Okay, so if we look at Bodhidharma there, what I thought we'd do, I mean, in a general sense, at least when we, at the end of the last episode, before we spoke, I left you with this diagram, too, and it gives a very phasing. And today and tomorrow, I don't know exactly how much of this will get through, but I thought we should start with Bodhidharma and that phase that It's called generally early Chan. Because Bodhidharma is, when you talk about origins, obviously he's very important. He's also a very intriguing figure, and what we do with Bodhidharma kind of sets up what we do with other kind of later phases, like Chan or Zen. And this also, I have to mention that I'm teaching this large enrollment course on Zen with Vanessa, and this is the first time I've ever done this.

[01:06]

I've never wanted to teach Zen for airheads, basically. I've always been afraid of advertising a course on Zen Buddhism and getting students who want to come in and paint little circles. And I tell them, yeah, I'll paint a little circle on your grade, too. But anyway, we have this initiative or whatever. We have this imperative at IU to build up our enrollment. And there's a particular type of class which we're supposed to focus on. It's not a survey, an introduction to the study of x. But it has to be about critical thinking. So we're supposed to teach the students not to dump a bunch of information on them and ask them to memorize it, but to somehow act as a catalyst so that students will learn how to think about the material in ways that we, in our particular field, identify as good, critical ways of thinking.

[02:17]

And the course that I'm teaching It's called Electronic Zen, the Sound of One Hand Clapping. And this is rank, how do you say, purely, I mean, the name, there's meaning to the name, but it's an attempt to kind of use or kind of capture as many students as possible. It's electronic because I have them do their assignments to create a website. Eventually, I'll publish the work that we do. Myself as editor-in-chief and the teaching assistant is kind of managing editors and the students are contributing authors. I hope that's not contributing. But the problem, of course, is if Zen is described by these people as related to Zen, if Zen is described as being irrational, then enlightenment of hearing is considered something beyond the ability of words to explain or outside of human culture, which is what I think it does better.

[03:30]

Then how do we go about exploring Zen or evaluating these statements using quote-unquote rational methods that we are supposed to be using in the university. So anyway, some of this material is, excuse me, some of this material that I'm giving you here comes out of this one particular story, the notion of how do you explore a rational experience with rational means. One of the examples that I use for introducing them to you to some advanced studies that describe this to Bodhidharma. So if you look on the page after the earliest complete Chan lineage statement, we have doing things with Bodhidharma's biography. And what I've given here first is straight out of the Encyclopedia Britannica.

[04:33]

So if there's Bodhidharma, Chinese, ,, Romanization, ,, ,, 6th century AD, Indian month is credited with the establishment of . And that's not so bad for a Greek definition, because it says credited with instead of you did establish. And that kind of nuance is important. I have particular problems with the word sex. To me, sex implies a sociological definition, an entity that has a group, that has members, that has organization lists, that has specific daily, monthly, and annual kind of ritual requirements that are placed on the members, and so forth. I tell my students I'm allergic to the word sex. So we use like school or tradition, words like that to be a little more vague.

[05:36]

Then a native of Kanjivaram, I actually have a student in my class who's Indian from the Middle East, and she says, yeah, Kanjivaram is a nice, relatively small city in southern India. I was kind of amazed I had a student in my class who'd actually been there. But anyway, native of Kanjivaram near Madras, Bodhidharma in 520, traveled to Guangdong, modern Canton, China. He was granted an interview with the Yang emperor when he noted that his good works to the emperors dismayed. He stated that the merit of flying the celebration could not be assimilated through good deeds. Then he went to the monastery in Luoyang where he spent nine weeks looking at a cave wall. I suppose he was looking at the cave wall, but anyway, he was facing the cave wall. We'll get back to that, yeah. He's considered the 28th Indian Patriarch in a direct line to Gautama. He's regarded on Chan's followers as their first Patriarch.

[06:39]

Because he taught meditation as a return to Buddhist spiritual precepts, his school was known as the Jnana Meditation Sect. The word is converted in Chinese to Chan and exactly as he said. And it goes on, and then it says, the accounts of his life are largely legendary. According to one such story, he cut off his eyelids in a fit of anger after falling asleep in meditation, and they grew up to be the first to see plants. My students will recognize that this is a kind of garbled kind of image. Some things which are I suppose you would say, are accurate. It says some things about all the words then. I mean, it's described as coming from the Indian word jnana. But it's not a very good definition. I think this is not the Britannica's most shining house, really. The interview with Emperor Wuji, presumably all of you have heard this story before.

[07:42]

number one. And it's an old, it's a hallowed story within, um, uh, con-literature, even before this was repressed. I mean, the stories, the literature before that. Um, the, uh, story about, but how about the eyelids falling off, and the cutting of the eyelid off, and then you can improve that. Has everybody heard of that story before? That's something that must be so running to quite the quickly. I don't know where that story comes from. One of my amusements with how, I mean supposedly Shaolin boxing and martial arts come from Shaolin, and Bodhidharma is somehow involved with that.

[08:50]

And I've recently gotten on a kick of how this is presented within English language, well, in Chinese stuff, on martial arts also. And the funniest line, this describes this baby, is by David Carradine, the guy who's the actor in Cold Cold, that comes to the season. And he says, during his nine years of meditation facing the wall, Bodhidharma had trouble with muscle tone. I would have liked to, I would have liked to speak. Yeah. There was a, there was a, they did like a martial arts demonstration for him. Yeah. There was an article in the New York Times, which was in the last three weeks, that talked about them.

[09:55]

Not, I didn't know they were traveling that clear, you know, on tour, yeah. Good, good. Where's the camera? Okay. Well, apparently Shaolin Temple, they said in the article, they get like 10 million visitors a year, I mean, mostly Chinese. And they have, I can't remember exactly the number, 80 TV fairs spreading martial arts and... Yeah, yeah. Well, I think there's no historical validity to the association of Bodhidharma with the martial arts books. The earliest date, this book that David Carradine is, I'm going at this from Vast Echo Text, but he's talking about this. The earliest text that I know of to associate Bodhidharma with the martial arts was published in 1646.

