I asked Otmar, what do you think I could do? Because sometimes I worry my lectures are a little bit all over the place. That was good, I like that. And he said, you know, you might consider staying on one subject a little more. He knows I think it's impossible for me, but good advice. So I thought after I talked with him, I thought, well, maybe I should just give the same lecture two or three times. And take a different point and try to Look at it.

[01:12]

For instance, I could easily give a series of lectures or at least one lecture on Dung Shan seeing his reflection in the flowing stream. Chairman, it's wonderful. It sounds like a mountain stream going over rocks. Sometimes I listen to the chanting and I watch my excuse me for saying this, watch my tongue, trying to keep up with all the different positions in German. Because the way you pronounce words, the way Germans pronounce words requires different positions than English does.

[02:12]

As far as I can tell, it requires more positions and I can't keep up. But I enjoy the tongue dance. Okay. You know, I left the, as you can see, I leave my Zagu down while I'm giving a lecture. So clearly in a bodily culture, this is that I'm still bowing now to you. So the lecture starts when I start bowing and ends when I finish bowing at the end. So instead of the

[03:27]

huddle in the moving stream, the reflection in the moving stream, I decided to talk about flower arranging. Not that I know much about it, but I'll talk about it. Okay. And what I'm trying to do, or what's important to me, is, and it's increasingly important to me, is really for us to see the differences between the two cultures. Yeah, a relational worldview. a relational-based worldview, and an entity-based worldview.

[04:50]

Or we could say a generative culture, generated culture, and a creator culture. And it makes a huge difference if you think this culture or this world was created by some entity outside this world. Und es macht einen riesigen Unterschied, ob du davon ausgehst, dass diese Welt von einer Entität, einem etwas außerhalb der Welt erschaffen wurde. And if you think this world is created now, in the middle of being in the middle.

[05:57]

Oder ob du glaubst, dass die Welt jetzt erschaffen wird, während des inmitten Seins der, des inmitten Seins. Yeah, and the difference is a real possibility for us. Because we're all human beings, we can look at things differently. And if you can really get the shift, a much, it's suddenly a parent, what's going on? And you've got to get it in your ordinary daily activity. So it's wonderful that you're primarily laypersons. Because you have such a wonderful opportunity to see if you can actually find it in yourself, in your daily activity.

[07:08]

Even though you're living in a different world than everyone around you practically. People are edging toward this, exploring this worldview. Google has conferences on mindfulness, you know. Google, the corporation. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I just thought you weren't finished. I never finish. In fact, Norman Fisher is one of their advisors. Okay. Yeah. And that concerns me because if you're going to get this sufficient to make it your practice in your life,

[08:25]

So you can continue it in your life. And be an exemplar of it for others in your life. Like a model? Yeah. An example, a model. And just continue the lineage. And even teach. Then you've got to know, feel, embody how this teaching is put together. So I tried to say something about it by speaking about Chinese poetry in the last tissue. And characters, kanji. Yeah. And Okay, so East Asia has a relational-based worldview.

[10:01]

Not an entity-based worldview. So we could also say relational activity-based worldview. So again, everything is seen as a kind of nexus of relationships. Now, our words tend to be used to turn an object into an entity. an object into an entity an object of attention into an entity so as I said to Christina this morning and Katrin

[11:03]

As we were walking back. The word consider in English means to do things according to the stars by astrology. Sidereal and con and sidereal. Sidereal means stars. so if we had a relational based culture and that was expressed in our language which by the way an ideograph and oral based language uses more of the brain And more fully than our sound-based language. And again an ideographic and... Picture-based and sound-based.

[12:26]

What? A picture-based, sound-based language uses more of the brain than just a sound-based language. So if you have a brain injury from a car accident or something, And you lose your ability to speak, you lose your ability to read and everything. And a Chinese or Japanese person might lose one or the other, or both, depending on the accident. Sorry, the ability to speak and what was the other thing? To lose both. To read. Okay. Because it's sound-based. So because... Because the relational-based culture, worldview, is a generated culture, self-generating culture.

[13:55]

It's a... I don't know how to say what I want to say exactly. It's assumed that... It's assumed that everything is relational. Let's just say it that way. So, if we have a word like consider... And it was an ideogram, a kanji. You might have a star beside two people. And then you'd see that it was about the stars, two people doing something together under a star.

[15:16]

And consciousness, that would be a tough one to sort of draw. Because it means internal moral knowledge that allows you to act. Conscience. So you'd have a little shape for knowledge and a little shape for action and a little shape for right action or morality. Okay, so for whatever reason, that East Asia chose a relational-based worldview. Primarily. And we chose a worldview based on outside creator.

[16:20]

The difference is ramified, expressed in everything. Our letters, A, B, C, D, etc., you can make with two-by-fours. Two-by-fours? With pieces of wood. Matchsticks. You can't make a Japanese kanji with matchsticks. It floats in space. It's connected by space. It's relational. Okay, flower arranging.

[17:27]

This is a small part of yesterday's lecture. Not yesterday, indeed. So, in Japan they plant cherry blossoms along the highways. In Japan pflanzen sie Kirschblüten entlang der Straßen. Flowers for Japanese people exist in nature. Für Japaner existieren Blumen in der Natur. And actually in agriculture too, because they're understood as the source of the crops. Und auch in der Agrikultur, denn die werden als the source of the crops. The seeds were developed into edible crops. So that's a relational concept, of course. And they're also understood as a human activity. And primarily as an activity of offering. So cherry blossoms are planted along roads as an offering of beauty to people walking along the road.

