So one side is, it really makes me happy to come down the stairs and hear you talking. I'm glad you're not waiting for me to talk. That's one side. But I can also say, I'm glad I told you I might give a short taste show this morning because you haven't left me much time. Now do not complain. That's the other side. That's the other side. Okay. I tried some of Nicole's hair pieces, but they didn't work, so I shaved them. I tried some of Nicole's hair bands, but they didn't work, so I shaved them. And Shiri has a friend who's... Sister.

[01:10]

It's a friend of my sister. A friend of your sister's whose husband died. No, father. Father died. And he brought this Shangri-La type construction on the altar there from Japan, though my guess is it's probably Chinese, but it may be Japanese. It could easily be either. Shiri has a sister whose friend's father died. And the father has this Shangri-La, in Shangri-La style, this shrine that you see on the altar, bought in Japan. And it could be that it's maybe Chinese, but maybe it's also Japanese. Yeah, and... It's extremely beautiful and a high order of craft. And here you'd like to have a photograph of it to show to her friend who gave it to us.

[02:20]

And I don't know where it should go eventually. Ideally, it kind of sits in a window, not against something, because you want to see the light coming through it. That's why it has glass on both sides. And I say Shangri-La, it means there's lots of stories in both Japan and China where somebody takes the wrong path or goes through a little cave or something and they end up in a land where everything is perfect. And usually the person stays there for a while, sometimes for decades, but once they leave, they can't find their way back to it.

[03:34]

We're not Shangri-La here, but we do try to at least have people have clear instructions about how to get back. So it's great that Atmar just intuitively decided to put those two bridges in. Because not only are temples in Japan usually a series of gates, that each one is a preparation for changing your modalities. Your modalities. Usually, and in Daitoku-ji and Myoshinji both, there's at least a kind of pond of some sort or little stream with a bridge over it.

[05:12]

So you have to go over a bridge to get there. And if you look at this carefully, you'll see that if you look at it coming from the left or right, because it's transitional, since it's like the way it's made, you're crossing a bridge on one side, and the other side there's a gap where you'd have to get across. So the center part is this ideal world. And if you look at it carefully, you can see that on the one side, you can read it from left to right. On the one side is a bridge over which you have to cross. And on the other side of it is something like a small gorge or a cliff where you have to cross to get there.

[06:18]

And the middle part, the central part, is the ideal land. Yeah, and of course on the island sort of itself of the ideal world, there's this really beautiful tree and this beautiful pavilion kind of temple building. So anyway, I had it just trying to be familiar with it in my window in the Johanneshof apartment. I don't know where we should put it, but we can talk about it. Ideally, again, so the light comes through. And one of the things that, again, we have to keep remembering that everything is an activity. And sometimes our conception of the world as entities is like the world is a snapshot waiting for a cause.

[07:37]

For a cause? Well, the snapshot is just stopped. But of course we know the world's changing, so you see the snapshot and you're waiting for it to change, but you're waiting for a cause which is outside the snapshot. And in our kind of entity thinking, we usually look at the world as if it were a snap shot, a stand-up picture. And a stand-up picture that waits for a trigger or a cause. As if the stand-up picture is first of all as it is, and then as if something causative comes in from the outside, which triggers the change. So this is not a snapshot. It's meant to be looked at as a passage between the two sides. But the immense amount of work that went, you know, we built ships in bottles, right? This is like a big version of that.

[08:41]

So this is the island or the port in the bottle instead of the ship. But what's interesting is the amount of work that went into it is part of its beauty. The amount of work that went into it, part of its beauty. And so I wonder if you could make that by AI, by artificial intelligence or one of these machines that makes something, would it be as beautiful? If a machine could print this out, which I think probably we don't have machines that can do that yet, I think it wouldn't be as beautiful somehow to know the amount of work that went into it as part of its activity.

[10:18]

Ich glaube nicht, dass wir schon Drucker haben, die so was Feines ausdrucken können. Aber ich glaube, selbst wenn es das gäbe, wenn man das könnte, dann wäre es nicht ganz so schön. Ich finde, dass der Arbeitsaufwand, der da hineingeflossen ist, ist Teil der Schönheit. That's one of the beauties of going to a good restaurant sometimes, because the labor-intensive food is quite interesting. You couldn't do it at home, I mean, unless you had a staff. And it's part of the experience when you go to a good restaurant sometimes, that the work that goes into the individual dishes is part of the experience. And you couldn't do that at home, for example, unless you had employees for it. Okay. So I've been asked to participate at SOM on the Big Sur coast.

