Working with this koan has been a kind of journey. Mit diesem koan zu arbeiten ist bisher so eine Reise gewesen. I came down the Donau from Budapest on the hydroplane. Ich bin mit dem hydroflugzeug, dem hydrofoil, you mean, ne? Hydrofoil. Ja, also mit dem hydrofoil bin ich die... What did you say? Oh, da fliehbrot, okay, fine. I should have known. Yeah. I don't think that's what studying this koan has been like. It's been more like riding in an inner tube down the donau. Inner tube? Like a big... And sometimes we're floating near each other.

[01:04]

And sometimes we're swimming. And maybe sometimes we're drowning. But I feel we've come quite a ways, actually. And I ended yesterday afternoon Saying I felt I needed to find out how to get to at least one of the harbors of this koan. I needed to swim there within our mutual minds. Now, as you know, I like the metaphor of water and fluids and so forth.

[02:16]

But, you know, I felt a little uneasy saying, swimming in your minds. Because each of you have your own Kyogai, as I defined the term earlier in the seminar. Your own mystery and power. And the sense of that is you can't ever fully know another person. Or another situation or another object. At the same time, there's sometimes a kind of mutual knowing of each other. Almost it buoys us up. Do you know the word buoy? You know, sometimes we actually, in the sense of a mutual body, we actually sense another person's body as if it were our own.

[03:54]

Yeah, occasionally. As has happened to two or three people in this seminar. So there is some kind of mutuality that mostly functions unconsciously. At least certainly mostly functions outside of consciousness. But yet it can bully us up, even if we don't actually notice it. We feel the flow of the Dharma, something like that, carrying us along. Yeah, and I need, in order to talk, to float some Dharma boats,

[05:13]

I need to feel a certain, as I've said in the past occasionally, a certain water in the room. Yeah, a certain mutual bodiliness. And somehow we generate that together. So now I want to try to float to some sort of boat that I just noticed recently. Yeah, now often I... When I find myself... You know, let me start again. Okay. I could do that all day, couldn't I? I could keep starting again.

[06:16]

Um... Uh... I get quite interested in certain kinds of Dharma boats. And sometimes I worry that I'm not paying enough. It's not enough related to your own practical practice. And although I notice that, try to notice that and worry about it, at the same time, almost always, when I notice a new kind of Dharma construction or boat, It's actually, it was made with us together.

[07:40]

I mean, I didn't think it up myself. We made it. Yeah, so then if we've made it, it sounds like an insane person is talking, but in any case, If we've made this boat partially together, and not all boards are in place, also we have the question, have we made enough water together to float the boat? Now I'm using this metaphor for a reason. I mean, I guess I am, why not? It relates to the boat that I'm trying to float. Okay, now let me change the metaphor. Okay.

[08:52]

What's the difference here? The difference is that you want to lift the boat with the water, you don't want to let the boat that is already swimming float on. Oh yeah, that's right. Goodbye! Yeah, okay. Um, So let me change the metaphor so we can look at koans. Let's use the forest and the trees. Or what I call the forest to the forest. So this is just, you know, stages in which you can look at a koan. First you look at it as a whole.

[09:54]

Or its relationship to other koans and so forth. Its doctrinal emphasis. And, you know, sort of what period of, you know, who's in it and so forth. Trying to get a sense of what kind of forest this is. And that can take a minute or 20 minutes or something, you know. Or a lifetime. But usually it's more like 10 or 20 minutes. And the second stage is you start noticing the trees. And the trees are, you know, particular phrases or metaphors.

[10:58]

Or particular even protagonists you're already familiar with. Yeah, like, what's the price of rice? Yeah, or cutting off ordinary and holy. Now, once you've noticed one of the trees or phrases or metaphors that sticks with you, and particularly sticks with you and you can't quite get it off, like some sort of cactus thing stuck on you, roll somewhere else. And you wonder why it stuck to you. This is a useful stage. No, I don't want you to think

[11:59]

to think that because I'm presenting this in four stages, that one stage is more important than the other. Or somehow you have to do all the stages to understand the koan. And for most of us, most of our practice with a koan is the second stage. We work with certain phrases. And the phrases can change your life. My life has been changed in the early days of my practice by a number of phrases from koans.

