You know, everyone in America, suddenly everybody's talking about even Obama thinking outside the box. And Marie Louise is doing this And Marie-Louise coordinates the project to build a new school in Crestone. And everyone on the architect speaks about thinking outside the box. But here we are thinking inside the box. This room is about as full as it can get. Oh, that's for Elijah. This is the space. You're almost on my lap.

[01:05]

Good morning. Good morning. So we had, I think, a fruitful, somewhat dense, perhaps, discussion yesterday. Yeah, and somehow I don't want to go over that again. Although perhaps aspects of it we should speak about at some point. This topic, what is the world, I mean, it can be the whole of The whole of Buddhism is answering or responding to that question.

[02:21]

So what part of What focus shall I choose with you to look at this question? A focus that is useful for your practice. As I did start out yesterday, I said, you know, from infancy on, we are all asking some kind of question, what is the world? And after a while, we live in the midst of received notions about the world. that are very hard to shake ourselves free of.

[03:29]

Once they get started, they have societal momentum, Once they get started, they have societal momentum. They last for centuries. It's called culture, religion, and so forth. Yeah. So both for us as contemporaries in Christianity, nowadays in this world. Science is a huge worldwide enterprise institution. As much as possible trying to answer this question, what is the world?

[04:54]

And a huge amount has been accomplished. But, I mean right now, you know, I mean, there's even larger amounts No one knows what to make of it. Some huge percentage, majority of the known world is so-called dark matter. And we don't, is it ten dimensions or... three or four or five or six dimensions. We don't know exactly. So science knows a lot, but not everything. But as I said, for us in this world, Buddhism tries to establish for us what is the world.

[06:12]

Now, I'd like to start with a koan which poses this question. That I happen to speak about in Crestone, in fact, just a few weeks ago. By the way, if I cough occasionally... Most of you are aware now, but I'm still, I'm at the tail end. T-A-I-L and T-A-L-E.

[07:14]

I'm in. Of this swine flu. As I said, the schweinehund is still wagging his tail. And the tail, the story of it is not over yet, but I'm getting better. But this is the first time this morning that I've been in the Zendo here, or Crestone, in about a month. And usually, as long as I'm not contagious, I like to sit in the Zendo even when I'm sick. I don't know.

[08:16]

Senescence is knocking at the door. Senescence means the frailties of old age. How do you spell that, please? Senescence? Ah. S-E-N-E-S-C-E-M-E-E. If that helps. Das Senium klopft schon an die Tür. Also das heißt, das echte Eide. Senescence is... But not too loud like that. We have a different word for that. Senium. Okay. It's the same root. All right. Well, good. It's the same root. I know. I can feel it. Okay. Anyway, the story is Case 12 of the Shoyuroku. Shushan comes to visit Dijan. And Dijan asks him, where are you from? And Shushan says, from the south. And Dijon says, how is it in the south these days?

[09:38]

And Shushan says, there's extensive discussion. And Dijon says, how can that compare to me here planting the fields and cooking rice? And Shushan says, but what can we do about the world? And Dijon says, what do you call the world? Now, We know Buddhism is concerned, shaped by the desire to free everyone, each of us, from mental suffering.

[10:43]

And create a world based on enlightenment. So this koan implicitly is asking you also, is that where you're at? Are you committed to ending your own mental suffering, delusion, confusion? And as much as possible. Ending the mental suffering of others. Through creating a world based on enlightenment. Now we can discuss these terms and what enlightenment means and so forth.

[11:46]

But right now, for the sake of establishing our context of our discussion, let me leave it at that. So then we can assume that You know, Buddhism is developing in China as it still is and developing here. So there's discussion in China. southern China about how do we end mental suffering and so forth. No, there's a kind of... Shushan became a famous Zen master, but there's a criticism later on in the Koran. Which is, you know, why did he just say there's extensive discussion in the South? Why didn't he show himself, says the koan.

[13:19]

Like he could have said, well, it's just too much talk about Buddha nature. Now, if he'd said that, Dijang would have probably responded differently. But there is, and there is among all of us, and what the Dharma Sangha is also is what we're doing right now, extensive discussion. And the context of the discussion is always our shared views Our Western views. Our personal experience. And the introduction now into our lives, not only of Buddhist teachings,

[14:21]

but also the experiences of Buddhist practice. So we have extensive discussion here in southern Germany. So, um dijang says well extensive discussion but how does that compare to me here planting the fields and cooking rice and given all the right now this what we've just you know, established that there's here, too, extensive discussion.

