Well, I see some new people. It's nice to see you. And I see a lot of not old people, but... Anyway, you know what I mean. And... We have this koan to look at. Have we passed out the translation? Maybe we can do it before you do the translation. Thank you very much. So I would like you to read the koan this evening. Before tomorrow morning.

[01:08]

But I'd like you to make no effort to understand it. Yeah. And I talked about this, Colin, at some length, actually, in the Sashin last May of 93, I think. It just came up in the middle of the Sashin lecture, so I spoke about it. It's a white ox munching on the... So, I mean, I'll make some reference to the discussion at the Sashin, but mostly we'll just start anew with this koan.

[02:19]

What do you suppose is going on over there? Remember the time we were in a room and they were doing the primal scream upstairs? Yeah, I think it was in Berlin, yeah. It was quite good, actually. And I'm doing this seminar here in Frankfurt because I have the irrational idea that a city is a nicer place if it has a dharmasanga group in it.

[03:29]

Almost nobody else in Frankfurt knows this, but I have this feeling. So because there's a Wiesbaden-Frankfurt group, I decided to try doing a seminar here. Now, this koan gives us a chance to... Again, let me say, I don't want you to try to understand it, but I'd like to look at a few phrases in it. It gives us a chance to look at what kind of world we live in. And it suggests a world we can live in that's, I think, quite foreign to us.

[04:52]

Although I think from guessing and from reading and talking with people a bit, I don't think it's foreign to our culture, Western culture, but I think it's foreign to contemporary culture. But then I really don't know. I mean, I don't know if I understand anyone. I know that I feel extremely connected to people. And connected to strangers in restaurants and so forth. But I really don't know if I have any relationship to understanding them.

[06:11]

And I know I'm pretty good at predicting people's future actions. But that's a matter of seeing patterns and energy in people and that's not really understanding them. So what I'm saying is I'm perhaps exaggerating it a bit, but I'm emphasizing the possibility that we know very, really very little about what is going on in another person. Well, or perhaps I should say what could go on.

[07:14]

Now, when we're little, when we're very tiny, our parents dress us up to show to the world. Look at this, just born. It's cute, isn't it? And then we get people, our parents, dress us up for school and parties and all kinds of things. And in many ways we are taught to live in the minds of others. Now we also have a... Many of us have an experience of having a kind of wall between us and the world. Perhaps glass or nowadays plastic.

[08:41]

And we feel it's rather difficult to sometimes actually make contact. And this koan talks about communion with the source and communion with others. But it doesn't talk about communication with others. Or communication with yourself. So I think anyway most of us grow up or grow down or continue in a way in which on the whole we're defined through the minds of others.

[09:59]

And we've talked about this in various ways, many seminars and so forth. But I'm trying to come at this a little differently than I have in the past. And so even if you, let's go back to sitting in a restaurant, even if you no longer dress up to go to a restaurant, And perhaps you dress down or you think you're not in relationship to dress at all, except you have clothes on.

[11:08]

But still, I think in some way we're dressed in the minds of others. Hmm. And to really be free of that is quite unusual. And there used to be in the Middle Ages, there was an attempt in the Western culture of building a memory palace. And a memory palace was a device for remembering things. And you created this interior architecture with different rooms. And you then put the things you wanted to remember here and there in the various rooms.

[12:37]

And when you walked mentally in those rooms, you could see what you wanted to do and speak about. And it got very tied to being a politician or a lawyer or a priest, so you could give long speeches and remember everything. But deeper than that, it was you created an inner space in which memory functioned. So that, I mean, your present consciousness is impossible without memory.

[13:39]

So people who, and when the culture supported it, when developed this, I think, I've never developed this, but my understanding is that they lived in a kind of inner architecture of memory which we don't have much or probably any experience of. And Buddhism comes out of an oral culture which had similar ways of developing a way to remember the teachings, the sutras and so forth. So this koan starts out with scholars plow with the pen.

