This is always a perplexing moment for me. Perplexing. Confusing. How to Because so many things have gotten started in the seminar. And I hope some of them have enough vitality to act within us, continue within us. But how to now take some of these things and give them some push.

[01:04]

At least try to make them a little clearer. Well, of course, we started with this topic, something like new Buddhism. And what I found myself emphasizing was what I think is most new about Buddhism in the West is the equal role of women in the practice. In the practice. And the role of couples in the practice. And the emphasis on a lay sangha. And the development of a lay sangha. I think those, the way that we're doing it and the emphasis on it just doesn't exist in traditional Asian Buddhism.

[02:28]

And there are of course other aspects There's, you know, what our contemporary society is. A pluralistic democratic society. This has to make a difference. And air travel makes a difference. I couldn't be here if there wasn't air travel. I would be either here or in Creston. And if you had to come here by walking or horse and buggy or something... Which is what people did in traditional Buddhism very recently.

[03:37]

You probably wouldn't be here for just a weekend. By the time you got here from... In Munich, you'd say, I'm going to stay a few weeks. Well, Buddhism developed in that context. And certainly if I just stayed, say, in Creston, other teaching and practice would develop differently. And the demography of the group would be different. It would be the practitioners would be people who could come and stay.

[04:38]

It wouldn't be otherwise. Okay, so air travel makes a difference. In the development of the practice. And of course the media makes a difference. The global media. Access to texts and so forth from all the schools of Buddhism. And contemporary critical scholarship makes a difference. It's much easier now to stick to the kind of substantial common sense of the sutras without so much of the

[05:47]

mythic container, a lot of it's in. Yeah, so the conditions of, you know, are Pluralistic society, the global media and critical scholarship and all of that makes a big difference. It creates more opportunities for practice but less support for practice. Bless the conditions which allow one to practice with depth. So all of this is making a new Buddhism. Now, given that, what I emphasize being meditation, mindfulness, and wisdom, these are true

[07:10]

been true for centuries, from the beginning. This is the beginning. And the transformative effects of language, Buddhism has entered new languages for a long, long time. So entering a new language is not new. Entering a new language in Buddhist history is not new. But how to encounter the new language and the new culture brings a certain newness. A renewal of concepts or a dropping away of concepts.

[08:23]

Now, what makes Buddhism new? inevitably and simultaneously traditional, is that it's not philosophy. It's a practice. And I never pay any attention to the sutras and the teachings. The truth is not carried in the sutras. The truth is carried in my experience. So I check up on the sutras by my experience. I mean, I certainly learned from the sutras.

[09:29]

It helps my, makes more nuanced and subtle my experience. But still, I check up on the teachings by my experience. And my obligation as a Zen teacher is not to teach anything that I haven't experienced, that I don't experience. So because Buddhism is rooted in meditation, a certain kind of meditation, and developed through that meditation and expressed through the mind of that meditation, ancient Buddhism and contemporary Buddhism are going to be pretty much the same. I would actually say not pretty much, but essentially the same.

[10:37]

Buddhism does develop. I mean, Buddhism of 1400 or something like that is not the same Buddhism of 400. But that's a development internal to Buddhism itself and internal to the practice of meditation. Okay, so it's through our experience of meditation and mindfulness that we are practicing traditional Buddhism. Okay. Now, how do we... But our mind is carried in culture and in language. And the mind that is carried by culture and language may not be the mind that can realize enlightenment.

[11:57]

Das mag nicht der Geist sein, der Erleuchtung verwirklichen kann. Das mag nicht der Geist sein, der den Buddhismus verstehen kann. Das mag die Meditation oder den Buddhismus aus Gründen des Wohlseins oder des sich Wohlfühlens praktizieren, aber nicht aus Gründen des Nichtseins. Now, we need to... The Eightfold Path starts with right views. Now, this is the most fundamental and the beginning teaching of the Buddha. So it starts with right views. It doesn't start with meditation. In fact, however though, practically speaking, to work with right views, you have to practice meditations. But your meditation will be encumbered by, limited by, your cultural views unless you also transform your views.

