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Mu and the Mind's Unfindability
AI Suggested Keywords:
The talk explores the transformation of mental states through the practice of Zen, focusing on the perception of 'appearance' and the 'unfindability' of mind and appearance in unison. It discusses the dynamics of fear and inner emotional states, suggesting physical comfort as a remedy and reflecting on the use of mantras or prayers. The speaker also touches upon Zen koans, specifically related to Buddha nature and their historical development, emphasizing individual experience and realization over textual understanding. The need for trust in one's fundamental endowment and the concept of Buddhism distilled into the Mu koan are central themes.
Referenced Works:
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Mumonkan (Gateless Gate): Discussed in relation to Zen practice and the brevity and focus on direct experience over sutra teachings.
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Blue Cliff Records (Hekigan Roku): Mentioned as a collection emphasizing the poetic and teaching spirit of Zen masters.
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Shoyoroku (Book of Serenity): Highlighted for its emphasis on lineage and teaching styles, serving as a different facet of Zen literature.
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Diamond Sutra: Referenced for its potential intuitive insights when appropriately engaged with during practice.
Key Concepts:
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Mu Koan: Essential to the talk, representing the convergence of Zen inquiry into a single experiential point and inviting deep personal engagement.
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Buddha Nature: Explored as a non-entity intertwined with practice and realization, prompting reflection on shared nature and interconnectedness.
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Koan Literature: Explored, with an emphasis on its evolution from dialogues and anti-textual traditions in East Asian Buddhism.
AI Suggested Title: Mu and the Mind's Unfindability
So the more you have this sense of seeing the appearance of things and seeing the appearance of things as both the conventional appearance and dustus, And feeling the mind in which these things appear. And feeling the unfindability of mind and appearance at the same time. And practice is to keep bringing us into this feeling. Your whole life is cooked different You've changed the environments of your mental events. And that simply changes the way you work. The mental events often remain the same. So they eventually will change if you change the environment of the mental events.
[01:09]
The mental events remain probably the same, but if the environment is changed, this is really a big change. Thank you. to come back to having fear, because from the view of being a therapist, I work with this very often, and I saw that fear mostly comes up after persons were going to open themselves. So it seems to me very often to see the energy inside, And then it's very helpful to find out what kind of energy it is. Sometimes more sorrows and being afraid and so on, and sometimes more aggression, but it comes from inside. And the other, what she was saying before, seems to be a fear which was coming from outside.
[02:29]
And so for me it's always very helpful to separate inside or outside. And my question to you is, Because when I'm with this kind of... I feel happiest with the situation. So for me at the moment, I feel the most happiest when my child is full of fear. So I'm thinking about if you know, for example, something... like a mantra or like a prayer for children because my child is two and a half and he's crying yesterday for one hour because I want to turn on the light or something that is not his bed and so he was very full of... full of... Excitement.
[03:33]
Agitation. And even myself, I know this situation during practice, and someone else, if there is something like a mantra to use in this case. I would also like to add that most of the fears that I have about clients come first when they open up and that it is very exciting to find out what is in these feelings, that it is usually not fear at all, but a feeling of sadness or anger or anger that were not recognized before and which then become noticeable due to an energetic tension. And that is very important for me to separate between external fear, where I can overshadow someone, and inner fear. and that at the moment I experience most of the tension in myself while meditating and sometimes, but also quite simply, when I see how my child is full of fear and tension, that he has just fallen asleep, that there are aroused states for hours, and that I ask myself, or rather ask Roshi, if he has something like a mantra, so something where you can
[04:52]
Well, I don't have a clear answer, like I did a fairly clear answer for the question about Nest. I can only answer from my particularities and my experience. When my children used to be scared, I would try to give them, through my body, a bodily sensation of comfort. I bring my body against theirs, hand, elbow, whatever I could, you know, find a way to be close, you know, in the situation. Just to convey a bodily sense of comfort, and I think that's the most direct way.
