I vow to taste the truth of the Tathagata's words. Now this con I think gives us a It can give us a good sense of how koans in themselves are a kind of meditation. As I said, you kind of float in the images of the koan. So what you're... Maybe I should start kind of from the beginning.

[01:21]

When you practice zazen, you're developing a little different kind of mind than the usual mind. And what you're trying to do is develop a state of mind that's always present. Or develop access to a state of mind that's always present. So that night and day, through the sleeping time and through the various activities of the day, There's one level of your mind that stays present. And the fastest way, the shortcut way, almost the only way for most people to get a tangible experience of this mind is through sashin.

[02:26]

It's one thing I talked with some of the folks about in this meeting we had at Crestone recently with the talking about Rudolf Steiner and western spiritual dimensions and Buddhism. And this sense of a mind that's always present seemed distant and hard to realize or hard to even imagine to most of the non-Buddhists there. You might improve the various states of mind you have, but still you're moving from one state of mind to another all the time.

[03:57]

Or you see yourself in a conscious state of mind which is often being pushed or pulled this way or that. And then you feel an unconscious state of mind as present underneath or surrounding your conscious mind. And then you feel a sleeping mind and deep sleep mind, which is quite different from your conscious mind. And even in your conscious mind we experience it sometimes clear, but often rather foggy, not too alert.

[05:19]

The development of a realization of a mind that's clearly present even in unclear mind, seemed far-fetched and quite impossible to imagine or realize to a number of the people I spoke to a few weeks ago about this. But if you practice zazen daily and you practice mindfulness now and then, or as much as you can through the day, And you practice Sashin once or twice a year.

[06:46]

You're almost sure to realize this mind that accompanies all your mind's moods and so forth. It's not so unusual. In fact, in a deep sense, your practice has to be quite mature, but it's really a development early in your practice. And there's various stages in realizing this mind that accompanies all your minds and moods.

[07:58]

You sense it and pretty soon it's present most of the time. And then one day you suddenly realize you feel good all the time. Even though you sometimes feel bad or you still have moods, somehow underneath it, the underpinnings of even feeling bad is this sense of feeling good all the time. And you probably begin to have what's the word non non I can't think of the word.

[09:17]

But states of mind, of joy or good feeling, oh, non-referential states of mind. I was looking for that word. In other words, states of mind, they don't arise because something good or bad happened to you. They arise for no reason. They don't refer to anything. They arise just out of the state of being alive. After all, being alive is basically a positive experience. It's a joyous, precious experience just to be alive. And we feel that when a baby is born. We feel a kind of joy in the preciousness of this beautiful, plump little life. But usually we forget it pretty soon.

[10:37]

So zazen practice is to awaken that plump little baby inside you. Sometimes he or she cries, sometimes smiles. So this image, this accompanying state of mind is imaged in various ways. Sometimes as a baby. Sometimes as a buffalo that accompanies you, eating grass here and there.

[11:40]

Sometimes as an ox, as in the ten ox-herding pictures. Sometimes it could be the Dharmasanga mascot, the guinea pig. Schmierschwein? Schmierschwein. It's called a pig in German too, huh? Doesn't look like a pig, does it? Anyway. Hmm. So you actually have to nurture and attend this little animal or this buffalo or whatever you call it that accompanies you.

[12:40]

Sometimes it may be a snake. It can be many things, sometimes a snake, sometimes a buffalo. So like in the ten oxherding pictures, first you have to get a sense of this accompanying mind. Sometimes you have to get a tether on it or a leash on it. It might be amusing if everybody in the Dharma Sangha walked around with a leash with nothing on the end. And people would say, what are you carrying that leash for?

[13:47]

Oh, my dog emptiness is on the other end. Yeah, or the Dharmakaya is on the other end. Hmm. You know, Jashan is mentioned in this koan, J-I-A-S-H-A-N. And he's, let's see, what would you call him? Dharma cousin or second cousin, Dharma cousin maybe of Dungsan. Dung Shan's teacher was Yun Yan. And Yun Yan's real brother and Dharma brother was Dao Wu.