[13:28]

So, from the very beginning, Buddhism has said the first real step in practice is dealing with the inherited views you have, your birth views, your birth culture views. And those views are not just cultural views. They're also what I could call survival views. In other words, I would say, to put it very simply, the job of consciousness is to In other words, to put it simply, the task of consciousness is to help us survive. So, as I say, the job of consciousness is to protect us from ticks and tigers.

[14:50]

And if a tiger is leaping at you, I've never had it happen, but you need to think about getting out of the way. And if you think about it, you're dead. Yeah. You might be, anyway. We have bears in Crestum, as all of you have, and you do have to think about it. What happens if a bear is controlling you on the path, or you're between the mountain lion, say, or the bear, and their cub? This can happen. Now, I suppose if you're a really great yogi, the bear's arriving, you... And the bear stops and starts to meditate.

[16:10]

I do know that Robert Wills, Bob Wills, is that it? The The man who stages operas, Robert Wilson. Robert Wilson. Yeah. He went up in the Arctic somewhere, northern Canada or something. I don't know, he was taking some kind of mad vacation all by himself in an igloo or a tent. And after he'd been there, I don't know, a couple of weeks, suddenly a bear appeared at the door of his tent. And he said, they just stared at each other for nearly half an hour.

[17:22]

And the bear did go away. Otherwise we wouldn't have contemporary opera stage. This is the story he told me. And there are stories, well, fairly well attested, where somebody was going to kill a practitioner and their attitude and the way they dealt with it made them not do it. But in general, The job of consciousness is to protect us from ticks and tigers. Its job is to make the world predictable, cognizable, chronological, meaningful, contextual, etc. So consciousness itself is the problem.

[18:23]

Because consciousness itself assumes implicitly a permanent world, a predictable world. And the world is not predictable. But we have to function in it as if it were predictable. So here's the two truths again. Function in the world as if it were predictable, but you know it's only as if. And more fundamentally you live in the uniqueness and newness and unpredictability of the world. So you have two problems, the world view established by consciousness And the world view established by your birth culture.

[19:46]

The lived culture. So then, the only way to What the word wisdom means is to deal with your birth, your lived culture and your culture that arises from consciousness. Arises through consciousness? The worldview that rises through consciousness and the worldview that arises through your culture. Now, worldview is a fabric of metaphors. Or it's structured through metaphors. So let's take our relationship to language. Nehmen wir mal unsere Beziehung zur Sprache.

[21:04]

In English, I don't know in German, but in English the metaphor for language and words is containers and conduits. Conduit is like a pipe. Leiter. Leiter, danke. Ich weiß nicht, wie das im Deutschen ist, aber im Englischen ist die Metapher für Sprache das von Behältnissen und Leitungen. We say, I want to put my idea, you put your ideas into words. That's a container metaphor. This is pointed out by George Lakoff and Reddy and other people. Anyway, so it's a container and a pipe, sort of. And we say the meaning is right there in the words. But an example from somebody named Pamela Downing, it's easy to remember.

[22:15]

Please sit in the apple juice seat. Well, without the context of breakfast, you have no idea what that is. So we can imagine a guest who's allergic to citrus juice comes downstairs for breakfast and there's five apple juices, I mean one apple juice and five orange juices. So you say, please sit in the apple juice seat. You're great. You just say these things. It's so easy for me to say them. It's so hard for you to go... Thank you. But you have to realize, I mean, you don't have to realize, but it's useful if you realize, that language in a yogic culture and most Asian cultures, as far as I know, is conceived of as primarily contextual.

[23:46]

It's not considered contextual. Words are not considered containers and language a conduit that transfers information. Metaphor for language, I don't know what actually the metaphor for language is in Chinese or Japanese. But it has to be something like food. Now language imagined as food is very different than language imagined as a container. We have expressions like that. Like you might say, you better chew on that for a while. Do you say that in German too? Now that kind of metaphor...

