My whole adult life at least has been a life of living in a sangha. And if the topic of our seminar is Sangha, we want to study the Sangha, we just look around us. Is this the Sangha? Now, you know, sometimes in the Buddha's time, of course, the idea of the three refuges was Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha was...

[01:03]

not develop the way it was after his death. And in his lifetime he emphasized, don't seek through me, seek through the teachings, seek through the Dharma. Don't seek through me, seek through the teaching, seek through the Dharma. And after the Buddha's death, you know, people emphasized of the three refuges, Dharma, Buddha was the most important, or Dharma was the most important. And nobody said Sangha was the most important.

[02:17]

Except me. Or rather, I think maybe Sangha is the most important. And as far as I know, historically, even where the teaching went very early in the country's areas of India and so forth. If there was not an established Sangha, it died out. So I'm asking you in this seminar to consider what is Sangha and what are your relationships to other people. And what kind of relationships... Do you have and do you want to have with other people?

[03:30]

And there's lots of books written about the Dharma and some books written about the Buddha, very few books written about the Sangha. There's information about the codes or what constitutes membership in the Sangha and things like that. But of course when you talk about the Arhat or the Bodhisattva there's an implicit understanding, recognition of the Sangha in such ideas as the Bodhisattva and the Arhat. For the field of practice of the Bodhisattva is other people.

[04:34]

Now, A sangha doesn't mean a lot of people. I mean, it might mean all people in some practice sense, each person. But a sangha in the sense of making decisions means two or three people together. making a decision can constitute a Sangha. And the ideal teacher is satisfied with... one disciple or one fellow practitioner. If you have a teacher who counts how many practitioners, maybe you better be wary of such a teacher.

[05:41]

Because, I mean, if you're a disciple, Do you want a teacher who says, well, it's nice that you're my disciple, but you're not enough. I need three. On the other hand, the ideal disciple is willing to share his or her teacher. Anders betrachtet ist der ideale Schüler wiederum bereit, seinen Lehrer mit anderen zu teilen. I mean, it'd be like friendship, you know, like, you're my best friend, but I want several best friends. So, I think if we try to understand Sangha not as... some rules from Buddhism, some rules from Buddhism, but understand it from our actual experience, then I think we start with friendship.

[07:05]

And how we care about and for other people. I know, I could say my sense of sangha... Yeah, I mean... maybe for some of you too, began in the Second World War. And perhaps could begin much more vividly for... Many of you are your parents in the Second World War. King Ashoka, who is the famous Buddhist king in India, he studied Buddhism. a kingship, the craft of kingship, and as part of that he was in wars, and in one particular war many people were slaughtered.

[08:38]

And he increased his power and his kingdom, but he felt terrible. Simply, as far as we know from history, and he's a historical a person. He thought there must be a better way. And he encountered Buddhism and decided to create a kind of Buddhist, much as he could, a Buddhist state. For me, I, you know, I had no such vivid experience.

[09:42]

I just listened to the news morning and night. And my parents listened to the news of the war morning and night. Every morning and every night. Not from morning to night. And I thought, if this is what human beings are like, I don't want to be one. So I was always looking for another way. And... Yeah, some at some point. So I studied a lot of different things, read a lot of different things. At some point encountered Buddhism. But, you know, I never thought it was a religion because I'm a very non-religious type person. I just encountered the teaching in various forms.

[10:49]

Yeah, and so when my sister, who turned to me often for help and... I couldn't help her and she had a nervous breakdown. I mean, what I was aware of is that I couldn't help. I could barely help myself, let alone her. So I decided I ought to look for a way to study Buddhism. So I moved from New York to California, sort of by chance, but also part of thinking maybe in California, you know.

[11:53]

I wasn't looking for the beaches, I was looking for a Buddhist. It just seemed like it was nearer to China and Japan. So anyway, one thing led to another and Actually, I was in a bookstore, George Fields' bookstore, and I was describing a samurai movie I'd seen to a friend who was a painter. It's strange that I was given my feeling about war. I was watching samurai films, but they were fun. So I was raising my imaginary sword and telling my friend about it.