[10:58]

And it is on, it's some kind of muscle chain. And there's a, this is not my discovery that it's from that late. I mean, there's a Chinese book, a little Chinese book that he's authored, I can't remember right now, who gives five reasons why this couldn't possibly have been written by Zodidon. There, one of the incidents that's always mentioned is that the monks of Shaolin in the early years of the 7th century So well after Bodhidharma was gone, they assisted the founder of the Tang Dynasty in establishing this reign. And that's a historical event that happened, but it doesn't mean that they were out there with bare hands. There's evidence of monks being armed in other temples in North China from a couple centuries before. I think that you're fighting on behalf of establishing a new dynasty. You're not out there with bare hands. And even if you were, that doesn't establish the connection that's building down there.

[12:07]

The basic point here is that folks like me can look at historical documentation. And I can tell you with a certain range of accuracy, what seems to be reliable. what did happen and what didn't. And so I can give me, I think, a reason. I'll tell you where I know something and where I don't know something. And I'll call that history. So the historical story of what actually happened, I'll label that history. I'll make the suggestion that we can say with... We can at least say what we know and what we don't know. And there's a lot that we don't know, but we can say certain things. On the other hand, I'll use another shorthand and say there's legend. The collecting of stories about an epic building drama.

[13:11]

And we can look at how those legends develop. You can see how the stories about Bodhidharma accumulate over time, and how Bodhidharma gets transformed over time. Not fundamentally transformed, I think there's a continuity here, but how you've built up in very substantial ways. And so with lots of things I can show you how what's said in the legend is not supportable in the history. Okay, so McCrae's first rules and study is not true, and therefore it's more important. That is, I can show you that second section element of the legend didn't happen. I mean, I can't prove everything in every faith, but I think there's a reasonable argument about certain events that are very important in the legend. I can argue

[14:12]

and with, I think, a reasonable claim of accuracy, the present-second event didn't happen. But the fact that it's not true historically, and not journalistically accurate, is not important. Or it's important only in a certain way. That the legendary reality, even though it's in a sense fictional, that that is more important. That's what is more important to generations of Buddhists. It's more important because it's precisely those inaccurate legends that are what motivate people to take up Buddhist practice. It's more important because those images are created out of the collective Chinese imaginations. Well, I wouldn't say, yeah, I won't be... My sister's a union analyst, so I leave that up to her.

[15:14]

But... Yeah, exactly. I'll say, so when I say it's not true and therefore it's more important, because this is the myth or the legend of how China decided, this is how we have to see our religious faith. It's from the psyche. It's from the psyche, yeah. And whether something or not happened in such and such a year, in such and such a place, in China, you know, It's interesting when we look at the kind of historical evolution, it's interesting to note that and to see the difference between history and life and therefore. It's important in a different way. But it's not the fact that I'm going to turn around and say, well, this didn't happen, that didn't happen, this didn't happen.

[16:16]

I'm not going to say why future did when it was early scholarly time. Then it's 99% fabricated. It's 99% fake. It's precisely in the fake the fabricated fact that we see what's really important to Chinese and in the origins of death. And Bodhidharma is the place to start with that. Because if you can look on the next page then, what I have as the facts about Bodhidharma. Now, these are what I would say probably what we know about Bodhidharma as a historical figure. And these different assertions about Bodhidharma are arrived at by putting together different sources. And I'll come back. That's a kind of a problem in a certain way.

[17:17]

He probably arrived in South China by soon. He came by the maritime route sometime before 479. And we know that because the text that's associated with him says he arrived in such and such a dynasty, dynastic area. And that dynastic area, the stone was a dynasty that reigned, I think, from 420 to 479 or 480. So, okay, if he arrived during that regime, he arrived in the South during that period. He could have come by the more conventional route. He could have walked across Central Asia, you know, been in some kind of a territory. I say that he moved to North Canada before 495, perhaps by 480, though, and I actually don't remember why I have it. Why do I have 495? I have to look at my book. I can't remember how I argued that he's probably 495. We do know that he was, well, we have reason to believe, I'll say, that he was in Luoyang, a city in North China, sometime during the year 516 to 526.

[18:31]

And that I would argue from kind of looking at the various biographies that he probably died around 530. Now, the problem is that, well, okay, we'll go on to the next set. We can probably also say he was a native of South India. His early text is described in that way. He was probably of the Brooklyn cast. He may have been a member, as he's referred to, a member of a royal family in the South. I think that the assertion of the inefficacy to Zertanesha to say that he's from Kandivaram is entirely unknown or unlikely. And I don't actually have this established as a third rule of Zen studies, but where you see information that's too precise, precision could be used as a measure of inaccuracy.

[19:36]

If it's too precise, it's probably not right. Second, I think it's fair to say he was a Mahayana Buddha, because he's not a big surprise. a meditation teacher. He seems to have focused on Luoyang. We don't... He may be... He's associated with Mount Sung, and we have no really contemporary information related with Shaolin Temple. He had a small number of students. Yeah, we have... Let's see. There's no contemporary or these earliest evidence does not associate him specifically with Bell and Temple. He was buried near Mount Song. He may have been associating with Mount Song, but there's no real reason to connect him with Bell and Temple.

[20:37]

It's on Mount Song, but there's other places there. Yeah, right. The Chow Yun Temple is one specific site on Mount Sung. He may have been there, but we don't... It's not a clear... He buried... He was buried on the banks of the river... I think it was just passing south of Mount Sung. I have to look at the map again. He was buried on the banks of the river. Yeah, I don't know that story. Let me come back to that, okay? And then finally, we have this text that's associated with it. Now... Correct. Can you at some point talk about why he did not have any association with it, so why the people feel the necessity to make them, don't they?

