George, you should have hammocks or swings from the ceiling. Everyone could sit. Since we have the creator of the building here, we can imagine modifying it. We could have swings, too. How many of you read the koan last night or some of the list at the beginning? Most of you did not. Well, I mean, I can tell you the story very briefly.

[01:15]

You don't have to read it. Don't worry about it. Yao Shan hadn't... given a talk for a while. So the temple superintendent came and said, you know, the students really would like you to give a talk. So Yaoshan came out He was requested to do so. What does it say that when it's five requests from three people, you're kind of obligated to do something. So he said, we'll ring the bell.

[02:31]

So the monks gathered. And Yaoshan came out and got up on his seat. And he sat there for a while. And then he got down. And... What? Difficulty here. Me, okay. Sorry. Can you change the acoustics? Very good. I know, it's me. Okay, so anyway, this is such a simple story, I was mumbling, I'm sorry.

[03:34]

Entschuldigung. Entschuldigung. Entschuldigung. This is a story Suzuki Roshi liked a lot. And he told it quite often. Anyway, so he rang the bell and he came out. And he got up on his seat. And he stayed there a while. And then he got down and went back to his room. It's as if I suddenly get up now and kind of tromped up the stairs and left you guys here. And Eric followed me upstairs. And he said, can you give it to me?

[04:38]

He said, why didn't you give a talk? Why didn't you utter a single word? And Yao said, I'm not a teacher of scriptures, I'm a Zen master. That's not the way I said it, but that's the way Sukhyo Hoshi is taught. Now, this story sounds like a Zen story. So you may think it's a Zen story. Man, you might be right. But really it's a story about you. Yeah. You know how dreams, I use the example of dreams quite a lot.

[05:42]

Because they're, you know, a common experience. So dreams seem to lead away from me. often they seem to lead away from the waking state. But when you follow them, often they are like a secret stairway that appears in the middle of your daily life. So this koan, again, what state of mind do you appreciate such a common thing as sitting down and getting up? You can think about it in such a way conceptually like he appeared and then went into emptiness by going away and was teaching emptiness or something.

[06:57]

And I suppose that's a way of explaining, but explanations don't explain. Imagine if, right now while you're sitting here, and you're not, you're alert but you're kind of in a half dreamy state. And you feel someone come into the room. And you look and it's your dead grandmother.

[08:12]

Or grandfather, someone. And they walk into the room. And you're not sure you can speak to them. And you feel your body, you can't look up or down, you can't act, but you feel your body totally connected with this person. And they sit down. And they sit for a while and you can't quite believe it. And then they get up and slowly walk away. And you look again and there's no one there. This koan is much more like that than some sort of explanation of emptiness.

[09:32]

This koan is in a way asking you, can you see this way in ordinary circumstances? With this kind of vividness. If your dead grandmother or grandfather came into the room, they wouldn't have to say anything. Just sitting down and getting up would change you for the rest of your life. So... So to go back to... What I was speaking about last night.

[10:49]

Let me tell you some other stories of Yaoshan. Now, one story I told you a while ago, a couple of seminars ago. is that Yashan was sitting. And his teacher, Shido, came in. And here, again, we have this kind of beginning lineage of Buddhism entering China. of the sixth patriarch and then Nan Yue and Xin Yuan. And then you have Matsu and Shido.

[12:05]

And all of Zen Buddhism comes from those two people. Shido's disciple was Yaoshan. And this Yaoshan is our great, great, great, great grandfather who just appeared in this room. So Yaoshan was sitting and Shido came in and said, what are you doing? Shido said, I'm not doing nothing. Yaoshan said, I'm not doing anything. So then Shido said to him, then you're sitting idly. We have missed several versions of the story here.

[13:07]

So this is the way Zen develops. Misunderstandings. Anyway, he said... sitting idly. No, he said, I'm not doing anything. So Shido said, ah, then you're sitting idly. And Yaoshan said, if I were sitting idly, then I'd be doing something. Yeah. If I were sitting idly, then I'd be doing something. If your grandfather, dead grandfather, or grandmother appeared in this room, and you were just sitting there, would you be sitting idly?

