He's a medium master in philosophy. He's a ritualist as a practitioner, Pendai and Zen ritualists. And he continues to be the Pendai Yuzo teacher. And he establishes a monastery that includes some Zen ritual practice. And he emphasizes that Zen is a tradition that speaks the Binyin. So here you see Zen being brought into the Binyin reformation. Zen is a form that speaks the Binyin most strictly, unlike Japanese. Actually all he's saying is that Chinese monks actually speak the Binyin unlike us. And that's exactly what he's saying. Because Zen here means Chinese Binyin. In other words, Chinese philosophy. He's not much into civil Zen philosophy. He uses the language and so on. He talks about the Binyin and so on. But he's really interested in Zen as a teacher. And as you might guess, contrary to someone like Yonan who gets harried and harassed, his budget is supported by the

[01:10]

government. It's adjustable now. Somebody saying we have a reformed government that will be safely inside the monastery. And we have the cultural prestige of Chinese Buddhism. Chinese Buddhism is the source of cultural prestige for the Japanese. And we can bring it back and establish it here in Japan. So the bureaucracy, the military government, as well as the court, are very supportive of this. And he makes an important figure and has an important job as a teacher. So that's another sign. And then, there's this very distinctive style of this guy, Dojo. He doesn't stick to either the radical philosophy type or the ritual type. He participates in both, but he does it in a new way, I think. A new kind of synthesis.

[02:11]

And I think I would like to hear us talk a little bit about Dojo as a Japanese Zen Buddhist. So what do you think, now that you've seen all this background? Can I let them talk? I don't really understand. But they have an interest for me in both Buddhism and Japanese Buddhism. Well, think about some of the major elements in Dojo. In Dojo's style of Zen. And ask yourself how they might fit into the mix. The complicated mix that we're looking at here. Yeah. One thing I was struck by when you talked about Eisai talking about the Vinaya and upholding the Chinese monastic model was the way Dojo can write in the sense of Dojo-ryu practices. And what it says is that we as Japanese don't do these practices. We don't know how.

[03:22]

Right. We don't teach them, but also we don't know how to teach them. And I forget where he talks about how that is, and how to put on a figure. I don't know if anyone in this particular age is very familiar with it. Yeah. It's amazing. It certainly is impressive. It's an amazing piece of stuff. Yeah, yeah. What strikes me is that Dogen's great doubt is actually a great doubt of everybody's for a long time. It wasn't his own personal thing. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You didn't make that up. Right. That great doubt, whether he actually had it or not, is another question. But it's expressing of exactly the situation of Japanese Buddhism in this day that everyone is talking What do we do now? Now that we've been told that our job is not to become Buddhists. Yeah.

[04:41]

Practice, and there's a guarantee. Awakening. Precepts. Not otherwise much talking. Well, and there's a lot of emphasis on transmission and ritual documentation of transmission and ritual of transmission. So all of, actually all of the elements that you described and I haven't yet mentioned about the radical philosophical issues because they're so obvious. But all of the issues that you mentioned, all of the nature of topics that are hot in Japanese Zen, find their patio system. It isn't that the sobo-genso is set off. Against any of this. But they all find It just does the same thing better.

[05:43]

Yeah, it's a very thorough exposition. Yeah, it seems like it fits all of these things. So, you know, kind of raises the question of what fits. What seems to be different and different. Well, doing something better can be different. I'm just thinking that the whole discussion that started with how the brain and the characteristics of how you kind of popularize it is not quite the right word because it doesn't mean anything to me but the effort to win back into ordinary things and that's like the hallmark of Zen. It's an effort to make complete contact, right? Moment by moment again.

[06:45]

Something like the way you were talking about the three mysteries are actually part of our practice in another form. What you might call a less symbolically elaborated form maybe. Yeah. I'm not sure if I told you this is instead of a precedent. When I talk to you today, it's like, you know, I'm in favor of putting on clothes which is a great way to talk to me when I'm not here. So, um, some mysteries although I'm starting to do things better, I come to Doge's with reflective communication with Chinese. I'm from Doge's and I've read other people's and I'm exactly the same Chinese person. So, I have a struggle looking at Doge's because I can't like communicate with him.

