OK, so if we look at Bodhidharma then, what I thought we'd do, I mean in a general sense, at least at the end of the last episode, before we go, I left you with this diagram too, and it gives the very phases. And today and tomorrow, I don't know exactly how much of this we'll be able to get through, but I thought we should start with Bodhidharma and that phase that's called generally Early Sons. Because Bodhidharma is, when we talk about origins obviously, he's very important, he's also a very intriguing figure, and what we do with Bodhidharma kind of sets up what we do with other later phases of Sons, or Zen. And this also, I have to mention that I'm teaching this large enrollment course on Zen

[01:03]

this semester. This is the first time I've ever done this. I've never wanted to teach Zen or Airhead, basically. I've always been afraid of advertising the course on Zen Buddhism and getting students who want to come in and paint little circles, and I tell them, yeah, I'll paint a little circle on your grade too. But anyway, we have this initiative, or whatever, we have this imperative at IU to build up our enrollment, and there's a particular type of class that they're having us teach, which is supposed to focus on, it's not a survey, it's an introduction to the study of X, but it has to be about critical thinking. And so we're supposed to teach the students, not to kind of dump a bunch of information on them and ask them to memorize it, but to somehow act as a catalyst so that students

[02:07]

will learn how to think about the material in ways that we, in our particular field, identify as good, critical ways of thinking. And the course that I'm teaching is called Electronic Zen, the Sound of One Hand Clapping. And this is ranked, how do you say this, purely, I mean, the name, there is meaning to the name, but it's an attempt to kind of use it, kind of capture as many students as possible. It's electronic because I have them do their assignments to create a website. Eventually, I'll publish the work that we do with myself as editor-in-chief and the teaching assistants and the managing editors and the students as contributing authors. I hope they contribute.

[03:08]

But the problem, of course, is that Zen is described as being irrational. Zen, in light of your experience, is considered something beyond the ability of words to explain or outside of human culture, which is what this course is about. And how do we go about exploring Zen or evaluating these statements using, quote-unquote, rational methods that we are supposed to be using in the university? So anyway, some of this material is, excuse me, some of this material that I'm giving you here comes out of this one particular course. And the notion of how do you explore a rational experience with rational meaning. One of the examples that I use for introducing them to Zen studies is the subject of Bodhidharma.

[04:11]

So if you look on the page after the earliest complete, non-linear statement, we have doing things with Bodhidharma's biography. And what I've given here first is straight out of the Encyclopedia Britannica. So it says, Bodhidharma, Chinese, Wei, Daoist, Chinese, Romanization, Da Mo, Japanese, Dada Ma, Flourish, 6th century AD. Indian monk is credited with the establishment of Zen, Japanese Zen, sect of Zen. And that's not so bad for a Greek definition. Because it says credited with instead of did establish. And that kind of nuance is important. I have particular problems with the word sect. To me, sect implies a sociological definition, an entity that has a group, that has members,

[05:12]

that has organization lists, that has specific daily, monthly, and annual ritual requirements that are placed on the members and so forth. I tell my students I'm allergic to the word sect. So we use like school or tradition, words like that, just to be a little more vague. A native of Kanjivaram, I actually have a student in my class who's Indian from the Middle East. And she says, yeah, Kanjivaram is a nice relatively small city in southern India. I was kind of amazed to have a student in my class who'd actually been there. But anyway, a native of Kanjivaram near Madras, Bodhidharma in 520 traveled to Guangdong, modern Canton, China. He was granted an interview with the young Emperor Wu Di, noted for his good work to the Emperor's dismay. He stated that merit applying to salvation should not be assimilated to disease. Then he went to a monastery in Luoyang where he said he spent nine years looking at a cave wall.

[06:17]

I don't suppose he was looking at the cave wall, but anyway, he was facing the cave wall. We'll get back to that. He's considered the 28th Indian Patriarch in a direct line from Gautama. He's regarded by Chan followers as the Patriarch. Because he taught meditation as a return to Buddhist spiritual precepts, his school was known as the Jnana Meditation Sect. The word was converted in Chinese to Chan and in Japanese to Zen. And it goes on, and then it says, the accounts of his life are largely legendary. According to one such story, he cut off his eyelids in a fit of anger after falling asleep in meditation. And they grew up to be the first few Chinese Buddhists. My students can recognize that this is a kind of garbled kind of image. Some things which are, I suppose you could say, are accurate. It says some things about all the words Zen.

[07:19]

I mean, it describes coming from the Indian word Jnana. But it's not a very good definition. I think this is not the Britannica's most shiny outfit, really. The interview with Emperor Wuji, presumably all of you have heard this story before. This is number one. And it's an old, it's a hallowed story within Chan literature, even before the Buddhist records. The literature before that. The story, but how about the eyelids falling off, and cutting his eyelids off, and then he couldn't see. Has everybody heard of that story before? That's something that my students don't run into quite so quickly.

[08:22]

I don't know where that quote comes from. One of my amusements with how, I mean, supposedly Shaolin boxing martial arts comes from Shaolin, and Bodhidharma is somehow involved with that. And I've recently gotten on a ticket of how this happened, or how this is presented within Liga flying. There's a lot of Chinese stuff on martial arts also. And the funniest line, this describes a baby. He's by a name of David, David's parodies. The guy who's the actor of Kung Fu. And he says, during his nine years of meditation facing the wall, Bodhidharma had trouble with muscle tone. Laughter. I would have liked to have seen that.

[09:41]

There was this, they did like a martial arts demonstration. There was an article in the New York Times just in the last few weeks that talked about that. I didn't know they were traveling around the world. No, I'm sure, yeah. Okay. Well, apparently Shaolin Temple, they said in this article, they get like 2 million visitors a year. I mean, mostly Chinese. And they have, I can't remember exactly the number, 80 students there studying martial arts. I don't know. Well, I think there's no historical validity to the association of Bodhidharma with martial arts. The earliest date, this book that David Carradine is, I'm going at this from back, back, back in the 20th century.