[14:34]

Would you be doing anything? Perhaps your body couldn't even move. You couldn't look up, down, left or right. So then Shido said to him, what is this? You said you were doing nothing. What is this not doing? And Yaoshan said, not even the saints know. Now, another story about Yaoshan.

[15:35]

And remember that, for those of you who... Well, let me say that these koans are, of course, presenting lineage teachings. Also, lasst mich kurz bemerken, diese koans präsentieren eine And what characterizes a lineage usually is particular gates that are used to enter. So this koan and these stories are kind of very similar doors.

[16:53]

And of course, for those of you interested in the whole Shoyuroku, the whole Book of Serenity, this koan is a duplicate, in a way, parallels the opening koan of the book where World Honored One, the Buddha, gets up on his seat and then gets down without saying anything. And Manjushri, who was the superintendent in this case, Manjushri said, behold, the Dharma of the Dharma King is us.

[17:56]

The Dharma of the Dharma King, behold, the Dharma of the Dharma King is us. There should have been someone who said, oh, come off it. But they sort of said that because someone said, oh, that Manjushri, he's always leaking. So again, this present koan is pointing out the Buddha may do this, or this holiness, the Dalai Lama can do this, but also a Chinese teacher named Yao Shan can do it too.

[18:58]

That is, and you can do it too. That is, if you have a mind that can see your dead grandfather or grandmother. Or reading a story, you can see Yaoshan. Or you can see me or each other the way your body and mind might see your dead mother, dead grandmother, dead grandfather. So, Yaoshan's I'm telling you so many things, I'm sorry, but they're all the same things, so don't worry. Yaoshan is the teacher of Daowu and Yunyan. And that's the story I've told you many times of Yunyan is sweeping. And Dao, his older brother in the Dharma and in the womb, said, came and saw Yunyang this weekend and said, hmm,

[20:27]

too busy. And Yunyan said, you should know there is one who is not busy. This is a koan that Thich Nhat Hanh told me his teacher gave him. Years ago in I was working with Ty in France. He suddenly told me this koan was an important early koan in his practice with his teacher. And he told the story as if you're in the middle of the kitchen, this kind of funny little dirt-floored kitchen. And he told me the story, of course, as if he were relating, just relating, and what he was doing, relating how his teacher told him.

[22:06]

But, of course, he was giving me the comment, too. Often you spend time with him and he starts telling you this story about something. Involving trees and somebody he met somewhere. And the story is sort of like a Russian fairy tale. It goes along and wanders into no ending. And he's telling you like it actually happened to him some months ago. You know, I'm used to it now, but... It takes a moment to realize he's just making this up and he's telling a story about me because he's talking to me, he's telling me something.

[23:15]

And I thought to myself, oh Jesus, my dead grandfather is walking around again. So that is referred to in the koan, right here where it says, I believe. The unskilled one is always at leisure in the first line, as a German it would be. So this takes the same, this koan refers to the Jungian and Daowu story about One who is not busy.

[24:25]

But turns it slightly instead of saying the one who's not busy says the unskilled one. Now these koans are trying to talk to you in a certain subtlety that you won't actually talk to yourself. But you often don't, you know, it's not always easy to see yourself doing this. So these stories are meant to kind of get stuck in you, in such a way that they

[25:34]

kind of block your cognitive energy. Because your cognitive energy is always kind of going along and trying to make sense of things. But usually try to make sense of things in a very narrow range. But in a normal case, Usually in terms of your daily mind. Which is very powerful. But we tend to confuse our daily mind with the present. Yeah.

[26:46]

And so it's very convincing. And this way you just hear what's going on. Christiana has to tell the woman, what is her name, in the cooking the food? Erica. Christiana has to tell Erica what time we're going to have lunch and so forth. And there's probably other things waiting for Christiana in her office up in the main house. And this seems like... daily life and the present. But daily mind is, in addition to daily mind, what maybe we could call non-daily mind is present too. Mm-hmm. And non-daily mind is often hard to notice.

[27:59]

But often we can notice it because the present talks to us. You stumble or you drop something. You stumble or you drop something. Or things don't seem to quite work out. Or there's a kind of satisfying unease underneath your day. You don't know quite what it is. It's like a toothache you'd like to have your tongue in. And maybe you can notice by the presence speaking to you That your non-daily mind, which really covers your whole life, not just the immediate present, and includes the real language of dreams, is pressing on.