[06:09]
One thing that I found out in this horse event the other night was that horses have a slightly higher body temperature than we do. And a slower heartbeat. So when you bring your body in relationship to a horse, there's warmth there and it slows you down at the same time. So you can say to Eno, do you want me to be your horse? Warm you up and slow you down. Remember that story about the dolphin and the terrified woman that Englishman told us about? And the dolphins carried her, and she came back feeling... But that was about depression.
[07:29]
She was depressed. But the dolphin anyway moved into her and carried her, and it was a very positive experience for her. Maybe you remember it better than I do. It's hard to find a dolphin when you're a kid. Yeah, I know. It's true. But I think Angela, you know, if she can be an angel, she can be a dolphin. Okay. You're so practical. It's hard to find a horse, too. I think that's why Angela mentioned maybe a mantra. Yeah. Well, my... My, again, you have to be, my daughter, the toilet was out in Japan. The toilet was in a separate building. And then she, and there's all kinds of stories in Japan that kids tell that somewhere in every toilet had somebody found hung in it or drowned in the shit in
[08:43]
And so she was quite scared. So for some reason she developed this mantra. First she'd take a vajra. You know what a vajra is? Dorje. I don't know where she got it, but she'd go out in the back toward the toilet and hold this thing up and say, Stumber! I don't know where she got it. It sounded like stumble to me, but as soon as she'd said that, then she'd go into the toilet and everything would be fine. And she was about four, five at the time, four and a half, five and a half. And then I noticed that she applied this in other circumstances.
[09:46]
Twenty-some years. 25 years ago or so, Japan, when you were a foreigner in Japan, you were quite strange. And large gangs of children, even adults, would follow you. And they would say, Gaijin, Gaijin Da, which means outsider, outsider. And particularly, she being a little girl, they would tease her. And you know how we imitate Orientals by going like this, you know?
[10:48]
Guess how they imitate us. So they say, cat eyes. And so they'd call us long noses and things like that. So they'd be all heckling her like that. And suddenly I was walking with her one day and she turned around and about 30 kids and she said, Stumble! And they scattered in all directions. Stumble! So maybe you should teach Eno to say Stumber. Every time you feel scared, say Stumber. It works. Now, just to go on with what you said, the ego bullies us. And the ego bullies us with fear.
[12:01]
And so you just have to, in a practical way, learn not to be bullied. And I think you're completely right that... When you start to open up, fears come. This is partly the fear of the loss of thought coverings. And when your practice takes certain steps, often you back up. And that's what the spiral is. You go out and you pull back. And then you go a little farther and you pull back. And so that pulling back is part of it, then going out again. But at real crucial points when one practices really developing, you know what people commonly do?
[13:03]
They fall in love. So you actually have to be aware that sometimes practice makes you fall in love instead of practicing. So you have to examine, is this falling in love a substitute for where I was going in practice? And if it is, can I bring it together? And last, you know, as I said, you can follow thoughts to their source. And if you keep following thoughts to their source, you find out their certainness. And you can see that, you know, you can see that the thought is also just interdependent and unfindable and all that stuff.
[14:35]
But when you discover a psychic nest, it's real hard to, there's a lot of fear around it and fortresses and so forth. Then you have to use a lot of skillful means to kind of open up that nest. As I say, a thief, they say, we have an expression in English anyway, a thief always returns to the scene of the crime. In this case, the thief, the thoughts that are stealing your mind, often lead you back to their nest. Now, Nico, you had a question? Yeah, the question about the relation of this koan to the mumukas version and how they relate to each other, because the mumukas is much shorter, it just says, .
[15:42]
Yeah. This is related to your question, isn't it? Yeah. And several other people asked me questions. Last night this came up, so maybe I should say something before we break for lunch, a little bit about koan literature, okay? And I'll just try to give you the picture so you can have a feeling for these koans and make your own maybe. If we go back to the source, the earliest source, we can say that in Indian culture you would not say in the beginning there was the word.