[10:51]

The earliest text that I know of to associate Bodhidharma with the martial arts was published in 1642. And it is on, it's some kind of muscle chain system. And there's a, this is not my discovery that it's from that late. I mean, there's a Chinese book, one Chinese book that the author, I can't remember right now. He gives five reasons why this couldn't possibly have been written by Bodhidharma. One of the incidents that's always mentioned is that the monks of Shaolin in the early years of the 7th century, so well after Bodhidharma was gone, they assisted the founder of the Tang Dynasty in establishing his reign. And that's a historical event that happened. But it doesn't mean that they were out there with bare hands. There's evidence of monks being armed in other temples in North China from a couple centuries before. I think if you're fighting on behalf of establishing a new dynasty, you're not out there with your bare hands.

[11:55]

And even if you were, that doesn't establish the connection with Bodhidharma. The point, the basic point here is that folks like me can look at historical documentation. And I can tell you with a certain range of accuracy, what seems to be reliable, what did happen and what didn't. And so I can give you, I think a reasonable, I'll tell you where I know something and where I don't know something. And I'll call that history. So the historical story of what actually happened, I'll label that history. I'll make the suggestion that we can say with, we can at least say what we know and what we don't know. And there's a lot that we don't know, but we can say certain things.

[12:59]

On the other hand, I'll use another shorthand and say there's legends. Which is a collection of stories about initial Bodhidharma. And we can look at how those legends develop. We can see how the stories about Bodhidharma accumulate over time. And how Bodhidharma gets transformed over time. Not fundamentally transformed, I think there's a continuity there. But how his image is built up in very substantial ways. And so with lots of things, I can show you how what's said in the legend is not supportable in the history. Okay, so McCrae's first rule of grand study is, it's not true. And therefore it's more important. That is, I can show you that such and such an element of the legend didn't happen. And I can't prove everything in every case.

[14:02]

But I can make a reasonable argument about certain events that are very important in the grand legend. I can argue with a reasonable claim of accuracy. That such and such an event didn't happen. But the fact that it's not true, historically, or not journalistically accurate, is not important. Or it's important only in certain ways. That the legendary reality, even though it's in a sense fictional, that that is more important. That's what is more important to generations of Buddhists. It's more important because it's precisely those inaccurate legends that are what motivate people to take up Buddhist practice. It's more important because those images are created out of this kind of collective Chinese imagination.

[15:06]

You heard that right. It's important because it's this, it's this, it's a kind of collective imagination. Well, I wouldn't say, yeah, I won't be... My sister's a union analyst, so I leave that up to her. Yeah, exactly. I'll say, so when I say it's not true and therefore it's more important, it's because this is the myth, or the legend, is how Chinese decided. This is how we have to see our religious history. It's from the psyche. It's from the psyche, yeah. And whether something or not happened in such and such a year, in such and such a place, in China, you know. It's interesting when we look at the kind of historical evolution. It's interesting to note that and to see the difference between history and legend and so forth. It's important in a different way.

[16:08]

But it's not the fact that I'm going to turn around and say, well, this didn't happen, that didn't happen, this didn't happen. I'm not going to say, well, I'm sure that one of the earliest scholars of Chinese then is 99% fabricated. It's 99% faith. It's precisely in the faith, the fabricated stuff, that we see what's really important to Chinese, and in the origins of Chinese. And Bodhidharma is a good place to start with that. Because if you can look on the next page then, what I have as the facts about Bodhidharma. Now this is, these are what I would say is probably what we know about Bodhidharma as a historical figure. And this, these different assertions about Bodhidharma are arrived at by putting together different sources.

[17:12]

And I'll come back, that's a kind of a problem. He probably arrived in South China by sea, came by the maritime route sometime before 479. And we know that because the text that's associated with him says he arrived in such and such a dynasty, dynastic area. And that dynastic area, the Song, was a dynasty that reigned, I think, from 420 to 479 or 480. So, okay, if he arrived during that regime, he arrived in the South during that period. He could have come by the more conventional route, he could have walked across Central Asia, or, you know, been in some kind of a caravan. I say that he moved to North China before 495, perhaps by 480 so. I actually don't remember why I have a, why do I have 495? I'd have to look at my book, I can't remember how I argued that it was probably 495.

[18:19]

But I do know that he was, well, we have reason to believe, let's say, that he was in Luoyang, a city in North China, sometime during the years 516 to 526. And that I would argue from looking at the various biographies that he probably died around 530. Now, the problem is, is that, well, okay, we'll go on to the next bit. We can probably also say he was a native of South India, because early texts can't describe him that way. He was probably of the Brahmin caste. He may have been a member, as he's referred to, as a member of a royal family in the South. I think that the assertion of the Encyclopedia Britannica to say that he's from Kandivaram is entirely unknown, or unlikely. And I don't actually have this established as a third rule of Zen studies.

[19:23]

But where you see information that's too precise, you know, precision should be used as a measure of inaccuracy. If it's too precise, it's probably not right. Second, I think it's fair to say he was a Mahayana Buddhist, which is not a big surprise. A meditation teacher, he seems to have focused on Luoyang. Let's see. He's associated with Mount Sung in early texts, and we have no really contemporary information to link him with Shaolin Temple. He had a small number of students. Yeah, we have... let's see. There's no contemporary, or the earliest evidence does not associate him specifically with Shaolin Temple.

[20:24]

He was buried near Mount Sung. He may have been associated with Mount Sung, but there's no real reason to connect him with Shaolin Temple. It's on Mount Sung, but there's other places there. Yeah, right. Shaolin Temple is one specific site on Mount Sung. He may have been there. But we don't... it's not a clear association. He was buried on the banks of a river. I think it is... it has to be... I have to look at the map again. Yeah, I don't know that story. Let me come back to that later. And then finally, we have this text that's associated with him.