[15:35]

How is that different or the same as or... relate to us just taking care of Johanneshof. Yeah, the staff here and all of us who participate in taking care of Johanneshof in the garden and cooking the meals and so on. So Dijon, I mean, Shushan says, well, he might something like, well, all in good, but what do we do about the world? Can we just sit here and twiddle our thumbs? You're supposed to keep your thumbs like that, you're not supposed to twiddle them. Yeah, when I spoke about this at Crestone, I had just read about something called the Dark Mountain Movement.

[16:59]

And these are environmentalists who've given up on the environmental movement. It's a pretty big, strong movement in Crestone. It's all over. Governments aren't going to do anything. There's going to be a hugely reduced population in a century or two, etc. What can we do about it? Let's forget about it. Yeah. person who's written a book about it called earth but spelled with two a's E-A-A-R-T-H. And his point is, he says, we've got to give the Earth a new name because it's going to be a very different Earth.

[18:02]

I think mostly that position is probably true. But it's fun not to give up hope. Makes life more interesting. It gives me a chance to encourage my daughters and grandson to make a difference. But this is a real question. What do we do about the world? And D. Chang says, what do you call the world? And What we call the world makes a big difference.

[19:27]

And because what we call the world also edits the world we experience. What What we call the world also edits the world we experience, shapes the world we experience. And what we call the world, we could also say, calls forth the world. So I looked up various words for world. And I think world is a useful word.

[20:30]

I feel comfortable using it. And within European languages, it's primarily a Germanic word. And it means something like old age plus strength or virility. But not old age in the sense that I'm experiencing. I don't really feel old, I'm just teasing. But old age in the sense of maturity or nourishing or growing. In the sense that the world is what we live in the midst of, which has been developing a long time.

[21:40]

And in German mythology it means the middle enclosure. The middle enclosure, not including gods, etc., but the middle enclosure of humans and the physical world. We don't know how long this middle enclosure will last, but let's live it while we have it. Now, as a name for the world universe, this is not an acceptable word for me.

[22:47]

In the sense that it means to turn into one. In the sense that it means to turn into one. And we've been trying to do that since Plato or Socrates or, I don't know, forever in our culture. We've been trying to somehow turn everything into oneness. Even Einstein is trying to find a unifying equation. But from the point of view of Buddhism, there's no turning the world into one.

[23:52]

The world is always turning into many and into difference and into newness. So I don't want to call it the universe or pluriverse or multiverse or something, but anyway, not the universe. Now, the biggest word, which I've pointed out quite often, For the world in Buddhism, as I think it's okay for me to mention again, is Tathagata Garbha. And Tathagata means suchness, thusness. Yeah, and Tathagata means the movement, that coming and going of thusness.

[25:14]

And Garbha means simultaneously womb, and embryo. Now I think this is a, if you can kind of train yourself to think of the world this way, it means you notice, as we talked about at some length yesterday, that the world is not made up of entities, it's made up of activity. So you just have to, you know, because we have our cognitive linguistic habits, And we just think that way, function that way without thinking.

[26:29]

We think that way without thinking. Yeah, so you have to kind of, part of then practice then is to train your thinking. And the main way we do that in the Dharma Sangha is the use of turning words, phrases. So we have to find some way to keep reminding ourselves that everything is an activity. Maybe on different time scales, but it's all an activity. Yeah, so I'd say practice with something. And I mentioned yesterday, like picking up a stone.

[27:43]

You can see the geological activity in it. in its time scale. But you're also holding it. That's activity. You're also thinking about it. And even if it's a mountain instead of a stone, the mountain is an activity. Crestone Mountain is an activity for bears and deer and... Elk and all kinds of critters. And it's a weather machine. It gathers storms and mists and then throws them out over the center. So you just have to kind of train yourself to see everything as an activity.

[28:52]

So that's part of the word Tathagatagarbha. Everything is actually movement activity. And this movement is fertile. It's that this is simultaneously seeds and womb. This activity is seeds, and the situation is what makes the activity as seeds change, develop, and so forth. So I think really, if you start really getting this installed in your thinking,

[29:56]

And embodied in the habits you inhabit. Finding yourself in a world that's constantly moving and fertile. It's fantastic. It engages you. So there's, you know, we can use the word world or... hopefully not universe in its conception, or we can use Tathagatagarbha. But, again, we can speak in many ways about what we call the world. We call it Buddha, Dharma, Sangha.

