That's okay. Well, first of all, thank you to Michael and the Zen Center for inviting me. I think this is the first time we were talking about it before. I think this is the first time that I've been back to the Zen Center since Professor Yanagida was here in Red 89. Something like that. He had lectures. I had the very good fortune of studying with Professor Yanagida in Japan for a couple of years, if he was there. profound influence on my understanding of Zen Buddhism. I have to start by saying that I don't have a game plan at all here. I only have a game plan for my opening question, and after that we'll have to see what happens. But I wanted to start by finding out what you folks are interested in and why you would care about the origins of Zen Buddhism.

[01:05]

That is to say, I want to ask you to tell me what you want to know about Zen Buddhism in China, and I won't give any kind of guarantee that I can answer all your questions by any means, but at least based on what it is you're interested in, and we can define what it is we want to talk about. So what do you think they're going to find about Peterson or the origins of Ray Zahn and Frank? Well, OK. That's good enough. I don't know if it fits so well or resonates so well. Is that an experience other people have, that other people in the group have?

[02:11]

Which is not, this is not, hi, my name's John, I'm a gentleman, you know. It's been a blessing to be able to talk to people and everything. It's been a blessing to be able to talk to people. It's been a blessing to be able to talk to people. It's been a blessing to be able to talk to people. Critics weren't too... not too much up for the topic, because, probably, they do like me, if you hear me put stuff to talk about. And people might like the topic. And people come to me and say, it's horrible. And people are just surrounded by a variety of critics. So what good is that to you?

[03:28]

I mean, you talk about koan study, and you have a historical framework for it. People with talent, I decided to come up. I did a thing with the, you know, the Sheminine Eclectic in Mexico several years ago, and I think that's One of the first that I did is the presentation at the Meditation Center. And there was a guy named Daigyo there. I don't know if anybody knows. Do you know Daigyo? Well, Daigyo had been a lightweight boxer. And they said, well, he's putting a few punches too many. So don't worry about Daigyo. I didn't mind at all. But you could think, what difference is it? What difference is it? I didn't have to identify. It's not going to help you on his office. as far as I can tell. Nothing that I can tell you will help you during Zaga and, in fact, a case might be made, you know.

[04:31]

Ooh, that's not the hand. What's this? So, um, I'm interested in hearing what you said about the truth Then how do you write the gems? Yeah, that's something that, yeah, that's something corporate at home, I think, sort of. I mean, usually it doesn't have to be on the back of your head. It's all the process. It doesn't have to peel off. So you're a part of that experience. And I think it's, it's, that's what's fascinating is you're connected to all of those different forms. And that's what it's all about. So it's a lot. I see my kids' numerics for failing to disagree with me when they were supposed to.

[05:39]

So you get positive points for disagreeing with me, right? Yes. There's a lot of other different kinds of good, very very special kinds of good. For me, I was like that. We have to keep the country in check.

[06:39]

We have to keep the country in check. We have to keep the country in check. We have to keep the country in check. Yeah. [...] I have a friend The senator adopted a couple of years ago, I think, on the Spanish-Spanish wine plant at Yale, and there's still none in the Kowloon Sun organization from Taiwan.

[07:49]

IFA, of course. A good acquisition, yes. And IFA's principal argument, or I think not her only argument, but I think one of the most fascinating ones, is that what we think of as the, quote-unquote, then monastic regulatory teams like the first three or five years in their lives, First of all, it's not just Jan, it's kind of Chinese, you know, Chinese. And what Yifa suggests is there's a lot of continuity from Indian monastic regulations in India into Chinese. And the one that I think I'm correct in saying, even the use of the stick, which I think is so significant. I took Chinese. I mean, if Chinese use the food, then it's definitely not good for eating more often. But even that, I believe, is inherited from Indian medicalism of all practice. And that was a surprise to me.

[08:52]

And the way they use it, or the way they use it, or the way they use it, but these are continuities from Indian monastic practice. We're so used to, in this country, or Western countries in general, or English language, we're used to setting up exams and stuff like that. Yeah. When I first started studying men, I didn't see the future, but I read interpretations. We were on the watch, very funny people, and found it incredibly frustrating. I was wondering at some point if there was any unity amongst these people. It was great that it was described, but to my surprise, then, as a radical... let's see what earlier on. Insuracism and another part of the other [...] part of

[09:57]

So I found that to be pretty frustrating. But later I find more of my scholarship seems to be more looking at them and where there's, you know, complexity and the shortage, which I find much more useful for communities We separate the grand, the purity, the spirituality from people's actually lives as they live, as it made their lives better, as it made society better. If we separate the two things, I'm not interested. So I'm interested in the relationship between the spiritual practice and the spiritual practice and the actual lives of the people who have practiced it in society. I mean, you could say, you know, I'm not trying to say I'm not a Japanese, but that will help promote materialistic or not. It's kind of one thing, two things. So it's really trying to debate through the relationship between the theory and the practice and the actual lives of the source. Yeah, I'm certainly, I'd say to that notion of looking at it as the associate, looking at releasing average functions in actual people's lives as much as we can.