[21:27]

It figures on the two entrances, the two accesses, and the four sides. Now... Correct. Why is it associated with Shaolin Temple? I think that he actually did not have any association with Shaolin Temple. So why did people feel that he had something to do with Shaolin Temple? Yeah, yeah. One of the things that we have to consider... These are kind of, what I would say, is the kind of bare minimum of what we could say about the historical figures of Bodhidharma. But there's a big problem with even saying this little. The notion of him being in Luoyang sometime during the years 516 to 526. There's a text about the description of the monasteries of Luoyang, that extols the monasteries of Luoyang. And Bodhidharma is trotted out as a foreign monk

[22:30]

who sees one of these temples, Yungling Asu, which is one of the most glorious of the temples of Luoyang. Apparently a huge and very beautiful temple. And Bodhidharma is trotted out as a foreign monk who says, I've been everywhere. I've traveled all over the Buddhist world. I've never seen anything as incredible as this temple. And Bodhidharma apparently stayed there for several weeks, quite some time anyway, panning namul, namul, namul, kind of being struck at how wonderful this temple was. Now, is this Bodhidharma the Zen monk? Why, you know, this doesn't fit our kind of image, even of a meditation master. He's kind of, as I use the phrase, trotted out. There are a number of foreign monks in this particular text, and they're used basically to validate how wonderful the temples of Luoyang are. Because they can testify that they've been everywhere in India and Central Asia,

[23:30]

and this is wonderful. The only detail that suggests, besides the name, that this particular Bodhidharma may be our Bodhidharma, is that it's described as having been 150 years old. And Bodhidharma is described in other early texts as having lived a period of 150. So, you know, what's going on here? We really can't quite tell. And it's really, it's in this article by Bernard Foer, Bodhidharma's Textual and Religious Paradigm, where he says, you know, scholars try to do this. We try to, you know, grab up all the data that we can and combine it together in a sensible way, and, you know, come up with some theory, some description, and so forth. And Bernard says, it's just not fair. Because we're really combining apples and oranges. And so this one little story that we use, well, this is Hu Sher's point about Bodhidharma. Hu Sher was a Chinese scholar who wrote in the 1930s and the 1950s about Zen.

[24:35]

And this is what Hu Sher, you know, argues. Because we have Bodhidharma appearing in this text at this particular time, that means he was in North China at that time. It could be. I can't tell you. But I will say that Bernard Foer's point that putting together an image of Bodhidharma from incommensurable sources is a problem. And I say that, if you've read my book or remember parts of it, the way I put it is, Zen studies in the 20th century likes to do what I call the string of pearls approach. That is, let's gather up all the information that we can about Bodhidharma and paint a nice picture of him. And we'll talk about his life, his teachings, and so forth. And then we'll move on and we'll talk about Hui Ke. We'll paint up a nice picture about him. And we do that one time after the other and try to say as much as we can about the individual patriarch.

[25:38]

And we end up with this image of Zen as a sequence of pearls on a string. And I say that that's not really to do real scholarship about Zen. When we do that, we're not really analyzing things. We're imitating that linear chart. Right? We're doing something like this chart where everything is homogenous. In this case, a beautiful set of pearls on a string. So Bodhidharma is too far back there. We can't say that much about him. What I will say is that in terms of the Indian and Kashmiri meditation tradition, Bodhidharma is an interesting case. You asked about esoteric literature. Bodhidharma is the last monk who comes from India in the western region to be identified as a meditation teacher.

[26:43]

He's identified in his Chinese historical sources. That after him, the monks who come after him, certainly they're well-trained in meditation practice, but they identify themselves as esoteric literature. I don't know quite what to make of that. But it's an interesting conjunction that somehow what gets started in Bodhidharma's name, a meditation tradition, Chinese meditation tradition, starts when the flow of meditation teachers from India and the west, when it stops. So you have Bodhidharma as the end point. You have Buddha Bajra and a number of other teachers coming before him. They were coming to him from the earliest point in Chinese Buddhist history, from the second century, teaching meditation. At the point when the flow of Indian meditation masters is cut off,

[27:44]

that's when he then begins. And I don't know what to say about that. That's a fascinating coincidence. That is that there's nobody after Bodhidharma, that I know of anyway, who comes from India or the western regions, the western general, who is identified specifically as a meditation teacher. There's a gap before... Oh, I have an exception here. There's a gap before we get people, but it's not until the latter half of the 7th century you get people coming in as esoteric teachers

[28:45]

in the beginning of the 8th century, in particular, the 700th century. And those esoteric teachers are very clearly, they're well trained in meditation practice, but it's a different style of meditation practice. I mean, well. You said that in Mahayana Buddhism, the end point of that practice is the same thing as Bajra. You can say both. Like, Zen is a constant practice in that sense, an esoteric practice. So I'm wondering whether that's why I thought of that as being a relationship between the two. Well, I would... I'd have to hear more about how you define Zen and Mahamudra if they'd be able to accept that. Why does Dharma exist? That's a good reason for me to disagree. I don't know. Buddha-Bob is a sweetheart. He's a sweetheart. He's a loud mouth.

[29:45]

I mean, at least he's got a loud mouth. Can you show us a picture? No, no, I... He's a sweetheart, but I... He's crazy. I mean, he's just crazy. Hi, Bob. I don't know. Zen was a tradition that already existed in China. There were many people who, by that, knew what Zen was. But Bodhidharma is the one that was traditionally a tradition of the entire Chinese community. My impression of Zen is that it's a representative of Zen,

[30:48]

and you can't say that there were Zen people who didn't know what Zen was. Yeah, well, that happens a lot. Lineage is mainly, you know, kind of tacked things down and simplified very... I mean, your lineage, your grand lineage, is an extremely complicated thing, but any range of connections is, I think, vastly oversimplified and fits back to the system of life. You don't only learn from your one teacher that you're identified with. We also learn from our teachers, and I think it's fairly clear that young masters learn from their students also. You had something to add, didn't you? Well, I guess it's partly the question about the community being very self-conscious, and that's really not the point, that's the important thing about learning and identifying. Yeah. And I don't know if you can answer that question, but I'm wondering if there's a fact that it's only likely not to have a

[31:49]

time, you know, to make you think about it. Is that a reflection of the fact that immediately, no matter who you are, there's a real tendency to see it as a feeling that the time is making you think about it a lot. And, or, is it a reflection of the fact that time is making you think about it a lot, and you think about it as a purpose, not necessarily a characteristic of your business. I'd say yes to the first, and no to the second. I think that there's... Well, it depends. A lot of people get called genji, and that's not limited to the genji school at all, and certainly not by the 8th century. A lot of people can be called genji, or tanji, even though they're not in the tanji school. So, and by the year 700 or 750 or whatever, tan was about, but the name was not that well settled yet. Greer's focus, actually, is far more restrictive than I am

[32:51]

on when tan becomes an identifiable entity. He wants to define it as a school that only happens in the 10th century, and later. And I think that's not quite fair, that we can see something developing that we despair to identify as a tanji. I would say that with regard to esoteric Buddhism, that there's a potential crossover in the... I would say that one of the fundamental characteristics of esoteric Buddhist meditation is, well, deity yoga. It's a relational type of practice where you visualize a deity and then join yourself with that deity. So there's a sense of relationship with a kind of a visualized image, perhaps. But that sense of relationship is profoundly important to tan. Profoundly. And that's what I'm going to hopefully be able to argue for the rest of this afternoon and more tomorrow. That that relationship and encounter...

