The new way of commons is silence. And that touched me very much. This was a meeting I told you about? In the seminar in Bremen you told this to us. Oh, that's right. You shared this with us. And that touched me very much. I first thought, what is he talking about? But that remained like that and became part of my practice. In connection with the Quran, for example, what do you call the world? where he says, what do we do for the world, this Quran?

[01:00]

And the abt then says, oh, that's interesting, what do you use for the world? And one aspect that I have of it, I sometimes have the feeling, Roshi was like this, that he said, only those who have the great amplifiers today, who have the media, are also heard, have the outer power. and I sometimes don't feel heard, but I have the feeling, when I enter the room of silence, also with concerns, that I can bring them into this world, into this being, let's say, into this world, into this being, that I can bring them and that they also have an effect, which I cannot directly measure, And one aspect of it is my practice, also the years-long practice of me and also of others. I have the feeling that it is a peace work on myself. That is disarmament, an inner kind of disarmament. And I can only recommend Alice Miller's book at the beginning of her education to everyone, where you can see what people like Ceausescu, Heter or such things did today, what individual people could bring into the world that did not disarm me.

[02:11]

And I don't know what kind of ego bombs, maybe some, or I would be, I can talk about myself, that I would have become if I didn't practice and other things, i.e. inner demolition of Katar and Fred. And one aspect that I sometimes still have, I sat recently, and sometimes I do that, Take the power of the world, or the energy, the cosmic energy, and send it, for example, into Putin's wormhole, or into Trump's wormhole. With compassion, of course. Yes, with the idea. Of course, I do that for myself, because I think that they are reasonable. Why am I so influenced when I think that they may somehow set a bomb? Yes, I think that. So that would be one way to do something. And the other is, of course, what I also like, something like Greta, such stories where I can support. When I come here, I don't feel comfortable here.

[03:21]

I don't feel comfortable here. I don't come here to feel comfortable. And sometimes I also have extreme pain, or whatever. But for me, there is no sauna, or no cinema, or whatever else I would love. Whether it's a nice time with friends. It's not the central element here. And about compassion, what Roshi said this morning, the distinction between personal and fundamental compassion, for me, it seemed to me that it needs both kinds of compassion.

[04:44]

The one does not go without the other. And to give compassion, I think, is still the question for me. For me, it is one thing to give compassion to a friend, to be compassionate, Sometimes that's easier than being compassionate with myself. Sometimes here it's a little bit difficult almost as if there's shame if you take care of yourself. Even though I feel like that has been changing recently. What if you don't take care of yourself?

[05:54]

He said that there used to be a feeling that you shouldn't take care of yourself, as if there's some shame that you need to take care of yourself. Oh, my goodness, I didn't know that. Is that transformative? Or am I damaging myself? I can only tell the result afterwards. And who makes the decision at the present moment? That's the kind of question. And I know that when I return home, I am happier and so is my surroundings.

[06:58]

Even though I am doing the same thing as I did before. Yeah. Maybe I should say something? You know, I'm very impressed with each of your practice and your presence, and it's made my life Better and more resourceful, maybe.

[08:08]

At the same time, I often feel like I've been looking at this koan 40 this morning because I talked about Heaven and Earth and I share the same root. And looking at this koan, I read it and I think, Zen is just too hard. Most people are simply not going to get it. But I recognize that at the same time, 50, 60 years ago, I actually benefited from this koan. I didn't understand it as fully as I do now.

[09:25]

But I sensed it. And just for... We've been talking about hishiryo, noticing without thinking about. This koan says, it is necessary to cut off all mental activity and cut off understanding. Now that's the kind of question I would or could have asked Suzuki Roshi.

[10:29]

Koan 40 says, cut off all mental activity. And cut off understanding. Now, when this book was first published, Tom Cleary, or the publisher rather, asked me to write the introduction to this book. This was 1960... What was it? It says 1977 here, but it was... I must have been asked in the early 70s. I told the publisher and I thought it was just crazy. I should not write the introduction because I don't know enough. I haven't practiced long enough. But what I did, so I knew I was not capable of writing an introduction I would feel okay about.

[12:01]

But I knew I was capable of helping Tom Cleary. So I arranged for Tom Cleary to be near the Zen Center in San Francisco. And I paid him. I had the center pay him. I think... couple thousand dollars a month and three thousand dollars a year for books and we did that for several years and much of his work was done during that period. Yeah, so I mean I wanted to do something but I knew writing the introduction to the book was not what I could do.

