Thank you very much for joining the winter branches again. To see if they bud eventually. Yeah, actually I think we're doing pretty well. and thank you for joining with each other to practice together and joining with me and the resident practitioners here at the Johanneshof. That's all part of the ritual of ascending the seat. And so we have this surprisingly significant koan in the history of Zen Buddhism.

[01:02]

And significant in the practice and teaching of Dogen and also Suzuki Roshi. So the subject of this koan is what I'm doing just now. Oh, except I'm speaking. Sorry. Anyway, the subject of the koan is ascending the seat. It's not so much that Yao Shan didn't say anything. For if he had said something, It wouldn't be so obvious that the subject of the koan is the ascending the seat.

[02:22]

Okay, so what is ascending the seat? Yeah. It includes your decision to enter practice. And for Suzuki Roshid, he said that when he first started practicing with his lineage teacher, Gyo-Ki-Jin, and so on, What is his name again? Gyokujin So-an. It's who Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind is dedicated to. Can you hear both of us over there? Okay. Oh, good.

[03:30]

But today you don't have to hear me. I just have to get up and get down. So you can pretend you're not hearing me. Okay. Some of you do anyway. No, no. Not in the winter branches. Okay. Okay. So Suzuki Roshi's teacher, Gyokujin, could feel that Suzuki Roshi didn't really accept him as a teacher. Gyokujin was... Suzuki Roshi's father, Butsumon, the disciple. And as a teenager, very young, he was sent by his father to study with Gyoku-jun.

[04:38]

And anyway, at that time, he didn't know quite what to make of this kind of rough guy. Who, among other things, was famous for having a bow. which no one could pull and string except himself. It was so difficult. And by comparison, Sukhiroshi was a rather frail, small guy. So one of the first koans given to Sukhiroshi, the young Shunryu, was this story of Yaoshan ascending the seat. And at some point Sukhiroshi realized that

[05:53]

Jokujin had given it to him as a problem to bring up the problem of would, could Sukhiroshi, young Shinryu, accept Jokujin as his teacher. So the koan became about Sukiyoshi's, for him, about his relationship to Gyoku-jun. Now Dogen, when he... put in a monastery when he was young and his mother died and his father had been, if we know who his father was, he was killed after an attempt to revolt against the Japanese government and emperor.

[07:15]

Dogen was still very young when he went to a monastery because his mother So what Dogen found was that it was hard for him to accept the teaching. How do you, you know, the teaching at that time was just being formed in Japan, Tiendai and the other schools. There were five or six schools. And Zen was really just barely beginning in Japan. So this koan for Dogen came to be, what is the teaching?

[08:17]

Okay. Now, if the subject of this koan is the direct pointing is to ascending the seat, and one of the Categories of Zen teaching is direct pointing. Another category is silence or stillness. And direct pointing and stillness or silence are part of the repertoire of Zen speaking. And as we know from the koans, and I've been pointing out, along with zazen, the teaching of zen primarily falls into the category of meeting and speaking.

[10:07]

And as we know from the koans, and as I have pointed out, together with Zazen, the main context of Zen practice is meeting and speaking. And that's what we're doing here, meeting and speaking. And there's an implicit assumption in that that you can't really probably understand Zen from just Zazen alone or practicing on your own. Practicing without a teacher. And more specifically, practicing without the context of meeting and speaking.

[11:17]

Okay, so this koan is about the context of meeting and speaking. which allows the ascending the seat. And in this case ascending the seat and not speaking. But it's in the context of meeting and speaking. But is it limited to the context of meeting and speaking? This kind of question you need to be asking yourself in order to enter into the depth of this koan. Now, the concept of seat is very rich in Asian culture as well as Western culture.

[12:27]

To find your seat is to find your location. Seinen Sitz finden heißt seinen Ort finden. It's an established place. Es ist ein etablierter Ort. The seat is the throne. Der Sitz ist der Thron. There's the seat of the government. In English, I don't know what you say in German. Der Regierung. And when you, if you're in parliament, you have a seat in parliament. And one of the phrases in Zen koans is something like the straight road to the capital. And that is a way of saying to ascend the seat, to find your place. And in the legends of King Arthur, there's an empty seat at his table, which is reserved for the one who will find the Holy Grail.