[24:47]

is really the root metaphor, I'm sure, for language in a Buddhist culture anyway. In other words, the words don't contain the meaning. A carrot is not food. A carrot is a vegetable. It's not food until you eat it. It becomes food by chewing it and, you know, digesting it and so forth. So, most Buddhist statements, the meaning is not in the words. It's only there if you chew it and digest it and repeat it and... Dogen said once to his disciple Ejo, Myriad holes pierced. What the hell is that? Well, it took Ejo some time.

[26:29]

And as the story goes, Ejo had it in front of him all the time. And then he said to Dogen after a few weeks, I don't ask about... a single hole but what about myriad holes and Dogen said pierced which was Dogen's recognition that he'd understood what he meant well that's not present in the words that's present in the context of practice Dogen said, the world exists objectively. The world exists objectively. That sounds good. In the fields of spring, the hundred flowers are red. Doves cry in the willows.

[27:52]

Yeah, well again, this is something you have to stay with. So again, all of these, if you think of these statements, these obvious ones I give you now, but is that, you know, if you think of most Buddhist teachings, As mantric, you have to repeat them, and you have to repeat them in your activity. Okay, now, if context, if the context of chewing, eating, digesting is emphasized, then the person who's teaching Buddhism or writing something is trying to write it so that it can be... so it becomes food.

[29:04]

Versucht es dann so zu schreiben, dass es Nahrung wird. I would say in addition, you know, a sentence is a location. Now, is it a location for thinking? Thinking? And I find when I read people who write sentences, which is a location for thinking, Yeah, I get bored right away. I can only read a few of the sentences. And once you've got the pattern, you can predict what the whole book will be like, given the subject. But when the sense is a location for thinking and feeling and emotion, caring, or something like that,

[30:29]

when the words call forth a bodily location and feeling because of how they're a container. As poets try to do, you know. And there's a whole tradition which I haven't spoken about in Europe of... Going way back and then into the romantic tradition and Schopenhauer is a key person in this and how he influenced Nietzsche and other people, Rilke and so forth. But that's another seminar for those who are not bored by history. And Stephen Batchelor has written a very good book outlining... What's the name?

[31:54]

Stephen Batchelor has written a very good book about just that. Okay. Okay, now a sentence which is a location, it's not just a conduit leading to the next sentence. Each sentence is a location in itself as well as related to the previous and the next sentences. Those sentences can be our food. They can be repeated. You can locate yourself in them. Now, what the compilers of koans try to do is to create sentences that are locations.

[32:58]

And they usually create sentences or phrases, images. die erschaffen dann normalerweise Sätze oder Bilder, sentences, images, images, phrases, oder, ja, oder Wendungen, in denen man sich leicht verorten kann. And then they throw one in that you can't locate yourself in. And then you're kind of like, I said it's like putting a caterpillar, the other day I said it's like putting a caterpillar in the shape of a butterfly. And the caterpillar is wiggling around in this funny shape and doesn't know what the hell is this shape. And suddenly, winds pop out. And then it becomes a butterfly.

[34:11]

So in the koans they try to make sentences which don't fit in until you become a butterfly or something like that. So what I'm saying here is that in order to practice Zen in the West One thing that's new for us as practitioners in the West is we have to negotiate the matrix of metaphors that are the structure of our worldview. Now let me start with another one that I have been using since ancient times, my ancient times. Which I never mention anymore, almost never. I've used it up. Anyway, I'll try to see if I can freshen it up.

[35:13]

Which is our metaphor for space is separation. And we say, give me some space. But the metaphor for space in Buddhism is connectedness. That's a really different metaphor. Space connects, space doesn't separate. And although, as I point out, we have lots of examples of space connecting, you know, science, the tidal effect of the moon and so forth. Yeah, all the poet feels connected to the moon, you know, etc. And lovers and all that. But still, despite that, our metaphor for space is separation. So how do we... Okay, so what's an example of our metaphor for space?

