Now I would like to try to make this more clear. Because I'm convinced it's quite doable and understandable. You can bring it into your life very powerfully and effectively. In small doses and that's how we exist anyway. Really our life is lots of small doses. But I think the best thing to do is to for me to stop trying to make it clear. And just hear something from you about your problems, whether it makes sense or anything you'd like to speak about except Santa Claus.

[01:01]

But since I practice acceptance, I will accept that. All right. Thanks. I can always depend on you. Move it. What I believe I've heard is the permanent world is a world in time. And when I take out the moment and don't feel a causal connection, Then I lose the sense which I give to things in regard to temporal... And that's what life is.

[02:28]

Buddhism is perhaps a method of learning to be amazed that there is something instead of nothing. And what remains is that Buddhism is a method teaching me astonishing, being astonished. Yeah, that's true. That anything appears. That's right. And that's the very place at which you meet Buddha. When you have that experience, we call that entering, we could call it, entering a Buddha category. So you're getting familiar with the territory that we call Buddha. Okay. There's problems with everything I say, but I won't try to clarify any problems next. How? I learned that in American movies.

[03:42]

I think my question concerns the role of a practice center in practicing these practices. because you know we're here at this beautiful seminar house very nice place the atmosphere thank you and the um and there's a sangha atmosphere here and it's very easy somehow because we sorry No, not really a but. And for you, wouldn't it be easier to just go around the seminar houses and lead practice weekends or seminars or sushins, and not have to establish lasting practice centers?

[05:12]

Because of course there are certain difficulties that come along with having a center. He lives at Crestone. He's speaking from the heart of darkness. Is that enough? Oh, I can hear you, yeah. Well, what's your answer? What do you want me to do? Well, for me, it's pretty important to live in Crestone.

[06:31]

And I'm still trying to understand the role of... I'm in the process of understanding my role within a practice center. And I can feel that it's very important to me. But I'm not exactly sure why. Why are you advising me to do nothing but seminars here and there and abandon the two centers? I hope that's not what I was doing. Ah, well... You know, I have an intention.

[07:57]

And my intention is to practice with you. And for me it's a kind of friendship, the best kind of friendship. And I love having you as friends. And friends in how we establish a view of the world. Yeah, and really establish it together, because it's establishing it together that really makes it wise. At the same time, I let the Sangha shape itself.

[08:59]

It's part of it, but still I just let, you know, as much as possible let the Sangha shape itself. It's not only that I'm not smart enough to do anything else. It's also that that we really don't know what form Buddhism should take in our society. I know that I, that Sugi Hiroshi came to Japan, came to America with the view to just to just live his life in America and see what happened. And at first he went out begging on the streets and going from, you know, buying all the damaged cars

[10:32]

When he shopped in the grocery store, he bought the oldest fruit and things like that. But then he found that it didn't work. cultural support or understanding of why this guy was walking around the street with a bowl. So he stopped doing that. And pretty soon people... By the way, I'm speaking about this in relationship to what Craig said. Because we're at a point of really rethinking the existence of Johanneshof. And a few weeks ago we had a board meeting In which we started, the meeting started with my saying, the agenda for this meeting is whether Yohannesov continues to exist and how and if I continue practicing in Europe.

[12:11]

And that's where we are right now, actually. And I could easily do what you have suggested. I could have a place to stay. I... Marie-Louise and I have an apartment in Freiburg. I could come occasionally if anybody asks me and do a few seminars and go back to Christoph. So that's really, you know, or just, you know, maybe I should just live in Creston. I like it. But I like you too. This is life, right? Okay, so after a while, so what Sukershi did is pretty soon people began joining him to sit with him.

[13:19]

But if he's a person, when he'd gone to San Francisco, if he'd gone to work in a diner, Pretty soon it would have been full of customers just sitting there buying a cup of coffee so they could watch this guy bring the cup of coffee to them. That's a nice guy. I'd like to go in there and have a cup of coffee. So people began joining him. And after about, I guess, four or five years, he... realized that he really wasn't able to get the teaching across to most of the people who were wanting to practice with him.

[14:27]

They wanted, partly they wanted a social relationship with him. You know, hello, how are you? Let's go to the movies. Or walk in the park. But the problem with that is you inhabit your social body and you don't know practice through your social body. Your social body doesn't have too many of the Buddha categories in it. It's not to put down the social body. Again, the social body, a home leaver is not someone who leaves behind the social body. Home leaver is someone who leaves home to re-inhabit the social body in a new way.