[14:51]

Who some of you know from other Khans and lectures. And Daowu and Yunyan had a brother, another Dharma brother, not a real brother, a monk called the Boatman Monk. And since this koan has a lot of images of boats and rivers in it, this boatman monk is implied in the background of this story. And Jashan was giving a... Somebody asked Jashan, what is the Dharmakaya?

[15:51]

And Jashan answered, the Dharmakaya is without form. And something, it has no marks or something like that. And this is intellectually not, is not inaccurate. But a Zen teacher should always give you answers that you can practice with, that hook into you in some way. It's the style of Zen teaching and practice. So just to say something like this, unless he said it with a particular kind of oomph or feeling or, you know, etc., it's not kind of flat as an answer.

[17:14]

So when he said this, some visiting monk in the room laughed. So he said, what are you laughing about? And it turned out to be Dogo or Daowu, you know, Daowu in Japanese, Daowu in Chinese. You know, Yun Yan's Dharma brother. So Da Wu said, you're a regular monk, but you don't have a teacher. So Jiaxuan looked at him and seemed open, wasn't defensive. So Dawu said, you should go see the boatman monk, my Dharma brother, the boatman monk.

[18:34]

He was called the boatman monk because he worked as a ferryman, ferrying people across the river. So he went to I met him and immediately they recognized each other. And he accompanied him on the boat going back and forth. And it's said that the boatman monk transmitted his dharma to Jashan and then pretty much disappeared. And Jashan went, I believe, and built a hut where he lived for some 20 years. And this period of... of sort of incubation, of winter schlaf, is quite important in Zen.

[19:59]

You might go work in an automobile plant or you might go live in the mountains in a hut. What you do is not so important as that you're not teaching and you're just hibernating. He was asked once, what is the state of Jashan? And he said, the monkeys are holding their babies to their breasts. Return behind the blue mountains. A bird holding a flower in its beak. A light before the green grotto. And this green grotto, or blue-green grotto, 200 years later became the place where Yuan Wu lived.

[21:22]

Yuan Wu gave the lectures there that turned into the Blue Cliff Records. And the Blue Cliff Records is also the blue-green grotto stories. So again, this is family stuff, you know. As a home leaver, you're beginning to make the lineage your family. So hearing a story like this is like hearing a story about your uncle. Or your father's cousin, you know. And you realize you yourself could be a ferryman or... live somewhere for 20 years in a hut.

[22:36]

And even the kind of cave, a temple you build could be the site after a century or two when the green pines are mature. The sight of someone giving teachings that become another form of pine trees present to us today. And this book of serenity, this Shoyoroku, is developed on the model of the Heikigan Roku, the blue-green grotto records. So you see the source of this collection of koans is implied in this story.

[23:42]

So the story, you can see the seed of this story, this collection of stories in this story. Now, what is this snake in this koan? We discussed many things. The snake is, and all of them, that's right, yes. But what is this snake in this koan? What is this snake in this koan?

[24:44]

It's a word. It's a word, snake. In English, S-N-A-K-E. It's just a word. It's not a snake first and then a word. It's a word first and then a snake. That's like a child. The child says, what's that child? It's a word. It's not a snake. So it's a word representing a snake. So if you remember that, then you can see that it's easy why this koan, the snake, is a wado, is a turning word. Because it's not a snake after all, it's a word. Representing a snake. And then the snake represents many things to you. So we could say hyphenating the word representing, it's a word representing a snake to you.

[25:54]

And what does the snake represent to you? Excuse me for this bad joke, but when your kids, people say, you know, they draw a picture, they dig a hole in the ground, and they, I don't know if you do this in Germany, but boys do it in America, they dig a hole in the ground, and then they draw a circle with a line across it. And they say, this one is your ass, and this is a hole in the ground. And then they get you to say, now, which one of these is your ass? Then you point to the one that they'd said was your ass.

[27:07]

And you say, and everybody says, ha, [...] you don't know your ass from a hole in the ground. Didn't get that. You didn't get that? She doesn't even get it. You do it. You draw it, make two holes in the ground. Two holes? Yeah. One you dig a hole and one you make a circle and put a line across it. And then you say, this one is your ass and this one was a hole in the ground. Okay? And then you say, you tell me which one is your ass. And people point to the one you said was a hole in the ground. And then you say, ah, it's just a hole in the ground. So this is actually a very common expression in English, colloquial English. They say about somebody, that person doesn't know his ass from a hole in the ground.