[36:52]

For separation. Is it in all circumstances, and when we meet somebody, this is the example I use, Our assumption is we're separated. In fact, we're saying something like already separated. Okay, so you can take a phrase, let's call it a wisdom phrase. Like already connected. As an antidote to already separated. And you can insert that into your activity. You can insert that as a metaphor that's functioning in the less visible metaphors of our world view. We don't even think of the function of space being separation as a metaphor.

[37:57]

We think of it as a fact. And in one level it is a fact. A kind of fact. But the fact that it's really only a metaphor hidden as a fact allows us not to see any other possibility. But I guarantee you, if every person you meet from now on, when you first meet them, the first person mental location you create. A thought as an intention and a location. And you locate yourself in the thought already connected.

[39:10]

after a while you actually feel significantly more connected with other people. But even for me to say this requires me to use language as a location rather than as a conduit. Das fordert von mir, dass ich Sprache als einen Ort benutze, statt dass ich die Sprache als eine Leitung benutze. So language doesn't always go somewhere. Sometimes it locates us. Also geht die Sprache nicht immer irgendwo hin, sondern manchmal verortet sie uns. And language as a location emphasizes more the verticality of the words and not just the horizontality. Like when we talked about just now is enough. Each word separately has its verticality outside the horizontality of the sentence.

[40:32]

So wie zum Beispiel, als wir über dieses einfach jetzt oder genau jetzt ist genug gesprochen haben, da hat jedes einzelne Wort eine Vertikalität neben der Horizontalität der Worte. Okay, now, when a sentence has horizontality or a phrase and verticality, then it has mantric, repeatable possibilities. And renews itself in your activity. Okay, now words and language is that context is emphasized. Please sit in the apple juice seat. I have a diaper for you. Excuse me. Okay. Koans are layered in this way.

[41:51]

A koan is a layering of context. So what is the context of a koan? First of all, there's the compiler and then there's the commentary and layers of commentary and poems and so forth. But the context of the koan, also the koan itself is elaborately, let's see, the koan itself is complexly contextualized. But it also assumes a context of meditation, of mindfulness, of the sangha, and of a teacher. And without those contexts, you cannot really get deeply into koans.

[42:54]

You can sort of study a koan on your own if you're practicing meditation and mindfulness, but still it doesn't really open up until you're in a sangha and with a teacher. And the teacher isn't the teacher because he already understands the koans. But he's the teacher because he's already connected and all of us are connected in a context. So the teacher is the teacher because he or she is part of the context. So most people study, Western scholars study koans as if they were containers and the meaning was in the words. I think it's very hard to study a caterpillar and find a butterfly.

[44:22]

Yeah, the caterpillar without the cocoon and the context will not be a butterfly. So, Yeah. Okay? We're all butterflies now. Dogen says, The whole earth is the monk's body. It's the practitioner's body. Now you can try to think, okay, everything's interconnected, and in Buddhism everything's interdependent, so in some kind of way, you know, the butterfly effect on the other side of the planet, and the monk is somehow also then connected.

[45:32]

Yeah, that's bullshit. Yeah. You can now somehow think, yes, in Buddhism, everything is interconnected and penetrates each other. And that's why it's somehow like that with the caterpillar and the butterfly. And then there's also the butterfly effect. And that's why it's all like that. And that's nonsense. I was waiting. I didn't know what would happen. I mean, it's not that independence isn't true. It's true, but this is philosophical stuff that has nothing to do with what Dogen meant. What Dogen meant is what happens when you feel that, or you say that, or you have that present for you in your mental and physical activity.

[46:38]

The one who hears butterflies laugh know what clouds taste like. Okay, I'm smitten. Smitten means to fall in love. Smittenly? Okay. Things exist objectively. In the fields of spring. Yeah. A hundred flowers are red.

[47:41]

Doves cry in the willows. I wish we could go on in this, but we have to stop. But it's so wonderful to practice with this location of our lay sangha. It is so wonderful to practice our Lion Sangha in this place. Already connected.

[49:44]

It's possible. Thank you very much, each of you. My last seminar here, I thought that almost no one would come. We've been so busy this year. I'm very glad to end my time in Germany with you. Thank you so much for translating. Thank you so much for teaching me.

[50:34]

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