From being monastically defined or self-defined by some kind of monastic standard to be more cultural Buddhism, to be more like ethnicism, to be more like lay Buddhist practice. You don't think about whether it's kind of lay Buddhist practice that people go there on Sunday morning looking for a lecture. You have to keep it kind of straight. It's what I've seen. I don't remember if I've seen it or not. I show up on the road. People can do it. I can do it. And that's one of the reasons. Do you meditate? Yeah. Yeah, at home. I do. I do meditation and meditation. I do yoga. And that's why I have a background in the New England Orthodox Church.

[01:07]

Among some Catholics. Among some Catholics. But that's why I work in the Catholic Church. And that's because I'm Catholic. Typically, because I'm a large Catholic. Meaning, I do the community. I'm not really creating the cultural foundation for the monastic practice. Why should we create it? Because we're all Christians. We're all Christians. You can put this in a framework that people can get a handle on. But all they need is to jump into the community. The community. And that's what helps us. That's what helps us. And that's what these ideas have been developed over the years. That these people can have a say. That's what has been developed over the years. And of course, in your religion you're going to have to be right, from the beginning, of this monastic practice to this theological practice. In the Latin tradition, you're going to have to be predicting.

[02:12]

I'd like to ask you a question for me on this topic. This is one of the problems I have with Japanese students. I like Japanese students, but I don't know if you feel that way. Does it really bother you when you look at how I deal, and I look at how other people do, but you don't feel the same way? No, it doesn't bother me at all. I don't really feel that way. I guess it's a beauty. It's funny, but I think in the last six years, I've had to do more of my thing in the U.K. to compensate for the incompleteness. Well, you're not just a little teacher, but there's this guy by the name of Brian Victoria. He pulls out this fairly, quite familiar,

[03:15]

this very big name, Takuto En, Oomori Shogun, and Natsutani, and so forth, and binds them down to a 14,000-person system, and binds the substantial evidence to their active participation in the Japanese imperialist effort from the 1890s onward. And especially, okay, we have this benefit in 2020 hindsight, and, of course, I've never done anything wrong, but you look back at it, and it's killing. It's killing. It seems to be that Suzuki came up with the phrase, maybe it's from earlier in the literature, I don't know, that the sword that can kill is the sword that gives life. You throw phrases like that around, and they say that you're killing a costly planet for the benefit of the planet, or something like that. It may have been a theory that Suzuki came up with,

[04:18]

but he was a great, quite brilliant, and someone who could do that, but he was also an engineer, so he had to have a set plan for what he was going to do, and he did it in the 1950s, and the argument that he came up with was that he was going to do something like that, and he could do more than that, and he did it in a sort of, something like a topology, i.e., he came up with a methodology that was a bit of Suzuki, Suzuki came up with a methodology, and you may have people that believe that this methodology is also Buddha, but because Suzuki came up with this methodology, he came up with a methodology. Why am I looking at it? Because you can rationalize anything. You can rationalize killing people.

[05:19]

With Thor, you can rationalize, because it's all one universe anyway, it's your life, it's your safety, it's your health, too. But people other than Buddha don't quote anything like that. It's just a theory. That stuff about the story, I don't think it's based on, it's not based on anything like that. It's a passage in the Lotus Sutra that says that the real thing you can do is to enslave and destroy people, and kill them, for their benefit, in order to be able to understand the Dharma. And so that was taken, it's a very short little section that was taken, and just literally, it was decided that that was it, how to rationalize, how to kill people, for their own good. So it's not about what that means, it's about the real thing that happens,

[06:33]

and to be able to understand the Dharma. It's a process, it's a feeling, it's a way of getting to the consciousness of the Buddha. And, you know, I don't think it's out of context, it's not a just a question of any kind of answer, it's a belief, and it's based on the Buddha's teaching. And it's based on the Buddha's teaching, and [...] it's based on the Buddha's teaching,

[08:03]

and it's based on the Buddha's teaching, and it's based on the Buddha's teaching, and it's based on the Buddha's teaching, Yes, it was right, well, we could talk about emptiness. I think that the evidence of emptiness is a large extension of whether other religions have similar mechanisms, and obviously you can agree with this. Buddha didn't Dr. Jensen has allowed me to be a part of the team. This is great. This is great. Okay, I think that we have a... There are a few things that I want to follow up with and say about Bodhidharma,

[09:09]

but I think actually it might be better to move on a little bit, and I'll try to get back to Bodhidharma later on. And if you have the handout that he did, you can find the diagram, too. I don't know if it's in the handout, but... The historical stages are coming on. Right after diagram one. Right after diagram one. There's some simplistic logic there, yeah. This is by no means a kind of final document, and I just tried to put down here for the benefit of students just the fairest essentials or the briefest kind of notations about what these different phases,

[10:13]

identifiable phases in early China, at least in China, what they were like, what you can use to describe them. In the Proto-China, for those of you Bodhidharma Hui-Ko period, when I say multiple locations, these folks, these guys wandered around northern China. They don't seem to have held any one location, although they're associated with two or three different locations. When I say practice based on the Buddha nature, you discussed the sense of principle yesterday, and I think that's what I'm referring to there. We don't know what these guys taught or what they believed about their own wisdom. We just don't have any effective way of knowing. Where we know about them, that is to use their treatise on the two emphases and four practices,