[14:51]

And orators plow with the tongue. And it was thought in the Middle Ages, I believe, that actually if you develop this memory relationship to your body, it actually brought energy and nerve energies into the tongue. and your tongue function in the world through this developed inner memory. Okay, so that's just a... What I'm trying to do here is give you a feeling, as much as I can imagine,

[15:56]

what kind of world the people who wrote these koans lived in. And if you have a speech that comes from your tongue, A speech is a people, is a culture, is a family. And a particular consciousness is a people. The way you The way we establish consciousness is something that's shareable with others. And the idea of a non-shareable consciousness which doesn't create a people is rather foreign to us.

[17:17]

And because we don't have that, we often get our borders mixed up with each other. Because our consciousness is so tied up with other minds, other imagined minds and consciousnesses, Is it because in German there's only one consciousness imaginable, or you just don't add an S to it? Generally, the tendency is that nouns that express immaterial things, you just can't add easily.

[18:36]

And the plural functions differently. It's not just adding an S. I see. I'm glad English is so easy. Just add an S. Thoth also says in his poem, What do you call the world? It says in the koan, what do you call the world? Now, I use this phrase as the kind of muse of the piece I wrote for the Thich Nhat Hanh book on precepts, and it was also printed in the tree planters.

[19:40]

Because the form of the world is also considered to be precepts. This is a microphone. And I treat it a certain way. I don't hit the bell with it. And I hit the bell with this, you know. And so this, the way you treat something that gives it its function are precepts. So in the basic human preceptor, you don't kill, you don't steal, and so forth.

[20:49]

Those are just basic ways we give the world form. So in all these ways, we are giving our world form. And this koan is a study of how we give the world form. And it emphasizes that when we give something form, we give form in the context of caring for others. But this koan takes a rather dramatic turn. This basic form we give to the world to plow this non-dual territory of interconnectedness We do it through our speech and through writing, this emphasizes.

[22:13]

It's like returning to the source of how we establish a people, meaning a consciousness which forms us. And that's been done in most of the centuries we know anything about through speaking and writing. So this koan says, some people speak, some people plow with the tongue, Some people plow with the pen. And plow in this sense means make fertile. To create the territory for us as a certain kind of people. The koan says Buddhist adepts don't do this.

[23:25]

They lazily watch a white ox. What's this? They lazily watch a white ox. So tonight, if you haven't had dinner when you go to a home or to a restaurant, if you have the kind of imagination which can do this while you're having your dinner, imagine white oxes lazily. walking through your kitchen. Now I don't think an ox in this, it means a castrated male bull. I just think it means a bovine mammal. It also means just a water buffalo in China and India.

[24:42]

And it goes back into the kind of sacred buffalo of India. And this image, this living image in your lived life of a white buffalo is pretty common in Zen. So, First we're imagining here in these, because I'm trying to bring us back into these kind of people who are also our ancestors and even our own culture.

[25:51]

We're not so different from this, I believe. And to, to, so that we can have a taste of that while we're doing things in the world, we can also have an interior space in which things function and happen, like dreams that are conscious. Yes, and I... Can you say that again? That in the midst of our... Our consciousness, yeah. There's another kind of consciousness which is imagistic, is of images. And which you can work on, which you can develop or plow.

[26:59]

And in this kind of inner field, you can imagine a white ox walking along, doing its, you know, bovine stuff. And it's, you know, it's a wonderful image because it's a rather, it's a more leisurely pace than most of us live at. Now this isn't a young filly of a ox. running around the restaurant. This is kind of, you know, taking it easy. This is a mature, rather lazy white buffalo.

[28:01]

And in this kind of idea, it implies also we should be a little lazier. And particularly in your meditation practice, you need to be... It's good to have some discipline to get yourself to sit, but after that, inside, you should be pretty lazy. Yeah, and man braucht natürlich eine gewisse Disziplin, um sich dazu zu bringen zu sitzen, aber wenn man einmal so weit ist, dann sollte man innerlich wirklich einfach ein bisschen faul werden. Sometimes you concentrate, sometimes whatever happens, okay. Now I often say that Buddhism is based on the thorough recognition that everything changes. But you can't recognize that everything changes unless you have an inferring consciousness.

