The other day I got a phone call. Actually, two or three times I couldn't respond from the state of Colorado. Somebody the state had hired to ask questions. And I have an unlisted number, but they have a computer that ranks numbers randomly, and so my number got ranked several times. Yeah, so they asked, this young man's voice asked, would you answer a few questions? I said, wow, okay. A few questions, 45 minutes later, I was still answering questions.

[01:19]

I thought, look, I mean, you've got to stop. He said, no, I have to repeat every question. Look, I'm healthy. I began to feel better and better during the questions though. I had none of the health problems they mentioned, which were dozens. My mother wasn't an alcoholic when I was four. No, my father was an alcoholic before I was 15. Neither were alcoholics. And no one abused me before the age of this and the age of that. So I began to think I've had a pretty charmed life.

[02:27]

I've been a mess myself, but nobody around me was a mess. But I guess the motivation is the government wants everyone to be equal. Equally healthy, equally protected, equally, you know, with an adequate food, etc. They never asked about enlightenment. I never asked about anything to do with anything good. It was all, what are these bad problems that happen or have happened to you? Yeah. So every now and then I think... in addition to speaking about practice, your practice and our practice, I should speak about what we're doing here.

[03:54]

Or really trying to do here, because I don't know if we're really doing it or can do it. Now, you never know for sure exactly what happened in history, but the image that's presented is the tradition of a shared or consensual orthopraxy. It's not a word you probably use every day. Consensual. That's what held the monastic tradition or practice tradition together.

[05:07]

Now orthodoxy is to believe or continue what's true. Something like that. A shared belief about what's true. An orthopraxy, orthopraxis, is to continue a practice you keep rediscovering together. So I'm trying to create here a consensual practice which means not just my practice and not my practice which may or may not enlighten me but my practice which I can share.

[06:13]

And maybe the Max Planck Institute is a kind of orthopraxy and not an orthodoxy in the sense it's a research institution. And if you're not a researcher, you're not there, supposedly. So, by definition, we are a community of practitioners. Wir sind via Definition eine Gemeinschaft praktizierender. And we don't really have followers or believers. Wir haben nicht wirklich Gefolgsleute oder Glaubende. Now we could, I suppose, but it's not the emphasis of the way I'm presenting the practice and the teaching. Ich glaube, wir könnten das haben, aber das ist nicht wirklich die Betonung von der Art und Weise, wie ich die Praxis oder die Lehre darstelle.

[07:37]

I'm trying to develop a practice we can share and share with succeeding generations and a practice we can develop the institutional basis for sharing the practice. Now, this may be boring to you to think about these things But it is what we're doing and we should understand what we're doing. So this group of buildings exists in several dimensions. One is the financial dimension. We just had a pretty difficult time making the second 100,000 euro payment. And we may have much more difficulty making the next one the end of the year, the last one.

[08:40]

So we have to have and do have a financial identity. Also haben wir so etwas wie eine finanzielle Identität. We also have a governmental identity. Wir haben auch eine staatliche Identität. We're a German kind of not-for-profit corporation. Wir sind eine Art deutscher, gemeinnütziger Gesellschaft. And we have legal responsibility and we have to have insurance and all that stuff that plugs you into the government. I mean, my image is, you know, sitting in a mountain in a cave and we're like a hermit and somebody comes to visit you and falls and they sue you.

[09:46]

I fell in front of his cave. He should have had insurance. And she was one of the heads of the office in Crestone for some years and knows about all these things. And here too now. As Katrin did years ago and now does here. So we have a governmental identity. We also have a proprietarial identity, which means we own the property. Proprietarial. So we have a responsibility to maintain the buildings.

[10:52]

Yeah, to develop how they're used, to develop them so they're useful. Yeah, etc. Yeah. And we also have a An identity as a polity. It's like a political, but polity means the civil unit that, an organized unit of people, polity, in English. Gibt es das auf Deutsch? A political identity, you could say that. Okay. Okay. And this is more complicated. And we also have a societal identity. And we have a societal identity in the West, not in China or Japan.

[11:57]

And what's clear to me after 50 years is we need more individualized space and toilets and sinks and things like that than you do in Asia. It's okay if you're a campsite for teenagers or college kids. But we don't sleep five to a room on the floor, or ten to a room on the floor, which they do in Japan. You have to learn to keep your elbows in. So, I mean, no one will be here if we have to have no elbow room. So we have to have a societal identity in the West which is not the same as in East Asia. Also brauchen wir eine soziale, eine gesellschaftliche Identität im Westen, die anders ist als die in Asien.

[13:18]

Okay. And now the identity as a polity. Und jetzt die Identität als polit-Einheit. How we relate to each other. Wie wir uns aufeinander beziehen. Okay. Well, it's a lineage term. A lineage temple means that the teacher chooses the student and the student chooses the teacher. It's a mutual arrangement, agreement. No, we don't have a highly developed mentorship tradition. In Asia, in Japan at least, which is the country I know best there, you have your mother, your father, and you have a teacher, and a lifetime teacher.

