It's a wonderful stormy day. Yeah, I wish it was snow, though. Probably some of you have to drive tomorrow. Glad it's not snow. It's always a little sad for me, too. You know, the last day or so of the... seminar like this. And I sort of think, please I'd like to go with each of you as an invisible practice companion. But Maybe I do to some extent, but it's kind of lonely too because you don't see me. But, yeah. And there's so many things in this world that are disquieting or... Disquieting?

[01:10]

Or much more than that. Horrifying. And we can't do much about almost any of them. Maybe we can change our government in the United States, but that's a... It'd be good, but I don't know if it... In the end, who knows what will happen. And I can't, like a medical doctor, kind of every day you help somebody. But at least every day I can decide, well, I should realize this practice as much as possible. Yeah. And, of course, realize it in a way that allows me to practice with others.

[02:38]

Okay, so now this koan, It's, yeah, it seems rather simple, almost cartoon-like. And, you know, of course... The most popular image in Japan, along with the fox image, Kitsune, is Bodhidharma. And he's often shown with no legs and no arms. His arms even fell off when he meditated so long. And he's usually shown without legs, but also without arms. So, you know, they make these various paper mache and wooden and so forth dolls.

[03:41]

Yeah, and probably you've seen them. And they're weighted at the bottom, and if you push them over, they sit back up. Maybe when I get older, I'll need something like that. There's that old Bodhidharma doll again. Look, he's But it's a cartoon also in the sense of cartoons are the first version of often great paintings. That's where the word comes from. So while this story is about imaginary people. Yeah.

[04:52]

I mean, there may have been an emperor, there was an emperor Wu, I presume, and there seems to have been a Bodhidharma. But they're treated so iconically. They don't have the sense of being real people in interaction like some of the koans about Zhaozhou or something. I'm sorry, I changed my legs. Oh, you did? Where did you put the other ones? I have to change mine sometimes.

[05:53]

Threat. Yeah. even though they're treated, I don't know where I was exactly, but iconically, without the kind of sense of reality we get with a koan about, say, Zhaozhou. But even if it is about, you know, sort of an imaginary situation. It's an unreal situation, let's say. It's one of the koans that's the most real in the sense of being most memorable. So it's very iconic.

[07:01]

Telling gives it a memorable reality for us. Bodhidharma meets the emperor. And if it hadn't been set back in earlier times, you know, you could get killed for implying the emperor wasn't perfect. In China, you could have been exiled at least. In a way, this is a very daring thing to do because it's saying a Buddhism is more real, more powerful than government, than emperors.

[08:11]

Now, Munen yesterday brought up Master Chi. Yeah, which is from the Blue Cliff Records. But he's in both koans. But he, you know, he's, in the story, he's a foil. I was testing, testing. F-O-I-L. A foil is when something is used by contrast to make better qualities in something else. you know, enhances. For instance, a pretty girl in high school who hangs out with a not-so-pretty girl to make herself look prettier is using the other girl as a foil.

[09:11]

He looks like he's had this experience. He used to hang out with the dumbest looking guys. Yeah, anyway, he's a saindava. Yeah, which is a word I talked about now and then, but certainly in Winterbranches 5. And Saindava means salt, horse, water, jar, and anything grown in the Hindust Valley. In which valley? Indus Valley.

[10:18]

Indus. Salz, Wasser, ein Pferd, eine Schale, alles was im Industal gemacht oder hergestellt oder gewachsen ist. So, you know, is it a horse or is it salt or is it a jar? It depends on the content. What it is, is it the horse, is it the bowl, or is it the salt, depends on the context, the respective context. And that means that you obviously understand it through and in the context. And what is that? a teaching of emptiness. So while this tawn is, you know, iconic and rather cartoon-like. How it's teaching and presenting emptiness is quite subtle.

[11:20]

Here's Master Chi who they say he actually died seven years before Bodhidharma is reputed to have come to And this is thrown in to show, to say, this whole story is made up. Das wird reingeworfen, um zu zeigen, dass die ganze Geschichte erfunden ist. Yeah, I mean, these two guys didn't even meet, probably. Und diese beiden Burschen haben sich möglicherweise gar nicht, sind sich gar nicht begegnet, vielleicht. Then it says, but what is the gist of the matter? Aber dann sagt es also, was ist sozusagen das Wesentliche der ganzen Angelegenheit? So Master Chi, he might have been, who knows, I don't know, some great master, I don't know, but in this con he's kind of Dumb bunny. Don't be fooled in these koans by who's called master and who's not.

