Well, oh, good morning. Guten Morgen. Guten Morgen. I'd like to continue the discussion of yesterday late afternoon, if anyone has something to say. Yes. Yes. The subject of the seminar made me look at my motives to come here and question so often. Can you hear her? Not really, okay. The subject of the seminar made me look at my motives to come here and question so often. And... I mean... I have a teacher, I...

[01:05]

I love her and we have a deep connectedness and I'm very grateful that she agrees and she also supports me to be here but it is as Evelyn said yesterday it's just it's a house where you go for seminar or a session and then you leave and there's nothing like Sangha and I have a teacher who with whom I have a great love and connection and with whom I am also very grateful that she understood me and that she also supports me in that I can also be here. But what is somehow missing there is that it is also a seminar house where you go for a seminar or for a Seishin and then you don't live there. There is actually no Sangha And when I look at my daughter, before I was here, I was with her on two Vipassana places, and they even had a children's program, and she didn't want to go there anymore.

[02:26]

And here, the first time we were here for the seminar, it was like this time there was no other child here, and she wanted to come back. And she cannot say why, and she just says she feels very good here, and I think it's a saving in me. When I look at my daughter, I was with her before, before I was here in 2008. as well as PASANA centers, they even have a program made especially for children. And yet she didn't want to go there anymore. And the first time we were here at the seminar, there was no other child there like this time. And yet she really wanted to come back here. And she can't exactly say what it is, she just feels comfortable. And yes, I think it's the same with me. And Yesterday some people also talked about this, the difference, how different it feels sitting alone and with other people.

[03:34]

So yesterday in the evening session I explored how this feels in this moment. I think I can dare to say it here. It feels, I don't have any other words, it felt to me like being embedded in blue velvet, which is also transparent and permeable. And because the topic came up a few times, that it feels so different. And I always notice that, whether you're sitting alone or with others. So yesterday, when I was sitting at night, I just researched it a bit, how it feels. And yes, it sounds a bit strange. But it feels like being buried, like being enclosed in a blue sump, which is at the same time totally transparent and transparent.

[04:50]

Well, I don't think we want to put a sign over the zendo, blue velvet zendo. But after the floor is sanded in there, it feels a little like velvet when you walk on it. Well, thank you. I mean, I think everyone thanks you for being part of the Sangha. Of course, I don't know about other groups, so... Perhaps your daughter can't really explain why she likes to be here. We can't explain exactly what makes this a good practice place or not so good.

[06:02]

But, you know, it's partly probably just the fruit of experience. Many of us have been doing this a long time. Paul and I especially. So we've had experience in this group. We talked the other day about when we were at Maria Locke and then House Distilla and then here. And maybe the feeling of just being together and practicing is emphasized here more than we might, rather we're not trying to teach something so much as just be together and practice.

[07:17]

So I would say that perhaps our, I mean I'm trying to understand these things because I'm interested in how Buddhism will continue. in Europe and the United States. And maybe we can't understand it. but we can have a feel for how to practice with each other and so forth. I think we're lucky to have such a good relationship with our neighbors. But that's not entirely just our doing or when Gisela was here, her going out and meeting everybody and stuff.

[08:23]

It's also because Graf von Durkheim's center was here for years too. and a anthroposophical kinderheim. What many of you know was in, I think, 1911, the neighbors burned it down because was a heresy of some sort. But somehow through that background of this place is one of the reasons I thought it would be a good place to choose to develop a practice in. And also some of the teachers from here, when it was a kinderheim, and some of the students married the local farmers.

[09:29]

And it's not exactly the same, but Buddhism came into Tibet when in the 6th century the king... Strong Sangumpo. You don't have to translate that. Yeah, good. He united the warring clans of Tibet. And made some sort of military forays into China and Nepal. He ended up marrying two Chinese princes and a Nepalese princess. Who were both Buddhists. And influenced him. And then they were considered emanations of Tara. So maybe some of our farmer wives here are emanations of Tara.

[10:51]

They don't know it. But I know my daughter caused some problem here, a little bit of problem last year. Because, you know, most of the families around here are Catholic and they have above every bed is a cross. And she announced at the kindergarten that there was no God. And the other kids asked, how did she know this? And she said, well, I've been up above the clouds in an airplane, and there's no God there.

[11:54]

And so we were cautioned that maybe we ought to tell Sophia to cool it in her car. Someone else want to say something? Yeah. We have in our group, every person has told how they came to be here. In our group each person told how he came to be here and although this has been of course very different stories as a consumption I could say that several elements were important for each of us. And the most important for most of us was the teacher.

[13:07]

Thanks. And why? Because the different persons who are here are being touched by the same teacher. That creates a connection to the people or among the people who are here. Being here together and also cooking together gives this bodily consciousness. Yeah, awareness or consciousness.

