Well, I used to, when I first came to Munster, like to walk around, get a feeling for the city so I know where I am when I'm speaking. But I've been here enough now that I can just drive into town and feel at home. Now, Has anybody here never heard of a bodhisattva? You've never heard of a bodhisattva? Okay. Most of you have at least probably some idea of what a bodhisattva means. Anyway, it's not like being a saint or something like that. You might have a very saintly bodhisattva, but it would be only one kind of bodhisattva.

[01:15]

And the emphasis is not really so much on the person who's a bodhisattva, As it is that a bodhisattva is a kind of identity for you. So, I can give you an explanation of what traditionally a bodhisattva is. And we'll have to look at that a little bit tomorrow. But the explanation won't really tell you much. What we need to do is getting a feel of what the territory of bodhisattva as an identity is in you.

[02:33]

In a way we could say that bodhisattva is a very developed way to say who am I. So this practice is asking the question, who am I? Now, in the 50s, up until about 1950s. The mainstream of Western psychology was mainly concerned with how we think and ourselves as thinking beings. People particularly studied, experimental psychologists studied how we think and cut apart cats and dogs and monkeys and tried to figure out what the pathways of thinking were in the brain.

[04:02]

But from the 50s on they began to study emotions, us as emotional beings as well as thinking beings. And they continued studying people who had car accidents and studying animals and cutting up animals and things. Some advantage to understanding things like what part of the brain, if it's damaged, then you don't have certain emotions. But what they mainly are discovering is you can't really locate much in the way of real physiological centers for emotions.

[05:19]

If you have a certain part of your brain damaged, you will respond differently, but that doesn't tell you much. What they really are finding out is that emotions and thinking are a systemic process. It's systemic in the sense it requires the interaction of a lot of different parts at once. Now, the concept of a bodhisattva is a systemic concept. It's an identity that arises from the function of many different parts of you at once.

[06:42]

As your own identity arises. But the word psyche in the West, psyche for psychology and your psyche as a kind of soul, The central sense of that seems to be to know your own personal story and your cultural story. And there's an element certainly of the bodhisattva practice Bodhisattva practice has an element in it of locating your story in a different way. Now, this evening I can only give you a kind of introduction to this subject.

[07:58]

And there's going to, I know a number of people aren't here because of traffic jams and things like that. And so I have to repeat some of this tomorrow, but probably I can do it in a way that I don't have to repeat myself. But what I would like to do Hi. You found us. What I'd like to do tomorrow and Sunday is to go into this Bodhisattva practice as it's possible for you And as it's both a practical and an ideal vision of our human existence.

[09:16]

And I'd like to go slowly enough so we can find out what we know. And as we go along, I would like to know what you don't know or what you want to know. So this question of who are you, who am I, is also a question of where do you live?

[10:17]

Where are you living right now? What are you living in? And so in Buddhist way of looking at the territory like thinking and emotions, thinking and emotions both belong more or less to the same category. They're but they're both defined ways of grasping the world or relating to the world. Now, Buddhism makes a distinction between feeling and thinking. And for this understanding of bodhisattva practice, we have to make that distinction clear as we can between feeling and emotion.

[11:45]

Now, do you have the same distinction in German between feeling and emotion? The language doesn't make it as clear as English, but I guess some English-speaking people don't know the difference between feeling and emotion. Yeah, I know. It's pretty common. I mean, if you ask people in general what's the difference between your feeling and emotion, they say, I don't know. And in English at least, the words are used almost interchangeably. Yeah, it means that when they're used interchangeably, it means the culture has lost the... emphasis on the distinction which the words have.

[12:51]

So it's not just that you're I'm speaking to you as if you were English-speaking people. If you're English-speaking people, it's not just that you've that you've not paid attention to the difference between the two words but the culture doesn't pay attention to the two words so people say I feel angry and in a way that's a misuse of the word a feel in relation to anger.

[13:58]

It can certainly be used that way, but if it's used that way so you begin to think they're interchangeable, then you're not noticing something. Okay. Now the best example, or simplest example I've sort of come up with for making the distinction, is I could feel quite sad or I could be quite angry right now, imagine. And if I was angry for some reason, I would have a very distinct feeling that I'd know I was feeling angry, I was angry. And if I don't I can't not notice that I'm angry.