[13:23]

And the prior history of that is there was a translation by R.D.M. Shaw, who was a Protestant missionary, And he translated the Hekigan Roku, the Blue Cliff Records. Now, I'm telling you this in an anecdotal way. Because the this place exists because San Francisco Zen Center existed and San Francisco Zen Center existed because it did things like support Tom Cleary. So what we're doing here is creating a place for shared practice. Now, Sukhiroshi's initial lectures, long before we had Tassajara or a building in San Francisco, he lectured every Wednesday, usually it was a Wednesday night, and every Sunday morning.

[14:56]

And I worked at the University of California. Actually, I'd planned to never have a job or career because I did not want to participate in our society, which had armies and wars. So I just worked in warehouses and things like that. But then I had a baby. and a wife, and you know, yeah. So I had to change my mind. So I got offered a job at the University of California, which I did for five years. Okay. So Sukhriyashi was, and I went to every lecture that Sukhriyashi gave, I think, for five years, anywhere, you know.

[16:18]

I moved near him and went every day to Zazen, and I don't think I, in five years I missed Zazen twice, I believe. I don't feel I'm saying anything about myself. I'm just trying to describe what practice was for me. So Suzuki Rishi was lecturing every Wednesday and Sunday, at least once a week and often twice a week, specifically about the Blue Cliff Records. But R.D.N. Shaw's translation was Christianized and Westernized. And I have Suzuki Rishi's book in which he kept crossing off things, writing in Japanese kanji and crossing off things and writing comments in English sort of.

[17:48]

I worked for Grove Press in New York for some time. I knew a woman named Lolly Rossett who had been married to the founder and owner of Grove Press. And Laura Lee or Lolly Rossett was German. And I knew there was a pretty good German translation of Blue Cliff Records. Und ich wusste, dass es eine ziemlich gute deutsche Übersetzung von der Niederschrift des Markten Felswand gab. So I asked her if she would translate the Blue Cliff record. Und habe ich sie gefragt.

[18:49]

Because I thought, she's trying to deal with this weird RDM show translation. Yeah. So she, and I don't know, I mean, we never had any money, you know, but I think probably we paid her $50 a case or something like that. So she translated up to around 20 and Sukersi used them and then Cleary translated this. And Cleary and his brother, J.C. Cleary was his name, John, I forget. Anyway, I mainly knew Tom Cleary. We're kind of geniuses at translation and at other things. So I should tell you an anecdote about Kaz Tanahashi.

[20:09]

Kaz Tanahashi had come to the San Francisco Zen Center at various points, and I also decided the center should support him. So we supported him for some years. So when Cleary started translating for us, I asked Kaz to participate. Now, if I remember correctly, Kaz Tanahashi, who you know very well, had translated 12th century, 13th century Japanese into modern Japanese, so he'd done a modern version of Dogen.

[21:14]

And Kaz Tanahashi, who you know very well, has translated translations from the Japanese of the 12th and 13th centuries into modern Japanese. So he has created something like modern Dogen translations. So they worked together in the afternoon. I thought Kaz could help because he is Japanese and knows Japanese and these were just Harvard students. college students who were 19 or something. So after they'd spent the afternoon together, I said to Kaz, how did it go? And he said, Cleary is a genius, he said.

[22:17]

He was sight-reading without dictionaries from 12th century Chinese, Japanese, just sight-reading everything without even looking at a word. He said, I didn't, I was just holding the book. And so then the second day I said to Kaz, how did it go today? He said, he's a monster. Okay. Okay. So, but I benefited from this book in those days. And I could have asked Suki Rashid, I did ask questions like this, I'd read this, and I'd say, Suki Rashid, what does it mean to cut off all mental activity?

[23:20]

How do you do that? Because anything I read I didn't understand. I went to him and asked, And I realized I didn't understand almost anything. So I asked a lot of questions. Although I saw him every morning, I saw him every evening. Because I would... I worked at the university and I would take a bus to San Francisco and then I would take a bicycle and avoid the hills. Otherwise, there's... And I could get to the Zendo about the time Zazen started at 5.30. And then I saw him in the evenings. But still, I couldn't ask him every question. So something like cut off all mental activity I would form, if I didn't have a chance to ask him, how you do that, I would form an image, mental activity.

[24:50]

I'd get to watch my mental, can I see my mental activity? And then I'd say, when is it stronger? When is it less stronger? How does it affect my breathing? How does my breathing relate to my mental activity? So I'd observe those things as carefully as possible. And when I couldn't ask him, I always drew a picture and tried to imagine it visually. Can I get a picture of what mental activity is? And when I get a feeling for what mental activity is, how does it feel exactly? When is it stronger? When is there more of it? When is there less of it? How does my mental activity relate to my breath? And so on. So in some subliminal and intuitive way, I was approaching, feeling into, cutting off all mental activity. And creating space around mental activity. And I remember one of my images at that time.