[21:48]

One of the things we have to consider, these are kind of what I would say is the kind of bare minimum of what we could say about the historical physical environment. But there's a big problem with even saying this little. The notion of him being in Luoyang sometime during the years 515 to 526, there's a text about the description of the monasteries of Luoyang that extols the monasteries of Luoyang and Bodhidharma is trotted out as a foreign monk who sees one of the temples, Yunging Tzu, which is one of the most glorious of the temples in Luoyang, apparently a huge and very beautiful temple. And Bodhidharma is trotted out as a foreign monk. He says, I've been everywhere. I've traveled all over the Buddhist world. I've never seen anything as incredible as your temple. And Bodhidharma apparently stayed there for a I've been in the temple quite some time anyway, chanting Namu, Namu, Namu. It's kind of being struck at how wonderful this temple was.

[23:04]

Now, is this Bodhidharma, the Zen monk? Why, you know, this doesn't fit, you know, our kind of image, even of a meditation master. It's kind of, as I use the phrase, trotted out. There are a number of foreign monks in this particular text, and they're used basically to validate how wonderful a temple they were in, because they can testify that they've been, like, everywhere in India in special ways and whatever, and this is wonderful. The only detail that suggests, beside the name, that this particular Bodhidharma may be our Bodhidharma is that he's described as having been 150 years old. And Bodhidharma is described in other early texts as having lived to the age of 150. you know, what's going on there? We really can't quite tell. And it's really, it's in this article by Bernard Foer, Bodhidharma's Textual and Religious Paradigm, where he says, you know, scholars try to beat it.

[24:06]

We try to, you know, grab up all the data that we can and combine it together in a sensible way and, you know, come up with some theory, some description of it. And Bernard says, it's just not fair. because we're really combining apples and oranges. And so this one little story that we use, well, this is Husserl's point about Bodhidharma. Husserl was a Chinese scholar. He wrote in the 1930s and the 1950s about his end. And this is what Husserl, you know, argues, is because we have Bodhidharma appearing in this text at this particular time, that means he was in North China at that time. It could be. I won't plug this, but I will say that Drenar Thor's point that putting together an image of Bodhidharma from incommensurable sources is a problem. And I say that if you've read my book or remember part of it, the way I put it is Zen studies in the 20th century likes to do what I call the string of pearls.

[25:16]

approach. That is, let's gather up all the information that we can about Bodhidharma, and paint a nice picture of him. We'll talk about his life, his teachings, and so forth. And then we'll move on and we'll talk about kway te. We'll paint up a nice picture about him. And we do that one time after the other, and try to say as much as we can about the individual's paper art. And we end up with this image of a sequence of pearls on a string. And I say that that's not really to do real scholarship with that. When we do that, we're not really analyzing things. We're imitating that linear chart. We're doing something like this chart where everything is homogenous. In this case, a beautiful set of pearls on a string. Bodhidharma is too far back there. You can't say that much about it. What I will say is that in terms of the Indian and Kashmiri meditation traditions, Bodhidharma is an interesting case.

[26:30]

When you asked about esoteric Buddhism, Bodhidharma is the last monk who comes from India and the Western region to be identified as a meditation teacher. identified in the Chinese historical sources, that after him, the monks that come after him, certainly they're well-trained in meditation practice, but they identify themselves as esoteric sort of people. And I don't know quite what to make of that, but it's an interesting conjunction that somehow what gets started in Bodhidharma's name are meditation traditions, Chinese meditation traditions, starts when the flow of meditation teachers from India and the West, when it stops So you have Bodhidharma at the end point, you have Buddha, Vajra and a number of other teachers coming before him They were coming to Tianjin from the earliest point in Chinese Buddhist history from the second century, you know, teaching meditation

[27:37]

At the point when the flow of Indian meditation mastery is cut off, that's when Zen begins. And I don't know what to say about that. That's a fascinating coincidence. I was saying that when you showed up, That is that there's nobody after Bodhidharma, that I know of anyway, who comes from India or the Western region, kind of the West in general, who is identified specifically as a meditation people. There's a gap before... Oh, I have an accepting earring. There's a gap before we get people that it's not until the latter half of the seventh century

[28:40]

You can get people coming in as esoteric teachers in the beginning of the 8th century, in particular, in the 700s and 50s. And those esoteric teachers are very clearly, they're, you know, well-trained in meditation practice, but it's a different style of meditation practice. I mean, well. In my new hair-dyeing practice, the antennae of that practice do the same thing as I saw them. Well, I would like... I'd have to hear more about how you define Zen and Mahamudra to accept that. That's a good reason for me to disagree. Bob, Buddha Bob is a sweetheart. He's a sweetheart.

[29:45]

He's a loud mouth. I mean, at least he's got a loud mouth. Can you talk to me, too? No, no. He's a sweetheart. But he's crazy. I mean, he's just crazy. Hi, Dad. I don't know. One, two, three, four, five. It's not easy to go into the community for the Dharma. At some time you start to think like that. Sometimes you think that you have to repeat what you've studied under some other group of people. But in other words, then with the tradition, with all of your gifts in this time, there's many things that might happen to you. But photodramas are the ones who forget that we need to take them off these backsliders, and then we need to think back to them. My impression is that these sort of replicates, really, these, what you say, that they're the things that people feel when they read them.

[30:53]

Yeah, well, that happens a lot, is the language is annoying, and you're kind of passing down that language. It simplifies very, I mean, your language, your grand language, you know, seeing your conference with a friend, but any, any language connection, I think, vastly oversimplifies the fact that you're first in life. You know, you don't only learn from the one teacher that you identify with. We also learn from our students, and I think it's fair to say that them masters learn from their students as well. You had something to add, didn't you? I wanted to ask you about the very first time that you came out this summer, I don't know if you remember, but we got married. Yeah. And I don't know if you remember, but I'm not convinced that the fact that this bullet died in my house I'd say yes to the first and no to the second.

[31:56]

I think they're correct. Well, it depends. A lot of people get called Uzen-ji, and that's not limited to the Zen school at all, and certainly not by the 8th century. A lot of people can be called Uzen-ji or Tan-tut, even though they're not in the Tan school. And by the year 700 or 750 or whatever, Tan was about, but the name was not that well settled yet. grip, focus that is far more restrictive than I am on when Kant becomes an identifiable identity. He wants to define it as a stool that only happens in a stone and I think that's not quite fair.

