Well, to go forward or go along with this koan, we need to establish together a number of views, subtle views, rather subtle views. Yeah, but not so much because they differ from ours in general, but probably they do. But more because they're a different emphasis. And whatever we speak about in Buddhism rides on English or rides on German.

[01:04]

Yeah, I mean, you know, you sort of clear... the situation, then you put it on the language, like the horse of language or the horse of German, you know, and off it goes and it becomes what it was before you tried to get it straightened out. It just gets, it turns into what it was before you tried to clear, make it clear, but then you put it on the horse of language and it turns back into whatever... It was before you, you know, it's not very clear, is it? No, it's not. What do you mean it's not clear? Ideas ride on, are carried in the language.

[02:07]

And you make something as clear as possible. Maybe we try to do that today. But as soon as it's carried within each of us in the language, our language, it soon becomes what the language assumes it is, not what I intend. Mm-hmm. So a koan like this one, you know, which is really quite simple, the story, we have to kind of muse about for a while. You know, Dipankara Buddha lived, I mean, supposedly 100,000 years. And we're in this... immense sense of time.

[03:16]

Yeah, I mean, the regular Kalpas, 16 million years, I think. Das normale Kalpa, das dauert 16 Millionen Jahre ungefähr. Yeah, that's a few million years. And a great Kalpa is, I don't know, a million, a trillion, 300 million years or something like that. That's before the Big Bang. So let's call it something like deep time. So yesterday we had quite a I mean, I'm sorry I wasn't there for the whole time, an entry into practice as, yeah, biography.

[04:31]

And the word biography, it literally means the track of a lived life. You know, Sophia and I like the Teletubbies. And I guess our favorite is Poe. Once we rescued a blanched, blanched? Blanched means all the colors taken out, et cetera, by the sun. It was lying out in the mountain in Crestone somewhere in somebody's house. And we rescued it and cleaned it, et cetera. And when Sophia was here two years ago, not this last year, she found some little tiny pole on paper, reflecting paper, that was in a piece of candy or something like that. And I was going to throw it away.

[05:52]

And Sophia asked me not to throw it away. But anyway, somehow it ended up on my bedside table. And through most of the last year, I thought, why didn't I throw that thing away? And I thought that when Sophia came this year, I'd ask her if I could throw it away. And I thought, when Sophia came this year, I would ask her if I could throw it away now. But I forgot to ask her. So now it's still sitting there. But now I can't throw it away. Because it has a whole history. Every night I see it, you know, there it is in the home. Every evening I see it, there it is, and then I greet it.

[06:57]

And I think maybe Sophia put it on the bedside table to protect me. Yeah. Well, I guess I'm stuck with Poe. Well, the stick. Sukershi gave me the stick. And it's got a burn mark here. I don't know whether it happened when he had it or someone else had it. You can see the grain of the wood goes this way, but they've cut it into the grain of the wood. So a circle of the grain of the wood appears right here. Yeah. And it was probably, I mean, I don't know, but it might have been made for Sukhavishi.

[08:02]

But it might have been owned or used by several people over a hundred or more years. This is the level it's supposed to stand without falling over. Now, I have one that Joe Cohen made for me from Manzanita in Tassajara. But this has some history, like Poe. And this also represents the spine. And it's also a back scratcher.

[09:19]

Nobody bathed much in the old days. You sat in the hot, sticky sun, you scratched your back. So Sukhriya, she told me, it's a teaching staff because it reaches anywhere. So, you know, I'm supposed to be living in the here and now if this is Zen. But this isn't the here and now. This is used by lots of people. And this little, tiny... Luminescent Po is not exactly the here and now. Luminescent? It's kind of reflecting. And I told you a couple stories yesterday.

[10:22]

that led me or supported me in practicing. And as I was sure, many of you had similar stories. Yeah. Now, are these stories real? You know, the story about waking up, that I told you, waking up and thinking, I'm an American. And then realizing I didn't know what that meant. Probably 10 or 20 or 30 or 40 or 50 or 60 years ago, well maybe not 60 but 55, I would have told that story differently. Well, at least a little bit of it.

