Well, good morning. Guten Morgen. I'm so grateful that we're all doing this together and that you take the time to practice here together with me and with each other during my short visit here to Germany while I'm right now mostly six months in the United States. As you know I'm trying to understand now you know I'm Because it's time to do so. We've been here 10 years.

[01:01]

And we're going to have, as you know, a 10-year celebration or something like that in June. Yeah, June. Please come. So it's time to sort of think, what about the next 10 years? And especially it's time for me because I seem to be getting older. So I'm wondering how will the Sangha continue this place? That's such a big question I have to stop after. But part of getting ready for this event we fixed up the Zendo and we tried to get all the electrical

[02:10]

stuff clarified and made safe. And I think we found one or two places where there was actually the wood that started to burn and smolder. And we fixed those places too. But the back house we haven't done yet. But I think it's safe enough in the back house. We haven't redone the electricity there yet. Certainly part of... part of continuing this place is taking care of this place.

[03:18]

That's normal. Everybody wants to take care of where they live. But you know that When we say in the morning chanting, all Buddhas, ten directions. The ten directions are given equal weight with the Buddhas. This physical world we live in is our physical world. And as I said yesterday, the Dharmakaya, It really means the actual experience of the connectedness of the world in us.

[04:26]

And as I said yesterday with the Dharmakaya, it actually means the actual connection of the and with the world and with us. So, you know, again, we have this topic, traditional and contemporary sangha. Well, are there differences? One of the reasons I'm doing this I'm calling winter branches, but some people call it the dead sticks. Winter branches is the idea that in the winter branches look dead, but when spring comes, they blossom.

[05:26]

So when time ripens for us, maybe we will blossom too. So I'm You know, I'm perplexed by how to make decisions of who attends the... who comes to the winter branches. Yeah, since I can't accept everyone, I have to make... some kind of difficult decision for me. Because each person, I see their name, I say, oh, jeez, I really like this person. I want to practice with them. But I'm going to decide on the basis of who is most likely to continue the Sangha. And it was already shown that they're taking care of or having a feeling of continuing the Sangha.

[06:40]

Continuing the Sangha and the teaching. Now, It doesn't mean that everyone who is in the winter branches has to feel that they now have to do nothing else but continue the sangha. But at least there should be the awareness that the sangha won't continue unless someone continues it. And if you're only committed to the Sangha if there's some kind of outstanding teacher or something like that, That's not continuing the Sangha.

[07:48]

You know, when I was in Japan, I chose to practice in Daitoku-ji in Japan. Kyoto, for most of the years I was in Japan. And I only went to Heiji and practiced in Heiji where Sukiroshi wanted me to practice. For three or four months. And the Japanese people criticized me. Japanese people criticized me. Because they said, you have to support Eheji even when it's a boring place, as we all know it's a boring place, to practice.

[08:50]

Because Eheji won't get better if everyone retreats from it. And that's a kind of generational thinking. Which I, yeah, yeah, I suppose if I understood that better, and I was more years anyway in Japan, I might have concentrated on the age. I saw the same thing when my favorite professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who really made me understand better than I would have otherwise, for sure, institutional history. The morning class after John F. Kennedy was assassinated, he came to class

[10:01]

Yeah, quite tearful. And he said, I feel it's partly my fault and people like me. Because we, he was a southerner, we abandoned the south. Most of the intellectuals abandoned the south. He took jobs at universities like Berkeley and Harvard and so forth in the north. And he said, as a result, the south supports the kind of atmosphere which... he thinks led to the assassination. So the support for the Sangha is the support for the friends who are practicing and the potential of practice. As well as whether there's a particularly good teacher or interesting teacher.

[11:36]

But since some of you will be the teacher, it's going to be good, because I know you're good. But it's not a simple matter what it means to support the Sangha. And I heard that some people didn't I wasn't clear enough last night, maybe, what I said. But I don't want to be too clear. If I'm too clear, you may have some conventional understanding just in, oh, that's, you know, then it's not right.