[31:16]

We can look at the whole world in terms of Buddha, Dharma, Sangha. Or we can call it the tri-dhatu model of the realm of desire, attachment, appropriation. Appropriation, attachment. Appropriation is to grasp, to think it belongs to you. Buddhism isn't so concerned really about desire. It's concerned with our instinctive appropriation of the world as our own. And the world of form is the third, the second. And the third is the formless world. This might be the most fruitful way for us to describe the world.

[32:34]

But of course, the skandhas and the eightfold path and so forth are all descriptions of the world. Not just neutral descriptions of the world, but descriptions of the world that... are simultaneously the wisdom of engagement. Or the six parameters. These are... descriptions of the world that we can engage. Okay, so let me put that aside for a moment, all of that. And say that the world is the content of the world. What is the content of the world?

[33:48]

How do we know the content? And what is the content of the world? What is the nature of the world? Because, you know, as science says, there's all this happening and, you know, et cetera. Yeah, it's not just willy-nilly. It's not anything you want it to be. It is a kind of activity. And what is that activity? We have to find some English words for it. So one word is everything is changing. Another is everything is impermanent. No, I mean, we can say that one word changes.

[35:00]

The word change covers all of those things. But the word change in English, things can change without being impermanent. Yeah, my car changes and it's not impermanent yet. So maybe we have to add, in addition to changing, we have to add impermanent. And things are not only changing and impermanent, they're interdependent. Yeah. And that's another recognition. Everything is interdependent. Now this is obvious to us, things are interdependent.

[36:02]

But it wasn't the common way of thinking when I was young. And even the great... a teacher and scientist, Lewis Agassiz at Harvard, thought that everything was, not only a century or so ago, thought that everything was independently created. A good German or Swiss, I think he was. But Asa Gray, who was also at Harvard and a contemporary at the same colleague, he could see that the trees of Japan and the trees of the United States were interrelated.

[37:07]

And Asa Gray supplied very useful knowledge and information to Darwin. And so, I mean, that wasn't very long ago, the time of Agassiz and Asa Gray and Darwin. And this brilliant man, Agassiz, thought that everything was independently created. And when I was, I don't know, 23 or something like that, I started something with a friend called the San Francisco Bay Area Science Guide. And we had a post-Sputnik fund to support it.

[38:21]

To, you know, do some kind of review of the scientific literature for folks in the Bay Area. This was in 1960, I don't know, 1960, one or two. And that's when Rachel Carson's book Silent Spring was published and I reviewed it in the San Francisco Bay Area Science Guide. But in America, I don't know about Europe, Rachel Carson's book started the environmental movement.

[39:25]

And if it isn't obvious from the title, Silent Spring, her point was, DDT was killing birds all over America. And DDT got into the environmental interdependence the interdependence of the environment and no one believed it it took some time before her views were accepted so in my lifetime The idea of interdependence was just, I mean, on some superficial level you knew things were interdependent, but not really.

[40:55]

You didn't really get it. So there's no, there's change. The nature of this changing. It's impermanent. It's interdependent. And I think we have to now say it's also inter-emergent. Things are not just interdependent, but they're generating. new forms all the time. So I made up the word intermergence. You struggle so beautifully. Okay. But I don't think anybody's ever described interdependence as intermergence before, but I think it's implied in Buddhism.

[42:25]

Right now in this room, Things are happening that have never happened before. And thoughts are occurring that perhaps no one has ever thought before in the world, let alone in each of us. That's the dynamic of interdependence we can call intermergence. That means that the Buddha, we can think things and do things that the Buddha never imagined or experienced. So the Buddha is not our goal, the Buddha is our beginning. Okay, so changing, impermanent, interdependent, intermergence, and no...

[43:33]

And that relationships are always being generated. But they're not arising from a common ground. Or returning to a common ground. They're... generating relationships that are always new. So Zen practice is first of all to really get this description of the world. There are many ways to try to experience this connective generating world we live in.

[44:53]

which has no common ground or oneness. And it takes time to get used to this. And it takes time to really Enter into the world with this understanding. Okay, I think that's enough for before the break, don't you? Yeah, okay. See you later. Thanks for translating.

[45:43]

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