I vow to taste the truth of the love of those words. Good morning, everybody. Well, this morning I want to do what I've done once in a while before. Instead of giving a proper dharma talk, I thought I would share with you another one of my little essays that I sometimes write when I'm asked to write something. It's worked before. It doesn't mean it will work today. And just a little background on what this is. This week, Green Gulch City Center and Green Gulch are hosting two really interesting and important conferences. It's come to that, you know, in Buddhism now we have conferences, which is good, right?

[01:05]

Conferences means that people get together and they share impressions and ideas and they help each other. Different traditions, different groups, didn't used to happen, and now it's happening. So that's interesting. And the one that's going on now started last night in the city and will be today in the city and moving over to Green Gulch Monday and Tuesday is a group of Zen teachers from the Soto tradition in all the different lineages in America, Kenneth Roshi lineage, Maizumi Roshi lineage, our lineage, Katagiri Roshi lineage, all getting together, bankrolled by the Soto Shu church in Japan. It's nice of them, huh? And we're trying to re-translate into English with the help of a very good scholar, Griff Folk, re-translate into English the daily liturgy that we, you know, our different texts

[02:11]

that we chant in the hope that perhaps the Zen groups would agree to adapt this liturgy so that a Soto practitioner could go to any, like it is in Japan, if you go to Japan or whatever Soto temple you go to, if you chant the Heart Sutra, it's the same text. In America, every temple has a slightly different English version of the Heart Sutra and the meal chant and so on. So I never thought such a thing could happen that we would, I mean we haven't agreed to do it yet, we've agreed to translate it, but we haven't agreed to, everybody likes their own best of course. Anyway we are getting, it's very interesting to sit around a table with all these Zen teachers and say, well it should say this, no that word isn't right, you know, it should say this, so it's kind of fun. And then on Wednesday and Thursday we are having another conference, this one is a conference

[03:11]

with Buddhist scholars and different from all across the country and Buddhist teachers and practitioners. And the subject of the conference is scholarship or study and practice and how they relate and don't relate and help each other and don't help each other. So we've before have hosted scholarly conferences but we've never hosted a conference where the topic was practice and its relationship to scholarship. So I think that will be interesting and the paper that I'm going to read to you is, I've been invited to give a paper on this topic for the conference, I'm the abbot of the temple so they invited me, otherwise they might not get dinner maybe, they think. So anyway I was happy to be invited, it's a great challenge to speak to a learned audience

[04:15]

like that. So I'm going to today read you this paper that I'm going to read to the scholars so that you can tell me what you think of it. And I warn you in advance, it's a little long, so if we get tired we'll take a break somewhere in the middle, take a breather so to speak and continue, so relax. So this paper is called, On the Uses of Study, so here's how it goes, one, two, three, in what I'm about to say I have the feeling that I'm not going to be giving you any news, I'm

[05:16]

going to say what is simple and obvious, what is probably plain to everyone here already. It would be good to give you some news and I myself appreciate it when I hear news because it is more interesting, but in considering the uses for study in our practice life, how study relates to or does not relate to our inner experience as practitioners of the Way, it would probably be better to say what is obvious and hopefully true than what is news. One could further wonder whether this isn't always the case, whether in attempting to say anything true one is always saying the obvious, or further still whether there really ever is any news about anything at all that is truly news, or if it is news whether it is truly useful. But this is another question for another time. And it is probably not necessary for me to talk about the basic and apparently anti-intellectual

[06:22]

manifesto with which the early Zen school begins. These words that everybody knows about attributed to Bodhidharma who is a legendary founder of the Zen school to the effect that Zen is a school beyond words and letters, outside of the scriptures pointing directly to the heart of the human being without mediation of texts or words of any kind. Such notions as this are repeated endlessly throughout the Zen literature and the typical Zen story features a monk with a satchel full of texts on his back who is dumbfounded and awakened to the point of throwing away all his texts by an encounter with a Zen master whose crucial and usually brief word or doing takes this satchel-carrying monk immediately beyond all he has previously learned. This is the typical sort of Zen story that we've all heard about.

[07:22]

And it is also probably unnecessary for me to mention something that Zen writers, writers about Zen frequently mention also, which is the fact that despite this stricture against attachment to words and letters and concepts, Zen has produced probably the most voluminous of all religious literatures. So how can we explain this apparent contradiction? So, whether or not you believe it, or whether or not it actually holds up to scrutiny, I think that the reason Zen so strongly emphasizes the pernicious quality of language and learning while at the same time producing tremendous quantities of texts whose main burden is this very point, is that the tradition has in mind an alternative way of holding or understanding language and meaning, an alternative way that is in fact one of the chief contributions

[08:27]

of the tradition and one of its crucial acupressure points for healing the human spirit. And I do not want to say too much about this because there are other things that are more practical about this relationship between study and practice that I do want to speak about, but I feel like I have to say a little something about this point because it's very important and in doing so I will mention Dogen Zenji's famous essay, The Painting of a Rice Cake, a famous writing of Dogen, the founder of Soto Zen in Japan. In this essay, The Painting of a Rice Cake, Dogen discusses the well-known Zen phrase, a painting of a rice cake does not satisfy hunger, a painting of a rice cake, in other words, will not satisfy your hunger. And these words are probably from a Chinese folk saying but they were used in Zen to mean

[09:30]

something like, mere words, mere learning or representation doesn't end suffering and produce liberation, only experience beyond words and representation will do that. That's the real rice cake, is the experience beyond the words. But as Dogen discusses this saying thoroughly, even in his unique way, exhaustively, as only he can do, he makes it clear or maybe not clear but at least compelling because one is hard-pressed to say that Dogen ever makes anything clear. He makes it compelling that it is not language and representation that are to be reified as the problem, rather it is language and representation seen as distant and removed meta-experiences that have the power to comment on reality, which we think is the case, that language comments on reality, that's the problem. Now, language and representation or study as such, which is to say language, representation

[10:39]

or study as themselves complete and undistanced and immediate experiences as opposed to explanations or descriptions are perfectly fine. Well, as it is often put in Zen, live words, not dead words, are Zen words. And furthermore, in a startling way, Dogen argues, isn't all experience, in any case, mediated experience? Isn't all experience insofar as we can know it as experience more or less the experience of language, representation and learning? As he says in his essay, the whole universe and the whole Dharma is nothing but the painting of a rice cake. Human reality is realized from a painting of a rice cake and Buddha ancestors are realized from a painting of a rice cake. In conclusion then, there is nothing that will satisfy hunger other than the painting

[11:40]

of a rice cake. And there is no hunger other than the painting of hunger. The physicist Niels Bohr makes a similar point when he says in relation to explanations in language of physical reality, we must be clear, he says, that when it comes to atoms, language can be used only as poetry. And I say, I'm mentioning all of this even though I want to talk about other things, because this is the underlying attitude often expressed in the Zen tradition, particularly in Dogen's Zen, toward learning, representation and study, and it is the spirit with which I hope all of what I'm going to say can be received and understood. It is an attitude that recognizes the value of study and learning for untying psycho-spiritual knots, but also understands a danger in the accumulation of, misapprehension of, and identification

