Good evening, guten Abend. Please sit comfortably. How many people here have I not done a seminar with or session before? Okay, thank you. And how many of you have not had much experience with sitting before? Okay. Oh, the same group. Okay. Okay. Well, after we finish this evening, if you'd like, if you come up here, I'll give some zazen or meditation instruction, give you some general idea of what it's about for five or ten minutes or something, if you'd like.

[01:11]

If you don't have any experience, I'd advise you to come. And if anybody wants, the rest of you want a boring, refreshing course, you can come. Now this is a new place for us. We've never met here before. And it feels like a pretty good room. Yeah. I don't think the lights have a dimmer, so we can't make the lights a little... But tomorrow during the day we'll depend on the weather to dim the light.

[02:22]

Now my idea was that... I thought because we sent the announcement out mostly to our regular mailing list we would have only people who have done sashins or done some seminars together. So initially my idea was to have So war meine ursprüngliche Vorstellung, dass wir also mehr sitzen als gewöhnlich, also zwei oder drei Sitzperioden hintereinander. But for the new people that's kind of difficult, so we'll figure out something.

[03:25]

But anyway, we'll talk about that when I meet with you at the end of this evening. Let me say I'm very grateful to be back here in this middle period where I'm not usually here in Europe. This was your idea, mostly asking me to come back during this period. So anyway, it worked out. I'm here for a week and I go back on Tuesday, I think. For some reason, I don't know why, but it makes me feel more at home in Germany to be here again this time of year than to just be here for a period of time in the summer.

[04:39]

Now this was partly Ulrike's idea to call this a Sangha meeting. And some other people too talked with me about it. So to some extent I want to make that part of our discussion. For those of you who don't know the word Sangha, it means those who practice together. And it also means all people. And it also means those people which have a developed interior consciousness which is not dependent on words.

[05:51]

And in that sense, feel in touch with each other even when they're not together. Now, somebody asked Eureka, why isn't Baker Roshi's photograph on the flyer? Someone asked Ulrike, why isn't Begaroshi's picture on the invitation? She said, your picture isn't on the invitation because it's about the sangha and not about you. So you can see who the boss is here.

[07:11]

I'm being phased out, I realize. So we have a picture of this building instead of me. I actually didn't notice because I never noticed there was a picture of me on the other flyers actually. So if you were going to do this right you should have had a picture of everyone here. Now I also want to try this year to have each seminar deal with a koan from the Shoyaroku. Now did the announcement say that? Who here has a copy of the Shoyaroku with them?

[08:27]

This book, yeah. How many people have a copy of this book with them? Most people don't, I see. Oh, so we have photocopies? Okay, all right, good. In English? Okay, and did you make photocopies in German? Okay, you haven't passed those out yet though. Could we do it now? As announced at the invitation, this seminar will also be about Choir No. 1 from this choir collection, which is called Shoyoroku in Japanese. And for those who do not have a book, there is a photocopy in English and Christian has made a German translation, and Niel too, and there are photocopies. If there are some differences in the German version from the English version, you can be sure that both are different from the Chinese version.

[09:39]

And I'm sure that your understanding will be different from all three versions. Okay, this evening I'd like you to read the koan in German and English if you can. And for those of you who are new to koans, don't expect to understand anything. I really don't know... Well, let me put it this way. I have confidence that we can study a koan in a group this large and even though you're unfamiliar with koans. Ich habe Zutrauen, dass wir ein koan studieren können in einer Gruppe, die so groß ist und die auch nicht viel Erfahrung damit hat.

[11:02]

I probably shouldn't have confidence, but I do. Wahrscheinlich sollte ich kein Zutrauen haben, aber ich tue es. So just read it for the general feeling of the story. And the general feeling of the story has a lot to do with what it's about. So you don't have to read it now. And by the general feeling of the story, I mean it's about this guy who comes into a room, sits down, gets up and leaves. That's the story. But then you have to treat this more like it was a dream perhaps. In which you had a dream about somebody coming into your mind, sitting down in your dream and leaving before you woke up. And you'd have to wonder, what was that about?