[07:49]

Maybe it wasn't that we can't, it was new, but I read actually Doge's before I read the Chinese. So I thought he created all that stuff new. Now I read the Chinese, I thought, Hey, Doge didn't say all this stuff. He was saying exactly the same stuff. So, I'm kind of searching here to find what your point is about the new nature of what Doge's is doing and you can see it in the Japanese. When you say that they're saying the same stuff, same phrases. Same phrases. But it's using vocabulary that you find in Chinese. And it's not phrases. Right. It seems to me there's a lot of difference between using vocabulary that's not phrases and saying the same thing. In other words, it depends what you mean by saying the same thing.

[08:50]

I wouldn't say, I shouldn't say, I don't see it the same. He doesn't say the same thing as the Chinese saying the same thing. That could mean a lot. And that don't necessarily have to be the same thing. So, in some sense... Isn't that kind of telling? That he's so interested in topics that they don't talk about? Isn't that suggesting that he's not exactly saying the same thing when he's using the same vocabulary? Maybe it is, maybe it isn't. It's a revelation, right?

[09:51]

And also, the idea of using a popularizer and popularizing these ideas happens to be sort of out there. He went off to live in the mountains, after all, as far as he can be quite blessed. So, what he's avoiding then is to talk about white camouflage and it's kind of like you want to popularize it. You know, again, he went off to the mountains and he talked to this community. I don't know if it's the same problem in Gobi, but he used to meet them and say that he was going off to meet them and he used to hang out with them. Well, going off to the mountains is not unique to Japanese. And the model that all the people in the Kamakura period were trying to popularize in the sense of take it to its feet is not. That is one model that's been tried that people have tried to apply to this period, but I've suggested that that's not a very good model that would fit someone like Gobi. He may have tried that

[11:02]

at some point earlier in his career, but he was more interested in building a monastic community by the end of this period. So popularization, in someone else's words, may not be the right word, but accessibility for a practitioner may be whether monk or layman. And in Gobi's case, it's less accessible for laymen. Other people's cases may be more accessible for laymen. Some way of translating the structure of the problem into practices where you can just get started doing them. You don't have to master the system. You can start with the answer of the system, maybe you are a Buddha, and now you wake up in the morning and say, well, how does a Buddha behave? Or how does someone who believes in this doctrine behave today? That attitude towards teaching Buddhism I think is shared, whether it's for laymen or for monks.

[12:02]

And you said something about the Japanese character. I haven't mentioned the Japanese character. I'm very shy about explaining people's religions on the basis of national character like Americans do this, or Westerners, that's even worse, like people say, well, we're Westerners, or like this, and the Asians are like that. And I would feel a little bit better with Chinese and Japanese, but still, I'm not interested in character, I'm interested in intellectual context, social context at a particular time and a particular place, whether you can find that in this place, we seem to get into the same situation again and again and again, and therefore we should talk about some continuous characters and other issues, but it seems to me, at this time, those of us participating in a kind of conversation about Japanese, in the sense that it's taking place in Japan, not because it's innately Japanese, comes out of historical accident as much as anything else, and that involves the question of how to behave as a human more than it has in other places, more than it was in contemporary films.

[13:06]

Even though they have the same ideas, right, of inherent virtue nature, and all this sort of thing, it's focused on a sense of urgency of figuring out what to do about it, seems to me, peculiar to this time in Japan, I mean, it seems to me, to produce people like this. ... [...] The Chinese did the same thing. They would suck up to the government by saying, put it in this good place, right, and we can protect the nation. I mean, they were a whole sutra about it, but to be no-kill, right? About how good a citizen is in divisions that will support politics and expand the empire. I mean, that's not a Japanese, purely Japanese association of secular and basic power.

[14:12]

Right. And I think Dick Baker probably had some idea like that, at least at the state level. I don't know about the federal level. I'm sorry. What would you say would be the kind of defining factors that you don't believe in? Well, I'm not sure that I have one answer to that, but one thing that I think has not been, I think we can understand this better, actually, than some historians of Japanese Buddhism or of Japanese Buddhism, and that is, Dogen was a Jinja master, among other things. He was interested, like Heizai, with whom he studied at Shoninji, and like other people in his day, interested in a ritualized form of life through which you could express Buddhism. In other words, the question, when you get up in the morning, what do I do now to be a

[15:18]

Buddha, has an answer, a set of concrete answers. And he found in Chan monastic routine, he could have found it in Japan, but I think it was probably a more powerful point, because he was going to the source of Zen, he found there a lot of rules and regulations and behavioral patterns that he could take as a model for a Buddha-like, the practice of Buddhism. There's a very interesting chapter in Shoninji called Gyōbutsu-iji, the comportment of a practicing Buddha. The comportment, translate something like the comportment of a practicing Buddha. Gyōbutsu-iji. Yes. Ji-ji means monastic practice or ritual practice, comportment, something like that.