[15:37]

But first you have to have some way to free yourself from your social body so that you can know somebody in the Buddha categories. This is the context we're speaking today. So after four or five years he decided, which he hadn't intended to do when he came to America, he decided... we need some kind of monastic situation. And it wasn't something I thought of. I mean, I worked out a way to practice with him

[16:47]

And I pretended the city of San Francisco was a monastery. Just a big one. Yeah, I practiced and I worked with phrases and I had a good old time. And Sukhirashi was always about going back to Japan to live, so I practiced with some fervor of fire. But then, because of his idea, we looked at a few places where we might make a... center in the countryside. And knowing this, his feeling, I looked around myself and I went hiking or camping and I found Tassajara. Yeah, so I

[18:08]

I showed it to him and he thought it was great, so we figured out a way to buy it. What did I discover? He said it went from almost no one getting the practice to dozens of people getting the practice within the first few years. It was an unavoidable fact I saw and it's changed my mind. And it's been clear since then that We need at this point to have some kind of mixture of monastic practice and lay practice. So then in 1983 I started coming to Germany for somebody invited me to come to a conference. And then the people who organized the conference began inviting me to come and do seminars.

[19:49]

But I had no particular idea. So I did some seminars. And then I got kind of, I felt I wasn't so good to do public seminars and teach seminars. try to teach with new people all the time. Yeah, I'm telling you this because these are for me facts. So I said, look, to really have a connection with the people I'm practicing with, I only want to go to cities which... have a practicing group connected with. So on that basis I began to go to some cities and not to others. And then people started asking me to do sashins. And I said no. For several years I said no.

[21:06]

Because I knew once I did a Sashin I could never leave Europe. Because you can't start responsibly start people practicing seriously and then abandon them. I knew I could Serious step. I had to stay in Europe until I died or until I had a successor. And so I did my first Sashenit, the Maria Locke. And then I got stuck with people like this. He came to the first Sashin and he's still here. Oh, gosh. Yeah, and he was a rough character then. He's not sweet enough. And now he's like, well...

[22:09]

But it's been a great pleasure to have this friend for 20 years. Yeah, it's true. That's true. Okay, so we did some sashins. One or two a year or something like that. Then people said, we need a center. Yeah, I said no. I knew it would only get worse. Yeah, so I said no and I refused to look at places unless they had previously been owned by the Stasi and they stunk. So then I knew Graf von Durkheim and he... He used to send me students in America and he invited me and I gave a lecture with him a couple of times, stuff like that.

[23:23]

So then I heard part of his center was for sale and they wanted me to look at it and I said no. And then about a year or two after I heard it was for sale, Nico here and Julio drove me or we drove you to the train station. Isn't that right? And you got me. You got my arm and you began to twist it. And they said, well, bigger than me, you know. And they said, you have to go look at your Anisov eyes. Okay. Well, it's not quite, but sort of like that.

[24:24]

So I went and looked at it and I knew the problem. Yes, it was okay, so we bought it. Now, and it's changed practice. And what's interesting too is the people who really take care of Yohannesov. And are most committed to the practice and taking care of Johanneshof. Almost all of them developed that commitment at Crestone during monastic practice. enough to say, well, this has a higher priority than my lay life or my profession. And I'm not married, or my children are grown, so I can do this. So we started Yohannesov, and we had our 10-year celebration,

[25:28]

in June or something like that. Okay, so, and what is the situation now? The Johanneshof works very well for the, seems to work very well for the lay Sangha. And the lay sangha is, you know, pretty big. It's most of you and others too. And... But it doesn't work so well for the people who live there. Crestone works better for the people who live there. But it's also not perfect. So why doesn't Johannesop work better for the people who live there? See, my problem is now to come back to what you said.

[26:58]

And I'm using the situation of Johanneshof right now to talk about practicing our own sense of how we interpret. Maybe you want to understand how I interpret. pretended San Francisco was a monastery, and how that worked in my lay life. But now coming back to the point that Craig brought up, There's no point for me to continue practicing at Johanneshof. If the practice with the people who live there isn't good for them. It may be good for the lay sangha, but it's also got to be good for them who live there. Yeah, and this was made very clear recently.