[13:57]

Probably it was some kind of Celtic thing. The church, Christian church, put the Holy Grail idea into there. The church did. It wasn't there originally. It was some kind of... But there's the seat waiting for the one who realizes something. And when you become the abbot of a monastery... It's called the mountain seat ceremony. And mountain seat because of what we're speaking about, but mountain because often they were first, temples were first built in the wilderness with wild animals and crazy hermits living nearby and so forth.

[15:22]

So to establish a temple was called opening a mountain. And establishing a seat. Okay, so you can see there's a lot of background in the wider teaching of Zen Buddhism about ascending the seat. Also könnt ihr sehen, dass es da einen größeren Hintergrund gibt in der Zen-Lehre zu diesem Ausdruck auf den Lehrstuhl zu steigen. And when Hui Neng received the robe and bowl of the fifth patriarch ancestor. Und wenn Hui Neng die Robe und die Schalen des fünften...

[16:27]

He couldn't ascend the seat because there was too much kind of rivalry and jealousy about who's which and blah, blah, blah. So he received it in the middle of the night. And symbolic of that, today the transmission ceremony is still done at midnight. So as you all probably must know the lore, Hui Ning was told, you know, you better clear out for a while. So he left and these kind of supposedly jealous monks chased him. The leader of the group was a guy named Hui Ming.

[17:35]

And the leader of them was someone named Hui Ming. Who knows if all this is true? But anyway, has any truth? But anyway, supposedly. So who knows if all this is true, but it is assumed. Maybe this was somebody like Gyokujun. A kind of rough guy and he had been a former general before he became a monk, military general. So when he caught up with Hui Ning, Hui Ning put the robe and bowl down on a stone and hid, supposedly. And hid. And then Hui Ning couldn't pick it up. This is also a symbol of the seat.

[18:43]

You can't take a seat that doesn't belong to you. And so then earlier Wei Ning had said, what is your face before your parents were born? What is your face before your parents were born? Yeah, and this has become, again, one of the key lines in koans and a koan itself since that time. Or, since that time is probably not quite right, it developed later. But in any case, Hui Ming said, I came here to receive the Dharma. So basically Wei Ning said, well then let's sit together.

[19:56]

Wei Ning said to Wei Ming, Ning said to Ming, Wei Ning said to Wei Ming, let's sit together. I was in a meeting once in San Francisco and some woman from the housing projects in San Francisco stood up and said, there's this Chinese woman and I can't remember her name. It sounded like a fork falling on the floor. Bing, bing. So anyway, Ning said to Ming. Yeah. Sit without thinking of good or bad.

[21:05]

And when there's nothing in your mind, I'll teach you. Okay. Now, this story is part of this koan. Of this koan number seven. I'll show you a look. The koan is asking also this basic question by implication. What is your face before your parents were born? Okay. Now, Yaoshan is a, let's call him a figure.

[22:07]

And probably the same etymology in English. It comes from dough, to figure, to shape something. Yeah, so it's to take something out of a situation and hold it. What it came to mean. So you figure something out in your mind. You do math and calculation in your mind. You figure in English. No, that's different in German. In any case, the sense of it here is the koans present Yaoshan not as a kind of biography of a person, He is used as a figure to represent a particular practice, mind and teaching.

[23:26]

of a particular mind, practice and teaching. So when you first look at a koan, After you've maybe read it rather lightly. Or perhaps read it carefully once or twice. You kind of see if you can feel what you want to take out of this koan and hold. And it's not presented as philosophy. One reason is because it would be much more difficult to present it as philosophy. And also because we can incorporate a figure, a personification, easier than an idea.

[24:51]

It's a little bit like if we told the story of Freud, Only in the way he exemplifies the unconscious. And we told the story of Jung, say, only in the way he represented archetypes. And in a like manner we took Adler and other people, Karen Horney and so forth, and created them as figures we could internalize. As figures we could internalize.

[26:22]

Yeah. So, Yao Shan, whoever he was, was a much more complex person than this, or at least more dimensions to him than is presented in the koans. And while he represents one of the archetypal early figures of Zen Buddhism, Hui Neng is his great-grandfather. Yeah. That's not very far back. You may have known your great-grandfather. Yeah. So, Yao Shan is being used to exemplify.

[27:27]

He's not really an archetype. He's more a figure to exemplify a mind, a practice and a teaching. So what you want to do, what we want to do and I want to do is to meet this koan with the feeling of, what is the mind, practice and teaching of this koan? That's exemplified by the figure of Yaoshan, which I can incorporate. So we want to, particularly during this week, see if we can incorporate this figure of Yao Shan.