[18:57]

And flowers are planted in gardens for an offering. And the flowers, the cherry blossoms, are planted along paths and roads. Because all the petals tend to fall at once and then you have this beautiful path of petals. And so you drive, you take drives through these things and petals are just flowing around the car because they're blowing off the trees and lifting up off the road, etc. And you walk along in them, etc. And it's also a good excuse for getting drunk.

[20:01]

Because it's essentialized as a moment of transiency. So the sense of something as a relational activity it's taken for granted everything is such. But culture is often to slow down the parts so you see them. Like in this room, Hugo Kugelhaus' idea is we can see the structure.

[21:03]

So if you want to learn carpentry or building, you have to be able to, if you want to be able to do it, you want to be able to continue it and teach it. you have to be able to see the structure. And probably also the electrical wiring and the plumbing. So Zen practice and flower range, the crafts of Japan, have a lot to do with slowing down the structure so you see it. So if a flower is primarily an offering, it's not just a flower, it's an activity. So you could say the flower doesn't exist.

[22:26]

Yeah, the flower is not red, nor is the willow green. A little Zen poem. The flower is not red, nor is the willow green. Yeah, so it's a flower as a human activity in that it's offered. the thing flower hardly exists the offering flower exists and if the offering flower didn't exist we wouldn't plant them in gardens and so on and so forth greenhouses Okay, so what is the flower ceremony study? It studies the activity of offering. Okay, so the first offering is what?

[23:45]

The mind of the offerer. So the flower ranger first prepares his or her mind. Okay. bereitet derjenige, der das Blumenbesteck macht, zunächst mal sein oder ihren Geist vor. And then there's the reason for the offering. Und dann gibt es den Grund für die Darbringung. A tea ceremony or a Buddha's birthday. Wie eine Tee-Zeremonie oder Buddha's Geburtstag oder so. And then there's the context, an altar, a room, etc. Und dann gibt es den Kontext, ein Altar oder ein Raum oder so. The table. And then the container or vase. And then the relationship of each flower to each flower.

[24:56]

Because it's an offering not only of flowers, but of each flower to each other flower. Weil das auch eine Darbringung von nicht nur jeder Blume, sondern auch von jeder Blume zu jeder anderen ist. She would never take five or six flowers and just put them in a vase with all the same length stems. Also würdest du nie eine Handvoll Blumen nehmen und die alle in eine Vase mit derselben Länge der Stiele nehmen. Because you can feel it wasn't an offering. Just I had these six or seven flowers stuck on the vase. Yeah, heck, what the heck. Because I'm supposed to have flowers there. Yeah. That's like salt in your food before you taste it. You're not relating to what's happening. Okay.

[25:59]

So the flowers each, you know, they shouldn't be all, they should, the Zen way is the flowers should look sort of natural as if you saw them in the garden. The formal flower arranging practice is more an aesthetic, sculptural, painterly creation. Yeah. So, I mean, and you have a bunch of flowers like these. They kind of go together as a bunch. But there should be some topography to the surface and sculptural feeling in its relationship to the vase.

[27:04]

So it's clear there was an activity of offering because the flower is an activity of offering. So we can understand these Japanese crafts The tea ceremony and so forth. As a kind of exposure of the structure behind a relational worldview. behind the structure or the structure behind a relational worldview. Okay.

[28:05]

And then there's this sense of essentializing it. And... So in tea ceremony, generally, there's only one flower. So as I said, the ingredients are the context and the vase and etc., but also the observer. The vase and the... The one who's going to view the flower. Okay. So again, essentialized, it's just one flower. The offerer and the observer. Okay. Now, we do the We do the meal service.

[29:25]

This is an exposure or simplification in a way of the relationship of cooking, serving and eating. Was hast du jetzt gesagt? Eine Offenlegung des Kochens und Servierens und Essens. Yeah. I mean, we say in the chant, we should know how it comes to us. So wie wir das in der Rezitation sagen, wir sollten wissen, wie es zu uns kommt. And we say, actually it says the first bite, but in English we say the first portion. And in German, since portion and bite, we say the first bowl. So the first portion is for the precepts. And the second is for the practice of samadhi. And the third is to save all beings. So in the context of practice, we're eating in order to follow the precepts, hold the precepts in mind, and have the strength to practice samadhi.

[30:58]

And now we're doing it with all sentient beings. Okay. And so there's the cooking and the serving and the eating. And when is it essentialized? When essentialized is... That's another lecture. Essentialized for Ines is when the last server turns and bows to everyone who's been eating. It's not a signal to the dohan, now you can hit the clackers. It's instead of saying, hey, all of this comes together in serving and eating together.

[32:12]

And that moment centralizes the whole cooking, serving, eating arrangement, relationship. And then we hit the clackers and start the meal. Okay. Clear? Clear enough? I mean, it just comes out of a culture that everything is relational, so you ought to see the relationships in order to really enact them. Yeah, there's two or three more topics that fit right in with this relational picture But it's time to stop.

[33:22]

Thank you for letting me talk about these things. People ask you, what did you do? We talked about law arranging. But it was the best example of seeing something as an activity. I could think of The flower is the activity of offering. Everything is like that. Thank you. We fulfill our purposes equally to every being and every being.

[34:26]

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