[33:55]

When you talk about encounter dialogue, the kind of language, the way that masters and students interact, that encounter, I think, is profoundly important to how tan works. It's also profoundly... genealogical. It's done as a genealogical practice. The lineage... Genealogy is not only a way of identifying the history of things, but it shows something very basic about how zen is practiced, by interacting with things, teaching, teaching. I'll come back to that. What I would say, rather than... And we can come back also to Bodhidharma, the mythology surrounding Bodhidharma. But let me say how I would describe Bodhidharma and his time, sort of. Let's take these facts, quote-unquote facts that I put together, and accept them as reasonable or not.

[35:00]

That Bodhidharma was the guy who came over from India around this time, hung out in the north. We think of North China as being more interested in meditative practice than in doctrine. There were other meditation teachers around. Perhaps Bodhidharma did have a unique style, either personal style or doctrinal style. It's certainly possible that he did, and it may be reasonable to think that he really did. But it seems to me that the important figure in his community was actually not so much Bodhidharma, but was Kweka. That is, if you had to identify the kind of central personality in this earliest phase of Chan, it's really Kweka. Because Kweka is described as a guy who's already in his middle age. And hey, I can already relate to that. Maybe it was.

[36:03]

He was criticized because he didn't have a teacher, but he claimed a certain amount of religious experience. And so he goes to Bodhidharma when he arrives, sort of for justification or accreditation, kind of getting his credentials. And whatever Bodhidharma was is dependent on how Kweka was described him and sort of identified him. After Bodhidharma died, Kweka said to bury him along the banks of the Higinbi River. And he got angry when people came to pay their respects at Bodhidharma's passing. He said, we never paid any attention to this guy when he was alive, so why come now? Afterwards, Kweka kind of moved around a little bit. He's in Luoyang, and then he moves up to another city, he gets involved in some kind of conflict

[37:06]

with other meditation teachers, but it's not really clear from the stories what's going on. But there's some kind of conflict involved. I have the image of Kweka as a little bit argumentative. But there's a group of names that we have from this period that I use to label the convenience of Proto-Shans. They seem to have wandered around some. They're known for the practice of Gita, of Greek aestheticism, which means that they would hang out in cemeteries and so forth. They wandered around a bit, didn't settle down so much. One of the names that's associated with this group is the figure Pan Lin, who is known as the figure who wrote at least a preface devoted on the treatise. And Pan Lin was known

[38:07]

as a participant in meditation, speaking and translation activities. And we have his name on a couple of lists in a couple of prefaces and so forth. He was one of the guys who worked to clean up the Chinese text of figures that had been translated. And so he had a certain amount of literary ability. It's not clear actually whether he was Bodhidharma's student or whether he was Kweka's student. And it seems to me just looking at the dates that he's more likely that he's effectively a student of Kweka rather than Bodhidharma. Other than that, there's not much that we can say about this group without looking at the one text that's involved, both the treatise and the two entries. And I thought we can do that now, but I thought before we do, I'll leave time for right now for questions

[39:11]

about this very brief and rather spare characterization that I give you for the present time. It's basically ascetic wanderers in the north with just a few names associated with them. I think it's very good. There's pretty few things that seem to be happening around the time of the 20th century. And perhaps Kweka actually reproduced in the city and allowed him to bring his experience into the country. It seems like Kweka was himself a Kweka student fighting for his freedom or whether or not it was actually Kweka who brought him to the city to fight for his freedom. And I'm wondering whether if he arrived in the forest, it seems like a lot of areas where it's foresty and there's a history between immediately between the two cities to fight for that part of the country and the people who live there. So we have a lot of history about Kweka.

[40:11]

It's certainly possible. I can't remember exactly. Tan Lin, I think, he's supposed to have devoted considerable energy to saving the Tlingit people during that time, I think it was like 574. The other thing that's more radical, it's not really radical, it's kind of common sense in a way. There's a great story, right, about Kweka cutting off his arm in order to prove to Bodhidharma that he's sincere about getting it done. And actually the earliest reference that we have to Kweka and his arm is in a collection of biographical texts from 645 and 654 that is the text was finished at one point in 645 and then the author, his biography didn't die until 654

[41:13]

and he seems to have added notes to that document. That biography, which is not a Zen text by any means, says that Kweka had his arm cut off by a bandit or a rebel, but that Kweka was very unmoved by this and he cauterized his wound and went around his bed and he drowned as usual. And so that it's a different story, but also the story was included there to be complimentary and say something impressive about Kweka. It then says that this is in contrast to the student Tan Lin, who also had his arm cut off and he screamed and cried the entire night. And hey, I sympathize with Tan Lin. To me this has kind of been made true. Then in the early 8th century text of 712 they say, hey, it's just nonsense about Kweka having his arm cut off by a bandit. And the story develops

[42:14]

about him cutting off his arm in order to gain the peace. This is one thing where I say, you know, you don't do that. First of all, what's a monk doing with a knife or whatever substantial enough to cut his hand off? Cut it off the wrist or something. Is it even vaguely, remotely conceivable that a monk would cut his arm off in order to gain the peace or something? I can't find it. I have an idea that I've always been quite surprised by this. It reminds me of the story in the Bible of the sacrifice of God and so on. So I've never been fond of that story. And we do have that in contemporary terms. But what I wanted to