[11:14]

is transmitted through traditional Chan or Zen texts, and we also know to an extent a certain amount about them from Dunhuang documents. That is, among the Dunhuang collection is a version of the, a copy of the treatise, and it has some letters after it, and then after the letters there's some dialogue. Yeah, correspondence, yeah, right. So there's a letter between Hui-Ko and a couple of different practices, and I think I translate part of this material in my book. And then after that correspondence, there are dialogues, basically, questions and answers, between figures who are sometimes given by name, but whose names we very rarely can figure out. And in the past I've tended to avoid looking at this material

[12:18]

because I can't state it clearly, but I think it's fair to say that this Bodhidharma treatise was transmitted within a community of practitioners who then, they talked about it and had dialogue exchanges on the basis of that, and those dialogues got noted down and added to the text and distributed to Dunhuang. Dunhuang is a pretty out-of-the-way place, so why it gets there, and whether there's some difference in what we see from Dunhuang, what was going on in more central locations in China, I mean, that's a question that I don't think anybody's really addressed statistically there, but they're aimed at that. But then there seems to be a...

[13:18]

Do you think, then, that there is a correspondence in this community, if we wait for it? I think it's a friend of a friend, I think it's a friend of a friend, I think it's a friend of a friend, I think it's a friend of a friend. And that correspondence, or parts of that correspondence are also found in the Shijiafeng Zhuang, which is a collection of biographies that were first put together in 1645. It's not just general biographies, it's a comprehensive group of biographies. It's called the Complete Lives of Dunhuang. First put together in 1645, and then modified up until the author compiled it in 1664. Shijiafeng Zhuang. So this early group, we know something about them, but not very much. And I think it's fair to say

[14:21]

if people around the year 700 didn't identify with them, didn't say these were our spiritual ancestors, we would have forgotten about them. It's probably fair to say. There were other groups, there were practitioners, with different styles and different voices, which we have forgotten about. We have certain descriptions of practitioners from the 56th century. So there was a lot going on, and these guys happened to be alive. Who knows why, but they're the ones we remember. I don't remember. I don't believe we have any of these names.

[15:23]

Bodhidharma is from the 7th century. I think that... I think it was... So it could have been, and probably was, but it's not written down. You said that Bodhidharma was a spiritual figure? Yes, I mean... I guess that they... I mean, he's not really... I'll take two positions about Bodhidharma. First of all, I think, yes, he was a spiritual figure. I think that it would be foolish... not foolish, I would not agree with you if you say there's not enough evidence that Bodhidharma is a spiritual figure. I don't buy that. But on the other hand, the evidence that we have about Bodhidharma comes from such conflicting sources that... or such different kind of apples and oranges

[16:26]

and sorts of incommensurable sources that it's very difficult to say with any precision what he was like. I think it's easier to say how he was remembered as time goes on. Well, certainly he changes... Actually, we could look... if you like, it certainly wasn't a messianic figure, but in the sense that somebody changes. If you look... Okay, if we go... Which way are we going on this thing? If we go... four pages or so on... Ah, that's silly. I have a chronological... We have this treatise on the two answers and the four practices and the chronological evolution of Bodhidharma's psychiography. One thing that we can say about...

[17:28]

Okay, I would say Bodhidharma existed. That's a reasonable thing. I would say we don't know precisely what he was like. I would say that people... people attributed great... kind of mystery... or not mystery... they considered him a great figure, a very inspiring figure. Whether they made that up, kind of laid that on him after he was already dead, who knows? What we can say is we can look... we can see with Bodhidharma more than perhaps any other Zen figure. We can see how his legend developed. So that... I just put down here when we learn different information about Bodhidharma. So that the text in 547 of the... about the monasteries of Luoyang says that he's from some country called Parthia

[18:28]

in Central Asia. That text isn't particularly clear on where the Central Asian countries are. In 645, this is with the first edition of the Srigatamkhanda, the Continued Lives of Eminent Monks, we get the basic story of him as a South Indian monk of the Brahmin caste. We get the text of his treatise. We get the story of Quakka's arm being cut off by bandits or rebels and Quakka burying Bodhidharma near Luoyang. By the time the compiler of that text died, or sometime before he died, he had added to his text and he adds the story about Bodhidharma transmitting the Lankavatara to Quakka. Someone asked yesterday about the association between the Lankavatara and Quakka. So, my tendency is to think it's kind of 60s, 40s, probably Bodhidharma didn't have anything to do with the Lankavatara. You want to nail down

[19:29]

what the historical figure Bodhidharma did, I would say 60s, 40s, probably not. This is a funny thing because as Yanagida has noticed and I, and Bernard Four and I both repeat, the texts that associate the Lankavatara with them are fairly empty of references to the Lankavatara. It's like, it's up there as some kind of a label. It has some kind of mystique to the text. But they don't seem to have been that much involved in actually reading the text or using the text. But somehow they never say why. So, people can look at the text and try to come up with ideas for why they would have used it. Yeah, it is.