[16:19]

But it means not just action, but regulated action. That type of action of a practicing Buddha. And in a way, that title suggests a lot to me, I mean, it sort of symbolizes a lot to me about Dogen's solution. That it's less interested in the Kensho type thing, that Zen is an insight into the nature of the mind. It takes that for granted in a way. It says, look, that's the premise that the mind is enlightened. And our issue is practice. And for practice, I have a tradition that has been sanctified. In other words, I'm not making it up. It's been sanctified by the people who understood that their minds were Buddha. That they were Buddha. And have lived it for generations. So, they can trust it. You look at the Ben-do-wa, you know, when he says, why do we choose our Zen? He doesn't say, because of the nature of the mind, we go off into some philosophical thing

[17:24]

about no thought and so forth. He says, because all the Buddhists and Ancestors have fabulous practice. That's enough reason for us. I mean, if we take Zen as enlightenment. But I think part of it was that, when he was a ritualist, and he combined that, unlike someone like Eisai, who was more shy about really going for Chinese Zen. He went wholeheartedly for Chinese Zen. Both its practice, contemporary practice, and its literature. So, unlike the other people teaching Zen at this time, in the early stage, he brought in all the wisdom of the stories. Precisely the language he was talking about. He brought in all the stories of the Patriarchs, and all the Korans, and started teaching that literature. This was the more of that community that he was trying to create. He was trying to re-create a community that had these practices, and this understanding, as expressed in this body of literature. And not in Tendai philosophy. And that combination of being very interested in monastic reform, and in this new literature,

[18:33]

a new way of teaching through stories, and example, is, I think, one of the things. Two of the things. That combination is one of the things that makes him very unusual among these early Zen masters. Yes? He was teaching in the early middle ages, but he wasn't really introducing anything that wasn't already out there in one form or another. And he said that he had not been in one, in the early middle ages, but in the early middle ages. People at that time, it was important for us to be able to talk to him and mention things. And now I'm reluctant to take this up a little bit. And I just wondered, if I'm putting it correctly, is that true? Because if you're looking from the Japanese standpoint, he doesn't stand out any more in that respect. I think there are two points to your question.

[19:39]

The first one, I think, is untrue. I mean, whatever I said, I think. God knows what I said. Speaking today, in the moment, I would say the first one is true, is untrue, and the second one is true. That is to say, that he didn't say anything new, I think, is untrue. He said something very interesting, the way he put things together. Even if he got vocabulary from China, and he got ideas from the indigenous Japanese Buddhist tradition and so on, he put it together in a way that was probably never put together before or since. He was a genius, a religious genius of some kind. Even if all the pieces were there, geniuses have to work with pieces, after all. That is true. I mean, and therefore it's untrue that he didn't do anything new, I think. On the other hand, it is true that he wasn't noticed. If people didn't read the Shobo Genzo, then no one said, oh my God, we have a religious genius in our midst. He just founded a couple temples and died, and had disciples who kept copying his book,

[20:45]

but not broadcasting them, not writing commentaries on them, not making them a central part of Japanese medieval gen culture. And then, in the 17th and 18th centuries, they began to work on this material, and brought it all out, and in the 20th century, he becomes one of the greatest minds in Japanese cultural history. Soto Zen began, yes. So there are two stages. First, he becomes, recognizing Soto Zen, his works get studied and he gets talked about, and his ideas get talked about a lot. And then, in the 20th century, he gets recognized in the secular world. Not just a Soto Zen Buddhist now, but a Japanese philosopher and religious figure. And he gets put up with the greats of Japanese history.

[21:50]

And now, increasingly, you see, he's being put up with Nagarjuna, and Vasubandhu, and Tsongkhapa. I mean, he's one of the best known Buddhist thinkers. Rightfully so. And when we have more materials, more carefully translated materials of this stuff, I think he'll take off. Because there's so much there. And we're just at the beginning. I read an interesting article talking about this. A lot of the monastic practice that we think of as being sort of characteristically Zen, or Chan, is actually sort of characteristically Chinese. And what's particular is that Chan was this whole body of literature and full emphasis on transmission and so forth. And that was kind of interesting to me. But the thing that I keep, the question that I have been wrestling with for months now is this question of, what you say about his emphasis on ritual practice and that kind

