I'm sorry to have kept you waiting, but it takes me nearly as long to unpack as to pack, and I just barely got myself to hotohan before the lecture. But you had some extra tazen, which is good. Now, if I don't pause for translation, which I get in the habit of even in a couple weeks, a week of teaching. But if I do pause, then Christian Michal can just start translating into German. Some of you might benefit. You know, as I feel I'm... as effectively as I can, teaching, practicing with you, teaching and practicing with you.

[01:06]

And in Europe, too, and I... The winter branches is working surprisingly well. And it makes me teach a certain way, practice with you a certain way. But at the same time as I It's strange, the same time as I recognize what I'm teaching, which is really very much drawn out by my practicing with you here and there, I'm also faced with it, this is almost unteachable. How can anybody, how can it really be taught? Well, the phrase I use often is it's an autodidactic apprenticeship, which one way to express that is that, you know, I can suggest you set sail.

[02:10]

I can say, well, we think the world is round, but you're going to have to find out if it's round, you know. And, you know, I hear there's currents and winds and stuff out there, but, you know, depending on when you set sail and what point, what harbor, what life you set sail from. You know, you're going to find different winds, different currents. And I can't predict what those currents and winds will be. But there's a very big or profound dimension of practice is the existentiality of your own life. And so, you know, the ingredients, the winds and the currents of your own life are going to be much of what makes practice work for you. So in that sense, it's autodidactic in that it's dependent on the existential circumstances of your life, and it's also autodidactic in that you have to do much of the

[03:25]

study, teach, practice yourself. And that's one of the big differences with the winter branches is that people started studying and studying together and knowing each other's practice. And you begin to incubate your practice in the womb of the Sangha. Yeah, no, I spoke because that's what they asked me to do and in about the first, about the Bodhidharma koans, which is number two in the Shoyu Roku, number one in the Blue Cliff Records, Higigan Roku in Japanese. And I'd like to give you a little feel of what I spoke about because Because it's directly relevant to what we've been talking about in your help on the text of the book.

[04:37]

And I can't emphasize enough what a dramatic help you've given me. It's making it difficult for me to give you a text because now I don't want to give you a text without looking at it from the point of view of you as the reader, you as the audience for it. And because, you know, the audience I wrote for before was much more of a general, more general audience than you, and I feel, yeah, it's a, Actually made a dramatic difference, big difference to me. Thank you. So this koan is the beginning words of this koan, which probably all of you know, which is when you see smoke,

[05:44]

on the other side of the mountain, you already know there's a fire. When you see horns on the other side of the fence, you know an ox is there. When you know three, picking up one when you know three, and judging precisely at a glance, this is the ordinary food and drink of a patched robe monk or a patched robe raksu wearer now these are the first words of the first koan of the major text, definitive, but most definitive text of Zen Buddhism in China.

[06:54]

Now, the, you know, the Chinese learned to think about text through the Analects. Uh, and it's the basis for Confucius' teaching. And, uh, They're just a bunch of neutral statements, seem to be fairly neutral statements. The Duke of Zhou did such and such on such and such a day. That's all. It sounds like a kind of diary. But the way the Chinese have learned to read this is what's not said is first what you look at. What's interesting in this koan is the Buddha is not mentioned. So that becomes a big subject of the koan that the Buddha has not mentioned. And then, why say anything? If you draw something out of silence, what do you draw?

[08:02]

Well, these are the first lines, let's say, of Zen, of official... you know, Zen is here in China, these are the most important words. It's like that, some kind of announcement. I used to play the trumpet, so you know, I can't resist. And of course in those days words, not only do you have the context, of how words are used in Chinese culture, but you also have the fact that there weren't many books, and there aren't printing presses, there aren't, you know... Words or even a text is very precious. So we have to give some attention to this.

[09:04]

But how are you going to give attention to it if you don't know the context in which to give it attention? Now I've often said, in Buddhist thinking, there's no ground of being. Now, for us, we experience a ground of being often, but it's really the karmic fabric of our life. There seems to be always a karmic context for our life, and that karmic context we kind of, I think, experience as a kind of ground of being. But if we take these two or three sentences that are the beginning announcement then in China, we can think of it that way.

