Well, first of all, thank you, Mr. Michael and the Gen Center for inviting me. I think this is the first time, we were talking about it before, I think this is the first time that I've been back to the Gen Center since Professor Yanagida was here in about 89. Something like that, give lectures. I had the very good fortune of studying with Professor Yanagida in Japan for a couple of years. It was a profound influence on my understanding of Zen Buddhism. I have to start by saying that I don't have a game plan at all here. I only have a game plan for my opening question and after that we'll have to see what happens. But I wanted to start by finding out what you folks are interested in and why you care about the origins of Zen Buddhism.

[01:04]

I want to ask you to tell me what you want to know about Zen Buddhism in China. I won't give any kind of a guarantee that I can answer all your questions by any means, but at least based on what it is you're interested in and we can define what it is you want to talk about. So, what do you think you're going to find about Zen Buddhism and the origins of Zen in China? Okay, that's good enough. I don't know if it fits so well or resonates so well. Is that an experience other people have?

[02:05]

This is not, Hi, my name is John, I'm a Zen Buddhist. I'm interested in what you've got to talk about. Some people might want to talk to you about something more important. Now, I'm interested in what you've got to say about Zen Buddhism in China.

[03:16]

So, what good does that do you? I mean, you talk about Koan study and you have a historical framework for it. People with talent, I decided to come up. I did a thing at the seminar in the future in New York a couple of years ago. The first that I did was a presentation at a meditation center. And there was a guy named Daigu there, I don't know if anybody knows. Do you know Daigu? Well, Daigu has been a lightweight boxer. And they said, well, he's punching too many, but don't worry about Daigu. I didn't mind at all, but you just think, what difference does it make? What difference does it make? I'm talking about history. I don't have the damage. It's not going to help you on the Zazen, as far as I can tell. Nothing that I can tell you will help you during Zazen.

[04:28]

And, in fact, a case might be made. Ooh, that caught the hand. What? Yeah, that's something that's closer to home, I think so. I'm going to give it to you, but let me talk to you on the back of your mind. Instead of a concept, I'm going to let you feel that you're a part of that understanding. I mean, I think it's fascinating, because the answer to all of those different things, when you start to develop them, is yes.

[05:30]

I see my kids do merits for failing to disagree with me when they were supposed to. So you get positive points for disagreeing with me. I'm going to say a few words on history. I'm going to say a few words on community. So, in history, what I think of history as being, is actually, and I think very much of what's going on in Japan, in Japan, and there's a lot of other different points of view. There is no essential point of view.

[06:33]

I mean, for me, what that does is, it gives the people an engine that gives them a sense of self-control. But it's helpful to say, well, how we got to where we are. And my particular question, and I think it might be interesting, is what does history mean? I mean, I think there's a, I don't know if you've heard that question, but if you've heard that question, why haven't you experienced it? And so, it's a particular aspect of history that we've already done. It wasn't about history. It wasn't history. I have a friend who finished her doctorate a couple of years ago,

[07:41]

and I studied with Fannie Weinstein at Yale, and there was a nun in the Kowloon Sound Organization from Taiwan, Yifa, of course. A good acquisition, yeah. And Yifa's principal argument, or I think, not her only argument, but I think one of the most fascinating ones, is that what we think of as the quote-unquote, monastic regulations of the 13th century, first of all, it's not just Zen, it's kind of Chinese. You know, it's Chinese. And what Yifa suggests is there's a lot of continuity from Indian monastic regulations from India into Chinese regulations. And the one that I think I'm correct in saying is, even the use of the stick, the shoestocking, which I think is so Zen, and it's so Chinese, and the Chinese use these big things, and definitely you can have the same thing maybe with music more often.

[08:41]

But even that, I believe, is inherited from Indian metaphysical practice. And that was a surprise to me. And the way, at those ages, how they used the orioles, the bowls, the beads, I believe there are continuities from Indian monastic practice. We're so used to, in this country, or Western countries in general, or English language, we're used to setting up Zen as something separate. Yes? When I first started studying Zen Buddhism, I didn't think of it as a religious interpretation. I watched those kind of people, and that was incredibly frustrating. On the one hand, I was disappointed that in the community, amongst the different ways they were described, one person might describe Zen as radical,

[09:47]

let's say, what is it, insurantism, and another person would describe it as a completely different thing. It was a complete contradiction, and I read it as Zen as some sort of metaphysical abstract entity. So I found that completely frustrating. Later, I found more modern scholarship to be more looking at Zen Buddhism more contextual and historically, which I find much more useful. Because to me, if we separate the Zen experience and spirituality from people's actual lives as they live, as they make their lives better, as they make society better, if we separate those two things, I'm not interested in it. So I'm interested in the relationship between the spiritual practice and the spiritual practice and the actual lives of the people who are practicing in society. I mean, the debate in Kyoto school and that kind of thing, and I wonder if Japanese Zen and the like will help promote

[10:48]

imperialism or not as a kind of way to fix these things. So it's really trying to relate to the relationship between the theory and the practice and the actual lives of society. Yeah, I'm certainly... I certainly favor that notion of looking at it as a person, looking at religion as it functions in actual people's lives as much as you can. I'm not a philosopher. I can't tell you much about Kyoto school. I can't deal with disembodied ideas so much as to get... I have a couple of questions. One, in your story, you had a great contribution from a couple of different kinds of people, probably some of those that probably... The other thing is, where is the kind of...