[12:16]

So in that sense, you look at a koan and say, what's this about? But you don't think too much about it. In fact, the images... to feel the story as an image is quite important. Ulrike and I just did a colloquium on the Occident and the Orient in Brussels. And met with some of the people who sit, a few of the people who sit in Brussels. And the Dutch branch of the Vinabandha. And then we spent two or three days with Ivan Illich in Bremen.

[13:42]

I don't know if you're all familiar with his work, but he's a wonderful, extraordinary person. And I think Ulrike almost returned to her Christianity through meeting him. In fact, we're going to try to meet with an Irish monk who's now in Frankfurt sometime this weekend, who is starting a new kind of monastery on an island off the coast of Ireland. And indeed, we will try to meet with an Irish monk this weekend, who is trying to found a new kind of monastery on a hybrid island off the coast of Ireland. No, I introduced the fact that we met with Ivan Illich because during the weekend I may refer to him several times and he should know what I'm talking about.

[14:54]

And one of the things we did talk about is that the degree to which these koans are about thinking in images much like we do in dreams. And how in the Orient to the extent that I know, that I could know this from Doksana in other ways, that people still tend to think in images much more than we do, in their ordinary consciousness, not just in dream consciousness.

[15:55]

And I said, still think in images, because according to Ivan Illich, who has made his recent years a study of the 12th century primarily, and one of his friends and associates, a woman named Barbara Duden, Found the notes of a doctor. Do you remember from where? What century? 17th century. Something like 3,000 pages or something like that of notes, a diary he took of women patients and what their experience was. What they told me.

[17:15]

And I believe it was page after page, almost always visual landscape images of this rushed around and there was floods and there was a stone here and there were, you know, it's all visual images of the interior of the body and a visual way of describing what's happening to them. And page by page it was written that all the symptoms that these patients reported, that these were all visual images. So how some currents went through their bodies and how a stone formed there and something moved there. So all pictures about an inner landscape. And I think that the universal literacy of our culture, where we all read, has pretty much taken over the way we think about things. So what I'm trying to say is that even though this koan is written down, it's actually based on a kind of non-literate way of thinking.

[18:41]

So when you read it, you read it to catch the feeling of it and the picture of it, more than kind of intellectually make sense of it. Again, as if I say walked in... And sat down and Ulrike said, behold, the peasant of the Dharma is thus. The peasant of the Dharma is thus. And then I said, I just walked out. So I could have done that actually. That would have been a good Zen trick to come up with.

[19:45]

When I was, the first night we were supposed to arrive in Bremen, we got there around 10.30 and we didn't know, but Yvonne had about 20 people waiting to meet us. And we didn't know this and we were driving through Holland and Belgium and by the time we got there it was quarter to eleven. And almost everyone had left. And it decided it was a good Zen experience. So you see, people intuitively understand these things already. So I could have come in and Richard said, well, And I could have left, and that would have been enough for this evening.

[21:08]

And there's actually a koan like that, other than the one we're looking at, where a Zen teacher hadn't lectured for some time, and they finally talked him into lecturing. And he came in and sat down and then get up and looked around and then get up and left. And so they went to see him afterwards and said, what happened? Why can't you give us a lecture? And he said, I'm a Zen master, not a teacher of the sutras. But I promise I won't walk out. Now, as we're talking about Sangha and this koan also, I would like to say that we can, one way to understand Zen practice, maybe the most fundamental way of understanding Zen practice, is as a practice of ultimate friendship.

[22:54]

And we perfect our understanding, perfect and develop our insight as the conditions of friendship. And we sit with others and sit with ourselves in order to become friends with each other. And this doesn't just mean the kind of person you usually like to hang around with as your friend.

