I enjoyed the discussion about science. Yeah, so I want to see what ingredients come up tomorrow and the next day. But today I'd like to bring in this quotation from the Lankavatara Sutra. Sutras are words, teachings attributed to Buddha. But in fact, Lankavatara Sutra is written much later. And some basics of Zen, which most other Buddhist schools don't share. One is that Buddhism is rooted in your own practice. And anything that can't be rooted in your own practice is not Buddhism.

[01:24]

And another example of what's characteristic of Zen, in contrast to most other schools, is that Buddha is the starting point, but not the goal. From the point of view of Zen, everything's changing. Everything's unique. So there's no way you're not experiencing things the Buddha never experienced. So in fact it means you have experiences that were never part of the Buddha's experience. To think that somehow the Buddha encompasses all possible human experiences is basically a theology.

[02:26]

And Chinese Buddhism developed in the Tang and some dynasties tried to get away from that. And shift Buddhism to arising in you and you also can be whatever is meant by a Buddha. Yeah, otherwise why do it? We're just imitating the past. Or we think there's some kind of fundamental truth. In Buddhism, there's no absolute truth. I mean, Zen Buddhism. So now the Lankavatara Sutra is supposedly introduced into...

[03:37]

into China by Bodhidharma. I went to that story you showed me yesterday and they had an extraordinary Bodhidharma, one of the best I've ever seen. But he said, this is an auction house, you can't buy it. And I said, where will bidding start? He said, well, yes, you're right, I can't buy it. Anyway, so, if you will translate, we did this, we translated it once in the Winter Precious Summit. So I hope you can stand to hear it again.

[05:03]

Mahamati said, That's somebody you know, I think. Mahamati said, In the style of a sutra, he calls Buddha the Blessed One. Blessed One of Hey there, blessed one, I've got a question for you. Is it not because of the reality of words that things exist? If not for words, blessed one, there would be no arising of things. Hence, blessed one, the existence of all things is by reason of the reality of words. The blessed one responded, dummkopf, I mean dummie, Even when there are no objects corresponding to words, there are words.

[06:23]

Mahamati. For instance, the hair's horns. I mean, there are rabbits and there are horns, but they aren't usually rabbits' horns. For instance, the hare's horns. The tortoise's hair. A barren woman's child, etc. They are all not visible in the world. But the words are visible.

[07:25]

Mahamati, they are neither entities nor non-entities. But they, the hare's horns, etc., are expressed as words. Therefore, Mahamati, if you say that because of the reality of words, the objects exist, this talk lacks sense. For words don't prove the existence of the hare's horns. Words are not known in all Buddha lands. Yeah, so this is a turning point in this statement. Words are not known in all Buddha lands.

[08:43]

And in fact, in the following paragraph here, which I don't have, it says, ants and gnats, G-N-A-T-S, ants and gnats live quite happily wordlessly. Also Ameisen und Milben oder was auch immer für ein Getier leben ganz glücklich ohne Worte. Clearly, for this teaching, ants and gnats are part of our sentient field. They just have a little bit different karmic inheritance. Words are not known in all Buddha lands. Mahatma, words are an artificial creation.

[09:46]

In some Buddha lands, ideas are indicated by looking steadily. In others, by gestures. In still others, by a frown. You don't frown in Austria? No. I don't frown because we don't have a word for it. Okay. By the movement of the eyes.

[10:50]

By laughing. By yawning. Or by the clearing of the throat. Or by recollection. Remembering. Recollecting. Or by trembling. Yeah, or sometimes it's and by, or by weeping. Okay. Now that words can indicate something that doesn't exist. It's a little more complicated that words establish the use of an object. So when you call something a shovel, it means you can shovel with it. But the point here, the teaching here is something like a Murphy bed. Do you know what a Murphy bed is?

[12:14]

No. In America and England, I think it's called a Murphy bed. Somebody named Mr. Murphy invented it in the 1800s. It's also called a wall bed. It looks like a wall and you can pull it down into the bed and you can put it back up. So teaching like this is a kind of a wall bed. You hear it, the hairs, horns and all that stuff. But then you have to pull the teaching down and sleep in it for a while. And after a while, the blankets that are covering you start to no longer blanket you, but dissolve. And finally you find yourself shivering with no blanket. Because words are no longer how you envelop, blanket your world. So the teaching here basically is discover wordlessness.

[13:36]

Because words don't exist in all Buddha lands is a pretty direct hint. If you want to vacation in Buddha land discover wordlessness now the practice of wordlessness is again one of these practices you have to mechanically figure out how to do and somehow you have to mechanically figure out what you should do with these teachings Now it's interesting because I'm convinced that our brain, the structures of our brain are created in a significant part by language.