[29:27]

So what goes with recognizing that everything changes, or the only way it's possible, is its companion, an inferring consciousness. Now, what is an inferring consciousness? In a simpler sense, it's a consciousness which can make up its own mind. Based on what you see and feel. Now again, in much of our middle ages, we had quite a different consciousness, which what was required for spiritual practice, It was a consciousness which could grasp what was present and understand it in the context of scripture.

[30:42]

In other words, to perceive things and put them together the way they're supposed to be put together. But an inferring consciousness doesn't necessarily put things together the way they're supposed to be put together. The idea of an inferring consciousness means, if from your meditation experience, you discover that the world is different than your culture tells you, you're able to believe that evidence and change your life. And it's said, if you do not have an inferring consciousness, you cannot really practice Buddhism. You can follow Buddhism and in that sense practice it, but that's not the same as practicing as an adept.

[32:14]

And this koan, again, is asking us to develop a mind which can find out what world we actually live in. Now, the way I'd like us to spend this time together until Sunday afternoon sometime is to really look at some very basic or simple things as a kind of personal research project we do together.

[33:23]

Do you have an inferring consciousness? Do you have a consciousness which actually looks at things and from the evidence is able to make up its own mind whether it agrees with the consciousness of our people? And do we have that courage without feeling we're something eccentric or crazy or something? And one way to again to recognize this, is this, Good Cohen says, we mendicant adepts lazily watch a white ox.

[34:40]

And we don't even I think it says pay attention to the auspicious grass. We're not even looking at how our consciousness presents things in a very basic way to us. We have this mind which actually described as a white ox, which maybe is, of course, hopefully quite considerate of everyone, but is not necessarily the consciousness that's dressed in others' minds. So you have several places you live.

[35:58]

And I think we need to stabilize our consciousness to do this. And as I said, because our consciousness is so tied up with other people's, we constantly get ourselves in difficulties with each other because our consciousness is overlapped with others and our boundaries get all mixed up and so forth. That's an unavoidable process of consciousness developed through others. But can you develop your own consciousness? Okay.

[37:17]

I caught this cold I have in Oldenburg. I say I caught this cold in Burg. I say I caught this cold in Burg. And I thought it was a specialty of Oldenburg, but I see you've discovered it here in Frankfurt. This evening, as I've been speaking, I've been somewhat vague and unclear and so forth. And that's perhaps my disability. But also, partly at least, my intention. Because we have such a tendency to want everything to be simple. To actually have a kind of reductionist consciousness.

[38:47]

And it's reduced to eye consciousness and conceptual eye consciousness. And what can be shared in a certain way. And also Zen is seen by the West as, you know, it's supposed to be very simple. And in some ways it is simple. But it has a very complex view of what a human being is. I mean, we are, each of us, as I said in the recent Sesshin, is an immensely complicated biological event. And from the in-betweenness of this biological complexity, a consciousness arises which can be divided into many cultures and individuals.

[40:10]

And wisdom consciousness means the ability to undo the fabrications of consciousness, get in a sense back to that original consciousness, and put it together in different ways. Experience this is what communion with the source means. And find out when you see it in its possibilities, You recognize various levels of self-organizing or own organizing processes in our consciousness. And you develop the ability to let that happen.

[41:32]

So I think that's enough for today, this evening. Is there anything you'd like to bring up, Ulrike? I wanted to say something but I forgot during meditation. Anybody else have anything you'd like to bring up? I want to thank the Frankfurt Wiesbaden folks for finding this nice room and organizing this and everything. Thank you very much. I think I actually have a question. I didn't quite understand what you meant with these palaces of memory.