[26:05]

And Houston Smith, you don't know who Houston Smith is probably, but he wrote the book on world religions. And he was a older than me, but a very nice person, and I arranged as often as possible for him to come to the university and teach so I could spend time with him. And until he was in his mid-90s, he was on the board of Dharma Sangha. But in the 60s, long before this, he had me give a lecture at Syracuse University where he was teaching at the time. And I remember saying to his students, because I was supposed to say something, I was this young Zen practitioner,

[27:14]

So I said, when you practice meditation, after a while your thoughts become something like billboards. And you can more and more, while you're sitting, see more and more space between the billboards, as if you were driving along a highway more and more slowly and the space between the billboards got bigger. Yeah, so that was my experience, intuitive or experience, from being with Suzuki Roshi and trying to feel the degree to which he was not involved in mental activity.

[28:38]

And so I could sort of, if I could mirror on him, sort of, I could feel what it's like to not be involved in mental activity. And the more I was with Suzuki Roshi, because I could already feel and see that he was not really entangled in mental activity, and when I could capture him with my mirror neurons, then I could more and more develop a feeling for how it feels not to be entangled in mental activity. So what I came to was thoughts were sort of like billboards, and between the billboards there was fundamental mind or natural mind or nature. And that experience of the natural mind or fundamental mind between billboards is in our meal chant where we say desiring the natural order of mind.

[29:48]

I think we got that out in German. We don't have that anymore. We changed the translation. Okay. Well, that's probably good. But Sukhriyashi asked me to translate with him the meal chant. So we sat at Tassajara on the first days of forming Tassajara, chanting, and I said, let's call it the natural order of mind. Maybe we have to change it in America now too, because nature is a very problematic concept. All right, it's basically a theological concept.

[30:58]

Okay, okay. So the point I'm making here is, on the one hand, I can read this poem and I'd say, oh gosh, nobody's going to understand this. And I think of somebody who's been practicing with me for many, many years at Santa Fe and then Crestone. I mean, really, I don't know, 30 years or more. He's recently become primarily a Theravadan Buddhist practitioner. And I don't know much about it, but he mainly goes to Goenka retreats. Goenka. Goenka. Yeah, vipassana.

[32:05]

That's Theravadan. Well, vipassana is a name for the inside side of Theravadan Buddhism which doesn't emphasize the shamatha side. And so in English we say vipassana. Now, Goenka is long dead and every Goenka seminar that he goes to they play Goenka's tapes You're going to play my tape forever. No, you'll play her tape. All right, anyway, but it tells you the temperature to practice at.

[33:11]

The tea water should be 70 degrees. And fundamentally, Zen practice is a do-it-yourself practice. You have to figure out how to do it yourself, and you have to do it yourself. And he just is not inclined. He wanted more clear instructions, and I understand. I'm too vague and confused and change... In the Zen practice, it's mainly a do-it-yourself practice, where you have to find out for yourself how it works and how you apply it and so on. And this person just needed more instructions. He wanted to have it clearer. And I understand that well. I dare him to do that and I constantly change myself. So he's a case where this is not what he's inclined to do.

[34:13]

But what I see is, in you and in myself from all these years, we can still, even though we don't really get it entirely, it does change our lives. Okay, so I would like to mention some things from this koan because what I'm trying to do here is give you a sense of how to practice on your own when I'm gone. Um, so, um... You can see how I... So I'll just read some things and try to comment on it because I think this helps me say something.

[35:32]

The basic case, as I read you, told you yesterday, yesterday, this morning, this morning, yeah. Some government official named Liu Shuang was talking with Nan Xuan, who is one of the most famous Zen masters. You understand that many of these people are from the Tang Dynasty. But they're characters from the Tang Dynasty, and it's the Sung Dynasty who made them into famous Zen masters. It's part of how this teaching was created. In other words, like Matsu... There are actually records of his Tang Dynasty lectures, and they're very conventional, traditional lectures.

[36:57]

And then in his lectures in the Song Dynasty versions are full of quads and lion roars and things like that. And that wasn't in his actual original lectures. So the Sung Dynasty folks decided, how can we give authenticity to our insights which they won't have if they're from us, but we can put them in the mouths or actions of the Tang Dynasty ancestors. In other words, these cases are all pedagogical constructs.

[38:02]

Okay, so... This public official, Lu Xuan, quotes Sun Zhao, who was a famous, and we do have real information about him. And he was an important figure from the 4th and 5th centuries. So this government official quotes him. And he says, Sun Zhao said, heaven and earth and I have the same root. Myriad things and I are one body. And then he said, this is really marvelous.