[14:53]

So you're using a worded brain to practice wordlessness. Okay, so that's an interesting nuance. I found the easiest way to develop the experience of living wordlessly and take away the directionality and guidance that words supply to our sensorial world. As a practice, and I'm suggesting as I did a week or so ago in the winter branches,

[16:00]

To really take on the practice and it takes some time to hibernate and what's the other word? Hibernate? I use all the time. My memory is getting farther away from my mouth. Yeah, and it's just like I'm shrinking, but my feet are getting farther away. Okay. So it takes time to incubate and it's also a kind of hibernation.

[17:29]

You introduce it and then sleep with it. Hibernate is also winter schlaf. Hiber is winter. Yeah, I see. I mentioned these things. It seems like it's an arbitrary remark. And it is an arbitrary remark. But I throw such things in once in a blue moon, which happens every 32 months. You know what a blue moon is, right? It's when there's two full moons in one month. So once in a blue moon means rarely.

[18:37]

Which also means it happened out of the blue. Which is more poetic than saying it doesn't arise from the void. But I don't avoid saying these things. Because it's like playing with the hare's horns. In other words, I'm saying there's an arbitrary complexity that is less arbitrary than it looks. And that's part of trusting what comes up. Okay. I'm getting a little farther out in this seminar than I usually do. Maybe I'm not.

[19:54]

He says no. But he thinks I'm not scientific. No, that's not what I said. I'm teasing you. If you take it personally, that's not good. Anyway, go ahead. Okay, so... You want to practice peeling the label off things. And I find one of the easiest times to do that is in zazen. Because when you're in zazen, you have so under consciousness.

[20:58]

And associative and alternating mind, alternative mind. And you're in a mode of mind. Which is more open to wordlessness. So you can hear something, a car going by or an airplane. And you have more of an opportunity to kind of peel the word off, the label off the tractor going by at Johanneshof, for instance. Or the Basel and Zurich planes playing knots and crosses, tic-tac-toe in the sky.

[21:59]

You can just hear them like the music of the spheres. Or the tractor is just sound or car. Somewhere you know it's still a tractor. So if it slid off the road and you heard a crash, you'd say, that was a tractor and it crashed. It happens in our neighborhood sometimes. But for most of the duration of the sound, you sort of don't know it's a tractor. So you don't want to get in the sense that it's absolutely wordless.

[23:19]

It's a spectrum. And when you move in the spectrum toward wordlessness, you're practicing wordlessness. Because there's only relationship, there's an activity. Directionality is what's important, not the endpoints. Yeah, so... if you get the experience of taking the label off mental objects. Taking the word labels off worded objects. Eventually you've done that enough.

[24:31]

Enough means over and over again. Und genug bedeutet immer und immer wieder. Until much of the time, 50% or 60, 70%, the time you look at the world without words. Bis die meiste Zeit, oder wie es dann so ist, 60, 70% der Zeit, du die Welt so anschaust ohne Worte. And I can say, once you get somewhere above 50%, und ich kann sagen, wenn du einmal über die 50% hinauskommst, It's a kind of mathematics. All the words fall off. And all the objects are suddenly undressed. It's embarrassing, actually. Having all these undressed objects around.

[25:32]

But it's an incredible freedom. Suddenly you find yourself in a world which isn't telling you what to do. But your cultural habits are suddenly not constantly reified. Through the involuntary experience of habit, of habit where you live, of wording the world. So one of the assumptions here in this statement of the Lankavatara Sutra is that you find yourself through practice in a wordless world.

[26:39]

Now, if Hishiryo is withdrawing attention, it's making attention an interior attention, So the physical experiential direction of noticing without thinking is a direction interior experience. the experience of being in wordlessness is in the direction exterior. Your attention can be exteriorized without being shaped by words.

[27:51]

So this is another kind of experience like noticing without thinking. Okay. Okay. Now, if you incubate or hibernate within the experience of wordlessness. Now, okay, let me stop and make a footnote or a headnote or something here. What I'm trying to do is say, okay, we're talking about Buddhism. And it is just a different emphasis.

[28:52]

I mean, instead of emphasizing the worded dimensionality of perception, but instead we're emphasizing the unworded unwordable even, dimension of perception. And recognizing when you take things out of their cultural habitation, everything is is unwordable. And then if your experience is unwordable, over some period of time that you become a different kind of person.

[29:55]

And when you find yourself located pretty much all the time in an unworded and unwordable actuality, The possibilities that occur are much more numerous. And you begin to store your experience, your karma, And you begin your experience, your karma... In a... In an unworded dynamic and not a language-based storage process. So we do function out of accumulated experience. But functioning over time out of an unworded accumulation of experience, you become also a different person.