[11:16]

I'm not a philosopher. I can't tell you much about filter school. I can't agree with disembodied ideas and that sort of thing. I have a couple of acquaintances here and there. One, he was a film schooler in a French country. He's got other offices in China. He's got interest in Chinese and some of those. and that the other thing is where the security is. I often get to sit in one of my chairs, where I sit down and I know more about the group that we've got. Thank you.

[12:24]

Yeah, wait, wait, wait. What's all this colon stuff here? I thought those were just photos. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, [...] no Yeah, I can't, I can actually go back to earlier. We probably, I can talk a little bit about what I know about Beijing and China today. They're sitting far from the topic. And I haven't traveled widely in China. I go to one place in southwest China. It's pretty kind of popular. As a parakeet, I'm trying to stay away from the journey, the kind of orthodox leaders established in there because they just kind of superimpose them above different people.

[13:34]

Yeah. Yeah. I think it's very important, particularly for students who need freedom of thought and who need some sort of freedom of thought. And I think it's very important for students who need some sort of freedom of thought. And I think it's very important for students who need some sort of freedom of thought. And I think it's very important for students who need some sort of freedom of thought. How are we doing? Anything else? Yeah, that's right.

[14:43]

That comes out at a rather specific point in time and then kind of stays around. But that's a non-sentient reality that we can see the nature of that rock and draft. I don't know if there's anybody else here who's read my book, but when I throw a mouse, when I drive a car, I'm like, what? Anyways.

[16:13]

That takes a certain amount of... I don't know. The French is very fine. It takes a certain amount of determination. Most of these things are difficult to manage without other people. In particular, I mean, 50-50, it's really difficult. It's an hour and a half. It's a lot of setup on both sides. But then this stuff started, just look at it. Three packets going on, I think, for her to do this stuff. But to me, it's just me just following some language style. It just makes me a bit more acceptable. And I'm not sure that that's the best way to describe it. I'm just interested in further exploration. I'm always interested to know what people think about it, but there's something new about it. No, no, no.

[17:16]

I was reading Bernard Ford's book, one of the public visitations, a part of the visitation, a public visitation, visitation was in 84. But it just came out in English, and I was reading that on the phone coming in. I did 600 pages, and he did 1,200 pages on basically the phone talk. We never met each other until afterwards. And we basically did that different style. Thank you. So I wanted to give you this fantastic, which is, uh, which is, um, you can, you know, what we know about what he's done and what we don't know.

[18:23]

Yeah, that's a pretty good, that's a, that's an easy tip to throw in the ground. Perfect. [...] We take the tunnel now. That's an interesting use of imagery.

[19:23]

The whole point of our view is that if we look in China and we have some folks there, all of the foreign religion, you know, out, out, and far, you know. Yeah, in a way, it's okay. It's interesting. It's interesting. So I think that's it. So I think that's it. Well, okay, from my perspective, first of all, there are things that I can talk about and things that I'll actually, very shortly, I'll pass out some things and I'll make you talk about them on the basis of a couple of passages that I've selected. My goal here is to do a little of the work and to make you do as much of the work as possible.

[20:31]

Some of the topics that you've mentioned... Taoism and Zen and Eton dispense with actually relatively quickly. Chinese civilization and Zen becomes, we can talk about that in one, at least in one particular way, and we'll come up very quickly in one particular way and talk about genealogy. And you'll see that this is in the word that I had Michael use. I assume that you guys are more familiar with Japanese pronunciations. I mean, okay, okay. It's always, I have a, I have a, I've been teaching a class, for the first time this semester, I taught a 100-level class that is a freshman-level class on them. I've always believed to do that in the past, but, you know, I mean, they're running the university now on the same principle as the generals used to run the war in Vietnam, that is on the basis of body tests.

[21:47]

And so we have to do large enrollment type classes. I may get, the students get very confused about Japanese, Chinese, a little bit of Sanskrit, a few different spellings of Chinese, but I think I can probably depend on better familiarity from the report. Certainly setting up the historical framework and kind of you'll see that I both look at genealogy and how it's used, and also try to characterize different phases in the development as well. Because I think we can look at the evidence that we have, and we can say certain things about Hori-dama and his buddy, for example. And we can say certain things about Hong-Ren, or the Fifth Patriarch, and his community, the Fourth and Fifth Patriarch, and their community. And we can say certain things about the group that's known as the Northern School, and so forth.