[17:08]
You'd say in the beginning there was the sound. And the sound is thought, the meaning of words and words are embedded in the sound. And the sound has a, itself has content, meaning. And then the writing system, particularly Chinese, is not phonetic. The writing system itself is ideograms or pictograms. So you have a sense of the sound having meaning and the pictures or the symbols having a separate visual meaning. Okay. And then in China there was an effort to, generally you can look at Khons as an effort to make Buddhism their own.
[18:22]
Sort of to take possession of Buddhism in a way independent of the Indian sutras. Okay. So then there was a, so what did they do? Instead of looking back to the Indian masters so much, they looked back to Chinese masters. So there's the earliest period of mythological and semi-mythological figures like Bodhidharma and the Sixth Patriarch and so forth. And then you have more historical figures like Matsu and Baicheng and so forth. And then you have the later figures who began to compile stories and put koan collections together. And then a lot of stuff was collected, written.
[19:36]
And it falls into various categories. One is biographies of famous masters. And in the earlier period, they're more mythological. In the later period, they're more historical. And then sometimes they're completely mythological about bodhisattvas and so forth. So there's various biographical stories. And then there's stories which emphasize the lineage, the connection between people. And who's similar to whom and who was descended from whom and so forth. Then there's another literature, which is similar but different, which is about teachings, not about the lineage, but about these people and the stories as teachings.
[20:56]
And... Then there began to be an emphasis not just on biography or teachings, but dialogues. Now, running through all of this development was an anti-textual theme. Against the sutras, against written texts, the teaching outside the scriptures and so forth. An iconoclastic, as someone said, since this looks like sugar, when you meet the Buddha, eat the Buddha.
[22:00]
So there's this iconoclastic anti-textual tradition too. Okay, so that resulted in emphasis on spontaneity and actual dialogues, not something that comes out of literature. And then there was also a feeling that this was independent of karma. Things occurred accidentally or spontaneously independent of karma at this moment. So then there's a sense of the opportune moment, the pecking in, the pecking out. And not only the opportune moment in history or in a situation, but an opportune moment of timelessness.
[23:03]
Where structures, time and space are stripped away. So these things, this anti-textualism and the tradition of biographies and lineage and so forth, came together in these dialogues. which occurred at a particular moment in time and yet also stop time and are embedded in this literary tradition and you make it yourself through Then in around the 13th century they started developing this wado technique of taking a phrase and embedding it in yourself. At a particular moment, this moment, and in a timeless sense where these ancients join you and you're also free. So one of the latter developments in this was different teachers picking from all of this literature, more the biographies or more the stories or more the teaching element, and putting them together in a story.
[24:53]
I would say the three main collections, the Blue Cliff Records, the Hekigan Roku, is the earliest. of the major collections. And it is very poetical. It's a vehicle for the teachings, for the sutra teachings. And mainly emphasizes all of this through the great spirit of these figures in the columns. The Mumon Khan, which is 50 cases, 51 or so, emphasizes that the practice element not so much as a vehicle for the teachings of the sutras and so forth.
[26:07]
And the Shoyuroku, which is a hundred cases like the Blue Cliff Records, Shoyuroku is the book of serenity from which this koan is from. It tends to emphasize both being a vehicle for the teachings and these individuals. But it particularly emphasizes the lineage, the connection between the individuals, the kind of style of teaching. And if anything, it emphasizes the teaching methods more than the spirit of these individual people.
[27:09]
So these koan collections are put together for slightly different purposes at different historical periods and draw on different aspects of the lineage, of the story, of the literature. And, for example, say that Ulrike is a teacher. And you are all her enlightened disciples. And all of you think she's just the cat's meow. And so you each write recollections of her down. Now, The tradition, custom is not to pay too much attention to your students' recollections of her, but to pay attention to your immediate recollections of her as the teacher.