[30:59]

And it's not the same cat that jumped off the couch. So then gestures occur in a different way, which is what the sutra is pointing out. Gestures occur in a different way when they're not rooted in worded perception. So to begin to live in a world of activity which is gestural, which we do anyway, As we smell each other's DNA.

[32:36]

Again, it's a shift in emphasis. We already do it, but when it's more emphasized through being unworded, The dynamic of our interbeing... To use Thich Nhat Hanh's neologism... Yeah, there's more you could talk about.

[33:42]

And what's interesting is the difference of maybe from Galileo or something like that, there's a sense that the world is definable material. And I would say that early modernity emphasized the kind of materiality of everything. But the materiality is empty. Or temporary. And all that exists is the interaction, interdependence and interpenetration And as I say, the intermergence or interemergence. Here is where we have the poetry and humanity and non-materiality. Non-materiality.

[34:56]

Because you can't grasp relationship. You can only bring energy and presence to the relationship. Okay. All right. Okay, in ordnung. Now this is an example during a seminar. At some point like now, I feel I've talked too much. Nine. Not in this case. Eleven. Not in this case. Okay. This is good. He's a great man. Not in this case. You know, he's tactful.

[35:58]

May I add something to this wordless world? Christa und ich, wir hatten letztes Jahr die Gelegenheit, den Komarobushi in Wien zu sehen, Butoh. Soll ich übersetzen? Christa and I had the opportunity to see the Komarobushi, Butoh, also the dance. The Japanese dance. The Japanese dance, yeah. It's marvelous. I liked it anyway. Yeah. And we are lucky in Vienna, because we have this dance festival, and I had the opportunity to see many Butoh performances, also these other renowned...

[37:01]

more pushy when he was a young man because he must now be above 60 or 70. Getting up close to me, huh? 20 years. Much older than you are. No, I don't know. I'm 80 next year. I'm already in my 80th year. So he's a guy like you. Yeah, good. But I'm now dressed in white and I have clothes on. And And I think this was exactly what you just said, what I experienced. There was an intensity. We were, if you remember the song, blown away.

[38:23]

It was an unbelievable experience. There was only a little bit of equipment, only a little bit of water, a little bit of sand, and only he. So for half an hour he only moved his hand and his arm. When will you see me tomorrow? Das ist so gewaltig. So there was this enormous kind of power, intensity, energy. It was so pure.

[39:44]

It was so intense. It was, wow. Wordless. It was wordless. It was beyond, beyond. Language. Yeah. Okay. Okay. No one's ever said that about my lectures. No, but it's great. I wish I had been there. Yeah. Okay. No one accuses me of wordlessness too often. But I try to have a wordlessness within my words. Bend it. I can't, unfortunately, I can't agree, because I think that you, if you allow me to make an observation, that, um, ich sag's, dass ich nicht durcheinander komme in Deutsch, also, dass Roshi das perfektioniert, zu sprechen und gleichzeitig auf einer körperlichen Ebene manchmal dasselbe, aber manchmal auch etwas ganz anderes zu sagen.

[41:10]

that you have perfection to speak about something and at the same time simultaneously on a bodily, physical level also expressing something, sometimes the same and sometimes also something different. Okay. But my experience actually is I feel, and then I sort of take, what words shall I use? It happens as a complete feeling, and then I add the words. Also to speak more well. Some other time. Tomorrow, maybe. So let me ring the bell. Thank you.

[42:47]

I, eh, hey. Enter, enter. An ultimate state. And offer you. discussion. Simply wishing you all and each be steadily only steadily intimate with your field of mind. to all of you and every single one of you to always be familiar with your field of mind.

[44:28]

Thank you. What time is meal supposed to be? 6.15. Oh, okay. And there is no evening program this evening. But of course we can bring something out. And that's the question, whether there is interest. We could, for example, sit down and dance, sing, talk to each other. I don't know. So we're talking whether we would meet in the evening and do something. I'll come only if it sinks. I mean if... Felix sings.

[47:06]

Maybe we should think about that for dinner. Or not? I don't have to decide now. Really? Okay. Erich says we have to decide now. Do you have any wishes or ideas? Okay. Thank you, Christoph. I would suggest to come together at 8 p.m. here in the room. 8 p.m. hier in diesem Raum und dann gemeinsam zu schauen, was für ein Gefühl wir haben. That's what we're doing. Thank you for the suggestion, ladies and gentlemen. Tomorrow morning, yes? Oh yes, tomorrow morning, sorry, not yet resolved.

[48:08]

Tomorrow morning there is the opportunity to sit together, completely voluntarily. So only if you come quite voluntarily. We start at seven, did we say, right? And we sit for two periods, 40, 10 minutes in Kinhina and 30 minutes, and then it goes well to go to breakfast, which will be at 8.30. The seminar starts at 10.

[48:31]

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