[20:30]

And people talk about what is it, it's an animation idea, it's a kind of a gardening idea, and also, the Lankavatara kind of motions its consciousness in that text. So, but it's, you know, there are these texts from the early 8th century that talk about a Lankavatara school. But they never seem to draw anything from the Lankavatara, so, you know. The rest of the Lankavatara have to come back from the other side. Can you read all of it? Yep. There it is. Okay, let me, hang on just a second, and I'll come back to that text. Okay, so that first reference to Lankavatara putting down the wooden hand is the Lankavatara that equates to the teaching of the Lankavatara family, the Lankavatara family. Okay. I would say that's part of the lore

[21:31]

that's building up about Bodhidharma. 689, this is from Faru Epitaph, the, the text from probably the other day, or yesterday, and that's the first time you get a link, an explicit link between the Bodhidharma Hoekoe group and the Daoshin homonyms. Okay. Because in the, in the continued biographies of Eminem's monks, this collection of biographies that he's done in 645 and then supplemented up until the compiler's death in 667, it has references to several of these people where Daoshin and so forth, it doesn't identify Daoshin as being connected with Bodhidharma in any way. Is this something that the compilers didn't say? Well, does that mean they didn't know it? You know, it's an argument for silence. Then there are two texts that are produced from the Northern School as different factions or people

[22:32]

within the Northern School, and I have them down here for convenience, 710 and 715. It's actually sort of a pop-up in a kind of cute version. They were written without knowledge of each other. The one, 710, I translate in my book as the annals of the transmission of the Dharma treasure. And that one, there, Bodhidharma gets identified with Shalinsa. There it says, know that earlier story about Shalinsa having his arm cut off by Banish, that wasn't true, he actually cut it off himself. It says that Bodhidharma was poisoned several times and he decided to go ahead and die. He decided to let the poison affect him at one point. It gives a little bit of the dialogue between Bodhidharma and Song Yun, Song Yun coming back from India as they pass each other at the border, Bodhidharma going back to India and Song Yun coming back to China. And he mentions

[23:32]

that they go, then, come back to open Bodhidharma's grave and find that it's empty. And I don't, when I say empty here, I think they, it's empty at this point. I think the one sandal is the later I would say in April or whatever. So it's in, then in the text of 715 is a text called The Record of the Masters and Disciples of the Colossus of Paris. And this is a text that Bernard Four talks about and you can read it. This is one of the curiosities of our specifications, right? I picked one text and he picked the other text. And, if you know Bernard, Bernard loves to work with margins and edges and, you know, whatever is peripheral that he believes the edges define things. And so his dissertation on this material kind of goes off in various different ways. And I

[24:32]

tried, maybe more dodgy kind of way to describe this text. And I try to dodgedly follow the central storyline. But, anyway, the second text, The Record of the Disciples of the Colossus of Paris. This is the text that identifies not Bodhidharma as the first text, but this I think, to use these numbers in the first paper and second paper. So what's happening is the kind of the structure of the lineage or the basic assumptions of the lineage are fairly well accepted, I think. They're arguing, I mean, the argument isn't quite right, but they're perfecting the details and getting the story straight. And between these two texts that come out of different elements within

[25:32]

the early Chan confraternity, they have very similar styles, but different specifics, if you will. But the guy who writes the text he says this is the teaching of the Lankavatara and then he doesn't have anything about the Lankavatara lineage. And he also, he criticizes earlier, some earlier material and then turns around and uses the material as well. So he has to work to fill out the picture. As a text, I can't say too much about it as an Indian version, it's a rather late, Mahayana text that does have ideas of

[26:32]

storehouse consciousness and also the part of the garbage which is in

[27:53]

the text can't say too much sometimes I use as an to it has significant membership sites. But I would say it's a fairly, very unequal, how do you say, you can't really talk about membership at this point. It's a very pooh kind of thing. The next period that we're going to see, and I'm trying to get there now, is the East Mountain Period, or what I call the East Mountain Period, which is when Taoskin and Hongran are hanging out in Hongmen. And there we can see a regular growth. We have, once again, we have about, what is it, about half a dozen names associated with Taoskin, about twenty-five or thirty names associated with Hongran. When we get to the next generation, the Sun Tso, we get about seventy names associated with Sun Tso. And we can assume, it's fair to assume, these are the ones whose names are remembered. So there's certainly large

[29:05]

numbers of practitioners who don't leave their mark. And we can also see a kind of regular growth. Just like you said, in terms of numbers, the numbers are very small in this period, but what in terms of incidence of influence is in the culture? Is the influence of the culture in part because of the relationship to the emperor and the empress much larger and somehow trickling out into the culture, or is it still very tiny? Unless you're very small. Well, to finish out, you can look at the chronological, there's just one sheet, and you can see how Bodhidharma's pedagogy develops. And you can see that it's a fairly simple kind of thing, how the legends about Bodhidharma appear, and his religious personality

