I felt a little badly yesterday after giving the lecture. Or I feel a little badly when I give certain kinds of lectures. Yesterday was one of them. Hmm. For me it was an important lecture. Well, you know, since I wasn't born in a Buddhist culture and I'm a Westerner, my life is trying to find my way into Buddhism. And so what I'm doing with you is with you trying to find our way into Buddhism.

[01:05]

And what I try to do with you is that we find our way into Buddhism. So for me every lecture is to some extent something new because it's all my effort to find my way and with you. Yesterday I was particularly emphasizing that the transmission process is really one of companionship. And so yesterday I found I was finding my own way into looking at Collins. And this koan came up because it's one of the prime examples among koans of an approach to the practice of the two truths.

[02:28]

So if you're going to compare various ways to look at the two truths, you'd have to say, oh, let's look at this koan as an example of how Zen approaches the two truths. And so, since it came from you that I should, the suggestion that I speak about the two truths, you know, a few weeks ago or whenever. Yeah, I really wanted to... find my way with you yesterday and I find afterwards I felt the with you was lacking so then I feel badly I feel like I'm on a lonely island on a lonely island

[03:42]

And the waves are lapping at the shore. Anyway. And also, whenever I speak too much about the complexities of this Buddhist and Asian yoga culture, I feel, and maybe I imagine more than is the case, a kind of resistance to what feels like an implicit comparison of cultures. I mean, there's no reason for Western Europeans to feel anything but embarrassed by the dominance of their culture.

[05:08]

There is no reason. Yeah. I almost didn't lose myself. I don't know if you said what I said, but anyway, it took up a little time. I mean... Western and Central European culture has basically dominated the world for a couple centuries. I mean, much of the trouble in the world right now is because the West went around and we changed boundaries and we said, you know, et cetera.

[06:12]

And addicted China to opium. Intentionally addicted China to opium. So, anyway. So let's have a little balance here and not get too worried about the fact that China and Japan have quite complex, subtle cultures. And if you do have a sense of comparison or something, just take it out, throw it away, and bring in a sense of difference.

[07:15]

It's different, and the difference is interesting for us, because we're all human beings. If you have a feeling of comparison, just take it out and put it aside, or throw it away, and replace it with a feeling of differentness. It's just something different, and it's interesting for us to look at it. Although we can all make babies together with the right number of toes. We don't have the same number of toes. Usually. But we don't make the same culture. And it's a kind of delusion we have hidden in us that, well, really, like we can all make babies, we can all make the same. Really, all the cultures are sort of the same.

[08:17]

I know a few times I've done seminars in which I've brought up Zen mind, beginner's mind. Which is still the best-selling book on Buddhism in the world. Yeah, it... If I speak about the complications or the subtleties behind the text, people don't like it. Because Sukhirashi had a genius for presenting it very ordinarily and a way to feel it as different but still within our own culture. And that, I think, under the simplicity there's a... parallel depth, which I think is part of the success of the book.

[10:06]

Success, terrible word. Underneath the simplicity is what? A parallel depth. Okay. Unter der Einfachheit liegt eine parallel laufende Tiefe, von der ich glaube, dass das Teil des Erfolges des Buches ist. Und Erfolg ist kein schönes Wort. When we did the book, and Sukershi's idea was, it was just going to be a kind of manual for our students. Als wir das Buch... That it would have any public sale was not of any interest to us. But what I find, although I think people like the book because of the not so visible depths, they don't want to hear about it. So if I say at a single stroke it's completed and I say but you really have to also look at the fact that complete means incomplete

[11:13]

Und ich dann sage, aber du musst dir auch wirklich die Tatsache anschauen, dass vollständig unvollständig bedeutet. I feel people, I don't want to get into words, can't mean what they mean. I'm going home. Dann höre ich immer wieder, warum können diese zwei Worte nicht einfach bedeuten, was sie bedeuten. Ich will nicht hören, dass vollständig und unvollständig das gleiche heißt. Da will ich lieber nach Hause gehen. So, to try to make this... difference accessible and sensible to us. You know, I mean, even we, as Zen practitioners, we should have a simple, ordinary, friendly side and a side which is not visible but a little different. Just look at her, friendly, nice, but, you know, a little different.