[15:06]

The anger takes over my sort of feelings. And if I'm really angry or deeply sad or something like that, then while I'm here talking to you, there's no way that anger or that sadness won't come through in what I'm saying. In other words, what I'm saying is just that when you have an emotion, it's hard not to notice that you have an emotion. If you show a snake to a monkey or make a loud noise, the monkey responds with fear and the monkey knows it's afraid. Okay.

[16:08]

But in this room, this particular room, which has the atmosphere of being a dance studio, and All of you here in it have given, have created a certain feeling already in this room. There's a definite feeling here that's different than before we were here. But that's not so easy to identify. And as soon as we're talking, it's hard to notice what the feeling is. So that's, I would say, the main obvious distinction between feeling and emotion.

[17:08]

There's a feeling in this room that you can feel, but it's not an emotion. And while an emotion is noticeable, it's hard to notice exactly the feeling here. If you try to grasp the feeling, then you really don't have it. Does that make sense? Kind of a clear example? No, yes. Best I can do right now. Okay. In Buddhist way of looking at things, Thinking is a pretty small but very powerful way of looking at the world and yourself.

[18:24]

And the next is emotions are a little bit bigger. And thinking is quite graspable. Und denken ist ziemlich greifbar. As soon as you have a thought, and particularly if it's formed into language, it's quite specific. Und sobald man einen Gedanken hat, ganz besonders wenn der jetzt in Sprache umgewandelt wird, ist der recht spezifisch. Emotion is a little less graspable. It's not so specific, but it's still fairly specific. Und Emotionen sind etwas weniger begreifbar, aber doch auch sehr spezifisch. And feeling is less specific and less graspable. But feeling is a much bigger territory than emotion and very much bigger than feeling, than thinking.

[19:26]

And feeling precedes usually emotion and thinking. I tell this anecdote quite often, but Einstein was asked where he got his ideas from. I asked him to give an example of how he comes up with something. He says, I feel something in my body. And then I pay attention. If I pay attention to that feeling, it changes into something more defined, and finally it becomes a thought. So the general sense in Buddhism is if you want to be on the ground floor where you exist, you are first of all in your feeling, not in your emotions and thinking. But it's hard to find your kind of existence or a place to rest in feeling if it's not graspable.

[20:48]

This is one of the distinctions between the gross and subtle understanding of teaching. For instance, it's an important distinction. And you're actually not supposed to teach certain. The tradition is you don't teach people things who over-define what you teach them. I mean, you're not supposed to give teachings to people who then give a lot of form to those teachings. Because they make something subtle into something gross, and often at a gross level it could be misused. In German, the word gross means big, doesn't it? The sound is the same.

[22:32]

The sound. But it's different. It doesn't mean big. So when I say gross, meaning coarse, what word do you use? Grope. Unsubtle. I see, unsubtle. It's different than gross. Like the size of sand corns, you have grope. I see. Yeah, that's right. Okay. So in other words, wine... While I'm talking to you, if we're entering into bodhisattva practice, you'll listen to my words, of course. But mainly you'll pay attention to the feeling. Does that make sense? So it's not so important what I'm saying exactly, though the words certainly have some meaning.

[23:35]

But I hope anyway. But through the words, a feeling is created. and then if you can kind of shift your sense your proprioceptive sense from the words to the more almost physical feeling and then you bring that feeling back to the words then the words begin to be understood a bit differently So the words create a feeling, and when then you begin to abide in the feeling, the feeling changes the words. Now, I'm not saying that's the case for you. But that kind of distinction and shift is central to Buddhist practice.

[24:50]

And the first step is to have a cognition about it or an observation that that's possible or the case. And if you had that observation, then you act, I mean, I just said that. And you may have thought of it before. Or notice it, of course. But by my emphasizing it, or if you've heard it the first time. In either case, it makes it more likely you'll notice how this happens than if you don't have a knowledge or information about it.