[42:54]

And I think first I thought it was these buildings that we have in our cultures, so Gedächtnisdom, and how you mean that in an inner space. Well, maybe I'll take some time tomorrow and give you a little background on the memory palaces. That was the way it was described in Western culture. It was very important one time in our culture. It's not anymore. Okay, anything else? Do you all feel taller? What about the people who feel they shrink? Okay.

[44:11]

Thank you very much. Well, good morning. Good morning. And is this for me? Last evening I gave a kind of introduction to this weekend. And so some of you are new here today, but it's all right. I couldn't be so pessimistic to say you didn't miss anything. But probably if you missed anything, it'll come up during the seminar. Now, I've been, as some of you know, been giving, we've been giving these lectures at Oldenburg at the university.

[45:26]

And the difference for me in... giving lectures like those and a seminar, is I try to present those kind of university lectures a kind of distillation of how I understand Buddhism. But the process of a seminar is quite different. For me, anyway. And the way I look forward to the seminars, because we can talk in a much more relaxed, slow way, At the same time, once I start a seminar like now, I say, I know something, I feel something, but how can I express it?

[46:42]

Because even though to some of you it may sound the same, every seminar to me is 90% new. So, looking at this koan, I know something about it, but I don't know how to express it to you. So if you want to find out, maybe in a year, if I give some other university lectures, you can go to them and find out what I wanted to say now. Yes, in a year, if you want to know something, how I understood it, you might have to go to a lecture at the university to understand what I meant now. But maybe this process, as you know, I feel that what we're really doing is a kind of research in consciousness and awareness. So we're joining together in this research, I hope, in a seminar.

[48:07]

Okay, I promised last night that I would say something about the memory pal... This is an answering machine? It's great, this is the modern memory palace. It'll still take messages, but we won't hear it, presumably. So anyway, I promised I'd speak to you about this memory palace.

[49:31]

And since it came up rather abruptly for me to speak about this, I haven't researched it carefully, but I can tell you what I know. Now also, when I start a seminar like this and look at this koan, I'm coming from the Sashin and from these Oldenburg lectures. And I realize actually to speak about it now in a new context and with some new people, I have to recapitulate to some extent.

[50:33]

So, and I also see that I have to keep going back to basics. So this is actually quite useful to come back to basics for us, but... So anyway, I have to do it anyway, whether it's useful or not. For me it's useful. For example, if you don't have a inferring consciousness, as I defined last night, You can practice meditation from now till, I don't know, forever and not much change will occur to you.

[51:36]

You may feel better. You might put your personality together a little better. And maybe you'd be a little calmer. It sounds pretty good, actually. You'd be a little calmer. And on the whole, you would do that reinforcing your own culture. That's a lot. I recommend everyone practice meditation. But the deeper point of meditation is to establish your identity through your consciousness. Not through your personal story or getting your emotions in order, that kind of thing.

[52:49]

That's true, true, and those things happen, but that's not the main point of meditation. Okay. Now one basic thing we have to accept is that consciousness is an artifact. It's something that you make and have made and has been made for you. If you don't see and understand that consciousness is an artifact, you won't really know how to recognize your meditation experience.

[53:52]

You won't really know what to do with it. Now I can't say that in the classical Greek period and then in the Middle Ages that they knew consciousness was an artifact. They acted like they did. I don't live there, I don't know. But whether they understood it that way or not, they treated it that way. I think a man named Quintilian, who taught oratory in the first century of the Christian era, commented on how important it was for children to have ivory alphabet letters and to play with them.

[55:04]

And then to, as they get a little older, to have the letters incised on a tablet and they trace them and learn the shapes. To make the shape, the form of the letter on a flat surface and then they trace the shape and learn the shape. Now, this seems pretty elementary. Most kids have blocks with letters on them and things like that. In fact, Beate's store sells them, I believe. But I think we think of it as you have a consciousness, and with that consciousness you learn the numbers and the letters.