[43:17]

say was about the phrase, I guess it was, number one rule which is that the myth is more important than the, and I wouldn't disagree with that, but it's also problematic. Because there's always the question of what's at stake around the story of the myth. So if we look at something more contemporary for example, what people in the United States think about the Civil War or about the fifties in the U.S. they have a lot of myths involved in it. But there's a lot at stake in terms of what actually happened and how that's viewed now, basically. So I would say there may be similar things too, basically, in terms of then-history, then-myth, and then-history as much as you can get it. But what's at stake? This is a story I can cut it off and on, or if there's two, one who didn't react

[44:19]

well and one did, because again, I don't know the larger picture of which one gets legitimated and which one doesn't, basically, in terms of how that is viewed now, basically. And what so much of this does is it's all retrospectively written now to justify something now, basically. Rewriting history is constantly rewriting history. So on the one hand, where you may be writing in terms of what people believe in its impact on their lives and on their culture, it's more important to go for another side of what's at stake in terms of how that history is transmitted now. That's rather the point. It's that the Zen text, as they developed it, I mean it's one transmission of a lamp text from 710, 712, it doesn't it wants to paint a different image of Bodhidharma in the first place. Not somebody who's asking who the victim is, so he was a he had a stiff upper lip,

[45:20]

as he does with Bodhidharma and stuff like that. It wants to create a different image of a spiritual model. And I think that that story of Quaker cutting his arm off has to have been used about 800 billion times to tell students this is a serious thing you're asking for, you've got to be sincere about it, you've got to really put out there. I think all of these stories are meant to be used by dharma, by teaching dharma, and I don't mean that teaching about dharma, but teaching the practice of dharma. That's where it's really real. Lousy.

[46:24]

Lousy. She did it on purpose, but it wasn't during the sewing. She's Japanese. Yeah, you burn off your finger or whatever, there was also a student in Stranhoft A student in Stranhoft heard this story in American TV and was cut off his finger. Some people said, oh yeah, that was not incredible, and the other person said, oh yeah, that was neat. But but quite accurate ... ...

[47:31]

... [...] And all this stuff is completely off the wall and crazy. But when you actually get back and look again at what he says over and over, and he's way up there, and way at scale, and my initial reaction to him was that this was kind of nice, that this, you know, might go right. You know, there really was something going on here. I think there really was a central part of our understanding of the tradition,

[48:32]

that there's been some interesting traditions. And again, I was kind of reassessed, and I was annoyed about it. I didn't feel like it was something really worth it. I mean, these kinds of myths, they're not, in some sense, right. They are at least wildly inaccurate, of course, and they're just plain nonsense. And, you know, again, you can't do anything about it. Yeah, well, we can talk about some of it tomorrow. I've actually, this is like my next book, which has been on kind of... If there's a cliff toward publication, you know, you've got to get that book just over into the publication process so it goes on to become a book. My Sunway book has been sitting at the edge of the cliff for, like, I don't know, eight years or something. So I've translated all of Sunway's writings, and they were given overly complex analysis, you know, analysis that Dan and other people can't... What is he talking about? It's like, Sunway is a fascinating book. But I think...

[49:32]

So we can talk about him some tomorrow. He is a fascinating case. I got into real trouble in Taiwan as well when I was doing this kind of teaching, and I described him as a scumbag. Which I think... I was teaching these, you know, 18, 19, 20-year-old Chinese Buddhist nuns, and they didn't like the notion of any Buddhist monk being described in that way. But there is a sense of, this guy is a sort of a snake-like thing. But he was talking about Kuinan. I mean, my rule, or it's not true, and therefore it's important, was really derived from the case of Kuinan in the Platform Sutra, which we can also talk about some tomorrow. But I can argue... I can't prove it, but I can, I think, give reasonable evidence to argue that the events that are in the Platform Sutra should never happen. But that's not to say that it's not important. That's an incredible fact. The very earliest fictions that we have of Bodhidharma

[50:51]

come from like the 11th century, 12th century, and they depict a skinny Indian monk. And then somewhere around the 13th century, he gets transformed into... I refer to him as a fat, furry foreigner. Rather like myself, in fact, actually if I wore an earring. That's an image of Bodhidharma that's generated on the basis of monks at that time period, and wearing an earring was apparently a fad among Indian monks around that time period. I don't think there's any reason to connect that image with the historical Bodhidharma. And even, you know, we have a couple, just two or three images of Bodhidharma from before that style got established to suggest the earlier representations of Bodhidharma with the skinny, maybe in some cases dark skin,

[51:52]

produced from the style of Indian monks. Okay, let's do that, and then let's actually look at the text a little bit, because I don't want to lose that. Do you guys know what Dunhuang is? Okay, if you look at the mask, which is I think the very front of what you've been given here, well, good, Dunhuang is not on the map. So... So... Luoyang is kind of right in the center, and Bodhidharma, Mount Sung, Shaolin Temple is kind of right near Luoyang. Dunhuang would be kind of off here somewhere. So Dunhuang is the last, basically the last Chinese outpost on the way to Central Asia.

[52:53]

Dunhuang is the site, in my mind, of basically two things. First of all, there's incredible cave art there. And you can get books in English, Chinese, Japanese that have pictures photographed and analyses of this incredible Buddhist temple art that was there. I think Dunhuang was founded... Well, we have evidence that it was a Buddhist center from the 3rd century anyway. The earliest cave carvings there, I think, are from, let's say, the 500s. And then the carvings and paintings, man, they're really very spectacular. They extend up until the 13th century or thereabouts, and maybe a couple of them later, but that's really the end of them. And so it's a remarkable repository of Chinese Buddhist art. But at the very end of the 19th century or the first year of the 20th century, there was a cave, basically a cell that was opened up.