[25:54]

So it's a kind of, as I've been saying, a kind of homeopathic dose. In other words, if you have a clear sense of something, even a little small sense of it, it weaves into your life and your activity. Okay, now a related idea which is important in practice is that it's often stated very simply for people who are practicing Zen, is don't think. Or get free of your thinking. And that's not very good advice.

[27:06]

It's a kind of confusing advice. No one knows how to do it. And early Buddhism was based on an idea of exclusivity. In other words, get the clouds away from the moon so you can see the moon. Clear the, get the sediment out of the water. But later Buddhism, which then is a part, is the central idea is inclusivity. The sediment is part of the water.

[28:10]

The clouds are part of the moon. Who wants the moon without a wisp of clouds and a plum blossom or something? Or a woman, or an ocean, or a man. Okay, yeah. So, my teacher, Sukhya, she used to say, a fish can't live in pure water. Yeah, so we can't live in pure water. And the advantage, the sense of that is the larger sense of this image of Suzuki Roshi's. It's not just that the fish lives in muddy water or water with all kinds of stuff in it. But the fish matures being a fish through being in muddy water or, you know, non-pure water.

[29:33]

Okay, so, as I started to say, the sort of simplistic advice is stop thinking or get free of your thinking. But Gogen says it more specifically. He says, think non-thinking. So he doesn't say, get rid of your thinking. He says, think non-thinking instead of thinking thinking. Okay. How's that in German? It's okay? Dink, dink, dink, dink. It sounds like a bell ringing. Okay. Cows, a lot of cows going by. Dink, dink, dink. He's thinking dink. You mean cow bells? Yeah, cow bells.

[30:55]

Dink, dink. Makes you think. I mean, dink. Also, das klingt für ihn wie Kuhkloppen. Die Deutsche war so zum... So, but I can't, maybe it would be useful, and I probably will, make a little bit clearer this weekend why Dogen says think non-thinking. But obviously, think non-thinking is a statement that's outside the graspable territory of thinking. So most words point to other words and to refer to one thought refers to another thought.

[31:58]

Dogen's statement is a reference to not an area of non-thought, but an area of non-thinking which is still introspective. Now, what this means is you're actually thinking a lot, but it's another kind of thinking which doesn't occur in thoughts. Am I sounding like I'm talking riddles? Yeah. Conundrums. Okay. What? Well even though you may not get the logic of this right away, it's still actually quite logical.

[33:29]

But if it doesn't seem logical, get the feeling of it. Because I'm actually trying to befuddle you a little bit because I want you to get out of your usual way of thinking. So if I can tangle your thinking up a little bit, but you don't fall asleep, maybe you can do something here. Okay, so... really what it means to not, to get free of your thinking in Zen practice, what it really means to get free of thinking in Zen practice, is to stop identifying with representational thinking.

[34:30]

To not reside in conceptual or representational thinking. Now, you're an alive human being, at least you all appear to be. And there's degrees of being alive. And as an alive human being, it's not just that your heart is beating. You are interacting with the environment in a million ways right now. Now, the more you're in... When you identify with representational thinking, you have a very powerful tool, but you're usually quite limited in what you perceive.

[35:57]

You only perceive through that territory. No, that's not considered a large enough territory for really feeling and knowing another human being. The baby has a powerful connection with its mother long before it has representational thinking. In fact, probably when representational thinking comes along for the baby, the relationship to the parent gets narrower. especially if the parent is one who insists on that connection as the definitive connection.

[37:06]

Okay, so when you move your identity, your sense of identity and location out of representational thinking, Please let me stop right now and say, is possible. And the point of practicing zazen, and we can talk about this more if you'd like tomorrow, is to be able to move your sense of location. in various ways and in one way is outside of representational thinking. And one of the most basic is right now, move your sense of location into your body. Or into your breath.

[38:16]

So just sort of right now, just take a moment and sort of feel, feel your breathing in your chest. Or if I ask you to look at this glass, And just name the glass, glass. Glass. You don't think about it like this is a glass, just glass, glass. You just say glass to yourself quietly, glass. That actually changes your state of mind. Just naming it without using language in the usual way, you're in a little different territory.