[33:02]

But we can see something developing that is fair to identify as a Kantian. I would say with regard to esotericism that there's a potential crossover in the I would say that one of the fundamental characteristics of esoteric Buddhist meditation is what is yoga. It's a relational type of practice where you visualize a deity and then join yourself with that deity. So there's a sense of relationship with a visualized image, perhaps. But that sense of relationship is a profoundly important example. profoundly, and that's what I'm going to hopefully be able to argue the rest of this afternoon and more tomorrow, that that relates to different encounters. When you talk about an encounter dialogue, the kind of language, the way that then masters and students interact, that encounter, I think, is profoundly important to how Zen works.

[34:07]

It's also profoundly genealogical. It's a genealogical practice that the lineage genealogy is not only a way of identifying the history of men, but it shows something very basic about how men are practiced, as I say, in the last few years. So I'll come back to that. What I would say, rather than, and we can come back also to Bodhidharma mythologies for any kind of Dharma, but let me say what I would how I would describe Bodhidharma and his time, let's take the quote-unquote facts that I put together and accept them as reasonable in that. That Bodhidharma was a guy who came over from India around this time, hung out in the north

[35:09]

We think of North China as being more interested in meditative practice than in doctrine. There were other meditating teachers around. Perhaps Bodhidharma did have a unique style, either personal style or doctrinal style. It's certainly possible that he did, and maybe reasonable to think that he really did. But it seems to me that The important figure in his community was actually not some of Corrigano, but was Cueca. That is, if you had to identify the kind of essential personality in this earliest phase of time, it's really Cueca. Cueca is described as a guy who's already in his middle age. And, hey, I can already relate to that. He was criticized because he didn't have a teacher, but he claimed a certain amount of religious experience. And so he goes to Bodhidharma when he arrives, sort of for justification or accreditation, kind of getting it prevented.

[36:18]

And whatever Bodhidharma was, He's dependent on what Kweka, how Kweka described him, and I sort of identified him. After Bodhidharma died, Kweka said he had buried him, and he got angry when people came to pay their respect at Bodhidharma's passing. He said, you never paid any attention to this guy when he was alive, so why come now? Afterwards, Quaker kind of moved around a little bit. He's in Luoyang, and then he moves up to another city. He gets involved in some kind of conflict with other meditation teachers, and it's not really clear from the story what's going on. But there's some kind of conflict involved. I have the image of Quaker as a little bit argumentative. But there's a group of...

[37:22]

names that we have from this period, that I've used the label, the label of convenience pro dot com. They seem to have wandered around some. They're known for the practice of yuca, or kind of Greek asceticism, which means that they would hang out in cemeteries or so forth. They wandered around a bit, didn't settle down so much. One of the names that's associated with this group is the figure Pan Lin, who is known as the figure who wrote at least a preface to Bodhidharma's treatise. And Pan Lin was known as a participant in Meditation, excuse me, Translation activities. And we have his name on a couple of lists and a couple of prefaces and so forth. He was one of the guys who worked to kind of clean up the Chinese text, like sutras that had been translated.

[38:25]

And so he had a certain amount of literary ability. It's not clear, actually, whether he was Bodhidharma's student or whether he was Kuei Tso's student. And it seems to me, just looking at the dates, that he's more likely that he... Effectively, a student of Quake could, rather than voting down it. Other than that, there's not much that we can say about this group without looking at the one text that's involved, the pre-design and pre-enrichment. And we can do that now, but I thought before we do, I'll leave time for I ask you right now if there are questions about this very brief and rather spare characterization that I give you for proselytizing. There's basically ascetic wanderers in the north uh, with just a few names associated with it.

[39:27]

Yeah. Yeah. It's certainly possible. Yeah, there's I can't remember that. Han Lin, I think, he's supposed to have devoted considerable energy to saving beautiful images, and he's like 574. Yeah, I don't know.

[40:33]

The other thing that's more radical, it's not really radical, I think it's kind of common sense in a way, there's a great story, right, about Hui Ke cutting off his arm in order to prove to Bodhidharma that he's sincere about getting it done. And actually the earliest reference that we have to Kweka and his arm is in a collection of biographical texts from 645 and 654. That is, the text was finished at one point in 645, and then the author is out there, and his biography didn't die until 654, and he seems to have added notes to the text afterwards. That biography, which is not a Zen text by any means, says that Huayco had his arm cut off by bandits or rebels, but that Huayco was very, you know, unmoved by it. He cauterized his wound and went around it begging rounds as usual.

[41:36]

And so that it... It's a different story, but it's also the story we've included there to be complimentary and say something impressive about what he did. It then says that this is in contrast to the student, Han Lin, who also had his arm cut off and who screamed and cried the entire night. And I hate, you know, I sympathize with Han Lin, you know. To me, this has kind of been the truth. Then in the early 8th century, the text of 712, they say, hey, just nonsense about, well, you could have an event like that. And the story develops about him cutting off the gong and letting it in. This is one thing where I say, you know, you don't need that. First of all, what's a monk doing with a knife or whatever, substantial enough to cut his hand off. I mean, you know, maybe cut it off the wrist or something, but you know.

[42:37]

Is it even vaguely, remotely conceivable that a monk would cut his arm off in order to gain the preaching from somebody? I just, I can't fight it. I mean, I do that. I've always, you know, said twice that, you know, it reminds me of the Bible of, uh, So I've never been fond of that story. And we do have that in temporary. But what I wanted to... say what the thousands of claims, if it was number one rule of law, which is that the myth is more important than the, and I wouldn't disagree with that, but it seems also problematic at the same time, because there's always the question of what to say.