[29:21]

And you don't hear it yourself. But things in the daily life are pressing on you. What's going on here? Why is this bell against my cheek? Would an accident be a very powerful way of pressing what they might know you? Not always, but often. I mean, when you're really down here, a car has to hit you. What's this opal doing against my cheek? But even if it was a real accident, it still brings up non-daily mind. It still does bring up.

[30:47]

Even if the accident isn't the present speaking to you, it makes it speak to you. The unskilled one is always at leisure. Could I change it again? Okay. So this last story I want to tell you about Yaoshan. Then we'll probably take a break. A monk came to see Yaoshan. And he must have been pretty old. So Yaoshan said, what is your age?

[31:49]

The monk said 72. Now this was an obvious question to ask an old monk who's traveling to the temple. And you can imagine if a 72-year-old monk came up here and came in. and visited with Giorgio, Giorgio might be quite surprised how he got here. Particularly in those days when there were no opals. He said, what is your age? And the monk said, 72. And Yashan said, is it really 72? And again, this monk is probably being further sucked into this question.

[33:12]

And the monk said, Because he's probably, you know, quite proud of his age and his health, walking around, so he likes to imagine he looks 50, so he... Yes. Now, Just let me say something about hitting in Zen.

[34:14]

I mean, this is all body culture. And violence, I mean, physicality is not connected with violence and sexuality. Of course it includes that, but so much of physicality is outside of both sexuality and violence that it's just much more common to poke each other and so forth. When I used to, I used to spend quite a lot of time with Suzuki Roshi. And when I first I was 25 and I would sit down.

[35:24]

He'd come sit beside me on the couch. He had only been in the United States at that time, maybe less than a year. And he hadn't picked up our distance. What you can feel is different in Austria than Germany, slightly, and it's different in Italy than Denmark and so forth. But Sukriya should come over and sit beside me. I said, what is this man doing? And his hip would be right against me. I said, this is awful intimate. Yeah. And Thich Nhat Hanh does the same thing. You start to walk with him, and you're trying to take a walk with him.

[36:29]

Pretty soon he's like this again. And then he's like this. And there's no little squeezes, you know, like we go... It's just a steady pressure. And when I saw his holiness in this hotel lobby, there was all this stuff going on, you know, and people trying to get him, giving him Bavarian beer mugs as presents and things like that. And... What he's going to do with a Bavarian beer mug, I don't know. But he saw me and he said, he stopped and he said, old friend. I'm like, what? Then he came up to me and he went... And then he came up to me.

[37:44]

And everybody said, huh? But it's a kind of physicality that we don't do. And I doubt it, Floor. holiness does it with, you know, Austrian politicians we meet. But I think he thinks I'm half Asian, so it's probably all right. And when I used to drive Suzuki Roshi, I told you, it was often hard to drive because he would sleep with his head on my arm here. And it's very hard to steer and shit.

[38:44]

Without waking him up. So if I asked Eric this question, and I said, how old are you, Eric? And Eric said, 32. He would lie. 27. 29. So Eric says, 29. So I said, is it really 29? In our culture, I wouldn't hit it. But I'd do something like, come on, Eric. Are you really, is it really 29? Come on, you're not 29. I said, 29. Anyway. So it's not really to be understood as something violent or a hit.

[40:04]

It's much more like, come on, Eric. It's really a simple story, another simple story. What's your age? 72. 72. Is it really 72? Yes. And so this was... Are you still with me? Um... So I won't say there's more that comes... There's a larger context to this story, but let's keep it that simple.

[41:12]

And let's look at it a moment in terms of our discussion last night. Now, sometimes... Well, I have to say a little bit something about this, a little bit more about the koan first. This koan was related to Saoshan. Again, to show you the lineage, we have the sixth patriarch. I'm not expecting you to remember this, but I'm expecting you to feel it.

