like to have some discussion with you at this point since I've talked so much. But I haven't said some things about the contemporary Sangha which I think I should say before we have discussion. And this is more difficult to talk about And also difficult because it could sound like I'm being critical of our Sangha. But I don't feel critical at all. I feel unbelievably supported and lucky to be practicing with you and for so long. But first just let me say, what are the institutional definitions of a sangha?

[01:18]

Well, first I would say it's a consensual democratic autocracy. Sorry, that's the way it is. So why is it like that? And can we even understand what it means to be consensual? I don't really know. It's not easy to develop an actual sense of consensuality. Consensuality. Consensus, yeah.

[02:32]

Consensus. You make things, decisions through consensus. We have the German colloquial word consens. I'm not sure yet if it's the same as when you say consensual. Okay. I don't know. Okay. Consens? Übereinstimmung, ja. Because consensus can mean also the smallest common denominator. Can mean what? The smallest common denominator. Oh. Sometimes. Yeah. And that's not what it is, what you meant. Probably not. See, that's why I hesitated. Sometimes I feel like the smallest common denominator. Undivided. I'm finding this good. Consensus means as a process that really things are only gone ahead with when everyone's in agreement.

[03:43]

It's very different than voting. And there was some years ago when I was living in Japan, the whole Japanese government collapsed because sort of 60% voted for something and 40% against, which would be a big majority in the United States. And the fact that 40% weren't brought into the consensus, the whole government collapsed. So it means there has to be a process in which people decide to agree. And there has to be a process by which you give up your disagreements for the sake of the whole.

[04:57]

Unless you feel so strongly that you're willing to stop the whole process by yourself. So it's a rather complex process of getting agreement that you probably have to grow up with to know how it works. But it Yeah. But we have some kind of consensual process here.

[06:03]

For the most part, I can't get anyone to do anything that they don't that the group doesn't want to do. I can say it, but somehow it's not heard. And in a voluntary sangha, you can't fire people. You know, you're fired, you didn't... So in fact, we have some kind of consensual system. But it does take time for a sangha to develop a sense of how you do things through consensus. And how you don't just outvote the ones who disagree, you really work hard at bringing the ones who don't agree into the consensus. So overall, a sangha is a consensual process.

[07:28]

And what goes along with that is that there has to be a lot of psychological openness within the sangha. You have to be willing to give up some amount of your privacy. And you have to be willing to know yourself to some degree how others know you. Und man muss bereit sein, sich selber zu einem gewissen Ausmaß so zu kennen oder kennenzulernen, wie andere einen kennenlernen oder kennen. I mean, we are all familiar with, well, we all know so-and-so is a jerk. But no one tells so-and-so they're a jerk.

[08:31]

We all know he or she has such and such habits and they just, you know, but that's okay. There's sometimes a striking difference between the way everyone knows you but the way you don't know yourself. In a Sangha, that difference is not so pronounced. Sangha functions healthily when you're able to get feedback, realistic feedback about yourself. And a sangha also, you know, it's like a big family in many ways and betrayals are more, felt more strongly and can't be gotten away from than they are in ordinary society. And if you watch Japanese...

[09:47]

movies or read stories, there's two codes. There's the samurai code, which is based on justice, and the more Buddhist code, based on compassion. In other words, do we really want justice, or do we have compassion as the root of our views. And to some extent, the sense of justice has to be secondary to the sense of compassion. And Sanghas have insides and outsides.

[11:07]

And when a person is outside, they can move themselves outside, or the Sangha can decide somebody doesn't fit in. And so sometimes there's a person who doesn't find something they like, and so they leave. If you trust the consensual process, you try to bring what you don't like as much as possible into the sangha and see if the sangha can solve it. But here in the West, usually if something happens, hurt somebody or they don't like the way they leave instead of trying to solve it within the Sangha.

[12:17]

So I'm just saying that this consensual process, which has been part of the Sangha for 2500 years, I'd say, It's going to be tested by our views of what is democracy and what is individualism in the West. Individualism. One of the reasons a simple democracy doesn't work in a Sangha because particularly when the Sangha is rooted around a teaching lineage if a Sangha is a teaching institution something like a college then you can have more of a

[13:36]

democracy. But when the glue of a sangha is the bonding between people and with the teacher, You can't vote that in or out. And if you have a sangha where there's more than one teacher, the one who has the most people bonded with him will control everything. So you can vote anybody to be head, but the head can't get anything done without the permission of the one I mean, I know an example of this, that everyone bonded to him or her.