[11:52]

I often think that you are not clear and you're at a point in time where you're not talking to people and it's practice that you do and it's practice that you do and you use it. And you're not talking to people and you're not talking to people and you're not talking to people that you're using. That you're using it out and you're not talking to people. I thought it was Kōan stuff here. I thought that was just a person. Yeah, I can't ask you

[13:04]

to go back to... We probably... I can talk a little bit about what I know about Buddhism in China today. It's a little far from the topic. And I haven't traveled widely in China. I go to one place in southwest China to study a kind of popular ethnic heritage. And I tend to stay away from the Zen, the kind of orthodox Buddhist establishment there because it's kind of a secret place in the South. And that's a different situation. Yeah. Boxing stuff.

[14:26]

Yeah, right. I'm kind of curious, I don't know if you mentioned that from a grant perspective, but the concept of data nature and relationships within data, there's things like shift that idea of the if you don't know something about that. Okay. Yeah, that's a, that comes out at a rather specific point in time and then kind of plays around to make it a non-sense in reality. Okay. Because it

[15:56]

Now, I don't know if there's anybody else here who read my book, but can I throw them out? Of course. Anyway, that takes a good amount of, I don't know, the print is very fine. It takes a good amount of determination. Makes it more acceptable. And I'm not sure, I'm not sure that that's exactly upside. I'm just interested in the way exploration works.

[17:07]

And I'm always interested to know what people think about it, such that some years after the book. Yeah. I was reading Bernard Ford's book when I published his dissertation, or part of his dissertation. It was published in France. His dissertation was from 84 or something like that. And, but it just came out in English, and I was reading that on the train coming in and he commented on that a little bit. And he was saying, you know, I did 600 pages and he did 1,200 pages on basically the same topic. We both studied at the same time. We never met each other until afterwards. And we basically did rather complete science. Well, I wanted to give you a response back there.

[18:14]

Which is. Back there. Which is, I'm interested in what we know about what we find and what we don't know about what we find. Yeah, that's a pretty good, that's an easy question. I don't know. [...] We've been here an hour.

[19:16]

That's the interesting thing is, the whole kind of argument about this is that we're not going to be able to do this. Well, okay, from my perspective, first of all, there's things that I can talk about and things that I'll actually, very shortly, I'll pass out some things and I'll make you talk about them on the basis of a couple of passages that I've selected.

[20:21]

My goal here is to do as little of the work and to make you do as much of the work as possible. Some of the topics that you've mentioned, Taoism and Zen, you can dispense with actually relatively quickly. Chinese civilization and Zen becomes, we can talk about that in one, at least in one particular way, and we'll come up very quickly in one particular way when we talk about genealogy. And you'll see that, this is in the blurb that I had Michael do, and maybe the subtitle, I can't remember, but I think that we're used to feeling that Zen in terms of genealogy is taking us. For example, down the street there's a big, down a hill, there's a path. And I assume that you guys are more familiar with Japanese pronunciation. I mean, okay, okay.

[21:23]

It's always, I have a, I've been teaching a class, for the first time this semester I taught a 100 level class that is a freshman level class on Zen. And I've always refused to do that in the past, but they're running the university now on the same principle as the generals used to run the war in Vietnam, that is on the basis of body counts. And so we have to do large enrollment kind of classes. And they get, the students get very confused about Japanese, Chinese, a little bit of Sanskrit, two different spelling systems depending on the difficulty. But I think I can probably depend on better familiarity from you folks. Certainly setting up the historical framework and kind of, you'll see that I'll both look at genealogy and how it's used, and also try to characterize different kind of phases in the development of Zen.

[22:25]

Because I think we can look at the evidence that we have, and we can say certain things about Bodhidharma and his buddies, for example. And we can say certain things about Hongren, or the fifth patriarch and his community, the fourth and fifth patriarchs and their community. And we can say certain things about the group that's known as the Northern School and so forth. We can characterize the folks, almost all men, as far as we can tell. But we can characterize these folks and their activities in certain ways. And there's some things that we can say about them and some things that we can't. So that a lot of the, I think actually a lot of the questions that you indicated, we can at least, if we can't hit the pitch squarely, we can at least put a useful foul paw there right or left in the field. But I think there are other things.

[23:27]

When you look at their origins, right, we're all, in a sense, we're trying to look, I think, I would assume, we're trying to look at what Zen really is. Not only how it developed, but what it was that the Chinese thought about it. And that, you see, I think is quite a remarkable event that at the end of the 7th century, beginning of the 8th century, the greatest religious fad, well maybe not the greatest, but one of the greatest religious fads in China, the imperial court for a while, was just a notion of simply practiced contemplation of the mind, practiced meditation. And I described it to students as the Nike motto, the Just Do It motto, you know, from the year 700. And I think it's quite impressive that in the greatest city in the world at the time, which is the capital city of Xiongnan, with a population of about a million, a very, very cosmopolitan city, this is where Zen basically took off.

