Okay, so what happened? First of all, Shun Hui happened. And Shun Hui was a guy who studied, apparently studied with Sun Tzu for a while. The first characters of their names are the same. And there is one statement, Dong Mi says that they studied with Sun Tzu. And then went to study with Hui Nang. Actually, it seems that Shun Hui studied twice with Hui Nang, but he went down there a couple of times. And that when Hui Nang finally approves of Shun Hui, that what he says is, after you've been in the north, I see that your understanding of Buddhism has matured, or your practice has matured. But Shun Hui, well, he identifies very closely with Hui Nang. And in 732, well after Hui Nang has died,

[01:05]

and after about 20 years after Hui Nang has died, 730, 731, and 732 actually, Shun Hui starts attacking the students of Sun Tzu, and saying that they taught a gradual doctrine, and their lineage was not the mainstream lineage, it was a collateral lineage. And it's at this point, in these kind of set up debates of 730, 731, and 732, that that's when the name Northern School is applied to Sun Tzu, and his followers. So it's a pejorative name. But the name is a little bit like the name Hinayana, which is a very negative kind of label. And Shun Hui says that Sun Tzu and his disciples taught a gradual teaching, and Hui Nang taught a sudden teaching. And in my mind, when you look at the writings of Shun Hui, he's very much a,

[02:07]

I'm good, he's bad, he's very much a very simple comparative kind of thinker. That Hui Nang and Shun Hui himself teach the sudden teaching, and that's good, and Sun Tzu's disciples, he doesn't name Sun Tzu by name, he always writes it as Ku Ji, another disciple of Sun Tzu. He always says, those guys taught a gradualist teaching, and that was bad. And in calling, and in attacking or criticizing the Northern school by name, and monks of the Northern school by name, I think Shun Hui was certainly doing something that Buddhist monks hadn't done before. At least, we don't see it happening. I'm sure that they criticized each other. I always imagine religious people are, they're kind of like dog club members, you know. I had a bowl master once upon a time,

[03:09]

there was any kind of, I raised orchids when I lived in Santa Barbara, any kind of little club, there were always factions, and people were griping at each other, and so forth. Shun Hui seems like the typical, or the prototypical kind of small-minded, my side is better than your side kind of mind, I think. But he was a very gifted evangelist, and the doctrine of suddenness worked for him on the ordination platform, because his major role in life was to bring people into Buddhism by leading them to a moment of religious inspiration as they listened to him. This guy was a sermonizer, a lecturer, an evangelist, par excellence. He would stage these kind of hokey debates, where he took some guy around with him who acted like a ball guy. He would inspire people as they're listening to him,

[04:15]

and inspire them to become Buddhists and just take ordination and kind of enter the fold. After that, Shun Hui doesn't seem to be too interested in it. We don't have any evidence that Shun Hui taught meditation on a long-term basis. His disciples, he had other monks that worked with him that edited his writings and so forth, but his lineage doesn't continue on, so he didn't create something that was substantial enough to continue afterwards. I mean, it's a little bit, I call him at one point the Oral Roberts of 8th century Luoyang, but I think he's a little more like Billy Graham. Now, Billy Graham has a particular style. He'll take his organization into a town, do a revival meeting, have people convert to Christianity, and then he pulls up stakes and goes somewhere else. And Shun Hui was a little bit like that, in a sense,

[05:21]

in that he seems to be only interested in that first moment of inspiration. And the doctrine of suddenness really works for him in that way. He can say, your first moment of inspiration, the definition of a bodhisattva, right, is somebody who has bodhicitta, who has the inspiration to achieve perfect enlightenment on behalf of all living beings. And Shun Hui will say, that first moment of bodhicitta is the same as the final completion of the path. And so he really wants to inspire people in that way. And I think that the doctrine of sudden enlightenment, he emphasizes it because it fits his mission. It fits his vocation on the Northern School path. But people, as I said, people didn't like the fact that he used names and that he criticized the Northern School, members of the Northern School so completely. Now, there really wasn't any entity

[06:21]

that he called the Northern School to kind of rise up in defense. These are very loose-knit, I use the word confederate, probably because I don't really know what it means, what it implies as far as the grouping. And they're very loose-knit kinds of associations with teachers and students and so forth. And once the Northern School moment had passed, there's really nobody around to defend it as an entity. In fact, the Northern School lineages lasted until something like 900. They certainly outlasted Sun Hui's. And I think also that the coming of Amoghavadra, Vajrabodhi, Subhakarathimha, in other words, the esoteric Buddhist masters who came into Chang'an in 719 and thereafter, that that became the next fad.