[22:49]

We can characterize these folks, almost all men, we can characterize these folks and their activities in certain ways. There's some things that we can say about them and some things that we can't. So that a lot of the, I think actually a lot of the questions that you've indicated, you can at least If we can't hit them, hit the pit squarely, we can at least, you know, have useful foul call here, there, right or left, you know. But I think there are other things. When you look at her origins, right, we're all, in a sense, we're trying to look, I think, I would have been, we're trying to look at what Zen really is. Not only how it developed, but, you know, what it was at the time you thought about it. And that, you see, I think is quite a remarkable event that at the end of the 7th century, beginning of the 8th century, the greatest religious fad, well, maybe not the greatest, but one of the greatest religious fads in China, if you hear a book for a while, was the notion of simply practice contemplation of the mind, practice meditation.

[24:06]

And I described it to students as the 90s motto, the Just Do It motto from the year 700. And I think it's quite impressive that in the greatest city in the world at the time, which is the capital city of Chang'an with a population of about a million, a very, very cosmopolitan city, this is where the van basically took off by people who said, You know, all that other stuff is nice, building temples and standing sutras and so forth, but the real thing about Buddhism is the spiritual practice. So I can get cynical at times, and I say, I try to be an equal opportunity offender and say nasty things about everybody in order to spread the blame around. But I'm genuinely impressed by kind of the beginnings of this and trying to pass out and take one and pass them on.

[25:14]

If you'll turn four pages in, actually. I should have put them in a different order, I suppose. The top of the page reads, The Earliest Complete Clinical Transmissions Statement. Kokai? Kokai. Kokai. You didn't get that, Freddie? You didn't get it. The one person I want to read, and then you've got to trade. Is there another copy? Have you reached up all the way here? Right there. I've learned in teaching this large enrollment course that I always have a backup plan.

[26:40]

One day I went in, wanting to give the students a geography quiz kind of thing, and I'd photocopied a map of Asia, but I'd photocopied it from a transparency, and I'd kind of thrown it on the photocopying machine and did like 50 copies or whatever it was. And it turned out, since I did it from transparency, I'd done it reversed right to left. So the student said, well, we can hold the paper up to the light. Anyway, Tokai, if you could read the start of the Transmission of the Tiki. The cognition of a person in India was common only in the lamp-wood, so this inconceivable speaking is solely dependent on the sense of the mind. Ananda received all the oral teachings of the Buddha, but he always concealed them in his heart. When in contact with them, he certainly liked this positive nirvana. Ananda sensed all the oral teachings of the Madhyamsaka only Madhyamaka could have done too. Sanaglaskar Sanaglaskar The achievement of the non-deaf, not the entrepreneur, and son of ourselves was beyond words and was not discussed in the secret, but was exaggeratedly about the slightest difference of fear gained by releasing a master, i.e.

[28:07]

the leader. They were able to respond perfectly to any occasion, from feeling their identities and accomplishments, though they no one knew of them. These tests cannot be distinguished according to tour, because they're called a two separate... Oh, a two separate from secretary and vassal. Okay. So, what do you see in there? First of all, either what you know or what you don't know. Um... Teaching is presumably dharma, yeah. I mean, I think... I mean, by what, you know, the dharma-transmission that we... the highly elevated things happen to... Okay, so you're giving, you're basically, you're giving the definition of dharma-transmission. No, I'm asking you, is this a description of dharma-transmission? It is.

[29:09]

It does sound like that. No, I didn't say, this is what it is. I'm saying, yes, that's what it sounds like. What the Dharma says here? Okay. Because it does say, fundamentally without words, right? Outside the fifth. Okay. It doesn't quite seem mind-to-mind here, does it? Wait, let's see. Transmission of the mind, okay. Have you ever heard of Magyantsev or Kanabase? I've heard of Kanabase, but not Kanabase.

[30:14]

Anybody heard of Magyantsev or Kanabase? Different guy, that's it. Oh, that's a different thing. I'm pretty, I actually have to go. Same name, same name. Tanavasa Sonawasu, isn't it? Tanavasa Sonawasu. Yes, yes, yes. Isn't it a universal phenomenon? It's given from the youth to the new youth. Yes. I would say, yes, that, I mean, that... Yes. I can't judge the fact sheets, you know. I can just look at what people wrote and left behind, what they said about it. And maybe there might be other... All I can do is judge evidence for what they say about things.

[31:23]

And this turned out to be the very earliest statement in the document associated with Kahn, the Kahn-East Kahn, that described the earliest full statement of the Kantian idea. First of all, have you heard of Magyantigit before, the lady in the back of the room? Who was it done about? Yeah, I think, yeah, it could be, sorry about that. And all that I remember, I could have, I probably could have done a, kind of a name for it, They're known for going off and proselytizing and certainly directing, and it would be useful for me if I'd remember this direction, or if I think it was off to the northwest, if it'd be legitimate.