[24:32]

By people who said, you know, all that other stuff is nice, building temples and standing sutras and so forth, but the real thing about Buddhism is the spiritual practice. So, I can get cynical at times, and I say, I try to be an equal opportunity offender and say nasty things about everybody in order to spread the blame around, but I'm genuinely impressed by the beginnings of this regeneration in China. Let me pass out, or let's pass out these, and take one and pass them on. And let me see, if you'll turn four pages in, actually.

[25:41]

I should have put them in a different order, I suppose. The top of the page reads the earliest complete quote-unquote Chan transmission statement. What's your name? Koka. Koka? Kokai. Kokai. Do you get that thing? Yeah. Ha! She didn't get it. The one person I want is you, and you get the page. Is there another copy? Is there anything else on there? No, we're good. Okay. I've learned in teaching this large enrollment course that I always have a backup plan. One day I went in wanting to give the students a geography quiz kind of thing, and I photocopied

[26:47]

a map of Asia, but I photocopied it from a transparency, and I kind of turned it on the photocopy machine and did like 50 copies or whatever it was. And it turned out, since I did it from a transparency, I'd done it reversed, right to left. So the students said, well, we can hold the paper up to the light. Anyway, Kokai, if you could read the start, the transmission of the teaching? The transmission of the teaching in India was fundamentally without words, so the intention of the teaching is solely dependent on the transmission of the mind. Ananda received all the oral teachings of the Buddha, but he always concealed them in his heart. When in contact with them, he couldn't conceal them. Shortly after this, Prabhupada and Ananda's friends gave the oral teachings of the Madhyamaka and the Madhyamaka's first citizen to Sanagasa. These are actually people's names. It's not the Madhyamaka. Madhyamaka. There's a guy named Madhyamaka, yeah. Yeah, okay. Let me do that again. Ananda gave the oral teachings to Madhyamaka and Madhyamaka's first citizen to Sanagasa.

[27:53]

Sanagasa. The achievement of Ananda, Madhyamaka, and Sanagasa is beyond words. It is not discussed in the teachings, but was exactly in the event of slightest difference of fear gained by the Abhidharma master at Indraprastha. They were able to respond perfectly to any occasion, to clear their identities and accomplishments that they know would be with them. These names cannot be distinguished with those of fear, because they had achieved separate from, oh, achieved separate from secondary embarrassment. So, what do you see in there? First of all, either what you know or what you don't know. Is this the Dharma transmission? Um, teaching is presumably Dharma, yeah. I mean, I can't... I mean, I mean, by what, you know, the, the Dharma transmission is the highly elevated

[28:53]

state of happiness in the family. Okay, so you're giving, you're basically, you're giving me a definition of Dharma transmission. No, I'm asking you, is this, is this the description of Dharma transmission? It kind of, it kind of doesn't sound like it. It is. It does sound like that. No, I'm not, I didn't say this is what it is. I'm saying, yes, that's what it sounds like. No, the point of the meeting was that I just thought, oh, that sounds like it is, it is, it is. I think I'm going to get the picture from the description. What's a Dharma transmission? I think it is a description of what, of what I gather is Dharma transmission. So you're going to be on your way? Okay. Because it does say, fundamentally, without words, right? Outside the picture. Okay. It doesn't quite say mind to mind here, does it? Let's see.

[29:56]

It's transmitting a mind, okay? Have you ever heard of Madhyamaka or Sannidasa? I've heard of Sannidasa. Has anybody heard of Madhyamaka or Sannidasa? Sannidasa is different. Different, yeah, yeah. Oh, that's a different thing. I'm pretty, I have to have to know. Same name, same name. Sannidasa Sannidasa, is it the name? Sannidasa is a different thing. That's a different thing. Do you mean that Dharma transmission isn't a universal phenomenon? It's different from the human experience? I would say, yes, that, I mean, that...

[31:00]

It's different from the human experience? Yes. The substance is different? I can't judge the substance, you know. I can just look at what people wrote and left behind, what they said about it. And maybe there might be other... I mean, all I can do is judge evidence for what they say about things. And this turns out to be the very earliest statement in the document associated with Chan, with Chinese Chan, that describes the earliest full statement of the transmission idea. Any, first of all, have you heard of Mahajandra before? The lady in the back of the room. That's me. Who is that about? Or Mahajandra? I don't know. Yeah, I think...

[32:09]

Yes, it's that. It could be some of us about it. And all that I remember, actually, I could have... I probably should have done a, kind of a maze first, but... They're known for going off and prophesizing in a certain direction, and it would be useful for me if I remembered which direction it was. I think it was off to the northwest, which would be the beginning. But... Yeah. I was going to say, the interesting thing in this is the non-institutional aspect, to say the least. Okay. Well, it's not like being at some school, like Soto, or Rinzai, or the different schools in India. It's not some particular line of school or institution. It's the transmission of the dharma from one way to... Anything that has concrete or solid meaning, like an institution or a particular teaching or doctrine. In fact, this statement, it's a very good point. This statement is...