[12:42]

And hidden in there is the tenso. I mean, among other things. Yeah. Well, you noticed at the end of the koan that it says there's a downpour on North Mountain and on South Mountain. Downpour? Downpour, I'm not sure. A heavy rainstorm. Oh, okay. A downpour. It's raining cats and dogs in England. There's a downpour on North Mountain and South Mountain. And then it says something like the sky over your head and the earth under your feet.

[13:43]

The Chinese and Japanese always speak in fields, F-I-E-L-D-S. Die Japaner und die Chinesen sprechen immer in Felder. Because there aren't entities, there are relationships only or activities. Weil es keine Entitäten gibt, sondern es gibt nur Beziehungen oder Aktivitäten. So they always say north and south mountain. Also sagen sie immer nördlicher und südlicher. Or sky and earth. Oder Himmel und Erde. Because... To say one thing, you don't feel the dynamic of a relationship. I know when I first started studying Chinese and Japanese characters, let's call them kanji, it's the simplest word for it for me. Learning them and learning the stroke order and so forth.

[15:06]

I saw immediately that all of our letters, A, B, C, D, we can make with two by fours. Two by fours? Two by fours are the standard board two inches by four inches, but it's not really two inches by four inches. Dachlatten. Dachlatten? Okay, okay. The equivalent in Germany is that? We have that in many cities. Okay, yeah. You can make them out of pieces of wood. You can't do that with Chinese characters. Because they're held together by space.

[16:10]

They're in a field. This is here and then this is over here and they're not connected. So as soon as I saw that, I thought, they see space as a glue or an object or a connector. Yeah. And then, as soon as I... I saw that very shortly after I began to feel this can't be just in kanji, it just must be in general. They feel they're in a space, spatial field. So I began to experiment with moving toward a person or walking in the sense of a shared field instead of empty space or something like that. So when I first heard about the teaching or the idea of Ma, I already was exploring it without knowing it.

[17:28]

Als ich das erste Mal über die Lehre oder die Vorstellung von Ma gehört habe, da habe ich schon damit experimentiert, ohne das zu wissen. Now, if your culture emphasizes that everything is interconnected, And nothing exists but interconnection. This puts you in a different world. Well, not better, but certainly different. Okay. So here we have So, every word, always in Chinese poetry where you see it most visibly, every word is an illusion, not an illusion,

[18:49]

An allusion is to play toward an allusion and an illusion is to make fun of, play against a mark. In German allusion is just what you're saying. Also in eine Anspielung ist eine, man spielt auf etwas hin und eine Illusion ist... Because every word's a relationship. Every word is also related to its opposite. And the opposite is there, hidden. And just as assumed by everybody, it's there. Any... And also, whatever is said is also, exists in the space of what could have been said.

[20:11]

There's an Indian tradition, I have a book of it, where, not Chinese, Indian, Indian. where entire texts are written where every word has a double meaning. And you can read either level. I've tried writing that way and it's too difficult for me. Es gibt eine indische Tradition mit Texten, wo jedes Wort eine Doppelbedeutung hat. Und man kann den Text immer auf die eine oder auf die andere Art und Weise lesen. Und ich habe versucht, so zu schreiben, aber für mich ist das zu schwer. I looked for the book, but it's in Freiburg. Okay. Okay. So I promised that I would be shorter today, so I'll stop now.

[21:13]

No. All right. Okay. And we're just warming up here. We're cooling off. They have to have opposites here, you know. Okay. Okay. So here we, if we just take how you work with a koan. Now, we need to remind ourselves that in those days, in the West too, not everybody read. Books were rare. It was a huge effort to make a book. They didn't have printing presses. And a standard procedure was always to memorize everything you read, because if you couldn't memorize it, you didn't really read it, so you could later read it in your mind and body. We don't do that.