[07:21]

And so it's probably fair to say that a certain amount or a substantial amount of the interest in Northern School style Zen Buddhism was lost to the esoteric Buddhist teachers after they came into town because they were the latest and greatest trend. Especially court society in Chang'an was very the fad consciousness. So did Sun Hui, what kind of impact did he have in causing the end of the Northern School? I don't know. It's hard to say. But I think less than is typically said. Most authors draw from Hu Shuren who's talking about a battle between the North and the South. And I see precious little evidence of any response by the Northern School. Sun Hui is banished at one point in time and that's kind of attributed to somebody from the Northern School.

[08:22]

But there's kind of biographical problems with it. Sun Hui, as a speaker, as a proselytizer, he would attract crowds. And just what his banishment is described as being based on the fact that he was drawing crowds. And I think it's quite reasonable for the Chinese government in Chang'an to have, and Luoyang in fact, to worry about large assemblies. They don't really care what he's saying about the Northern, some other Buddhist monk, big deal. The fact that he's attracting large crowds is a lead to the possibility of social unrest. Now within the Zen tradition then, what seems to have happened is that the platform sutra comes along and, as I said, resolves this crisis. And the platform sutra resolves the crisis by accepting Sun Hui's ideas, in particular the notion or the slogan of sudden enlightenment. And it relegates Sun Hui,

[09:25]

it basically paints Sun Hui out of the picture. So that Sun Hui appears in the platform sutra in a couple of places, but then as a boy. He's not, it's not a negative treatment, but he's relegated to a very minor position. And the story of his debate, so-called 730, 731 and 732 are basically eliminated. Also, if you look at the platform sutra, it has a different, it's not the simple, gradual is bad, sudden is good. It's not that simple. And if I read you the verses, right, which I'm sure you, is it fair to, has anybody here not heard anybody talk about the platform sutra verses before? Okay, the platform sutra tells the story

[10:27]

of the fixed patriarch of Hui Nang. And it tells the story in terms of a kind of a verse composition. Where Hong Ren, the fifth patriarch says, well, you know, I'm about to pass on, I need to appoint a successor, right? And so he calls all his students in, and he says, okay, everybody go write a poem, right? And write a poem that describes your understanding of enlightenment, or of Buddhism, rather. And all the students say, hey, look, we know it's the TA, it's the teaching assistant, head monk, or you were head monk for a while, right? It's the head monk, Shen Xiu. Are you head monk now? I see, I see, I see. Anyway. The straight guy, yeah, exactly, yeah, the phog, yeah. So the students all say, hey, look, he's the guy, Shen Xiu's the guy who's been teaching us the Dharma. And it's clear that whatever we know, basically,

[11:29]

yeah, we know Hong Ren's our teacher, but he's the guy who actually takes care of our kind of day-to-day instruction and stuff. And he's gonna get this. So all the students, they kick back, and they don't do anything, which is typical of a student. Back then, back then. And Shen Xiu, he's described as, it's not a negative portrayal, really. It's just that he doesn't quite have it yet, okay? He realizes he doesn't quite understand Buddhism, he's really not in a profound sense the way he's talked about in the way he's done it all. And he kind of agonizes over it. Should he write a poem and describe his understanding? If he does it in order to become the Sixth Patriarch, that's going after a kind of personal advancement. So maybe he shouldn't write the poem. But then his teacher told him to write the poem, so if he doesn't write it, he's disobeying,

[12:31]

what his teacher told him to do. Doesn't, is it Beckett? Do the right thing for the wrong reason? Anyway, this is not a dilemma that's limited to Shen Xiu anyway. So finally, he goes, and he's kind of embarrassed about this thing, and he writes the poem on the wall of the corridor outside the Abbot's, the outside hongan room. And he writes, the body is the Bodhi tree, the mind is like a bright mirror's stand. At all times, we must strive to polish it and must not let dust collect. And he does this at night. So the next day, Hongren sees this, and Hongren says, great, wonderful, everybody should practice according to this. He gets great benefit from practicing according to this verse, right? And so the disciples all, they start reciting. Meanwhile, Huineng, who's the eventual hero of the story, right? He had arrived at the temple like eight months before.