[11:41]

But it's lived in my memory, not as a false memory, but it's a real memory. But it's gathered... gathered understanding, sort of lying potently, dormantly in the alaya vijnana that I seem to... Yeah, et cetera. Okay. So now, let's... I'm trying to get at a very basic difference in our world view with Buddhism.

[12:52]

Now, from the Buddhist point of view, I mean, I'm making it very simple. This stick, this staff, this teaching staff is not real. It's existed for a lot of decades, but it'll sometime not exist, of course. But even whether it exists as a physical object, it still has no meaning except in its use. hat es dennoch keine Bedeutung außerhalb seiner Benutzung. Now, it is very difficult for me to even say a physical object. Es ist für mich sogar sehr schwer, überhaupt physisches Objekt zu sagen.

[13:55]

Because, I mean, I'm trying to say something that isn't in our human space. Weil ich versuche, etwas zu sagen, das sich nicht in unserem menschlichen Raum befindet. Yeah, I mean, photons are Higgs bosons. Yeah, what your disciple is trying to figure out at the Hadron Accelerator. So he didn't come because one of the... I mean, the thing had a broken part or something, right? The transformer exploded. Oh, God. Terrible. He couldn't come because... So he's trying to start it accelerating. What do you say? It's top secret. Oh, it's a top secret. I just saw in the newspaper a part broke. But if I say physical, physical means something that's alive.

[15:13]

And it means also healing. And if I say matter, I mean matter, that means mother. Or materia, something that's made, something you use to make something. And phenomena, of course, means known through the senses. So even in English, which assumes a reality outside ourselves, There's no word I can find in English that actually refers to a reality outside ourselves. So sometimes I say the... Elementary particles out there are right here too.

[16:25]

Anyway, external physical world is something and then the phenomenal world and our experience. Excuse me, can you repeat that? the external physical world, and the phenomenal world, which is our experience. So from the point of view of Buddhism, the emphasis is, if there's anything real, it's our perception of this. So if this is not real, and only my perception of it is real, then I'm in a world which is only activity. And if it's only activity, then within activity there's function. Okay.

[17:32]

All this is to say there is not a clear distinction in Buddhist thinking between dreaming, vision, samadhi, etc. If we use the word real, I mean real, real we can't usually use, but real estate, real estate is the most basic way it's used. Some piece of property that's actually out there you can buy. Es gibt eigentlich keine wirkliche Art und Weise, wie wir das Wort real oder wirklich tatsächlich benutzen können. Am besten wird es in dem englischen Wort real estate, also Grundstücke, Eigentum. Ja, Grundstücke, that's right.

[18:33]

Da wird es am grundlegendsten noch verwendet, also ein tatsächliches Objekt, das da draußen ist, das man kaufen kann. Okay, so, I mean, but I'm going to use the word real and say that Whatever you experience is equally real. It might be delusion, but it's at some level also your experience. Okay. So... they would not ask the question the way we do, is this story about Dipankara Buddha and Indra real? Now I suppose if Buddha adopted The Virgin Mary.

[19:42]

Adopted. How can you adopt the mother of us all? Anyway, say we adopted the Virgin Mary. And I believe, I don't know too much about these things, but I think over the, particularly in the Middle Ages, the Virgin Mary, the worship of the Virgin Mary, Mariology, the study of the Virgin Mary, all developed a lot And I suppose the iconography of the Virgin Mary would end up to look something like this scroll back there. I don't think the Virgin Mary would look like this lady here.

[20:47]

Yeah. My point is that If Buddhism adopted the Virgin Mary, it would be real because it's our experience, but not real because it has any external reality. So the Dipankara Buddha is real? Because it can be in our experience. Now, it's about as real as the Buddha walking along with Indra. Yes, and that's a different kind of reality than the historical Buddha.