[33:09]

If you look down at the bottom of the page, we'll kind of hide the second paragraph for the moment. But this is taken from the epitaph of a guy named Bablu, who died in 689. So he died in 689. The epitaph was written either that year or within a couple of years, anyway. And usually when an epitaph is written, well, you never know precisely, but it's probably the teacher's idea, the guy who just died, whose ideas go into the epitaph. It could have been his students who are deciding something to say about him. And we don't have to worry about that detail. But the material here, this first paragraph, is borrowed. I mean, if this were done in a college paper, it would be referred to as plagiarism. But this kind of borrowing happens all the time in religious texts, in Chinese religious texts. This is borrowed from a preface that was written to a meditation sutra,

[34:10]

the so-called Meditation Sutra of Dharmasattva, that was translated at the beginning of the 5th century, so in 420 or thereabouts, something like that. And in the original, it's talking not about the Zen lineage, but it's talking about transmission of the Vinaya, of monastic regulation, and that there were five different schools of the Vinaya, and all of them had the true teachings of the Buddha. I mean, it is, in fact, in the original, it's a very non-sectarian kind of statement. It says that all these five schools of the Vinaya, they transmitted the true teachings of the Buddha. They had some kind of minor, I would say, superficial differences, but they all transmitted the teaching. And this is what's being transmitted here, is their understanding of Buddhism as expressed in meditation sutras as five Vinaya masters.

[35:11]

So that you see in here, yes, you get this notion of an ineffable teaching. You get in this, from this, there are actually two prefaces that talk about similar things, but they talk about the transmission as an ineffable teaching that's transmitted without words, directly from the Buddha in an unbroken line, down to the present day. Yes. That's right. Well, also, what do you know about Ananda?

[36:19]

Ananda is usually, pardon? That was his principal characteristic, he was always there. And he had a good memory too, right? But Ananda is, if you look in the sutras, right? Ananda is kind of, especially in the Mahayana sutras, he's the Buddha's cousin, right? Cousin, nephew, cousin. And he recited all the sutras after the Buddha died. But he's always, or very frequently, accused of not having really understood the real gist of the Buddha's teaching. So he's kind of good memory is superficial, right? Med student kind of type, you know? He can memorize, he doesn't have memory. So it's rather odd, right? That he ends up here. And as somebody noted, this is not the standard version that can understand the Vedic teachings of the Vedas. He's a partner. He's a great master of the Vedas.

[37:22]

He's a great master of the Vedas. He's a great master of the Vedas. Yes, he's a great master. And, and he's a good teacher. He's good. He's a great master. Inaudible Yeah, see, Bernard says something like that. Inaudible I, that, that, that problem, that may happen. I don't, I don't think it should. Okay, well, okay, let's, before we, you know,

[38:27]

we can actually cut into numbers with these guys. Why don't we read the second paragraph so that we could have it all kind of in front of it. Can I keep going around? What does he mean? Okay. Okay. Some time, I think. Okay. Pardon? Is there a Harrison?

[39:28]

Pardon? Is there a Harrison? Why do you say a Harrison? Ah, ah, ah. Who is Farooq? Anybody, have you ever heard of Farooq? Farooq is an interesting guy about whom we know relatively little. I think actually, he was probably, or was probably Homeland's closest disciple. Unlike Homeland's other students, Farooq stayed with Homeland for, I think it was 16 years, which is a considerable amount of time, whereas most of Homeland's other students, including Sun Cho of the North and that other guy, Hui Nung of the South, they both seem to have been with Homeland for only three to five, five to six years, something like that.

[40:38]

And that seems to be the general pattern, and we'll talk about that later, but you went to study meditation with Homeland and you hung around for a few years until you sort of gave your time and you moved on, whereas Farooq was really the closest. He was also interesting in that he moved, after Homeland died, he moved into the capital area, he actually was the first one we know of to hang out at the Shaolin Temple. And the story is that, I mean, the epitaph about him says that he tried to hide out. He didn't want people to point him to official office or anything. But he may have been, that's kind of a standard trope he may have been, sort of being coy or whatever. But he seems to have only started teaching in the last few years of his life. But the way he's described is as having a very spontaneous, interactive kind of style.

[41:39]

And I think he's one of the first monks that he's described in this kind of way as kind of a, not that he's innovative, but a deeply personal kind of den master who would respond to the needs of his students and respond kind of automatically and very skillfully to what students actually needed. But he ends up being sort of forgotten by the students. He doesn't, as you say, he doesn't appear in the, he's not a big important part in the traditional stories and so forth. One of the things I have to compliment you guys on is that I use this passage partly to force students that have troubles about pronunciation. And you did great with the photographer. It drives you crazy to have students saying kappa gata or something like that. My rules of pronouncing Sanskrit are that there are no th's.