[30:09]

is transformed. We have basically three periods to talk about, and I've characterized the Proto-San period. Then we have what I call the East Mountain Period, or the Early Period. And then the Northern Period. I would say that the crucial event in all of this was that in 700, Emperor Zhu invited Sun Tzu to court. Sun Tzu is the quote-unquote loser in the Platform Sutra work, which he was an extremely important figure during his lifetime. And it was by that invitation to court that he was invited into the capitals of the people. Two capitals, kind of like Washington and New York, and Shanghai and Hualien. And it was from that that a lot of the texts of both Bodhidharma and also

[31:12]

the Fifth Patriarch, that they get distributed. That if it hadn't been for that national recognition, that we really can't say what would have happened if they didn't do it. I think that that's crucially important. Because it was once they hit the big time, once they hit the Chinese capital, that these guys had the right to move down. If you're off in the boondocks, you know, if you're down at Takahara, for example, and if Takahara were your only part of the government, and all of your students come to Takahara, you tell them how to sit. Having texts is nice, and so forth, and you wouldn't be busy with it. But you can tell them what they need to know. But it's when you get invited off to the White House, and there's a zen boom, and people want to know

[32:17]

about it, and they can't all make it to Takahara. They don't want to all go off to the boondocks. They want to be able to get at it in the capital. That's when zen becomes, it's launched on a national stage. And you should realize also, as I said briefly yesterday, that this time, Chang'an is the largest city in the world. The population is about a million. A very cosmopolitan city. China at the time was very international. There's trade across the Silk Route to not only to India, but also to Iran and the Mediterranean. If you look at things that are preserved in Japan from roughly this period, I mean the trade in luxury was remarkable. There's a book that I just saw on Japanese poetry that has a blue goblet, a glass cup basically, from the 7th century

[33:20]

Japanese collection. And I saw a picture of this thing when I was a kid, and I said, if I saw that in the yard sale now, I wouldn't look twice. I wouldn't pay 50 cents for this thing. You know, it's the same blue thing, blue goblet, maybe with a silver base to it. And this funky kind of pattern to it. I think it's just you know, I wouldn't even look twice at it. But in the 7th century this is remarkable stuff. This is remarkable stuff. You know, it benefits the trade across in ideas and in luxury goods and stuff like that. And for Japan to be not the only game in town, but one of the most highly publicized and popular approaches to religion at the beginning of the 8th century in the biggest city in the world, I think is impressive. And that's when the springboard affects

[34:22]

the study. All Buddhism has been around and no, I think that in fact that Sun Tzu when he gets into the imperial city, you know, Buddhism has been supported by kings and so forth for centuries. And one of the things about Sun Tzu is you have to figure out well, or effectively, how can I teach and make it sound like it might be a myth. Now maybe he didn't, I have no evidence that he thought about designing a marketable doctrine, but he ends up designing a very good presentation of Buddhism. Because what he says is all those ideas about Buddhism that you've heard, they're not really about

[35:23]

gathering flowers, they're not really about building temples, they're not really about casting energy, he didn't even care about that stuff. He cared about contemplation of the mind. And all those things are metaphorical explanations for the meditation practice. And that was basically his style, to take traditional explanations of Buddhism and read them as metaphors for meditation. Well, I would say it was his own practice. And that allowed him to use stuff that people knew and to reinterpret it for them in a different form. It also happened to be a doctrine that was not politically disadvanced. He didn't imply that the state of corrupt is, in a sense, to deceive the mind. He didn't imply that

[36:25]

you can give lots of money to the mind group if it's, at least on the surface, it doesn't have that, there's no imperative to give money to the mind. It allows them to adopt a very noble plan. I'd actually argue that it has a very good effect on fundraising, it's very useful in fundraising to adopt that code. So, when you say, when does it become popular, I think that until one sprinkle of invited support, that's when things take off. That, if that hadn't happened, this photogram would have been forgotten. And the numbers, and I'll talk about Hongyan and his community in a little bit, the numbers were significant. We can see that it's a substantial community, but it's not massive. And then they say

[37:26]

like eight or nine out of every ten spiritual practitioners in China visited Hongyan's place to study meditation. Well, that's what kind of hyperbole this is. This is a well-known place, but let's not believe it's a place they have given money to. You may have written in your question, and this is not one for me, but this is one of the main things that they did, and I'll give you the case that Hongyan and his people were given money from the community, and that's the one that attracted a lot of people. And then, you know, it says that that's partly because they adopted and they incorporated a lot of other Buddhist practitioners. And so the idea of the family, you know, he proposes that as one of the reasons why it became more of a popular thing. That's one thing I want to say. The other thing I'd say is

[38:31]

you're afraid that the person who did it, you're afraid that it happened during the time of the Buddha Dharma, it seems like there must be like this historical gap in information, of course, and one of the things that I think I want to include in this part was the origins of Buddhism in Vietnam and Korea, all of this, including the monk, an actual Indian monk, that supposedly studied under, anyway, very high in the technical school, all of this tradition states that the origin of Buddhism in Vietnam does not come from the origin of Buddhism in China, but actually Buddhism in China says that Buddhism was known for its time, and this is simply documenting some of the great traditions that he had learned during that period, in the way that he could stand up and recognize some of the dojos that were supposed to be in China.