[42:15]

We have the sixth patriarch in Qingyuan. And then Shi Dou. And then Yao Shan. And then Yan Min. And then Dung Shan. And then Shao Shan. So Shao Shan is here. And he's the great, great grand son of Yao Shan. Okay, so this story of his great-great-grandfather is being told by a monk, too. It's being related to a monk. The monk is relating it to Saoshan. And so... The monk tells the story about 72 and yes and being hit.

[43:26]

And the monk says, what's this all about? And Zhaoshan says, the first arrow struck lightly, the second went deep into the body. And Zhaoshan says, the first arrow struck And again, this arrow went into the body, not into the mind. That's the way we talk in Zen. So these simple stories, and I'm giving you these simple stories here to see if it helps you develop a feeling for, insight into this kind of koan language. This language which seems to lead away from your ordinary life.

[44:30]

But then if you have a feeling for your non-daily mind, you may feel it suddenly surfacing through a secret passageway in your daily life. Interfering with or blocking your cognitive energy. Your cognitive habits. Your habit energy. So the first arrow struck lightly and the second went deep. So why is this an arrow? Sometimes this can be interpreted like Yao Shan is trying to take away this old monk's ideas about age, time, comparisons and so forth.

[46:11]

And this is again not a bad explanation. It may be slightly more useful than saying he's returning to emptiness. But really I think it would be more useful to you to use the tool we opened last night of borrowed consciousness, immediate consciousness and secondary consciousness. When you say something, when he answers, I'm 72, in which category is he answering? Obviously, he has to be answering in borrowed consciousness. Because the idea of counting your years to 72 is something that's done in borrowed consciousness. So, Yao Shan tries to point this out by saying, is it really 72?

[47:42]

Now, is Yao Shan trying to... Teach him something? Is this pedagogical? No, to some extent. And if it's a student, maybe it's more pedagogical. But really, this is just a visiting monk. At 72, maybe some attention should be given to him. But still, it's really not so kind of, well, I know something and I should teach something to this other person. It's much more a friendship.

[48:44]

It's a kind of love. You're practicing Zen together. But you also want to have some real contact, some real conversation with this person. When he thinks he's 72, you can't. Like you ask somebody, what do you do? And you're really just trying to do something to start a conversation. And... And he says, I'm president of small time enterprises.

[49:49]

Good, and do you have a house and a car? Because this guy, obviously, by telling you he's president of the small-time enterprises, wants you to look at him from borrowed consciousness. And so you might say to him, where did you borrow these enterprises? But if he answered, he said, what do you do? Aber wenn er geantwortet hätte, was tust du?

[50:56]

But if he answered the way a little boy I know answered me when I asked him the same question? Aber wenn er in der Art und Weise geantwortet hätte, wie ein kleiner Junge geantwortet hat, als ich ihn gefragt hatte? If this man said to me? Wenn dieser Mann gesagt hätte zu mir? Sometimes I do, sometimes I don't. Also wenn er geantwortet hätte, manchmal tue ich, manchmal nicht. So you say, what do you do? Oh, sometimes I do, sometimes I don't. Hey, you think, now here's a chance for a real conversation. Or perhaps the guy is, you know, retarded. Yeah. Yeah. So out of a kind of friendship you say, oh, come on, you're not, it's really, you're really 72?

[52:01]

Yes. And don't I look younger? So this is the second arrow which went deep. Because at that point, the monk has to realize something else is happening here. So I would ask you, this question. If someone, if your dead grandfather appeared, your dead grandmother appeared and sat down on the seat, and looked at you from their venerable no age, because they some time ago stopped counting. There was nothing left to count. And they said to you, what's your age?

[53:25]

What would you answer? So, we should take a break in a moment. I would like, after the break, you to get together in maybe three or four groups. And like we did in Munich, some of you come to Saschins and some other seminars. I would like you to disperse yourself among the groups. So if there's some questions for my friends here, I only see once a year. About what I've been teaching or what we've been doing in the Dharma Sangha the last few months.

[54:31]

Some of you who were been to the Sashin or seminars can have at least some idea if you remember if you stir around immediate consciousness a bit. Like stirring old dead leaves. But I'd also like you to see if each group can come up with an answer to the question. Well, you can come up with another question if you like. Come up with an answer to Yaoshan's question, what is your age? And don't try to be too zen-y.