[28:16]

I don't know, three or four people left all at once for various good reasons. And one view is, well, this has happened before and we always figure out how to go on and so forth. Yeah, I could look at it that way. But I'm too old to look at it. And it's just too fragile. And it's conceptually not You have five or six people, sometimes ten, sometimes three. And a residential group that changes every few years. Sometimes every five years, sometimes every two years. And they get no pay, basically.

[29:26]

Some get 200, 300, I don't know, Euro a month. But most of them do it for toothbrush money. And to keep the place going, they have to do outside seminars all the time, so they don't have a really good monastic practice. And it doesn't make sense for these few people to keep trying to make it work for the lay Sangha when their own practice doesn't work so well there. So the lay sangha... at this point, has to take responsibility for making the anus off work, or I'm going to close it or give it away.

[30:33]

Period. Because I don't feel good having people practicing and working and not being satisfied with it. It is satisfying, but it's also problematic. And trying to make this work for this fairly big Sangha, When they can't afford to go to the dentist or get eyeglasses, all kinds of real basic things. And I don't want to ask people to do this any longer. Yeah, so that's... Yeah, does... The lay Sangha want Johanneshof to exist.

[31:46]

And does it make a difference? Now, people tell me it's much better to do Sashins at Johanneshof than it is at Roseburg. Is that true? That's the feeling? Yeah. You had some hesitation. In a picture of it, yeah. That's true. But I don't want to start doing sashins again at Roseburg. We have to outfit Roseburg. We have to buy them a refrigerator and bring all the dick. Here. No, anyway. So that's where we're at, and some of us are even having a meeting about it tonight. And it really doesn't matter. I mean, if it matters, we'll solve the problem. If it doesn't matter, we won't. I'm taking refuge in change, in alterity.

[33:05]

Micro moment after micro moment. But I have preferences. They're not all that important. Okay, so that was my little speech. But we'll see what happens. And I'm very interested to see if the Sangha can develop within it its own structures. One of the problems with my teaching now Because I have a relationship to you. A new relationship. And a relationship to you and to you and to you. And you have friendships with the sangha.

[34:12]

But mostly it's a lot of individuals having a relationship to me. That works moderately well. But what the Winter Branches Program has shown us, where we have people meeting in a more developed way, with each other in one, is that the more the Sangha begins to take responsibility for the teaching, And doesn't depend on me to present the teaching. Teach as much as possible and then we meet. I do. Each of us does as much as possible and then we meet.

[35:13]

That makes it much more possible for me to teach with some depth. So the winter branches has shown that the developing structure within the Sangha improves the teaching. So, I've almost not... I've stopped doing seminars like this. I do only two a year. This one and... Deep bow to Northern Europe. Northern Europe. And one in Rastenberg in Austria. Other than that I just do the winter branches. The sangha itself does the teaching and I just have to kind of watch. So, in answer to your question,

[36:24]

At the present time in my life and in this period of history, and in the only way I know how to practice with people, a mixture of monastic practice and lay practice is essential. And if the monastic practice develops, which doesn't mean all your life, it means for a few years or whatever, if it develops, it definitely develops the lay practice, even if you don't go. to the monastery. But it can't be entirely my decision. I have to look at what the Sangha does. What do you want to do? And we'll find out. And what? Because it's not that, you know, because that's the only way it can really continue in a healthy way.

[38:06]

Yeah, so we've come at Yanisov to see that very clearly that it can continue. The conception of Johanneshof has to change. And the particularities of how the life is there have to change. We see it pretty clearly right now. And that gives us a chance to make use of this opportunity. Yeah, I'm sorry. It took so long to answer your question. You get no more questions during this. Go back to Crestone. someone else I mean too if any of you want to not talk about Santa Claus and talk about even though you don't go to your house so very often if it's important to you it's good for me to hear things okay

[39:23]

Yes. and since about that summer and we live here in Hannover and since about this summer, last summer a certain restlessness has developed in me and Ralph. We didn't exactly know what was going on, we just sensed it. I want to express this. Although we can't be there as often as we want because Anna is so small. It's so much like a home for us that we sort of were inside of, it made us quite disquiet, really inside.

[40:56]

We felt that. I'm still at a loss how we can personally support that. Well, you know, it helps the more the sangha thinks of it as their second home or something like that. But understand that this is a problem of two and a half thousand years. There's been no way to support practice places, training places, traditionally, unless the emperor decides or a patron decides, I'll own this monastery for accumulating merit. And that doesn't work anymore. You can't do that nowadays. And the way small places...

