Dogen speaks about, because establishing monastic life was extremely important to Dogen, and he emphasized it because he was very critical of monastic life at the time in Heian period Japan. In the earlier period. So he wanted to do what he thought was Sung Dynasty monasticism. And it's clear that Zen developed a kind of monasticism which was different in In China, the Chinese Zen developed a kind of monasticism which was different from earlier monasticism.

[01:03]

You know, in Japan, the word for beautiful and clean is the same word. And so he didn't think the Chinese kept themselves very clean. So he emphasized having a washroom and bathing regularly and washing your feet regularly. He really was proud, supposedly, of reintroducing a way to use a stick to clean the teeth. And that was part of his monastic rules. But one of the reasons he emphasized monastic life, for example, one of the things he said is that the self assimilates itself to others.

[02:26]

The self adjusts itself to others, but much more than adjust, assimilates, it overlaps, includes. The self enters into the self of others, and others enter into oneself. The self assimilates itself with others, more than it adapts itself to others. The self assimilates itself to others, and more than... What was the last thing? The self... The two alternatives, that's all. And vice versa. The self and others include, then close, their own self. Okay. And when he speaks about the practice of the Buddha way is the non-duality of self, other and others.

[03:51]

Und wenn er darüber spricht, dass die Praxis des Buddha-Weges die Nicht-Dualität des Selbst, des Anderen und Anderer ist, So he says that in this Vengeful Column. The absence of self and other is a condition for practicing the Buddha-Way. Okay. So he saw, as far as I can understand what he saw, he saw that the monastic life allowed you to create a field of mutual assimilation. So it was a kind of meta-identity. And the precept, I spoke about this in the Winter Branches, I consider it took me years to see it, but the far-out concept that there's a generational precept body.

[05:19]

In other words, Buddhism doesn't have a pope. There's no institutional central headquarters. There's no Vatican. But what does unite Buddhists everywhere? basically a shared conception of what is a human being. And that shared conception is rooted in the precepts, what you hold before, precept, sept is to hold. So if all of us here have these precepts, not that we follow, but that we embody, we hold them in our activity.

[06:43]

And that's what, of course, these raksas, most of us have, many of us have, represent. That we've taken the precepts. And it's even expressed in sewing, if you make it yourself. Okay, so it's a sense that The degree to which this is a multi-generational pre-sexual body is called the blood lineage. Now Richard and I share a name, but not much genetic overlap for some centuries probably. But if we share the precepts in the sense that we decide to live that way,

[07:58]

In Buddhism, it's called the blood lineage. We don't share blood, but it's called the blood lineage. So Buddhism has this Zen particularly, this way out idea, I think it's way out at least, not in usual sociological texts. If a significant or any part of a population embodies the precepts. And that embodiment is conveyed. What's the word? Authenticating and cultivating

[09:07]

the horizontal lineage. And in an overlapping way cultivates the next generation lineage. This is called the multi-generational precept body. So the lineage of teacher-disciple is one concept of lineage And another concept of the lineage, an overlapping, an emetic concept of the lineage, is this vertical lineage

[10:42]

continues as a I mean the horizontal lineage becomes a vertical lineage through generations it's a kind of a societal dimension rather than individual dimension and it's the vision of how Buddhism can transform society as well as the individual. And so Dogen's effort to establish a Heiji was also an effort to establish a society which continued the precepts. And Dogen's and was also an effort to change the society. To transform society as well as the individuals.

[11:59]

And how can he pass this Well, I mean, he would be very happy to see the barbarians of the Eastern Reich are now practicing. Because they, I think, thought of us all as barbarians. Okay. So we are accomplishing in our own way Dogen's vision. So what he tried to do again in establishing a monastery

[13:01]

And he went to Echizen, as it's called, the area where the Heiji is, because he wanted to be in the mountains and isolated from the high society of Kyoto. The society he was born into. when he first came back from China. Okay. So, again, in my primitive way, I'm trying to see if I can speak about this. Okay. So he saw the monastic life in its possibilities of assimilating self into others and others into self as creating a field of enlightenment.

[14:34]

So he would also say, I think, When a practitioner enters the world through knowing the world as appearances, And when you get the habituation of knowing the world as appearances, And you empty the world and you simultaneously empty the appearances.

[15:48]

There's a kind of technical word called kenosis, which means to empty things. A knowing which is empty, kenosis. Okay. That when you practice in a monastery or in any other circumstances emptying appearances of substantiality. You're creating a field of a non-dual field. which is free from self, the duality of self and other. And creating this field free of self and other

[16:52]

And again, this doesn't mean it's always your experience. Well, it can be or could be always your experience to various degrees. But it's more in the context of we need to sleep sometimes as well as be awake. And now it's up for the practitioner, you need meditation as part of your lived life. So there's sleeping and waking and zazen. And zazen is an absorption, a subsumption of your experience.

[18:01]

Subsumption means to absorb from underneath. Zazen is an absorption, a subsumption of your experience. It's maybe in contrast to reductionism. It epitomizes through absorbing your experience, not in reducing it. So that the habit of meditating regularly absorbs and unifies in a way waking and sleeping and generates waking and sleeping as a field of enlightenment.