[22:02]

Yes, but the distinction between the historical Buddha and a cosmic Buddha is not so big in Buddhism. You can have a relationship to a historical Buddha, you can have a relationship to the cosmic Buddha, and they can both profoundly affect your life. So this story calls forth, as we saw yesterday in my tesho and in your own experience, calls forth your own biography. And I said that the essence of Buddhist teaching is the encounter dialogue.

[23:03]

All right. But this Po on my bedside is an encounter dialogue. Because every time I go to bed, there it is, and I say, Hi, Sophia, thanks for protecting me, etc., Because every time I go to bed in the evening, I say, Hello, Sophia, thank you for protecting me. And recently she told me that she dreamed that when I came back from Germany, I would have a whole suitcase full of presents for her. Now what am I going to do with that dream? My suitcases are already full. Oh dear.

[24:24]

Now this stick is a dream? You have a different dream of this than I have a dream of it. It's reality isn't the stickness of it. It's because she gave it to me. It's got a burn mark on it. I've been using it for, I don't know, 40 or 50 years or something. So what's more real, my experience of it or the stick? When I come in in the morning when we're starting Zazen, This is an encounter dialogue, in a sense, something like that.

[25:34]

We have a bell, but it's not like a school bell. It'd be a little like if you were in a university class. When the professor arrived, a student rang a bell. Yeah, there's a schedule, yeah. But it's always shaped around people's actions. It's not about some sort of status thing that abbot or something comes in, you know, so then we ring a bell. It's really just that someone comes in and when that someone comes in, that's the beginning of zazen. So when I come in in the morning, I come in into the field of all of you, each of you.

[26:44]

And I become a different person at that time. I think of a, you know, sometimes I think a bad actor is an actor who plays a part. A good actor, I'm just making this up, a good actor is one who lets the audience or you play the part. They don't really try to play the part. They try to play the part so that a part of the part, which allows you to play the part.

[27:47]

Yeah. So this koan is something that we do mutually. It's not just that, could I play the part of the Gipankara Buddha or something like that. No, that's impossible. But maybe together we can play, discover this Dipankara Buddha, Shakyamuni Buddha, etc. So again, we have this little story. Which calls forth our own biography of practice. Yeah. Calls it into the present.

[28:50]

There's no biography of the present. There's no now-ography. Oh, good. Maybe there's a non-ography. Because you can't write down the present. So that's part of what this koan is about. What is the present? And in Chinese Buddhism generally the Buddhas of the three times are Dipankara Buddha, Shakyamuni Buddha and Maitreya Buddha. And in Chinese, it's quite general that the... Sorry, the three Buddhas of all times? The Buddhas of the three times, past, present and future. Oh, yes. That the Buddhas of the three times, past, present and future, are the Pankara Buddha, Shakyamuni Buddha and Maitreya Buddha.

[29:54]

Yes. So here again is this long... This koan calls forth our own practice biography. Put in the scale of a kind of deep, vast time. put in the scale, put in relationship to. Represented by Dipankara Buddha. And Shakyamuni Buddha. And even the top god of the Hindus, Indra. Okay. Now these represent some kind of reality for us in our experience.

[31:04]

Now this business about Shakyamuni Buddha spread his hair out like Sir Walter Raleigh. Yes. Sir Walter Raleigh supposedly took his cloak off and put it down in the mud for Queen Elizabeth to step on. Yeah, and he knew about Dipankara Buddha. So Dipankara Buddha supposedly said to the Buddha, Even though he lived eons before, he said to Shakyamuni Buddha, you're going to be the next Buddha.

[32:11]

He said, hooray! No, he didn't say hooray. No, he said, he spread his hair on the ground. He said, if I'm going to be the next Buddha, walk on my hair, walk on my birth, old age and death. Yeah, what does this tell you? What is this relationship of succession? So I get it sort of straight. I wrote it down here. When the world-honored one... Now we're back to Mr. Who, of course, from the first colon.