[28:34]

And we can see that this koan is coded in relationship to other koans. So all of these stories were all developed later, primarily in the Sung Dynasty. That was much later. And they used the various figures, persons, protagonists, to create an overall teaching which you could enter through various gates. But this koan is particularly the gateless gate. But it was the work of some wonderful people to try to make the teaching accessible to us.

[29:36]

Not only to realize the teaching but to love it so much and to love us, they imagined, so much. to love us too so much in their imagination because it was for future generations you were loved you still are that their aim was to make it accessible to us through these koans okay Now again, if the subject of this Quran is ascending the seat, which is also partly the structure of our seminar, because it's been designed to, in the morning I'm ascending the seat, in the afternoon it's more informal.

[31:22]

So right now, the structure of the winter branches is to study the difference between when I give a lecture like this with a teaching staff and robes on and everything... What's the difference with more informal presentation in the afternoon? Und was ist der Unterschied dann zu der informelleren Präsentation am Nachmittag? Ist es überhaupt ein Unterschied? Oder ist es einfach nur eine andere Form, den Sitz zu besteigen? So again, if the topic of this koan is ascending the seat, why am I speaking?

[32:48]

If I'm going to exemplify this koan, shouldn't I just get down from this little platform and high-tail it up to my room? High-tail it. Can you hear me? I don't know what high tail in German is. Sorry. Well, do you know what it is in English? Just to run. Just to get out of here. To show your tail to the one who is pursuing you. Okay. Okay. Well, can there be stillness within speaking? What is this stillness that's also being pointed at? Now the room that I live in upstairs,

[33:52]

In the attic. Yeah. Was created by Wolfram Graubner when he was, I don't know, 18 or so. And he was sort of, I guess, the head of this place or something for a while for Graf von Durkheim. And he lived upstairs. And he made the room in the attic. And he used to look out the window and see the property across the street. And then it was just farmer's fields or fields or swampy fields. I guess a chunk of that down there is sort of owned by we the people or the government or something. As a marshy area, which isn't farmed.

[35:29]

Uh-huh. Anyway, he imagined at some point, he liked the property, and he imagined the two buildings he's built there in the gardens. But when he first looked, it was just an empty field. Or was it an empty field? I presume there were a few trees or something. There was marsh and there was grass. So can we imagine it without the buildings? Can we imagine it without even grass before, as some sort of space without any form? Before any concepts or distinctions are made?

[36:44]

Before do not think? Before bad and good? Do not think bad and good? That would really be an empty field. Is that something that's possible? Well, we can't really think it because thinking inevitably makes distinctions. Yeah. So I'd like you to kind of experiment during this week. with the feeling you have, say, when you're in the hall and then the feeling when you walk into your room and you walk into your room, maybe it's empty. What's the difference between the feeling in the hall, which is sort of public space, or at least what does other people maybe?

[38:09]

And what is the feel when you go into your room? And what is your feel if there's someone else in the room? Now I'm talking about not thinking it, but feeling it. So we need to experiment with the feel of stillness. Or could you have a feel for stillness that was the same in your room and the same when you're with a lot of people so no we don't want a silence that's in between speaking a kind of silence that's waiting for something to happen

[39:11]

But maybe we want a speaking that's in between silence or stillness. And the speaking is just waiting for the silence or stillness to reappear. Now, in order to get the point of this koan, you cannot reach this koan by thinking. And if you reach it by thinking, oh, I know what silence is, or I know what stillness is, So I understand this because I understand stillness. Those are mental categories. And this koan is trying to point to a teaching that is not in mental categories.

[40:31]

So you need to experiment with your own experience. Yeah, so you can start by simple things like what's the difference between being in a room with people and being by yourself. And sometimes we need to be with other people. And sometimes we need to be by ourselves. This is just the way it is, the way we all feel. But is there something that's not in the category of being by yourself or with people? And you can maybe approach this if you start feeling the difference between being with people and not with people.

[41:55]

And then being in zazen, feeling your seat in zazen, So as much as possible during this week, let's locate ourselves, find a location in stillness. And when we speak about something or do something, It leads to stillness and not to more speaking or doing.

[43:10]

That's also the subject of Yunyan and Dao sweeping. Thank you very much. May our intentions be the same, to go through every being and every place.

[43:34]

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