[28:30]
But you all heard different things and you wrote down different things. And Roku means record or collection, so we'd have the Uli Roku. So your Uli Roku and your Uli Roku would be different. And later, when I put the Koan collection, I'd say, well, I like his version of the story better than his version or something. So you get slightly different versions chosen for the Momonkan than chosen for the... Okay, does that answer your question? Well, I think it's time for us to take a few minutes to sit and then have lunch.
[29:30]
So... Here we have the central challenge of Zen Buddhism. Buddha nature? No Buddha nature. Do you have any questions? Yeah. Actually, this morning, it's a long time ago, but I was... I was thinking that the yes and no has to do with who's asking. Who's asking this? And one monk in a sense knows, but deliberately transgresses.
[30:43]
And the other gets a no, because he still hasn't caused it. Consciousness, one might say. And then I wondered, The different koans, is it always who's asking? It must be the different koans reflect different aspects of the asking mind? You want to say briefly what he said in German? It's about the central question, who's asking? I think that covers everything. All the koans are asking who's reading the koan. But, you know, that's basic and that's always present, but you don't want to get stuck in who, you know, etc. Just do it.
[31:46]
Yesterday you told us something about a basic state of mind, like doing it for others, that there is pain or fear or whatever comes up to have the feeling, it hurts me, it is painful to me, I am kind of doing it for others. Can you tell us something more about this state of mind? In German? That's a good kind of question actually to discuss from the side with each other, to see what kind of experiences we have.
[33:17]
I'll come back to it in a minute What is the difference between nature and polar nature? I could say something, but really there's no answer to that kind of question. And if there is an answer, it's something you discover in yourself. Of course, you have the problem of what nature means in English, and is nature outside us, or is Berlin natural, like an anthill?
[34:52]
Yeah, but there's some feeling, and that's one of the things in this koan which is emphasized, going to your natural endowment. You know, in this first question you asked, And the first one, the skin bag, is the cause. We're the cause, you know. And the second one, there's a little bit of a challenge, you know. Well, if all beings have a Buddha nature, why don't we have a Buddha nature? Why do dogs have a Buddha nature, you know? And what the monk is doing here, or the questionnaire, is he's going to the words for a response. Instead of really...
[36:09]
being grateful for what's there, his instinct is to, in a way, talk about what he knows while challenging Zhaozhou. And challenging Buddhism, you know. And that's sometimes good. And sometimes it just arises from impulsive consciousness. In this case, Zhaozhou thinks this question is just kind of agitated mind coming up. He's not turning to his fundamental endowment. And I want to come back to that before we end.
[37:37]
Central to this koan is a trust in your fundamental endowment. Yeah, way back. Yes. Does it make any sense at all to read something in the context of teaching, for example, when one can do nothing and can only continue somehow? Is there, for example, the Theran Sutra or other sutras to read? Does it make sense at all to read something considering emptiness and so forth? Does it make sense to read a sutra like the Diamond Sutra? It's fun to read.
[38:50]
Then it's much sparsely. And you learn a lot from it, actually. You kind of have to know how to read sutras to learn from them, though. But the Diamond Sutras are rich treasure trove. If you have it internalized, it begins to appear. It's like in some situation a phrase comes up and you suddenly know what it's doing to you. But someone brought up sutras the other day. And if you're willing, if you want to, I might do some seminars in which we'll be on a section or passage from a sutra. We'll see if anyone comes. Or then after they come, if they stay.
[39:52]
But maybe I can jazz it up a little bit. I don't know, but it might be good if we learned how to read sutras. Okay, yeah. And I'll say more about this because I want to come back to what you said in relationship to the koan. And I'll come back to that in connection with the choir. Yes. For me, taming a seminar like this tames the impulsive mind a little bit, so it creates a special feeling of energy.