[23:56]

It means anyone you meet is your friend. Not just your tribe or your family or your gang. So a healthy sangha would have many different kinds of people in it, not the kind of just people you'd usually spend time with. And the sangha should be a stretch. It's not easy for you to be friends with. And the degree to which it's not easier for you to be friends with or to put yourself in another person's shoes is actually a measure of how your practice has developed.

[24:57]

So of course you can't be friendly with others until you're friendly with yourself. This is a practical, homespun psychology you can find in newsstand magazines. But even so, it's quite difficult to do. It's quite difficult to be friendly with yourself, to really accept yourself, and ultimately to feel at ease with yourself.

[26:14]

And that's finally what this koan is emphasizing, is finding your seat. And I hope during this seminar we can find our seat. And if only for a few minutes you find your seat, that's a lot. Now I... Mike Boss, as you know, does the tree planters.

[27:26]

And Christian, a year or two ago, did a transcript of the lectures I gave in a session in 1991. And Mike in, I don't know when, November was it, Rob? Where are you, Mike? Yeah, it wasn't around November you sent me the transcription? Something like that. December? July? Anyway, you sent me a transcript of the last much of, I guess most, all the last day of that Sashin. Yeah, pardon. Yeah. So I was supposed to look it over and edit it a bit to put in the tree planters. And I didn't actually have a chance to do it until I was here this week in Europe. And I discovered, much to my surprise, much of it is on this koan.

[28:45]

So I was going to Xerox and passed that out to you too. It's 18 pages and people said, oh no, that's too much. But I have five or ten copies if anybody wants one. And it's going to be in the tree planters. So you can, when you get your copy, you can read it in relationship to this seminar this weekend and this koan. So this is, again, finding your seat. And Dogen, in a famous section of his book called Menju, Which is the section of Dogen's writing called Face-to-Face Understanding.

[30:07]

And Dogen's point here is that if there's any truth in this world, the basis of it is face-to-face meeting. Between Buddha and Mahakashyapa. Between Buddha and his disciples. Between you and each other. And I suppose ultimately that's what the court system is about, with the jury and so forth. It's about face-to-face communication, a face-to-face decision. But it's not truth based on some outside set of rules or some book or something written.

[31:10]

The truth is found in face-to-face meeting. And for Buddhism, there's no standard of truth outside that face-to-face meeting. And I think in Europe, you're lucky because you have more of a locally embedded culture And I see that and I feel that in contrast to the United States. America is disembedded. And in fact, all of our Western culture is becoming disembedded, I think, but it's particularly the case in America.

[32:36]

So in America, almost nobody lives near their parents. And it's such a big country that even if you live near your parents, they're very far away. And in most places, most of the people have arrived there, nobody grew up there. And there's very little that joins people except the newspapers. And the movies. And so everyone's constantly concerned with what's going on in Washington. And what's happening with Bush's dog.

[33:36]

And I don't think you're too interested in Cole's dog, are you? But it is really the case in America, the level of communication is pushed up to a media level, which most people then talk about. And so in a locally embedded culture where there's more contact with each other, there's a more diverse sense of friendship. more diverse.

[34:51]

And in America, really, particularly for men, I don't know really what happens in Europe because I don't live here in that way, but in America, very few men have any friends. Women often have more friends than men, but it's rare to find a man who has friends. They have acquaintances but not really friends. In fact, there's now groups of men who meet in order to talk about the fact they don't have friends. Friendship anonymous. But this sense of friendship I'm speaking about in Buddhism is, do you have the capacity for the truth of face-to-face meeting?

[36:25]

And to meet with someone without ideas, judgments, preconceived ideas and so forth. And do you have the stabilized consciousness that allows you to really accept the way we exist? So the question then is, what is this stabilized consciousness based on and how do you practice it that allows true face-to-face meeting? First of all, what is this stabilized consciousness which allows you to feel at ease with yourself?