[14:22]

Yeah, and they're equally, if anything, the teacher relationship is sometimes more lifelong than your parental relationship. My usual example of this is Nakamura Sensei, who was a tea teacher and a no chanting teacher, no theater teacher. Mein Standardbeispiel dafür ist Nakamura Sensei, die eine Tee-Zeremonie-Meisterin war und eine Noh-Theater-Spielerin. When she was in her 70s about, her 85-year-old Noh teacher died. Als sie in ihren 70er Jahren war, ist ihr 84-jähriger Noh-Lehrer verstorben.

[15:27]

And she was good enough to perform in between the plays, the Noh plays in Kyoto. In the regular plays, of course, all the women are actually men. That's becoming more and more true these days, isn't it? No, I don't know. Yeah. But when her teacher died, she chose another teacher who knew less than her, and he was only 45. But it wasn't about knowing more. It was about the relationship that happens between two people. Anyway, we don't have that tradition.

[16:29]

Okay. So if it's a mutual decision, teacher and disciple, when you're practicing in a place for five or ten years, you develop a sense of ownership. If you've invested your life, say, here for decades, and the teacher suddenly says, we can't practice together any longer. Wenn du dein Leben hier jahrzehntelang investiert hast und der Lehrer sagt auf einmal, wir können hier jetzt nicht weiter zusammen praktizieren. Well, there has to be a mutual freedom of the teacher and the student can each keep re-deciding. Es muss aber so etwas geben wie eine gemeinsame Freiheit, dass sowohl der Lehrer als auch der Schüler immer wieder neu entscheiden können.

[17:36]

Yeah, and... And it's the teacher's job to tell the practitioner that I don't any longer think I'm your teacher because otherwise I'm wasting your time for the next few years. Well, this can create a dynamic of fear. Because you're always afraid. If you don't please the teacher, he can say goodbye. But in Asia, there's not the same sense of ownership of the place. You're involved in a teaching lineage and you can just... Anyway, the dynamic is different. In Asien gibt es aber nicht dieses Gefühl von Besitztum, sondern du bist einfach Teil einer Lehrlinie und die Dynamik ist eine andere.

[18:44]

And then, if everyone has a relationship, each person has a separate relationship to the teacher, like Andreas may have a relationship to me, And you may have a relationship to me, but you may not have a relationship to each other. So if everyone has a relationship to the central teacher, the main teacher, That doesn't mean the Sangha has a relationship with each other. And we don't know how then to develop a Sangha relationship. That's what I mean by polity. How do we create a civil unit that works together? And this gets more and more important as I get older.

[19:49]

I mean, I've got another 20 or 30 years left. Or five or one. I mean, I'm 78 in a few days. Okay, so the Sangha has to continue the practice. But if you only relate to me and you don't get along with each other and you never go out to dinner with each other, hell... But, you know, it's... I don't know. I don't have... You know, I'm extremely pessimistic. The world's going to hell in a handbasket. That's a line from Philip Wayland's poem.

[20:57]

But he still enjoyed the cherry blossoms in that poem. So I'm a pessimist and an optimist. But we need to think about these problems. Now, also all leadership in this tradition is shared leadership. Außerdem ist alle Führung in dieser Tradition gemeinsam oder geteilte Führung. But how do you lead and share simultaneously? We tend to emphasize leadership and not the sharing of leadership. Aber wie kannst du gleichzeitig Führung teilen und führen? Also wir neigen dazu, die Führung zu betonen und nicht das Teilen. Yeah, and I remember, you know, this doesn't seem like an example of it, but it is. In the Heiji, all of these monks, 180 monks or something, going up the stairs like a black caterpillar.

[22:02]

Yeah, and it's... It's built on a mountainside, so it's got stairs. Endless stairs, beautiful stairs. So when I came out of where I slept in the Zendo, everyone does everything with energy. So this is energetic monks going by me one at a time, boom, boom, boom, and I'm politely standing aside waiting to the last monk. And I, after two or three days of waiting like this, Several monks independently came up and said, what's wrong with you?

[23:13]

Push in. Because everyone's supposed to push. But it's you push, but you also accept. And there's no clear leader and follower. Everyone is simultaneously leader and follower. So there's a consensual decision-making process articulated through hierarchy. Which requires a skill of leading through, going along with. Consensual processes do not work unless you're always willing to go along with the consensus.

[24:33]

But that would become very stagnant unless there's a way to lead sort of from underneath. We don't know how to do this. Sorry. Yeah. So it's like this and there's a sense ideally of generational leadership, generational ownership. Yeah, and how we articulate that through a vision of how this does belong to generations. First of all, it's rooted in a consensual practice.

[25:49]

Das wurzelt in erster Linie auf konsensueller Praxis. A practice we share. Eine Praxis, die wir teilen. Okay, so I take statements of Dogen and other people and try to make sense of them for us. Also nehme ich Aussagen wie die von Dogen oder auch anderen und versuche die für uns offen zu legen, dass die Sinn für uns machen. Okay. So yesterday afternoon I mentioned Dogen's statement. Locate yourself fully in immediacy. Place yourself fully in immediacy. And consider this the entire universe. Okay. Now we could also say the second phrase, place yourself fully in allness.