[40:54]
So my question is, how to stay with this kind of energy? I remember you talked about leaking and about sealing, and I would appreciate maybe some tips, Yeah, yeah, tips. Why not? And how to stay with the kind of energy from the seminar. For me it is a kind of tindle that has built up this seminar on the potential of energy and has also infused something in the restless mind. And for me it is about ways to protect it or to prevent it from running out or leaking out. And I remember that Belger-Rosch once spoke of a sealer. Yeah. Well, first of all, come to seminars occasionally.
[42:07]
I mean, really, one has to probably, to continue practice, have a seminar or contact with a teacher occasionally. And second, do zazen as close to daily as possible. And third? And third, find a way to practice mindfulness during the day. You know, some reminders. And then ideally, you try to bring these all together.
[43:14]
I mean, what's most characteristic Zen practice, try to bring all the things I just mentioned together, all the things I just mentioned, bring them together in some phrase that also lets your personal life come in. And it can be, on the one hand, as challenging as Buddha nature, no Buddha nature. Or it can be what's happening with my spouse or partner or something. And both are productive if you bring the feel and field of mind to it. We actually don't know what will happen. Christian?
[44:31]
Do you have a question? Is there a question in this column that you... I would also like to know more about the answer and the meeting of Jaros, the cursed monk, where Jaros says, because he knows it, deliberately transgresses. I don't know if this is concerning the monk, because it seems to me that he doesn't mean a dog, because the dog probably wouldn't know I'm deliberately transgressing. Yeah, you don't know all the dogs I know. Nothing, I'm just kidding. Some dogs deliberately transgress. don't assume he's not talking about maybe this means some of us also because he knows yeah
[45:45]
I would also like to know a little more about the answer of Jojo when he talks to the first man, where he says, because he knows, but still, before it happened to him, I don't know what he meant. How did he work with you? I don't know. [...] Well, the first question, does a dog have a Buddha nature, as I said before, is a pretty challenging question.
[46:58]
In a positive sense, it's a very challenging question. In this case, I would say not coming out of impulsive consciousness. And Jaojo just says yes. Putting it to rest. And the monk then is asking, why is it in this skin bag? The monk then is asking, why is it in this skin bag? And you have this basic thing, Buddha nature or just this me, this skin bag. But the sense of Buddha nature, as I said the other day, is not original mind, but the practice and realization of original mind. So Buddha nature is not an entity, it's identified with practice.
[48:06]
So here, the skin bag is our practice. So the next, when Zhaozhou says, because he knows yet deliberately transgresses, He means we don't have to transgress. That deliberately is a choice. So he means, Zhaozhou means, we have a choice about it. And also it becomes a question in its own right. As I said last night in the end, I said, none of us have deliberately transgressed. So you can ask, do we deliberately transgress?
[49:19]
Do we not? It becomes a question just like Buddha nature, no Buddha nature. The relationship to our interfering or not interfering or being a skin bag. So really you're just practicing with this. You play with it rather lightly. Try this, try that, but really stay in the presence of the questions. You just practice by playing around very easily and then try out the other side with the question. Yes. I don't like to believe that they are deliberately blocked.
[50:24]
I am much more of the opinion that everyone always does the best he can. That is much more plausible to me. find it hard to believe this whole thing about deliberately transgressing. I mean, I rather feel everyone does his or her best. It's much closer to the way I feel. Okay. I think in the sense that Angela was mentioning that sometimes when we're beginning to open up, we stop ourselves. This is deliberately transgressing, interfering with ourselves in some way. But I like that we all do our best.
[51:39]
Anything else? Something else? Yeah. Thank you very much, Christian. He's the most Buddhist Christian. And could you remind me of your question again? I asked about the music statement. I'm doing it for others, yes.
[52:57]
When you mentioned it yesterday, I asked myself, doing it for whom? For a special person or doing it for mankind or for all people? I'm so small and so many people here. I'm doing it for Buddha nature or whatever. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I think that all of this is something that just happens inside ourselves. It's not really so much whether it's actually helping others, but you feel yourself part of others. I know you can feel, you might sometimes feel, maybe I'm schizophrenic. So you might give up. But then you say, even schizophrenics have a Buddha nature. So I will practice for other schizophrenics.