[10:18]

I'd like you to think of it that way, to give the kind of weight these words have. I mean, really, when you read the poem, you say, why did they choose these as the very first words? I mean, you've got to bring this thought to it to even begin to work with the koan. Why did they choose these words? And then what do they say? This is the ordinary food and drink of the patched-robed raksu wearer. Ordinary food and drink. Well, they can't make it more basic than that. I mean, without food and drink, you know, you don't need a roof over your head. And so much of monastic life is about the basics of eating.

[11:23]

Food and drink. Okay, if this is the ordinary food and drink, the way... Okay, food and drink. Food and drink. Objects and maybe a kind of flow even. The nourishment, the food and drink, the nourishment, these are what nourishes the ordinary patched road monk. Okay. Now, what do you want the first words, first announcement? If there's an announcement in the village square, the town square, it's supposed to be the truth. clearly they want these first words to be the truth.

[12:33]

And what are they about? They're basically about perceptual and inferential knowledge. Because if you see horns, you know there's an ox. If you see smoke, you know there's A fire. You pick up one, you know three or seven. It means to know the hidden dimensions. And to judge precisely at a glance. To know without thinking. To judge precisely at a glance. This is the ordinary food and drink of the pastoral month. So this is basically, starts out with what we've spoken about before, the idea of a pramana, or a prama is a knowledge event, something like that.

[13:49]

And a knowledge event, and the whole thinking behind the idea of pramana, which came into China much earlier and was, you know, Bodhidharma rec, rep, Bodhidharma rec, represents the kind of incubation of Buddhism in Chinese culture and his own incubating his own practice for nine years. It's not an accident that the number nine is used. And then around 1100, 1200, you have the compilation of these koans. about a thousand years after the idea of pramana was brought into China. So pra means something like perfecting and ma means something like cognition

[15:03]

And so perfecting cognition is prama. And the ana, when you add ana and it becomes pramana, it's the instrumentality of perfecting cognition. Okay. Okay. Now, it's instrumental in two senses. How you perfect knowledge. How you create a knowledge event. And it's instrumental also in what's the aim of it. And the aim of it is always, in Buddhism, to reduce suffering and realize enlightenment. So this says what we want to know is a knowledge event that reduces suffering and a knowledge event that leads to enlightenment.

[16:06]

That's... All other things are not so important from the point of view of Buddhism. It's what knowledge events do you have that lead to your enlightenment or your wisdom, your understanding? What knowledge events do you have? that lessen suffering. Okay. Now, so the first words of this koan when you see smoke on the other side of the mountain, you know there's a fire, is to say what the food and drink of the pastoral monk is, is a continuous stream of knowledge events. Which allow you to know at a glance, judge precisely, etc. Now the second part of this

[17:07]

Introduction takes you another place, cutting off myriad streams, etc. But hey, you know, we all want to get to the advanced part first. But if you're starving, the advanced part isn't going to help you. And this first part is the ordinary food and drink of a patched robe monk. Now, what I'm trying to do is, you know, use a koan like this to put you into the fabric of practice over time, over your lifetime, and over, you know, and in your moment-by-moment activity. And I would say, you know, if you really... You know, you read this koan, etc., and it does incubate in you for quite a while. I mean, ideally, if you read it carefully, with a sense of the weight of what it's presenting.

[18:18]

But the ideal practitioner doesn't even go to the second part of the pointer, the introductions. I mean, you go to it because you can read it, but really you don't go to it with the power of your... the currents and winds of your life until you've really got as far as you can in the first part. I say this kind of thing all the time. So in the first part, you really want to know what is this ordinary food and drink. It ought to be your food and drink. Okay. Now, I don't think we can go further in what I'm saying until we look at that there's no ground of being. And the consequences of that.

[19:26]

Now, some Buddhists or some proto-Buddhists or something, you know, they kind of accept the ground of being. And most of us, most Buddhism is taught as a kind of therapy to make you feel better, make your life work better. And you do it enough to have a feeling of therapy, but you do not give up your sense of a ground of being. And it's not because you're, I mean, you're attached to a grounded being. Mostly, you don't even know you're attached to a grounded being until your practice is pretty mature. You don't even notice that you're attached to a grounded being. But it's very difficult because our common sense view of the world, I could say also our consciousness sense view of the world, I could also say our communal sense view of the world, The world we've developed communally, the world we've developed in our consciousness, the world we've developed as, you know, the common sense world, it's unbelievably persuasive.