[39:36]

And I saw these transmissions going on at that time, I mean, I don't know how, I can't remember, maybe there was more going on there than I'm aware of, but a lot of it got wiped out during the Buddhist depression, and you can see the effects of that, how much is really happening. Well, that's certainly one of the things. I mean, we don't, that's probably the easiest of the things that we can say, and I think we could all agree on the likelihood that there's more that happened that we don't know about than we do know about. I mean, these are remarks that we could record people in comparison to India. So we know a lot, and we couldn't be talking about this without India. Yeah, I mean, you know, if you can nail stuff down to a century, thank the Lord. But to put a name on things, we have to argue about whether it's the second generation

[40:43]

or the third generation. Anyway, with one of the things that is happening here is that the character's son, Tom, who is identified as the third patriarch, he's like, this is a total mystery. And I would argue just on a kind of common sense approach, this is a guy whose name is to connect the Bodhidharma-Hawaiian characters with the Taoist emperors. Was Tsang Tsang really involved in this? Was there really a third patriarch who was really in the series of this? I tend to think not, but I think this is something I can't speak to. I think there's a list in the Continued Lives of Eminent Monks in this collection of biographies. It was Tsang Tsang's name that appears at the top of the list, and I think he's just taken off that list.

[41:43]

It's a list of students who are specialists in the Lankavatar. And these early, the two texts, the early transmission of the Lamp Text in the early 8th century, they both agree that Tsang Tsang is in there. They buy the lineage. But they have real difficulties describing what Tsang Tsang was all about. And because he was such a cypher, later on in the 8th century, Chinese Chan figures realized this, and there was kind of a movement in a way to document Tsang Tsang's biography, and so there's a couple of epitaphs that are written for him in the 750s and later. And we have this the text, the speaking name, which, I mean, it comes from sometime in the latter part of the middle, say, roughly around 750, give or take,

[42:47]

50 decades. Yeah, right, right. And I don't think there's a snowball stamp in hell that was actually composed by the historical figures for Tsang Tsang. Actually, there is a historical figure, Tsang Tsang, who's a very prominent monk in the Sui dynasty, and sometime I want to write an article saying that Tsang Tsang was actually Tsang Tsang. But most Zen studies people don't even consider the possibility that this guy was actually the Tsang Tsang of the Zen lineage, because the images are so very different. He was kind of an occult figure in his own right, but he was a very fancy, very high-ranking kind of political dude. He was very prominent in the Sui dynasty court. I think it's entirely reasonable that his name would have been on that list, but then the Zen tradition is not going to associate

[43:48]

with this guy at all. They have to make up a Tsang Tsang who far more fits the kind of style of Bodhidharma that he developed. Anyway, what we get then is the Huike group, and then there's the East Mountain group, what you think of as the 4th and 5th Patriarchs. When we look at the careers of Daoxin and Hongren, we see some interesting things. Daoxin arrives at Huangmei in the year 624, and he teaches there until he dies in 651. Hongren becomes his successor and teaches there basically in the same place. They move from one mountain peak to another, but it's not a major change. He teaches there until he dies in roughly 674, 674-675. So here we have 50 years where we have a community that's developing in one location. And we can say a number of things about this community.

[44:52]

And I have substantial disagreements with me in a couple of ways, and you'll see what I mean here. First of all, we can see the numbers increase. There are something like a half dozen students that are associated with Daoxin, and something like 25 or 30 associated with Hongren. Do you have a platform to remember all the disagreements? Yeah, and I think that's where basically. And the platform is if Hongren dies in 674 or thereabouts, it's presumably in the event that they take place roughly just before he dies. The text actually appears to have been written around 780, and that's when it first appeared. The manuscript is a little bit later, but the text probably appears right around 780. So it's a hundred years after the event goes to take place. And people exaggerate. I mean, when Hongren dies, I think the biography says there were like

[45:57]

a thousand people at his funeral or something like that. Well, maybe so. But, you know, a thousand people from town. Hongren was actually from Fangmen. And he was from a local family in Fangmen. And after he died, his home was turned into a temple. And I actually, I think that Hongren, where I say Huike was the central figure of the Bodhidharma Huike group, that Hongren was the basic figure here. That basically they brought in Daoxin to become Hongren's teacher. He was somebody they liked. I mean, Daoxin, I'm not dumping on Daoxin. Well, I suppose Hongren would be the best. I think that's kind of covering up that Hongren was really the obvious choice. Anyway, of the names, if we look at the names and the biographies and so forth, even though there are like 30, 25 or 30 people associated with Hongren, him as teacher,

[47:01]

it seems like they only stayed at his place for a few years. They stayed with Hongren for two, three years, and then they'd move on. Sparu is really the exception. Second, we look at their biographies, the people that come and study with him are, they have various different styles. There are practitioners of the Lotus Sutra, there are people that have previous experience in meditation, there are specialists in monastic regulations and so forth. And so he's drawing from the kind of Buddhist monastic community as a whole. Third, in my mind, there's nothing associated with Hongren except for meditation. He doesn't do translation, he doesn't do sutra interpreting, there's no reference to any other kind of religious practice. He's a meditation teacher.

