I wish I could give the lecture I'd like to give. I feel again I'm on this altar with you. Yeah, maybe of our true nature, our potentially true nature. Hmm. And I've gone into this koan 40, number 40, much more thoroughly than I expected to. But I don't feel I should shortchange you. Shortchange you? When you buy something and somebody gives you back less money than you should get, that's called being shortchanged.

[01:02]

They say that in New Zealand too? In the sense that I think we're doing something very parallel to what happened in the early centuries of Buddhism coming into China. Yeah. And it was one of the most transformative and deeply thought through and practiced through events in history. Because of somewhat similar conditions and because of the seriousness of our practice, each of your practice. Okay. Yeah, so... The world seems like it's a big space.

[02:29]

But sometimes it's hard to find our place in it. It's strange. There's this big world. And there's not even a small space for us in it sometimes. A space that really reflects how we feel, how we actually want to know the world and do know the world. Mm-hmm. it almost feels like the world in us is bigger than the world that we try to find our space in. And then, what did I say? Yes, the karmic vomit, excuse me for the vulgarity. But sometimes it feels there's a kind of dark slimy pool somewhere in those that keep coming up.

[03:52]

You did that very well. I felt, eww. And, you know, it's how do we make a story that can express our life, contain our life. And one of the main roads of our story is consciousness. It's the main road for our personality and our behavior. Although not the whole of our personality or behavior is only on this public road of consciousness.

[04:56]

So we have this idea in Buddhism, which I mentioned yesterday, of the Alaya Vishnana. And as soon as you have, you know, in the koan saying eyes, ears, nose, taste, mind, etc., The five senses. And the sixth, the mind. Then you know you're in the territory of the eight vijnanas. And these koans assume you know this. You know, it's interesting.

[06:12]

Dogen, as I told you one evening, when he came back from China, he said, I discovered my eyes are horizontal and my nose vertical. And I can't resist saying, I'm sorry, that for Japanese their noses are more vertical, ours tend to be more horizontal. And he said, I come back with empty hands. And I have no Buddhism, he said. But we know he was a brilliant young man and had the best education possible in China at that time as the child of a noble family.

[07:26]

Not because he was noble or something, but because he had access to resources, education. And So they say he read the entire Buddhist canon, which was available at the time, in his late teens. And yet he said, I have returned with empty hands and have no Buddhism. I just leave it there because that's one of the cons or conundrums of our practice. Canundrum is a puzzle.

[08:34]

Just before I came here, I did a seminar in Boulder, Colorado with the title, What is Buddha? And a young woman in the seminar said, I like this question because I don't like this question. And I said to her, this is a little too zen for me. Will you please explain it to me? She said, I don't like this question because it can't be answered. But I like this question because it can't be answered. Because holding the question starts opening things up.

[09:48]

And that's true of most of the aspects of Zen, which are conundrums, puzzles. Das gilt für die meisten Aspekte des Zen, in denen die Dinge eben Rätsel sind. Seeming contradictions and you resolve them in yourself, please. But don't resolve them, keep them open. Scheinbare Widersprüche und ihr löst die in euch selbst auf, aber ihr löst sie eben nicht auf, sondern ihr haltet sie unaufgelöst. Resolve them by keeping them open. So the laya-vijñāna idea is that, embedded in our cellular life experience, Is everything that's ever happened to us.

[11:07]

Yeah, and sort of the way some things can be recovered. Tiny details of a car license plate that you saw in an accident can be recovered through hypnotism, but you don't consciously know it. So things are laid down in a very layered way in our wide experience. And come up not through the usual methods of trying to remember, but through the context of situations. Like my arm remembered. While I'd forgotten, my arm remembered the hot bathroom pipe.

[12:19]

So it's not only that everything that's happened to us is in the Laya Dajjana. But all the things we might have done are in the alaya vijnana. Or could have done and didn't. Or could have done and didn't. Yeah, I said pretty much the same thing. Okay, might have done it. Okay. And you know, when you're young, it's still, yeah, I might do that. And that creates some kind of dynamic or tension in how you exist. And as you get older, more and more of the things you might have done or could have done, you haven't done and you know you never will.

