson. But still, you have to bring your own experience of each word, what it possibly means. See if you can find yourself in the list. Find some territory of your own experience in the list. Now I, again, suggested that the first three of the six paramitas are a kind of, excuse me for these words, incubatory locus, where with each person you meet, you are willing to

[11:18]

offer them anything they want or need. You're also willing to receive anything they want or need. And you have the patience to be in that. And this patience is also the tolerance of causality. In other words, everything has a cause, so you might as well, whatever appears before you has some cause, so you might as well be tolerant of persons and situations. All of these ideas are in the list. So I would call that a kind of conceptual locus that allows you to enact the to enact the list, to enact the practice by finding yourself in each meeting with whomever and wherever you're in this incubatory space.

[12:24]

Now if you imagine a space in which you which is simultaneously giving and receiving Really that's a definition of samadhi. So the space, the mind required to be in this incubatory space of receiving and giving and the discipline to just be present is also samadhi, definition of samadhi, experiential definition of samadhi. Now, Let's take Sophia. I think every parent everywhere, and I think it's good to look at these things from various points of view, every parent everywhere is doing something like the six parameters with their kid. We try to teach Sophia manners.

[13:30]

Marie-Louise tries to teach you more than me. I'm still trying to learn manners, at least Marie-Louise thinks so. But we're trying to teach you manners, of course, me too. How you behave when you eat, for example, but also how you behave with others. And what does Sophia have? Well, I mean, she's feisty and she's full of energy and that energy comes out to resistance. To, well, I don't want to do this and I'm not going to do that and blah, blah, blah. Well, from the point of view of this list, it's because she lacks discipline. Somatic discipline, perhaps. Because she doesn't have the ability to take that energy which becomes resistance, and turn it into acceptance, receiving, absorbing. Imperturbable is too rigid a word, but unflappable, you know?

[14:35]

Some kind of space that it absorbs her energy, but it doesn't come out as feisty energy or resisting resistance. Well, that requires discipline. And no other location mind requires discipline. And no other location mind is a way of saying that you don't displace actuality by interpretations. You don't displace actuality by interpretations. So that could be no other location mind. But no other location mind requires discipline. So in this list we have, you know, discipline, we have samadhi, concentration, samadhi, the mind which can absorb awareness without perimeters. Sometimes unbounded awareness, but I find it more accessible as practice to say awareness without perimeters.

[15:41]

But awareness without perimeters, that's just not, you know, doesn't just like pop up. It needs some kind of discipline. So we can take the first three as one kind of location or locus. You know, the Mumonkan is the gateless gate. Well, that's an operatic title. The gateless gate is something that's impassable. So you want to approach a list like that as something impassable, although you kind of spend a lot of time in the gate, but you don't get through it. And again, I started to say one of the things I work with is... I use generosity, energy, patience.

[16:43]

Now, I don't know what that means exactly. And I like generosity, energy. It kind of like goes together, the vowel sounds, consonants. And then patience, generosity, energy, patience. But I find the three words mediate thinking in action, or a medium of thinking in action. Somehow it's a, what I would call again using this word I'm trying to introduce, aporetic locus, or an aporetic focus. If I say to myself, if I feel these three words, generosity, energy, patience, generosity, and I can't say what it means, but it's a certain feeling. And, you know, it makes me think of Ivan Illich. You know, I got a certain, I had a certain feeling from him that I can't say what it is.

[17:53]

I can't explain it. But I still have that feeling, and I have that feeling, I got some feeling like that from Suzuki Roshi, as I said in the Teisho a couple days ago, a kind of pace. And I try to suggest that pace to you by saying, stay within a feeling of nourishment and completing, completeness. Now again, that's a kind of, it's a craft, you can't quite say, but when do you feel not nourished? And then you kind of move back. Once you get the feeling of nourishment, you stay within that feeling, then sometimes at the edge, sometimes more in the center. Or you feel, what you do always feels complete, your completeness. As long as you do that, if you can stay within nourishment and completeness, in what you do, think, say, read, etc.

[18:56]

We could say that's the territory of the Dharma. So, you know, maybe I feel generosity, energy, patience, and I feel a sort of nourishment in saying it, and it sort of goes somewhere and then stops, and then generosity, aid, energy, patience. So this kind of, you know, kind of weird technique, perhaps I'm teaching you, are a kind of epiretic dharani, dharanic approach. where you assume you don't understand, you assume how do you enter this single interdependent continuum which is always becoming new.

[20:03]

The Buddhism assumes that through samadhi, meditation and samadhi, And through the mind of meditation samadhi, the samanic mind of meditation samadhi, which receives, gives, absorbs, and seeds, S-E-E-D-S, seals and seeds, it sort of seals, locates your world, but seeds your world. It seeds the person you're with and you're seeded by the person you're with. So it doesn't just receive and give, simultaneously you have this, but it also generates, it's fertile. And that fertility is also the fountain which always overflows is a description, a metaphorical description of the Bodhisattva.

[21:21]

Yeah, so this is a territory of attitudes toward others and enactment of these attitudes with others and the practice of meditation, samadhi, and insight. In a way, we could say that samadhi is the reception The territory of reception or something like that. And prajna is the territory of re-presentation or orientation and actualization. So samadhi and prajna here, very closely, one is receiving and the other is actualizing.

[22:29]

So there comes to be eventually where you just kind of like fool around within your own experience and then you begin to bring more fruitfully and fully Buddhist teachings in like a deeper understanding of samadhi as the awareness without a perimeter, an absorbing awareness without a perimeter. And that then becomes the other side of the other half of prajna, of actualizing, or of the orientation that arises through samadhi, through absorbing, receiving, seeding, and being seeded by this single interdependent continuum.

[23:34]

Okay? Thanks.

[23:44]

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