[43:38]

around, in short, anything there. So if we look at something more contemporary, for example, what people in the United States think about the Civil War, or about, you know, the 60s in the U.S., and they have a lot of men involved, and there's a lot of states in terms of, you know, what actually happened and how that's viewed, basically, you know, mass, basically. So I would say there may be similar things, too, basically, in terms of It's a grand history. It's a gem myth. And it's been a victory as much as you can get it. But what does it say? It's a story that I've been cutting off before. I've worked it through. I wonder if it reacts, you know, well. And I'm kidding. It's a grand planet. I don't know about it. for the market picture of which one gets rejuvenated and which one doesn't, basically, in terms of how that moves out, basically. And with so much of this stuff, there's always control that's effectively risk, you know, now to justify something now that particularly, you know, you write a history, for example, you write a history, so at one end, where you may be writing in terms of what people believe that has been passed on their lives, and on their cultures, and that would be more important, is also another side of what you say in terms of how that history is consistent.

[45:01]

That's right, that's right, and the point is that as they develop, I mean, if one transmission of the lamp passed from 7-10, 7-12, he doesn't, he wants to paint a different image of Bodhidharma and Kweku. Not somebody who has to be a victim, you know, okay, so he was a, he had a stiff upper lip, you know, or an agonetic, stiffy line, chopped off. He wants to create a different image of a spiritual, a spiritual model, anyway. And I think that that story of Kweku cutting his arm off I mean, you know, that has to have been used like about 800 billion times to tell speed. This is a serious thing that you're asking for. You know, you've got to be prepared about it. You've got to really put out there. I mean, I think all of these stories are meant to be used by Dharma, by, you know, teaching in Dharma. And I don't mean that, you know, teaching about the Dharma. Teaching the practice of that. That's where it's really, you know, it's really weird.

[46:05]

It's really weird. Lousy. Lousy? He did it on purpose. There wasn't very much sewing. It's a Japanese soldier. Yeah, you burn off your shoulder or whatever it is. There was also a student in Santa Clara. I remember. Thank you. As soon as John Hart heard the story in American TV, he had to cut off his finger.

[47:12]

I remember some people saying, oh, yeah, that was not incredible. And the other person said, oh, yeah, that was neat. Holding it there, you know. But... The laws that he put forth are quite accurate. And I, most greatly, would be interested to see what they said in the school, what it sounds like. And this is why cases have been deleted. So there's a case But when we actually get back and look again at what he says, over and over and way up and way to scale.

[48:19]

And my initial reaction to end up with this kind of message is, you know, Michael's right. There's really something going on here. I think that really was a good part of our, of his then-line tradition, of his then-conviction tradition. Yeah, well, we can talk about some of it tomorrow. I've actually, like, my next book has been on kind of If there's a cliff for publication, you know, you've got to get that book just over into the publication process so it goes on to become a book. My Fenway book has been sitting at the edge of the cliff for like, I don't know, eight years or something. So I've translated all of Fenway's writings and written overly complex analysis to Dan and other people saying, what is he talking about?

[49:28]

Fenway is a fascinating place. But I think So we can talk about him some tomorrow. He is a fascinating case. I got into real trouble in Taiwan where I was doing this kind of teaching and I described him as a scum dog. I was teaching these 18, 19, 20-year-old Chinese people to none. They didn't like the notion of anything among the guys in that term. But there is a sense of this guy's a sort of a snake, I would say, in a way. But he was talking about Huanan. I mean, my rule, or it's not true, and therefore it's important, was really derived from the case of Huanan in the platform, which we can also talk about some tomorrow. But I can argue that I can't prove it, but I can give reasonable evidence to argue that the events that are in the platform could have never happened. But that's not to say that it's not important.

[50:31]

That's an incredible fact, and it's a lot to read. Yeah, the very earliest pictures that we have of Bodhidharma come from like the 11th century, 12th century, and they depict a skinny Indian monk. And then somewhere around the 13th century, he gets transformed into, I refer to him as a fat furry foreigner. Rather like myself, in fact, actually, if I wore an earring, but that's an image of Bodhidharma that's generated on the basis of monks at that time period. Wearing the earring was apparently a fad among Indian monks at around that time period. I don't think there's any reason to connect that image with the historical environment.

[51:36]

And even, you know, we have a couple, two or three The images of Bodhidharma from before that style got established. The earlier representations of Bodhidharma were just thin, maybe in some cases dark skinned, or maybe from the south, right? Indian monks. And why not? Thank you, Bodhidharma. Thank you, Bodhidharma. Thank you, Bodhidharma. Okay, let's do that, and then let's actually look at the text a little bit, because I don't want to do that. Do you guys know what Dunhuang is? Okay, if you look at the map, which is, I think, the very front of what you've been given here, well, good, Dunhuang is not on the map. So Luoyang is kind of right in the center. and Bodhidharma, Mount Song, Shaolin Temple was kind of right near.

[52:43]

Dunhuang would be kind of off here somewhere. So Dunhuang is the last, basically the last kind of outpost on the way to Central Asia. Dunhuang is the site, in my mind, of basically two things. First of all, there's incredible cave art there. And You can get books in English, Chinese, Japanese that have pictures, photographs, and analyses. There's incredible Buddhist temple art that was there. I think Zheng Hong was founded... Well, we have evidence that it was a Buddhist center from the 3rd century anyway. The earliest cave carvings there, I think, are from, we'll say, the 500s. And then the carvings and paintings, they're really very spectacular. They extend up until the 13th century or thereabouts, and maybe a couple of years later, but that's really the end of it. And so it's a remarkable repository of Chinese Buddhist art.

[53:48]

But at the very end of the 19th century, or the first year of the 20th century, there was a cave, basically a cell that had opened up Like a crack appeared in the wall. There are a couple of different stories. But anyway, this cell that was basically 10 feet by 10 feet by 10 feet was discovered that was filled with holy scraps. It was paper and some filth and so forth. It was the kind of remains of a copy shop, of a monastic copy center. And this was under the control of an illiterate Taoist priest who marketed this stuff off.