[39:20]

So you can use naming as a practice to get out of representational thinking defined through language. And then you can just look how shiny and look at this as an object of light, not as a glass. And just feel the light of it. Instead of going into the name glass or anything, just feel the light of it. And then shift that feeling to the whole room as an object of light. So going back to the glass, you just feel the appearance of the glass. Let's peel the name off it. So you don't have any name or language.

[40:24]

Just peel off the name. And you just sense the appearance of it with the shininess of the light of it. And you can feel the train through the floor. Can you feel it? The more you get used to that kind of shift, it's not so difficult to shift out of representational thinking. But in zazen, in zazen practice, you begin to notice that You notice as soon as you sit and then you concentrate on your breath, you actually have begun a kind of shift outside of representational thinking.

[41:30]

Then if you really kind of go into zazen, in the sense one goes to sleep but here you stay awake, Then a lot of thinking comes up. But it's really not the thinking you were doing before you did zazen. It's a thinking in the associative skanda or channel. You have many associations come up and this and that, and they float around. And you can sort of think about them. And you can begin to see things change from feelings into emotions and then into a thought and then back into an emotion and so forth.

[42:40]

Okay, so this is, as I emphasize often, this kind of zazen thinking is actually an important stage in your practice, it's not just to be getting rid of. What I called introspection, or what Dogen calls non-thinking, still occurs, but it doesn't occur through representational thinking. In other words, the energy to know the world and feel the world that's in representational thinking The intent and curiosity and sensitivity that really makes representational thinking alive. When it's not in representational thinking, it still exists, but it works at a different level. It works at a different level.

[44:15]

So it's not just a matter you've stopped representational thinking, you've deepened your thinking into your sense fields. So instead of thinking through the thought, eye consciousness field, You're now what Dogen calls non-thinking, which he means as a kind of thinking, through your sense fields. Does that more or less make sense as a picture? Again, I'll try to make this a bit clearer tomorrow. But this evening I'm just kind of sort of giving us a feel for the territory.

[45:25]

When should I stop? We started at seven, so we'll go a little bit longer and then stop, huh? It did stop. Okay, we go a little bit longer than longer. We start at 7.50. Okay. So, I mean, we could take a break and then start over again, but would you like to take a break and then start, or should we just go for another 20 minutes and then stop? Okay, all right. We'll just keep going for a little bit longer. And please sit comfortably. What I'm trying to suggest here is the territory of bodhisattva practice, not just the idea of a bodhisattva.

[46:28]

Now, what does bodhisattva mean? Bodhi means enlightenment. And sattva means the stuff of. So what is the stuff of enlightenment? Thinking is not the stuff of enlightenment. So you've got to get out of the thinking stuff as where you live. So you want to live somewhere a little different where you already live. But there's a difference between living there and knowing you live there. And sensing your location there. Now, one of the central aspects of Bodhisattva practice

[47:36]

is the bodhisattva vow, which is the seed of a bodhisattva. And the bodhisattva vow, again, we'll talk about it in more detail tomorrow. And if you look at the Heart Sutra, which quite a few of you know the Heart Sutra. It says, Avalokiteshvara Bodhisattva. And Avalokiteshvara is the Bodhisattva who hears the sounds of the world. And he's probably the sort of classic, definitive bodhisattva for the Chinese Buddhist world.

[49:03]

Well, I should say Chinese, Tibetan, Vietnamese, Korean. That world, it's Abha-Lukhi-Tishvara is the definitive bodhisattva. Actually, it's called Avalokiteshvara, the Bodhisattva, Mahasattva. But we won't worry about Mahasattva this evening. In the Sanskrit it says the Bodhisattva, Avalokiteshvara Bodhisattva was coursing, coursing, you know that word? Like a sailboat courses through the ocean or a bird courses through the sky, was coursing in deep emptiness.

[50:12]

In the sense of coursing is one of the things I'm kind of talking about tonight. What are you, not only where do you live, but what are you swimming in? Or what are you coursing in? So, If the vow is essentially an intention, we first have to look at you yourself. What intention do you have in your life? Can you each look at your life and say, you know, what do I intend with my life? And if I could, what would I like to intend?