[27:07]

Let's take the English word universe out and say allness. So this is something like... a teaching of interdependence, if everything is actually interdependent, interactively interdependent, you have this ultimate butterfly effect. It causes a typhoon somewhere else. Then, in the end, you have this butterfly effect. You do something here and that causes a typhoon somewhere else. By the way, who has the time? Anybody? I forgot my watch again. Does anyone have a time? About?

[28:10]

17 to 11. Oh, I'm in not terrible shape. Although some of you have already sleeping. Although some of you have already sleeping. All right, okay. So I would call this the practice of the Alaya Vijnana. Now, how can I give you a feel for this? And it's interesting, I think, what should be for you, that I'm using Dogen. I'm not using Hakuin or Rinzai. Their teaching is not basically different. But it's integrated in a different lineage flow. So the emphasis on Yogacara practice in Dogen is particularly in our lineage.

[29:21]

So I'm trying to establish a consensual understanding of practice. in a primarily lay Sangha. By definition, that's probably impossible. But who wants life to be easy? We might as well try. Okay. So, The Alaya Vijnana is a controversial topic in itself. It's primarily a Yogacara concept. There have been disagreements about it and what it is over centuries. So I'm presenting my experience of the teaching.

[30:39]

So we have the fourth skanda, which is associative mind. But the associative mind, which is primarily experienced in zazen or psychotherapy or something, is a real kind of storehouse, is actually a kind of storehouse mind. And when you loosen the boundaries of consciousness, associations can more freely come up which aren't collated, related to each other in a collective way, through consciousness. So your situation of sitting more and more as an openness, non-conceptual gnosis or cognosis.

[31:47]

A non-conceptual gnosis. G-N-O-S-I-S. Gnosis is like cognition, but it's more a spiritual knowledge. And the main thing I'm trying to present is non-conceptual gnosis or cognosis. Yeah, as... dynamically characteristic of our lineage. Okay, so now let's try to look at the Alaya Vijnana.

[33:14]

I'm taking this extremely controversial topic and trying to give you a definitive sense of it in three minutes. I know. Okay. So, let's go back to bodily time. Not clock time. Your heartbeat, your breath beat, your metabolic beat. And you can't be out of time because you are time. Yeah. Okay. Then, if you really know yourself as bodily time, This is your location and there's no comparison.

[34:18]

Then from there you can enter contextual time. As I said earlier in the seminar, you represent right now contextual time. As soon as I come in the door, I go from the contextual time of... Katrin as Jisha and myself. And walking in my wooden monk's high heels or geta. Which are a kind of bodily activity. contextual time. Then I step in the room and I'm immediately in this contextual time.

[35:24]

And we chant in this contextual time. And I'm not like a university professor coming in to give a lecture. I do three full bows first to the Buddha. We're in the context of an idealized and ideal human possibility. It wasn't asked, nobody asked me about it from the state of Colorado. So my first thing I do is bow to the Buddha to show that whatever I say is in the context of this ideal human being. So first I'm in a contextual space, which I'm discovering through my bodily space or bodily time, contextual time, bodily time. And then we could even say we shift into compositional time.

[36:40]

Like composing music. I have to start composing this situation through how I'm speaking so that we can discover a consensual practice. Ich muss dann finden, wie ich diese Situation komponieren kann, indem wie ich spreche, sodass wir eine konsensuelle Praxis herstellen können. And then I have to enter the alaya vijnana. Which in this case I would call gestational time. In other words, you have an intention to practice. You have an intention to realize your innermost request. In Japan, as a non-Buddhist idea, somewhere between Buddhism and not, the state of Japan might have asked, instead of the state of Colorado, do you follow your innermost request?

[38:03]

Because if you're, say, you're elderly and healthy, a Japanese person would say, ah, you've listened to your innermost requests. You've listened to what works for you to be the kind of person you want to be. Yeah. So you have an innermost request to be the kind of person you want to exist on the planet? You have an intention to practice. And maybe you have some particular pause for the particular or some kind of wisdom phrase.

[39:04]

And maybe you have karmic shadows following you. Or karmic merit following you. That all exists in gestational space. And when I give a lecture, I'm trying to enter your gestational space. So some of the things I'm saying will bear fruit maybe in months or years. That's part of the tradition of what I'm doing. Okay, so this gestational space is like placing yourself fully in allness.

[40:24]

This ripening space. to place yourself fully in immediacy and to place yourself fully in allness. Now, if everything is an activity, if everything is a field of possibilities, if you take your innermost request and put it in the field of possibilities, It becomes a functional process of knowing. All of what you know is brought into the wide open field of knowing. The non-conceptual cognitive process

[41:44]

Which is a kind of thinking and knowing. But thinking through your situation always, not through ordinary consciousness. Okay. Okay. In ten years. You just have to say yes. I think it's not so. We're doing it. They just learn to discover how to keep your vows and your deep intentions present in your background mind. Which all the little rituals of practice are meant to reinforce. Like bowing to the Buddha when you cross the room.

[43:00]

Or picking up your Yogi bowl and bringing it into the space of your body. And so forth. Thank you very much.

[43:26]

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