[39:05]

So Nanchuan pointed to a flower. Now what does that make you think of? Mahakashika holding up a flower. That's clearly where this comes from. So Nanchuan doesn't hold up a flower, he just points to a flower in the garden and he says, people these days see this flower as a dream. And he's also saying in that statement that People these days think the historical Buddha of 1,500 years ago, at that time, was, it's history, it's a dream. It's not a dream. Okay, now this is the concept of a hyper-object.

[40:33]

This is the person I mentioned this morning, Timothy Morton. And the picture on the cover is, I don't know how they got the picture, but it's the 10% of the iceberg which is on the surface and most of it's under the water. So basically, Nanchuan is saying the Buddha is a hyper-object. A hyper-object is something that's extended over vast reaches of time and space, which is affecting us like climate change or global warming or various ways to say it, which don't sound scary. And a hyperobject is something that reaches far into space and time, such as climate change or, what was your other example, climate change or...

[41:59]

global warming. In English, the Anthropocene is another name for it, or the sixth extinction. We've had seven, five extinctions. We're in the middle of the sixth extinction. Okay, so the hyper-object of our environmental crisis. Yeah, it has some boundaries. You can say it started with the plow, plowing fields. And then it had another big shift, which we can't undo with Watt, W-A-T-T, inventing the steam engine. And then the next is the explosion at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

[43:06]

Okay. We can't undo these things. They are part of us already. We're living a life based on agriculture so that this vast hyper-object of environmental warming is our life already. It's not over there. It's us. But we're not guilty. We did what we thought were reasonable things to do. Wir führen ein Leben auf der Grundlage von Ackerbau. Und dieses riesige Hyperobjekt, das wir jetzt Klimawandel nennen, ist jetzt schon Teil von uns. Wir können das nicht rückgängig machen. Aber wir sind gleichzeitig auch nicht schuldig dran. Wir haben einfach nur die Dinge getan, von denen wir gedacht haben, ja, okay, so muss man das machen.

[44:07]

We just did not understand the limitations or actual dynamics of the planet. Now this vast, in time and space, hyper-object He got this word hyper from Björk, the Swedish singer. He's an English professor and historian and a philosopher and his writing is full of things like the Beatles and then what Proust said and things like that. English professor, Ant. philosopher. He wrote, I haven't read it, but he wrote a book, The History of Spice Throughout the European Middle Ages.

[45:10]

So he can take a subject like spice and trace it, where we get it from, how it's shipped and things like that and how it's transforms European history. So, in other words, we are inseparable from this hyper-object which extends in space and time beyond our own ability to perceive it.

[46:10]

Now, this is partly a reaction of some contemporary philosophers, mainly this young man who I've been in some email contact with, in a reaction against the too much emphasis from Husserl on phenomenology. Now, one of the most brilliant books written, I think, on Buddhism in the last 20 years or so is Lusthaus' book, what's the title? Buddhist Phenomenology. It's one of the few books that I can read and say, yes, he knows what practice is.

[47:24]

Okay. But, Morton and others are saying there's been too much emphasis on the humanness of our phenomenology without really realizing these objects are part of our life and they extend beyond our life in all directions. And what Morten and others just say is that, okay, there was too much emphasis on the phenomenology and how our human, the humanity, i.e. the human aspect of our experience, without it, it was lost from the look, that it is beyond that, now what he calls hyper-objects, these huge phenomena that stretch into space and time and that go far beyond our human experience.

[48:30]

Now the first lecture of Sukhiroshi that transformed me was he gave a lecture on the three bodies of the Buddha, the Dharmakaya, Sambhogakaya and Nirmanakaya. And at that time I didn't have word for it, but that's clearly presenting the Buddha as a hyper-object. When we say that, as I said this morning, all the Buddhas in ten directions, the historical Buddhas just, you know, And from the point of view of Zen and later Madhyamaka, the historical Buddha is a starting point, but he's not our practice.

[49:32]

So from the point of view of Madhyamaka and Zen, the Buddha is a vast field of potentialities that we're always in the midst of. Okay, now, if some of us are able to have enlightenment experiences, and some of us do, Even with very little acquaintance with Buddhism or none. Enlightenment experiences shift, is a shift when things don't compute. Now, the shift may be well outside your perceptual range.