[42:43]

You try to do as best you can with a long mark. Any mark on an s becomes a sth sound. So here we have shanavata. But if it's a mark over, a mark under the s, I don't care. Just give me an f8 and ignore everything else. Any other dots and squiggles and marks and so forth. Then Chinese gets to be different, difficult. It's a different set of problems. But these are quake, sungtan, dao shen, and hongren, by the way. And here, as we sort of got into this, because bodhidharma is sometimes confused with buddha-bhagavata. And here, this text, Faru's epitaph, takes this earlier material that was buddha-bhagavata's definition of his own identity. I mean, it's presumably, although it's not explicit in the early 5th century text, it's buddha-bhagavata saying, this is where I came from.

[43:47]

And I'm a sarvajnavata master. I translate a number of different things. But I have this vinaya, this monastic regulation, lineage. And we have a few lists of lineages like that. That have, I think, 53, 54 names from the buddha down to roughly buddha-bhagavata's day. Buddha-bhagavata may not actually appear. He may have left off the list of his teachings, I think. And so the notion of a lineage is something that, first of all, comes from the non-Chinese tradition. And it's something that's associated with the lineage tradition. So it doesn't just have this kind of meaning. Right? It's a non-preface. That's right. It's a non-preface. That's right. So it comes from the preface. Correct. And the preface... The Chinese tradition. Correct.

[44:49]

So... That is a non-preface. It's a non-preface. And it's a non-preface. And the preface, the Chinese preface. Yeah, what happens is, I mean, Kui Yang is a very famous early monk. He lived in a... Had his retreat on Mount Lu. And Buddha-bhagavata had come into Chang'an, up in the north, earlier on. And his students had kind of gotten into conflict with Sumer's buddhist students. And he left town. It's not really that he was thrown out of town. But it was kind of too much hassle. He and Kumarajiva don't seem to have any problems. Their students are problematic. This is perhaps an understandable story, you know. And so he did the translation at Kui Yang's retreat. And Kui Yang and another monk named Kui Guan both write prefaces. And the content of the prefaces are similar enough that it's fair to assume

[45:54]

that this information is based on Buddha-bhagavata's lecture. ...tradition in Kashmir, in northwest India. And this is considered to be one of the... You say a hotbed of meditation, I may be? Anyway, it was a center of... A hotbed of still activity. Anyway, it was a center for meditation practice. And they wrote down various meditations, sutras. And this is the justification for why this is a sutra, but not written by the Buddha. There's a meditation sutra with somebody else's name on it. So it was originally a justification, not for far-rooted. It was a justification for why this should be... The meditation sutra about dharma practice. Why it should be a sutra, even though it wasn't spoken by the Buddha. Because, this is the memorized thing, it's just as good as it is. If you're in the lineage, it's just like the universe. Now, there's another famous sutra.

[46:55]

That's the original purpose of this. At least the first paragraph. Was originally used to justify the meditation sutra of dharma practice. Well, yeah. I don't think it starts with that. I have to think about it. But before we let this little moment go, do we know of any other texts in Zen history, that's a sutra that's not spoken by the Buddha? Pardon? The Platform Sutra, yeah. And everybody says, this is totally unique because it's a sutra spoken by a Chinese guy. Okay, fair enough, it is. I will say, also, it's in a tradition of meditation sutra. So it's, from one perspective, yes, it's unique. But from another perspective, this is as dominant as the Platform Sutra fits within. It actually limits that.

[47:56]

It seems to me that this was the first text the Buddha had written in China in the 18th and 19th centuries. It was a while before the Buddha ever taught it. Is that right? It is in a way, yes. It's certainly the... But it seems to me that this is what took hold in the different kind of... So it's kind of related to Zen meditation because it's higher than Zen meditation. But it's a genuine text. That was my question. That's pretty much true. Certainly, the earliest translations we have, which come from the middle of the 2nd century, 149 and thereafter, are meditation-related. There are lists of terms used in meditation and there are descriptions of meditation and so forth. And then, at the end of the 4th century, before Kumarajiva arrived, and before Kumarajiva and Buddha Bhagat arrived, Chinese monks are concerned

[49:14]

because they don't have the complete genuine regulations. And they've kind of made up monastic rules. But they're very concerned because they realize they don't have all the rules. So they have trouble kind of operating the community. And so this becomes a major need of the religious community. And particularly, if you know the monk Dao An, he's a very important monk who died in 1885 or something like that. He's not a translator himself, but he was kind of a steward of a lot of translation activities. He collected a catalog of what texts were available. And he was very explicit on the need for a complete version of monastic regulations. Then the other question is, why would they have a lineage, a succession associated with the lineage? And that's a question that I can't answer with documentation.

[50:17]

At least, I can't think of a chapter or verse. But an ordination is thought to provide, to make some change in the initiate, in the ordinary. And rather, we can think of that as a precursor or kind of the model from which the Zen lineage, the mind-to-mind, the word-list lineage, a model of how that developed. Initially, you have to be ordained by somebody who's ordained by somebody who's ordained by somebody who's ordained by the Buddha. And to take that Buddhist ordination, it's not simply to say, OK, well, I'll follow these rules and I'll act this way. It actually is thought of by these guys as changing you, putting something into your person that changes you. And I've heard it said, I don't know whether...