[51:17]

And then also look at not just what you'd like, but if someone from outside looked at the stuff of your life, what intention would they see? What intention are you already living, consciously and unconsciously? So this bodhisattva practice means you have to become, study yourself and have a sense of what Sukershi called your innermost request.

[52:25]

What intention are you actually living? And what intention would you like to live? No, I could stop right now because that's enough to keep you busy this evening. Yes, please come in. It can come this evening when we start tomorrow morning. Oh, ten o'clock. Ten o'clock. Okay, thanks. That's responsible. Okay.

[53:28]

And this is not just a practice for this evening, of course. Exploring one's intention and clarifying it is something you do all your life. It's good if you do all your life. Because intention is extremely powerful. And if your intention is obscure, mixed up, or whatever, then you're going to be living either passively or usually out of an unconscious intention. And when you see how important intention is in your life, and an inclusive intention, not an intention that excludes some part of you, how do you find an intention that includes

[54:35]

all of you now and what you might be. The problem of finding an intention that includes what you have been and could be, and that you can put your heart into, heart and mind into, Without ambivalence is really the sort of core of bodhisattva practice. And this you just find out from yourself. How are you going to find it out? And zazen is one of the ways to find it out. You just have to explore yourself and be willing to ask yourself this question.

[55:57]

And the more you see how powerful intention is in your life, And the more you see how effective intention is in your life, the more you realize that you yourself are an active imagination. How you imagine yourself is also intimately connected with your intention. Now, this isn't like imagining yourself in a science fiction movie. Or a horror movie. But sometimes you may imagine yourself that way. But an imagination that's intimately connected with not thinking.

[57:04]

It's thinking that allows weird imagination. When you're in the territory of feeling which includes emotion and thoughts, and you become subtle enough that you can reside in the non-graspable territory of feeling, then imagination is like the wind. The wind can't be something other than the air. Because when imagination acts through feeling, it's not imaginary. Now, so this practice of you as a bodhisattva, or who you are actually,

[58:09]

is looking at your power, your imagination, your will, and your vision. Now, power. There's quite a beautiful evergreen tree over there, pine tree of some sort, I see. And that tree has tremendous power. Yeah, the trains go by and Munster, hot summer weather. Cold and rain. And that tree just serves there. And roots go down in underneath the buildings and stuff. And its trunk is quite wonderful. And its branches are out with a wonderful sensitivity.

[59:28]

Now if the word power has any meaning, that tree has power. So how do you know your own power that's intrinsic to you, like the power of that tree? I can remember for years I've had this, you know, I'd be working on something late at night. I'd hear a whistle or a train or something. And it would pierce through me with a kind of almost painful poignancy. And a kind of, maybe you've had similar experiences. And so I would stop for a minute and sometimes the sound would be so, maybe it would be tugboats talking to another boat in the harbor.

[61:13]

In San Francisco or in New York. Or particularly trains here used to have these wonderful whistles. But distance suddenly comes in the window. And sometimes I'd be so pierced by these sounds, I would think I could die on the sound. It was a kind of weird feeling, actually. Because I thought to myself, you know, if I had to die, it would be great to die on a sound like that. But it only lasts for a moment and you think, Jesus, I'd better get back to work here and then I'm done.

[62:19]

And you put it aside as some sort of nostalgia or something. I don't know, it just reminds you of hearing things when you were a child or something. And I used to think, that's the past. I've got to get back to the present here with what I'm doing. And this for years, and it often perplexed me. Why does it pierce me so? And yet it's just something I have to put aside. And I didn't recognize really what was going on. And when I said it was in the past, that's true, I was right. But it's not the past that's in the past, it's the past that's in the present.

[63:34]

And it's not like past and future over there, it's past and future that make the present. In this sense, past and future and present all reach out from you and reach into you. And it's actually such a sound as a kind of opportunity or gate. And it's a funny cry of power or imagination or vision. But I didn't realize because I was kept trying to do the present in representational thinking, what was actually happening.