[14:44]

So the voting is a sham. But much is somewhat the same when it's a tribal culture. And democracy doesn't work very well with tribal cultures. Western democracy. And America doesn't seem to understand that at all. But of course Bush himself, if we talk about the real culprit here, one of them, Bush himself is a tribal person. And he's supporting his tribe.

[15:54]

It's just much more disguised. He talks democracy, but he supports his tribe. So in any case, in the midst of this, A consensual process is a very particular process to come to an agreement and what we do and how we take care of things. Und inmitten all dessen, was jetzt gesagt wurde, ist also das doch dieser Übereinstimmungsprozess ein ganz besonderer Prozess, also eben zusammenzukommen mit dem, was wir tun und in welcher Weise wir uns um die Dinge kümmern und so weiter. And I also said it's democratic. Because among the senior people, there's a kind of voting that goes on. And it's also, as I said, autocratic. I'm sorry to say. Because in the end, it's rooted in the decision of the teacher to practice with the student or disciple and the disciple to practice with the teacher.

[17:08]

And so, within a practicing Sangha, Things that relate to what the practice is tend to be decided autocratically. And the the more autocratic side of the Sangha should be limited to decisions about what the practice is. And the other decisions, which are the majority of the decisions, should be mostly made through a consensual process. Okay, so that's generally how the Sangha has...

[18:11]

thrived and survived over the centuries. And probably if we have a, if sanghas continue to be a way of supporting a teaching lineage, We're going to have to develop some form of this institutional process. Decisional and institutional process. Now, another, a little more a little more subtle or a little different aspect of a sangha in a yogic culture.

[19:26]

This is a little harder to figure out how to talk about. Is that a sangha is not so much psychological as Body logical. Now, body logical is not to be confused with bodilogical. That's just my joke. We hope we're bodilogical, but we have to know how to be bodilogical. What are you studying, bodilogical? Bodeology.

[20:28]

Yeah, you can try to do your thesis in bodeology. Confuse your professors. Okay. Now, why do I say body logical? I hunted around for a corporal logical. Maybe that's... In English, that sounds like you're not a sergeant. In German, we don't have body. This is very German, yeah? The corpse. Yeah, it's the same. Probably, yes. Okay. So anyway, you've got the general idea that I'm talking about something I don't know how to talk about. But, you know, in a yoga culture, there's a sense of body a wide sense of the body.

[21:39]

The Dharmakaya means the body of connectedness. The Sambhogakaya is the body of connectedness. bliss or merit. The nirmanakaya is the body of transformation. And in a similar way we could talk about a sanghakaya or sangha body. Now what does it mean to say something like this? It means that on one hand, and I'm just going to throw some things out in a mosaic-like way, collage, that the consensual process works better when there's a kind of

[22:48]

In other words, we don't meet mind to mind, we meet body to body. Now, if I say we meet body to body, it sounds sort of erotic or something. In our culture. Erotic? Yeah, it sounds that way. He says, what? Just precise. Yeah, okay. But in a... body logical culture, all body contact is not necessarily erotic. There are really, if you live in Japan, startlingly difference, startling differences in people's familiarity with strangers' bodies. That we would find offensive, where you dial in America, you dial 9-1-1.

[24:07]

You can walk into an elevator and see a completely strange pregnant woman and put your hand right in her stomach and say, oh, how's the baby coming along? You couldn't do that in America. Really? Yeah, it's marvelous. It's marvelous? Okay, let's go to Japan. Right. But there's just a sense, well, we all have bodies, we all have babies, I mean, it's just... They don't have the sense of territorial, same territorial sense. And until General MacArthur, all public baths were nude men and women together. And it was not considered sexual.

[25:25]

A sexual situation is two adults fully clothed in a room alone. The general idea in Japan, you can never trust two men alone, a man and a woman alone, but you can trust them naked with others. So it's a very different way of thinking about things. Okay. So it's just assumed that there's a kind of shared body sense. And that actually causes some problems in the Western Sangha.

[26:32]

Because you sit a sashin with someone for seven days and you actually have a shared body sense more than knowing their mind. And practicing creates a kind of physical intimacy that's sometimes misunderstood. Yeah, I mean, most of us can have physical intimacy with children. It's okay, but it's not so possible to have physical intimacy with adults unless they're your spouse. So anyway, in the traditional Sangha, there's a lot of just physical things. feeling we're all in the same boat body together.

[27:46]

But there's also differences like, you know, when I was at a heiji, you could not embarrass somebody verbally. If you did, there was an effort to get revenge. But you could kick and punch people without any problem. Like, you know, if I told you not to do something, I could just kick you in the leg. And, you know, I finally said to some of the monks, I said, you know, I partly grew up in the street in America, and you just don't do that. Yeah, so... You know, there are differences that, you know, we don't want to necessarily be like that.