[12:44]

with learning, which will bind knots tight again. Another way of putting all this is to say that the Buddhist teaching or the Zen teaching, and I do believe, with others of my tradition, that these are the same. Not to say that Zen is the highest or best form of Buddhism, rather that it is nothing more than a radically simple presentation of basic Buddhism, is that, is an anti-teaching or an anti-language, Zen or Buddhist teaching is an anti-teaching, an anti-language, designed to free us from the bondage that our ordinary and inevitable relationship with language will create. So having said all that, as a preliminary, I would like to talk in a very almost practical autobiographical way about how I have actually found study useful in my own practice in teaching. And I want to discuss this from two standpoints. First, the uses of ordinary text study as

[13:51]

it directly relates to our experience as practitioners, and secondly, the use of scholarship or critical studies in conditioning attitudes for practice. So as to the first text study, I have always been a reader, and I have always taken my reading personally, which is to say, I try to take what I read to heart and to change my life based on what I read and understand. I read for pleasure as well, almost as a kind of exercise, just to read. I like to read no matter what. But really, this reading for living is the greatest of all pleasures for me. I have never been able to read romance novels or genre fiction. I have a hard time with newspapers and magazines, even Buddhist magazines I cannot read too much. There are several ways in which study has influenced

[14:53]

my practice. Most broadly, study inspires me. Dharma practice has its dry spells and rough spots, and sometimes it is hard to find in the midst of the weight of ordinary life. We often need inspiration, some bright light up ahead that coaxes us on. Quite often a dharma book will do it. It will get us to the cushion one more time. It will take the edge off the afflictive emotion that has got us stymied and spur us on to looking at it in an entirely different way. So study for inspiration. Second, study helps me to develop an attitude for practice. There is the saying, you are what you eat, and you also are what you see and hear and touch and taste and read. In

[15:58]

ordinary life we see and hear and read plenty that takes our mind and spirit in a different direction, in a direction we actually, we thought about it, don't really want to go. We fill our minds innocently with all of this, not really appreciating that we are creating a climate or an attitude that may run quite counter to what we want for our lives. The practice of reading sutras and other dharma books will help us cultivate a sustained attitude for dharma study. So that's the second one, a study for building up an attitude for practice. A third study, if it is surrounded by a spirit of actual meditation and liturgical practice, and quite often even if it is not, can lead us to real insight into the nature of mind. Although Zen professes, as I have said, an anti-literary attitude from the beginning, the Platform Sutra tells us that the sixth ancestor, the most important of all Zen masters,

[17:03]

was awakened initially simply by hearing a line from the Diamond Sutra. There are many other such stories in the tradition. I myself remember many, many moments of insight in study times, and you can remember the book, the look of the page, and the words themselves for a long time afterward as vividly as one recollects an off-the-page experience. In our Zen monastic schedule, as in the Catholic monastic schedule too, there is daily time reserved for study as practice. The Catholics call it, in a wonderful phrase that I learned recently, Lectio Divina. Don't you like that? Pronounced with an Italian accent, preferably. Lectio Divina. I often recommend to students who practice regularly at home that it can

[18:12]

be quite valuable to read a Dharma book in that way. Not for information or knowledge, but simply as a practice without goal or desire, just as one would meditate for a certain amount of time at a certain time of day, carefully and mindfully, even perhaps in the case of Lectio Divina or reading as practice, covering the book carefully with a cloth. As you see when I come in with my text, I have my little cloth, a sutra cloth for covering the book, and chanting before and after study so that it's a kind of a ritual. This is exactly how we practice here at Green Gulch and at Tassajara during study hall. I've always found this practice a really wonderful practice. Study period in the schedule at Tassajara particularly was a time of day that I always looked forward to, and I was almost never disappointed in study hall. When there are six or eight hours of meditation in the daily schedule, a little bit of reading can go a long way.

[19:13]

And the fourth use of study, which is probably the most useful of all, is study as nuts and bolts. In other words, reading the sutras and other texts as though they were user's manuals, carefully looking at them and adapting them and actually, to some extent, systematically putting them into practice in one's daily life on the cushion. Of course, the most obvious example of this sort of thing is the Zen literature itself, the Koan literature certainly, but also other Zen texts. Everybody knows, I think, about Koan study, which I think is unique, really. I don't know of another literature in world religious tradition quite like it. Stories of the ancients are memorized and honed down to a fine point so that they can become clear, almost non-discursive objects

[20:21]

of meditation. The idea is not to memorize and internalize a particular teaching like a catechism, but rather to explode beyond the story, to enter it experientially until the inside issues that are embedded in the story below the surface will become personal. This is a dramatic and colorful process quite often, so that what you can see by really digesting the literature in this way becomes quite vivid. Somewhat like this, but also a little different, is the liturgical study, which is used in Zen, but also in almost every tradition that comes out of language. Here you chant a text every day, or often anyway, with a spirit of concentration and reverence, not particularly studying the text for its meaning, but just chanting it over and over again, not really thinking about it particularly. But in the course of a day or a month or

[21:23]

a lifetime, words in this way, internalized and magnified and somehow made mysterious by use in all sorts of situations and repetition and all sorts of mental states, these words take on a kind of shape and color that can be quite unexpected. And I can remember many, many times in sessions and other times suddenly understanding a line, you know, boom, from nowhere, you know, understanding a line from the Heart Sutra or from the Sandokai text that we chant all the time, and lines that one may not have thought much of or been puzzled by all of a sudden can become clear. You forget, of course, but at the time they seemed clear. One of the most dramatic examples of this kind of thing in my own life was the time that I chanted the Heart Sutra when my mother died, on her deathbed as she passed away. I had, before this, chanted the Heart Sutra

[22:25]

probably thousands of times, and all those thousands of times were there at the time that I chanted at my mother's deathbed, yet the Sutra seemed new and full of reverberations of meaning that I had never experienced before. Among the different schools of Zen, Dogen Zen, our tradition of Zen, in particular emphasizes Zen not as a special school but as the essential Buddhism. So, as a follower of Dogen Zen, one feels full permission to study texts beyond those associated distinctly with the school, especially in the West and especially in the Bay Area,

[23:28]

with so many schools of Buddhism rubbing shoulders together, this is the case. And so my own study has included, in a primary way, much material outside of Zen, specifically and outside of Dogen Zen. Among texts that I have studied and taught extensively are the Mindfulness Sutra, with its very concrete and practical suggestions for how to meditate with the breath, the body, with the idea of death, with one's own thoughts and sensations and emotions. My study and reflection on this Sutra, which includes the many ancient and contemporary commentaries on it, has been very useful for me and also, I hope, for our students in some very practical experiential ways. There are many texts like this that I have used. I have studied a lot in the Digha and Majjhima Nikayas and derived benefit not only from the teachings that the Buddha gives in