[28:11]

Ulrike is not good at translating these things. It's not like the ass in the well. That was a donkey. So to think that this is a snake and not a word is the same kind of, from the Buddhist point of view, if you ask, is that a snake or a word? It's a word. You can't tell a snake from a word. So the koan's a word, the koan's a story.

[29:16]

And this is a story that, you know, again going back to this accompanying mind. Yes, and we go back to this story of the spirit that accompanies everything. If you practice mindfulness during the day, you could say practicing mindfulness is trying to put a leash on the accompanying mind. And to keep bringing your attention to your feet or to your walking or to what you're doing, is kind of trying to make a connecting link to whatever you're looking at, whatever you're doing. A kind of leash. Of course, eventually you want to be able to get rid of the leash, but for a while you need this effort to bring your attention to things. And this leash even becomes kind of like a little tunnel.

[30:36]

And you can put things into this funnel, into your background mind. So you begin to have more of a sense of a way to feel this accompanying mind, feel it accompanying you. This mind that's present in everything you do. It's always there, actually. It's just that we don't have a leash to it or a sense of it.

[31:36]

And it's in your breath. And it's in a big sense of space around you as you're acting? And the more you get a sense of this, the more it's the seed, a seed of the Dharmakaya. So here, that's one reason. Jasha, and it's in here, representing a kind of simple idea, initially simple idea of the Dharmakaya. It's just that it's first tasted as a kind of accompanying mind.

[32:38]

Mm-hmm. The process here of working with a koan is a little, maybe almost the opposite of working with images from a dream. At least in some senses opposite. Because a dream offers you an image, and then you try to feel, see what's stuck to the image, what accompanies the image. But in this case, the... The koan in the lineage is giving you an image.

[33:51]

It's almost like instead of you're fishing and you bought up a fish, the image being a fish, In this case, the koan is baiting the hook. It's giving you a little fish, a snake or something to put on the hook, an eel, and you're dropping it down into your deeper mind. So part of... So part of the practice of a koan is, as I said again, floating in the images of the koan, and in a sense baiting your hook, your leash, with images from the koan. Sort of, if this is the hook, you kind of put the koan on it and you let it down into your background mind and see if anything bites.

[35:11]

And this is sometimes called in koan something equivalent to fishing for dragons. Or sending a dragon or a snake down into your deeper being and it comes up with a jewel. This is often imaged in Zen pictures of dragons with a jewel in its mouth or even the mokugyo here, the wooden fish. If you hold it up, I think in the bottom you can see there's a jewel in the mouth of this two dragon heads coming together. And it's called the wooden fish that we beat for chanting. And it's also shaped like a heart. It's your heartbeat, which is also a wooden fish, which is coming up with a jewel.

[36:17]

And when you can let go of your conscious mind, which is almost like a dock or a pier out into a big lake or ocean, there may be out there in your lake a Loch Ness monster. Didn't we talk about Nelly here once? Sort of like you can begin to feel actually a kind of energy or dragon or something moving inside you at some depth that you can't feel easily. It may look just like a snake across your path. But when you take hold of the snake, you find out it's a dragon that's turning your whole life. And it can be quite dangerous. And sometimes, as a Kawafi poem says, it comes the time when you have to come up with the great yes or the great no in your life.

[38:09]

And you say no. And even if asked again, you would say no. And that no fixes your life for the rest of your time. And we are more often than we realize at that moment of a great yes or a great no. Of a dragon with or without a jewel that turns our hundred years. Turns our hundred years. Hmm. Hmm. And the I Ching is, the whole I Ching is based on the sense that, you know, throwing the reed, the reed stalks or the coins, you see the presence of a great yes or great no every day in your life.

[39:29]

It's really hard, you know, you go along in your daily life and it's hard to see that it's much other than just a kind of another day. And you need something like astrology or the I Ching to awaken you to something deeper in your life. But in general, astrology is definitely not recommended in Buddhism. You're supposed to look at the stars in your belly, not in the sky. But institutional Buddhism does use some forms of astrology sometimes.