[37:29]

And certainly we could say that the main point, certainly in the beginning of zazen practice, is to develop a stabilized consciousness by which, through which, and in which you can meet yourself. And to feel at ease. And then the development of your practice is the search for true friendship. Not for career, understanding or knowledge, but friendship. And for a Buddhist, career, understanding, knowledge is in the service of friendship. And it's funny to... that it comes down to something so simple.

[39:05]

But that's the truth of it. And partly I'm talking about this because of course Ulrike gave me these instructions that this is a Sangha meeting. And also, because by chance again, my discussions with Ivan Illich were primarily about spiritual friendship. And he said, Christianity comes down to a search for ultimate friendship. And that spiritual friendship in Catholicism and Christianity is always in the midst of the presence of him or her. And also has the element of ultimate friendship includes sometimes, and particularly at a certain period, an unequal relationship in the friendship.

[40:24]

A friendship with someone you learn from. Now, In our society, freedom is equated with equality. And this puts both words, both ideas, experiences in a prison. Because if freedom always means equality... then you can't learn from other people. Because sometimes there's an unequal relationship.

[41:36]

And Let me bring up something else that seems a little to the side, but again it's something that Ivan and I spoke about, or we spoke about. Is that historically, childhood is an invention. The childhood as a special life for children to lead is an invention of recent centuries. And the creation of childhood then in turn creates parenthood. And parenthood by definition, childhood by definition, means the only models for your behavior are your parents.

[42:49]

And freezes us into being unable to take other adults as models. Or in the terms of contemporary psychology, we turn all adult models into fathers or mothers. And all adult models are not fathers or mothers. So my own feeling is we'll all be much healthier as a culture if all of you, as you get older, become models for younger men and women. It's a very deep need in young people to find an older person they can model themselves on and can turn to emotionally.

[44:06]

And I think you know from your experience, there's very few men and women, older men and women, who you can turn to as models. And if you do, they'll be a little ashamed and kind of shuffle and say, oh no, we're equals. Or don't look to me, you know, and they're nervous about the responsibility. But I really believe that as you get older, this is a responsibility you need to take on because younger people need you. And in the traditional cultures of Asia, which have been in a kind of isolated place for centuries, the sense of the mentor and the

[45:19]

teacher and the older person as a model is still very developed in the cultures. To such an extent that if you're 80 and your teacher who is 95 dies, You then take a teacher who's 45. Not because he or she as your teacher at 45 knows more than you at 85. But because this relationship is healthy and necessary. So if we have a healthy sangha, we'll all be each other's teachers and pupils.

[46:46]

And there'll be a freedom in sometimes you're teaching me something and sometimes I'm teaching you something. Und es wird eine Freiheit geben und manchmal werdet ihr mir etwas beibringen, manchmal werde ich euch etwas lehren. Aber es ist eben nicht auf der Basis, dass wenn du mir fünf Dinge beibringst, dann bringe ich dir fünf Dinge bei, damit wir gleich sind. Es geht hier um den Geist, einfach offen miteinander zu sein. So, I'd like to start out with, and we'll sit for a few minutes this evening before we end. And in the beginning of tomorrow morning, I want us to Just have a sense of finding your seat.

[48:00]

And when you have your seat, it means there's no other place to go. It's like maybe in a monarchy, everybody looks toward the king or queen. And the best place to sit in a monarchy is on the throne. And everyone wants to sit on the throne. I don't know if in German it's the same, but in English a very common word for toilet is the throne. So we have to find our seat sometimes. So in this sense, you come to the place where you feel you're on, not the toilet, but a throne.

[49:23]

In the sense that there's no other place you'd rather be. Now, Dogen talks about this sense of finding your seat. As finding the Buddha sitting on your lap. As you're suddenly sharing the same seat with the Buddha. So here we're talking about finding your own seat and sharing your seat. And in this fascicle of Dogen's on face-to-face meeting, this is where he talks about sharing your seat with the Buddha. So this is thoroughly your own seat where you feel 100%, as close to that as possible, at ease.