[22:57]

of thing in the background context of he's trying to make the Vinaya accessible through math ordination, that kind of thing, sheds a lot of light on the system in which Dojo is operating. But still, it seems to me that this formulation of 16 precepts that went out and got so popularized in certain men, do you think that that was particular to Dogen, that he innovated that? Or that maybe it was kind of floating around someplace else and he drew upon it? Yeah, as I recall, you asked me that before on email, and I still don't have the answer. Yeah, that's what I've been trying to do. That's what I've been trying to piece together, is where I'm pulling on these bits. I mean, I sort of know where the three refuges are standard, and the three pure precepts on Vipada, and Indian literature, and that kind of thing. And then there's this group of ten precepts that come from a particular Chinese sutra,

[23:57]

but to put them all together in that particular way and make that sufficient for monastic ordination seems to me to be a rather radical step. And when I've said that to various of my instructors, some say, well, do you really have any reason to believe that Dogen started that? Or was it something that's floating around that he drew upon? And I do think, from what I've been able to tell, that he drew upon it from China. I mean, it definitely has Chinese precedent, but kind of my impression is that it was an innovation of his. I just can't prove it. I can't help you further. Thank you. But I'll keep it in mind, and if I can, we'll talk a bit more about that. Okay. Have you talked to Gil Bradford about it? Yeah. And he said, basically, that Dogen didn't really talk about his own ordination. And the only writings of his that talk about precepts mention only these sixteen.

[25:01]

And he sort of said, you don't know. So I was looking at the ten moral actions and the ten novice precepts from the Jinyang and the Brahmadalas. And I'm trying to pull all this together and sort that out. But it's still kind of working. But I do think, I do suspect that he got this from China. Because that's what he says, and there's some reason to believe him. About how it was understood there. We got a lot of stuff from China, how it was understood there. Yeah. Yeah. I have the impression that, from some reading of D.P. Suzuki, that when Dogen took the philosophical, maybe the ontological stance from China, he actually turned it more into what we say in the West, idealistic Romania. Yes. Yes. And I have that feeling myself, kind of a sense that there's less,

[26:07]

there's more mind only feeling in Soto as I've experienced over the last twenty years. Well, then I've been in a... Well, not... But you said he turned something from China. Right. And what was it in China? Well, that it was more grounded, had a more sense of the concrete material world. And I'm just curious as to whether you have a sense of that. I was never able to find that essay again after I read it. I read it in someone else's house and then I didn't remember where it was. So it probably doesn't exist outside your mind anyway. Do other people have that impression that Dogen is a... Well, I think that D.P. is supposed to go to China. Well, for a mazu literature...

[27:10]

Wouldn't you expect that from D.P.'s position? And some of the koan letters say, you know, that I'm just mazu to my Dogen and that kind of thing just didn't show up. Those things show up. I'm sorry, just, you know, just no mind, kind of... I was actually thinking more of no world. The idea that our... that the phenomena is always there. That there's no actual world beyond the phenomena of the world. Is there some place in Buddhism where this is not true? Or is there a substantial existing world beyond the experience of phenomena? A conventional reality? There is a conventional reality that is conventional in the experience of phenomena. Is there a substantial world? Depends on how you understand substantial.

[28:11]

But a difference between phenomena and, you know, a material world. A world that has its own internal structure, I guess. For example, the atomic structure and molecular structure. Which is not part of our phenomena. Well, we're getting here fairly deep. And I would just... I, myself, would be hesitant to see... a philosophical distinction between Dogen, whatever it is that he's doing, I'm not sure I understand it, and something called Chinese Zen that had a different perspective. I think there's quite a range of stuff going on in Zen. One of the things that's different about Dogen, and it's important to bear in mind, is that although he's borrowing a lot of stuff from China, the genre in which he writes, the Sobo-Gendo, has no precedent, I think it says.

[29:14]

Virtually no precedent. Has virtually no precedent in China. Zen masters in China typically do not write the kind of discursive arguments that Dogen writes. They do comments in poetry. They make clever remarks. They write poetry. They do comments on poetry. They tell stories, and so on. But they don't sit down and write extended essays on themes, like, you know, yoga tea, or yoga, yoga, etc. Unpacking their understanding for the reader. That's something different. And, so, when you say, well, what is the metaphysics of bingji, or of maji, or even of dahua, or something like that, it's very difficult. Because you have to construct it for them. And it's very difficult to say what Dogen's metaphysics is,

[30:15]

but the difficulty is different. It says too much, in a way. It's very hard to put it together, to figure it out. It's a very complex, sophisticated, I guess sophisticated, at least, difficult worldview that he's expressing. Whether it's idealism or not. Yeah, he's trying to explicate the principles of his religion, both philosophical and ethical and ritual. And, you know, it's one of those things that they'll come back and say, you know, he did this, he did that, and I was, you know, me, him. I don't know, I don't have a view on that. I haven't gone chronologically as far as exploring it out.