[13:18]

The southern branch owns the whole of spring, as also does the northern branch. dem südlichen Zweig gehört die Gänze des Frühlings an, so wie auch dem nördlichen Zweig. So that's, I mean, I think the main territory of our practice. Und ich glaube, das ist so das Hauptgefilde unserer Praxis. Of our individual practice. Unsere individuellen Praxis. But let's say our lineage practice. Aber nehmen wir mal, oder sagen wir mal, unsere Lehrlinienpraxis. Our affiliation. Unsere Verschwisterung. with each other, with this generation and with the past generations of our lineage, is most awakened if we are familiar with a number of, even many koans. This requires a decision, an intention on your part to decide, okay, I'm going to take Blue Cliff Records or the Book of Serenity

[14:30]

I'm going to read one koan a week. So in two years you're more or less finished. And that one koan, you can do other things during the week, I think, but that one koan can kind of be like a pupa, an insect chrysalis. And you can... No, I don't... I don't know what that is. My poop pen. Okay. You can read other things during the week, but this koan can be something like a doll in that week. You know, it's the sort of inactive stage between insect and butterfly or something like that. So this resting stage between the insect and the butterfly. Yeah, yeah, butterfly. So you have this kind of little caterpillar of a koan crawls into your week.

[16:00]

And during the week it weaves a little chrysalis. And even if it's kind of boring to read it, you just read it, you know. And then, yeah, you just read it enough to let it form its little cocoon. And then next week you read another one. And after a while, you know, sometimes the butterfly doesn't come out until colon 33. You know, colon 1 produces a butterfly several colons later. Okay.

[17:02]

Now, if you want to finish the book of Trinity, you're going to have to do something like this. Because at the rate the winter branches is going, the speed it will change. I'm wondering if I'll die during the 40th koan or the 50th koan. Isn't that a great idea? I'm going to die in the middle of a koan. And all the winter blanches bloom. Blossom. I live in a fantasy world.

[18:15]

In any case, we can only do so much in the winter branches. But what we're doing is great. I find new boats all the time. Okay. So now that's stage two of the forest. And stage three is finding a path within the forest. A path between the trees. And you begin to, particularly if you have looked at several koans, there's several trees and in each koan there's a number of trees. When you feel not just the trees, but the space between the trees, the space made by the trees, you start finding a path. First of all, it's a path within yourself. And a phrase or metaphor from a koan can open up a path in you quite independent of the koan.

[19:47]

But once you start opening up a path in the koan, in yourself, This third stage is the path begins to be within a particular koan. to be within one koan, not just within you. So I would hope that you felt some kind of intimations or intuitions of a path in yourself during this seminar. But I also hope those paths have also wandered back, flowed back into the koan and opened up and you've discovered paths within the koan itself.

[20:51]

And paths, which I tried to show you yesterday, started in 4 and continue in 21. Now, the fourth stage of my forest-to-forest metaphor I'm sorry, I know I did understand that, but I'm not fully grasping the image of the forest of forest. Yeah, the forest to the forest. Yeah, still. Okay, we've started with a forest which is to look at the colon as a whole. It's a historical situation. The second is we find some trees. Okay. The third is we find paths within the forest. The fourth is we return to the forest as a whole. Okay. I don't know, I'm not very clear, but that's a lot. It's good that you make it clear, because if you don't understand it, they might not too.

[22:12]

Well, not the way I would have translated it if you hadn't explained it. Oh, good, thanks. They probably have many paths. I'll translate the metaphor again. The fourth level is the return to the forest itself, the forest of the forest. Of course, let me just say, English is not exact like Deutsch. I don't know how exact Deutsch is, but it's a lot more exact than English. And sometimes an English sentence, depending on how you say it, can have quite different meanings with the same words in the same order. Okay. So now we go back to the koan and we feel it as a kind of feeling whole. When we're familiar with a lot of its trees, we know a number of paths within the forest, and it somehow begins to affiliate with our own personal history.