[13:24]

And that's another kind of tension. And they both exist at any age. Maybe there's an emphasis. The emphasis changes as you get older. But it's a little bit like It's a great lake, big lake. And everything you... Zeidersee? Oh, it sounded like Holland, Zeidersee. Anyway... And this great lake has a small dam at one end. And in the image of the eight vijjanas, the seventh vijjana is Manas.

[14:36]

And it is a kind of conveyor belt and editor. And it kind of decides what's let out. And it goes back and forth, kind of. Manas is where I-consciousness resides in this teaching of the eight vijnanas. No, I'm mentioning this because, you know, this is the necessary background for this koan. Or, yeah, maybe not completely necessary because you can get things out of cones without knowing this stuff, but it makes a difference if you understand really what the background is.

[15:55]

So, when we're doing sashin, we're kind of beating at poor old eye consciousness. Eye, pronoun eye. I mean, it just gets tired. I mean, the eye, the ego's eye says, if I had any authority, you'd leave this sashim. I'm tired of this. But you're sort of glued together, and so, you know, you don't leave, you know. You're kind of glued to the other people, so you don't leave. So I said, well, this is your problem, and I'm going to sleep. And suddenly the lake starts flooding through the gate of Manas.

[16:59]

And all this stuff comes up. And it's bigger than our story. And it doesn't fit in. There's parts we don't tell anyone and there's parts we don't know how to notice or talk about. Yeah, not because of some parts are secret or something, but just because it's not in the realm of the tellable. Yeah, so, yeah. So then in sashin you are sometimes overwhelmed. And sometimes, you know, since I'm talking about the chakras, sometimes it overwhelms individual chakras.

[18:17]

Because in yogic understanding of the being, the person, It's the persona, the mask. It's not just consciousness through which your story has to flow. One thing the 20th century study of shamanism has done for Western philosophy... One thing, the 20th century, that was the last century, is it true? What the study of Shamanism has done for philosophy in the 20th century is make At least some philosophers were aware that you have to take the body into consideration and not just the mind in trying to develop a philosophy.

[19:34]

And not just the mind. Oh, I said that might be... Oh, den Körper mit... Ja, Entschuldigung. Den Körper mit in Betracht ziehen musste, nicht nur den Geist, um Philosophie zu betreiben. Yeah, and shamanism did his bit. I mean, no, I mean, Castaneda did his bit. A big bit. And LSD, yeah, had a role. Among other psychedelics. So... we're now not just talking about your story, your lived life in terms of some kind of mental or conscious story. If you try to put it all through your consciousness and have it sort of publicly checked, you know, understood in terms of other people and...

[20:36]

your story is just going to get stuck. So we try to tell the history of the West now in terms of the unconscious as well as the conscious, but the image within Buddhism and yoga Cultures is, excuse me for saying so, but wider than that. At least somewhat different. Okay. Now there are practices, I hope I have time to speak about, to allow this flow to come into you and to be clarified and dispersed.

[21:55]

At first, okay. Now, The brain, our brain, our human brain is extremely complex. The most complex thing we know of in the known universe. You know, I remember I was looking at the... for some reason studying the cardiovascular system the other day, and I can't remember exactly, but something like we have 60,000 miles or something like that of blood vessels. Anyway, whatever number it is, it goes around the earth a few times. Well, that's amazing, this little guy.