[12:24]

And it says, you know, Emperor Wu should have just driven him out of China. So the emperor asks, do you know who that guy was? And the koan says, I don't know. I mean, the emperor answers sincerely, I don't know. And then it asks, obviously, is this I don't know the same as Bodhidharma's I don't know? That's a signed up. Things are relative. Yeah, look the same. And then the Master Chi says, don't you know?

[13:40]

That was the Mahasattva Avalokiteshvara. Don't you think that's a pretty obvious example of adding holiness to Bodhidharma? So to call him the Mahasattva Avalokiteshvara is to go against what this koan says, the point of this koan, emptiness, no holiness. So then again the commentary says, this emperor really should have driven him out of China. And this statement parallels driving Bodhidharma out of China by being so stupid, or not stupid, or sincere, or whatever.

[14:57]

And if we look at the Shoyoroku koan, Bodhidharma is both making mistakes and being successful. failing and succeeding. Sukhriya, she said once that you should have the strong conviction that you're going to lead your life beyond any ideas of success or failure. You diminish your life and the possibilities of your life when you start trying to measure it or think of it in terms of success or failure. He didn't say that, I said that. So now, when Master Chi said,

[16:02]

that is the Mahasattva Avalokiteshvara, this is a statement in this koan which is not true. So actually, when Master Chi said, I know, he actually meant, In fact, I don't know. Now, so is Master Chi saying he knows when he didn't know different than Bodhidharma saying I know and different from Master Chi saying I'm not knowing, etc., etc.? So... Basically it's showing that everything is relative. Relative in a particular context. Not absolutely relative. So... Because there's always a context. But...

[17:22]

Seeing that things are relative in a context is a teaching of emptiness. So in this book that Ed Brown did of Sukershi's lectures, teachings, not always so. There's a quite good section called Letter from Emptiness. And Sukershi makes use of the common Japanese word sho-soku. Yeah. Which means a letter from home. So he uses it as a... He turns it into a Buddhist term, which he calls a letter from emptiness.

[18:55]

In other words, he says, you know, you get a letter from home and you don't know really what's going on, but you read the letter and It makes you think of what's familiar to you. So you don't really know, but it calls forth lots of... So he's implying that many things we do are actually instances of emptiness. And we don't really understand them or hardly notice them, but something is called forth of emptiness. fundamental truth which is what he's implying is our home.

[20:01]

We could say that Christian's experience of the gruel at Crestone was a letter from emptiness. But it also says in this koan, you know, again, using Master Chi as a foil. What's wrong with him calling Bodhidharma Avalokiteshvara? Yes. Doesn't Master Chi know that the light of spiritual illumination or something like that shines forth from under his own feet?

[21:27]

So the koan says that Well, if Bodhidharma is Avalokiteshvara, then Master Chi is also. Avalokiteshvara. And then it says, which is the true Avalokiteshvara? We got two of them now. This is the same, putting the same idea forth, assigned ava or emptiness. Okay. Contextual meaning. And then it says, Avalokiteshvara is their legion. And this is the same point made in the first koan of the Shoyaroku.

[22:42]

It says, Manjushri struck the gavel and Mr. Hu, the World Honored One, got down from his seat. Then it says, Kashyapa struck the gavel and a billion Manjushris appeared. I only see 30 some. Yeah. And that's a story, if you remember from that koan, where supposedly Manjushri on a summer vacation started hanging out in the wine shops and brothels and stuff like that. Or at least doing something, you know, wasting money or something. Yeah, so... Mahakashyapa tried to throw him out of the Sangha.

[23:55]

When he tried to throw him out of the Sangha, a billion Manjushris appeared. This doesn't just happen with Manjushri. At Crestone right now, we have a kind of a dispute about which is the right project. And the proponents of the two different projects have their experts who say, this is what's right and that's what's right. And both sides think there's such a thing as called right. So they're actually rather antagonistic toward each other. Because the other Manjushri, or I mean Avalokiteshvara, is less important than the project. But, you know, I'm the Abbott, so I don't have to worry.