[40:38]

And the I Ching is absorbed into a lot of koans. And Dung Shan's teaching of the five ranks is expressed in terms of the hexagrams of the I Ching. But the basic sense in Chinese Zen practice is that you are the I Ching. But the basic understanding in the Chinese Zen is that you are the I Ching. You are the reed stalks. And you are the coins. You are the astrological signs, the stars. And find ways to peer into that, to open that up yourself. This is to go from one-sidedness to many-sidedness to non-sidedness.

[41:48]

And that place, transition between many-sidedness and non-sidedness and one-sidedness, one-pointedness, we begin to feel this dragon moving within us. Okay, so again, this is the sense of using the koan as a meditation. To join this snake in its many forms. Join it with your background mind or accompanying mind. And joining it with your accompanying mind or inner awareness or inner consciousness is a way of educating your inner consciousness. beginning to articulate your inner consciousness.

[43:07]

And so it's more accessible to you, so it surfaces more often into your usual consciousness. So the koan being a kind of dream language is on the one hand ordinary language, on the other hand is dream language and is floating somewhere in between. So that very floating in between begins to articulate the in-between. So the koan, the use of language like this, the use of images like this begins to create a kind of awake conscious territory between your non-conscious and conscious beings. So it's almost like you have the water coming up into the boat, and the boat is maybe half in the water and still floating, but half in the water and half on top of the water.

[44:25]

And the other image of one another, the image in this koan is that you bring into this floating koan meditation. It is the boat. A boat appears and the boatman monk in by implication appears. And ferrying across to the other shore. And gate, gate, paragate, parasamgate, bodhisvaha is to go across, to completely go across to the other shore. Nirvana present in our daily life. So the boat is in the reeds, the boat is pulled to the side of the river and in the white flowers.

[45:40]

So you have these images. And we don't in Zen talk about something like the clear light. This is too much of a generalization and then would require techniques to realize it or something. Zen, again, wants to give you metallogic images, direct images of light. Images you can practice with. Like the white reed flowers. And the snow. And so you have two kinds of white here, and that's already something subtle, white and two different kinds of white. Sometimes we say, as I've said, snow in a silver bowl.

[46:59]

And this isn't meant to be analyzed. This is meant to give you a feeling of an experience, a yogic experience of silver, of light, of snow in a silver bowl. Sometimes plum blossoms, the first flower in spring, white against the snow. Or here a white bird against the snow. Or a white bird against the snow. And here white flowers, the reeds against the snow. And here you also have the quality of the white of a flower, probably flax, and the white of the snow. And these dimensions of practice, which includes winter and snow and also spring and the rustling breezes and the willows.

[48:20]

And you even have two banks of snow. Two banks which reflect each other, which represent each other. And what's between the banks of the river? And we even have a 10,000 bushel boat that floats like the wind. So this isn't just your boat, your little boat with a single oar, but also a boat, a huge boat of the culture carrying 10,000 bushels. So again, in this con, you don't try to think about it so much. And these images like, again, pushing a cork down into water, it keeps spinning. The snake is something bad.

[49:38]

The snake is something good. The snake is your backbone. The snake is your mind. And it's true. In one way, one mood, one way your body is, this is illuminating throughout your body. In another way, it's making you physically sick or making you ill. Take care, teacher. This is poisonous for all of us. As Shakespeare points out, I think in Romeo and Juliet, poison and medicine are the same thing, depending on the quantity and how you use it. So every situation is both poison and medicine, and it's up to you to realize this in your practice. So this is a kind of meditation in which we have flowers and spring breezes and boats and water.

[50:46]

And also there's the repetitious image of plants. His name is what? What's it mean? Green Forest? Green Forest Sanctuary. Yeah, Green Forest Sanctuary. That's where he lived, Green Forest Sanctuary. And he uses the image of bamboo sprouts. And there's the poem about him planting pine trees that we see today in this koan. And we see the seeds of the Blue Cliff Green Grotto records in this koan.

[51:46]

So again, you don't You're not so much thinking about the story as letting these images integrate with your own life. You're baiting your hook with water, boats, flowers. Snakes, dragons, images of light, snow, white flowers. The moonlit flowers reflected in the depths of the water. Your single oar deep in the water, the rudder turning the boat. Maybe a fish will jump into your boat. Maybe you will find out you yourself are the jewel. What is more direct than a shortcut?