[23:02]

And I think we shouldn't know it's amazing. If we know it's amazing, we will work with our simple pictures of the world differently. Because this immensely complex brain-body system makes extremely simple pictures of the world. macht außergewöhnlich einfache Bilder von der Welt. And this world from subatomic particles, which you can't call particles even, strings or whatever, to galactic scales,

[24:03]

and to scales, incomprehensible scales that we can't even speculate on. And yet the order within these scales is surprisingly, I've read, algorithmically compressible. OK. In a sense we can say the mind makes such hopefully accurate compressible pictures so that we can function. So this immensely complicated being we are with an accumulation of our experience of micro-moments over the decades we've lived

[25:23]

functions through very simple pictures of the world. That is a tremendous fact that we should notice. Okay, so this koan is attempting a picture of the world is simple but it functions in the realm of practice, not in the realm of consciousness. So it functions to articulate and transform our experience in relationship to the whole body and the world.

[26:51]

Okay, so that's a little introduction. Okay. So the koan starts out... You're laughing at my little introductions? Well, it's a big introduction. Okay. Well, it's a big topic, short time. Okay. And it's five to five, no. Nine to five. Yeah, it's a regular work day. Okay. Mm-hmm. So this Quran starts out with Yuan Wu's introduction. Cease and desist an iron tree flowers.

[27:59]

What was the first? Cease and desist. Stop and stop. Cease something and desist. They both mean stop. Okay. And now the rest. And now the rest. Yeah, oh. And iron tree flowers. An iron tree. Halte an, ein eiserner Baum blüht. And then it says, you know, Officer Liu quoting Sen Chao, And I'll repeat it again. Heaven and earth and I share the same root. Myriad things and I share the same body. And it's attributed, I think, accurately enough to Seng Jiao.

[29:05]

Who lived from 374 to 414? It amazes me, these guys, so many of them lived relatively short lives, 40, we would consider that not very old. He certainly used his first 40 years better than I used my first 40 years. Perhaps time was different for people. I don't know. External life was certainly different. I talked to a Chinese farmer once, a guy who had grown up, who lived in San Francisco, who had grown up in a Chinese family, farming family.

[30:12]

He lived in San Francisco and he grew up in China of a farming family. And where he grew up was like here. They had nine months of snow. Here they spent their time carving clocks. True. They became the clocks for the world because they could make wooden clocks which were cheap and they went all over the world. Nobody could afford metal. He said we had tunnels under the snow between the houses and we had nine months of nothing to do except sing and talk and tell stories and so forth. And he said we had tunnels that... Tunnels that?

[31:31]

Tunnels under the snow between the houses. Yeah. So maybe time was different. Anyway, he was Chinese. He was from central China. But the way he wrote was literature of a high order. And he was a representative of the Chinese San Lung School, the Chinese Majamaka School. San Lung. Yeah, and he combined Indian and Chinese philosophy together. So this koan starts with, Zheng Zhao said this.

[32:43]

Yeah, that's a bit like saying Plato said this. Or St. Thomas Aquinas said, used Aristotle. Reformulating Christianity. So this koan, koans in general are a Chinese way to transform Indian Buddhism. The Chinese way to transform Indian Buddhism. Oh dear. Well, I can't do much.

[34:18]

There's not enough time. So I've asked Otmar, and he agreed we'll go another seven days. We'll have to have a vote, he said, though. All right. Okay, let's just take heaven. It's certainly a Christian translation of a Chinese idea by missionaries to bring Christianity into China. The word heaven. The image is quite different than our idea of heaven. Heaven is male and earth is female. And it's a creation myth.

[35:41]

And heaven and earth are in a continuous, unending, conjugal intercourse. You can use vulgar words, but... Okay. And so many babies are born... that they had to make space for them. So Heaven had to keep lifting up to make space for the babies. So space was created so that there could be room for all the babies they were continuously making.

[36:44]

This is not the Western idea of heaven. I mean, maybe it is. But it's not the Christian idea of heaven. And the emperor is considered the special, has a special relationship to heaven. So here this koan says, heaven and earth and I, the adept practitioner, share the same root. A statement like this would not be allowed on Google in China. Because it says we are the center, not the emperor and not the state.