[50:30]

And the miracle of your life will be if you can really ultimately someday really be at ease. So this practice and this seminar is Only for a moment, find your seat. Find yourself completely at ease. And to be willing to share this ease with others. And to find out how to share this ease with others. This is friendship.

[51:51]

So let's sit for a few minutes and then I'll meet with the people who need some instruction in sitting. Then we can all find where we're supposed to be staying tonight. Is to let your sense of self and location move down in your body. Out of your head and your thoughts. More into your breath and shoulders and stomach and seat. Almost as if you're trying to usual consciousness

[53:17]

sort of went into your body the way water disappears into sand. It's so nice to sit with you. I hate the idea of ringing the bell. Illich says he is always looking for those people who have lost their clocks. Although I suppose I should ring the bell. You might pay attention to the feeling of sitting.

[54:39]

And keep some of this feeling in your body this evening and through the night. and try to keep some of this feeling in your body during the evening and during the night So there's a few of you who weren't here last night, right?

[55:57]

You and you. How many people weren't here last night? Quite a few. Okay, thanks. You were here last night. Well, I can't repeat what I said last night. But good morning, good morning. But what we talked about last night was... sangha and practice as friendship. And we talked a little bit about this koan. And what I'd like to do this morning is after we talk a little bit, I'd like us to take a break.

[57:18]

And after that, I'd like us to get together in maybe ten groups of seven or seven groups of ten. and read the koan together in German or English or both and those of you who went to Japan with me where I think we looked at this koan And those of you who have been to the Koan seminar we did. At the last Sashin. You might scatter yourselves among the groups, so every group has somebody in it who's done some Koan study.

[58:33]

Now, I don't expect this to take too much time. But it's good when you start looking at a koan to look at it together, reading it together initially. Now what else we talked about last night was Dogen's fascicle called Menju, which is face-to-face meeting. So what we're taking here is a few themes and looking at them carefully. I also mentioned the two or three days Ulrike and I spent with Ivan Illich.

[60:01]

Not so much, partly rather, to share with you some of the things we talked about, because I always find his feeling, thinking very moving. But I also brought it up as an example of of bringing into a koan study or your practice what happens to be happening to you recently. So that you bring what you've been feeling or thinking recently Or maybe some, for me, conversations you had with someone recently.

[61:19]

You read the koan as a commentary on your own experience. Or your experience as a commentary on the koan. And this isn't just for koans, it's also how practice becomes a commentary on your life and your life a commentary on your practice. Now, Dogen speaks about in this face-to-face meeting, And he talks about the great round mirror face. And he talks about the face skin, meeting the face skin.

[62:27]

Now, one thing I've done recently over the years is because this sense of face-to-face meeting as being the condition of truth. Meeting yourself and meeting another being the only condition of truth in Buddhism. Since there's no outside agency to give us rules. So the sense of the teaching or experience of lineage becomes you can't imagine Buddhism without it. So I've asked a lot of ordinary and prominent Catholics and Protestants if there's some tradition of lineage in the Catholic or Protestant church.

[63:40]

And almost universally, I had people tell me, well, you relate to the church. Or you relate to, sometimes to a bishop or in monastic training, sometimes you have somebody who's responsible for your training. So in the context of talking with Ivan Ilyich, I asked him the same question. And in the light of conversations with him where his whole personal history and intellectual development is tied up to other people. And you can't meet a... I mean, it's very difficult to meet a person more brilliant, multilingual, informed...

[65:12]

unbelievably informed than Ivan Illich. There must be few people on the planet as informed and brilliant as he is. And yet when he talks about himself, it's always in terms of what he's learned from others. And he makes you feel completely at ease and at one with his way of thinking about things. So I said, what about this sense of lineage in the Catholic Church? What's your experience? And that's partly the reason or how it came up that he said that he sees Catholicism as a search for ultimate friendship.