[22:23]

Unless you are able to memorize it, you haven't really read it seriously. My memory isn't that good. I hadn't trained it that way. By the way, Asian culture views the brain, the body, as a muscle that you can exercise and it gets better. We tend to view intelligence as a genetic quotient that we're stuck with. You can also look at koans as a way to improve, deepen, develop our dharmic intelligence. And today what I'm trying to do is say we don't have a language and a culture which lends itself to the way koans were studied.

[23:43]

But if we understand how they were conceived, we can use koans in our own practice. Beneficially. For example, Wang Jie, I think his name is, in the 17th century, a commentary on somebody who wrote about Chinese poetry. He says, immerse yourself in the poem. But a koan would be the same as a poem. immerse yourself bathe yourself in the poem understand that every word includes others and

[25:09]

enter the poem until you feel it on your eyelashes, he says. And you feel it in the corners of your mouth. And then it will begin to, he doesn't use the word incubate, but something equivalent, incubate and appear for you. Well, this is serious embodiment. You know. But we can embody things, too. I mean, we just have to get the feeling for what it means to physically read something. Okay, so let's go, just the first line of the koan sets the stage for the whole koan.

[26:36]

The first line of the pointer sets the stage for the whole koan. At a single stroke, it's completed. It goes beyond ordinary and holy. So what are the ingredients here? First of all, the concept of a single stroke. Erstmal das Konzept von einem einzigen Pinselstrich. That you have sufficient attentive alertness that you notice things and they affect you everywhere. And it says completes. And then you have to ask, complete what?

[27:49]

Well, you have to sort of look at the koan to see what he must be talking about, what's being completed. But then there's a simple experience of completion. And we know enough to know that in a culture where Buddhist culture, yoga culture, where everything is in a process of change and interrelated, Und wir wissen genug, um zu wissen, dass in einer Kultur, einer yogischen Kultur, buddhistischen Kultur, in der alles in einem Prozess des Wandels ist und miteinander in Beziehung steht. Wie kann da irgendetwas jemals vollständig sein? Die Vorstellung von Vollständigkeit ist nur eine Illusion. Aber du kannst dich vollständig fühlen. So the koan is suggesting right away, practice feeling complete.

[28:56]

And I would suggest a practice we could call like each breath completion. Every now and then, or for a few moments, once or twice a day, you feel the breath being completed from the move the top, circling down, circling up, and you feel that as complete. Okay, so that gives you your breath is going one after another. There's no stopping, at least not for a while, let's hope. But you complete it at that moment. In the midst of incompletion.

[30:10]

And you say to yourself, how wonderful it is to feel complete and I'm so glad I'm not yet complete. But I'm still incomplete. Another ten years. A month or so. A week. A few days. Who knows? Death is not in the future. It's always present. In one of the capping verses it says, lie in your koan with wide open eyes. In your coffin with wide open eyes. I've got koans and coffins confused.

[31:11]

He looks alive. He looks dead. I don't know. Okay. Now, Kanji and an ideograph, logograph, pictograph, so forth, various names for these characters. You don't have to say them all. Okay. As of the kanji? But some people say that the Chinese characters are about 20% rooted in pictographs, but others say actually it's about 80%. A pictograph is little pictures of a tree. Sometimes it's called sonographic because it's drawn and sounded.

[32:15]

And because it sounded and written, imaged, it uses both sides of the brain. If a Western person is in a accident where they have brain damage and they lose their language center, they lose their language. If you're a Chinese or Japanese speaker, Korean, you may lose the written, or you may lose the spoken, but you seldom lose both.

[33:32]

Unless you're really damaged. So already the language itself is activating your neuro-linguistic bodily And then characters, kanji, are also gestures. And one of the practices of kanji study, of koan study or sutra study, is to activate Is every morning before Zazen, after Zazen, if you do Zazen, you calligraph a few pages of sutra?