[11:22]

and two more week-long conferences. And I'd like, now that I've retired, they started inviting me again, and Michael Murphy, who's founded Esalen on his family's summer home, So I've been sort of connected to Esalen and the location since even before it started as Esalen. So it's sort of nice that their attitude is, Michael and I like to hang out together, and they say, give the old guy a chance to say something, invite him to come to the conference.

[12:27]

So the first one is physics and mysticism. I don't know whether to pretend to be a mystic or to pretend to be a physicist. But it's organized by a physicist friend of mine. So I don't know. We'll find something to say. And the other one is the second one, the second week of December, is the religion of no religion. So I have to write or should write abstracts for both of these. That's kind of the rule of participation, that you can write a good abstract, which everybody reads and then decides they want to come to the conference.

[13:45]

So when I began looking a couple months ago or so at the Koan 11 in the Mumonkan, I recognized because one of the teaching devices in... Zen has got lots of teaching devices. One of the teaching devices in that Koan is... usually translated as the grasping way and the granting way. Okay. So that reminded me that Suzuki Roshi, the first, I would say, two years, two and a half years, basically he taught the grasping way and the granting way.

[15:04]

Okay. And you're saying now grasping and not gathering. I'm saying grasping at present. Yeah, and you want to translate it differently probably. Well, the literal translation is grasping and granting. Okay. but the practice is really gathering in way and granting out way. For us, grasping in English is a kind of negative word. In German, too, it's completely... It's not a good translation. Okay, but what it really means is... offering everything or taking hold of the world. So it's grasping, in this case, is taking hold of the world. But the word sept, like C-E-P-T, that is in many of our words, means to grasp or to hold.

[16:12]

So in this distinction there is the practical dynamics or what it really is about. The one is the feeling of offering everything, giving everything out. And the other is to take the world completely and to collect it. Accepting and collecting is used as grasping, as grasping. And in English, this sept part of the word means as much as holding on to it. Exceptional and so forth have the sept in it, which means to take hold of the world. The word exceptional also has this sept part in it, and that means as much as grasping the world or holding on to it. Okay. So for Sukhiroshi, he didn't realize that grasping had a negative connotation in English. So I had to, we had to sort of like make sense of it. What does he feel like when he says the word grasping?

[17:17]

But when I thought about the fact, remembered, recollected the fact that for more than two years, that's what he taught. And so it made me realize he wasn't teaching Buddhism to us. So what would I say he was teaching? I would say he was teaching actuality. Ich würde sagen, er hat Tatsächlichkeit gelehrt. How do? We're in something, actuality. How do we make sense of it?

[18:30]

You're born, there's actuality. What do we do? Wir sind in etwas. Und wie machen wir, dass das alles Sinn ergibt? Wie handeln wir darin? Now, it's interesting how... Zen is definitely part of Mahayana and Theravada Buddhism. And Sukhiroshi had complete respect for Buddhism in all its forms. And for the lineage which has made this practice possible for us. And sometimes I get a little annoyed when I read some scholars saying, well, the lineage isn't really true. Back in 500, it's not actually so-and-so, it's so-and-so.

[19:32]

And then they made up mythological names. Who the hell, I mean, heck cares. Manchmal nervt mich das ein bisschen, wenn ich irgendwas von Gelehrten lese, die dann sagen, ja, die Lehrlinie, das stimmt ja alles gar nicht wirklich. Da vor 500 Jahren, da war eigentlich der und der der Schüler und dann hat er das an den und den weitergegeben. Da denke ich mir, wen zum Kuckuck kümmert das denn? First of all, it is simply amazing you can go back fairly accurately in the lineage to the 10th and 11th century. That's unbelievable. Who can trace your family back to the 10th century unless you're the king of England? But The point of our chanting, the lineage, as I enjoyed joining with you this morning, and why we chant in Indian Sanskrit, sort of, and Chinese as well as Japanese,