[66:35]

And that's been the subject of his seminar at Bremen. And he said that that's the way the Catholic Church used to be. but it's lost that sense of person to person, face to face contact some time ago. Now, I'm only quoting him. I'm not a historian of the church, so I don't know. But he definitely has a feeling in his own relationship to religious practice of lineage in the same similar way to what I feel.

[67:53]

And another thing we talked about was in the, I don't know when, the Well, the 14th century, I believe, optics had nothing to do with light. The study of optics had to do with the studying how light comes from the eyes. The light that we see here from the sun in the day was just a kind of condition for the glance. And I think you probably, we feel something like that in the way in which it's difficult sometimes to be in another person's glance. So you see in this koan, there's the phrase, sporting devil's eyes.

[69:05]

And this is partly a reference to that kind of eyes that you find difficulty being in the presence of. And Dogen also says in this classical Menju, he speaks about the skin that's three inches thick. And ten feet thin. So he says something that completely doesn't make sense. Your skin is three inches thick.

[70:07]

That's pretty thick. And ten feet thin. So again, he's trying to take some particular... theme here, face-to-face meeting, and get us to notice something about it, feel something about it, outside of the easy, obvious ways to think about it. So the sense in this face-to-face meeting, Vasco of Dogen's, is not just that something comes from our eyes, And something comes from our other, our friend's eyes.

[71:30]

But something comes from our skin and our friend's skin. And the body arises. It says the eyes take up the eyes. The body takes up the body. So I noticed here last night too, there's some kind of unspoken rule that we have this much faith. Which at least all of us who are Germans follow. So this kind of study of face-to-face meeting is like noticing this distance. And going against the distance a little bit, like maybe when we regather, you can sit on my lap.

[72:54]

No. We can sit closer or something. And we can, when you gather in groups, there's some kind of, I mean, you'll feel something about which group and how you sit down and so forth. And from the point of view of practice, this isn't about social skills or social discomfort. But almost as if you were afloat in a liquid of face-to-face meeting. And how you sat down with a group of people and it's like you're sitting down in water together in it.

[73:57]

all affects each other. So the few themes we have here in this koan and from last night is this taking your seat, finding your seat, and stabilizing your consciousness, or having the kind of consciousness which allows you to feel at ease, And this, again, face-to-face meeting.

[75:22]

And skin three inches thick and ten feet thin. Mm-hmm. This sense of face-to-face meeting doesn't mean you have to be looking at someone.

[76:52]

Just now we're in the sitting, even if you aren't looking around, sitting in face-to-face meeting. So let's take a break. Is there anything, is there tea or anything like that? No? So we just take a break for five or ten minutes and then regather. Okay. Okay. Well, do any of you have any questions about... Yeah, go ahead.

[78:00]

We were discussing about the Dharma and we didn't get... You know what it really means? You like to get right to the, you know, center of things. You want to say that in German? You want to say that in Deutsch? It doesn't matter. No, but so other people know what you said. I saw. Thank you. Well, in this koan, dharma, of course, means the teaching.

[79:10]

And it means reality. And it means your relationship to reality. And in this koan, there's a play between Manjushri striking the gavel. Which is what a judge does when he states what the law is. Order in the court. Do you do that in Germany too? So striking the gavel is, this is the law. And in that sense, the Dharma is the law, how things work. But when he said that, then Mr. Hu The World Honored One is WHO.

[80:35]

So I call him Mr. Who. Mr. Who gets down from his seat. And so leaves nothing there. So there's a kind of play between Dharma as law and Dharma as thusness. So every koan is going to present Dharma a little differently. But in the most... I think the most practical sense for us as practitioners, I was just in Belgium, as you know, and I was being translated into French.

