In your speaking together in Swedish, what particular points or what main points came up for you? Anything? Well, one thing was I said Buddhism to me is pretty vague. I don't really know what it is or about. I would like to learn more. What else? I won't forget. Pardon? I won't forget. You won't forget. No. Thank you. I particularly... Just the idea of doing the things that nourish me and being aware of them.

[01:02]

And also this part about intention to bring attention to the breathing and working or being aware of these two together. Yeah. So that was one of the things that was most clear or... touched you the most in what I've seen yeah but also the thing you said about which was only a sentence about this inwards this wisdom and outwards compassion and that I would very much like to do more about and also I'm interested in what ideas were perhaps interesting but hard to make sense of or didn't make sense of or anything like that The sentence you gave out. Yeah.

[02:04]

Okay. So we can come to that after because I think it's a remarkable statement after the break. Attention on attention and intention And the fine level of intention, how important it is. Mm-hmm. For me, it's sort of... Just subjectively, what do I go back to, to the intention, how... Mm-hmm. How faint it is, how subtle it is. Mm-hmm. It really shifts my attention. Mm-hmm. And when I bounce back on attention, on attention, I'm not attention. Mm-hmm. Attention is the greatest treasure we have. What we bring attention to shapes our life.

[03:07]

So should we have a break now and come back to these things after the break? Or if you would like to... There's one more... I see paradox in, well, as in there isn't, it's no such thing that the forest metaphor, that there isn't a truth, but there is different ways, but that is the truth, isn't it? So do you have the paradox always? You started out with connecting to paradox and that you shouldn't have a concept and that it's a concept. I keep seeing paradoxes in Zen and Buddhism. I don't really know how to phrase the question yet. The sixth patriarch, whoever he was, three-quarters mythological, always asked slightly before he died, supposedly, what advice would you give me how to instruct successors?

[04:41]

And he said, tell them the opposite. because truth is always somewhere in between. So if you don't begin to see that, but to say that there's no one truth, I didn't say things aren't true, but there's no one truth, at least from a Buddhist point of view, we might be wrong. Okay, what is a Buddhist? I would say anyway that strictly speaking, Buddhism is a kind of science. It disguised itself for various reasons as a religion. And then there's interesting compromises.

[05:47]

Much of Chinese Buddhism has been, I think, weakened by the compromises they made. For instance, I would say, again, strictly speaking, reincarnation, for example, might be true. But there's no teaching in Buddhism that depends on reincarnation. But Chinese Buddhism, I mean, the idea of reincarnation Buddhism does not fit with the Chinese idea of ancestor worship. But they kind of tried to make it fit because if you, I mean, the idea was, if this is what people, it's a distinction between mercy Buddhism and transmission Buddhism. And the idea was, if you could get a large population like China to accept the basic worldview of Buddhism, a few fibs were okay.

[06:58]

Fibs is a small lie. So many Buddhist teachers will do funeral ceremonies and talk about it as if this person is going to be reincarnated, but they don't actually believe it. But that's what people want to hear. So how much do you tell people what they want to hear in order to overall benefit them? For instance, from a Buddhist point of view, there's no such thing as oneness. You can have an experience of... Now, I'm speaking quite strictly about Buddhism, not general popular Buddhism. And if you can get a population to believe in God, a Buddhist would say, if you can get a population to believe in God, then you can get them to believe in anything. And then, okay, if you can get a population to believe in reincarnation, then you can get them to believe in anything, if they go over that edge.

[08:00]

So... I spent, actually at Esalen, three years meeting with a group of people for any indication for survival after bodily death. Survival after bodily death. And Michael accumulated, gathered the top researchers in the field from all over the English-speaking world, but to a French person occasionally, to discuss this. There's some very interesting evidence for some kind of out-of-body experience, that when the body itself seems to be medically dead, and there's information, those experiences are fairly common. But still, I found no evidence that convinced me or even interested me about survival after bodily death.

[09:03]

And they now have a book out. They asked me to contribute to it, but I didn't. The great big book, what's it called, just came out a few weeks ago. If I think of the name, I'll tell you, because it's interesting research. So I would say Buddhism, it's not a psychology because there's no psyche. I would call it a mindology. It's a study, really, of how the mind functions. And knowing how the mind functions and being able to participate in how the mind, by this mind we mean mind and body, mind-body function, you lead a different kind of life. Now, as a teaching, Buddhism isn't just a pure science, trying to find out how things exist, but the overall sense of it is, yes, let's find out how things actually exist, but also let's find out how they free us from suffering and how they might lead to enlightenment.

[10:16]

So those are two constraints on the research, so to speak. So Buddhism popularizes very well the most sophisticated, adept practitioners' teachings. Usually the understanding is not much different. So Buddhism has tried to develop so it popularizes well. But anyway, there's a historical person called Buddha that seems to have been really a person who lived about 2,500 years ago. And supposedly the Indian government has found a tomb of a man who says that he was Buddha's teacher, Buddha's father. My son, the one who was known as the Buddha, I don't know if it's true.