[32:27]

But, yeah. How so? Well, it's not like, you know, some people like Soto or Ridgway or the different studios in India. It's not just a little line of studio or... It's just... It's... [...] In fact, this statement, it's a very good point. This statement is, if you look down at the bottom of the page, we'll kind of hide the second paragraph for the moment, but this is taken from the epitaph of a guy named Favre who died in 689. So he died in 689, the epitaph is written, you know, he did that year, within a couple years, anyway. And Usually when an epitaph is written, well, you never know precisely, but it's probably the teacher's idea, the guy who just died, whose idea is going into the epitaph.

[33:37]

It could have been his students who are deciding something new to say about him, and we don't have to worry about that detail. But the material here, this first paragraph is borrowed. I mean, if this were done in a college would be referred to as Clojurism. This kind of borrowing happens all the time in religious texts and things in Chinese. This is borrowed from a preface that was written to a Meditation Sutra, the so-called Meditation Sutra of Dhammatsattva, that was translated at the beginning of the 5th century, so in 420 or thereabouts, something like that. And in the original, It's talking not about the Zen lineage, but it's talking about transmission of the Vinaya, of monastic regulation, and that there were five different schools of the Vinaya, and all of them had the true teachings of the Buddha.

[34:41]

And it is, in fact, in the original, is a very non-sectarian kind of statement. It said that all these five schools of the Vinaya, they transmitted the three teachings of the Buddha. They had some kind of minor, I'd say, geographical differences, but they all transmitted the teachings. And this is what's being transmitted here, is their understanding of Buddha as expressed in Metta-pe, particularly, as by the Vinaya master. Yeah. Yeah, so that you see in here, yes, you get this notion of an ineffable teaching, right? You get in this, from this, these two, there are actually two prefaces that talk about similar things. They talk about the transmission as an ineffable teaching that's transmitted without words.

[35:43]

directly from the Buddha in an unbroken line with Jati, down to the present day. Yes? Well, also, what do you know about Ananda? Ananda is legally... Pardon? That was his principal characteristic. He was always there. And he had a good memory here, right? But Ānanda is, if you look in the sutras, right? Ānanda is kind of, especially in Mahāyāna sutras, he's a Buddha's cousin, right? One cousin and another cousin. And he recited all the sutras after the Buddha died.

[36:46]

But he's always, or very frequently, a teacher, not having really understood the real history of the Buddha's teachings, right? So he's got a good memory, super faithful. Med student, kind of like, you know? So it's rather odd, right? That he ends up here. And as somebody noted, Bush is not the standard Volkan. He's a botanist. Yeah, I think Bernard said something like that.

[37:51]

That's a classic article. That may happen. I don't think it's true. Yeah. Yeah. Okay, well, okay, let's, before we, uh, we have to ask quite a number of issues here. Why don't we read the second paragraph so that we could have it all kind of in front of us. Uh, can I keep going around? What is your name? Okay. Okay. The Central Minister of South Asia, Garibaldi, said, Garibaldi said, Garibaldi said, during the series of the forms.

[39:02]

Every day, when the oceans of rain come up your corner, they take, take, rid of the seasons to be fair. Seasons can give us the same forms. Same [...] forms. They could not speak with us. If the first thing they want to do is to confront us with these things, we could possibly transmit those things. Pardon? It's a heresy? Why do you say a heresy? Ah, ah. Who is Fari? Anybody? Have you ever heard of Fari? Yeah. Although I'm... Okay. Um... Favreau was an interesting guy.

[40:04]

He was probably Poland's closest disciple. Unlike Poland's other students, Favreau stayed with Poland for, I think it was 16 years. for a considerable amount of time. Whereas most of Hoang Lan's other students, including Sun Tzu of the North and that other guy, Hoi Ngan of the South, they both seem to have been with Hoang Lan for only three to five, five to six years, something like that. And that seems to be the general pattern. We'll talk about that later. You went to study meditation with Hoang Lan and you hung around for a few years until you sort of did your time and your job. whereas Faru was really the closest. He was also interesting in that he moved after Hunan died, he moved into the capital area. He actually was the first one we know of to hang out at the Shaolin Temple.

[41:11]

And the story, I mean, the epitaph about him says that he tried to hide out. He didn't want to He didn't want people to appoint him to official office or anything. But he made them, that's kind of a standard trope he made them to sort of do coy or whatever. But he seems to have only started teaching in the last few years of his life. But the way he's described is having a very spontaneous, interactive kind of style. And I think he's one of the first monks that he has described in this kind of way as kind of a, not necessarily innovative, but a... a deeply personal kind of gen master who would respond to the needs of the students and respond kind of automatically and very skillfully to what they actually needed. But he ends up being sort of forgot by the kids and he doesn't, as you say, he doesn't appear and he's not a big important part in the traditional story because

[42:19]

One of the things I have to compliment you guys on is that I use this passage partly to force students to have trouble about pronunciation. And you did great with photography. It drives me crazy to have students saying papagapa or something like that. My rules of pronouncing Sanskrit are that there are no THs. You try to deal with that. You can with a long mark. Any mark on an S becomes a sound. So here we have . But if it's a mark over a mark under the S, I don't care. Just give me an F-A. And ignore everything else. Any other dots and striggles and marks and so forth. Then Chinese gets to be difficult. It's a different set of problems. But these are . So what do we... And here, as we sort of got into this, you think Bodhidharma is sometimes confused with the Buddha-Bhadra.