[38:01]

We have our own conjugal relationship to heaven and earth. Can you explain me conjugal? To have sexual intercourse. Oh, that's conjugal. Yeah. That's easier then. That was different. No, say that again. I said, we have our own conjugal relationship to heaven and earth. And heaven is considered invisible and generates or creates. And earth is considered the maker of forms. Yeah, the maker of forms. And the idea of heaven and earth then parallels the idea of form and emptiness.

[39:17]

So heaven and earth sharing the same root has a complex resonance with basic Chinese pre-Buddhist ideas. So the concept of heaven and earth has a pre-Buddhist resonance with Chinese ideas. And over many Chinese doorways they have, good luck comes from heaven. And there's a kind of Taoist Chinese idea of this flow of relationship between heaven and earth through us. And one practice which is simply called the practice of Taoism is to imagine through the transformation of meditation the newborn self, the reborn self, big self,

[40:29]

travels, flows upward to the crown chakra and down to the belly and upward and down. And this flow is the birth of the new self and awakens and relates to, connects one to others. And the crown chakra of course is the chakra that connects us to the world. Yeah, and there's seven chakras. And remember, there's seven flowers and eight blooms. And remember, we put our okesa and raksu on our head. And you can see in the Kuan Yin behind me, her top knot, like the Buddha, has a top knot, or ushnina.

[42:04]

In the Buddha, it's just a top knot, and in her, it's a top knot with a Buddha in it. And what's characteristic of the Zen Jukai and Tokudo ceremony, ordination ceremonies, is they are considered to be not only a receiving of the precepts, but also a receiving of Buddha's mind. And the Ketchumyaka you get, the blood lineage, And then what?

[43:11]

The ketchumyaku, the piece of paper you get with all the names on it. It's called the ketchumyaku. Which is a circle, and then a circle with all the names in it, a wound-up circle, and back to the Buddha. It represents the Buddha's mind and the flow of Buddha's mind to us and back to the Buddha. This is parallel to our breathing, exhale and inhale. And parallel to this Taoist practice of the new big self being born and circulating. So the seven chakras, the six senses and the six chakras connect us with the, rather open us to the world and receive the world.

[44:49]

But the seventh chakra, the thousand petal lotus, as it's understood, called, which is connected with white, gold and purple, connects us with the world in an invisible bloom that can't be seen. Now these are ideas in Indian Buddhism and in Taoism. And Seng Jiao is this person who unites Indian and Chinese Buddhism. So this koan is, please have an image of the world which allows the flow of your experience and your transformative nature to be fulfilled.

[45:56]

Please have... an image of the world as inseparable from the body, as heaven and earth is also the macrocosm-microcosm relationship. So please have an image of the world that goes beyond ordinary conscious images. Which allows the flow of your experience in the body, mind and the world to be transformed into a big self and into enlightenment. That's the basic idea of this. Behind this koan. To work really with your image of the world.

[46:59]

Now, my time has run out, but let me just say one more thing, if your legs can stand it. The smart people have their knees up. No. The translator can't do it, though. No, I'm not doing it. You look at a leaf. A leaf is the shape of the air. It's impossible without... It's about the air. And if there were no air, there'd be no leaf. And if there were no leaf and other plants, there'd be no air, because plants make air. And if there were no sun, there'd be no leaf. Photosynthesis and all that. So you can't really say where the borders of the leaf are.

[48:18]

Because without air and without sun, there'd be no leaf and vice versa. And then you have the tree, the roots like this tree of life tree. So that's just a description of the Buddhist idea of interdependence. Which becomes interpenetration. And then the concept makes a poetic leap And a practice leap. As you can see, you can't really say where the boundaries of this tree are. It's so mixed with the air and the sun. And with the concept of the universe, world, multiverse, Well, there's no outside of the universe or there's no God.

[49:39]

There's nowhere you can go to other than here. So this interpenetration and interdependence Where you can't say where the boundaries are is transformed in practice into heaven and earth and I share the same root. Myriad things and I share the same body.

[50:12]

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