[13:31]

He's not a monk. He was a wood collector from the far south, like from Hong Kong. I love to have people from Hong Kong in my classes. Or Canton, actually. So this was, in this day and age, that was a boondock. You're talking about, you know, like, Arkansas, basically, right? Indiana, they, you know, we're talking about Kentucky, you see, right? So he was an illiterate woodcutter from the far south. His father had died. His grandfather had been, like, banished there or something. An official had been banished there. He was supporting his old mom by collecting firewood. Now, to collect firewood is like the bottom of the social scale. Pretty much the bottom of the social scale in China, anyway. He wasn't a monk, but he hears somebody reciting the Diamond Sutra and has a moment of inspiration. And he, through this circumstance,

[14:34]

it turns out that the person who learned about the Diamond Sutra from Hong Ren's wife. And when he goes up to Hong Ren's community in East Mountain, Huangmei, they send Huai Nang, or they send him to the threshing, they send him to work, basically. You know, he's not even a monk. And he's in the threshing room. And he hears some student coming along reciting this verse. And because Huai Nang, even though he's an illiterate, barbarian, lay person from the far south, he understands Buddhism. He has this intuitive grasp of Buddhism. He hears this verse and he realizes that the person who wrote the verse didn't quite understand Buddhism. And so he asks to be taken to the wall, the quarter wall where this verse had been inscribed. And he recites his own verse. He dictates his own verse and he has somebody read it for him. And actually, in the Dunhuang version, there are two verses that Huai Nang recites.

[15:36]

And it's clear that the editor of the Dunhuang version couldn't quite figure out which one was best. And then in later texts, it reduces it to one verse. And I'll just go by the later one because it's more, so the standard thing is that Huai Nang writes, Bodhi originally has no tree. The bright mirror has no stand. Fundamentally, there's not a single thing where could dust arrive. And Huai Nang's, excuse me, Hong Ren's reaction to this when he sees that is exactly the opposite from before. He rubs the thing out. He says, oh, don't say anything here. That's what he does in public. In private, he calls Huai Nang into his room like at midnight that night. And he gives him the teachings. He gives him a full exposition of the teachings based on the Dynasty's gifts. And he confers the Patriarch's gifts on Huai Nang. Gives him the robe and bowl and sends him away. So he makes this illiterate barbarian from the far South to fix the Patriarch's gifts.

[16:37]

And part of the impact of the story, I think, is a kind of a paradoxical message, a paradoxical impact that it's to say that we in the Chang tradition, we have gone so far to make this illiterate barbarian lay person from the far South, we will make even someone so unqualified socially and intellectually and from any kind of worldly standard, we'll make someone so unqualified by any worldly standard, our Patriarch, because he has the one qualification, the only qualification that matters, which is that he's enlightened. He has this intuitive understanding of Buddhism. And- It's very different, but it's in the form of life. Yeah, yeah. Well, yeah, but when I say it's a paradoxical,

[17:44]

in fact, what this says also is that anybody that we designate as a successor, we didn't care about the fact that he may have come from a very wealthy family, that he may be socially very well connected, he may be very well educated and a very elegant kind of person. The only thing we care about, in spite of all his apparent qualifications, is that one most important thing is whether or not he's enlightened. So, on the one hand, this serves two purposes within the Buddhist tradition, the Zen tradition. It does have a kind of an everyman aspect to it, that we don't care about social status. But I think also, paradoxically, it has a very conservative kind of impact because we can appoint people who are rich and well connected, and we didn't appoint them because of that. We appointed them as successors because they were enlightened. Also, these verses say something interesting,

[18:52]

I think, about, or it's an interesting structure for the explanation of Buddhist practice. Because, first of all, these verses cannot exist apart from each other. That is to say, if I simply presented you with Kuineng's final verse, Bodhi originally has no tree, the bright mirror has no stand. Fundamentally, there's not a single thing. Where could dust arise? If that was all we had, it would be incomplete. It would be, I think, almost incomprehensible because it really has to answer. These verses have to exist as a pair. And so, that leads us then to look at the first verse and to ask the question, what relationship does this first verse have to the teachings of Sun Tzu, the historical Sun Tzu? Can we figure out a way to some manner in which the editor of the,

[19:57]

the compiler of the Platform Sutra actually took from Sun Tzu's actual ideas and created this verse? And there does turn out to be a way. And when it writes that the body is the Bodhi tree, the mind is like the bright mirror's stand, it's using different kinds of metaphor, different kinds of similes. And it turns out there are a number of references in Northern Chan, Northern Zen school writings to such and such is like the Bodhi tree. It says, for example, the Buddha is the path of Bodhi, non-abiding is the feet of Bodhi, the serenity of mind is the cause of Bodhi, the serenity of the body is the condition of Bodhi. We don't get the Bodhi tree in there. But they do talk about, there are lines in Northern school material,