[54:49]

He did a pretty good job, actually. A British guy came along, Oral Stein came along. He was the first foreigner to hear about it. And this Taoist priest gave Oral Stein some of the track. What the Taoist priest was most interested in was copies of the Lotus Scripture and other important scriptures written in gold. They're written in fancy, you know, schoolhood characters and gene papers, but really fancy stuff. And Oral Science said, you know, okay, you keep that. I'll take the junk. Well, the junk contained really interesting stuff, because it would be kind of underground material, and just the sort of thing that you wouldn't get copies of, right? Then a French scholar named Pelliot came along, and a Russian scholar named Oldenburg, and so forth. The French scholar Pelliot was quite a good scholar of Chinese. I mean, he used a great phonology. And he read through the stuff. He'd open the stuff up, look at the title, and he decided either they didn't need it.

[55:51]

And the stuff that he wanted was just the stuff that's about free. He didn't care about the underground stuff. And the non-Chinese stuff, there's just There's quite a bit of Tibetan material, and there's material in a raft of other languages that you've probably never heard of. Sobyan, and Tocarian, and Sanskrit, and so forth. The Zen materials from there are kind of underground materials, in the sense that some of them are written on the backs of other texts. You know, they didn't throw away tapes. and the official government officers would keep their records for, I think it was 15 years, and then they'd give their paper to the monastery so that they could use the paper again. So we get some text, one of the most important collections from the study of early Chan, on the front side is very, very important economic records for the area, and they're kind of economic historians have been studying the recto side of it for decades.

[56:54]

The verso side, the back side of it, contains Bodhidharma's precepts and all the collective Zen stuff. And you can kind of group the scholars who have been studying this stuff for decades without knowing, hey, the other side is Bodhidharma. What we get, you mentioned the Keitoku Denshodoku, and this is a text that was published in, written in one thousand and four, and that really established the kind of the orthodox story for how Zen developed. What we get from Dunhuang is material about, you know, how they were putting it all together. And so we get the pre-orthodox version, or pre-orthodox version, plural. And so the discovery of the Dunhuang materials, not only was it profoundly important for Chinese art and other aspects of Chinese Buddhist history, and history of Chinese medicine, and in Tibetan texticals, but it's profoundly important for the study of that.

[57:59]

And also the fact that these things were so difficult to get at. I mean, the British were pretty good. The French were really a little. let's say, descriptive, so to say, about letting people study this stuff. And I can't remember, do you remember when the French collection was available on microfilm? I mean, now you can get it, you can read the microfilm, you can use the microfilm to see virtually all the Pelel and Sainz collections. I can't remember. Yeah, I would think 1960s sometimes. So it was quite a while. And my point is that if that material had been released immediately, the fact that it kind of dribbled out, it's been far to our advantage as professional historians. It kept us in business for years and years. Every more difficult. Every more difficult, yeah. Well, there's lots of different figures on it, but we've barely touched the surface of it. Yeah. Well... In fact, after they were extinct, you know, there's actually a difference also.

[59:10]

but it's not really around the business. We're at the top of the two-throwing, fourth-throwing, down-throwing, and second-throwing. And the punishment for the top-throwing is up-throwing. And the top-throwing comes with the way that the top-throwers are allowed to do it. A lot of leaders are supporting things to do back there, and they want to support things. So we're going to have to find a way to do it. Anyway, there's plenty of fun stuff there to do. Let's look at the one... There are a bunch of texts that are attributed in the Junho materials or in later texts to Bodhidharma. There's only one of them that has any possible association with Bodhidharma. And that's the text which, I think it could be after the fact about Bodhidharma. Yeah, we have the treatise on the two entities and the four practices.

[60:19]

And you'll see other translations of this. They'll say the two accesses and the four practices. And that's beautiful. I don't think we need to read aloud the introduction. I've just given a little bit of the preface. He talks about Bodhidharma's third son of the great Brahman Singh from southern India. He effaced his mind in the serene and had a penetrating understanding of the affairs of the world. I mean, he's saying good things about him. Wise, he's both eternal and external, his virtue exceeded the standard of the age. And so he comes to China to proselytize. This is nice, kind of flowery, pleasant language. The real thing. What is your name? Andrew. Would you read for me the paragraph that starts the entrance of the principle? The essence of sensual attempt to enlighten the student makes him a teacher, one that has found faith in the trance of one and the trance of two notions, which connects all sensual beings, both ordinary and enlightened.

[61:34]

An ambitious student who is only covered up and made introspectable when he hears of ordinary concepts by false sensual perceptions. It is why this type of thought is reputed in the theory when it grasps clothing and draws out of place. Well, it could be b-guan. I'm disturbed at how much... Yeah, you're right. Okay. So that some people will translate this, and the emphasis of the absolute. So we get two entrances with two accessors, and one of them is li, is principle, and the other is practice, or jing.

[62:45]

Yo in Japanese, or li in Japanese. And what I'll, let me just, I don't know if this is exactly the ground rules, but I would say that this text is, at the very least, is associated with Bodhidharma's name as soon as we begin to hear about his identity. I would say that, now this may be just my kind of cynical, not really cynical, but critical nature, I don't think there's a snowball stance in hell that Bodhidharma actually wrote this Chinese text. I mean, he's not a translator, there's no, you know, he didn't learn Chinese. This text is written using some very sophisticated allusions to Chinese. There's an allusion to the Zhuangzi, the Daoist text for Zhuangzi that they come with. I don't buy it. Was it translated from his sermons or his lectures? Was it somehow summarized or written on the basis of that?

[63:48]

Could be. There's no way to say, really. What's certainly the case is this was applied to Bodhidharma at least retrospectively, and this is what they chose to attribute to Bodhidharma. Okay, let's not get hung up on the details, so to speak. This is what people thought of in the early period, early period, as being Bodhidharma speaking. And in that sense, it's worth looking at. So what do you see? Buddha nature. Yeah, I think that's fair. True nature, Buddha nature. What is, what's the, what is, you brought it back, you tell me. Okay, so, so, okay, everybody's got it then, whether you're enlightened or not, but what is it?