[28:55]

I'm just saying there's differences. And one of the differences also in a consensual process, body differences, is there's no leader's It's exactly not leaders and followers. That distinction doesn't exist. Everybody's a leader and a follower. So, for example, at a heiji, I was ranked exactly the minute I came in. The person who came in a minute afterwards was below me, and the person who came in a minute before me was above me. I remember Graham Petsche saying to me once, because he came into Heiji ahead of Kobunjiro Roshi. And he said, well, he may be a Roshi now, but I was in a Heiji ahead of him, and I'm his boss.

[30:08]

But it really is, you are more or less can ask somebody immediately below you what to do, but you can't ask the person below that what to do. You can only ask the person next to you to do something. And I had a problem when I was, you know, they have these big, I'm just trying to give you examples here, to show you differences, not preferences. All the monks, Haiti's built on a hillside, and so all these monks are in a line, sometimes as many as 180. And when I was there, and they're like a big black caterpillar going up the steps.

[31:09]

So people joined the line though from various places. Kitchen monks joined from one place and the Dojo monks joined from another place. Then you're going along. It's freezing cold, by the way. Going along. So somebody comes and they push in front of you. So I would let them push in front of me. So this whole line is pushing in front of me. Then we go a little further and another line would start pushing in front of me. And then everyone got mad at me. I said, what are you doing? And I said, well, I was being polite. They were pushing in front of me, so I let them go. And he said, what are you doing there?

[32:24]

And I said, I wanted to be polite and let them go. Are you crazy? You have to push back. Are you crazy? You have to push back. A certain amount of pushing is required. And if I don't push back, the whole line is held up behind me. So you have to push, maybe one or two get in, but then mostly you just push yourself and they push. There's a sort of standard pushing of acceptable pushing. And if you don't understand that, you'll never get on the Tokyo subway. But it's not rude. It's just a different kind of behavior. But it makes people very attentive to the physical world.

[33:29]

Now here's where I feel I might be seen as being critical. For example, we moved from the other room to this room. I don't know who moved my cushion, but someone did. I'm grateful they brought it here. But in the other room, there was a space here where my bell was. When the cushion was brought here, it was here, and there was no space for my bell. That's okay. I can just push the cushion back and put the bell up. But this simply is very unlikely to have happened in a heiji or daitoku-ji.

[34:29]

Because the person would have an exact... image of the way it was there, and he or she would put it exactly the same way here. It's as clear as in German when you get the word order wrong and you put the verb in the right place, The sentence feels weird. In a body culture, there's a grammar to the way physical objects are. But more precisely, Objects are not objects.

[35:35]

Objects are in various ways I've talked about often. Do you have the same word object in German? I mean, the word object means to throw against. It means to throw. Eject is eject, to throw, and ob means toward or against. So a ball is an object, for sure. Yeah, but in a body culture, What we call objects are activities. So if anybody brings this, they see the activity, which is... I'm sitting, there's a bell, there's a glass. The activity is what's moved, not the cushion.

[36:38]

Another example is, you know, there's this scroll that was behind us in the other room. And it's got quite a bad fold, kind of crack in it. It's a scroll given to me once by the Dalai Lama and he wrote something on the bottom. And I'm fairly certain that someone carried it to another place open without rolling it up. So in a culture which sees it as an activity, you would never move it flat. You'd always roll it up. move it to the place, hang it and roll it down.

[37:47]

And if you carry it even a short distance flat, any movement will crack the surface. I'm not blaming anyone, it's just that we tend to view things as objects. Oh, I moved the scroll from there to there, it's an object. But if it's an activity, you roll it up and move it. And you roll it up without your hands in the middle, because your hands in the middle... crack it itself. You always roll it at the end. So there's a kind of attunement that happens in the sangha body through the objects of the world as well as each of us.

[38:57]

And we take care of things very well here. What I'm talking about is just about fine-tuning. Now, there's also what we would call a psychological dimension to this body attunement. In body culture, the body is considered to be intelligent. The body isn't just something that carries the mind around.

[40:00]

And that idea is, of course, very different than when I was young. I mean, somebody like Herman Kahn. Can you remember Herman Kahn? Mr. Thinkshake. He said, my brain could be in a Petri dish. I don't need my body. His body got much too big for him. But no one would say that nowadays. They might think it, but they wouldn't say it. But still, the degree, for instance, we put our hands like this. And I said, you know, to do it very lightly with the hands, each independent. But in a monastery, and I don't require you to do this, your hands are always like this.