[20:59]

ah, here we go. The mind serene and enlightenment distinct, the body of serenity is the Bodhi tree, peaceful and vast to that limit is untaintedness is the path of Bodhi. So, okay, that does occur in Northern school writings. Maybe that line, there is something, some relationship to Northern school writings. But it then says the mind is like a bright mirror's stand. How could you understand that line? Is there any way to understand the line by itself? The mind is like a bright mirror's stand. It's often translated incorrectly because nobody knows, well, the words in Japanese pronunciation, shodai, or dinkai, does sometimes mean mirror by itself in modern Japanese. Very often you see this line translated, the mind is like a bright mirror. But that's not what it says.

[22:01]

It says the mind is like a bright mirror's stand. Any takers? My question is, I don't understand the line, the mind is like a bright mirror's stand, but there's no way to understand the Bodhi tree. The force of how that, the Bodhi tree. Well, okay, go ahead. Of course, if we understand mind to be the mind's mirror, the mirror to be the mind's mirror, then mind, our mind, is like the stand, and you can set up the mirror wherever you need it. Okay, I think that's a fair answer. I mean, so, so that if we say mind here means consciousness, so that the mirror represents, say, the Buddha mind, some kind of? The mirror is the Buddha mind, and the stand.

[23:03]

The stand represents consciousness. And maybe mind is, maybe brain instead of mind. Right, okay. I think that's- Or the difference is the idea of the mind is like your head, outside your brain. I think that's a good stab, but I think that's not quite what's happening here. And I actually gave you a clue earlier on when I read that passage about bodhislamp. Remember that the passage about bodhislamp said, when one's wisdom is bright and distinct, it's likened to a lamp. For this reason, all those who seek emancipation always consider the body as the lamp, stand, the mind as the lamp, dish, faith as the lamp, wick, the augmentation of spiritual discipline is taken as the addition of oil, for wisdom to be bright and penetrating, is likened to the lamp flame. At this point in time, a mirror, we think of, you and I think of mirrors as reflective. And they, the Spaniards knew that mirrors reflect, but they think of a light source, they think of a mirror as a light source.

[24:05]

That there are passages that say the seeing of the eye, that is how the eye sees how a lamp illuminates and how a mirror reflects, it's basically the same kind of process. That a mirror is somehow, I mean, they don't know about photons or whatever, bouncing off of objects on the mirror. And so if you take this passage and you say, well, let's, instead of saying lamp, we say mirror, we say, when one's wisdom is bright and distinct, it's likened to a mirror. For this reason, all those who seek emancipation always consider the body as the mirror, the mirror is the lamp, the mind is the lamp, is a mirror's dish. Now, these lamps are like, they're cups, they're kind of little ashtray cups with oil and you put the wick in from the side. It's not, it is a candle kind of effect, but it's the wick goes in from the side and they have to trim the wick every once in a while. So the mirror doesn't necessarily have all the same parts

[25:11]

as the lamp, but I can imagine very easily an extended metaphor based upon the mirror, where they would say something on the order of the mind is like the mirror's fan. So I suggest that that line in the verse attributed to Sun Tzu is a truncated or an excerpt from an extended metaphor, very much like kind of metaphors that he would use. And what he was originally arguing for in that kind of metaphor was this kind of constant practice where the mind, the mirror constantly illuminates, the lamp constantly reflects. So it represents in any best interpretation of Sun Tzu's teachings, represents not a gradual teaching, but the perfect teaching, the constant teaching, because that's the way mirrors function and Buddha mind functions. What did you mean by the concept of Buddha mind function?

[26:13]

Yeah, sure. It seems like you're arguing that the mind is kind of the brain. The brain is the thing that supports the mind. Yeah. Yeah, it wouldn't necessarily be the brain, right, but I take the point. Yeah, I, in fact, I don't, I don't, yeah, actually, in his, in his, that's where these metaphors come from. He talks very clearly about the, it's a very dualistic presentation. And I think one of the reasons that, I think the Norman school formulations are very easily kind of misrepresented as being that dualistic, because it's so dualistic.