[65:00]

The two principles. Well, okay, you guys, you're being good because you're sticking to the text. And it doesn't really say, does it? Okay, so it's a short text. What do you know about the Buddha nature in general? Outside. Yeah. Oh. That's it. Anybody know anything about the Buddha nature? The Buddha nature? Or... He had some... Okay, so the Buddha nature... Yeah, I think he says that somewhere that you... Right, right. So somehow, if you take refuge in the true, and if we say that you take refuge in the Buddha nature, because we were talking about true nature and so forth, that gets you beyond, you realize that there's self and other distinctions.

[66:24]

So it does involve getting to a realization of non-reality. I mean, typically, I would say the Buddha nature is is one of two things, and maybe both, it's the potential within all humans to be enlightened. Right? So it's kind of a seed of enlightenment. Or, and this may be an either or, maybe both and, depending on who we're talking about, it's enlightened wisdom within all of us, which we obscure. And I think these guys here, or this text here, is referring possibly to the first part, that included nature as potential, but it seems to me more clearly to be referring to the second. The pre-nature is possessed of all sentient beings. It's only covered up and made inconceptible by false sense impressions.

[67:29]

Well, I don't know. The idea is not... Well, actually... Yeah, but Dogen has particularly... I was going to say weird. Dogen has a weird idea about the universe. Let's say unique. I didn't say weird. I said unique. Pardon? OK. I mean, the traditional story about Dogen, right, is he encountered this line in the Nirvana Sutta that says, basically, all sentient beings have the Buddha nature.

[68:38]

And Dogen, supposedly, this is the reason for his great doubt, you know, well, we all have the Buddha nature, why do we have to work the damned hard to realize it, you know, as I tell my students, why not, hey, let's party, you know. And he goes off to China, goes through this entire rigmarole, you know, to figure it out. Then, later on, presumably in the Buzhou Maki, I'm not a real great Dogen fellow, but he redefined, I mean, that line in the Nirvana Fiction is in Chinese, and he decides that he had the grammar wrong. And he decided that sentence said, not that all living beings have the Buddha nature, but that everything that exists is the Buddha nature. And that's what I'm claiming for a unique and, he didn't call it weird, interpretation of the Buddha. I think that it's a very intriguing fact that Dogen does. He clearly, in an interpretive read of the Chinese, I'd say that that's the kind of interpretive read that, you know, Drew E. did that in China.

[69:46]

I mean, he kind of butchered some Chinese. So it's not like this is a foreigner who can't read the text. I mean, Doug Ann is... And it ends up being thought of as a very Japanese style. The whole world is divine and holy. Yeah, but it's also... The entire world, I mean, this is at least a generalization about Japanese religion, that it doesn't take the world as being kind of nasty, ugly place like those dirty Indians did. The whole world is kind of, it's looked upon positively. when they go there and find this way or they just somehow manifestation or fit with a Japanese worldview and soon the world will be positive and only be laden around, you know, this kind of place. You know, in some ways you could just say that floating is just building a monomical view so it's positive from here.

[70:51]

Uh... Okay, I see what you're getting at, and yeah, yeah, that's... Boy, he never had an original thought in his life, yeah. Yeah. Yeah, and it's one of my good friends, you may know his name, Rob Dinello, and he's been here for a long time. His first published article was called Apophatic and Capophatic in Chinese Buddhist Discourse. And it's basically apophatic means negative discourse, like Madhyamaka, not this, not that, and all that negative discourse. And the Chinese like to put things in more positive terminology.

[71:57]

Yeah, I certainly wouldn't say it's just. I'd say that that's in there, but let's not... I refuse to take on these... I refuse to explain the relationship between Marjamit and Yogyakarta. Just taking us too far at the end would be a little bit of a... Yogyakarta sees Yogyakarta as anti-hyperical in a way, in where it goes by full sense and practice. I think even if it said simply sense impressions, you could gloss that as their fault, because Our, and, and, immediately what it means is not that when I see you as, you know, beard, gray shirt, whatever, it's not that I see that incorrectly. It's that, that sense impression I impose my own kind of conceptual framework onto that.

[73:23]

So that I, I see you falsely. You're a false construction of reality. that I kind of make up in my head. And certainly the Yogacara notions of perception are involved in this. So what did you say? Anti-empirical? Yeah, perhaps. One of the things that Inayata says about this line, which I think is significant, he says, the most important word here, or the word to pay a penny to, is the little word only. That he says, You've got to have a profound faith. In Buddhism, you know, this is not an emotional, boxy kind of outpouring of devotional faith. This is unforeseen confidence, right? You have to be totally sure in your acceptance of the fact that everybody's got the Buddha nature. It's just that... We all muck it up. It's only that it's covered up and we don't see it.

[74:29]

It's covered up by false terms and phrases. But what you're not going to say is that if you read these texts, you see that word only, the word that means only. And that indicates a difference in, how do you say it, valence, or a difference in importance, that the really important thing to do is be different to the good and the bad. And that's where you want to keep your focus of the text. The lesser reality, or the less significant reality, is that we cover this Buddha nature up with false things. And that's kind of a construct that I think is very common in early Zen writing and very much central. I mean, this Buddha-nature construct of the Buddha-nature covered by false sense impressions is everywhere.

[75:30]

Well, no, that's not fair. It's not everywhere. Nothing's everywhere. One of my favorite texts in all of early time materials, you might look at it some tomorrow, is a text attributed to the fifth patriarch, the Hong Lan, that starts off with a passage saying, there's a sun. up in the sky. But it's blocked from our view by clouds. And does that mean that when the clouds block our views, does that mean that the sun isn't there? No. It just means that we can't see it because of the clouds, and that sooner or later, the winds of wisdom will come along and blow away these clouds of ignorance, clouds of fog. And we'll see that the sun is clearly there. But the point is not to reach up with some gigantic claw and drag the clouds away. The point is to simply be confident that that sun is up there. Now, you know, I used to teach them in Michigan, New York, I could always depend on there being clouds, you know.