[55:32]

I thought you might like the sound of the bell. Ah. Did anyone go swimming? How was it? Good? Which lake did you go to? Is that one where the dam is? Good. Maybe if it's a nice day tomorrow, I'll go. What did you feel about the question of what age are you?

[57:10]

Does anybody have any ideas about it or any way you'd answer it? Yes. That what you'd say is yes? Okay. Is that the decision of your group or is this a personal decision? We decided that the group... I see, okay. All right. Anyone else? Everyone else, I mean? And all the others? Yeah. Well, I have the difficulty. It's not difficulty at all. That's good. Yeah, I have the difficulty, which is no difficulty at all.

[58:15]

So if I'm with the koan, I can talk about the koan, and I can make sense of it, and it's quite... It's not only intellectual, but it's also relating to my practice. But when I remember my feeling I had when you were telling the story of entering in my place grandmother, then it's just a feeling that cannot be expressed and nothing is said to my grandmother. It's just sitting with her and having intimate feelings. There is no answer. What is this no answer? Anyway, in German. I have a problem. It's actually not a problem. I can read this Kronen. It makes sense. Not only if it's connected to my practice. But when I look at myself in the mirror, But what if your dead grandmother said to you, what age are you?

[59:24]

But what would it be like if your grandmother asked you how old you are? I cannot imagine my grandmother asking that question. Yeah, okay. Anyone else? If I ask you, what age are you? Okay. Yeah. Yeah. So maybe my great-grandmother comes in and asks me this question. I don't know what age I am because I'm astonished and maybe I wouldn't know what to say and what age I am.

[60:53]

Good. I would say, because networking is something imaginary, I get this question, and how was the journey? Yeah, it's an opening for sure. What age are you? How was the journey? Yeah, good. I mean, my asking you this isn't a test, I'm just trying to explore the way koans think. And the courage of Castaneda to try anything is good. Yeah. The same age, yeah. Anyone else has some? Yeah. Yeah. I would say between five and grandfather.

[62:12]

Between five and grandfather? Great-grandfather. Great-grandfather. Okay. Yes? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Since my imagination is not good enough to imagine it, I think about it now only in concepts of my answer. So I think it's not a question that in a situation there would be the right answer there. It's not when I think about it now. I think it's not possible to come up with an immediate or secondary conscious answer. Well, I mean, looking at a question like this of Yashan asking, what age are you?

[63:29]

And this man saying 72. And if we think of it in terms of the distinctions I made of immediate borrowed and secondary consciousness, And it's clear that he, by answering that I'm 72 and by then saying yes again, when he says, is it really 72? He's clearly prodding him to respond in the friendship or the connectedness immediate consciousness without some outside reference point.

[64:31]

So in a way this is a this kind of story is not trying is I'm not trying to teach you a kind of technique. You can think out a Zen answer. But it's trying to illustrate a dialogue that maybe you'll remember and have a feeling for. That makes you aware that you can respond to someone else in ways that isn't always in borrowed consciousness. Or that answers what's really being asked.

[65:42]

it's as simple as somebody saying, you know, what do you do? And you recognize they really just want to talk with you. So you answer in a way that answers their question but also allows a conversation to start. And it's not more mysterious than that. Except that These two people are Zen practitioners. So they're talking about a particular way of being in the world. For those of you who just arrived this afternoon, the context in which we started speaking from last night and this morning may not be clear to you.

[67:07]

But it can't be helped, I guess. So if you, the kind of answers, and one way to look at something like this is to imagine your own answer. If the monk answered in borrowed consciousness and clearly it's asking, can you answer in some other way? A good answer is that, I mean, an answer that I might make, if I make up some answers for myself.

[68:08]

If someone said to me, what age are you? If a Zen teacher or, say, we were speaking about his holiness, the Dalai Lama or Thich Nhat Hanh asked me, what age are you? If I felt he really wanted to know my age, I would tell him my age. But I would probably, because I realize it's quite inconsequential and also is an answer that arises in a very shallow consciousness. I would want to have a contact with him as I expressed earlier with Eric, just this feeling of actual physical touching, but that's present sometimes just without touching.