[51:22]

At the moment, the citation doesn't come to mind. But we think about Buddha-nature. The Buddha-nature is a term that, I've heard actually Professor Yanagi say, was built on the analogy of the Kaiso, the nature of the precepts. So you're actually the showing of a Kaiso into something. Now, this is not a term that has wide currency, but the thought is that the succession of, the then succession of the mind-to-mind transmission is, how do you say, modeled on, an outgrowth of, a permutation of, somehow, related to this kind of lineage. Do you think there's anything in relationships that you could just infer from the author of the notices that say those kinds of... It seems like those sort of things do not have been talked about,

[52:23]

but even that kind of text is so important to a practitioner, in my mind, in those people who have experienced that kind of relationship between the... My partner, in whom I asked to identify my yantra in front of us, this is Dan Matthews. He teaches also at Indiana and has a certain knowledge of the ashtas. Pardon? Obsession with the ashtas. Obsession with the ashtas, yes. Do you want to take that on? Yes, yes, yes. And some people, I know, sometimes they feel the ashtas may be related to the ashtas. Just very quickly, it's interesting that you mentioned that there are different kinds of ashtas, different kinds of ashtas, that are related to different kinds of ashtas. All I'm trying to suggest is that people do have to be, they need to be, they need to be able to feel that there's some ashtas that need to be healed. I wanted to ask you a question

[53:24]

that's particularly related to healing. And if there's a way you can comment on that, I think it would be very helpful. The last thing you mentioned, I think, about healing, the other observation that I have that I find interesting to me, and this is a data, is that there's a lot of ashtas that are related to different kinds of ashtas. And there's a lot of people who have a lot of ashtas that are related to different kinds of ashtas. But, and one thing that the existing kind of ashtas don't have any kind of connection to other ashtas, but if there is a healing, if there's a healing that's particularly related to ashtas, there's a big difference in the healing that's related to other ashtas that are related to the healing that we have. When we heard, when we heard about healing in the old hospital that we had ashtas, And we hope we can do that, but we can't tell it. The first time we did this kind of stuff was in 2015.

[54:25]

It was back in the early 2000s. It's still out now. Now, the limits of what we can do are the same. So, what we really have to do, is we need to do something about it. The first time I did it, I didn't really do anything. So, we have to get back into it and get on with it. I don't recall it being an issue. Well, I don't know. How does that? Okay, so they're practical people. Does that mean it doesn't matter whether you get a prediction or not.

[55:29]

Let's just go ahead and do it. Yeah. I think it's okay, yeah. I think it's easy. Well, I just unified them very easily. Everything that you were talking about, there's something about the prediction ceremony, you thought you had some part of it that had to do with prediction, but I have to ask you about that. Maybe it was specifically what it was. I didn't make it clear. I know the name, but I didn't know. All right. There were a couple of things that you did. One would be, one would be, you asked if you could do it. Yeah. You initiated it. I didn't initiate that. Yeah. I didn't. In other words,

[56:34]

you're going to have to take into account what you found out. That's a very good point. I'd forgotten that. But it's right there staring at us, isn't it? And he's called Sharma Master, so he's on it, too, right? He's not Zen Master or anything like that. Yeah. This is Shen Hua. So give me a 10,000. Well, I would suggest that it's useful to notice. These little points, because what I,

[57:35]

because what happens, okay, what I would suggest is that the Zen doctrine of the lineage, of the transmission, is inherited from the Indian or the Kashmiri meditation tradition. Or at least let's say there's a continuity there. And one of the subjects that I'm trying to address here is the question of, is Zen Buddhist and Indian, is Zen Chinese? And I'm going to come down squarely in the middle. We used to say, or a friend of mine used to say, my first Buddhist teacher used to say about, well, he used to say about virtually any religious group, but mostly about, like, universalist, Unitarian type. They had their feet planted firmly in midair. And that's where I'm going to stay here. But anyway, that there is a model of the transmission that's associated with the meditation tradition as it comes into sign from India. And it's particularly from northwest India, from Kashmir.

[58:39]

As we, so that there's some definite, you know, Buddhist, I don't like to use the word core, but anyway, there's a Buddhist model of it. And as it becomes expressed in Chinese material, it becomes reformed or modified or dressed in Chinese terminology. And we can look at a sequence of texts, we won't have time to do it today, but where early on they're doing things that later on would be considered sort of fervent, like calling Bodhidharma, because that implies skill and dedication to translation. I mean, whatever we know about Bodhidharma, he's not a translator. I mean, his whole image is based on being something entirely different from that. Well, okay, that's, okay, good point. It's someone who has mastered the Pacifica, and yeah, this is a good question,

[59:44]

but he's, at least in Chinese, and I'm not sure that we know whether there's Chinese use in Sanskrit material or not, but we don't have the same kind of biographical material, but it implies someone as a scholar, someone who has studied and mastered things. Now, Bodhidharma, it's fair to call him a Pacifica master if you say, well, he understands the Mahayana, the true teachings of the Mahayana, and that, you know, is the underlying principle of the entire Pacifica. So that, you sort of have to fudge it a bit. It's a matter of style. It's a matter of style. The other thing that happens in a different way is that you notice here we have Bodhidharma, then Huike, Sang-San, Dao-Shin, Hong-Ran. They're not given numbers. They're not called first Patriarch, second Patriarch. They're not, they're put in a sequence, and this little text is important because it puts them in a sequence. It's the earliest dateable text that we have