[52:54]

The biggest shortcut is to be already there. So you can practice with a phrase like already there. Already here. Now in English, already here has a little more power than just saying here, here. So I don't know in German what would have similar power. But that's what you have to do. You bait your hook with a word. You bait your hook with a snake. You made your hook with already here.

[53:55]

Already here. Already this world and you are one bright jewel. I got the first full night's sleep I've had since I've been here last night. And I had a dream in which there were three very vivid images, different images. And so I assumed that this dream was churned up by the dragon at this convent. by the dead snake of this koan. So I in zazen still had the strong feeling of this dream present in my mind. So I tried to follow my own instructions.

[55:08]

So I very clearly as I could identified the feeling associated with each image separately. And although each of the images was vividly different, I found that there was a quality, an aspect in each of the feelings that joined the three feelings, though the three images were not joined. And then I let that common feeling, the feeling common to the three images, sort of permeate my zazen mind.

[56:14]

And I found that it I don't know how to explain, but something happened. I'm going into more details, not necessary. I just wanted to tell you that I had that feeling from working with the con. I don't want to go into more details, but I just wanted to tell you that I had that feeling from working with the con. Often I find when I say, what shall I... Is there anything I should do in relationship to a call-in or a lecture if I... Often my dreams instruct me what to talk about in the lecture.

[57:20]

Often when I ask myself what I should do with a horn, it happens that my dreams tell me what I should do. Last night's dream was instructing me to instruct myself. And the dream of last night taught me to instruct myself. Is there a deep depth of a koan? Almost not. Gibt es ein Ende zu den tiefen eines koans? Almost not. I mean, in other words, you can reach a point where a koan will work in you no more. But if 30 years later you come back to the koan, it would be very different. Maybe it's two years after the koan. Well, an answer has no meaning if it doesn't work in you.

[58:41]

And in that sense, of course, there's no end. When a koan starts working in you, that continues. And one reason that's tied to ordinary circumstances and not in some kind of special magical Lotus Sutra-like situation is that then your ordinary situations keep bringing up dimensions of the koan because you live in ordinary situations. Okay, I'd like to ask you a question here. What world is this koan presenting to you? If you arrived here from Venus, if you wanted to take a cool vacation, and somebody said, here's something, and you were able to read this.

[60:16]

And so you said, oh, this describes what human life is like. This describes the world of human beings. What world would you see here? You'd say, geez, I'm going back to penises. I can't tell a dead snake from a live snake in this place. A world of change and transformation? Yeah, that. It's no escape. Yeah, that too. You can't go to Venus. You can both stay in Germany.

[61:17]

In Germany. Mm-hmm. Mind stuff. Mind stuff? It's not, it's a sense object. You mean everything here is mind stuff? Words, words. Yeah. It's a word, so... Yeah, I'm trying to say what we mean by soul these days. That's the point. A word of serenity. I hope. Well, let's go, let's turn to, let's turn to page XX, no, XXIX in the introduction.

[62:27]

Yeah. Page 19. Okay. Cleary gives us six levels of stages of enlightenment. Cleary describes here six stages of enlightenment. You can see he says the first level is numinal identity. The main thing is this line, consciousness has inherent within it the nature of enlightenment. And down here in the third one, the third is the level of where levels of reality, which shows you levels of reality to contemplate.

[63:53]

I was reading exactly, I was just saying the third emphasizes that some koans present various levels of reality and just to make you aware of them. Now, I would say that this koan, of these six aspects, this koan emphasizes the first and the third. And the other thing it does is it emphasizes the use, how to make use of these levels of identity. Okay, so when we look at this case, let's talk about what's being talked about. Okay, so the first line. When the student goes by a shortcut.

[65:22]

Now, we can assume that perhaps this person has been talking to Xin Ling in Doksan. And He's been practicing for some time and he's come to the point where he feels he can bring his practice together in a single act. So instead of... practicing a number of different practices, he feels, like I said, instead of practicing a number of different practices, a little bit like I said about the dream, I found a feeling that united the three images.