[64:40]

And I didn't realize in a way that this was power speaking to me. It was the phenomenal world speaking to me. And you could say that that bodhisattva practice is to bring the whole phenomenal world, the whole of phenomenal existence, into your body, speech, and mind. So this world we live in begins to speak in us and speak to us. And to speak through us.

[65:43]

Speak in us and to us and through us. You already said that. Actually, she tells me early in the evening what to say. And then I say it and she translates it. But sometimes I forget what she told me to say. So if any of you want to tell me, I'll say it. And that's what we'll do tomorrow. So it's this territory when our phenomenal existence begins to speak in us, that we can hear our vow and our intention. And we can begin to have a territory where our deep vision of life and our inner requests can find sustenance. So just as that pine tree or any tree has its roots down into the ground, and its branches and pine needles out into the air,

[66:51]

So you actually have your roots and your branches your roots and fruits maybe in the sounds of the world in the sights of the world in the smells, taste and feel of the world So bodhisattva practice is to recognize where you're living and where your roots are in the world. And how to open that up through your own practice and through really knowing other people. And maturing yourself and maturing the world at the same time. I think that's enough. So, tomorrow we'll try to... Look at this maybe a little more slowly and carefully.

[68:30]

Okay. Thank you very much. Now when you practice zazen, we could describe zazen, is entering the stream of the bodhisattva continuum. Is that possible to translate okay? And I'm choosing those words pretty carefully.

[69:36]

So entering the stream of the Bodhisattva continuum. Now the idea of the bodhisattva is endemic, is everywhere in Mahayana practice. It's the definitive difference between Mahayana Buddhism and earlier forms of Buddhism. And yet it's not really very easy to give you a real feeling of what it's about.

[70:50]

One, because it's rather different than the way we think. And also because it's a very highly concentrated idea. It's a word like God, maybe. It's just one word, but... You know, you could have several centuries of history concerned with it. Or a word or an idea like Father, Son and Holy Ghost. However, the bodhisattva is definitely not a god in any usual sense.

[72:12]

It's a very developed idea of a human being in an extremely full way, but it's not a god. And as I said last evening, it's not a saint or a sage. You might have a saintly bodhisattva, but that would just be one type of bodhisattva. This is a statue of a bodhisattva. And you all look like that, don't you? It's supposed to be you.

[73:14]

So I said entering the stream of the Bodhisattva continuum because the Bodhisattva is really a way of practicing. And by definition, has to be something you already are. Exactly. Discovering how you already are, or if you want to make that discovery, that's something else again. Now, as I'm emphasizing this year, this year in Europe, I'm emphasizing going fairly slowly And trying to find out what we know as we go along.

[74:34]

And I'm trying to develop certain insights or practices or ways of looking at things that relate to each other throughout this three or four months I'm here in Europe. Actually it's more like four and a half months, I think, something like that. And so as I go along, if you have something you'd like to say or ask me about, please do. And not just kind of intellectual questions, but questions about how this teaching settles into you. In what ways it makes sense to you and what ways it perplexes you?

[75:49]

So, I mean, if you wanted to, you could start with a question or... Do you have a query, a difficult question? No, it's about the same. I said Zazen is entering the stream. As I said, zazen is entering the stream. So you could ask, what is entering? Or what is the stream? But what is the continuum? All of those are very developed ideas having to do with how we exist.

[77:14]

So as you go to church, you may have gone to church or something like church and heard the Father, Son and Holy Ghost. And you might have wondered why it's not Mother, Son and Holy Ghost. Or Father, Daughter and Holy Ghost. But probably even if you'd asked the local minister, what it was about, you might not have learned much. Because mostly we go through our life with these big things sort of taken for granted. And it's not entirely wrong to let them go for granted, be taken for granted.