[14:24]

And also important was that the people, either they were part of it already or they were being received by the people being here. And the presence of the people that have been so present here, being here or living here, is very important too. And also we talked about the small groups where we were being forced, and also appreciated it, and talking about these things among ourselves.

[15:31]

And this physical connection, it causes us to open up on levels where we otherwise wouldn't dare to have a conversation with other people. And this bodily connection helps us to open up within realms or areas where we normally don't dare to communicate or open up to other people. Yeah, thanks. Someone else? Well, let's say that what Agatha said is true.

[16:36]

But the... Let's say that the teaching is an essential part of what we're doing, of course. But the teaching isn't just me teaching. The teaching is a relationship. Now, I hesitate to say these things because I make something that's kind of sacred and rather subtle.

[17:44]

too explicit. And it's better when it's less conscious because it's more powerful when it's less conscious. At the same time, the ability to articulate something, if it doesn't fall into generalities, actually increases the power of what you're doing. Yeah. So it's very clear that, I mean, Tsukiroshi was Tsukiroshi when he lived in Japan. And many people admired him and he was... looked up to and had a few students.

[18:53]

But he really became a teacher when he came to the United States. And he became a teacher through having his teaching received And when it's received, it's almost like what he knows is hidden until you take the teaching off the top. Another teaching comes to the surface that you didn't know was there. And it only comes out through the relationship and not... you just can't take a teaching out and then another one pops up.

[20:03]

But if it's received, another one pops up. Or it's something like that. I haven't... thought about how to express it or find a good image or analogy. But whatever teaching there has been in this Sangha has developed through the Sangha that's here. A different sangha would have produced actually somewhat different teaching. And we've matured as a Sangha a lot in the last 20 years.

[21:15]

And that maturity allows... the level of the teachings to develop. So at some point, really the Sangha is, from the beginning, but more and more clearly, the Sangha itself carries the teachings.

[22:19]

Yeah. And it is quite clear that the Sangha itself carries the teachings to an increasing extent. It carries them on. Okay, you know, I, I'm, I'm, from the beginning I've, of my practicing in the, Yeah, even in the 50s and certainly the 60s. I've had a feeling of how this is going to happen in what's going to happen in the United States, how it might develop. And I had an intuitive feeling that I have to think about that, act upon that.

[23:33]

I didn't have so much of a conscious feeling. And I didn't see this as a process of writing books or being in the newspapers or something like that. So although I think it's probably been a mistake in some ways, I've always refused to have any media coverage. And in the early days when the when, you know, what we did was quite new.

[24:35]

You know, because I was about the only Westerner practicing with much visibility. A kind of BBC Timelife thing wanted to do a program on me. And the New Yorker wanted to do a profile on me. And this would have been some of the first kind of Western Buddhists presented in the media. And I said no to both. And NHK wanted to do something. Yeah, maybe so. I forgot about that. Think if I'd said yes, I'd be famous now. Anyway, I said, no, I told this guy who became a close friend of mine, Ron Eyre, who was doing the BBC thing, I said, think of yourself as bird watchers, and as soon as you get too close to us, we're going to fly away.

[25:50]

And I said to the interviewer, who later became a good friend of mine, imagine you were watched by a bird and if you are too close to the object, it flies away. I also was kind of rude. I said to one television person, yes, you can film me holding up a frame. And when you get in close to the frame, I'm going to put it over the camera and then you say, turn off your sets. He said, no, I'm not going to let you do that. Anyway, that wasn't very polite of me. But I did have the feeling of, you know, this is going to be about contact with people. So one of the things I did was Bill Thompson invited me to be part of Lindisfarne.

[26:56]

And he had this young son. He was educating Evan. Evan wasn't going to school. He was just learning, hanging out at... at Lindisfarne meetings. And now he's one of the leading cognitive philosophers presenting Buddhism to the academic and scientific world. And he was just at this conference in Rome. It's one of the reasons I because he and others I know have, you know, reaching into our society in various ways with Buddhist views and ideas. And I did much more of that kind of stuff when I was younger. But as most of you know, Lindisfarne ended up giving their center in the mountains to us for Crestone Mountain Zen Center.

[28:21]

Yeah, well... Let me just say something about the transmission of Buddhism to other societies, just so that we have some background in what we're actually doing. Yeah, I mean, Ivan Illich calls translators and people doing it, the frontiersmen or the ferrymen. And you may be mostly concerned, of course, with how practice can be part of your own life. But, you know, in China there were these kind of think tanks which went on from about

[29:23]

I think some of you know about this from about the second century in our so-called common era to about a thousand years later, 1200. And somehow the society thought it was so important. They almost always had imperial support. And there were sometimes as many as a thousand monks working together. And in the early days they a lot of Taoism was kind of the Trojan horse of Taoism was bringing Buddhism into Chinese society. And one of my personal decisions, again, has been not to let the Trojan horse of psychology and science bring Buddhism into our society.