[66:37]

This this student has come to the point where the various practices he has been doing, he begins to see that they have a common feeling that he can concentrate on. It's almost like there's a jumble of things and he sees right in the middle of the jumble of things there's one place he can take hold of the whole jumble. So he's asking his teacher, what about if I take hold of the whole thing in one place? So he's saying, what happens if I do this?

[67:46]

Is this a good way to practice? And so Xinling says, a dead snake lies across the great road. Okay, he doesn't just say the road, he says the großen strasse. He doesn't just say street, he says big street. Three years in Boston was a bit late. He says great road because he's honestly talking about practice.

[68:47]

Practice. The path, the way. And if he says the great road, the great path, it implies that the student is close to enlightenment. Okay, so... What is enlightenment called in Buddhism? What's a common term for enlightenment? The great death. To die. Okay. So what happens when people have experienced a great death? Sometimes they stay dead They stay stuck in enlightenment.

[69:52]

So one of the things this case is about is about staying stuck in enlightenment. And where do you see him stuck in enlightenment? It's in the next page where he lived in his hut for ten years. And he suddenly says, I should help the ignorant. Okay, so here you come to the point of how do you how do you get out of being stuck in enlightenment? Well, you have to learn how to turn your boat around. So, okay, so there are many images of that and so forth throughout the koan. There are many pictures of it in this koan.

[71:06]

On the first level, this is a koan about somebody taking a walk and they run into a snake. But since there's a lot of levels to this story, the images are not consistently on one level. If it was just a story about a boy scout protecting himself from snakes, of course the snake would not be dead. Wenn es nur eine Geschichte wäre über einen Pfadfinder, der sich vor einer Schlange schützt, dann wäre die Schlange nicht tot. So as Christian pointed out, for the Boy Scout, it would be don't step on his tail. Und wie Christian das hervorgehoben hatte für den Pfadfinder, würde das vor allem heißen, dass er nicht auf den Schwanz treten soll.

[72:13]

So if it's a dead snake... we know that the level of the story just shifted. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. and use the cane, wouldn't that be also a dead snake? Another thing is that the teacher takes For me it feels a bit like fighting a kilo or so where someone takes the energy and really in another direction so that the snake is stuck around his waist and he

[73:24]

It's weird. For me, it's weird now, I think, to show it. It's more subtle and more... It opens another direction for the practice of the mind. And there's a possibility of a show, but it's just not... Is that all said in German? No. Do you want to say it in German? My feeling is that in the way the monk buries, that he actually provokes it, that when a whole alien being falls into this box or this conversation, that the way he buries is actually a little bit provoked, like in such an abrupt situation, where a scream or a sleep comes, and my feeling is that the liver is actually a bit unwieldy and a bit in the wrong direction.

[74:44]

That may be good for the scream, but it's more like an alchemy where you absorb the energy from the body, I think it's the same view. For me, it's a difference. It's more subtle, the way of answering. To the monk, in this situation, there are different possibilities for his practice. Okay. Well, first let me say I myself object to the image of not what you said, but in general, to the image of these stories as dharma combat or fighting.

[75:48]

Occasionally that is the nature of the... of the encounter. But when you say it's like some kind of a keto situation where you're shifting a person's energy, that I agree with. I'm not speaking just to you, I'm speaking to everyone. So when you're thinking of it as a kind of shifting someone's energy, then I think that's right. But if this monk was practicing with Deshan or with Linji, then the response would be different. I don't think, at least I can't say one's better than the other.

[77:10]

It's a different style of different lineages. The style of shouting and striking people actually developed in Sekito's lineage, which is Jungshan's lineage. in Sekito's lineage. But it actually was then picked up by the Rinzai lineage and became the style of teaching. And the Dongshan lineage emphasizes more like this style of catching people in their own actions rather than directing something at them.

[78:11]

Yeah, but I don't think you can say one's better than the other, it's just a different style. Okay, so we should take a break soon. Maybe now. We'll come back to this story. Now, a story like this is... Of course presenting a teaching. But part of the teaching is also trying to get you to be able to notice your own life in a certain way.

[79:14]

So, but this story is much, you think this story is maybe a little complicated or, you know. Er denkt vielleicht, dass diese Geschichte kompliziert ist. or hard to see what's going on. But it's much more difficult to see what's going on in your own life. In your own life, it looks like a real snake. And so you don't recognize that it's a dead snake. or in your life you approach it more like a boy scout. Do you have boy scouts and girl scouts in Germany? And there's no signals given how to change levels.