[50:38]

That may not even be a nanosecond. But in that nanosecond, which is enough time to get three e-mails, sent from Europe or America or something. They say, I love it. They say, I'm going to send you an email. And I say, okay. And they go, bonk, bonk. I didn't have time to pick up my pencil. Yeah, okay. So... But in that nanosecond, if your way you've grounded your organized your mental framework is undercut or shifted

[51:49]

And suddenly you look at everything in a new way. That is an enlightenment experience. It doesn't mean it's a Buddhist enlightenment experience exactly, but it's an enlightenment experience. Because you suddenly are free of the structure of your habit and birth culture. So then what's the point of all this? depth in this one koan if you can just be enlightened with knowing very little about Buddhism. Okay, so what I call the four marks of Buddhism, or four tenets, or four convictions, And I would say they, I spoke about them for the first time early last year, I mean, or late last year before I went to America.

[53:15]

But the four are which are necessary to make practice work. You have to actually believe that transformation is possible. Even if you never have an enlightenment experience, you've got to know it's possible, otherwise you won't see the teachings in their real texture. Yeah, okay. And the second is it's actually possible to be free of mental and emotional suffering. And that's also hard to believe if you're in the midst of a lot of people suffering or if you're a therapist even.

[54:43]

And it's interesting that Christianity... has made the part of the world that everyone wants to live in. I'm not a Christian, but boy, everyone wants to live in Northern Europe. But still, one of the feelings in Christianity is that suffering, you learn from suffering. And Buddhism would say you learn from feeling things completely, but not necessarily suffering from them.

[55:46]

So again, if you don't really believe it's possible, you won't see in your own... potential bandwidth, those little nuances which are actually the steps, the doors that free you from suffering. Okay, and the third is it's actually possible to live in a way that's for the benefit of all allness, phenomenality and sentience. Okay, and the fourth is, it's possible to live close to how things actually exist.

[57:03]

Now, that also includes nowadays, and is the interest of people like Timothy Morton, can we live close to the world of relativity and... What's so... When the world isn't predictable, it's uncertainty. Can we really live in a world rooted in uncertainty and probability? And the interest of someone like Timothy Morton and philosophers in that line is the question, is it actually possible to live in the kind of world as it is thought of by relativity and in a world that is based on uncertainty and probabilities?

[58:04]

I'll be at a conference later this month on consciousness and I will not try to speak about consciousness biologically or psychologically? Too late. Or neurologically. But I will speak about it experientially. And my experience experience is. If you do know the world experientially it's very consistent with contemporary relativity and quantum mechanics. And my experience is that when you know the world

[59:08]

how it actually exists experientially. Yeah, so... The detail which a koan like this goes into is a koan which increases the likelihood of enlightenment and the depth and thoroughness of enlightenment. and increases the way the structure of practice itself and the institutions of practice like Johanneshof increase the likelihood of enlightenment.

[60:27]

Okay, if you've survived that much, I'll try to just say a few things. I'd like to finish this if I could. Is it okay? Okay. It says, Lu Xuan, the government official, quoted Zhang Jiao, what root do they share? Which body do they have in common? But when he said that, it was undeniably unique.

[61:30]

He was a very alert practitioner. Aber als er das gesagt hat, konnte man nicht leugnen, wie einzigartig es war. Und er war ein sehr wacher Praktizierender. And then the book says, this is not the same as an ordinary man's ignorance of the height of the sky or the breadth of the earth. Weil er gesagt, das ist nicht... This is not... not the same as the ordinary man not understanding the height of the sky or the breadth or scale of the earth. The height of the sky or the scale of the earth is a hyper-object. If we're not in a culture which believes in a creator, What you've got is the sky and the earth, and they're vast.

[62:43]

And that has to be part of your understanding. But, it says then, this is the way to say both sides all the time, but while his questioning was extraordinary, it still did not go beyond the meaning of the teachings. I'm going to stop after this paragraph. If you say that the meaning of the teachings is the ultimate paradigm, if you say the teachings are the full truth, then why did the Buddha raise a flower?

[63:45]

The raising the flower represents going beyond the teachings to actually what's in front of you, the pencil. So, because the officer's questioning was still in the context of the teaching and not in his own creative realization, Nanchuan pointed to the flower and said, people see this in a dream like you are. Now, here's the last statement I'll mention.

[64:46]

Which refers basically to fundamental compassion and personal compassion. Nanchuan's way of answering by pointing out the flower was to use the grip of a realized patched robed monk to take hold of the painful spot in another person and break up his nest. Meaning, real compassion is to take the person out of their usual way of thinking about the world. Okay, there's a lot more here, but I think that's enough for us to absorb. Yeah, I can come back to it if it seems appropriate. So let's have a break and come back at some point.

[66:27]

Okay, thank you for translating.

[66:29]

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