[56:15]

Now perhaps in more primitive times, or when people were closer to having to establish their own inner culture, Perhaps, and definitely in Buddhist culture, it was thought that doing something like trace the letters of the alphabet wasn't something you learned, it's something that generated your consciousness. And some people think that when the alphabet first came into use in Greek times, before the alphabet, words were just In fact, in Greek, there was no word for word.

[57:42]

There were signs that represented things you made with your lips. But the idea of words as constructs made up of units was something that came about around Plato's time, I think. And I think it was Plato who remarked that, or they thought at that time, if letters make up words, then maybe atoms make up the world. It's a very important step when you begin to see things aren't holes automatically, that they're made up of parts. And the development, the thoroughness of the development of this simple idea is called wisdom in Buddhism.

[58:52]

So the simple things studied thoroughly are the source of much of what our culture is. So in teaching kids these memory techniques, Which was also to consciously create an imaginary inner space. And before the alphabet was really an organized system in a particular order, A, B, C, D, E, F, G in English. They used numbers. And the child was taught to imagine a series of numbers reaching off into infinite space. And then when the child became skillful imagining the string of numbers, they then had to be taught to jump from one number to the other immediately, from 7 to 32, et cetera, without having to go up the line.

[60:33]

We take this sort of for granted, but it's actually a technique. So the first thing you do when you learn a language, you learn to count and you learn the alphabet. And driving back from Oldenburg, Ulrike was trying to teach me to count in German. Mainly so I can figure out how to leave tips in the restaurants. In America it's more simple. They give you the money and you give some of it back. But here you have to tell them what to subtract. So I'm in a very primitive and let's hope fertile state.

[61:38]

So they learned this series of numbers and they saw it as a psychomotor development too, not just memory or visualization, that their body would know. 37, 42, their body would know it. And then the next step was they taught them to visualize a Noah's Ark in interior space. A Noah's Ark? They were taught to visualize the Noah's Ark in an interior space. Oh, really? Yes. And then the next step was the memory palace, which was literally said to be in the Schatzkister of the heart, in the treasure chest of the heart. And this became quite a complex building with entryways, thresholds, columns, cornices, many stories and so forth.

[63:11]

Now, the only living human I've ever seen do something like this was a Tibetan teacher who was in charge of the making of the Kalachakra mandala. I went to the Kalachakra that the Dalai Lama did in Switzerland in the 80s sometime. And while they were making the mandala, they let me backstage in the tent to sort of watch the people making it. And the main person in charge who would come and look at it regularly was this guy who could visualize it on many layers.

[64:43]

Now, again, I'm not telling you this because I expect you to all develop a memory palace. I'm trying to fiddle around with some stuff to maybe give us, you know, I don't know what, something. Okay, so he would come in and he'd look and he'd say, because they're doing it all on a flat surface. And he'd say, oh, that is actually the sixth story, and that is a door, and this here is something else, and so that has to be shaped that way, because when you lift it up, it's this way, and you've got to lift it up so it's that way or something. So they do this from a formula, but they actually do it from an internal memory.

[65:57]

In which they feel they're inside this memory. stupa-like shape of many stories, a kind of palace. With Buddhist, different bodhisattvas on different levels and so forth. And they see it inside themselves. And then they have to put it down flat, so they say, okay, that level, if we flatten that, it'll look like that, and then they do it. So it means the mandala that's flat there is, if you have the imagination, is one of these children's pop-up books, a Buddhist pop-up book that pops up into a space which is your interior.

[67:10]

So you can imagine if the person working on these mandalas has this in their interior space, for them it's virtually exterior, and they feel they're living in this Buddha space, in this Buddha realm. And in Buddhist history, there's a break from the body of the Buddha and stupa worship to the mind as the transmitter. To the inner and formless Buddha body and not to any externalized form of it. And Zen is quite strict about this and very rarely has stupas on the property of a Zen temple.