[53:57]

I mean, like a crack appeared in the wall. There are a couple of different stories. But anyway, there's a cell that was basically 10 feet by 10 feet by 10 feet. It was discovered that it was filled with kind of holy scrap. It was paper and some silt and so forth. It was the kind of remains of a coffee shop, of a monastic coffee center. Like, you know, the... What is the... Give me the name of it. Tinko. Yeah, it was like the back room of Tinko. And this was under the control of an illiterate Taoist priest who marketed this stuff off. He did a pretty good job, actually. This British guy came along, Oral Stein came along. He was the first foreigner to hear about it. And this Taoist priest gave Oral Stein

[55:02]

some of the scraps. What the Taoist priest was most interested in was copies of the Lotus Sutra and other important sutras written in gold. Written in fancy silver characters on blue paper. Really fancy stuff. And Oral Stein said, OK, you keep that. I'll take the junk. Well, the junk contained really interesting stuff because it was kind of underground material. And just the sort of thing that you wouldn't get copies of. Then a French scholar named Pelliot came along and a Russian scholar named Oldenburg and so forth. The French scholar Pelliot was quite a good scholar of Chinese. I mean, he was a first race in all of these. And he read through the stuff. He'd kind of look at... He'd open the stuff up, look at the title, and he decided he would take it and leave it. And the stuff that he wanted was just the stuff that the Taoist priest didn't care about. The underground stuff. And the non-Chinese stuff. There's quite a bit of Tibetan material.

[56:03]

And there's material in a raft of other languages that you've probably never heard of. Dzogdian and Tocharian and so forth. And Sanskrit and so forth. The Zen materials from there are kind of underground materials in the sense that they're written on the... Some of them are written on the backs of other texts. You know, they didn't throw away paper because... And the official government offices would keep their records for I think it was 15 years. And then they'd give their paper to the monastery so that they could use the paper again. So we get some texts... One of the most important collections for the study of early times, on the front side, is very, very important economic records. And the kind of economic historians have been studying the recto side of this text for decades. And the verso side, the back side of it, contains Bodhidharma's treatise and all the collections of Zen stuff. And these two groups of scholars

[57:05]

have been studying this stuff for decades without knowing, hey, the other side is important too. What we get... You mentioned the Ketapa Dantodaka. This is a text that was published in... written in 1004. And that really establishes a kind of orthodox story for how Zen developed. What we get from Dunhuang is material about how they were putting this all together. So we get the pre-orthodox version. Or pre-orthodox version. And so the discovery of the Dunhuang material not only was it of profound importance for Chinese art and other aspects of Chinese Buddhist history and the history of Chinese medicine and Tibetan texts and so forth. It was profoundly important for the study of Zen. And also the fact that these things were so difficult to get at. I mean, the British were pretty good. The French were really a little

[58:07]

let's say, restrictive, shall we say, about letting people study their stuff. And I can't remember... Do you remember when the French collection was available on microfilm? I mean, now you can get it... You can read the microfilm. Virtually all the teleo and sign collections. I can't remember. Yeah, I would think 1960s sometime. So it was quite a while. And my point is that if that material had been released immediately the fact that it was kind of dribbled out had been far to our advantage as professional historians. It kept us in business for many, many years. Ever more just... Yeah, well, there's lots of different things on there. We barely touched the surface. Yeah. Well...

[59:11]

But it's not... I'm not going to... There's plenty of fun stuff left to do. Let's look at the... The ones... There are a bunch of texts that are attributed in the Dunhall materials or in later texts to Bodhidharma. There's only one of them that has any possible association with Bodhidharma. And that's the text that... After... I think it should be after the fact about Bodhidharma. Yeah, we have the treatise on the two entrances

[60:18]

and the four practices. And you'll see other translations of this. They'll say the two accesses and the four practices. And that's... I don't think we need to read the... Well, to read aloud the introduction. I've just given a little bit of the preface. And it talks about Bodhidharma's being the third son of the great Brahmin king from southern India. He effaced his mind in the serene and had a penetrating understanding of the affairs of the world. I mean, he's saying good things about himself. Wise in both the internal and external with virtue of seated the standard of the age. And so he comes to China to prophesy. This is nice, kind of flowery, pleasant language. What is your name? Ann. Ann, okay. Would you read for me the paragraph that starts the entrance of the principle?

[61:18]

It's on this side. Well, it should be Di Guan. I'm disturbed at how much... Right. Yeah, right. He is as discriminated between serene and romantic. This is called the entrance of principle. So some people will translate this as the entrance of the absolute. So we get two entrances, or two accesses. And one of them is Li, is principle, and the other is practice,

[62:44]

is being. And what else? Let me just... I don't know if this is exactly the ground rule, but I would say that this text is at the very least associated with Bodhidharma's name as soon as we begin to hear about the Zen tradition. I would say that... Now, this may be just my kind of cynical... not really cynical, but critical nature. I don't think there's a snowball stance in hell that Bodhidharma actually wrote this Chinese text. I mean, he's not a translator. There's no... He didn't learn Chinese. This text is written using some very sophisticated allusions to Chinese. There's an allusion to the Zhuangzi, or the Taoist text of Zhuangzi, or somewhere. I just... I don't buy it. You know, it's not... Now, was it translated from his sermons or his lectures? I mean, was it somehow summarized

[63:46]

or written on the basis of that? Could be. And I don't... There's no way to say, really. What's certainly the case is that this was applied to Bodhidharma at least retrospectively. This is what that he proposed to attribute to Bodhidharma. So, OK, let's not get hung up on the details, so to speak. This is what people thought of in the early period, as being Bodhidharma's teaching. And in that sense, it's worth looking at. So what do you see here? Buddha nature. Yeah, I think that's fair. Yes. True nature, Buddha nature. What is... What's the... What is the... You brought it up. You tell me. OK, so...

[64:54]

OK, everybody's got it then. Whether you're enlightened or not. But what is it? The true principle. Well, OK, you guys are... You're being good here because you're sticking to the text. And it doesn't really say, does it? Right. OK, so... Yeah. So it's a short... It's a short text, and it's... What do you know about the Buddha nature in general? Outside. Yeah. Oh. That's a... Anybody got anything about the Buddha nature? The Buddha nature? Or... Yeah, some...

[65:57]

OK, so the Buddha nature is... Yeah, because it says that in some way, doesn't it? You... Right. Right. So somehow... If you take refuge in the true, I mean, if we say that you take refuge in the Buddha nature, because we're talking about true nature and so on and so forth, that gets you beyond... You realize that those self and other distinctions... So it does involve getting to a realization of non-duality. I mean, typically I would say the Buddha nature is one of two things, and maybe both. It's the potential within all humans to be enlightened. Right? So it's kind of a seed of enlightenment. Or... And this may be an either-or, maybe a both-and, depending on who we're talking about. It's... Enlightenment. The wisdom within all of us, which we obscure.