[41:58]

survive is, you know, in Japan and other places, usually they do funeral ceremonies. Yeah, and that's not what we can do either. We're too young. We don't die fast enough. Plus, you know, there's no money in funerals in America. So, The temples support themselves either in a feudal way or by doing services for the congregation. But the training monasteries, which often, if they're good, have only five or six people in Japan, for instance, have no way to support themselves. So this is not a new, this is an old problem that we now have to solve in our society if we want such black justice to exist.

[43:30]

Okay, someone else? Yes, you're in it. I remember the words of Suzuki Roshi who said I trust my feet and my practice. I remember the words of Suzuki Roshi who said I trust my feet and my practice. I think it's wonderful that I really want to practice. In these eight months I've been in Johannesburg now, they're beautiful and they're really good. I want to practice. I understand that you do.

[44:30]

Thank you very much. Yeah. Anybody else? Well, I can say Something about just to end, another way to look at thusness. An entry into thusness. We can also understand as the kind of

[45:32]

stability of equanimity. And the word equanimity in English, the etymology works quite well. It means to impartially treat everything as equal. 100. Okay. And you find a stability in this treating everything as equal. A balance. Okay, so then this means, can you actually treat everything as being equal? And this is the practice of the Bodhisattva. Okay. Now, what I suggested at the winter branches meeting of a week or so ago is practice with trees.

[47:10]

First of all, trees are activities, even the location is an activity. The tree is always relocating itself, finding its location. And the tree itself isn't a tree, it's actually treeing. And if you just stand in front of a tree, feeling it relocating himself. And just have the patience to be present For the tree. And feel the tree from the tree's side. And that's also partly this idea of alterity.

[48:11]

In other words, the tree is other than you, but you are also at each moment slightly other. And now you notice your continuity, but you also notice your moment by moment in each situation sort of different. Now, I'm not always a teacher. Right now I'm a teacher because I'm teaching. And I do not carry that identity into other situations. In other situations I'm a different, something else. Am I a teacher?

[49:12]

No, I'm only a teacher when I'm teaching. So I'm standing, you, we, I'm standing in front of a tree. And you also, there's a shifting boundaries in this thus. One boundary is me and the tree. But also maybe there's two trees there. And suddenly there's a boundary. of two trees and one tree. And you can feel the boundaries shifting. And part of understanding change or entering into change is to feel these fluid boundaries that don't fall into fixed categories. So you're standing in front of a tree. And you just notice what's there. And again, one of the phrases in Buddhism, and Sukershi used to speak about, is to know things from their own side.

[50:33]

That's an interesting challenge. How do you get there? Well, one thing is to be patient and kind of draw up your own views. This is some kind of immense, vast, interconnected being of the tree and me and the insects. It's all ecology, but it's what we live. And we've known this intellectually since the 60s sometimes, in the environmental movement, etc. And everyone pays lip service to it. Do you have that phrase, lip service?

[51:45]

Lip service, we say it's lip confession, brother. Your lips say it, but you don't. That's not the meaning, yeah. Also, we have, dazu wurden auch genug Lippenbekenntnisse abgelegt. But paying lip service is better than before when people didn't even do that. But even though we know about it and give it some lip service, we aren't doing anything about it. or very little. And all these companies which are doing the most to destroy the planet, their advertisements are always about how they're not destroying the planet. They're just lying. Okay. So, this view of the interdependent equality of everything.

[52:51]

My opinion is I'm living in the funeral of the way the world used to be. And I don't expect my grandchildren to have a planet to live on. I really feel that way. Well, we could do something about it, but it doesn't look like we will. We're running out of time too fast. But at least we can start practicing it. So you're in front of the tree, not thinking, I'm me and the tree's okay, but I might cut it down because, you know, I need to plant some peanuts.

[53:53]

So I'm talking politics and ecology here and so forth. But it really, that's just... The epiphenomenon, what we're really talking about is practice. See you in front of this tree. You're just there. And you drop your views. You drop any comparison. Stop thinking about it. You let awareness come up. And in a way you can almost start feeling the tree from its own side. Because the tree too has a presence. An aliveness, not exactly like ours, but definitely an aliveness and presence which relates to what is next to us.

[55:01]

So with the tree you can actually...

[55:03]

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