[34:38]

Or the heart sutra is a common one to do the whole thing every day? Mayumi Oda, who we have several of her pictures up here of Samantha Badra on a bicycle carrying an elephant instead of standing on it. She, for some years, did the Heart Sutra every morning. And I have several silk screens of her Heart Sutra that she turned into silk screens, which I haven't framed, but they're around somewhere. Okay, so there's a specific traditional established, you know, Japanese, Chinese writing system has been around over 3,000 years.

[35:50]

And the stroke order was established a long time ago. And the stroke order, you can see immediately when somebody who wrote the Kanji doesn't know the stroke order. It doesn't feel right. So the stroke order embodies it in your body. It's a gesture. And you can know your bodily memory is bigger than your conscious memory. And it's very common to ask a Chinese or Japanese person, what is that character or kanji? And they say, I don't know anymore. Oh yeah, that one.

[37:10]

Because their finger knows it. Okay. So if we take this, and characters tend to be composites of contexts. Schriftzeichen neigen dazu, Zusammenstellungen von Kontexten zu sein, von Zusammenhängen zu sein. The sound of raindrops. What is that sound? Was ist der Klang von Regentropfen? What is a character which has got a person standing beside another character, which means what's possible? So what means what?

[38:15]

When you draw it, you're drawing a person beside the word possible. Oh, okay. Now, people will say, oh, when you read Chinese and Japanese, you don't think of all those things. If you write it with a brush full of Dripping ink, soot-based ink. And you're bodily repeating it as well as in memory repeating it. So the question, what is the sound of a raindrop, say, is a person standing next to what's possible. And sound, I think, is something like to stand on top of the sun.

[39:25]

And rain is I don't know what drops is, but rain and raindrop is a cloud, a drawn cloud. With four drops of rain. So you draw a cloud and you draw the cloud first and then you put a line straight through which is part of your spine. So you draw this little cloud, and then you put a straight line down. And then you put two drops on one side and two drops on the other side. So that's rain. And then drops is another country. So when you're just the question, what is the sound of raindrops?

[40:47]

It's got all this stuff going on it. And the gestural embodiment. And then the sound. And the sound. Yeah, and incubating it, repeating it, repeating it. And the meaning comes out through the repetition, not on the first reading. And Dahui, who created much of the way we do koan study, he said you should when you're working on a koan you should doubt yourself doubt your own existence and doubt each word until they appear in your experience okay that's enough

[41:59]

So it's a... And Daoui, you know who he was, right? He died in 1163, 90 years earlier than Dogen died in 1253. He died in 1163 and Dogen died in 1253. Der ist im Jahre 1163 gestorben, 90 Jahre vor Dogen, der 1253 gestorben ist. Und Da Wei was Yuan Wu's disciple. Und Da Wei war der Schüler von Yuan Wu. Ein total brillanter Person, dem alles leicht fiel, außer die Erleuchtung. And one of his teachers before Yuan Wu said to him, you know, you can give lectures, you can write commentaries, etc. You're lacking one thing.

[43:09]

And we said, what's that? His teacher said, enlightenment. And Dowie said, that's just my point of doubt. He'd studied earlier with the Soto teacher. and he studied for two years he studied the five ranks and when he went to study with Yuan Wu he said I'll give Yuan Wu five years Nine years.

[44:15]

Now look at the kind of commitment here. I'll give Yuan Wu nine years. If I'm not enlightened in nine years, I'll find another teacher. Or I'll give him nine years just to see if he's a false teacher or not. Or, and I will see he's a false teacher if he acknowledges me too easily. So he went and he had, after a while, over something Yuan Wu said to him, he had a pretty big enlightenment experience. But you're not beyond enlightenment yet, he said, so this isn't good enough. So a couple, I don't remember exactly, a few months later, he completed it and was acknowledged. Okay, how am I doing?

[45:31]

I'm just not too good. I'm going to feel badly again. Okay. Anyway, then he burned the whole Blue Cliff Records. All the woodblock prints. Can you imagine how hard it is to carve all those characters? But I'll tell you something about that tomorrow. Thanks. Thank you. Thank you.

[46:30]

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