[12:48]

Or I don't want to simplify in order to be clear, because then we lose... what's really going on. But to summarize, for those of you, because some of you weren't here last night, and some of you were here and weren't here. Or I wasn't here, I don't know. So let me summarize briefly. I said the Sangha can be all people. Or all people who practice together. Or more The living Sangha is really the job of the living Sangha, the more dynamic way to understand the Sangha.

[14:03]

The Sangha is to support some people practicing, doing sitting practice. And to support all of us having the opportunity to do sitting practice sometimes. And I said that the widest definition of the Sangha, whether it's traditional or contemporary, is the vision and the view that all of us share Buddha nature. And then the practice of the Sangha is also to discovered from ourselves what this means.

[15:16]

Because if we all share Buddha nature, then we can define what Buddha is from ourselves, not just from Buddha's point of view. Yeah, so then we have to ask, what is Buddha? In what way are we really connected and can experience that connectedness with others and with the world? And also, I didn't mention, but most of us are able to connect feel immediately connected with babies.

[16:27]

So a good legitimate question is, why can we feel connected with babies and not so easily with adults? It's not so simple as that adults just messed up their baby nature. It's just a more complex experience. It requires the wisdom and experience and craft of Buddhism to realize to experience this connectedness. And I said, let's start with knowing the basic sense world. And I didn't add that Knowing the basic sense world, as much as possible before culture and personal knowledge.

[17:48]

history is added, isn't just taking away much of what consciousness adds. Through our personal experience and culture. But it opens us to awareness, a field of awareness instead of And we talked in the prologue day, many of you weren't here for that, about Shikantaza, nothing but precisely sinning. Is a practice to open us up also to discover our fundamental nature.

[19:10]

Discover and generate our fundamental nature. I mean what Yuan Wu calls our intact great potential. He says realizing our intact great potential is like pouring water into water. So this is a way of saying original mind and a way of saying connectedness, but describing it so vividly as pouring water into water. Okay.

[20:11]

So that's more or less... summary of some of what I said last night. Okay. So now I'd like to venture into what is the some of the differences in the contemporary Sangha from the traditional sangha. Now, well, there's some obvious differences. We can have a sangha that doesn't live together. Because of contemporary transportation.

[21:28]

We can shop around a lot more about which sangha, which teacher, etc. I mean, you know, it wasn't long ago that you walked to a place like this and once you got here you were too tired to walk somewhere else. So you usually stayed. Like Peter, if he walked from Freiburg. It's not so far from Freiburg. But if you walk, it's pretty far. Yeah, so then you might... It took him some years to decide to stay here. He might have decided earlier if he had to walk each time he went back to Frankfurt.

[22:30]

So that already changes the pace and kind of glue that holds a sangha together. And also, as I said last night, both Sukhyoshi and my vision has been that the sangha should be men, women, young and old. And traditionally that's been because Buddhism is developed in male-dominated cultures. I'm sorry. Yeah, the Sangha has developed mostly through men.

[23:38]

And that should be different now. And the main reason I think that should be different is because I have three daughters. Well, that's not the only reason, I think. I actually think, as you know, that this civilization is in a very primitive stage if we only recently thought that women might be equal. Yes, and I really mean that. But also there's a difference in the way in which women can participate, particularly if a certain percentage of women have families and babies and the bonding of mother, etc., So, the Sangha has to somehow

[24:39]

accommodate the differences in our lives. And I would say that most of the sanghas I know something about, not only have women been essential in continuing in developing contemporary sanghas. But it's been very often couples. Yeah, like Gerard and Gisela. Or like myself and my first wife, Virginia. It's been couples often that have been the longest, most committed people in the Sanctus.

[25:58]

And couples have this habit of having babies. Not all, but some. So if we have a sangha with men and women and Couples, there's going to be children as part of the Sangha. Now, how does this affect hard, cold, dedicated practice? I really didn't like this movie, a Korean movie about Zen practice, which I know some people did like. It was so male, I just didn't like it. It was all dark, cold, wet, and difficult.