[48:05]

No, no, about him specifically. Well, first of all, I don't buy the platform sutra historical documents. Yeah. Well, I can't say that he didn't have special interest. I wouldn't say that. I can't tell you, I won't accept in that sense, I won't accept the platform sutra's testimony. It's not that simple. But I won't deny the guy his interest or his attraction to particular text is just that he wasn't there to teach the Dharma. He was there to teach meditation. That's what people came to.

[49:06]

They thought of him as a meditation instructor of particular gifts. They came and studied with him for a few years and then they went on. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. There's a at least, let's see, we're talking 7th century here in the, one of the contemporaries of Bodhidharma, a rough contemporary is a guy named Sung Cho. Sung Cho was a meditation specialist and he's contrasted at some points with Bodhidharma as a different style of meditation teacher. At one point Sung Cho helped out a Dharma instructor, a guy named Hui Yen. It's a different Hui Yen from the one we've talked about here. Hui Yen was a scholar and an expert that he explained sutras and so forth. And he lectured

[50:07]

on them. And at one point, I think Hui Yen was a, this particular Hui Yen was a type A personality. And he, at one point, he had a heart problem. He had what I would call there's got to be high blood pressure and maybe he was having other kind of cardiac events. And he went to Sung Cho for help. Or he remembered, I think, that he had studied some meditation. He'd kind of been forced to study some meditation as a kid sort of thing. And he decided to go back to that. He calmed himself down through the practice of meditation. And he realized that that was good for him. But he went back to teaching. Well, and... Yeah, but there's a lot of Dharma out there. And people the meditation teachers tend to argue that

[51:09]

the Dharma is there in order to support meditation practice. People who focus on the Lotus Sutra, for example, or focus on Pure Land Text, or focus on the Nirvana Sutra, they have a much greater stake in simply teaching the Dharma. So what I'm saying is that nothing like that kind of focus on teaching the Dharma is apparent in the materials about Kona and maybe something more. It seems to them that real meditation is focused silently in practice. The platform students have kind of a dividing line of almost like doctrine. I don't know. It seems like the platform teacher sets up the whole lineage and myth of origins in a way.

[52:12]

It kind of creates this whole story. And it also seems very polemical. So it seems to behave very political in a way. So in some ways it polemicizes against the so-called Northern School. But then it also seems to have polemical aspects against Confucianism and against Taoism. I don't know if I'm reading that in there, but it seems to take this type of... There may be some in there about Taoism and Confucianism. I would say that mostly the Platform Sutra there's... We're getting kind of ahead of ourselves in a way. Is this kind of like the place of the institutionalization of that platform teaching? You mean in a vicarian sense that these guys are finally getting buddy-buddy and no longer... Well, just in a...

[53:13]

In terms of something that's solid and established, that we're an actual school, we're an actual conclusion, we're here, we're not just people practicing and meditating and people talking, but we actually exist as a real institution that would come here if we wanted people to be critical. Well, I don't know about institutionalization in any sense. At least that's not primarily how I think of the Platform Sutra. I would say to kind of give the overall outline that Zen kind of matures in this East Mountain period. The people we associate identify as the Northern School, they take it to the public in a big way and to the fancy people, the poor society in a big way. Shen Hui comes along in 732 and attacks the Northern School and he gives the Northern School its name. He's the one who first uses his name. And he creates this very

[54:14]

uneasy kind of situation. People don't like how personal Shen Hui was in his past. There's something a little bit unsavory somehow about his style. The Platform Sutra comes along and resolves the crisis. Shen Hui creates by his factionalism, by his name calling, he creates a crisis. The Platform Sutra comes along in 780 and it resolves the crisis by adopting some of Shen Hui's ideas which were very I think inspired and very useful, very kind of malleable in certain ways. And it resolves the crisis in a way that leaves Shen Hui out of the story. So that I regard the Platform Sutra as a gem.

[55:15]

As a religious document and also as the kind of capstone text of what I would call the early Trump. And so whether it institutionalizes or what, but it kind of settles the story in a way that everybody can be kind of happy with and it creates an image of Hui Nung that people can use in teaching. It's just a remarkable, wonderful text. So whether that I don't know whether that institutionalizes it. It certainly kind of sets the, sets a template for how, this is how we're going to think about this earlier period and this is how we're going to think about Zen from now on and so forth. Yeah. I think it doesn't seem to me as if it's something extremely divine in order to kind of micromanage the role and role of different kind of

[56:21]

and you know you say well it's been quite a problem I mean it's always been quite a problem for me to follow the line but nevertheless I think there's a difference Yeah I think there's a difference between Shun Hui and the Platform Sutra. There are enough cases, and this is the inaugurative research from 1967 actually. There's enough that where you look at Shun Hui's specific ideas and then you look at ideas in the statements in the Platform Sutra and there's enough difference there. There's a substantial doctrinal difference between Shun Hui and the Platform Sutra. So some scholars Suzuki kind of flirted with the idea Uehaka Ju, a great Japanese Buddhologist flirted with it. I think he believed that Shun Hui wrote the core of the Platform Sutra. Husher I think believed that Shun Hui wrote the core of the Platform Sutra.