[20:36]

is to recognize it's not only coming through people, it's coming through different cultures and different languages. Das machen wir, um anzuerkennen, dass diese Lehrlinie nicht nur durch unterschiedliche Menschen hindurch fließt, sondern durch unterschiedliche Kulturen und Sprachen. And the importance of it is that it's a lineage. Und was daran wichtig ist, ist, dass es eine Lehrlinie ist. Now I have some disagreement with Buddhist groups which decide to chant a lineage of women when there isn't a lineage of women. But I think we could consider saying, have chanting in the morning, and these significant women teachers are so and so and so and so. They're not a lineage, but they are part of our tradition. What I think should be clear in what we do is Buddhism has been passed in a male, I'm sorry,

[22:19]

male-dominated cultures as in the West. And I am hope and pray that we can start a female lineage that continues into the future. So I'm very happy we can have Nicole to support in her practice and her leadership. Yeah, and I hope there's, before I die, there's a few more women who become teachers in the Dharma Sangha.

[23:41]

Okay. Okay. But the point of the lineage is that when you're chanting it, you're feeling, this ancestor is also me. This ancestor is also me. This ancestor is also me. But that's the point, when you recite the teaching line, then you can have the feeling, this ancestor, that's also me. This ancestor, that's also me. I think when we're teenagers, this father is not me and this mother is not me. That's a teenage reaction.

[24:41]

But when you get to be 40 or 50, you start saying, geez, I'm a lot like my father. I'm a lot like my mother. Oh, gosh. And this is the concept of a hyper-object, or an extensional object distributed in time and space. In other words, we're multi-generational beings. And our practice is a multi-generational practice. And we are one of the generations.

[25:43]

And the Buddha is a hyper-object. In other words, we say the Buddha of ten directions, and we say the Buddha of past, present, and future, and then we say all these bodhisattvas, I mean, obviously, the Buddha is an everywhere present object, a kind of object, better to call it object than subject. And I wear this raksu because this is me teaching and speaking from the lineage, not from myself only.

[26:58]

So the custom is, you do not speak about Buddhism unless you have your raksu on. Now, if I'm at a conference on consciousness that's been going on for 25 years with neuroscientists, as I was with Nicole and Ravi and Gerald a few weeks ago, It really is. It's kind of funny for me to speak about Buddhism without putting my rock suit on, but it would be funny for them for me to have a rock suit on. They think, oh God, this is some cult. So sometimes I fold up the raksu and put it... Or I put it in my bag, which I'm carrying on my...

[28:09]

Because I think it's important to observe these things because they actually remind me that I'm speaking from a lineage and honoring Suzuki Roshi and our Dharma ancestors. Ich finde es wirklich wichtig, sich an diese Dinge zu halten, weil sie mich tatsächlich daran erinnern, dass ich aus einer Lehrlinie heraus spreche und dass ich zu Ehren von Suzuki Roshi zum Beispiel spreche. So with each name I sort of say to myself various things, depends on the morning, but often it's thankfully Dogen Zenji, thankfully Keizan, sort of like that. In myself I say thankfully.

[29:33]

So I feel in myself, I'm not only my father and my mother and my grandfather and grandparents, but I'm also Keizan, or Zhaozhou, etc. Yeah, and it makes me feel very humble because I think I have to be worthy of this ancestry. All right. Okay, so in the midst of looking at Koan 11, I recognized, yes, Suzuki Roshi was teaching actuality.

[30:43]

And I remember, you know, first he came from Japan to America. He came with the feeling I want to bring a good feeling for the Buddhist culture of Japan and I want to bring a good feeling for Dogen practice and his two main teachers, one of them was the main scholar and Zen master who was an expert on Dogen, was Tsukuyoshi's personal teacher. And so Tsukuyoshi is kind of like the expert on Dogen in Japan as a Roshi. And his feeling was, okay, so I want to come with a good feeling for the Buddhist culture and with a good feeling about what it is about in Dogen's teaching.

[31:52]

And Sukhiroshi was, so one of his most important teachers was the most famous Dogen teacher and the one who Okay. So he got to America, and what should I do? And some of you know he went out and tried begging for a couple of weeks with a bowl in San Francisco streets and it didn't work very well. Well, as I've told you, he also made a habit of taking, when you went to a grocery store, taking the worst vegetables so that other people could have the good vegetables.