[24:32]

those texts, which like the Mindfulness Sutra can be applied, but also I have learned a lot from those texts that have been of great use to me in looking, between the lines, at Buddha as a role model, a master teacher, as a personality. Although, of course, it is usually not practically possible to be the person that one is and at the same time to behave as Buddha did, it is certainly instructive to reflect on his behavior in many situations and to try one's best to take those reflections to heart. Then there are texts like the Vasudhi Magga, the Path of Purity, which give kind of almost like Buddhist encyclopedia of practice, which give teachings on a wide variety of topics from jhanic practice to moral practices to

[25:35]

emotional practices, like the Four Immeasurables that we have been studying lately. The four, sometimes they call them altruistic or social emotions of loving-kindness, compassion, and sympathetic joy and equanimity. The texts like this will give instructions for how to train in these qualities. I have used these and they have been enormously helpful. I have taught them frequently using the texts as well as oral teachings that I have received about them. Even texts like the cosmic, outrageous Mahayana Sutras, which seem like far-out poetry, I have found to have a nuts-and-bolts application with practices like the development of compassion and bodhicitta, which are attitudinal trainings

[26:41]

that can be quite crucial for practice. As a Zen practitioner, I try to approach and uphold all of these things and the many more that I have used and not mentioned with a spirit of non-literalness and non-clinging that I spoke about in the beginning, using words in a way that is beyond words or drops words, or at least one hopes is not too much caught by words, and one hopes at the same time is also not caught by the effort not to be caught. With a sense of flexibility and tolerance, alert as constantly as possible to the main point of what we are trying to do in practice, which is to be open and free, compassionate, accurate and warm-hearted, and avoiding as much as is possible the persistent human tendency to grasp at a fixed truth, one studies.

[27:47]

As far as I am concerned, this is the spirit of Zen practice and of all Buddhist practice, of all spiritual practice. And given this attitude, almost any text study can be useful, even genre fiction and romance novels and newspapers and magazines, even Buddhist magazines. We're doing okay. Let's take a break though. Let's take a three-breath break. Thank you.

[28:49]

So the next part is about scholarship, critical studies. So all of what I said so far, I think could have been said at any historical period. Religious texts have always been studied by practitioners and have always been used in the various ways that I have said that I've used them. But what is different, I think, about our period is the possibility of what I suppose you would call critical scholarship, an approach to study that could only have been possible after the scientific revolution and the establishment of the scientific attitude. All of the uses of study that I've mentioned so far depend to some extent on faith and surrender to the text. Critical studies, on the other hand, with their emphasis on philological studies, historical studies, detailed textual studies of all kinds, all

[30:13]

of which are founded on an attitude of scientific skepticism and experimental openness, not to mention the high social value in the West placed on originality, controversy and debate, this kind of study is something else. And there are many religious practitioners who, I think, with good faith and maybe a good sense, ignore such studies, don't like them, think they should be overthrown. And some of them have a definite dislike of such scholarship and see it as somehow antithetical to the practice. And I suppose there are some religious practitioners not only who feel that way in the past and certainly in the present who think that science in general is a bad thing and is the opposite of their study of religion or what they're looking for in their religion. And I think there's probably some merit in this view, but I don't share it myself. So then, how can one use this kind of study, critical

[31:22]

scholarship and so on? Well, first of all, I think the most obvious thing is that critical scholarship does correct errors and promote accuracy. And it also adds a sheer weight of information to a text that makes a tremendous density of interpretation possible. Of course, any text that we receive has passed through many, many hands, and in our particular case, many languages as well. With each passing of the text, there are opportunities for prejudice and error. It's a little bit like the game of telephone, you know, where you pass this little thing around a circle. The message that you get at the end of the line may be quite different from the one that was sent in the beginning. Now, in the case of received religious texts, this is not a simple issue of saying the message in the beginning was

[32:23]

the right one, and then everything since then is a distortion, because maybe the message at the end is a better message or a more useful message, or at least it's going to be one that takes into account all of the opinions and values of everyone down the line. And perhaps all the subtractions, additions and outright mistakes made along the way were important and fill out and illuminate the original message, which I think is the case usually in religious traditions. But even so, I think it's pretty helpful to know what the alterations have been, and to be able to trace the transmission of the message as clearly as possible, always aware, as it dawns on you little by little, that there is probably no entirely complete and accurate record of the transmission of the text, and that we will endlessly make new discoveries and refine our understanding of it. But these

[33:24]

refinements, as I say, usually add something important, and very often they will correct difficulties, things that are really wrong and need to be corrected. An example of this is the Platform Sutra, the Sutra of the Sixth Ancestor, that was translated early on in the West. And I read those early translations that were made from later versions of the text in the Ming Dynasty, and those versions were very polemical, and they put into the Sixth Ancestor's mouth a kind of bald statement that this so-called sudden method of Zen enlightenment was the real stuff, and the so-called gradual approach to enlightenment was totally wrong and even stupid, ridiculous. So reading the text a long time ago when I first read it uncritically, and this by the way is one of the problems with reading for living, as I was saying earlier that I read for living, one of the problems with reading

[34:27]

for living as opposed to reading for a living, as scholars do, is that one reads uncritically. That's a little bit of a problem. But I did read it uncritically, and I was completely convinced, and this was not good for me, to be convinced of this. I had many misadventures as a result of believing this. Later on, when I read translations of the earlier text, which were less corrupt and scholarly, you know, descriptions of the difference between the text and how they got that way and so on and so forth, this showed me that the Sixth Ancestor's teaching was a lot more subtle and complete than I had originally thought, and understanding it in this way was very improving for me. It helped me a lot. And this example, I think, is fairly typical, because the more that one subjects a text to the various operation of critical studies, about which I confess I know very little,

[35:28]

there's a lot of, you know, there's been a tremendous amount of effort and smart people turning their intelligence to this sort of thing in the last 25 years, the more this kind of study is applied, the more and more complexity of meaning is teased out of a text. And this has two different results, I think. On the one hand, there's more to study and more to appreciate and more, as I say, more depth. Layers and levels of meaning are revealed. On the other hand, all these layers and levels and depths also give rise, if you think about it, eventually to a sense that the text is fundamentally mysterious and ambiguous. And impervious to clear and definite interpretation, which can make you nervous. One becomes more and more thoughtful, and one hopes more and more humble, and less and

[36:38]

less certain in relation to any particular interpretation. And you can easily see why fundamentalists do not like this sort of thing. Because certainty is something that all of us certainly appreciate. And fundamentalists are people who appreciate it to a fault. And insofar as critical studies militate against certainty, they can be perceived as a threat or as negative. And a lot of people see it that way. But I've always felt that radical uncertainty in regard to all views, which is to say, again, an uncertainty appreciated as such and not an uncertainty that is poised against a background of desire for and belief in the possibility of certainty, that kind of radical uncertainty seems to me the essential