[57:23]

I think that's not valid anymore. Now the inaugurative, bless his heart in 1967 he comes out with one like 600 page book which argues among other things that the Platform Sutra was compiled by an Oxford school figure. And that's the interpretation that I tend to still follow. And then 20 years later, what is it, 1985 or so he publishes a 400 page journal article. I mean seriously it's a at least 400 page journal article. He was from the Institute for Humanistic Studies at Kyoto University. He was head of the institute and I don't know why he didn't publish it. But there he has a different interpretation for kind of where the Platform Sutra comes from in terms of who the name is associated with it. But he doesn't go back and comment on his earlier

[58:29]

theories. So we have kind of two theories. The early inaugurative and the late inaugurative. Well for this kind of argument there's really only been one version to work on. And the later versions add a lot. It would be fun to study. I've actually, I translated the main version later on. It was one of the main versions. Before then there was lots of translation projects. And now that Phil Yampolsky has died I would like to go back and do a comprehensive translation of the three major versions of the Platform Sutra. There's the Dunhuang version. There's two Japanese Daidojins on. What is it? Koshojin and Daidojin. That are kind of

[59:31]

you know, say Song Dynasty versions. And then there's Shujin Dynasty versions which are very similar. I'd like to do a what's it called? A synopsis translation of the whole map. Because it would be fun to watch how the text grows. What's happening to it as it grows. But it doesn't really relate. Those later developments don't say much about those three origins of the text. Yeah. Yeah, I thought of this is four months on when I organized the conference. And I was involved in I thought I was involved in organizing it. It seems less so than when I got there actually. And they published the papers on that. And I thought of taking

[60:34]

selective articles out of that and actually editing them and publishing them. The four months on people have no conception really of how to deal with the style of their work. It's too bad. They're very wealthy. They do some great things. They have a Chinese Buddhist dictionary. It's also out on CD. It's a great dictionary. But they have very funny style of interacting with and dealing with conferences. They want to do a conference and get the conference record out like the next week. Scholars like to be able to think about what they say and pay attention to detail. I just found two weeks ago a student brought me something and said, hey, I hear you've got an article in this thing from this thing from four months on. I'd given a paper.

[61:37]

They'd taken my paper and published it. And included in there, as I had in the original paper, following parts to be translated by my student or something like that. I had in caps. And I just left it in there. In all these notes to myself. Yeah. Anyway. So the platform feature, hopefully, we probably ought to take a break pretty soon. Let me just finish, if I can, about these mountain boys. So I have them have a community. It doesn't have to be a very large community when you think of the numbers. There's thirty, twenty-five to thirty students over the life of a twenty-five year teaching career. Even if you figure maybe they're bunched up a little bit towards the end. It doesn't have to be more than ten to twenty-five

[62:38]

monks at any particular time to have that kind of, to produce those kind of numbers. It doesn't have to be a huge kind of thing. Also argues that it was here that the Zen style of work as practice developed. And I would say there's no evidence for that whatsoever. Could have been. Could have been. But we can't go on the basis of the platform sutra, which is a hundred years later. And in fact, if you look at the platform sutra, right, Kuineng shows up as a barbarian from the far south. He's put to work as a temple servant. So the fact that he's put to work implies, in fact, that the monks weren't working. So there's a notion of Zen monastic discipline in the development of that particular style of practice. Something that we can't

[63:41]

argue from here. We do have one text that's associated, that's attributed to Hongren in the Fifth Patriarch. It says it's only included in the Dunhuang material. It may have been distributed in Korea as well, but it's not really Chinese. It's not found in Chinese text. It says at the end of the text that it was compiled. Hongren is supposedly quoting Hongren and he says, this text was compiled for me by my students. And that's the way Zen text traditionally got, or eventually came to be compiled, is that the old man starts to get on in years a little bit, or after he dies, he puts together a list of his faiths and so forth. And that happens with Hongren's text. Now, did that happen before he died? Does his text date from, is it actually a transcript of his actual teachings? I don't know. But it certainly is

[64:43]

the way that Shunxiu and his friends, that is Hongren's disciples, how they remember him when they celebrated and popularized his teachings in Chang'an beginning in the 700s. So, we're down to a fairly small gap here. I think it's clear that Hongren's first generation of disciples compiled this text to represent his teachings. Maybe there is some difference between what he actually said, but I don't think it's very significant. And that particular text, and we can talk about the text when we come back from break, but that particular text I think is a gem. It's just a very sweet text in the way that it emphasizes effort over and over again throughout the text. It says, make effort, make effort. It's rare enough to be born as a human being, but to be born with a chance to practice Buddhism and achieve liberation

[65:47]

is very, very rare. So, go for it now. But then it sets up a style of religious practice that by the design of the practice tries to keep students from clutching at the goal. Aiming at being truly results-oriented. Aiming at nirvana too much. Grabbing for the moon. And I see this text as just a delightful combination of the paragon of faith. Yes ma'am. In my book. I don't get any revenue from pushing my book either. You don't know? I think there's another index in the volume. Chris Cleary published a book called Zen Dawn.