[27:19]

But he talks about the perfect mind and the defiled, or the pure mind and the defiled mind. I can't remember if he talks about consciousness holding the pure mind or the kind of the Buddha mind within our ordinary consciousness. I'm not sure that he talks that way. But that seems to be what's going on in this verse. Actually, I think on the basis of this little verse, we can't, probably can't get to that level of specificity. But what I've noticed is that there are actually quite a number, several of the elements from both verses, that is, the verses attributed to Sun Tso and the verses attributed to Huang Nan, they occur in Northern school material. Yeah, you had a? Yeah. When I read this sutra, my feeling was, oh no, I'd better study Chinese history. I can't really understand this without understanding Chinese history. But my reading of it, the actual poem debate

[28:22]

were the least significant aspects of the sutra in my reading. So much, it seems to me, and again, it was just so much reading in because of how little history I knew having to do with the split between, you know, China being divided between the North and the South, the fact that barbarians were not seen that they could have, that they could be enlightened, that China was in the process of nation building and finally united itself. So we have all these other kind of things. It's very hard for me to know how much he's reading in, but all these other kind of political and social aspects here and the fact that he's a barbarian, he's illiterate, all these kind of class and social and all these other questions, basically, at least to me, struck me as much more important than the poems that were written and the debates between the poems. At least that's how it really hit me. Well, I think that the poems, what's striking to me is that the traditional explanation of the poems

[29:24]

from Zhongli, and Zhongli is the guy who died in 1841, and writes a lot about Chan, a lot of our information, and he quotes, apparently quotes quite actively when he's quoting people, but Zhongli has this whole, he's a systematic thinker, very systematic, and he describes the Northern School as gradualistic and on the basis of this kind of rubbing the mirror kind of thing, and that explanation becomes kind of adopted by everybody, and what strikes me about these poems, first of all, is that that explanation doesn't seem to fit the teachings of the Northern School, that there's a structure to these poems. Well, first of all, there are other things that we're not gonna have time to go into, where in Huineng's response for us, he says, fundamentally, there is not a single thing, this is in later versions of the text, so we get a number of references to a single thing, and I do not see a single thing

[30:27]

in Northern School writing, and even there's a line in a kind of an early Chan, I think it's basically kind of from the same period as a pre-Shunwei text, where it says, fundamentally, originally, there is not a single thing, so what I'm saying here is that the Platform Sutra is written to represent Huineng's teaching, it draws on Shunwei's innovation, but when it actually gets down to describing Huineng's teaching, it also borrows very significantly from Northern School material, so the kind of the lines that you see in a lineage chart are fundamentally, I mean, profoundly oversimplified, you know, where they say, Huineng is descended from Hongreng is descended from Daoist, and so forth. Now, in terms of the structure of these ideas, it's much more, I mean, where I said Shunwei is gradual is bad, sudden is good, you know,

[31:30]

dare that, I'm this, he's very much a team player, and my team wins, and your team loses. The Aksed School people, if this is, as the Inaugurative argued, if the Platform Sutra is, as the Inaugurative argued in 1967, an Aksed School text, it fits, because the Aksed School people have a particular style of thesis, antithesis, synthesis kind of argument, right? And so, if I want to describe my teachings in a way, like, if I'm a mathematician, right? And if I have a new type of theory of math, I don't want to say my theory of math is better, even in addition to just the graphics, you know, something you learn in second grade. I want to say that my new theory of math is better than whatever, you know, quantum mechanics. I want to establish a high bar to jump over,

[32:34]

so that mine is even higher. And this is, I think, what the Aksed School people are doing, they're saying, there's this perfect teaching, where you, it's basically the Bodhisattva practice, you teach on behalf of every, or practice on behalf of everybody. But then, we apply the rule of emptiness to that, and we knock the kind of symbolism of that, with which that teaching is explained, we knock the terms of that out. We say they don't exist, they're nonsubstantial, they're empty. And by doing that, we point at a higher type of meditation, of religious practice, that is basically the same as the perfect teaching, but it's without conceptualized, or without a scripted view, you see? And the Aksed School, if you look at their other teachings, they tend to have this threefold kind of structure to the way they argue things.