[54:16]
Because if I can do it, then other schizophrenics can do it. So some feeling like that in our gut really makes practice work better. And I know that I've watched people practice over the years. A big step is when they suddenly just stop, just start helping other people practice. It's really a big step in their practice. Setting up the chairs, you know, dumb stuff like that. Well, you don't set up chairs too often around here, but... Yes.
[55:25]
I believe that you said yesterday that to say he shines means to find his own nature, or to find her. But now I can imagine a dog, at the very least, that he is away from his own nature. Is your dog shining? You said yesterday enlightenment is returning to your nature or your true nature or whatever, but I can't imagine that a dog ever has left or gone away from his true nature. So does that mean a dog is enlightened? That's the question, yeah. I mean, we can think about it that way, and actually I think it's sort of useful to think about it that way. But really we're talking about you. And how you cope with the idea that somehow you share a nature with everything.
[56:47]
It's not just asking whether a dog has an enlightened nature, but whether a dog is also vastness or... But it's really asking what kind of nature, not whether a dog has a Buddha nature or not, but what kind of nature do you share with everything? And can you really feel that and discover that? And at the same time, how does that enter into your aspiration for enlightenment? Or your imagination of what enlightenment might be. Or your taste of it. Yes?
[58:01]
Randy? I can leave when it's over, but there may be no There may be no way out of this room for any of us. Now that's not a clever statement or poetic statement. It's a true statement. This little story leaves me no Squaring. Should I make a cancellation?
[59:09]
No. Yes, I can sit here all day and then I can get up and go away. But at the same time it can be that I never come out of this room again. And that is a poetic complement in a sense. But on the other hand, when I read this little story, I don't have any freedom of movement at all. So this is a famous question or an old Zen question? But it may be more difficult than that if it's an essential question for me. So I'm just saying something because I feel that I should say something, not just sit here.
[60:22]
But I don't know whether he has a Buddha nature or not. So I'll just continue to sit here. I could go to the movies. The life of a dog. You know, Randy put his finger on it, though. There's a certain problem I have with such a demanding koan in such a short time.
[61:28]
This is not a television program. You can turn it off if you want. Certainly I can't teach Buddhism that way. So there's a problem in how intimate do we establish this connection and how do we continue it? In that way, if we really hear this question is central to not just you and me, but our society, And if this question is not only important for you and me, but for our society, our humaneness, our planetariness, and we're not used to and we're too modest to think that way, I alone in the world honored one,
[62:49]
But if we can hear that in this question or imagine that we, you know, who's going to do it? Our leaders? Our political leaders? For whom, who carries the responsibility of our existence? Together and individually. And are we able to open ourselves to that? And if we are, maybe there's no way out of this room. Yes. It's similar, like what Renly said came over to me, After dinner I came here and all my questions and thoughts I had yesterday and today were culminated on this only question, what is Buddha nature at all?
[64:19]
And I know that that's not a question to be answered, can't be answered. And this is, yeah, I just want to share that I didn't have the courage to ask something like that because I know it's a question like poison to be answered with poison or something like that. Yeah, Deutsch. It's a question that can't be answered. And if I ask the question, then it's poison that can only be answered with antidote. Yeah, maybe you could translate for me. Yeah, and I can't help you much.
[65:21]
I mean, I could say something more about the history of Buddha nature, the development of the idea of Buddha nature, which hasn't been studied much in the West. But it's not really necessary. I mean, it's helpful sometimes, but my feeling is enough has been presented in this room that you can work on this koan. And I'm sort of wondering what... what we should do right now. If we had another day or until tomorrow morning, I might say that we ought to meet together in groups again and have some discussion and then follow up on that.
[66:52]
But there isn't much time this afternoon. We don't really go very far. And I did want to talk about some breathing practices and how to study one's mental events. But I think at this point we should just try to really feel this question. And maybe we could look at the koan for a few moments. Okay, what you have here, as I expressed it this morning, is really you have the enormity of the Buddhist tradition coming down to a single point.