[66:52]

Which I reviewed quite negatively. I have... I mean... They could be so much better so easily. I've never met Tom Cleary. I've met Chris Cleary at Harvard. I have to practice more in order to meet him. Well, I mean, these guys Chris, certainly his Chinese is very good. When I say they could be so much better, and the problems with Zen Dawn I think are typically probably greater than with other stuff that they've done. They never tell you where the text is from. So they don't tell you what they're translating. Okay, you don't want to scare off readers who ooh, Chinese characters. Dangerous. Well, you can put a page at the end of the book. It doesn't have to have the Chinese characters in it.

[67:56]

You can say what edition, what text, what pages you're translating. They don't tend to do that. They tend to avoid doing that. I think some kind of spiritual elitism. Tell this to Thurman. How about the Avatamsaka? He just translates through names. It takes time. This stuff is not easy. The Avatamsaka it ain't easy stuff. Now, I haven't looked at Tom's translation of the Avatamsaka, but I've had people say that and my impression of Chris's stuff in Zen Dawn is sometimes he has very felicitous renderings of things and his English can be very good. And sometimes he's just off the wall. And he doesn't take the time to look things up. And with the Avatamsaka too, I've been told that he will kind of translate through things that are names. I have a mantra where he sees

[68:59]

something and he doesn't realize that it's somebody's name and he translates it as if it's a subject and object or something grammatical part of it. They're very prolific. Well, like in this Zen Dawn, I can't...oh, there's also a guy named Bajo who I think he translated. And his was okay, actually. I mean, I have differences of opinion about how to render things, but that's the kind of style. He was working earlier and so forth. So in Roaring Stream it might be Bajo's translation. P-A-J-O-W But clearly he translates

[70:01]

and Zen Dawn he translates the record of a master's dissertation of the Lankan Atara part of it. But he goes from a 1940s Chinese edition, printed edition that in the United published an edition in Japanese translation annotated with lots of explanation in 1977 or 72 or whatever. And clearly he doesn't use that because he doesn't like Japanese sources. And so he used a new manuscript discovered in the beginning times. So he's using an old text and then he starts by 200 and some odd characters into the text. He just chops off the beginning of the text without any explanation for why. And in other stuff that they do, they tend to do anthology and they tend to pick what they love. And if you want to pick just the groovy stuff and just make it the stuff that you think is inspiring, that's the editorial manipulation of the text.

[71:02]

And I don't think that's fair to the reader. What's the traditional Chinese approach to that text edition? The traditional Chinese approach to bringing out Chinese text, for example, is pretty formulaic. You give a little biography and then you give a story of their enlightenment. Then you give an example of their teaching. And usually they give one major interpretation of that person to be representative of what they did and then you end up with how they died. There's kind of a formulaic thing there with the things. You tend to pick the main things in there. Yeah, well...

[72:04]

But what you're saying Andy is he dropped off that formulaic part. Well, I think he tends to leave out some of the...in the back of the group, the group that corrected they go in and they actually present a lot of the information from that formulaic presentation. And I always thought that was a little bit unfair that that stuff kind of got locked off in terms of putting others in instead of putting some of the stuff about that people in context and presenting it that way. Because that's a pretty constrained way of presenting that material. And I guess I'm not going to leave you with that argument. Just to say that it doesn't seem to me it's too far from kind of the Chinese approach which is present the important stuff and don't worry about the rest. I used to do it with the Five Lambs, of course. A lot of people in there have master directors that you can go back and translate. And the formula of Five Lambs kind of takes it and it's where a lot of this is just kind of... Yeah, I think there's something also that's like in some of those collections

[73:09]

they present anecdotes, they present stories, interactions between masters and students and students and their stories without context. And I think that that's significant. That they're giving you the story that's in a bare bones form and...see my students have never heard of Marshall McLuhan. This is a hot medium. And what this material is used for so much within the tradition is teachers and students imagining, visualizing what happens. And the fact that they leave off the context is I think important to kind of allow that practice to happen. Because that's you know, in any...I joked the other day about Dogen using koans. Well, they're clearly... however you use koans, whether it's in a Hakuin style kind of regimen or if it's in Dogen

[74:14]

style of explanation at the very least, they're visualizing how enlightened masters behave. And it's important I think that they don't give context. So that you have to do it on your own. It's like listening to the radio rather than watching the radio. You've got to imagine it all. But, okay, so it's clear as you're gonna recreate that material, fine. But it's not...there's a great difference between creating material that can be used by Zen communities, say, and explain what happens in the kind of the dynamics of the evolution of the Zen school. And I'm doing the latter. I mean, that's my... try to explain the kind of social historical dynamics

[75:16]

for how Zen evolved as a religious movement. And I need to notice things like they're leaving out context. But I don't want to make choices for my readers and pick just the stories that I like because I think they're groovy. And I want to get away...see, I think that's what you're calling a traditional Chinese style of presentation. If we do that in English, that's...I call it the string of pearls method. One fancy pearl on a string. That's not the way that in late 20th century America that's not how we understand religious movements developing and spreading and growing and changing. It's two sunken stools. Very different purposes. It's a document which is important.

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