[33:05]

The ones were bruised or, you know, etc. But then he thought, if I'm doing this, I can't think I get any merit for doing this, because if I take the bad vegetables... And I'm taking the merit, then I'm preventing other people from having merit with the bad vegetables. So he started everything. What should I do? How should I teach? Well, I'm an example of Buddhism for people. And he didn't want to bring Soto Buddhism into America.

[34:14]

And Dogen himself didn't even like Zen being called Zen because it's just actuality. It's not some special teaching. And Dogen himself didn't even like to call it Zen, because it's basically about reality and not about a certain school. And I remember that I really went to every single lecture for at least five years. Longer than that. So he, so let me start.

[35:20]

So he in a way refreshed himself or renewed, recreated himself because he had this new responsibility for Westerners who knew nothing about Buddhism. So he came and his idea wasn't, I'm going to show people Buddhism. He came and said, I'm going to see what people need. Okay, now... The question we've asked ourselves, which is also a question in a koan, what do we call the world? He started in this very basic way. There's the big world of politics and nations and the environment, etc. And there's the world as it appears to you.

[36:36]

Like you're staying in a hotel in New York, perhaps. Somewhere in Germany. And outside you hear streetcars and sirens and honking horns and so forth. And you may want a room in the hotel toward the back of the hotel so you don't hear all the street noise. You may think to yourself, I'd like to keep the world outside or the world of New York outside. So this is another way to use the word world. So I'm going to suggest, and what Sukhirashi suggested, is that we decide to call, not use the word world, but just say appearance.

[37:43]

Let's try to avoid all generalizations except where there's no choice. Okay, so... If you hear the noise of the city coming in through your hotel room window, you say, ah, that's the appearance that I'm hearing from the street. Okay, and if you, so if you're walking along on our path here and there's a banana slug, what do you call them in Germany? The little snails?

[39:02]

The snails without shells. Yeah. I hate to squash them, but our gardener doesn't like them eating the garden either. And so for a while I would pick them up, but then my hands are all kind of slimy. And I have a friend who was a botanist scientist, and he tried to eat them. I said, what was it like? He said, take two or three days, give all that stuff away or not. But then I hadn't seen him for a couple of years and I saw him and he said, Dick, I figured out how to prepare banana slugs so that they taste good and they're edible.

[40:13]

I haven't tried it. And he's dead now. But not from eating banana slugs. Okay. So now I kind of brush them off the path. But it's an appearance. And what happens when you stop using the word world and you see only notice appearances? So each inhale, as I've said, is an appearance. Each exhale is an appearance. Each step is an appearance. The left foot's appearance. The banana slug appearance. The tree appearance. What is this simple distinction?

[41:31]

It's a process of embodiment. If you're thinking of the world, it's about continuity. It's discursive consciousness comes in right away. If you just think of step or appearance, [...] it's an act of embodiment and it really changes your life. Each note. When you think in the context of the world, then it's continuity. And immediately... And Sukhyoshi said, One of the things he was teaching us the first two and a half years or so was to see everything as an appearance, and that was an act of embodiment.

[42:58]

And one of the first things, and this was also before, this is a process of embodiment. And one of the first things that Sukhirashi taught us in the first years is to see everything as a phenomenon. And that is a gesture, an act of embodiment. And in those days is when I first started carrying a mala. This is a mala. And I asked Nicole, I asked the bead man to make me this, and he never did. So when she went to Japan, I said, go to the store and say, why didn't you make that? And so he made one for her, for me. And there's three or four different seeds used for malas. And this one I particularly like because each seed has an eye in it. And there's another one, very common one, which has many little dots and one big dot on each seed, and that's called moon and star beads.

[44:32]

So I quickly wanted these big beads. So each one is an eye. So I, eye, an eye. And here every single pearl is an eye. And that reminds me to think of appearances with every single one. I should have stopped in the past. But if you can handle it, I'll continue for a little bit. Are your legs okay? I mean, Eric, you know I've never seen you uncross your legs.