[13:04]

And George Field said, he looked up, I had my sword in the air, my imaginary sword. He said, you should meet Suzuki Roshi. And I raised my imaginary sword to show it to my wife. And Josh Pierce saw it and said, you should meet Tzuki Roshi. So I put away my sword and stuck it back in. Oh, who's that? Who dat? He told me he's a Zen teacher from the other school. Yeah, I knew what he meant immediately because all the books on Buddhism at the time, D.T. Suzuki and others, were about Rinzai Zen. I think that night I went to his lecture. He told me there was a lecture that night. And he was the first person I'd seen from giving a talk, and I'd been to a lot of lectures in college and so forth, who was what he was speaking about.

[14:28]

And I'd only met one person before in my life. And I'd only met one person before in my life who there seemed to be No barriers to friendship or no barriers to acceptance. Anisit was a man named Shukrila Ali, who I met in Bandishapur, Iran, when I was working on ships. in the merchant ring. Banda Shapur. Yeah. And, you know, both in the living on the East Coast and then living on the West Coast.

[15:51]

Yeah, I'd also lived earlier in the Midwest. I'd met, you know, I had friends. I'd always had one or two good friends. But in friendship seemed... Extremely important to me, more important than anything else. But friendship seemed to be, you know, somewhat perishable. Sometimes, I don't know, you had good friends and then it changed. So I began to study what constitutes friendship, what is friendship. But this interest of mine, or inclination of mine, to consider friendship, to find friendship,

[16:57]

perhaps the most important thing on this planet. And somehow the opposite of war. But it is funny that, you know, if you talk to people who've been in war, often the ecstasy of the companionship Often the companionship in wartime is a kind of ecstasy and friendship that they never forget. So I began to have a more complex view of our human life than I had before. But my inclination to study friendship A basically Buddhist idea.

[18:19]

If we were going to say what constitutes a member of the Sangha, I would say it's someone who, at least one of the key aspects, First of all, let me step back a moment and say, for me, the key to understanding Sangha. Is to look at Sangha in the context of the three refugees. As three aspects of each other. One of the sayings in Zen is it takes a Buddha to see a Buddha.

[19:24]

In other words, something like if you're not a Buddha, you don't notice who else is a Buddha. This is a basic idea of Sangha. The Sangha is those who might recognize a Buddha. So Buddha, Dharma and Sangha are really three aspects of one wider way of being in the world. Yeah. And the Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha are called the Three Refuges.

[20:39]

Now, refuge isn't such a good word in English, but that's what we got right now. We can understand it as something like, what do you turn to when you're trying to discover how to exist? What do you turn to? when you are trying to understand how we exist. And we can also say it means something that's closely related to what you give attention to. Okay, so what do you give attention to?

[21:50]

Okay, so we can define the Sangha as those who give attention to a number of things. So there's a kind of phrase is to investigate And cultivate. No. Lots of people just live their lives. They don't investigate anything. They follow the rules of their society and think it's the way it is and that's it. I mean, everyone investigates to some extent, but it's not the main emphasis.

[22:59]

I suppose that underneath investigation is... Why do we live this way? Why do we harm each other? No. Why are we not satisfied in just being alive? If you don't question things like this, probably we would say you're not part of the active Sangha. I don't know. You know, there's the so-called noble Sangha, those who realize emptiness, and then the conventional Sangha, those who practice.

[24:03]

Yeah, I think let's not call it conventional, let's say the active sangha. I think that's more important. It's nice to have a noble sangha, but the active sangha. The active sangha are those who investigate their life. And in particular, for example, investigate impermanence, and cultivate the awareness of impermanence. And you can feel the difference in a person who investigates impermanence and cultivates an awareness of impermanence.

[25:18]

Yeah, and in the tradition it says, and I think it's quite correct, they investigate their energy and vitality. And cultivate their vitality, their energy. And they investigate the world as Well, we can use terms like impermanent and interdependent. But I would say more accessible for us. We investigate the world as a construct. Or investigate the world as an activity.