[68:27]
Now, Buddhism, you could bring Buddhism down to many points or groups of points, but this is one way to look at Buddhism. All of it is here in this MOOC. In this East Asian tradition and working with the Indian tradition and finally developing these dialogues, koans, and then turning word phrases. And you also have a kind of brilliance here, if you're available to it, which is you have this immense triangle and you have the dot. But with a little bit of instruction you can just deal with the dot.
[69:36]
It requires a lot of intention on your side but you can just deal with the dot. So we have down here at the bottom he didn't under the first part of the commentary, he didn't base it on his own fundamental endowment. This is where faith is required. I mean, as you say, the doubt is here. What is Buddha nature? It's not an entity. It's four words. What is Buddha nature?
[70:39]
What is Buddha? And yet, somehow the Bodhisattvas, Buddha images, our own Buddha posture affects us. What do we do? You can't resolve this intellectually. You have to let your fundamental endowment resolve it. We can say your fundamental endowment is Buddha nature. But here it's a matter of not realization, but faith, a deep faith and trust in your fundamental endowment. Can you do that?
[71:48]
Because it cannot be answered in any way but through your fundamental endowment. So you just have to keep presenting it to your fundamental endowment. That's what this koan is saying. And like in the next page where it talks about, the scholar says, I have mastered 24 styles of calligraphy. And then great song makes a dot in the air. And says, understand. And the scholar says, no. Guaizong says, you said you knew the 24 styles of calligraphy, but you don't recognize the first stroke of the character always.
[73:01]
So it means all the calligraphy comes out of this one dot. So it's not just all of these big triangles resting on this point, all of this big triangle comes out of this point. And this koan says, find a way to put yourself on this point. Are you willing? Are you ready? And they say here it's like a person who takes a jewel and puts it against his head and is willing to smash his head with the jewel. And here you can see the structural imagery and consistency in the koan, where it starts out with a gourd floating in the water, that's your head.
[74:15]
And the skin bag and deliberately transgressing. And a jewel in the sunlight is Buddha nature. Or the jewel and the pillar here, they're together. Head and gourd, jewel, etc. And the character he's in is always, always, always And then there's this thing, watch the lion turning. So there's a very powerful kind of dream imagery, philosophical, poetical, Buddhist dream imagery in this.
[75:19]
So, anyway, that's the koan. I mean, you know, it's more interesting than movies. Or sometimes. For me, you know, I find Mu, working with Mu... kind of difficult. So I feel the presence of Mu. I worked with the Mu koan with Yamada Mu Monroshi who emphasized this koan, this Mu. Having the name And I went in you know, and saw him and said, Moo, with as much dustness as I could, you know, Moo.
[76:37]
And he would say, show me Moo. Or hand me Moo. And I'd do various things. And then I'd go home, you know. Come back again. So that was great to do that with him. But usually when I work with this koan, I work with Buddha nature, no Buddha nature. Practicing this way, I don't know what Buddha nature is. At that moment, Buddha nature, I give it to everything. And then I say, no Buddha nature. It's not that I take Buddha nature away, I just give everything, no Buddha nature. It looks like I'm just walking down the street, but actually I'm saying,
[77:42]
And it adds nothing to Berlin at all, one way or the other. So I offer you this koan. Shall we sit for a little bit and then we'll stop? And... Ulrike, who translates all this stuff. Thank you. Why are you fishing with a straight hook three feet from the water?
[79:08]
Buddha nature, no Buddha nature. This is my bait. Somewhere there's a fish swimming toward you. knows you very well.
[80:14]
Now release this fish. There's no need to catch it. Buddha nature?
[81:18]
No Buddha nature. I don't know. Buddha nature? No Buddha nature. I don't know Buddha nature. No Buddha nature. Thank you all for coming and practicing together.
[82:40]
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@Score_75.98