[30:42]

And I decided also not to marry a Nepalese princess. So... So... But Buddhism is being brought into our society big time through psychology and science. And this influenced... I mean, they translated something like 35,000 volumes of... The most famous was Kumarajiva, the translator. And he was actually, the emperor abducted him from Gandhara, from Afghanistan, Kandahar.

[31:52]

And brought him to northern China and said, you're going to translate. And in Tibet, they... In the 8th century, this later king, because there was a lot of objection to Buddhism as a foreign religion, a later king brought in the head of Nalanda University in India and brought in one of the leading meditation masters, Padmasambhava. And certainly Part of the motivation wasn't only the teaching of Buddhism, but the philosophy, the art, the music, and so forth.

[33:07]

In China, it added 35,000 words to the vocabulary. And helped develop the four-tone system and so forth. Yeah. In Japan it was more individual monks, like practitioners like Dogen went to China and Chinese came to Japan. So we have a lot of fair number, a lot of Tibetans and some Japanese and Koreans and others coming to the West. And we also have this cultural transformation going on where Buddhism is deeply influencing psychology for sure and now beginning to influence science.

[34:24]

Now if we get somebody in the Bush family to marry a Buddhist princess, Anybody volunteering? You all look like Buddhist princesses. Paralyzed. No arranged marriages for you. Maybe next life. So there is a quality of, you know, describing these translation teams which went on for, as I said, a thousand years.

[35:26]

They functioned much in the society like our academic journals and scientific communities function. So the support for and the development of practice is a wide cultural phenomenon. But it's always rooted, for Buddhism, in the example of the individual teachers and the example of the individual practitioners and the example of the Sangha. The translation of the text does not bring Buddhism into a society, but rather it helps, but rather it's primarily the individuals who do it.

[36:34]

So I'd like to, just before we have a break, and I should try to, you know, on Sunday we end around lunchtime, right? Late lunch. So I should say something about the way Our meditation practice opens us to understanding or experiencing others as, let's say, simply Buddhas. Let's say it simply as Buddhas. I can experience you all as Buddhists, but it's a little harder to experience each of you as Buddhists.

[37:54]

But I want to say again, I think what I said yesterday about yoga, For Buddhism, yoga is not on a mat or in a class, but all of our postures are yogic. And I don't expect to be understood or exactly understood. what I'm saying. But I remember when I was in college, there was some kind of event in the Christian church on campus for various religions to do something.

[39:04]

When I was in college, there was a church on the campus and there was an event where different religions were supposed to do something. from various religions or priests were there. When the Buddhist came in and went up to the altar, he stopped and bowed to the Christ figure on the altar. None of the other religions did that. It was even in the newspaper the next day how tolerant the Buddhist was to bow to the Christ figure. But I don't understand it that way. He was just doing what everybody else did.

[40:10]

That was his situation, so he did that. When I practice at Daitokji, they bow this way. They bow from this chakra. So when I'm in Daitokji for two and a half years practicing, I always bow this way. And the way we bow, we bring it up through this chakra and then lift it into this space. And for a Buddhist, yoga is the context you're in to reflect in your body the context you're in, to develop the context you're in through your body. So if you go skiing, you wear a ski outfit. If you play tennis, you might have tennis shorts on.

[41:24]

I don't know. I wouldn't, but I don't know how to play tennis. And when you go into a church, if you're in a Christian church, you act like a Christian. It's that kind of thinking. Because in a yoga, you're not so involved in belief, or this is meaningful. The context is meaningful, not the specific bowing. So when I come downstairs, and we have a seminar going on, There's a certain invisible yogic architecture. Now I'm beginning to mean what I'm not sure I'm going to be understood. There's the building with our little anthroposophical motifs, not triangles. But there's an invisible, I would say, Sangha architecture.

[42:41]

And in each seminar, it's a little different. And when I come in to the space here, or when we're having a break, I can feel it. And I feel I'm almost in a kind of altar, which the Sangha itself is. And I feel it in my body as an invisible thing. shared space and that allows me to find something to teach so I really do think that we when we practice together, most for the most part outside our consciousness, which we can't really just call physical, but a kind of articulated space that extends beyond

[43:44]

and that we carry in our life and can feel. And it's closely related also to the way vows work and views work in us. how vows and intentions kind of gather our life together and gather even our friends and our family and even our friends and associates into some kind of invisible space, articulated but invisible space.

[45:06]

And this is the deeper meaning of yoga in the sense of yogachara, yogic practice in Buddhism. No, I've said too much, I'm sorry. But I want to try it out. Let's sit for a minute and then we'll have a break.

[45:30]

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