[26:29]

And investigate even our investigation as a construct. No, I was reading recently about an Indian chief called Plenty Koops. What is Koops? A coup is when you... A coup d'etat? Yes, like a coup d'etat, when you win something. It's a great name. You first wonder, what the heck is Plenty Coups about? What a strange name. You don't question... There's an eccentric side to Crestone. And there are some babies which are born in Crestone which are named the way American Indians are named, like

[27:35]

When the baby was first born, they saw a silver fox or something. So there's some kids named things like that in Creston. I always imagine a kid named Silver Forceps. The first thing they saw. Anyway, this guy, this Indian, Crow Indian chief was named Plenty coops. And then there's a beautiful photograph taken by Curtis of a Crow Indian with this long pole with a, like a shepherd's crook with feathers off it and stuff.

[28:42]

And this is just an anecdote. This doesn't pertain to Sangha particularly. But, you know, to explain why he was called Plenty Koops. The Crow Indians hunted buffalo. And the various tribes were always in some kind of jostling and competing... for hunting grounds, hunting territory. And to defend your territory, you had to be ready to go to war. But they usually didn't actually fight. They'd have one man fight another man. So they would establish a boundary.

[29:54]

They'd go and say, the two tribes would come together, all the warriors, I guess, and they would say, okay, this is our place, and if you don't agree with it, come fight me. So the person would put down his coupe stick. Sorry, we need a better word in German. Challenge stick, maybe. And they'd say, if you cross this line, you have to fight me. And Chief Plenty Koops won plenty of them. And he really... was the bravest leader and most successful leader of the Crow Indians.

[31:05]

But after the white people came, and killed the buffalo and brought disease and so forth, and courage... The main virtue of their culture was the cultivation of courage. And so he tried to change the culture and emphasized what people in Crestone do quite a lot. They go on a vision quest. To see if they can find some new way to put society together. And as I, what, I've read about this Chief Plenty Koops.

[32:43]

is that they lost the concepts which allow them to establish a narrative. And And the man who was writing about it said, it's not just that from some points of view they lost... the concepts which allow them to establish a narrative. But they lost any point of view. They lost a point of view itself. So Chief Plenty Koop says, when the buffalo were gone, my people's hearts fell to the ground.

[33:50]

And they were unable to lift them up again. And after that, he said, nothing happened. I mean, that's incredible. Nothing happened. For his point of view and his people, they had no way to reference anything, so nothing happened. They had no reference point. Now, here what I'm defending really is whatever culture we're in, we have to have some concepts to form a narrative that gives us a sense that something's happening.

[34:55]

And if you investigate your own way you're constructed... We have to have some new way of putting together a world. So I'm trying to speak with you, join with you, in looking at a new way to put together a world. Because in some ways we are all stepping out of our usual way of defining ourselves and our world. In the beginning, we're adding a new way, an additional way.

[35:56]

And after a while, this additional way begins to be in a kind of dialogue with our usual way, and transforms our usual way. And then how do we maintain our usual way to function in our society? Maintain this new way. And maybe we don't even recognize it as a new way. But actually, when you look closely or practice seriously, it is a new way. And that this is serious business.

[37:03]

To mess with the narrative of how we put the world together is serious business. So I want to be sure I present as much as I can, present the teachings in a way that gives you a hopefully even a more stable way to put your world together. So I started in this business about speaking about the chief plenty groups. When I said we investigate the world as a construct, and we even investigate our investigation as a construct, and we're aware and we cultivate the awareness that our own activity of perception is a construct,

[38:27]

So in a sense, there's nothing fixed. There's nothing you can depend on. That can be scary. But what are you going to take refuge in? So let's take refuge in a break. Not too long. Sorry. Well, you've been sitting half an hour, and now it's an hour and 15 minutes. Great practitioner. See, I'm concerned about you. Yeah.

[39:27]

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