[31:18]

I mean, one of the things that strikes me, if you come to think about it in terms of Japanese Buddhism, the first text he writes, the Bendo-wa, you look at the introduction to the Bendo-wa, it's very conscious. There, he talks about meditation as entering into a samadhi, right? The Jiji-u-Zanmai. And then he goes into this standard, in a way, Japanese-Japanese conscious vision of the world from the perspective of the Buddha. Read that introduction to the Bendo-wa before he starts going into the historical part, when he talks about the Jiji-u-Zanmai. There, I think, you don't find that kind of stuff in, you know, he wasn't getting that out of Chinese literature, he was getting that out of his Japanese training. It's the first text he writes. He drops that style. It's awesome. And he takes up much more of the Zen vocabulary and Zen style of talking about the world. He drops the Jiji-u-Zanmai as a name for his meditation act. He starts talking about God's partner.

[32:21]

So one of the things that we might say, although I guess I haven't tracked it chronologically, is that he moves towards a more fully articulated Zen-style talking about the world. Maybe in part because he's getting Zen disciples. He's getting these disciples of Nonya, people who have read Zen texts. And so he can start talking in their language, which he uses, what you might call his native Zen language, rather than trying to broadcast that to people who don't read it. And you did something, and then carried on for... and just did that. Did you see realizations that you had been doing,

[33:24]

or were evolving, or... I don't know. My own feeling is some things stay the same and some things change. And I guess I don't have a... maybe it's because I'm not a particularly believing Zen Buddhist, I don't have a sense that enlightenment is a single statement. You either have it or you don't have it. And... And... So... He had some kind of understanding, and he worked on it, and he worked with it, and he expressed it differently, but he probably changed it. He did, I believe. In my mind, it's very difficult to think that what he did is... that he either changes or doesn't change. I think it's a very complicated thing that involves culture as well as something beyond culture. I'm wondering if you may discuss over this whole period that we've talked about some of this... thought and change as what the meaning of teaching over this period of Japanese history?

[34:27]

Well, the transition from... Well, the Kamakura transition. Right, from China to Japan. Well, from China to Japan. The basic understanding and things that were known to the youth. I guess that we're learning new developments. And obviously, you've discussed a lot of different ways of practice and different thoughts. But what about the actual truth or relevance? Well, I have trouble stepping back from particular systems or types of work in which there's what it is that people believe is the basic truth. So, if you look at China at this time, Han materials are dominating. And Shintai materials, Chinese Shintai materials, are well-known. There are some Shintai monasteries. They're rediscovering Shintai

[35:28]

and they write a commentary about Shintai. So, you've got at least two models there. And in Japan, you've got the centipede model, which is quite different. It's not very popular in China. It wouldn't become popular yet until the Yuan Dynasty and the Mongol brought it from Tibet. So, it's a period where, at this time, the way of talking about the world in Japan and China is somewhat different because they're using... they're coming out of two different dis... dis... Whether you can get behind that and say there's a Chinese way of talking and there's a Japanese way of talking, I mean, it's a difference. Especially when, of course, people are playing with it. And some people talk about, you know, models for the way Chinese talk about it as a kind of root branch model or substance function model, these sorts of things that are often talked about. The Chinese have a worldview, whether Buddhist or otherwise, a worldview in which there's a hidden reality that manifests itself in this world as phenomena. And we are a part of that. And the process of the Tao and so on

[36:29]

is the expression of that manifestation And the Japanese don't have that model. They have a much more phenomenalistic model. That what you see is what you get. The hidden world is another world of spirits or something, but metaphysically those are phenomena. And they don't think that a human being has these deep roots in a hidden world. But those are such abstract ways of, you know, getting so deep in the psyche of the culture that it's dark down there. I mean, I'm not sure that you have more light. You have less light, I think, you know. And a lot of it is the kind of, you know, you have to smooth out a tremendous amount of this quite abstract model that probably covers everything, as they reveal it. So I'm just shy about that way of going. I like to stay on the surface. Waving around in the shallow end. I guess, to make my question real easy,