[67:00]

And I think these guys here, or this text here, is referring possibly to the first part, the Buddha nature's potential, but it seems to me more clearly to be referring to the second. Um... The true nature is possessed of all sense of being. It's only covered up and made imperceptible by false sense impressions. Well, I don't know. Maybe it's not... Well... Yeah, but Dogen has particularly... I was going to say weird. Dogen has a weird idea about the Buddha nature. Let's say, unique. I didn't say weird.

[68:04]

I said unique. Pardon? Okay. I mean, the traditional story about Dogen, right, is he encounters this line in the Nirvana Sutra which says, basically, all sense of being have the Buddha nature. And then he says something like... And Dogen, supposedly this is the reason for his great doubt, you know, well, we all have the Buddha nature, why do we have to work so damn hard to realize it? You know, as I tell my students. Why not, hey, let's party? And he goes off to China, goes through this entire rigmarole, you know, to figure it out. Then, later on, presumably in the book Shomaki, I'm not a real great Dogen scholar, but he redefined or re...

[69:08]

I mean, that line in the Nirvana Sutra is in Chinese, and he decides that he had the grammar wrong. And he decides that that sentence said not that all living beings have the Buddha nature, but that everything that exists is the Buddha nature. And that's what I'm saying is that a unique and, he didn't call it weird, interpretation of the Buddha... I think that it's a very intriguing step that Dogen does. He's clearly doing an interpretive read of the Chinese. I'd say that that's the kind of interpretive read that, you know, Durie did that in China. I mean, he kind of butchered some Chinese, so it's not like this is a foreigner who can't read the text. I mean, Dogen doesn't realize it. And it ends up being thought of as a very Japanese style, the whole world is divine, is holy. Yeah, but it's also saying the entire world,

[70:10]

I mean, this is at least a generalization about Japanese religion, that it doesn't take the world as being kind of nasty, ugly place, like those dirty Indians did. That the whole world is kind of, it's looked upon positively. And Dogen finds this way, or there's just somehow a manifestation, or fits with a Japanese worldview, seeing the world as a positive, an energy-laden, you know, kind of place. You know, in some ways you could just say that Dogen is just stating the metamorphic view from a positive point of view. The metamorphic view, um... Dogen makes it as a positive description of emptiness. Okay, I see what you're getting at, and yeah. From that perspective, it's like,

[71:12]

he isn't having an original idea, he's having an original question of a very, you know... Boy, never have an original thought in his life, yeah. You know, of a very mainstream doctrine he's living in. Yeah, and there's one of my good friends, you may know his name, Rob DeMello, and he's been his sponsor. His first published article was called Apophatic and Cataphatic in Chinese Buddhist Discourse. And it's basically, apophatic means negative discourse. Like Madhyamaka, not this, not that, emptiness, all that negative speech, you know. And the Chinese like to put things in more positive terminology. I don't know. Yeah, I certainly wouldn't say it's just.

[72:15]

I'd say that that's in there, but let's not... I refuse to take on the... I refuse to explain the relationship between Madhyamaka and Yogacara. That's taking us too far afield, and we'd be a little bit... You have to read it as anti-mysterical, in a way, in where it says, by false sense of presence. Like, if you read out the false, basically, you'll have to have the same meaning. In a kind of somewhat platonic way, in that our sense of presence, our false, our experience of reality is false. Is the false feeling perpulant, or is it necessary? I think even if it said simply, sense of presence, you could gloss that as their fault. Because our... Presumably, what it means is not that when I see you, as, you know, beard, gray shirt, boots, whatever, it's not that I see that incorrectly. It's that that sense impression,

[73:16]

I impose my own kind of conceptual framework onto that. So that I see you falsely, or that you're a false construction of reality, that I kind of make up in my head. And certainly, Yogacara notions of perception are involved in this. So, what did you say? Anti-empirical? Yeah, perhaps. One of the things that Yanagida says about this line, which I think is significant, is that the most important word here, or the word to pay attention to, is the little word, only. It says, you've got to have a profound faith. In Buddhism, this is not an emotional, bhakti kind of outpouring of devotional faith. This is unswerving confidence, right? You have to be totally sure in your acceptance of the fact that

[74:20]

everybody's got the Buddha nature. It's just that we all muck it up. It's only that it's covered up and we don't see it. Because it's covered up by false sense impressions. So what Yanagida says is that if you read these texts, you see that word only, the words that mean only. And that indicates a difference in, how do you say, valence, or a difference in importance. That the really important thing here is you listen to the Buddha nature. And that's where you want to keep your focus at the center. The lesser reality, or the less significant reality, is that we cover this Buddha nature up with false sense impressions. And that's kind of a construct that I think is very common in early Zen writing and very much central to the...

[75:21]

I mean, this Buddha nature's construct of the Buddha nature covered by false sense impressions is everywhere. No, that's not true. It's not everywhere. Nothing's everywhere. One of my favorite texts in all of early Chan materials, you might look at it some tomorrow, is a text attributed to the Fifth Patriarch, the Hongren, that starts off with a passage saying there's a sun up in the sky, but it's blocked from our view by clouds. And does that mean that when the clouds block our view, does that mean that the sun isn't there? No, it just means that we can't see it because there's clouds, and that sooner or later the winds of wisdom will come along and blow away these clouds of ignorance. Clouds and fog and whatever. And we'll see that the sun is truly there. But the point is not to reach up with some gigantic claw

[76:22]

and drag the clouds away. The point is to simply be confident that that sun is up there. Now, you know, I used to teach in Michigan, New York, and I could always depend upon there being clouds. It doesn't happen that way. You get some clouds, you get a break, we can get some clouds away. But they put the emphasis on the existence of the being, just as even if it's a cloudy day, we know that the sun is going to be up there. And that becomes, I think, a fundamental guideline to how these guys interpreted spiritual practice. You don't try to make it happen. You work as hard as you can. But in a certain sense, you don't force it. And I think that idea,

[77:23]

at least the logical structure of that idea, is present here in Bodhidharma. I think that's a statement of truth. And the secondary one is the path statement. The path statement? Yeah, because to say that to ascribe it as being observations of, you know, the true nature of how you interpret that implies that there is a way to change the expression. And that's the path statement. How do you do that? How do you manifest those observations as the path of the school that you're a member of? Okay, fair enough, yeah. How do you do that? So that becomes secondary to the infinite, you know, the truth of the... Well, they're sort of saying that as a path statement of our school, of their school, they're saying that the path, the most important step in the path is to focus on the infinite. Yeah. Yeah, that's what he's saying. I think they're all saying that, right?