[69:22]

And it's interesting talking with Kai because Because more than any Zen teacher I know, he maintains an almost exclusive presence in immediate consciousness. And I've told you the story about the peace march in New York. Some of you, right? Did I tell a story? You don't remember? You've been to every seminar, so if you don't remember. Well, I'll tell you the story because it's uncanny

[70:24]

that the presence can be this powerful. And what I'm telling you is fact. I was at the last big peace conference march in new york there's one in london i was in and then i was one in new york and i guess the year was uh 81 or something like that and there maybe the one in in London was after that, but this was the last big one in the States that I know about. And it was a huge march, I mean, from hundreds of thousands of people. And it stretched from the south part of New York filling the whole street of Fifth Avenue going... All the way up and... And Ty and I and three students of... Two students or three students of mine... And... And...

[71:39]

Sister Phong, I believe, and a Vietnamese niece of Thich Nhat Hanh. I don't know if that adds up, but I think there were six of us. Fifth Avenue is a very wide street. Counting the sidewalks and the lanes, it's several times the width of this room. And I'd met Tai before and we'd given some lectures together and become friends. But I'd never, I'd noticed he walked slowly, you know, he always walks slowly upstairs and things. But I had never done anything like this before, so I had no idea what to expect. Because I'm used to adjusting myself to other people.

[73:09]

Perhaps not as much as some people would like, but you know, I do my best. All right, so we met around nine o'clock down at the UN area. And we got in the parade sort of in the beginning somewhere. So we started to walk. We just get up and walk. I'm patient. I'm almost as slow as Dick. There's like a rush. Would you rather I say something?

[74:14]

So, I would stand there. Okay. I'll stand there. So, he took hold of me like this. Like this. I guess he had his own answer. And he started to walk, and there were about six of us, right? And he would walk like this. And we would get to sometimes, I couldn't believe we were going. And what was amazing is the entire parade wouldn't go astray. We get to a street or a stop light. Sometimes they let traffic through. And then the light would turn green, or the police in the state goes. So I would step forward.

[75:15]

But he wouldn't. He just stood there for three or four or five minutes. Sometimes in the middle of a block, he would just stop for several minutes. And I thought, this man is outrageous. This is unbelievable. How has he had the nerve to do it? But it was so nice to be with him. And he said, such a convincing presence. Okay, here we are. We said, hug, you know, let's hug him. And there was the AFL-CIO, which is the American Union. Sort of marching band was behind us. And they were kind of... And they couldn't get past us.

[76:36]

And how six people held an entire parade, which was hundreds of people across, without anyone going across the field he made. I couldn't believe it, but it happened. And the organizers got kind of frantic, because the rest of the parade was blocks ahead of us. But they couldn't even signal people to go past us. They wouldn't go past us. It's like he... physically committed the six of us to move at this pace. I'm trying to explain it now. I don't know what happened. Then I guess the people to the sides of us, all sort of out of respect, kind of stayed there too.

[78:13]

And then that conveyed down the line, the whole width of the street. And I think the people on the side just didn't go any further out of respect. And that continued all the way down the street. Now this is also a man, by the way, who was willing and able to train people and himself to be in between the lines of North and South Vietnamese and go out and take bodies out or take wounded people out of both sides. So this is a person of tremendous force and personal courage. And once a bazooka shell went into his tent and it was picked up and thrown out and blew up outside. So, to just finish the anecdote about the parade. Around, say we started at 9, around 10, 30, quarter of 11, they just decided to reroute us.

[79:15]

Because no one would pass us and the entire parade behind us was held up. And it took them about an hour and a half to figure out that they should do something. So they put up these wooden horses across the road in front of us. They're wooden and they block traffic with them in construction sites. And so they came to us and they ordinarily said, the whole parade is turning this way now. And we looked and the rest were up there, but What could we do? So we turned to the right. And after we turned right and there were a few hundred people behind us, they took the things away and let the rest of the parade go through.

[80:37]

So we found... So we found ourselves something with a kind of lonely contingent of 150 people or so walking along. I don't know quite what happened, but the big parade, of course, has to stop for traffic and various things. But Thich Nhat Hanh is completely unfazed. We continued at our own pace. His feeling was, it was very clear, that a parade like this is not about a body count. It's not about a kind of voting by going out into the parade. Yeah. What we were protesting were those rockets that were... What were the ones that were put into Germany late in the... What?