[37:43]

Buddhist position, or maybe we'd better say non-position. And this is, of course, the famous position of Nagarjuna in the Madhyamaka school of Buddhism, which is basic to all of Mahayana Buddhism. This is the non-position of the emptiness of all phenomena, the emptiness of all views. And so in this sense, critical scholarship, which might be seen to be corrosive of faith to me, only builds it up. Now, another aspect of this critical scholarship nowadays, as I understand it, and again I know, at least I have an idea of how little I know, which is useful, but I think another part of this is the detailed historical studies and social kind of things that are applied

[38:46]

now. Instead of the religious texts being sort of held up in the sky as if they were disembodied, you know, timeless things, they're now quite, the custom among scholars now is to place them in a historical context and see them that way, interpret them that way. These historical studies have dominated religious studies for the last 25 years or more, I think mostly under the influence of the French intellectuals, Foucault is really dominant in scholarly studies. And I think that this kind of study helps the practitioner become more realistic about the tradition in which she is involved. This is one of my favorite words, realistic. Of course a very impressionistic word, what does it really mean? When I say realistic in this

[39:46]

context, what I mean is something very specific in terms of the process of spiritual development. The opposite of realistic is idealistic, and idealism is a most natural attitude that arises for anyone who is practicing a spiritual tradition with any depth or commitment. You really have to be idealistic, I think. You become quite aware, this is idealism, right? You become aware of the huge gap between one's own understanding and capability in relation to the capability and understanding of great sages of the past. So this idealism, seeing this gap and wanting to go toward the ideal, is really important in the beginning for practice, because without it, you would have no incentive to begin the search, and there would be nothing pulling you along. So you need that. But at a certain point, it becomes counterproductive, and it

[40:54]

will play into, this attitude of idealism in this way, will play into what Buddhism identifies as the main stumbling block to awakening, which is our habit of self-definition and self-identification. As long as we continue to see the ancients and their teachings as profoundly other than what we ourselves are, we will continue to bind ourselves with self-denigration and suffering. So, for me, the word realistic, you see, is the opposite of this. A realistic view of practice and teaching allows us to recognize that as great as our predecessors and their teachings are, they are not fundamentally different from what we ourselves are, as we are right now. And one can easily see why sincere practitioners really don't like it, when critical scholars come along and show that the great sages are possibly or certainly

[42:00]

motivated by venal human concerns, as they often do. We don't like that. It's shocking. And definitely, the traditional texts and biographies taken at face value did not admit any such possibility. And it certainly seems as if this critical sort of debunking of our heroes will weaken faith and enthusiasm. But as I say, in my view, the opposite is the case. Maybe I'm odd, but I have always been encouraged to find that my idols have feet of clay, because I have feet of clay. And everything on the earth is made of clay. It all comes down to clay in the end anyway. So this has always been encouraging to me. I think this is put in our tradition, when you see the Buddha, kill the Buddha. Now I suppose one could say that historical critical studies can go too far in this attitude

[43:08]

and can fail to appreciate sometimes that all human behavior is not explained by economic or gender or power issues, and that we are not entirely products of what I believe scholars call the world of discourse, or the various discourses in which we live, which is a Foucault's term. It's a very smart term, fascinating and useful, but it maybe doesn't explain everything. But even so, this doesn't really bother me personally, because to me critical studies themselves are poetry and are to be taken with just as many or as few grains of salt as the original texts which they study. An example of this kind of historical study, again from my own study over time, is the changes in the view of Dogen. I mentioned Dogen earlier. There have been changes in the view of Dogen over the last 25 or 30 years

[44:12]

with all this scholarship. When I first started studying Dogen many years ago, that entity which was referred to as Dogen was actually, I mean I didn't think of it at the time, but it was clearly some sort of disembodied saint. You know, you never thought of Dogen wore underwear or something. You never thought of things like that. Dogen wasn't like that somehow. He was floating in the sky, completely removed from any historical period or any kind of issues of anything. That's how we thought of it at the time. And I never questioned this view. It was just, like I say, uncritically continued with it. But that view certainly conditioned how I would read and receive Dogen's writings. Now of course, thanks to all sorts of scholars and all their work, I know a whole lot more

[45:12]

about Dogen's context, maybe more than I would like to know, and the various problems and struggles that he dealt with. Although a lot of this is, of course, presumed and sort of detective work, you know, because there's no diaries or that kind of thing. In any case, we know a lot of that stuff, and I have myself a much fuller sense of Dogen, Zenji as a person like me, trying to make the best of the situation that he was in, and using whatever he understood of practice as his guide in doing this. And while some may find this discouraging, personally I find it rather cheery. One final point here in relation to this thing about historical studies, that I think I've

[46:17]

thought about for many years, and I think is particularly important to us as first-generation Buddhist practitioners receiving tradition from Asia. I think that this sort of scholarship, and again, this kind of scholarship is useful to us whether or not we read it, because it filters down. We get it. We all know it anyway, whether or not we actually study it. I think this kind of scholarship does help us with understanding and appreciating and being more clear about the process of cultural transmission, particularly from East to West. As Buddhist practitioners, we are, as we all know, engaged in a great cultural borrowing, maybe the greatest of all cultural borrowings, and it's very tricky. We are all deeply culturally

[47:21]

conditioned Westerners attempting to put into practice a tradition that is really thoroughly Asian. And although as practitioners we are concerned about our lives as we live them, and we're not particularly interested, perhaps, in the history of culture or something like that, still we cannot escape the fact that our religious understanding on an everyday basis is conditioned deeply by our often unexamined prejudices and cultural biases. And I remember the early days of interest in Eastern spirituality in the West, and maybe many of you remember those days too, 25, 30 years ago, when we all thought that the West was completely materialistic, violent, selfish, negative, nothing whatsoever good could be said about it, and the East was completely spiritual, non-materialistic, positive, wonderful,

[48:21]

exotic, fantastic in every way. Everything that came out of it was good. And there was certainly an idealization of all Asian spiritual teachers and a fascination with almost anything that they said or did or even the way they looked. And what we thought of as Asian was actually a particular sort of Romanticism that was entirely Western. But we called it Buddhism or we called it Asian. But it was actually a Romanticism that came deeply from some longing within Western thought. So we projected all of this Western Romanticism onto Asian things, and probably the Asian teachers, bless their souls, were completely confused by it. And I think because of this, there was a long period there when there were

[49:22]

exchanges and events that happened between Eastern teachers and Western students that seemed completely understandable and reasonable, but in hindsight were quite based on misunderstanding and cultural bias and confusion that we're only now beginning to sort out, and we still don't understand, I think. And critical scholarship, I think, really helps to sort of scrutinize these things and to help us gradually bring to light some of these cultural prejudices and helping to deconstruct our unexamined ideas. In the end, I think we are all coming to a view that honors the richness and the complexity of our world and of our personal situations. And of course, the more you think about it, the more you see that nothing and no one is exactly Eastern or Western, just as nothing