[60:45]

to put them in such a sequence, but we should pay attention to the fact that it doesn't dress them up with the kind of terminology that they have later. Later on, the first Patriarch, Bodhidharma, the Zen master, transmitted the Dharma to the second Patriarch, Huike, and so forth. And that style of more and more nuanced or higher definition in the description of these individuals as Patriarchs, we can watch that process as they gain definition over the course of time. It's hard to know when that process ends, but in one day, there's one text that's done in the year 800, the Dao-Lin-Zhuang, which is the first to contain the list

[61:48]

of 28 Patriarchs that become accepted as orthodox. We don't have that complete text anymore. There's another text done in 952, but those are in Japanese pronunciation. It uses that list of 28 and gives the full-blown kind of form. That text was basically lost in China and just discovered it by accident. It was retained in Korea, but it seems to have hardly ever been read. The major text is the Transmission of the Lamps that's done in the year 1004, and that has biographies of the seven Buddhas of the past, the biographies of the 28 Indian Patriarchs from the Buddha Upanishads, to Bodhidharma, and so forth. So what I would say is that the notion of a lineage, or the concept of a lineage, is inherited from Indian Buddhism

[62:48]

and then becomes represented, and it becomes a very central issue to the Zen school that's developed. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Yeah, right.

[63:58]

I have one of the videotapes that I showed my class a little bit this semester. It's a Taiwanese movie about Bodhidharma. One of the things that drives me crazy is how Zen has been used as an explanation for the martial arts and Bodhidharma and Shaolin boxing. And there's this pretty style of how this is done in Japan and a pretty style of how this is done in China. And actually, it drives me crazy, but it's also a lot of fun. I have a couple of movies of Bodhidharma from Taiwan. And even before he... He's just some kind of 38th prince, right? But he already is a master of Chinese martial arts and has various influence, where he's flying around through the air and doing all kinds of nifty films and stuff like that.

[64:58]

But they also depict him sitting for nine years facing the wall of Shaolin Temple. And they actually... I guess for movies, I don't know if it's some kind of myth or legend that gets circulated in China. They depict monks and maybe the local officials getting upset by this strange Indian guy sitting there unmoving for nine years. And so they hook ropes up to him and try to drag him off the spot. They hook him up to horses and so forth. But he never moves. The ropes break and so forth. But see, I had a point here. And then, of course, the second patriarch, the guy who eventually becomes the second patriarch, comes along and sits behind him. And then the one movie buddy, he must be on some lazy season or something. He kind of turns around to face... I think that that kind of story, I can all argue that that's really later mythology.

[66:02]

That it's a nice story. That I can show you that it's probably not true. And we'll talk about that later. But the notion of not transmitting the text to someone who is not as worthy of it. I think that if someone asks about Taoism, I think this is a theme that is inherited from the Chinese Taoist tradition, where you only give the text to your best student. So if it's a student who's going to pay the initiation fee. Because they're usually... Taoists very often don't do initiation fees involved. Where you're giving the text to the best student. And if you have a text, that's an indication that you have that lineage. So Taoists in the 5th century, 8th century, they would complain that they've seen many of these fake scriptures going around. I think in other respects,

[67:05]

the only thing that you really see in them that comes from the Taoist tradition is very important. The notion of spontaneity. The notion of inspired ability to interact with students. That has some kind of a relationship to the Taoism that we see in Zhuangzi, philosophical Taoism. But there's a religious tradition of Taoism in China that is... the overlaps with Zen or the interactions with Zen are very minimal. Very minimal. That's certainly possible. I don't know that. It's certainly possible. There's also a meditation technique that's attributed to Taoism in the 4th and 5th century, Taoism in Hong Kong, like maintaining the One.

[68:06]

Taoists have a doctrine of maintaining the One. But it's attributed entirely differently in Taoist meditation. So there's certainly this kind of interplay, so to speak. What we tend to think of as Taoism in this country is from the Taoist pool and so forth. Well, it's actually such a good little book. It's not funny enough, but it's such a good little book about philosophical Taoism. That is kind of the style of thought that the whole Chinese tradition gets to claim. And everybody needs that stuff. You have to know your flow, sort of thing. But the Taoist religion involves very different styles of meditation practice, very different styles of religious rituals. It's just as an organized religion, it just doesn't seem to have much to do with it. You're talking about religion and transmission.

[69:09]

To me, a lot of times the difficulty is which lens we kind of use to look at these things, whether we have a lens that takes it at face value, whether we have a lens that takes it at depth, whether we have a lens that looks at it socio-historical and political, because so much of the way it is seems to be concerned with the human nature. So if you look at something like a platform teacher, to me, when I read that, I hadn't read much history, it was like a political practice in a way, and not knowing an awful lot about it. I spoke nothing about Chinese history in this period. I couldn't help but be remiss. An enormous amount of what's going on in China, how do we construct what is dead, and how do we construct the relationship of Southern China and Northern China with the time, class structure, and the influence of the class, all these different kinds of, they're called universes.