[45:38]

That's all right. It wasn't a criticism. It was appreciation for being comfortable. Okay. So in this koan of the two hermits holding up their fist, the teaching device mentioned in it is this grasping way and granting way. And the other very common teaching device, instrument in koans, especially the Heikigan Roku, the blue cliff record, is the concept of host and guest.

[46:46]

So now you're bringing into actuality the concept of choice or difference or alternatives. Because if we're doing things, there's always an alternative. You have to choose what you do. So here's this koan in which both hermits put up their fist and say nothing. Hier ist dieser Chor, in dem beide Einsiedler ihre Faust heben und nichts sagen. So how do we choose between the alternatives? Und wie wählen wir jetzt hier zwischen den beiden Alternativen? So this is the initial practice with Suzuki Roshi was how do you cope with alternatives, choices?

[47:46]

Die anfängliche Praxis mit Suzuki Roshi, da ging es darum, wie gehst du mit Alternativen, mit Wahlmöglichkeiten um? We think in simplistic alternatives they can become more sophisticated or they can become a spectrum of differences which aren't simply alternatives. Okay, so I'm going to try to make this shorter or more telegraphic. Or perhaps just seeds that might stick with you. So what we have, if what Sukhirashi was teaching, maybe we could even say it was the religion of actuality. Vielleicht könnten wir sagen, was Suzuki Roshi gelehrt hat, war vielleicht sogar so etwas wie die Religion der Tatsächlichkeit.

[49:00]

Religion means something like, although supposedly according to Ivan Illich it's a false etymology from the 14th century, it means something like connecting. I was walking with Ivan Illich and some other folks up in Green Gulch on his first visit to Green Gulch, Ivan Illich. And he brought up some question about religion and when you're sick, do you go to Zazen or not? And I said, sick or not, you go to Zazen. He said, jeez, I wish the Catholic habits knew that. They're always finding excuses not to. And I said, no matter if you're sick or not, you still go to the Sason.

[50:11]

And there he said, I wish the Catholic apes would know that too, because they always look for preconditions to go to the Sason. So, Ivan Jelic is very quick. So he said something about religion, and I said, to the side, well, you know, like offhand I said something like, well, things are joying sometimes, and sometimes they're not. And then a moment later he said, false etymology, 14th century. I said, ooh, okay. Okay, okay. So now, in effect, what Suzuki Roshi was saying, there's always appearance and there's always an alternative.

[51:13]

Let's explore how to respond to alternatives. And you know, the word enact, which is hard to translate into German, I guess, it basically means to make happen. To enact something is to make it happen. So in English, probably better than the religion of actuality would be the religion of inactuality. And what was the beginning of that? Better than the religion of actuality, it would be better to have the religion of inactuality, inactable actuality.

[52:20]

So, in host and guest, for instance, when Tsukiyoshi would say, don't invite your thoughts to tea, That's a teaching of host and guest. Because the host is the one who doesn't invite the guest to tea. So then you begin to discover host mind and guest mind. So then the alternatives of yes, no, or like, dislike can become the granting way. Yes, everything's okay.

[53:22]

You're a Buddha already. Or the grasping ways, no, you're not Buddha, you know, you've got a long ways to go, etc. And after a while, they become Avalokiteshvara, who turns out into the world, and Manjushri, who brings the world in and has no disturbance. And after a while, these two become Avalokiteshvara, who turns into the world, and Manjushri, who cuts off and turns inward.

[54:30]

So basically, and I'm stopping now, Sukhirishi was showing us with this teaching of gathering in way and granting way Ways of relating to actuality that become ways to enhance everything and ways to internalize and somatically absorb everything. So that's a kind of religion of no religion. So if I send you an abstract called the religion of no religion, you've just heard the preface. And I'm not sure it was any useful, maybe a little too schnooky.

[55:33]

I don't know what, a little too something. But anyway, I said it, so I have to accept it. Thank you very much. So let's have a break, and how much time do we need to see the slides of Japan? Well, if we had half an hour, that would be great. Okay, and it's now, so let's come back about 10 after 20 minutes, 25 minutes from now? Yeah. 10 after 12. Okay, sorry I talked so long, but I am glad to get some of this out. Thank you.

[56:28]

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