[80:26]

and there are no signals how to change the levels. When you read this and you see that the snake, this dangerous snake is dead, you know that this is a signal that the story has shifted levels. So this story, let's say, let's just look at the snake. First of all, this story is organized on the level as if it was an ordinary snake you ran into. And this story is also organized in the level that this snake is like your psychological problems and so forth. But it's also organized in the level that this is the problems that arise when you're free from your psychological problems. So, sometimes this dead snake is your problems.

[81:47]

Let's say, sometimes this dead snake is your problems with your ordinary life. Sometimes this dead snake is the problems you have with enlightenment. And sometimes it's just an ordinary snake. And you, the story shifts those meanings rapidly back and forth. And, okay, so that's the dead snakes. And when it lies across the great road you know it's lying across not only the ordinary road of your life but the road of practice.

[82:49]

Now, What Qin Ling means is when he says, I urge you not to step on its head. He means grab it by its head. Now, why does he say it as not and not say it as grab it by its head, you idiot? Because if he said grab it by... I'm just talking... He's speaking intuitively. He's not thinking this out. He's just speaking intuitively. So if he's just said, grab it by its head, it doesn't make sense to grab a dead snake by its head.

[83:55]

And also it doesn't convey a sense of danger. So he's advising him to... Because what he's saying is, if you grab it by its head, it'll come alive. And if it comes alive, it's dangerous. So if you want to avoid the danger, don't grab it by its head. So at the level of which a dead snake is dangerous, you don't grab it. So he's again shifting the level of the story here.

[84:57]

Do you follow that? In other words, he's pointing out that a dead snake can become dangerous if you grab it by its head. It becomes dangerous because it becomes alive. But it's more dangerous if it stays dead, though. Okay, now, so what do we have here in the relationship between dead and alive? This is again a general theme in Zen, is whether your, as I've said already, whether your words are alive or dead.

[85:58]

So if a student just imitates his teacher, then he's a dead student. A live student transcends his teacher. Okay, so if I say A and you say A, that's a dead word. But if I say A and then you advance it slightly to B, that's a live word. Wenn er A sagt und wir bilden das zu einem B, dann wird es ein lebendiges Wort. So, when I said to the boss over here, why are you foreigners always late? Also, als ich zu ihm sagte, wieso seid ihr Ausländer immer spät?

[87:02]

And if he had apologized, I said, oh, I'm sorry. Und wenn er sich entschuldigt hätte und gesagt hätte, es tut mir leid? That might be just his profound courtesy. And compassion for my rude remark. But it might be just an answer on the same level. Because really there's no, because obviously we're all foreigners. So he advanced the discussion slightly by saying, because you got here before me. So in that sense, his answer was a live answer, because it changed the topic, changed the level. And pointed out exactly what I meant, which was that we're all foreigners. So what he's doing by saying here by this thing is a step on his head is telling him how to practice.

[88:09]

Yeah, and so down here at the bottom of page 249 It says, what is the method of reviving people, right at the bottom. And he talks about the skills, points out the skills of a Zen teacher here. You can send somebody away, you can summon them, and so forth. So at this point, he's captured. And so the monk says, when one steps on its head, then what?

[89:12]

Because the monk knows... the monk has shifted levels with Chin Ling. And then he says, you lose your life. So that's actually more or less staying on the same level, and what does it refer to? Hmm? Anyone? What's losing your life? What? Yeah, it's enlightenment. So he says, if you do this, you might lose your life. This is put in a negative sense. He doesn't say you might get enlightenment, which is kind of like stupid that you say something like that. First of all, it's giving up your ego or giving up who you thought you've been all these years.

[90:20]

You do lose something. We put a lot of energy into being a certain kind of person. And although it's often been fruitless energy, it's also sweet. It's, you know, the stuff of life. And so you may, and it's not uncommon, at a point where you come to one of the satori experiences to actually cry for some days.

[91:38]

Because you feel something, a great loss, in that so many things that were important to you aren't important anymore. Okay, so that's in one sense why it's put negatively, you lose your life.

[91:59]

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