[19:06]

In other words, the practice of Buddha's way is to generate a field of enlightenment. What a lovely tiny human being. And so again, The conception of the monastery is to be a field for enlightenment. Now you may not create a self which notices you're enlightened, But you're functioning in a field of enlightenment. And he would, his idea was, and my idea is too, that once you know that field, it that becomes your way of functioning to significant degrees in your ordinary life.

[20:36]

So if you also Again, practice emptying appearances. That practice establishes a field of enlightenment. So I think Dogen would say, not only does it create the likelihood that you will have an enlightenment experience, and that enlightenment experience will become an enlightening experience within your activity, But even if you don't have a specifically identifiable experience of enlightenment, if you're functioning within the field of enlightenment, it becomes

[21:54]

of functioning within the field and through the field of enlightenment. So again, it's maybe like the field or the context of plants. None of the plants are intelligent exactly or enlightened. I have a tulip that's enlightened. Anyway, even though the plants don't know, they're creating a field of intelligence. They create another dimension, they create a dimension given certain circumstances, which functions intelligently.

[23:04]

So part of the sense of the teaching that these folks and Mahayana folks and Zen folks are trying to do is deal with the idea that everyone is already enlightened. And part of what these Marayana people and the Zen people are trying to do is simply to deal with this idea that everyone is enlightened. It's partly that if we're so interrelated, if one person is enlightened, it somehow is interrelated with everyone. But a more sophisticated and realistic way of looking at it is certain conditions create a field of enlightenment which a society or a whole society or at least a sangha or some persons can function within.

[24:24]

And the concept is, if there are some persons or some groups of persons which function as fully as possible in the way human beings ought to be and ought to actually exist, Und das Konzept dabei ist, dass wenn einige Menschen oder eine Gruppe von Menschen so vollständig wie möglich auf die Art und Weise funktionieren, wie Menschen das am besten sollten, dass das dann Auswirkungen auf die gesamte Gesellschaft hat. Or at least it's the best we can do to affect the whole society. So we could say the Genjo Koan is a teaching about what is the field of enlightenment. So it starts out, when all things are the Buddha Dharma, there's delusion and enlightenment, sentient beings and

[25:31]

Buddhas. And what's the second one? And practice in birth and death. And given that, even with the Buddha Dharma, those things all exist, now let's take the next step and when the duality of non-self is not present, you begin to create a field which can transform the whole situation. And given that all things are Buddha-Dharma, if the dynamics of no self is equivalent, then we can create a field that begins to influence the dynamics of Buddha-Dharma or of enlightenment. So again we could say the profundity of the ordinary moment becomes the profundity of every moment. And that is communicated into the field of enlightenment. Yeah, I think that was rather clumsy in how I presented that, but... I've never said that before.

[27:08]

I'll improve. So you can see that this small shift from the 10,000 things to the 10,000 dharmas is Dogen's shift from their things and appearances. That's an important thing to function. But now to empty them creates a field of enlightenment. And creates a field of enlightenment for yourself. So now wisdom practice is to find ways to create a field of enlightenment for yourself.

[28:17]

And we could say that the field of enlightenment calls forth the laya vijnana. In other words, if the field of enlightenment is a particular configuration within immediacy, the alaya vishnayana as the accumulated experience of your lived life, within the infinity of its patterns, some of the patterns can be called enlightened. And what happens with field intelligence or field knowing Und was mit dieser Feldintelligenz oder das Feldwissens passiert, is field knowing calls forth from the environment information embedded in fields.

[29:44]

Ist das das Feldwissen aus dem Umfeld, aus der Umwelt, Informationen hervorruft, aus Feldern. In other words, a field, an assimilated field, has a dynamic, an activity. Because it is an activity. We even say, trying to use language from physics and neuroscience, it creates a quantum field. that's not comprehensible by consciousness. One of the things that interests me is how when you, which I do occasionally, I haven't for some years, but I did recently, spend time with scientists who are at the edge of trying to figure out how to describe what's unknown to us or barely known.

[30:58]

I mentioned this in the winter branches. Is it... Their effort is not simply to explain quantum phenomena of the collapse of the wave and stuff like that. Through consciousness. The collapse of the wave. The collapse of the wave. they're also experimenting with the edge of where language can go because they don't know where they're trying to do, in effect, the same thing we're doing.

[32:06]

So their language is not just expressing, they're not just exploring what they see in their experiment or through their colliders and so forth. Their effort also becomes an experiment and how you say certain things. And I think people wouldn't explain things as particles anymore. But they're more waves or fields. But the concept of a particle led them to trying to split atoms and so forth. So now there's new concepts which grew out of the previous concepts because their experiments are showing them the previous concepts were limited.

[33:30]

And Buddhism develops the same way, in a very similar way. In other words, what Eric brought up earlier. In our attempt to find... language for our practice. Helps finding some language, then helps develop our practice. And then that development may say, hey, that language is wrong, it's got to be more subtle. I think maybe in the upcoming seminar with the psychotherapist I should speak in some detail about the vijnana.

[34:37]

Because it's a concept that you wouldn't think up on your own. But when you bring that concept into your lived practice, it's extraordinarily fruitful. Okay. So again, I guess to say one last thing, what interests me is that a dynamic of knowing is knowing and assimilating and acting is developed through field awareness that isn't possible through individual consciousness. And so I'm very grateful to share the field of practice with you.

[36:04]

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