[76:37]

Get some clouds. Get a break. Yeah. I mean, they put the emphasis on the existence of the buddhism, just as even if it's a cloudy day, you know that the sun is going to be up there. And that becomes, I think, a fundamental guideline for how these guys interpreted spiritual practice. They don't try to make it happen. You work as hard as you can, but in a frequent sense, you don't force it. And I think that idea, or at least the logical structure of that idea, is present here in Bodhidharma Satsang. The path. Yeah. Well, they're sort of saying that as a path statement of our school, their school, they're saying that

[77:54]

The path, the most important step in the path, we need to focus on the evening. Yeah. Yeah, that's what you said. Yeah. I think they're all saying that, right? Because this is like 50 seconds. This is interesting. Don't you think most of what is in your book is suddenly graduating? How do you see that? Yeah, well, yeah. Suddenly graduating isn't stated clearly in this stuff, but it's been sort of put around the edges. I mean, one of the things that you're doing, how do you, How do you look at this language? Does it reside frozen in the wall kind of place? Yes, absolutely. That's what we do. Yeah. That's what happens. That's what happens. What's frozen in the wall kind of place is what happens. I think this word, frozen, is one of the reasons why later Zen kind of leaves this text behind, kind of.

[79:27]

It's too, the text is a little too logically oriented or too organized, and then it's just frozen in a wild kind of way. It didn't later, you know, after a little while, it didn't even get quite to that point. Yes? It's certainly not Confucian. I mean, Taoists talk about the perfected zhengren, Well, I don't know. I certainly wouldn't... You don't have to think of Taoism here to understand true nature.

[80:29]

I think it's more generalized here. Mm-hmm. Well, and then the other thing, this is, as you know, this funny word walk-on equation, and I'll just give you the, I mean, I believe that actually, I mean, that this When it says yi guan, guan means contemplation, or discernment, or meditation, or whatever. My personal belief, this is a friend of ours, Paul Swanson, who is visiting in Indiana. He teaches at Nanzan Institute. There's a research and teaching position at Nanzan Institute in Nagoya, Japan. He's argued that the D is a transliteration of the first syllable of Dukkhajana, or conduct for civilization.

[81:38]

And Guam also is a translation of Dukkhajana. And it's an unusual way to form a Chinese Buddhist term, but it's not unprecedented by any means. There are a number of cases where you get composite words like that, one character being a transliteration, one being a translation. And I think that's probably what this was here. But certainly the Chinese, they... It's a false sense of fashion. Ah, okay, so this, this, okay, well, let me, I'll come back to that. Yeah, yeah.

[82:42]

So, Wang Guifei's, you know, the consort of, of this gentleman, her, her, she was a substantial, a woman of substance, I think. She's not a skinny little waist, right? And she's described as skin as being like congealed fat. And I always think of it as kind of like bacon grease. It's a kind of translucent kind of feeling that her skin, that emberswine bone is really capable of. So yeah, it's frozen, it's fixed or congealed or whatever, yeah. When it says return, that notion of gwe, to, what does it say? To return, to guard the falsehood, to take refuge in the true. When we say to take refuge in the Buddha, to take refuge in the Dharma, that's because of gwe, gwe yin. And that is to go back to where you're naturally supposed to be.

[83:46]

Well, resume is right. It's where your natural place is. It's where you, it's in that sense of return. Well, it's not backward in the sense of, I mean, we think of backwards, or I think when you say that, I think it's the opposite of project. It's to resume your natural place. Where you were before, you go back home, kind of thing. So that, it's a good sense. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, so, I mean, that English phrase that we have to take refuge in the Buddha, that's a pretty funny, we talked about Buddha's hybrid English. That's kind of Buddha's hybrid English. Take refuge in the Buddha, take refuge in the Dharma. I proved it. This is interesting because, you know, in our tradition, we, especially, have very darned a false connotation as fear is chief oncologist.

[84:55]

Yeah, right. And fear, it sounds more like a vagina state, you know. Right. Then what we think chief oncologist, they see how we, you know, how we relate to that. Yeah, and in fact, here, if you... if you buy for the moment that in some form of the original quote-unquote meaning of the term, that... or contemplation, then the next one resides strictly without wavering, wavering, never again to be swayed by the... That looks like samasas, it's concentration. And they're traditionally too... wing the two aspects of Indian Buddhist Meditation, the concentration of Samatha and Suncite contemplating the Paschal. And it's not too far-fetched to say that this is simply an interpretive rendering of the concept.

[85:58]

I think that, but this use of the character B, Wall, stumped with early Chinese. It just wasn't that usual to use it. And so the notion of Bodhidharma sitting facing a wall is developed on the basis of not really knowing what the hell this is all about. Okay, let me just make one more point. If you look down at the four practices, And I'll do this as kind of a leading on to tomorrow. These four practices are all about... Somehow if the entrance of principle or the access of the absolute, whatever you want to call it, if that's some kind of abstract or internal stance toward the world, and maybe even a kind of more yogic kind of thing, the four practices below

[87:03]

or how you interact with what goes on in life. So there's an inner, interior, exterior, or inner, outer, or substance, function. There's some kind of distinction going on there. And I want to build on that distinction tomorrow. Because I think one of the things that I think that we need to address when we talk about the origins of Chan is that You know, we think of them, these are people who talk in weird and act funny, right? And how do we explain, how do they develop that very unique style of dialogue that's left right there? Where does that come from? And I certainly can't give you, you know, I can't give you a canonical or authoritative explanation, but at least we ought to think about where it comes from, and that's somewhat the key there, I think, the theme that you've got two entrances.

[88:09]

So I'll leave it. That hopefully is the cliffhanger for tomorrow morning. Is that enough of a cliffhanger? I'll say more ugly things about people, too, if that's, you know, like Bob Thurman and, you know... Pardon? Yeah, okay. 9.30 tomorrow morning. Thank you.

[88:34]

@Transcribed_UNK
@Text_v005
@Score_74.52