[78:33]

Because these words or large ideas have a power, even if you don't understand them. So you may do Bodhisattva practice, or you may say, I'm doing Bodhisattva practice. And somebody says, well, what's a Bodhisattva? And you'd have a, really wouldn't know what to say. Well, you'd chant, you know, the Heart Sutra. If you practice with a group, you may chant, you know, Avalokiteshvara, Bodhisattva, you know. You don't know what you're chanting. And in a way, there's no reason to know. If you pick up the basic feeling and attitude of the practice, which is good and

[79:34]

But I'm trying to practice Buddhism with you in a way that really takes account of Western culture in our practice. And how our Western psyche and self best work in Buddhist practice. So I think that that's best accomplished by seeing what this Buddhist culture is. And this Buddhist culture or the idea of a Bodhisattva is important. Because the bodhisattva is something you do and you already are.

[81:05]

Maybe Father, Son and Holy Ghost isn't exactly something most of you can do. Now, it may be understood by some people as something you do, but for the most part it's not a practice that is given to you in church to do. But really, the idea of the Bodhisattva is a practice that you do, whether you know it or not, when you're practicing Zen. Now, did anybody have any questions from last evening? Or anything you want to bring up?

[82:06]

If you do, you can just bring it up and I will write something on the board. Now, let me say something about the contrast between the arhat and the bodhisattva. Now, the shift from Mahayana Buddhism to Hinayana Buddhism is a slight shift, but a dramatic shift. So the change from Mahayana to Hinayana is a very fine change.

[83:11]

And I should, just out of politeness, apologize for using Hinayana, the word Hinayana, because it means lesser vehicle. And of course, if you're a practicer of Hinayana, you don't like to be called lesser vehicle. But it's become the most common word to distinguish the two schools, the earlier school and the later school. Mahayana and present-day Theravadan different from each other but not different in the same ways that Mahayana was different from early Buddhism. And I'm saying these things just so you get the picture a little bit clearer. Okay. So the shift is one from an emphasis on karma to an emphasis on dharma.

[84:27]

Shift the karma being sequential causality. And Dharma being more something like in this context, the simultaneous interdependence. In which the simultaneity is emphasized so much that you're looking at the absolute independence of each thing on each moment. It doesn't mean karma's gone away from Mahayana Buddhism. It's just emphasized slightly less than dharma. So this has to do with how you see.

[85:32]

In other words, while I'm seeing your heads, I can see a train going past the top of your heads. And from the point of view of karma, I can think, oh, the train is on schedule or it's coming to pick up people to take them to someplace else. And from the point of view of dharma, I don't think of the train as on schedule or going anywhere. It's just this wonderful blue and pale yellow thing going like this in the window. Now, both are true. But... Your life is a little different if you emphasize one more definitively than the other.

[86:54]

So if I just look at you, what is your name? Werner. If I just look at Werner in his brown pants and green shirt, And I just sort of feel your appearance as if there's a timeless quality about you. And I don't think about why you came here or what you've done with your life or anything. Or who you are. All I see is you're here. So that's more a sort of dharmic way of looking at things. So I might just look at each one of you that way. You're here. Wow. Then immediately I have to say, I'm here. Wow. Wow. And you're here and I'm here are dependent on each other.

[88:12]

But it's a simultaneous dependence, not a causal sequential dependence. In other words, the many reasons that brought me to sit here are different from the many reasons that brought you to sit here. We had different parents, experiences, different things to do this weekend. And from sorting out those causes, we got here. If we keep working on sorting out those causes, maybe we'll become a Buddha. Translated to become with become in German, but that means to receive.

[89:47]

To receive the Buddha. No, but that's the Dharma practice. So in the emphasis on karma, if we can get the causes in our life straightened out and purified sufficiently, we can become Buddha. But if I emphasize that I just look at you, or you, or you, and you're here, and I'm here, from that point of view, I can also say that what brought us both here was similar, but we might not have found it so clearly in the causes. So, you're here and I'm here.

[90:49]

And you're actually here because I'm here and I'm here because you're here. It's not so dumb, but it's not so dumb. And my... When you think that way, my here-ness and your here-ness create something that's in between us. In other words, the combined here-ness that arises from my seeing you and saying, is something that we've created together and actually is more real than you and I separately.

[92:04]

For you, if you'll excuse me for saying so, you will eventually perish. Unless you're one of the lucky few. Or unlucky few. And I will perish.

[92:24]

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