[43:28]

And here, this text, Kvaru's epitaph, takes this earlier material that was Buddha-Bhadra's definite and his own identity. I mean, it's presumably, although it's not explicit in the earlier, the early 5th century text, it's Buddha-Bhadra saying, this is where I came from. And I'm a Sarvasivaran master. I translate a number of different things, but I have this Vinaya, this monastic regulation, this lineage. And we have a few lists of lineages like that, that have, I think, 53, 54 names, from the Buddha down to roughly Buddha Padre's day. Buddha Padre may not actually appear. He may have left off the list with his teachers, I think. And so that the notion of a lineage is something that, first of all, comes from the Western, the non-Chinese, predicament. And it's something that's associated with the lineage predicament.

[44:29]

That's right. That's right. Correct. And the prep... Correct. And the prep is a fanny prep. Yeah, what happens, Kway Yung is a very famous early monk who lived in a... had a retreat on Mount Lui. And Buddha Bhadra had come into Chang'an up in the north earlier on, and his students had kind of gotten into conflict with Kumara Deva's teachings, and he left town. It's not really basically he was thrown out of town, but he was kind of too much asshole. He and Kumara Deva don't seem to have had any problems, but they're pretty good, it doesn't matter. This is perhaps an understandable story, you know.

[45:38]

And so he did the translations. at Guiyin's feet. And Guiyin and another monk named Guiguan both write prefaces, and the content of the prefaces are similar enough that it's fair to assume that it's information based on Buddha Vajra's lecture. ...tradition in Kashmir, in northwest India, which is considered to be one of the... can you say a hotbed of meditation, I may be? Anyway, it was a center of... A hotbed of still activity. Anyway, it was a center for meditation practice, and they wrote down various meditation sutras. And this is a justification for why this is a sutra, but not written by the Buddha. The meditation sutra with somebody else's name on it, so it was originally a justification not the far root, but it was a justification for why this should be a meditation sutra about the Dhamma project, why it should be a sutra even though it wasn't spoken by the Buddha.

[46:43]

Because, this is the Memorex thing, it's just too clear to see it. If you're in the lineage, it's just like being a guru. Now there's another famous sutra. That's the original purpose of this, at least the first paragraph, at least the first paragraph, was originally used to justify the meditation secret of Dhammatrapa Well, that's Dhamma too Well, yeah, I don't think it starts with that today I have to get that, I don't think it's important But before we let this little moment go do you know of any other texts in Zen history that's featured with not spoken by the Buddha? Pardon? The platform feature, yeah And if everybody says, this is totally unique, this is a sutra, you know, spoken by a Chinese guy, okay, fair enough, it is. I will say, also, it's in a tradition of meditation.

[47:44]

So it's, from one perspective, yes, it's unique, and, but from another perspective, this is an examiner, this platform, this is a sutra, it's actually in the past. It is in a way, yeah. Certainly that's pretty much true. Certainly the earliest translations that we have, which come from the middle of the second century, 149 and thereafter, are meditation-related.

[48:57]

There are lists of terms used in meditation, and there are descriptions of meditation, and so forth. And then, at the end of the 4th century, before kumara-jīva arrives, and before kumara-jīva and deva-bhaja arise, Chinese monks are concerned because they don't have the Central Eastern Venue Regulations, and they've kind of made up monastic rules. but they're very concerned because they realize they don't have all the variations, so they have trouble kind of operating the community. And so this becomes a major need of the religious community, and particularly if you know the Monk Dao An, which is a very important monk who died at the age of 85 or something like that. He's not a translator himself, but he's kind of a steward of a lot of translation activities and collective catalogs of what text is available, and really, he was very explicit on the need for a complete version of Manassas Regulations.

[50:05]

Then the other question about why would they have a lineage, a succession associated with the lineage? And that's a question that I can't answer with documentation, at least I can't think of a kind of captial verse, but And ordination is thought to survive, to make some change in the initiates, in the ordinates. And rather, and you can think of that, I think, and we can think of that as a precursor or a kind of a model from which the Zen lineage, the mind-to-mind, the word-list lineage, a model of how that developed. And initially, you have to be ordained by somebody who's ordained by somebody who's ordained by somebody who's ordained by the Buddha. And to take that Buddhist ordination, it's not simply to say, okay, well, I'll follow these rules and I'll act this way.