[23:30]

When we pull on a tag end, we don't just necessarily pull up our own anxieties, we sometimes pull up a koan. Now, sometimes you hear it said, but if you understand one koan, you understand them all. Well, this is one of those nice things to say. Like one instant of Zazen is one instant of Buddha. Well, that's sort of true, but I wouldn't take refuge in it. I'd depend on it. A lot of instances go by where there ain't no Buddha in sight. Or that Buddha. Um... So while it's true that, let's say very simply, all the koans are in some sense about the two truths.

[25:19]

And we see it presented in various ways. And Otmar and Dieter both made telling points about that yesterday. The permutations of one and two. Okay. But if that was all there is to koans, then one or two or three koans would suffice. Why bother with a lot of koans if they all tell you the same thing? And it's true that one koan will open up other koans. But Really, there are so many koans because of this fourth point.

[26:24]

These koans are meant to be experienced as a whole. They're written that you can kind of grasp it as a unit. And it can grow into your own sense of history. Like there's certain books you may have read as a kid. I read a lot of Tarzan. And I'm still swinging through trees. Now it's Tarzan. Yeah, and I thought of calling Zen Tar Zen, but I decided not to.

[27:30]

Yeah, but as well as Tar Zen, I also read Proust so thoroughly that it feels like it's part of my personal history. And a number of other writers. But that capacity we have as historians shape history by writing history. Historians shape history by writing history. So we, I've begun to, it's almost like my, part of my history is these koans, the lineage. And I could be a lot more familiar with them. But to the extent that I am familiar,

[28:35]

I sometimes will see a koan and there will be a particular person in it, a protagonist. And one or two statements are attributed to that person. And I know immediately what lineage they belong to. So there is an important aspect of koans is to develop a sense of lineage. To draw a likeness, to create a model. So the koan then can be talismatically used To protect you.

[29:50]

To protect you sometimes from your own personal history, which may be kind of goofed up. So you're a home leaver creating a new home. Creating a personal history which has an infusion of wisdom. An infusion of wisdom not through philosophy, but through stories. Stories you can feel. But that participate in your own narrative. Okay. I haven't got to the new boat yet. Yeah. Now, one of the things I said yesterday, if you want to change your legs, it's fine, because we're going to go till 11.30, 12.30.

[31:11]

I'm just kidding. When you are... Yeah, I mean, you can loan your legs to him, and he can... Let's change legs. Let's count off. One, two, three, four, five. You get number five late. Okay. Now, there's a French philosopher. I don't know quite how to pronounce his name. Maybe some of you who know French much better than I do. Alain Badiou. B-A-D-I-O-U. Badiou? Yeah, okay. Okay. He's the only contemporary philosopher I know, or any philosopher I know, who deals with the world as appearance. The world as Interactive, interdependent appearance.

[32:34]

Well, just interdependence, okay. No, it's good. Interactive, okay. So, now, we're all familiar with this idea. But being familiar with it is not the same as it penetrating into our belief system. Into the assumptions that underpin our thinking. Yeah, as I started to say, I... I started to say, I said yesterday, how do I take something and when we have such embedded ideas, make it float within the embedded ideas.

[33:45]

You know, it's like a rocket. Within minutes, the boat is sinking. And if you have a river, and it's full of rocks, and you have a boat in it, and it's trying to float through the rocks, it sinks quickly. And Sukhiroshi's teacher told him once, I don't know, I've used this image before, Sukhiroshi's teacher told him there's a big rock in the air. And we don't see it. Like the elephant or the gorilla in the room, right? And we just walk around the stone. We don't see it at all. And we all are walking around a big stone. I would say that the most fundamental belief we have is that the world is composed of entities within containers.

[34:46]

And our normative consciousness functions through this concept. No, this is also their separate bodies. Well, what Badiou Badiou brings up the concept of not only appearance but multiple being Badiou brings up not only the concept of appearance but also the concept of multiple being I'm not sure do you mean beings or being as one being as multiple Simultaneously multiple.