[78:25]

That this is like, this is the path. They're saying, this is the infinite. Don't you have stuff in your book that's sudden and gradual, and why don't you set that as being there about present? Yeah, well, yeah. Sudden and gradual doesn't isn't stated clearly in this stuff, but it's been sort of pushed around the edges. I mean, one of the things that you're doing, how do you how do you look at this language to reside frozen in Waltham as well? Well, it has to be like this, I mean, that's just because like, there are some Waltham persons who think it would be up to me. He's not going to tell you that he's got the path. That's what he's doing. Yeah. That's what happens. That's what happens. And what do you mean by frozen Waltham? Frozen in Waltham. That's what happens. I think this word frozen is one of the reasons why later or then kind of leaves this text behind. It's too

[79:26]

the text is a little too logically oriented or too organized. And then there's this frozen in Waltham. I think it's it didn't later, you know, after a little while it didn't give me quite the right feeling. Yes? Certainly it's been done or seen or been seen through some Wong, Mo, Mugabe and Paul. It's certainly not Confucian. I mean, Taoists talk about the perfective, dungeon. But I don't know. I don't I certainly wouldn't you don't have to think of Taoist Taoism here

[80:27]

to understand true nature. I think it's more generalized. Yes. Well, and then the other thing is as you know there's plenty of good wall contemplations. And I'll just give you this. I mean, I believe that actually I mean that this when it says yi guan guan means contemplation or discernment or meditation or whatever. My personal belief this is a friend of ours Paul Swanson who's he's visiting in Indiana lives upstairs from us actually and teaches at Nanzhan Institute does research and teaching at Nanzhan Institute

[81:28]

in Nagoya, Japan. He's argued that that d is a transliteration of the first syllable of detachment or contemplation or detachment. And guan also is is a translation of detachment. And it's an unusual way to form a Sino-Judaic term but it's not unprecedented by any means. There are a number of cases where you get composite words like that one character being a transliteration one being a a translation. And I think that's probably what this was, but certainly the Chinese think, well, wall. Right? Yeah. What is the difference between the... The false sense of the... Ah, okay, so this is...

[82:31]

Okay, well, let me, I'll come back to that. And also, when it says frozen, it means when it's icy, when it's made, it means how it looks like in real or it's not. Yeah, yeah. So, Wang Guifei, you know, the consort of this gentleman, she was a substantial, a woman of substance, I think. She's not a skinny little waif, right? And her, she describes her skin as being like she yields fat. And I always think of it as kind of like bacon grease, kind of translucent kind of feeling to her skin, that Emperor Shunzang was really taken with. So, yeah, it's frozen, it's fixed it or congealed or whatever. When it says return, that notion of Guifei, she would say that to return, discard the false and take refuge in the true.

[83:34]

When we say to take refuge in the Buddha, take refuge in the Dharma, that's that sense of Guifei. And that is to go back to where you're really, you're naturally supposed to be. Well, resume is right, it's where your natural place is. It's where you, in that sense of return. Well, it's not backwards in the sense of, I mean, we think it's backwards, or I think when you say that, I think it's the opposite of progress. It's to resume your natural place. Where you were before, you go back home, kind of thing. So that's, it's a good sense of return. A very, very deep sense of return. Yes, exactly. Yeah, so, I mean, that English phrase that we have to take refuge in the Buddha, that's a sort of funny thing. You talked about Buddhist-Taiwanese English. That's kind of a Buddhist-Taiwanese English. Take refuge in the Buddha, take refuge in the Dharma.

[84:37]

I suppose that's what I meant. I think this is interesting because, you know, in our tradition, we, especially in the 30-Dharma world-concentration, as do Shakyamuni Bodhisattva. And here, it sounds more like it's a jhana state, you know, than what we think Shakyamuni Bodhisattva thinks it should be, as to how we relate to that. Yeah, and in fact, here, if you buy for the moment that in some form of the original, quote-unquote, meaning of this term, that while di-guan simply means vipassana, or contemplation, then the next one that resides strictly without wavering, never again be swayed by the impeachment, that looks like samatha, concentration. And there are traditionally two wings, or two aspects of Indian Buddhist meditation, the concentration, or samatha,

[85:44]

and insight, contemplation, vipassana. And it's not too far-fetched to say that this is simply an interpretive rendering of those concepts. I think that... But this use of the character bi, wall, stumped the early Chinese. It just wasn't that usual to use this. And so, the notion of Bodhidharma sitting facing a wall is developed on the basis of not really knowing what the hell this is all about. Okay, let me just make one more point. If you look down at the four practices, and I'll do this as kind of a lead-on to tomorrow. These four practices are all about... Somehow, if the entrance is principle,

[86:49]

or the access is absolute, or whatever you want to call it, if that's some kind of abstract or internal stance toward the world, and maybe even a more yogic kind of thing, the four practices below are how you interact with what goes on in life. They're more... So there's an inner... an interior-exterior, or inner-outer, or substance-function. There's some kind of distinction going on there. And I want to build on that distinction tomorrow. Because one of the things that I think that we need to address when we talk about the origins of Chan is that... You know, we think of Chan as... These are people who've talked in weird and abstract terms, right? And how do we explain... How do they develop that very unique style of dialogue, of repartee? Where does that come from?

[87:52]

And I certainly can't give you... I can't give you a canonical or authoritative explanation, but at least we ought to think about where it comes from. And that's somewhat the key there, I think, is seeing that you've got two entrances. They'll leave it. That hopefully is a cliffhanger for tomorrow morning. Is that enough of a testimony? I'll say more ugly things about people, too. But that's, you know, like Bob Thurman and, you know... Pardon? Yeah, okay. 9.30 tomorrow morning. Thank you. Thank you.

[88:35]

@Text_v004
@Score_JJ