[25:06]

I don't care which project you do. I mean, if it's a totally stupid project, I might care. If it's just in between, I don't know. I sort of, well... Well, the one of you has the highest hierarchy. You get the choice. Hierarchy? It's not so different. In other words, what's the reference point? Emptiness means to see the world without reference point. Yeah, and again, Otmar mentioned the other day, direct perception. We can understand direct experience. direct perception as an expanded pausing for the particular.

[26:18]

So in the practice of direct perception you pause for lots of conceptually unassembled particulars. Did you follow that? In direct perception you pause for a number or numerous conceptually unassembled particulars. Now, how can I make it a little clearer? Say you're a plant biologist or a botanist or something. And you're looking at a plant or a tree or something.

[27:38]

If you really want to do research, you want to look at the plant as a conceptually undissembled bunch of particulars. in other words the basic thing here is you know most of these Buddhist logicians is that we normally, usually know an object through its conceptual representation. And there's some dispute whether you know it through the conceptual representation or you know it through the language representation.

[28:41]

Yes, I would say, if I was going to join this dispute, I would say, of course both, but primarily you know it through its conceptual representation. But in either case, the point is you don't know it directly. Now, when you hear an airplane, as someone mentioned yesterday or the day before, and you peel the name off it, and you just... hear the sound and hear your own hearing of the sound, like as I say, the music of the spheres, this is a letter from emptiness.

[29:50]

If you take the conceptual concept away from the sound, Peel the concept off and peel the name off. And I think you can fiddle around with this while you're doing Zazen. You can actually see that you name an airplane and you also have a concept of an airplane. Something's up there flying and somebody's getting their orange juice. You hear it differently. So when you hear it without the intermediary of a concept or a name, then you're having a direct experience of emptiness.

[30:56]

Emptiness is the sound, but it's not a sound intermediated by concepts or names. So we can call it a direct perception. Now letters from emptiness make you feel better. Letters from emptiness change you. If I drink, have water in a cup, say. I can drink some of the water and Empty the cup. Yeah. That's at the level of Master Chi and Bodhidharma.

[31:57]

But I can just by my way of looking at the cup before I drink I can empty the cup. And what do I mean when I say that? I empty it. empty it of any concept of inherent nature or permanent nature. So when I look at the cup and what I see is a full cup of water, I've emptied the cup. Because what I've noticed is its use, its interdependence.

[33:00]

I know this sounds stupid, but it's not. And then when I drink the cup, drink some water, I've proved its emptiness. Because it's no longer a full cup, it's now a half full cup. And In fact, it's a coffee cup full of water, so it's no longer a coffee cup, it's a cup full of water, so it's emptied of its coffee cup-ness. Now, this doesn't come naturally. You have to make an effort to do this. But it is the way things are. Nothing has a permanent nature.

[34:03]

We've got to find little silly examples. Airplanes and misused coffee cups. And keep noticing that they're empty of any inherent nature. And every time you do it, little by little, you empty yourself of some idea of permanent or inherent nature. So letters from emptiness begin to free you. Another example Suzuki Roshi uses in this piece, A Letter from Emptiness.

[35:16]

He says, things don't have scale. They're not big or small, except by comparison. So, my props. A stone. Mary had a little lamb. Two stones. It's nice down there. Going to be food soon? A hot drink? Anyway, this one is smaller than this one. They're obviously constructed. You can see their history, geological history.

[36:18]

But... This one isn't small. There's no scale of smallness attached to this stone. This stone is neither big nor small. No. If I put it next to this one, oh, it's smaller. This one is big. But compared to me, they're both small. That's when self-referential thinking comes in. We're always looking at things really in comparison to ourselves. We're always looking at things in comparison to ourselves. They were diminished as soon as I self-referenced them. And this one thought it was bigger. This one thought it was Bodhidharma.

[37:20]

And this one thought it was Master Chi. That's the teaching of this koan. Time to stop, all of you. We do have a seminar in the afternoon, is that right? So I can see all of you. This group is Avalokiteshvara, this group is Manjushri. And in between you guys can squabble.

[38:11]

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