[51:07]

It actually was thought of by these guys as changing, putting something into your person that changes you. And I've heard it said, I don't know whether at the moment the citation doesn't come to mind, but we think about Buddha-nature. Buddha-nature is a term that was built on the analogy of the nature of the precepts. So you're actually bestowing a Now, this is not a term that has a wide term, but the thought is that the succession of the then succession of the mind-to-mind transmission is, how do you say, modeled on, an outgrowth of, or somehow related to this kind of veneer.

[52:09]

Is it because of the relationship with addiction, both in the after, or the, how do you say, those kinds of It seems like those interesting things you've not even talked about, if they didn't have time, perhaps they're important to a practitioner, in my mind, and that in most cases, they're not experienced, but the relationship between that. Tonight, my partner, whom I asked to identify my Yannick and son-in-law, because this is Dan Mathieu. He teaches also at Indiana and has a certain background Now we're to the Ashta. Pardon? Obsession with the Ashta. Obsession with the Ashta, yeah. Do you want to take that off? All our evidence that we have to protect people, human rights, and human rights, and we have to protect many of them, and we have to protect [...] them.

[53:40]

In the past, there was a lot of talk about the possibility of building a new city, a new city, in Russia. In the past, there was a lot of talk about the possibility of building a new city, a new city, in Russia. In the past, there was a lot of talk about the possibility of building a new city, a new city, in Russia. In the past, there was a lot of talk about the possibility of building a new city, um um I'm very, very proud of what I've done. I'm proud of what I've done. I'm proud of what I've done. I'm proud of what I've done.

[54:45]

I'm proud of what I've done. I'm proud of what I've done. I'm proud of what I've done. I'd say no. I don't... I don't recall it being an issue. Well, I don't know how does that... Okay, so they're practical people, but... So it doesn't matter whether you get a prediction or not, let's just go ahead and do it. Well, uh, I was, you know, talking about, I think you were, you were talking about this, and you were telling me about the Confession Ceremony you saw from that son, part of it that led to the solution that, Dr. asked me about that.

[55:54]

Tell me just specifically what it was that you made the plan for? I know the name, but I never knew how it ended. The case, there were, there were a couple of cases, uh, with, with the one with the, um, One is the emphasis on feeling, not just feeling around, but in creation and in self. How you associate that with the spirit. That was ideal. And one way or another, that is to say that that was ideal. Another was the identification of the Buddha Dharma as a particular matter. This is not particularly in the sense that we get up in the current age of the Venn Williams. That's a very good point.

[56:54]

I've forgotten now. But it's right there staring at us, isn't it? And he's called Dharma Master, as he's done it, too, right? He's not Venn Master or anything like that. Oh, I see. um well what i would i i would suggest that it's useful to notice these little points because what i this is what happens. Okay. What I would suggest is that the Zen doctrine of the lineage, of the transmission, is inherited from the Indian or the Kashyari, and other places. Or at least, let's say, there's a continuity there.

[57:55]

And one of the subjects that I'm trying to address here is the question of is Zen Buddhist and Indian He is then Chinese. And I'm going to come down squarely in the middle. We used to say, a friend of mine, my first Buddhist teacher used to say about, well, he said about virtually any religious group that's mostly about, like, universalist, libertarian types that have their feet planted firmly in mid-air. And that's what I'm going to say. But anyway, that there is a model of the transmission that's associated with the meditation tradition as it comes into planet from India. And particularly from northwest India, from Kashmir. As we, so that there's some definite, you know, Buddhist way, how do you say it, I don't like to use the word core, but anyway, there's a Buddhist model of this. As it becomes expressed in Chinese history, it becomes reformed or modified or dressed in Chinese terminology.

[59:05]

And we can look at a sequence of texts, we won't have time to do it today, but where early on they're doing things that later on would be considered sort of provoking, like calling Bodhidharma a Sephitika master. Does that imply that he's dedicating his translation? Whatever we know about Bodhidharma, he's not a translator. His whole image is based on something entirely different from that. Well, okay, good point. It's someone who has mastered the Sephitika. Yeah, it's a good question that he's... at least in Chinese, and I'm not sure that we know whether the term is used in the source literature or not, but we don't have the same kind of biographies in Syria, but it implies someone who is a scholar, someone who has studied and mastered things. Now, it's pretty darn fair to call him a critical master if you say, well, he understands the Mahayana, the true teachings of the Mahayana, and that's, you know, the underlying circle of the entire critical.

[60:13]

So that's You sort of have to plug it a bit. It's a matter of style. It's a matter of style. The other thing that happens in a different way is that you notice here we have Bodhidharma, then Huayka, Sun, Sun, Dao, then Hongren. They're not given numbers. They're not called First Tetra, Second Tetra. They're not... They're put in a sequence. And this little text is important because it puts them in a sequence. It's the earliest... that we have to put them in such a sequence. But we should pay attention to the fact that it doesn't dress them up with the kind of terminology that they have later. That later on, the first patriarch, Bodhidharma, the Zen master, transmitted the Dharma through the second patriarch, and so forth.