[41:08]

And we just think it's kind of arbitrary, kind of weird, some sort of dumb rule. And I wouldn't want to have students who went around like this all the time. I would think you're being too monk-like. But there's a reason for it. Which is much of our psychology, memories, traumas, shocks... need, shock, are carried in our body. And particularly carried in the back. And you can see it when people get massaged.

[42:12]

Often they do Rolfing or one of those techniques. Often many memories come up. And in America, osteopathy, which was, I think, invented in America. There was a Swedenborgian student who connected it with Swedenborg's ideas. And it was originally considered a way to give people spiritual experiences. Yeah, and then there's the whole history of the American medical, etc. But anyway... When you do hold your hands like this, not just some of the time, but all the time, eventually your back feels like there's daggers in it.

[43:21]

And your back is going to give up, or this hand posture is going to give up. And if you keep doing it, suddenly the back starts to relax. It's a very interesting psychological, a kind of psychological process. And you can see when somebody, that this has happened, their back is soft, their shoulders are soft. So, and also... You know, I see people who've been practicing here for years. It's not important, but they still stand with their feet almost touching each other. And they do Kenyan like this. And we put our feet this distance apart. And it's a different kind of stance.

[44:37]

And when they're doing kin-in or walking, they sort of walk the usual way. And if you lower your center to your hara, you slide your feet. And Japanese monastic shoes, they don't work unless you slide. And the way the kimono and the robes are held with the body, You can't really walk this way. You have to walk with a different kind of gait. Now, we can't put you all in dresses, you know, with low waistlines so that you learn this. But Paul would look good, you know. But I'm saying that part of the...

[45:42]

psychological dynamic of a sangha is this body attunement outside your usual habits. To break the psychological trance we're in. that we maintain by holding our body a certain way. That's my opinion. While you're here, what we do is we put our hands, for instance, like this. And not the thumbs like this.

[46:59]

And you'll find it makes a difference. If your thumbs are here and you begin to feel the difference, you'll find out actually things change throughout your body with just such a small difference. The idea, and we say, oh, I just want to do it naturally. So what's naturally like this? I miss Mama. I always think this is important. I show people and a few minutes later their hands are like this. And others, you know, I show them pretty soon they're like this. Keeping everyone away. So it's arbitrary, but there's nothing natural here. It's all posture. So the attempt of this kind of body culture is to create postures which break your habitual postures.

[48:09]

But Tsukiroshi... He gave up trying to teach people this, because most people just didn't pick it up, or their own psychological trance doesn't let them see it. The idea is, you're free to do it the way you want, but you're also free to do it the way the Sangha does it. Okay, we should stop soon. But first I want to sing a lullaby. No, I want to talk about lullabies.

[49:10]

It's the most universal form of music. All over the world, lullabies are pretty much the same and you can recognize whether it's a lullaby or not right away. Even deaf sign language deaf sign language for babies is more like a visual massage. It's more soft and dance-like. And babies seem to have as big a capacity for for signs as they have for words. But deaf people's signing to babies is like baby talk. And when the mother sings to the baby, the baby goes into a kind of trance.

[50:11]

And actually the chemistry of the saliva changes for a baby being sung to than a baby being spoken to. This study was all done by a Scottish woman psychologist, pediatrician. Her name wasn't McLean, but you know. Could have been. And if a mother's on a TV screen, if she talks to the baby, the baby doesn't pay much attention. If she sings to the baby on the TV screen, the baby just stares at the screen. So I guess, just before lunch, I don't have much time, but we're all in a kind of trance.

[51:42]

A trance in our society or a stepping out of the trance of our society. Or a trance within our own psychology. And a body culture is partly designed as an antidote to that. And let me say, looking out here at our snowy garden, which is really, every year gets better, and most of it is through the work and vision of Atmar. But part of the purpose of a garden in a temple is to attract birds. Because you want to get up before first light.

[52:54]

And Buddhist temples always, every city even until recently, until Rachel Carson pointed it out in Silent Spring, There are birds present. And birds are not just an incidental part of our practice. We get up early so that we hear birds getting up. And one of the symbols of transmission from teacher to disciple are two, I'm sorry to say, roosters. Roosters, two roosters like chickens, birds. Okay, but males, not because they're male, but because they both...

[53:59]

separately announce the dawn. So this separately announcing the ten directions, announcing the dawn, and the sense of the temple and our schedule being connected to the birds. It's all part of the sense of a body culture and a sangha body. Sorry, I downloaded a bit or crammed too much into it. Cock-a-doodle-doo. Thank you very much.

[55:07]

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