[27:09]

Well, there's some advantage to difficulty in practice, but if it becomes the style, it's, I think, not right. So what is the contemporary sangha going to be? Well, you are actually one of the best examples of it on the planet. I mean, I did a sesshin the other day, and... Crestone. And there was a small Sashin. I don't know how many people. Were you in the... No, you weren't there. That's right. It was before you came. She was at Crestone just recently. But there were... I don't know how many people in the Sashin. 20? It was a fairly small Sashin.

[28:14]

And there was something like 250 or 300 years of shared experience. Almost everyone I'd practiced with, 10 years, 15 years, 20 years. That's actually, that's a lot. Yeah, I mean it means that there's something happening here that we can call a sangha, you know, on the planet. in this century in the West. And we will find out in the next generations how it will continue, and even whether it will continue.

[29:14]

There's also the problem that commerce has bought our private time. Commerce has bought our private time. There's even nanobots now that are going to give you, while you're meditating, pop-up ads on your eyelids. Well, I made that up. It's not true. It may happen. Walmart. I'm facing the wall. No, Walmart. But it is actually a serious problem. There's spyware in our computers.

[30:15]

And we give up a kind of internalization if we externalize our desires. And the whole aim of contemporary culture is to externalize our desires. And it becomes very difficult to develop the kind of internality or interiorness that allows practice to mature. It makes it much harder to step out of our culture. Because we... All Buddhism is about, all real Buddhist practice is about discovering how to step out of one's culture and then back into it.

[31:43]

And I think actually that in Europe there's more opportunity to step out of your culture than in America. Because in America there's no... The first joke I heard when I came to Germany was, what's the difference between yogurt and America? No, one has a living culture. I said, thanks for the warm greeting. I actually don't think it's true.

[32:47]

The most powerful culture in the world today in art and music and so forth tends to be America in most things. I'm being a little patriotic here. But there's very little common day... How can I put it? shared common culture. People tend to, to put it simply, believe what they hear and not what they see. Europeans more look at what's in front of them. They believe that. And if they hear something, oh, well, that's secondary. So you're less caught up in the media culture. Somewhat less caught up. And the medium culture thrives on what we hear and see in an external sense. So, I mean, I can't talk more about that.

[34:06]

There's no reason to do it. But I think it's the greatest danger that actually the Sangha and practice face. Unless there's also the wisdom of some kind of reaction against it and a turning into and toward practice because of it. Well, I've barely gotten started here. Time for a break. But let me say that... that practice of the Sangha as an institution is certainly one of the oldest ongoing institutions on the planet.

[35:18]

There's some kind of real continuity for about 2,500 years. Longer than any nation state or any other tradition I can think of except Hinduism. And the beliefs and practices of Hinduism are about 5,000 years old. But I don't know about the institutional history of Hinduism so I couldn't make that comparison. So we can ask, what has allowed this institution of Sangha institutions, practice institutions, to last so long? With a very similar form. Also können wir uns fragen, was hat es erlaubt oder auch ermöglicht, diese Sanger-Institution mit einer sehr, sehr ähnlichen Form über so lange 25 Jahrhunderte einfach bestehen und fortbestehen zu lassen?

[36:47]

Can we change the institution? Do we have to change the institution? Well, it's already changing in the sense that this is really a lay sangha primarily, not a monk monastic sangha. Can such a sangha exist? And I said last night, I decided to become ordained because... no lay lineage has ever survived for more than a generation or two. And let's face it, Most monk lineages fail, disappear. Not fail, disappear. In every generation, in China, say, there's thousands of potential lineages.

[37:50]

Next generation, three. The next generation, maybe ten or five. Not many lineages have survived. And very few have survived. survived for many, many, many centuries. And those always have to be revived and renewed every now and then. So it's my life, come on, in a way. Can, in this context, a lay sangha survive and can the teaching lineage survive in our contemporary world?

[38:50]

So I can say, are we going to lose something that's survived now 2,500 years? You may say, well, of course, we fail. Everything is all right. Everything goes along. But it's not true. There is death, and some things die. And we may be, in fact, killing the planet. That's much worse. killing the planet, that's much worse. So our main job is to see if the planet survives, and second, the sangha. Okay, so now it must be time for a break.

[39:51]

Thank you very much.

[39:52]

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