[61:14]

And that style of kind of more and more nuanced or higher definition in the description of these individuals as patriots, we can watch that process as they gain definition over the course of time. It's hard to know, again, when that process ends, but it's, I mean, one date is, there's one text that's done in the year 800, the Baolingguan, which is the first to contain the list of 28 patriarchs that become accepted as Orthodox. We don't have that complete text anymore. There's another text done in 952 for those who are indefinitely sanctified, and it uses that list of 28 and gives the full-blown kind of form That text was basically lost in China, just discovered it by accident, or it was retained in Korea, but seems to have hardly ever been read.

[62:14]

The major text is a transmission of the lamp text done in the year 1004, and that has biographies of the seven Buddhas of the tab, the biographies of the 28 Indian patriarchs from the Buddha, Upasak, the three of the Bodhidharma, and so forth. Okay, yes. Yes. So what I would say is that the notion of the lineage, or the concept of the lineage, is inherited from Indian Buddhism, and then becomes represented, and it becomes a very central issue to the Zen school at the development. Thank you.

[63:22]

Yeah, right. I have a, one of the videotapes that I showed my class in the semester is a Chinese, that is, a Taiwanese movie that I've already done. And one of the things that drives me crazy is how Zen has been used as an explanation for the martial arts and Bodhidharma and Shaolin Boxing. And there's a certain style of how this is done in Japan, and a certain style of how this is done in China. And actually, it drives me crazy, but it's also a lot of fun. I have a couple of movies in Bodhidharma from Taiwan. And even before these, you know, anything, these are some kind of, sort of like prints, right? You can print. But he already even mastered Chinese martial arts, and they have various... where he's flying around through the air and doing all kinds of stuff like that.

[64:59]

But they also depict him sitting for nine years facing the wall at Shaolin Temple. And they actually, I guess for movie value, I don't know if this is some kind of myth or legend that gets circulated in comics, They depict the monks and maybe the local officials getting upset by this strange Indian guy sitting there, unmoving for nine years, right? And so they hook ropes up to him and try to drag him off the spot. You know, they hook him up to a horse and so forth. But he never moved, you know, the rope break and so forth. Let's see, I had a point here. Oh, yeah, and then, of course, the second Patriot, the guy who eventually becomes the second Patriot, comes along and sits behind him, and then in one movie, he's like, you know, some lazy season or something, and he kind of turns around and stays right there. I think that that kind of story, I can all argue that that's really later in ecology, but it's a nice story.

[66:04]

I can show you that it's probably a nice story. And we'll talk about that later. So the notion of not transmitting the text to someone who is not deserving of it. I think if someone asks about Taoism, I think there's a theme that is inherited from the Chinese Taoist tradition, where you only give the text to your best student, to pay the initial fee. And Daoist texts, very often they're reviewed if the APC is involved. Or you're giving the text to the best student, and if you have a text, that's an indication that you have that linear. So Daoists in the 5th century, 6th century, they would complain if they'd seen any of these fake scriptures running around in their books. I think in other respects, the only thing that we really see in them that comes from the Taoist tradition, it's very important, but the notion of spontaneity, the notion of this kind of inspired ability to interact with students, does that have some kind of a relationship to the Taoism that you see in Guangzhou, in philosophical values?

[67:29]

But there's a religious tradition of Taoism in China. The overlap with Zen or the interaction with Zen are very minimal. Very minimal. That's certainly possible. I don't know that. It's certainly possible. There's also meditation techniques attributed to Taoism, the fourth and fifth stages of Taoism, like maintaining the one. Taoists have a doctrine of maintaining the one, but it's interpreted entirely differently in Taoist meditation. So there's certainly this kind of inner play, so to speak, What we tend to think of as Daoism in this country, from the Daoist crew and so forth, well, it's a good little book.

[68:32]

It's not funny enough, but it's a good little book by a photographic adult. That is kind of the style of thought that the whole Chinese tradition gets to claim. And everybody reads that stuff, how brilliant the flow of everything is. But the Taoist religion involves very different styles of meditation practice, very different styles of religious rituals. As an organized religion, it just doesn't seem to have much to do with it. You're talking about radio, right? I see a lot of times the difficulty with which lens we have a view to look at these things. Whether we have a lens that takes us at safe challenges, whether we have a lens that takes us back, whether we have a lens that looks at it socio-historical and political, because so much of religion

[69:32]

He declared that this would be amazing. So if you look at something like the platform sutra, to me, when I read that, I kind of read it like a political track, and not knowing an awful lot about or nothing about science and history in this period. I couldn't help but read in an enormous amount of China, what's going on in China at this time, how they're trying to deconstruct, what they said about the relationship with southern China and northern China at the time, class structure, including such a classic, all these different kind of universe stuff. For me, a lot of times it's It's a little skitsy, basically, trying to figure out, you know, which lens to get used with. I just got used to it all. Yeah, and I've played with that. Remind me of that.