[33:35]

And that, I see, is the kind of, what the message of the verses is. Now, as far as, is the rest of the text, yeah, there's a lot of material in the rest of the, the Platform Sutra, and, frankly, it doesn't all fit this nifty little exposition. But, whether the rest of the text is more important or not, I don't know, I think the image of Quenon as an enlightened deliterate, I think that's, I mean, besides all this doctrinal stuff, I would say that that image of Quenon is the most important thing. The thing that has the most lasting value. But, as a religious document, this text, then, kind of sums up all of what had gone on in early times, kind of, it's a capstone text, essentially, it gives us a final answer, and it establishes

[34:37]

the one story that everybody can go with. And it doesn't really offend anybody, then, you know, it's not a really negative view of Quenon, it's, you know, it doesn't describe him as evil, and nobody knew anything about Quenon, so they can make him up however they wanted. And so, it creates the kind of final orthodox story, and they kind of build off of it. The thing that we haven't gotten to at all, that I'm sorry we haven't gotten to, is how all of this relates to genealogy, and how it relates to dialogue. And I think that also important is the fact that the platform is a story. The fact that it's, well, I mean, okay, Kongren says, go write me a poem. And that's maybe not real interaction,

[35:37]

like, you know, Linji and somebody, one of them going at it with a fist or whatever, but it sets up a model of religious practice that's based upon genealogical descent, okay? And I would argue, I started out talking about that one passage from Fahri's Epitaph. And I'll say, I would start, and basically lead you with this, I mean, I have to go to the airport. But that genealogy is used in Chan, in at least two ways. One is to define the history of the school. And that's, I mean, it's like, right on the surface. That our school, the Zen school, is defined as the succession patriarch. And that's pretty easy. But I would also argue that Zen is essentially genealogical in that religious practice, as it describes in these texts,

[36:37]

in this, not so much these texts of early Chan, but the next period, is genealogical in the sense that it's an encounter. You know, in the Northern school and earlier, and like in Ten-Time Materials, we have a great teacher, Michael Wenger, he gives his lectures, he gives his sermons, somebody writes them down. We don't know, really, who writes them down. We write them down as his great expositions on the teaching. When you get to Mazu, he doesn't do that. He has dialogues with his students. Now, he may be given sermons, right? Otherwise. But they don't pay much attention to that. And they start writing down the dialogues that teachers have with their students. And so the interaction, the encounter between Mazu and students becomes essential. And I would suggest that the genealogical model that is gaining entry into the family tree affects how Chinese Zen practitioners

[37:40]

thought about this practice. That it wasn't simply me, as a practitioner, sitting alone in meditation, kind of rubbing the mirror of my mind, trying to gradually perfect things. They may be doing that in some, they may be spending a lot of hours a day doing that. But what they focused on, what they thought was more important, was me interacting with my teachers. And that I, as a teacher, don't exist through my lectures and sermons, I exist through my interactions with my students. So that enlightenment, what it gets you is it gets you membership in the old boys' network, right? It gets you membership, you're accepted into the family tree. And that's a different kind of conception of enlightenment from the Indian model. Yeah. Well, what I'm saying is that-

[38:41]

Enlightenment becomes a way of being part of it. Yeah, well, I'm trying to be controversial too, because it's fun. But we can argue about, or we could argue about, does that mean that religious awakening, according to the genealogical model, is somehow experientially different from an Indian, yogin experience of enlightenment? You know, you get into some rather interesting issues about defining religious experience or mystical experience and so forth. And it's tough, tough to say what, for me to say what your religious experience is like, right? And people will say different things. Some people will say all religious experience somehow has to be all the same. And other people will say, oh no, I don't think so. And that becomes a rather extensive argument. What I am saying is that the genealogical model, to me, seems to define, not only in the macro level sense,

[39:45]

a history of a movement, it seems to also define the way that some practitioners view the most important aspect of the religious practice. So that you have what becomes most important in Chan literature from the mazu onwards, is the sense of interaction between people and students. And that's a really big change. John, there's actually a few more questions. Oh, there's a few more questions. Do you want to say any closing or anything? That's basically my closure, I guess, is to leave you with that great opener. We can talk about phases and try to characterize periods and stuff like that, but defining, the question is defining how does Chan become, how does it change the spirit?

[40:46]

How does it become so popular in Chinese and East Asian society? I, one of the challenges, if this is true about Chinese Chan, if it's somehow centrally or quintessentially or fundamentally or characteristically genealogically based practice, is it going to work in American society where we don't have the same notions of genealogy? I'll leave you with that one. I think maybe those serious questions I'll type up and that'll be the next seminar that John will come to follow up on. So thank you very much. Don't forget, next month, Karl Bierkopf is going to come on the origins of Journey into Pain. And I've already prepped him to answer some interesting questions. Give him a hard time. You know, he deserves it. Jmcrae at indiana.edu.

[41:50]

J-M-C-R-A-E. J-M-C-R-A-E.

[41:55]

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