[70:11]

So to me, a lot of times it's just a little skitty, basically, trying to figure out which lens I'm going to use and I just got used to them all. I want to say that I'm a big fan of Mahayana in general because it's the one view that I've been really keenly getting myself, but I'm curious about whether there's a relationship between the Indian architecture and Buddhism. Wasn't that one of the phases of late Indian Buddhism? Yeah, and I'd point with that. Remind me of that one. Let's talk about Bodhidharma specifically. Let me forget that for a second. You said you know about Bodhidharma.

[71:24]

Can you tell us a little bit about Bodhidharma? Well, I came from, for me, I came from Professor Yanagida's book. Professor Yanagida, he was the one who was the first to notice it. And I noticed, I think, you had just that Yinsheng book on, Yinsheng, I think, read Yanagida's book at least to the extent of looking at the Chinese book and then using the program again. I'm not sure, never been quite sure how well Yinsheng really read the Japanese text of Bodhidharma. Let me, I don't want to dug every question. Actually, if you can look back to the second page on the handout, there's a linear diagram. And this is, I mean, in a sense, this is what we're talking about

[72:26]

in a way is this kind of a framework. And now, what was your name? Michael. Michael, okay. When you, okay, you had an interesting thing to say about reading a five-point picture. When you look at this diagram, what does a diagram like that do? What's it good for? You know, are we talking about doing things with words? How do you know? I don't know. Well, it certainly makes it simpler than it probably were. Yeah, yeah. And I think that's fundamental to how linear diagrams and linear statements work. I'd say that at least, if we only,

[73:28]

we don't have to go all the way down. I mean, basically, there's one line, right? And I think the fundamental point of a linear diagram and a linear assertion is to assert that we're all the same, that there's a uniformity or a homogeneity. In fact, that a linear assertion, which we kind of neatly put in a diagram like this, and it's not just me doing these diagrams. You find these diagrams in Chinese texts as well. But the fundamental goal or purpose of that linear diagram is to homogenize things. And that means that it's, now, we do have a, you know, one, well, two splits here. We have the northern and southern school, and then we have two different lines under the southern school that eventually come out as so-so and so-and-so and so forth. But I would say that the goal of this kind of diagram

[74:37]

and the assertion that our teaching is transmitted from Bodhi Dharma to Ho Chi Minh Sun Tzu is to say that we're just like Ho Chi Minh. That we're just like Bodhi Dharma, or we're just like Hoi Nang, and that Hoi Nang is just like Bodhi Dharma, is just like Ho Chi Minh. It's to paper over any kind of differences that you might otherwise want to detect. Now, let's see. I don't have to put it in such a negative way. I mean, it's to indicate continuity. Okay. Then you can look at that as the glass is half full or half empty. You know, so it's to state that what I'm doing religiously is the same as what Chakramini was doing here religiously. And that's a religious assertion of positive value. But I will say that maybe from a more negative or kind of cynical standpoint,

[75:38]

that McCrae's second law of Zen studies I haven't given the first law of Zen studies, okay. McCrae's second law of Zen studies is that any lineage assertion is problematic to the extent that it's important. That is to say, if it's important to me to identify myself as in succession from Masters X, Y, and Z, the bigger deal I make out of that, the more likely it is that there's going to be some kind of historical funny business going on. Okay. And that's a rule or an inference that comes out of looking at a number of different lineage statements. And it's certainly true about the most famous one here. But we'll come back to McCrae's second law and I'll even tell you what McCrae's first law is eventually. I know this.

[76:39]

I need to leave you in some sort of suspense. Oh, okay. Well, it's true about the passage that we've read and it's true about the lineage statement. This lineage statement argues for or implies continuity and homogeneity. What I do in terms of Zen studies, if you look to the next page, you'll see Proto-Chan, Early-Chan, East Mountain Teaching, Northern School, and so forth. When I put together, this didn't come out to be very diagrammatic. I could do it with boxes and circles and arrows to make it more graphical. But what I do as a scholar in looking at the evolution of Chan is something that's almost diametrically opposed in purpose

[77:41]

to the lineage statement. Whereas the lineage statement is trying to show continuities and homogeneity, I'm trying to diversify and show distinctions. So I guess when we come back, what we can do is, I'll talk a little bit about Bodhidharma and his gang, and then talk a little bit about the East Mountain Boys, their gang, and what they were up to, and so forth. In a sense, one of the things I do as a historian is to try to characterize these different groups and see what they were talking about. And define how Zen changes over the course of time from one phase to another. And Zen studies both mean well, Ben-Hur, and Gore, and Riff Boak, and well, Phileo M. Polsky,

[78:41]

and Judith Live, and Robert Buswell, and Peter Gregory, and so forth. We can kind of argue back and forth about what to call these phases and exactly how to characterize them. But I think basically we're in pretty rough agreement about what we're going to do. So, can we take a break now? Take ten minutes and we'll come back and talk about Bodhidharma. However that works.

[79:13]

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