[20:28]

And not only is it persuasive moment by moment, persuasive, but you've been persuaded by it by 10 years or 20 years or 40 years or 50 years. Yeah, and it's how you've constructed yourself. It's how you construct your present, and probably more important, it's how you construct your future. And most of us, every action we take in the present is inflected by what we want our future to be. The idea of the Diamond Sutra, no idea of a lifespan, oh boy, is that far away from most of us. Each moment we're thinking, how does this lead to not to enlightenment or not to less suffering? Even if it leads to a lot of suffering, I want a certain future. So our life is constantly swarming around in the idea of a future for ourselves.

[21:33]

When we prove ourselves, when we make people realize what we really were when we were young and we had hopes or whatever we have. And it's kind of natural that it's this way. But it ain't wisdom. And it's nothing. And you'll be a hungry ghost all your life, hunting for something that you won't find if you base your life on an imagined future. Imagined through some sort of ground being that you have to realize, that you have to kind of make... Yourself understand what a good person you are other people what a good person you are or how it's okay or something So we have a communal Sense view of the world common sense view of the world a conscious consciousness sense view of the world and It has incubated us We shaped our life

[22:41]

through a common sense view of the world. And it is very difficult to even imagine a world without a grounded being. I mean, I think if we ever imagine it, it's at the moment of death or a serious accident or something like that. Because it's just not in the context of how we can imagine. Buddhism says It's when you can imagine this, no lifespan, no self, no person. It's at those moments that wisdom comes in. And it may be that's why when you do have a life-threatening, seriously life-threatening event, that people do have something like much of their life flashed before them. because suddenly all that life that flashes before you, it constructed you, but in the end, what was it?

[23:50]

Okay. So, imagine a modern car. The Toyota or the Ford. Imagine all its parts. How many parts does a modern car have? 10,000. I don't know. Some huge number. All its wires. The modern cars have all these computer parts. I hear the new Mercedes and the BMW have 700-page manuals or some unbelievably huge number of pages of a manual to know how to operate the darn thing. I know one person who turned the car and the manual back in because it was too complicated. Okay, so you have all these parts and there's some kind of wind tunnel here that can spin all these parts around, right?

[25:00]

They're all spinning around, all several thousand of them spinning around in front of you in some kind of special karmic wind tunnel. I've said one of the things that no grounded being means is all you've got is the parts. There's nothing that unites the parts except the relationship between the parts. Okay? There's nothing that connects the parts except the relationships between the parts. Okay, so let's imagine this car. There's a Mercedes, all the parts of a contemporary Mercedes, spinning in front of us. There's no way in, I don't care how many hundred billion years you want, those cars, those parts are going to come together as a Mercedes.

[26:08]

Unless somebody assembles them. No chance we'll bring those together. If there's a ground of being, if there's oneness, somehow all those parts would settle into the ground of being and become a Mercedes. But you know they're not ever going to be... I mean, if we go to Mars and we find rectangles and a bunch of rectangles we know there's some kind of very smart insect, or there's some kind of conscious, thinking, perceptual, inferential being. When they dig down through layers of earth and they suddenly find, hey, that wasn't made by a bug, that was made by people who think conceptually, because it's the foundation of a village. We know there's no way that chance flow of water is going to produce the outlines of an ancient city.

[27:17]

And not only do these parts, no matter how long they spin in the karmic wind tunnel, they're never going to become a Mercedes. They also weren't all created at once. It's taken, you know, a hundred years or so to produce these various things. If you had a 1950s car, it would be very different. So there's, in each of these parts, there's a whole history. These parts could only be spinning in front of you now. A car of ten years ago or even a year ago, different parts would be spinning in front. So each of these parts has a separate history. Separate science, separate technology. I mean, it wouldn't even be aluminum parts because there's almost no... Bauxite requires electrical processor to make aluminum. There wouldn't be aluminum. It's not found in the world until you make it.

[28:21]

Okay. Well, alone computer parts. Okay. Okay. So this is just an example for me to kind of, with no pun intended, drive home that there's no ground of being. Okay. So here's these parts. They're parts of the world and they're parts of consciousness. Now I want to use one more example because otherwise we'll be here forever. You've already been sitting a while. If a blind person comes into a room, imagine, you can imagine, it's utterly dark or you're in an utterly dark room. Let's just say, you know, these restaurants here and there where you're served by blind people in an utterly dark room.