[70:52]

We should talk about bodhidharma specifically. Don't let me forget that question. I don't want to do it right now. People are really in contact better when people are put on these different places, different paths. Well, I think, for me, it was Professor Yanagida's death. It wasn't Professor Yanagida. He was the one who was the first to notice it. And I noticed that he had the entrance looked on, you know, the entrance I think red. I'm not sure. I've never been quite sure how well you read the Japanese text.

[71:56]

I don't want to go over every question. Actually, if you can look back to the second page on the handout, there's a linear diagram. And this is, I mean, in a sense, this is what we're talking about, in a way, is just kind of a framework. And now, let's see, what was your name? Michael. Michael, okay. Okay, you have an interesting thing to say about using a platform feature. When you look at this diagram, what does a diagram like that do? What's it good for? You know, we talk about doing things with words and timing. Well, it certainly makes things, uh, simpler than a cup of water.

[73:09]

Yeah. And I think that's fundamental to how linear diagrams and linear statements work. And in fact, I'd say that at least down, if we only, we don't have to go all the way down. I mean, basically, there's one line, right? And I think the fundamental point of a linear diagram and a linear assertion is to assert that we're all the same, that there's a uniform and there's a homogeneity. In fact, that a linear assertion, which we kind of immediately put on a diagram like this, and it's not just me doing these diagrams. You find these diagrams in Chinese text as well. But the fundamental goal or purpose of that linear diagram is to homogenize it. And that means that if

[74:11]

Now, we do have two splits here. We have the northern and southern stool split, and then we have two different lines under the southern stool that eventually come out of Soto and Rinzai and so forth. But I would say that The goal of this kind of diagram and the assertion that our teaching is transmitted from Bodhidharma to Kvetas and Sancta and everything that we do, is to say that we're just like Ekta. That we're just like Bodhidharma, or we're just like Poinana. That Poinana is just like Bodhidharma, it's just like Prakriti. to taper over any kind of differences that you might otherwise want to detect. Now, let's see, I don't have to put it in such a negative way. I mean, it's to indicate continuity.

[75:16]

Then you can look at that as the glass is half full or half empty. You know, so it's to state that what I'm doing religiously is the same as what Dr. Lillian is really doing religiously. And that's a religious assertion of positive value. But I will say that maybe from a more negative or kind of cynical standpoint, that McCrae's second law of Zen studies I haven't written the first law, but that's probably okay. McCrae's second law of Zen studies is that any lineage assertion is problematic to the extent that it's important. That is to say, if it's important to me to identify myself as intersecting from masses X, Y, and Z, the bigger deal I nudge out of that, the more likely it is that there's going to be some kind of historical funny business going on.

[76:17]

And that's a rule or an inference that comes out of looking at a number of different linear states. And it's certainly true about the most famous ones here. But we'll come back to McCrae's second law, and I'll even tell you that McCrae's first law is eventual. I need to leave you in some sort of suspense. Oh, okay. Um... Well, it's true about the passage that we've read, and it's true about the lineage statement. This lineage statement assumes, or argues for, or implies continuity and homogeneity. What we can actually, what I do, in terms of Zen studies, if you look to the next page, you'll see Koto-chan, early-chan, East Mountain teaching, Northern Shul, and so forth, When I put together, you know, mine, it didn't come out to be very diagrammatic.

[77:25]

I could do it with, you know, kind of boxes and circles and arrows and stuff to make it more graphical. But what I do as a scholar in looking at the evolution of time is something that's almost diametrically opposed in purpose to the linear statement. You know, whereas the linear statement is trying to show continuities and homogenies, I'm trying to diversify instead of distinction. So I guess when we come back, what we can do is I'll talk a little bit about Bodhidharma and his gang, and then talk a little bit about the East Mountain Boys, their gang, and kind of what they were up to, and so forth. In a sense, one of the things I do as a historian is to try to characterize these different groups so you kind of see what they're talking about. And define how Zen changes over the course of time from one phase to another.

[78:29]

And, you know, Zen studies folks, you know, me and, well, Bernard, Thor, and Griff folks, and we're feeling upholstery in these lives, and You know, we can, and Robert Bugswell and Peter Gregory and so forth, we can kind of argue, you know, back and forth about what to call these phases and exactly how to characterize them, but I think basically we're in pretty rough agreement about what we'll do. So, can we take a break now? Take ten minutes and we'll come back and talk about Bode-Dunlop. Bode-Dunlop, [...] Bode-Dunlop. I remember that word, too.

[79:13]

@Transcribed_UNK
@Text_v005
@Score_43.74