[50:27]

and no one is particularly free from prejudice and from positive and negative characteristics. And in seeing all of this clearly, little by little, I think practitioners have really been helped by scholars. However, in accepting it and putting it into practice, without becoming cynical or diminished in faith and energy for practice, I think we're on our own. So, that's the end. I think we did very well. Nobody fell asleep, as I could see, except Jordan, but he always falls asleep. So I don't count him. So, I appreciate your allowing me to read you these things. You see, it's very practical

[51:29]

for me because then I don't have to prepare another talk. And also, I think that it's kind of interesting to reflect in a different way, you know, on sort of standing a little bit step back. It's important, I think, for us to have these kind of reflections about our practice. I hope it helps a little bit. Thanks. This is also true with language itself. There's no difference. That a word, really hearing a word can be the same as hearing the sound of a bird. So language can be taken that way. And you can see the difference between that sense of language and the usual one that we engage in. So that's what I was trying to indicate. I understand that part. When one comes to critical scholasticism, that it seemed to

[52:31]

me that it was the, although seeking elsewhere, that it could, on the one hand, be a way to on this intellectual level, take you to the place of not being critical. And you were sort of talking about that, but also lead you to that sort of fundamental agnostic, intellectual agnosticism that's essentially Buddhist. Whereas just studying the text without that may not necessarily work. Yeah, that's right. That's the point I was making. That's the advantage of critical theory and critical scholarship. But you have to hold that lightly and take it with a grain of salt. Because people get in huge fights over the way that they view texts and they get into all kinds of arguments and debates and they self-identify with their work as

[53:34]

scholars and so on and so on and so on. So I think one has to hold it lightly and not take it with a grain of salt, like I was saying. It was very interesting to me the way you described Koan today. I was wondering, because I have trouble with Koan. I don't even know where to begin studying that, although I'm interested in it. Do you have any recommendations for someone who is in that position? Where to begin studying? They don't seem to have any inherent meaning. Well, I would forget about them. Seriously, I don't think there's any reason to study them. To appreciate the Koans, one really has to have an appreciation of a lot of other

[54:36]

things in Buddhist thought. If you think about it, and I've said this before, you think about this typical Zen story of the guy who has all the texts on his back and all of a sudden he hears a word from the Zen master and he throws away all the texts. Well, the part that we always notice is how he threw away all his texts. But the part that we don't notice is that he had them in the first place. I think that the story really does tell us that, that actually, historically, the Zen literature was a literature that came out of, it was assumed, a background in Buddhism, assumed a basic grasp of fundamental Buddhist teachings, Hinayana and Mahayana teachings, and Madhyamaka philosophy, and Yogacara philosophy, and then it was sort of like as if the Buddhist teachings were a jar with a lid on it, and

[55:39]

you had to have the jar and the lid on it, and then Zen comes along and takes the lid off. But if there's no jar there in the first place, taking the lid off is pretty meaningless. So that's why I really feel like, and this is not only true of Koans, but to me any studies in Buddhism, that what you should study is what seems meaningful to you. You have a certain karmic predisposition in your practice now. You're at a certain point, at a certain place. It's not a question of beginning, or intermediate, or advanced, or anything like that. It's a question of just one's life, right? This is where I'm at. And things that you study, you'll really get it. You'll say, wow, that's important to me. Something else you'll say, what? Who cares about that? And I would say that if it strikes you that way, forget about it. And I basically didn't study the Koan literature for years for that reason. I found it actually, it's another story. But there's something about it that's counterproductive. Because

[56:45]

if it creates the attitude in the practitioner, oh my God, this stuff is so enlightened, I'll never understand it. But the teacher understands it. This is not helpful, as far as I can tell. And the Koan literature is very susceptible to that sort of thing. And so, insofar, if you look at yourself and you see that that's the case, a lot of people are fascinated with it for just that reason, which is, I think, a little neurotic for some people. You know what I mean? Like, oh, what I can't understand, what makes me feel stupid is what I really love. The more stupid I feel, the better. No, really, this is not a good thing, it seems to me. But there are people, it's a little bit masochistic, right? So, I would say, forget about it. Who cares? I mean, the important thing is not, I suppose if one is a professional Zen or something, which is not a good profession to begin with, because how many jobs are there?

[57:46]

Professional Zen jobs, six? So, I would say it's not a good profession. But if one is a professional Zen, then maybe one has some, I should understand this stuff. I mean, I feel that way to some extent. That's why I'm now studying the Koans, because I feel like it's terrible if I don't, you know, I should know it, right? So, I have a sort of professional feeling about it. And also, of course, as I study it, I appreciate it, and I find more than just a professional interest in it. But if you don't have a professional interest, then the main thing is not that we have a professional interest, obviously, but that we have practice, that we have spiritual transformation and satisfaction and happiness out of our practice. That's the only thing that's important. And so, you study what moves you in that way, what helps. And then, of course, it changes. And then later on, or something else it is that you study based on what you learned before. So, I would say, in all honesty, not being flip or anything, you can totally forget about the Koans and not worry about them. And if

[58:49]

you are in your life, you may have to encounter them, whether you like it or not, in a Dharma talk or something like that. Then just, you know, sit and follow your breath and appreciate them as far as you can. And as far as it seems not so meaningful, just let it go. I really don't think it's necessary. If the time comes when it's meaningful to you, then it'll come and you'll enjoy it. You were talking about how useful you found it to study, apart from Zen literature, also hands-on how-to-do texts or practice and so on. To what extent is there a chance now, when Buddhism comes to the West, to sort of open up the strict Soto line into a more general curriculum, that it can actually draw to other schools to the extent that it helps the Western mind to open up to it? Well, that's exactly what we're doing, of course. We have a curriculum with six different divisions to it. And of the six divisions, Zen is one of them. The other five divisions

[59:52]

are not about Zen. One is early Buddhism and the life of Buddha and early teachings, including the Mindfulness Sutra and so on and so on. These are part of our curriculum. Another one is Buddhist psychology, where we study the Abhidharma and the detailed teachings of psychology. And the third division is the Mahayana Sutras, the teachings of compassion and ethics and so on. And the fourth division is teachings of emptiness, the whole literature on emptiness and Madhyamaka. The fifth one is Zen and all the Zen teachings. And the sixth one, the one that we just added as we revised the curriculum, is contemporary Buddhism, where we do a whole bunch of topics like women in Buddhism, ecology in Buddhism, social action, et cetera. A whole bunch of topics like that are part of the curriculum now. So we recognize that it's much more beneficial to study more widely than just our own school.

