I want to talk about Sangha today. And is often the case I don't know quite what or how to say what I'm feeling. Partly I'm speaking from my feeling, and I don't want to be too maudlin. Do you know that word? It means... too obviously emotional. I'd like to find words she doesn't know. It's more and more difficult. I'm going to stop feeling like an American. I don't know more words than you. I'll lose my separate identity.

[01:17]

Might be good. You know, did you see that funny board out there with the Buddhas carved on it? You won't believe this probably, but once you've looked at it, but I asked you guys to buy it. I said, you won't believe it once you've looked at it probably, but I actually asked some of you anyway to buy it. It was a kind of experiment of mine.

[02:19]

You know, I don't, although I obviously know almost no German language, don't think by that that I'm not paying attention to your culture. I'm quite interested in and engaged now in your culture. Both German culture and Austrian culture Thank you. Mike, are you all right? OK. And you know, Americans don't know much about Germany or German culture.

[03:48]

And I think there are two main reasons. One is, of course, after the war, there was a kind of, although you may not realize it, nobody came to Germany except soldiers. And of course there was this thing after the war, and you may not have noticed it, but no one came to Germany except soldiers. Everyone I knew traveled, but they always traveled to France or Italy, someplace. No one I knew ever came to Germany. Unless they had relatives here. That's changed in the last, I'd say, quite a long time, 10 or 15 years. So the result was, anyway, you got no feedback from people about Germany and what Germany was like, etc. People went to the Salzburg Music Festival, it's about as much as we...

[04:51]

But the other reason, and I think at least as important, is that Germany doesn't have a large film industry. And most Americans actually know about France and England and so forth from British movies and French movies and Italian movies and so forth. And I think when I have been to France and England and so forth, the feeling I got from the movies was pretty accurate about what the countries are like. So Germany was quite a mystery to me when I came. For the first time, I came actually to Austria in 83 for the first time. And I didn't have any particular plan to come back.

[06:06]

I didn't have any idea about it at all. I just happened to come to a meeting somebody invited me to. And I had refused all invitations prior to that and I didn't expect to come back. And at this meeting I met people from all over Europe. But it's predominantly Germans who kept inviting me repeatedly to come back.

[07:08]

And the people who, along with With Austria, again, the people I felt the most connection with for some reason. Lynn, the other day, I don't know if you were there, Randy, in Creston, but Lynn mentioned one day, Lynn is English and lives at Creston. Lynn, who lives in Creston, has recently mentioned, and I don't know if you know this, Randy, She said, it's funny, now most of my friends are either American or German and not English. And she said that with very clearly the sense that she somehow feels naturally closer to both Germans and Americans than she does to her own people from England, where she's from. Now, I have various ideas about why this is so, but the ideas are not so important.

[08:22]

What's more important is my... for me, my feeling of entering into a lifetime with you people. Now, just to go back a moment to this board that I sort of initiated the purchase of.

[09:29]

And also two umpans, which are these gongs, these cloud gongs. They're called umpans. And I saw them at this store that Daniela and Stefan discovered, which is quite a nice guy, runs it. And he's quite helpful, interested in being helpful to us. And he sells, he's got about four floors in this building. Yeah. And he sells lots of things that he has remade, you know, copies made in Thailand or someplace. Thailand, usually, I think. And Gaurika bought a quite nice Buddha and so did you from him.

[10:32]

Pretty big. I'm impressed. It's quite nice. His wife is Thai, isn't she? Yeah. And Buying copies of Buddhas is probably better than buying old ones in general, because all the old ones are copies too. Just older copies. And after all, your copies... But he had these two old umpans, which are hard to come by.

[11:33]

And this odd board. And he was willing to sell them to us for not much more than he paid for them. So I thought, what would happen if I asked people to buy them? And then I thought, what would happen if I just asked you to buy this? And there is a... Come on, straighten up.

[12:34]

When she's incapacitated, Christiane, could you translate for a minute? It's all right. That's one thing I notice about Germans more than Americans, they like to giggle. We've had a few almost uncontrollable episodes in so sheens. Okay.

[13:35]

So, I mean, I didn't know what I was doing. I just saw these things, and so I asked myself afterwards what I was doing. I didn't know what I was doing, and so I asked myself afterwards what I was doing. I guess, again, one of them was with the sense that we might have a place, a permanent place sometime. But actually, but I was surprised because mostly I don't care whether we have a permanent place or not. If we do, great, we know, okay. But I did buy this or I did initiate the purchase of this thing. And the wooden thing I bought because it's the kind of thing no one would buy. So if no one would buy it means you inherited it or just was there.

[14:40]

Because it's kind of funky and, you know... Old? You can't translate funky? What? This funky is good enough. Okay. So I thought that if we ever have a place that could just be like inside the door somewhere and it will look like it's always been there. So that was part of my experiment. The other part of it is to try to feel out what philanthropy is like in Germany.

[16:00]

And I don't think that philanthropy is as common as it is in America. I mean, in America you get a significant tax deduction for every dollar you give away. So every dollar you're giving away, you're only giving away 50 cents or something like that. And you can give away quite a large percentage of your income. So the result is, almost everybody, even people who have no tax advantage because they barely pay any taxes, assume they're going to give away at least a few hundred to a thousand dollars a year, just naturally to do that.

[17:07]

So if you made $10,000 or $15,000, you might give away $1,000 or $2,000 during the year. And also, I guess the churches here are supported through a tax. You pay taxes, and the government pays, right? People pay 10% of their income tax automatically. And then the government gives that to the churches? Goes directly to the churches. To the finance, to the tax officers. And then to the churches. Some of it gets to the churches. There's a treaty between the church and the state. So do people individually support the church, too, by giving money?

[18:23]

A little. A little. Well, again, in the States, the custom is, when you have a meditation group, say, is that everybody gives a certain amount of money to it. And so it would be quite natural to, say, find a Buddha and say, oh, we just found this Gandhara and Buddha. It costs $25,000 and it's worth $75,000. And could everybody chip in something? And I'd write a letter in America and I'd have $25,000 in two or three weeks. But that's not the custom here. And also there's not the tax advantage. Or if we were a non-profit organization.

[19:48]

Oh, it would be a tax man. So I just thought, what would happen if we bought these things? Would anybody want to buy them? Well, I guess five or six people contributed to them. Is that right? Oh, quite a lot, really. I have a list here. It's... And partly, this is for instance, if I go to Japan this year, this bell we have here, I think, was one that you bought, Ruth, is it?

[20:52]

And then it's used by the Frankfurt sitting group? Well, you bought it together. Do you want to translate that? So anyway, if I go to Japan, I might think of some things that we could use for sashin and stuff. It might come to $3,000 or $2,000. And I'd say to myself, normally I could expect people to want to buy this, but maybe in Germany you can't and I shouldn't do it. I don't know. I'm just trying to find out. So, please understand, I don't care whatever way we want to do this or whatever we do is okay with me. But I'm trying to find out what are the ways we act together as a group.

[22:10]

We have an identity of practicing together. of coming to sesshins and seminars and to form several small sitting groups. And maybe we're going to create a legal identity in Germany at least. And do we have some financial identity? I don't know. These would be the questions that would come up in a similar situation like this in America.

[23:10]

So on the one hand I'm in small ways experimenting to see what kind of identity we do have.

[23:25]

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