[29:32]

I haven't been in one, but it might be interesting. But let's imagine you go into an utterly dark room. You actually don't even know it's a room. You smell. Am I in a kitchen? Is that water? Is it a bathroom? Yeah, a kitchen smells different. Even a kitchen that hasn't been used for a while smells different than a bathroom smells or even a living room smells where there's rug and stuff like that. So all you'd know is smelling, but then you'd listen. No sounds, but yes, If there's walls, the air is different. The sound of the air is different if there's walls than if there's no walls.

[30:35]

So you might say, yeah, I think I'm in a room. Pretty big room. No, no, not so big. Okay. And you can't see anything, but maybe there's a faint quality of light somewhere. I mean, you can think about it. So what does, what, in that sense, what is existing? Is there a room? You don't know. All you know is there's six regions. Six sense regions. Six sense regions. Five physical senses and mentation. So there's six regions. Now the adept practitioner, in a sense, is never in a room.

[31:39]

He or she's only in six regions. And if you know you're already in six regions, always in six regions, again, as I've been talking about in the book, text, you know that there's boundaries. You feel the edges of the regions. This is a very big step. If I'm sitting here talking with you, I know I'm in six regions with you. And when you have the... What the problem is, is When you have a sense of a ground of being, the six regions disperse into a physical world. They flow right into a physical world that exists outside you. So when you really know there's no ground of being, you always only experience six regions.

[32:47]

And you know when you let it flow into an externality, an externality that seems to be complete, but it's not complete, it's only six regions. So that would be one way to talk about the two truths, and that's one of the subjects of the main subjects of this first con, Bodhidharma coming to China, is the two truths. When you allow externality, when you allow your senses to flow into an externality as a ground of being, then you're in the conventional truth. When you actually have the actual experience of being only in six regions, then you're experiencing fundamental truth. But we have some idea of fundamental truth and external and conventional truth and some kind of head thing.

[33:55]

We don't actually, with our body, know six regions. Then how do you get there? Why do you want to get there? Why do you want to do that? That's another question. If I start this off to give Tayshia, it's all practice. Now let's imagine a musician. I think a musician, when a musician is particularly playing with others, at some point, I would guess, the reference point for the musician is only the realm of sound. The room, what people are thinking, the more, and particularly jazz musicians, you can feel when their reference point is only sound, and they start playing together in some kind of way, which is only determined not by any ground of being, but determined only by the parts, the musical parts.

[34:59]

the ear region, the sound ear, ayatana region. And the ayatanas, the ayatanas, the teaching of the ayatanas is about entering six regions, not knowing that somehow there's the ear and there's the ear, the object of sound, object of ear perception, and the field that's created. But to make the ayatana of ear your reference point, Not just something you know about, but your reference point. As if right now, listening to me, you had no other experience except being inside the sound of what I'm speaking about. And then hearing the teaching. And the teaching then becomes being in the ayatana of sound. But I bet your head's going somewhere. You're thinking about other things. Very hard to shift into this rough That's one of the things at one point it means me to really be able to shift into each of the six regions So the experience of the six regions is way one of the ways you end up with Well, let's say I've got to stop parsing consciousness I

[36:32]

Parsing the parts of consciousness. Parsing is a word, I think, you know probably, I think it's the same word in German, is it? Parsing? Like you parse the parts of speech in a sentence? Maybe not. But in English, when you look at, is this a noun, is this a verb, you're parsing the sentence to see what its components are. Well, mostly Buddhism, sophisticated Buddhism, is often or mostly taught with, well, you know, we can't take language for granted. We have to look at how language works, etc., when we look at the world. But really, Buddhism also says not only does language need to be parsed, but the components, the factors, the components... The constituents of consciousness itself have to be parsed.

[37:34]

What are the parts of consciousness? So now what we're talking about is consciousness itself is made up of parts. Can we be conscious of the parts of consciousness and then realign them? Construct new sentences which don't sentence us new sentences from the parts of consciousness From parts of these automobile parts So, what I'm talking about is how you really make the flow of perception into instrumental knowledge events.

[38:40]

Each moment an instrumental knowledge event. Now, I think maybe you understand what I'm saying. But then the problem is, why bother? Why would you want to do this? I suppose we should talk about that another time. Okay. Thanks. Maybe our intentions equally penetrate every place.

[39:27]

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