[60:55]

I was referring more to the translation of the Soto school and Soto texts, including at least general translations of Japanese to English, which are common. To what extent do you mean? Oh, you mean translation. Including and drawing on other schools and make that part of a Western Soto line continuation. Oh, I see. You're saying, in other words, that we were taking certain texts that are not characteristic of Soto in Japan and putting them in the Sutra book and stuff like that. Well, again, we have done this. Although we've only done it in our own group, we haven't tried to export it to other groups. But in our group, one of my, well, two things that I have been particularly interested in adding, which we've added to our Sutra book. First is, we chant the Metta Sutta every day, which is not a Soto Zen text, but it's now in our

[62:00]

Sutra book, because I think it's very important for us to chant those words, you know, just like a mother with her only child, so with a boundless mind should one cherish all living beings and so on. We chant that. And also, we've added to our dedication, chanting a hymn to the perfection of wisdom as a female deity, which is not in the Soto Zen Sutra book. And we also now chant a lineage of women ancestors, which is from the first, there's a book called the Terigata, which is a collection of poetry by women who were ordained during Buddhist time. And we chant all the names of those women every day now as a lineage, which is very unkosher in terms of Soto Zen. So we've done that, those two things, which I think are important. And we study a lot of other things, but I think it's, you know,

[63:06]

when you get into kind of like officially changing the religion, to me it's a lot more trouble than it's worth, you know, because all the conversations and debates and organizing, you know, it's hard to organize. I groan when I think about, you know, like for example, to try to convince the other Soto Zen temples that they should chant the Metta Sutta. It's like, ah, I've got other things to do, you know. You know what I mean? So, but little by little, things that are right, you know, I think do. So some of the people from, like maybe they'll come, they'll be here for this conference, they'll come, and this has happened actually, where they'll come to the Zen Do, they'll go to service, they'll hear the Metta Sutta chanted, and they'll say, oh, that's good, you know. So as we've gone to each other's temples, in fact, that has happened. And we're not the only ones who have made innovations, obviously, in the liturgy. And when we hear innovations from

[64:08]

each other, often we try to copy them and use them. So it's little by little changing. Oh, I'm sorry. You brought up Foucault. Are you referring to the book that's recently out on him? No. I can't remember if that book was problematic to that. Oh, no, I wasn't referring to that book in particular, but more to his whole opus, of which I know very little, a little bit. I get the general drift of what he's doing. I find it hard, my son gave me, who's studying this stuff, gave me a copy of, he wrote a something like three-volume History of Sexuality. And there's a famous book that is the introduction to the three-volume History of Sexuality, which my son gave me to read. And I was real excited, because I thought, oh, Foucault, you know, never read him. Interesting. So I read almost all of that, but I found it kind of boring, because the style of writing is

[65:17]

extremely prolix. He uses a lot of words, a tremendous number of words, and on and on and on. You read 20, 30, 40, 50 pages, and you say, well, this only amounts to blah, blah, blah, which is a good idea, but why did he have to say it in 40 pages? He's French. He's French, right. Yeah, I know. So I have a hard time reading. But I would like to, in the best of all possible worlds, if I had time to read anything, which I don't really, I would like to read, try, maybe I could get into it if I read more. But I haven't read much of Foucault, but I've read other scholars. There's one fascinating Buddhist scholar, who I think is going to be at our conference at the end of the week, named Bernard Four. He's a wonderful guy. He's French, right, and brilliant guy, I mean, totally brilliant. And he's completely digested, not only because he's French, the entire French intellectual tradition, and read all the great giants of it, but also is an expert in two or three Asian languages, and knows especially Zen literature inside and out.

[66:21]

And his sort of scholarly project is to apply the categories of French historical scholarship to Zen materials, which of course really burns a lot of people up in the Zen world. But I like it myself, because his idea is, well, if we're really going to have Zen in the West, then we should Westernize these materials, and we should treat them just the same way we would treat anything else. Why should we treat them otherwise? Why should we say, oh, they're Japanese, so we can't really criticize them? So he applies all this stuff, and it's very hilarious, and clever, and wonderful, and great to read. He's got three books that I would really recommend. And a lot of what I know about the French tradition comes from reading his books, which I've read about half of his three books. And Bernard Four, F-A-U-R-E, a wonderful person, and a brilliant guy. And then also, so many, almost anything you read now is contemporary scholarship, refers to Foucault, and if it doesn't refer to him, it's based on his methods

[67:25]

and his understanding. So one knows it, even if you've never read it, somehow, just like anything. We live in a Darwinian, Freudian, Marxist universe, and maybe we never read any of those people, but it's all in the air. We all know it somehow. It's typical. We think based on those ideas. And I think the same with Foucault, although it's taking a little longer. We're not quite there yet, but it's certainly shaping our way of thinking. I have a fundamental misunderstanding about koans that I've never asked to be heard. If one takes the koan and meditates on it, and you become it, your answer appears. But it's also my understanding that there are right answers. I mean, you go down the list and you pass these koans. How can that be?

[68:25]

Well, if the koans are really sort of fundamental structures of the human heart and the Buddhist teaching, then how could it be otherwise? Right? So, a subtle teacher will see the right answer in your answer, or not. So, my understanding is incorrect in that I think there has to be these four words, or these 20 words, or this one word. Right, but there has to be the… Right, right. So, there's many stories, for example, where someone comes in and presents the right answer. Those four words. And the teacher rings the bell and says, Wrong. Right? That's common. And then the person comes back years later after much struggle, presents the same four words. That's right.

[69:30]

What's the difference? Well, the teacher was subtle enough to understand that the person had the right words, but didn't really understand. And the converse is also true. Sometimes the person says other words, and with some probing the teacher can discover whether those other words mean these four words or not. So, it's a subtle thing. And you know from sitting that there's a tremendous intensity to the sitting practice and the doksan experience in that intensity. And there's this hyper-clarity that one can bring to bear to be able to ascertain these things. And, of course, there's mistakes also. There's mistakes. And also, any system is a system. There's no system that is absolute truth itself. It's a system that one hopes carries absolute truth, but it's not absolute truth. So, understanding koans, you understand them always in the context of a particular system,

[70:31]

and you have to organize yourself to play ball with that system. So, you have to conform to that system. And it takes a while, and then eventually with practice you do conform to that system. And then through conforming to that system you can understand something, we hope, that's beyond that system, that we're not stuck with a kind of narrowness. But one could also get stuck with the narrowness. So, that's how it really is. And what you're saying about how you have to get those four words, well, that's in a particular system. There are other systems of studying koans where it's not that way, where there aren't right answers, where there's no passing or not passing. That's more our way. There's more of a sense of not necessarily passing or not passing. My teacher described koans as a carrot dangling before you to inspire you to continue your practice. And the whole koan system is basically that.