[81:42]

And, you know, I have this habit of speaking in these little phrases. And Marie Millis, who was Appel, who was translating for me. And she said, give me a verb, please give me a verb. Well, somehow I can say things. Ulrike doesn't seem to need verbs. Yes. And German has more verbs than English. English has more nouns than German. In any case, for us as practitioners, I think the best way to understand Dharma is that it means to do things in units.

[82:56]

In other words, the basic teaching of Buddhism is that everything's changing. And the root of the word dharma means to hold or to stand for a moment. So if everything is changing, we still have to perceive things in some kind of way. So that moment-by-moment perception is a dharma. To have a feel for something for a moment, to see something for a moment, those are dharmas. And the dimension of those dharmas or quality of those dharmas depends on your consciousness.

[83:59]

And one way to practice with that is to have a feeling of intactness or completeness in each thing you do. Okay. Something else? You mean you read that whole con and no one had a single question? I'm leaving. Yes? Yes. When a child gets up on his seat and shakes his head and gets down again, what's the difference to this koan? Not much. Except usually he doesn't get down, he wants food.

[85:01]

Not much difference. What is leaking? What is leaking? This world is leaking. What are you doing here? Leaking and licking. Where's the toilet? You have to be careful in German. Oh, licking is nearly the same? It's the same word. Oh. Leaking and going to the toilet is the same word in English. Yeah, lecken und auf die Toilette gehen ist in Englisch das Gleiche.

[86:05]

So, Manche treat leaking means he's gone behind the building to take a piss. Because it gets harder and harder to embarrass you. Um... Leaking is the, I mean, what you've done is you put your finger on the main idea in the koan. The whole koan turns on this idea of leaking. Look, the way koans do things is they present a story that has to work sort of as a conventional kind of anecdote.

[87:28]

And then it has another storyline that runs underneath it. About practice or about fundamental reality. And usually the teachings are kind of built into the koan but not specified. But sometimes they point out that they're pointing out. For example, he says here on page four, the beginning of the commentary. He says, he just asks some questions. Is it... The world-honored ones ascending the seat that is the unique breeze of reality.

[88:35]

Where is it? Is it the world-honored ones ascending the seat? Strange. Oh, in the same... It would be right... I can't find it in the... Is Chen Dong's reciting his verse the unique breeze of reality? Is my further inquiry the unique breeze of reality? Now, say in a Tibetan text it would say, now we're going to discuss the Sambhogakaya body. But in Zen style, you don't point that out. You just present it as conventional reality. Because these things exist to us at the first surface as conventional reality.

[89:45]

Now this being the first koan, it does sort of point it out by saying this way it's become three levels. So in these three things, these three questions point out the three bodies of Buddha. OK. So we'll have to come back to this sense of leaking. But probably all of you don't understand the basic idea of leaking. And it's the only word I think we have in English that at least, it's like a technical term almost, but it's a kind of strange word to use as a technical term.

[90:59]

But I guess the simple example of it is, for example, those of you who've done a sashin. After the sashin, if you talk about your experience with the sashin, sometimes you feel you've lost the energy of it or something. That's leaking. Or if you're writing something and you're in the middle of writing it, a writer, you ask them, what are you writing? They don't really want to talk about it because they talk about it, it's leaking. Or there's a little poem that's used in koans sometimes. She says she's not in love, but the bracelet on her arm is a full inch too big. In that sense, the bracelet is leaking.

[92:25]

Because when you first fall in love, you don't want to even tell yourself you're falling in love because, no, no, this couldn't be so. So if you say so, you leak. But she wears this bracelet from this person. So the bracelet is leaking. Does that make sense? Okay, so now we have to sort of look at why leaking is so important in this koan. And now we have to look at why a leak in this koan is so important. Okay, so something else? Something else? Yes. This world is leaking, fundamental reality is leaking too. No.

[93:44]

Fundamental reality doesn't leak. That's the point here. What's fundamental reality? There you go again. That's what this koan is trying to say something about. Now, where would fundamental reality be most presented here in the koan?

[94:14]

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