[36:12]

Or multiple becoming. In other words, if there are no entities and all that is, is appearance interdependent, interactive appearance wechselseitig abhängige interaktive Erscheinung, dann ist was auch immer wir mit Sein bezeichnen, das ufert aus, das sprudelt über in die Vielzahl hinein. Maybe the idea of niche construction could help. All organisms create niches. Construct niches. In other words, they modify, change, transform their environment. And the idea is, I mean, the activity transforms the environment so it's more compatible to the organism.

[37:42]

And you can't really separate. There's no clear boundary between organism and niche. Organisms also destroy their environment. And after several millennia now, humans are big time destroying their global niche. Now, a niche is a concept of multiple being. Being and becoming is not an entity, being as condition, entity as activity. It is not being as entity. Being as condition. As a condition.

[38:44]

And becoming as an activity. Our entity ideas. We have something more like multiple becoming. is more accurate about what's happening to us at each moment. Now, how are we going to be open to multiple becoming? And also hold on to our own simple sanity. We have a sense of our own location and narrative integrity and so forth. Now this has been an implicit concern and even a tension within the development of Buddhism.

[39:46]

Das war so eine implizite Sorge und sogar auch eine Spannung innerhalb des Buddhismus. Okay, now, it says in the Koan, Im Koan heißt es, Tien Dong's verse emerges from the merging of subject and object. Yeah, I can't quite remember what the next line is. Let me just say, because there's a number of phrases, I've got so many different things in my head. It's not just ancient sages. you also can come from, you also can be the host within the dust.

[41:21]

And you can also be the guest from outside creation. Now this is interesting. Why doesn't it say something more like you can also from the dust be the host? Why is it not parallel in its construction? Why does it also say you can be the guest from outside creation? Where the heck is that? Okay.

[42:21]

Now let me go back again to... good people you can good people as you eat boil tea so sweep and sew um um uh Let the one who is not busy appear, whatever it says. Don't forget the one who is not busy. Then you will know the union of mundane reality and enlightened reality. Okay. In other words,

[43:21]

We're not so much emphasizing the one becoming the one who's not busy, who in the midst of situations is relaxed. Okay. The one who is not busy now is the union of mundane reality and enlightened reality. So the one who's not busy is understood as a kind of dynamic. It's not just, you know, on vacation. So we can try to think of the dynamic of the one who's not busy who joins the two truths. And then it says in the Dongshan progression, our lineage, this is called simultaneous inclusion.

[44:38]

Simultaneous inclusion. Yeah. Okay. Now, there's quite a bit about this that we cannot discuss unless we want all our individual boats to sink. Because I imagine some of you already have legs through the planks into the water. But I think I should bring this up to some extent. And I'll try to make it telegraphic. But I won't download. Okay. I try not to. Okay. What we have here is the sense of the importance of the concept and the percept.

[45:58]

And this is an emphasis of famous Dharmakirti. The precept and concept are different ontological being-related things. They're different. So, there's no such thing as raw perception. Even the idea of raw perception is already a concept. So Dharmakirti's point is perception always functions through the partnership of the concept.

[47:13]

And so you join perception to a concept. As I've said, zazen is the perceptual field of sitting itself. Joined to the concept of don't move. So the sense of simultaneous inclusion or mundane reality and enlightened reality is a concept of multiple being. It's a concept of how you bring alive as yourself appearance.

[48:20]

That's one of the things that joins these three koans, 4, 5 and 21. is this concept of mutual inclusion or simultaneous inclusion joined now in this spatial pause which brings us closer to or enters us in to things how they actually exist which is not as entities in containers which we can call ordinary consciousness or normative consciousness

[49:28]

but enters us into the progression of multiple being. So you feel yourself alive in a new way of proceeding in a kind of wholeness from moment to moment Okay, that's as close as I can get to getting this new boat afloat. I'm sorry we don't have one more day. But we have one more lifetime. That's lineage.

[50:40]

And if you have any tag-ins left from this whole week, this afternoon is the last time we can discuss them. Because I believe tomorrow I'm off duty. And you are each on to your usual duties. So, thank you very much. And thanks for translating.

[51:09]

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