[71:32]

Of course, so often we have our own koans that arise in our daily life that inspire us to do that, in a more direct way perhaps. Yeah, that's right. I think that the koan system that we usually think of, which is the one that was created by Hakuin Zenji and carried to the West by various teachers that we know about, that one is essentially a literary system. It's a system of understanding insights into the Zen teachings using these stories, and they do have specific meanings and so on. And it's a good system, but most of the teachers who would teach that system also understand that without applying those literary insights into one's life and understanding them in terms of one's life, it doesn't mean too much. And a lot of the teachers that I know who teach in that system have added an element to it,

[72:34]

which was not so in the Japanese tradition, but in our tradition a lot of those teachers will say, will have a dimension. You can't pass the koan until you can convince the teacher that you understand how this applies to your life. If you just understand the story, even though you might have a profound understanding of it, and you can't say when questioned what this has to do with your life, then they'll say, not yet. A lot of the teachers now, the good ones, do that. Yes? On the subject of koans, what's the role of koans in Soto Zen? I had the impression that it was expressed less. Not only studying Zen literature, but all sorts of Buddhist literature,

[73:35]

therefore we don't have the time to be only dealing with koans. That's one thing. And then the other thing is that even when we do deal with koans, as we do, we study koans also, we don't have an organized curriculum, we don't have the system, the doksan system that you need in order to move through koans one after the other. And so our way of koan is more like standing, like the koan is like raindrops. You sort of stand there and let the raindrops fall on you for one year, two years, five years, ten years, twenty years, thirty years, and after a while you're pretty soaking wet with some flavor and some feeling for the stories that comes out of your practice. Although you haven't said, okay, this is my answer, right, now I'm on to the next one, right. You haven't done it that way. You've just, over the years, studied them and heard them and meditated on them and appreciated them in a number of ways. And like I say, I feel like they're not as mysterious as they seemed when we first heard them.

[74:40]

They are, many of them, and there's different types of koans. Some of them are fairly obvious in a way, insights into the teaching that we could intellectually explain. Although explaining them and really putting them into practice are two different things. Others have no explanations. So they're all, there's many different. So anyway, that's the difference. So I always feel that, I feel like our tradition, we are not, at least I would say, maybe other teachers would not agree with me, but I would say myself that if somebody said, gee, I'm totally into koans, I'm really interested in koans, that's what I really want to study more than anything, I would say go to a teacher in one of the other lineages that focuses more on koan study, because I don't think, our lineage is kind of like a little stupid, not so, you know, koan study is very sharp and clear and all this. You know, our lineage is a little bit not so smart. So I would say that, you know, if that's your main interest, that you're better off

[75:42]

going to someplace that really has that clarity. And I myself have done that. I go to those other lineages to study. That's where I've studied, done a lot of koan studies in other lineages, which I appreciate for their clarity and so forth. So if somebody came to me and said, I want to study koans, I would say, well, why don't you go study with this teacher or that teacher, because it would be better. We have a lot of questions today. Is there a great deal of controversy about whether chant should be done in Japanese or English? And the reason I'm asking that question is that having grown up Catholic, I think I realized that, for me, the most powerful part of the Catholic mass, in retrospect, is the Latin.

[76:44]

Yes. And in English, it doesn't make it better. I know. Because it's about mystery. What you realize in there is it's about mystery. Now, studying the mass, I would want to do in English, perhaps, if I were a scholar. But experiencing the essence of the power of the religion, or that ritual of the religion, needed to be done in Latin. And I thought, well, maybe it's like a relationship. When you're at my level of awareness, they have to be two different things. Like in a relationship, you go from, I don't know you, so I'm romantically in love with you. I know you, so I'm not romantically in love with you. And I really know you, so I'm romantically in love with you again. And maybe if I were a true Buddhist scholar, I would be intimate enough in a new way with the material. So chanting it in English and studying it in English had the same, even more powerful impact. But now it seems to me, I try to say, emptiness is form, form is emptiness.

[77:47]

It's like I'm trying to say it up here, but not here. And if I did it in Japanese, anyway, you know what I mean. Yeah, well, most, we use both. And I think that we are committed to, like all the sutras that we chant, or sutra equivalent texts, are all translated into English. And we chant them sometimes in English and sometimes in Japanese. And all of the Dharanis that we chant, which are sort of like magical formulas, you know, we don't translate into English. We only chant them in Sino-Japanese, not even Japanese. It doesn't make sense in Japanese either. It's a Japanese attempt to say Chinese syllables, which themselves were attempts to say Sanskrit words. So it's a very odd thing where we're repeating phrases that are supposed to be in an original language, but they're not. They're meaningless, actually.

[78:49]

Although scholars have made attempts to translate the original words, which makes some sense, but not too much. And I think we have no plans to change that. In other words, what I'm saying is we use Japanese for some things, Sino-Japanese for some things, Japanese and English for other things, and this feels like where we want to be. We don't intend to never use Japanese words at all. And I think partly, you know, some religions have sacred languages. Like in Judaism, Hebrew is a sacred language. And although prayers are translated into English, somebody could argue because of the concept of a sacred language that you can't really pray in a Jewish tradition outside of Hebrew. There has to be Hebrew. That's not true in Buddhism. It's also true, like, say, in the Vedic religion and so forth, where the language is considered... I mean, there's a whole theory of this, right? The language itself is considered to hold the insights of the tradition

[79:54]

and they can't be translated into another language. And, you know, one knows that when you translate from one language into another, an enormous change takes place. It's not like you can literally translate this word equals that word. It doesn't. The more sensitive you are to language, the more you see that nothing can be translated ever. But there's a famous passage where somebody asked this to the Buddha. They said, shouldn't we be translating your discourses into the Vedic language, the language of religion? Shouldn't we be teaching in that language and shouldn't we be transmitting your teachings in that language? And the Buddha said very clearly, no, wherever you go, speak the language of those people. Translate my teachings into the language of those people. And so Buddhism doesn't have an idea of a sacred language. And I don't know, in Catholicism, was Latin considered a sacred language for the mass or just a convenient language? Do you know? I think it was the language of scholars. Yeah. It was the universal language.

[80:56]

Yeah, it was practical. It was the English of the time. It changed in 1960. After 1960, it was all done in the language of the country. Yeah, so apparently they didn't understand Latin as a sacred language. It was a convenience, you know, like in Buddhism. And actually, while I was in Chile, most of the people were very happy to understand. Yeah. Before, you were repeating everything and you didn't know what you were talking about. Right. Like a parakeet. Yeah. But then after 1960, when the mass was done in Spanish and the songs were done in Spanish, people felt happy about it. Of course, the opposite thing happens too, where I know in Judaism this happens, where people said, well, I really enjoyed the prayers until I found out what they meant. Now I hate it. It doesn't mean anything to me now. And I think a lot of Catholics feel that way too. I really loved the Latin. You know, all the singing, it was beautiful. And it had deep meaning to me. But now that they translated it, I'm out of here.