[81:38]

The ones that can get to Russia in eight minutes or something like that. Cruise missiles, maybe, yeah. So I don't know quite what happened, but we went down this street and then could see the parade over there, so we turned back toward the parade. And I don't know why it happened, but maybe the main gets held up for traffic and things. But it took us about 45 minutes, and we entered the parade ahead of where we'd left. And the organizers were really... And the union band was behind us again. And everybody was... Because there we were... The six tanks.

[83:23]

Well, at some point, I don't know, around noon at this point, the organizers just really kind of blocked us and just made people go around us. And then after a while, the habit started, and people just went around us. By around noon, they started doing it. But the more I look back on that, that six of us, six of us here, say, could hold up an entire parade just by walking slowly, it's hard to believe that this would happen. So more than... In fact, his way is rather unusual because it's a kind of Buddha way, not a Bodhisattva way. The style of the Bodhisattva is to go along with people.

[84:30]

He is much more... He maintains his... his sense of the absolute. And I mean, I'm not, I couldn't, I wouldn't teach that way and I don't have the, personal power and presence to teach that way. So even though I wouldn't do it if I could, still it's wonderful to be with him and it's tremendously satisfying and convincing. But I told you that anecdote because I started to say, when you're having a conversation with him, and he brings up things like I was talking to him, he said, I would like you to go to Vietnam.

[85:42]

I hadn't planned to go to Vietnam, you know. I had other things in mind over the next year or two. But he says it was such... I said, okay. But if you have a conversation with him about something, as soon as it strays into borrowed consciousness, If I bring up or someone brings up anything that's at a different level than you're talking about, he simply gets up and walks away. He just won't have such a conversation. And it's kind of... In a way it's wonderful, and at the same time it's kind of tyrannical. But it's a kind of compassionate tyranny, so it's okay.

[87:17]

So I'm giving you, of all the Buddhists I know, and I obviously know quite a lot, he is the most, by far and away, maintaining the sense of immediate consciousness all the time. I've never seen anyone like him. Okay. So again, how to respond to somebody or in these Zen stories which are attempting to give you a... a feeling for a way of speaking and acting with someone that allows you to stay in immediate consciousness. I'm sorry that was so long. Excuse me. So I think that what you responded was quite good.

[88:33]

If he asks, what is your age, to say the same age. Because if someone is, that's something that arises in secondary consciousness, not borrowed. 72, if you ask the answer 72, that's in borrowed consciousness. And it involves comparisons, etc. So you could just say the same age. Or you could say only Buddha knows. And if you say that being clever, it's not so good. But if you mean that actually it can't be known. And if it refers to the experience of Buddha or the Buddha body, but still it's a little bit of a conceptual answer.

[89:56]

Or you might answer, what age are you? And you might answer, sometimes I wonder myself. And that's, you can answer, anyway, I think this is a little too much borrowed consciousness for me to explain these things. But the point in the koan is, how do you But the Koran is trying to give you a kind of permission to maintain a way of having a new kind of conversation without losing your deep rooted consciousness.

[91:00]

Okay, well that's enough for that little exercise. Unless you have something you want to bring up about it. You had a question before? Yes. there is a reaction or a conversation or in being with other people of aggression or anger that's quite immediate or quite secondary. And I'm still not clear about the way Buddhism or the way that Buddhism treats aggression. I sometimes have a feeling that there is a lot of, you know, you should We should practice compassion. We should, I don't know, a lot of concepts how to get rid of aggression. And this seems to me a contradiction. Concepts about how to get rid of aggression.

[92:18]

Not about how to get rid of it, but how to transform it. Well, I want to say that in German, in Deutsch. Do you like the question? Do you like aggression?

[93:32]

Does your aggression hurt anybody? Do you like hurting them? Well, I hope they can fight back. And if it's not a problem for you, then it's the other person's problem. I'm not trying to... Well, but if it's a problem, then you're not entirely happy with it. If you're not entirely happy with it, then there's something we can do about it.

[94:14]

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