[68:24]

But they have, in place of the stupa, they often have a revolving library They build a library that can be quite big. The one of Tsukiroshi's temple is, I don't know, here to the wall, eight-sided, I think. And it sits on a kind of pall bearing in the middle, at the bottom. Pall bearing? a ball bearing that you turn something on. And it's like a big prayer wheel. And you put the books in it, the sutras, and then you turn it, you revolve it. Now, this kind of thing, when you see that there instead of the stupa,

[69:26]

you're seeing a basic change in the way culture and consciousness assembles itself. Because now, instead of the relic of the Buddha in the stupa, connecting you to the physical Buddha in the past, You have the Buddha's words in the present, which, if you know how to read them, can awaken Buddha's body in you. And the turning of the whole building means that you read a certain way. Now, a process like this, I don't know if the time periods are related, but a process like this went on in the Middle Ages, when what was really a kind of musical notation for chanting became a text.

[71:04]

Now it was said by some, in the Middle Ages again, and most of this is, because it's the only book on this I have with me, is from Ivan Illich's book, In the Vineyard of the Text. And this is something also we discussed because there's a common interest in this territory for us. What you can find if you understand most of what I'm saying in his book, which was published recently. Okay. It was said by some in those days, in the 12th century, which was the turning point, according to Illich, that your eyes were not just something that received visual images like cameras.

[72:33]

Through creating an inner imaginary space, your eyes began to shine. And you know very well, some people's eyes seem to shine. And some people's eyes look quite dark and you just have the feeling that maybe they're seeing what's outside them. And it was thought that developing an inner space that was equal to the outer space, allowed the eyes to look both ways, and then they shine. Now this is a world that many of our ancestors lived in. And I don't think it's a world our parents lived in too much.

[74:11]

We live in too much. But a world something like this is what these guys in this koan were living in. Now, we should take a break in a few minutes, I think, but it was also one of the major changes in the 12th century, supposedly, again, was that the sense of the person as an experience of distance began to happen. That you felt your body was separate from other bodies. And you thought your personality was just as separate from other personalities. And this is when the word persona, which meant mask and meant your office, began to represent you as a person, separate from other persons.

[75:42]

So, You began to feel you had frontiers between you and others. And you communicated across those frontiers. But I think it's significant in this koan they talk about communing. Communing is not the same as communication. What I would say in this case, it means you simply feel connected, you feel intimate with others. And the idea of communication is rather secondary.

[76:47]

Now also at this time, you began to have people no longer having the, as poets say, your heart engaged in your home soil. All soil became foreign or all soil became home. And so as people began to feel they were separate persons, people began traveling all over Europe. They left home. And thousands of people traveled and resettled and were pilgrims and so forth. Finding out they could live on their own, separate from the bonds of their village. Now we take this virtually for granted.

[78:15]

And home leaving in Buddhism specifically means this. It means the ability to live anywhere. Because you're not carried, you're not attached to the Buddha's body or the stupa or a particular physical location because the Buddha's body is formless and within your shatskister. Now the function of memory was so important in this, though I think it's actually inseparable from the creation of an inner space. Because if I'm going to look around at the microphone, the bell, you, etc., it's quite available to me through my visual perception.

[79:38]

At least a certain level of these objects is available to me through my visual perceptions. Now, they wanted you to be equally able to jump around inside and have everything available to you from memory. So... In the early days, books didn't have indexes, so you had to find your way through the book by knowing the book, not by looking at in the back a subject, a topic. And in Illich's book has a rather detailed table of contents, but consciously has no index. Now, St.

[80:47]

Augustine speaks about a man named Simplicius who must have been anything but simple because he could recite any of the books of Virgil forwards or backwards at any time. Now, St. Augustine thought this was quite wonderful and admired his friend's skill. But he felt, if I can try to remember, he felt something like it tied his friend, it separated his friend from the fertility of memory. But it separated him from the fertility of memory.