[81:58]

I'm going to go study Buddhism. But of course, not everybody feels that way. But there's a lot of, particularly Catholics, and also a lot of Jewish people who, you know, because of the translation, don't like what the texts say. It's like opera. Like opera, yeah. Yeah, right, opera has to be in Italian. Otherwise... Another aspect to it was, I mean, this is true of Catholicism, but it was the language of the elite, the educated elite. Yeah. And within a closed circle of the church, fathers and priests, and to keep the magic of it, the mystery of it, and the power of it, away from the common people, was a very important element. It was broken when the mass was translated. Which I think coincided with liberation theology. Yeah, well, it was a liberalizing thing with Pope John in the 60s. But I know I've heard many people say what you were saying,

[82:58]

that they missed the mystery of the mass, and there's a different feeling to singing the mass, I'm sure, in Latin than in English. Somebody over here. Yeah. Norm, what do the beads stand for? Oh. Well, they don't really stand for anything. I use them to recite mantras, and sometimes I forget about the mantras and just use them to remind, to stay present. Yeah. So it's very much equivalent, really, to rosary beads in Catholicism, where you would say a prayer, a little prayer with the beads and so on. Similar. Yeah. Yeah, on the power of the liturgy. Well, of course, I don't really know

[83:59]

because one would have to experience. But maybe you could say. You're from Europe, Hebrews, grew up speaking Hebrew. What effect, if any, would you say that the fact that in Israel, Hebrew is the everyday language, what effect does that have on the liturgy, though? In other words, what effect does that have on going to synagogue and praying in Hebrew? Yeah. So it doesn't feel like... It's analogous to Shakespeare's English. When you say those words, it feels like a different level of the language, not the same as everyday. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So being a Hebrew speaker, you could appreciate the liturgy more. Well, there you go. Yes, she's from Israel. Well, or maybe the problem is that the...

[85:07]

See, it's the opposite thing. I mean, if we were all to speak Chinese... In other words, when we translate, we're translating using... If we have impoverished English, we're now bringing down these texts into that impoverished English rather than the other way around. So she's talking from an experience that's from the other direction. Taking a sacred language and bringing it to the demotic, then you can appreciate the sacred language. But... See what I mean? So... I know, I know. That's an amazing thing. Somebody just decided. Imagine that, right? Imagine going in and saying, like, let's make this the language of this country. When it didn't exist, the country was a miracle itself. And then all of a sudden, it happened. So that is a kind of amazing thing. Yeah. Yeah, well, that reminds me

[86:10]

of Malcolm Margolin, you know? My friend Malcolm Margolin, who has devoted himself to preserving a number of these languages that are actually dying, right? So he's, like, publishing these books written in these languages that don't exist anymore, to preserve them, a number of Native American languages. And of course, what a labor of love, right? Who's going to buy these books, right? Who's going to read them? But he is... He's commissioning these translations and so on. It's amazing. Yeah. So that's a whole wonderful thing in itself, the idea of a language and preserving it. You know, just think of it, you know, where you get a language, and like some of these languages, the last two or three speakers of this language are living now, and they're in their 70s or 80s. That's the situation with a lot of the local languages from around here. The last two or three speakers are now living. And Malcolm is trying to, you know,

[87:11]

get them to preserve the language for future generations. Mm-hmm. Joseph. Yeah. Mm-hmm. [...]

[88:19]

Mm-hmm. Well, scholarship, you mean this kind of critical scholarship that I was speaking about? Is that what you mean? Uh-huh. Yeah. Oh. Yeah. Well, sure. I mean, in fact, most people who are teaching and practicing in temples, doing retreats, and so on and so on, are not scholars, right? And don't even know, I mean, much about scholarship. And, so Buddhist teachers, to me, it seems like, are entirely concerned with the heart.

[89:21]

I mean, not the whole person. I don't want to say the heart, but the whole person, not just the mind. This is entirely the approach, I would say, in Buddhist teaching. And Buddhist teachers do get together and discuss things, not with scholars. But we have many gatherings of Buddhist teachers of all sorts that I go to many formal and informal meetings of Buddhist teachers where the subject matter is not these issues that I was talking about today, but how do we practice together? How do we, what really works with students? What's, how can we meditate and all these kinds of things we talk about? So, I'm not worried at all about that side of it. I think Buddhist practice, as practice for the whole person, is certainly alive and well and thriving. I think. No, no, I think so. I'm not worried about scholarship taking over. Not at all. In fact, the reason why there could be a conference like this is because now,

[90:22]

unlike in the past, scholars recognize the primacy of practice. They feel that their, they feel and they hope that their scholarship will aid practitioners and most of them themselves are practitioners. Which was not the case before. Before it was considered to be unkosher if you were a scholar to be interested in the religion as such. You were only supposed to study it. You weren't supposed to be a practitioner. Now, that's not the case anymore. 50 years ago or 25 years ago there was lots of Buddhist scholarship but they would never have thought of coming together for a meeting with practitioners. It would be like, why would we talk to them? Except unless we were doing a survey of trying to get some sociological information about the group. Otherwise, why would we talk to them? But now, it's not like that. So this is a first in a way but it wouldn't be happening if it weren't for the fact that that's the case now. So I think it's the opposite of what you fear. In fact, it's all about practice

[91:23]

and not about scholarship heady kind of thing. Yeah, Del. I don't actually think he spoke in Pali. It was some other dialect. No, some other, close to Pali but I forget the name of it but another dialect. Well, I'm not an expert on this. I'm not entirely sure but I think, what I understand is that it was passed on in a variety of dialects in different parts of India that were related to

[92:25]

and similar to Pali and in Pali. That's my understanding. Yes. Translated from Pali. Latin was the language and then it went to various countries like France, Italy, Poland, Czechoslovakia, England, America and although it went through these different languages whenever there was any service done it was always Latin. But somehow in Buddhism that hasn't been the case. It hasn't been that anything sacred has been in Pali. It has been in Tibetan and Chinese and Japanese and now a combination of Japanese and English. I'm just wondering how the Pali got lost and how it's become these other languages

[93:25]

and it seems like every generation holds on to the language a little bit from the generation before. So we're holding on to a little bit of Japanese. It sounds like the Japanese held on to a little bit of Chinese but it's not that we're holding on to the original language. Oh, I see. Well, again, I'm not entirely sure I can answer your question because this is a matter of scholarship and historical studies. I only have a vague impression but my impression is that the Pali, see, I don't think it's the case. See, I guess I don't agree with your original concept here, which is that Pali is the language of Buddha and it's the original language. I don't think that that is actually the case. I think that from the very beginning there were a variety of dialects and Buddha didn't actually speak Pali. Pali was one of many versions. You see, the original Buddhist canon

[94:26]

did not exist in one version. This is the point. It wasn't that there was a version and then it was disseminated. From very early on there were versions, many versions. And the Chinese didn't get it from Pali. They got it from Sanskrit because Chinese Buddhism came through Central Asia and in Central Asia the language was Sanskrit or other, or a number of other Central Asian languages so that the Chinese in the first place didn't necessarily get it from Pali and there's a different, there's a number of Buddhist canons that are actually different in different languages and it never came to China from Pali. So the Chinese got it from Sanskrit and other Central Asian languages and they just translated it into Chinese and then the Japanese got it in Chinese. So it never sourced in the beginning from Pali through China. Yeah, Latin was not the original language either.

[95:28]

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