[33:32]

WHO. When the world-honored one spread his hair to cover the mud... And offered flowers to Dipankara Buddha. The lamp. That Buddha, Dipankara Buddha, pointed to where the hair was spread. and said, a sanctuary should be built on this place. Yeah, a sanctuary. In this world we live in. Which I guess is always in a bad shape, but Today's bad shape seems particularly bad to me because I'm living in the bad shape of this world.

[34:42]

And our job as bodhisattvas is to have hope in a hopeless world. How do we do anything really to make the world safe Wie machen wir, wie können wir irgendetwas dafür tun, um diese Welt sicher zu machen? How do we realize in ourselves this mudra of fearlessness? Wie verwirklichen wir in uns selbst dieses mudra der Furchtlosigkeit? It's said in Western culture, a man who is wise prepares for death. And philosophy is sometimes called the teaching that prepares you for death. So in this kind of world we live in, how do you create a sanctuary? And here, The Buddha does it, historical Buddha, or Shakyamuni Buddha does it when he says, I'll spread my hair that you can walk on on my birth, death, life, birth, old age, and death.

[36:16]

An elder known as the foremost of the wise... placed a marker on the spot. and said, the building of the sanctuary is finished. Poe is already protecting me. Well, then it says, the gods scattered flowers and praised him. Und dann wird gesagt, die Götter haben Blumen verstreut und ihn gepriesen.

[37:23]

For having wisdom while an ordinary person. Dafür, dass er Weisheit besaß, obgleich er ein gewöhnlicher Mann war. He was for most of the wise, but an ordinary person. Er war zwar der Verzüglichste der Weisen, aber dennoch ein gewöhnlicher Mensch. Then the koan says, the story Qianjiang quotes here And Tiandong, you know, is the compiler of this Book of Serenity. And he was a reviver of the Cao Dong, the Cao Dong school. Which had basically disappeared in China until Tiandong revived it. The story Tien Dong quotes here is much the same. I say the world-honored one's ancestral work was given over to Dipankara Buddha And then there was the elder getting it from the beginning.

[38:44]

He took it to the end. Now it is given over to Tien Dong who must produce a matching literary talisman. der einen passenden literarischen Talisman erschaffen muss. Do you have the same word in German, a talisman? Oh, okay. So this case is about what, in a simpler sense, what do you do in the present that transforms you and the world? I think you have to repeat that, I'm sorry.

[39:45]

What can you do in the present that transforms yourself and the world? So here it's Dipankara Buddha. Shakyamuni Buddha passing the ancestral work along and this elder too. Now it's Chendong giving us this koan who right now in this koan must produce something equivalent to this ancestral work. Okay. We should stop in a minute, or I should stop at least. You don't have to stop. Who are the characters in this story? Well, of course, Indra and the Buddha and the story and so forth are not real in any usual sense.

[41:07]

But we have Chendang who collected these stories. And then they were lost. And Wansong reconstructed them. And he reconstructed them really out of the urging of his disciple, Yelu Chuzai. Who was a Kitai, a Mongolic person from northern China. Who became, I think, a kind of administrative warlord under Genghis Khan. And he was credited with calming Genghis Khan down a tiny bit.

[42:10]

And he thought the most important thing he could do in his life was get this book published. And I don't remember. It took him 10 or 20 years to get one song to do it. And so one song reconstructed it, wrote the introduction, The commentaries on the case. The commentaries on Tiandong's verse. And then the interlinear comments on the poem. The interlinear comments. So they're characters in the story.

[43:27]

So this isn't, this is, they sort of made it, it's a team that made this group, this story. And they're using the story of of Dipankara Buddha and so forth. And we, you and I, together, not separately, you and I together are characters in this story. Yeah, and so McClellan asks, what is the ancestral work? What is the work or activity or view that will make the world safe? Safe now and somehow safe in the future. Is there anything more important to do?

[44:45]

This koan tries to put this in a big scale, but it's your actions. Yeah, I'm afraid I didn't make this as clear as I would have liked. But Dogen says practice is one continuous mistake. Okay, thanks.

[45:09]

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