[81:52]

Because Augustinus was interested in when sometimes he could remember something and sometimes he couldn't. And that sometimes the thing he most wanted to remember was the most hidden. So he thought you should study the pattern of memory for what that told you, rather than just have it all down in a line. Once the child learned these numbers going off to infinity, the apostles would be put on them. This is apostle number three, apostle number four, and so forth. The Apostles?

[82:54]

Apostles in Christianity? The twelve Apostles. The postman, the twelve postmen. And this inner memory palace was designed to accord with scripture. The inner memory palace, or the Noah's Ark in the numbers, was designed to accord with scripture. So it would be the same as what was in the Bible. Now the design of cathedrals was considered to be an externalized memory palace. And you can see the apostles in a line in many temples under their arches and stuff. Now you can imagine you're in a very different world when you're an adept Christian and you walk into a cathedral which is also inside you.

[84:18]

It was inside you before you went in. So when you go in, you can feel it resonating with its differences and similarities and opening up spaces inside you and so forth. Now, Japan still has a lot of this because it's been such an isolated culture. In a somewhat similar way, like Tibet. So they don't like using maps very much in Japan. And when Illich went to Japan for the first time, he tried to buy a map of Tokyo and his host wouldn't let him do it, didn't want him to do it.

[85:31]

You should learn a city not from above, but from walking around and feeling it in your body. Like you discover a book without an index. Wie man ein Buch entdeckt ohne einen Index. That's a different kind of procedure and a different kind of memory. Das ist eine andere Art von Prozedur, eine andere Art von Gedächtnis. And you get to know a city differently. Und man lernt eine Stadt ganz anders kennen. You never know where you are, but you can always find your way. Man weiß nie, wo man ist, und man findet aber immer seinen Weg. And the city opens up differently. Ja, und die Stadt eröffnet sich einem ganz anders. Mhm. In the famous Ryoanji rock garden, the rocks are placed so wherever you move, one of the rocks starts to be hidden by another.

[86:39]

And the only way you could see it as a whole is if somebody suspended you by a crane over the temple and you looked down in the garden. Now the hotel we're staying in nearby is absolutely, totally packed with Japanese, Chinese, and Malaysian, as far as I can tell, tourists. There was a 45-minute wait to even get in the breakfast room this morning. So the maitre d' said, you can sit outside and I'll bring you a roll. He said... I actually ordered a cup of tea and a croissant.

[87:45]

He came back, no croissants, here's a basket of rolls. And I'm stupidly saying, speaking to all these Japanese tourists in Japanese, and then they turn out to be Chinese and Malaysian, and they look at me. And I'm stupidly saying, speaking to all these Japanese tourists in Japanese, I don't think these tourists are, I don't think these folks from Asia, who must be the majority of people in the hotel, are sightseeing. I think they're seeing if they belong to the planetary family. I mean, Japan is so specific that you can hear somebody, as they did with somebody who kidnapped somebody, a child or something.

[88:46]

And in his voice, when he asked for a ransom, On the telephone, they were able to identify that he was in his 40s and that he had lived in five or six different places and what his home village was. The geography, the stupa, is right in your tongue. So all these Japanese are out wandering around in Frankfurt, you know, looking at this big stone, I mean, sculpture which goes like this, you know. And, you know, I'm actually touched by seeing them experimenting with, can they imagine existing outside of Japan? And this is a huge step, I think, for them, actually.

[89:51]

I mean, as I've talked about before, just the idea of public space is probably a British or European, at least, creation. Und ich habe ja schon darüber gesprochen, einfach die Idee eines öffentlichen Platzes, das ist wirklich eine britische Erfindung. The idea of a hotel lobby where anybody can go in never existed in Japan. Die Vorstellung einer Hotel lobby, wo einfach jeder hereinkann, das ist also etwas völlig unvorstellbares in Japan. All spaces were initiated and all spaces you had permission to enter. Also in alle Plätze musste man initiiert werden und man musste Erlaubnis haben, diesen Platz zu betreten. But any of these Asian countries that want to have a tourist industry have to rush around figuring out how to create public space.

[90:44]

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