[11:23]

I've never seen much evidence of it. There's a funny story about Bertrand Russell, who was an atheist, was asked, but what if when you died, you found yourself at the pearly gates and there was God? What would you do? Bertrand Russell said, I would say, sir, you didn't give us enough evidence. So, strictly speaking, in Buddhism there's no belief. And so there's an early school, let's just call it early Buddhism, and sometimes it's identified with Theravadan and Hinayana, or Hinayana. which is a negative way to say early Buddhism, because hina means lesser vehicle, mahayana means greater vehicle. There's a little politics in there. But the basis of all Buddhism is early Buddhism.

[12:23]

And what was first an oral tradition and then written down, some hundreds of years after Buddha's death, but when Buddha was coming into China in the early centuries before Christ, most of the teachings were still oral. Indian and Near Eastern and Afghani, really, Afghanistan was part of this. Our Buddhism flourished in the early days. When they came to China, they tried to transcribe the oral teachings. So there was the early Buddhism, which was oral, then there was the transcription of Buddhism, and there still is an oral dimension to Buddhism. If you... If I have a disciple who I give transmission to, transmission is primarily oral, but you can take notes, but you never pass the note on.

[13:36]

It's called cut paper, because it has to be essentially a face-to-face tradition. So then the next big step was the development of the Abhidharma. And the Abhidharma was the attempt to systematize Buddhism and get the essential things that the Buddha taught in these oral and then written down teachings and make it something you can practice. And of course, Buddhism is an accumulated teaching. It develops. It's not a revealed teaching. It develops the way science develops. Then, once the Abhidharma was developed, it then became a seed of new development. Because suddenly all these things were worked out and put down, and then they over-systematized it by trying to make the terms in this teaching fit the terms in this teaching, and have consistent terms throughout, and it doesn't work.

[14:45]

Because many of the teachings, you can't map one teaching upon another easily. Because, again, there's no consistent meaning for these words. The words have meaning in context. So anyway, the Abhidharma led to the Mahayana. And the Mahayana, the so-called greater vehicle, is most of Far Eastern Buddhism. Chinese, Japanese, Vietnam, Korea. And most Theravadan Buddhism, I mean now Buddhism, although early Buddhism and its versions in the West, really, and Tibetan Buddhism all have teachings which are basically interrelated and similar. And Mahayana Buddhism, which Zen is part of, or Zen is a late development within Mahayana, are now, will develop here in the West.

[15:52]

I mean, what we're doing here is part of the development of Buddhism in the West. And how, in terms of Western paradigms, because if you take an experience, right, You have to look at it in your own terms. I mean, you have to have some way to look at it. So I have a concept. I look at it through my concept. The way I look at it changes it. Again, there's no one truth. Okay. So when I change, I may be having a very similar experience. And in this sense, the historical Buddha is the beginning. He's not the end point. We're the end point. So we may experience things the Buddha never experienced. If we say only the Buddha had this highest, then you've got a theology again. So whatever this experience is, we now in the West are trying to identify it in ways that we can develop our own experience and develop it with others and that will change the teaching.

[16:59]

Which is what you have in science anyway. And that's what you have in science too. Did you say that it stems from the yogic traditions? It is a yogic tradition within Indian Buddhism. A yogic tradition isn't just about yoga. Although this is a yogic posture. So Buddhism is in a larger stream, which I could call a yogic culture, a yogic tradition. Hinduism is part of it. Yeah. And I think while Indian Buddhism is mostly early Buddhism, in fact, Chinese Buddhism strayed a bit, I would say. I agree with a scholar named Lusthaus. because the great Indian theologians theologians logicians like Dignaga actually were in it they advanced Mahayana beyond where Chinese Buddhism went and they didn't the Chinese Buddhists didn't pay attention to the later developments in Indian Buddhism so I think in the West now we're paying more attention to the later developments in Indian Buddhism okay that kind of

[18:21]

picture of it. It's been around for a while. What's very interesting in Jaspers, Carl Jaspers pointed out, is that Confucius, the Buddha, Socrates, Plato, all lived about the same time in the world. So there was some kind of, what he calls an axial point, where the world, a little bit like you know, the quark was discovered the same day. All over the world, these teachings culminated at a certain point. Okay. Should we take a break? I mean, I'm happy to continue, you know, I just had a break. I don't know what the situation is with the hotel. Whatever we want it to be. Okay. Oh, but they have coffee and all that stuff now if we would like to. Yeah, but around. Yeah, around three, so it's ten after three. Yeah.

[19:25]

So if we have that, we could go now. Yeah, let's have a break and then we'll start afterwards and maybe start with this. Okay. You don't have to bow back to me. It's just my habit. Last time I went to Thailand, they called it the way. The way, yeah. The way. And they told us not to do it back, because they said, the way you do it, it looks terrible in their eyes. So we said, okay, I stop. I would say that. But they also have the outer and inner smile as a practice. Yeah. Which is again. They told me they had 12 different smiles. Really? Eight were friendly and four weren't that friendly. So if you were supposed to do business, you have to know the distinction. Yeah.

[20:25]

Well, I know that from Japan.

[20:26]

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