[37:30]

did they get any deeper? Or did they already know as deep as they're going to go? Deeper in the understanding of the hidden condition? No, deeper in the analysis and coming up with new ideas about the world. In other words, you say that you don't like to go that deep. Well, did they go deeper? Deeper? Well, one thing that's often said, right? I can't answer deeper than that. One thing that's often said that's different is that the Japanese took the notion of a visual enlightenment to an extreme, whereby earlier tradition had talked about the Buddha nature as the opposite god of all these things, that somehow inherently we are Buddha, but in the manifest. They took it to an extreme such that they, this is called the Hongaku process,

[38:32]

or the visual enlightenment process, was prominent at this time, in the Tendai era. The entire world was a state of reality, perfect just as it is. Not just that we have a potential to become Buddha, but that phenomenon, just as they asserted it, in all their multiplicity and ambiguity, a person. And that Buddhism is a celebration of that, in some way, not in what way, it's again that question of what do we do now. And it's often criticized by modern people, it's famous now, and of course most people should criticize Buddhism, that's the common argument of it, but that kind of worldview is a denial of Buddhism. Because it doesn't take seriously karma, reincarnation, morality, dependent origination and so on. It's a kind of best of all possible worlds, and the difference between what is and what ought to be is just extinguished, and it justifies the status quo, both for ourselves as individuals

[39:35]

and also for the government. There's no room or no rationale for action, of any sort of spiritual action. That's the kind of criticism of it, as a philosophy. But that is to express something in Japanese culture, Japanese Buddhism, that is very deep-rooted and deep, and a desire to affirm the immediate reality, just as it is, as ideal, perfect, sacred. And that there is less of a tendency, even though the instruments for doing it are in Chinese Buddhism, there's less of a tendency to push it to that extent. And what do you say that's going deeper, or perverting it, or whatever? I mean, that would be a valid study, but... So, one example of that would be the famous re-translation, you might say, or re-interpretation of the Nirvana Sutra passage, All sentient beings have the Buddha nature. One of them is quoted again and again,

[40:37]

and we'll talk about how much better Nirvana is than Chinese Buddhism, because Nirvana says all being is the Buddha nature. He took it from the potential, the inner human being, the metaphysical vision of the Buddha nature as the activity of the world like itself. And some people will celebrate that, Habe Masao will celebrate that as the pinnacle of all Mahayana non-dualist society, and then other people will criticize that as a darkest problem in Japanese Buddhism. But it celebrates what's here now, whether it's the Asian people in Nanjing, or whatever, as somehow perfected. Or you can play with it, But I think, to be fair to Govind, however you interpret that, it's clear that he himself doesn't interpret that as a justification for not doing it. The Buddha nature is practice, it doesn't exist as such practice. He's very practical.

[41:37]

And especially what he does. Lunchtime? Past lunchtime. I work 15 minutes overtime. A time and a half, I guess. I just have a quick question for the microphone. Because it seems that one doesn't speak Shambhuda unless there is an early Mahayana, right? So, for the Indian, might India be a Chinese invention? Or would it be, I don't know. Yeah, it's a difficult question. You certainly have terms that are cognate, like photographic artifacts from various... Oh yeah. The Buddha nature is a translation, usually in English, an English translation of Chinese words, of course. And that term itself, what it means, you know, we can translate Buddha nature, it's very often written with a character meaning lineage. It's a homophone.

[42:40]

Depending upon which radical, if you use a heart radical, if you use a woman radical, if you use another, the same, the homonyms, right? And when it's written as a lineage, we're talking about a term that's very ancient in Indian Buddhism, Buddha Gosha. It means Buddha family. And from the very earliest Mahayana, the texts say, we are members of the Buddha group. That is to say, unlike other forms of Buddhists who just listened to the Buddha as though he were a stranger, we belong to his family. That is to say, we are his descendants. And that was one of the original meanings of a Bodhisattva, is somebody who belongs to the lineage of the Buddha and will, by implication, inherit the property of the Buddha, namely, omniscience, samyak sambuddhi. So it's a way of talking then about being part of a tradition that accepts Buddhahood as a goal and having the potential, because you are a member of the family, to achieve that goal.

[43:41]

The Buddha Gosha is a very important term in the very earliest Mahayana, and it gets mixed together. Just because of the acronym the way we write the two characters, it gets mixed together with this metaphysical term, nature, which in Sanskrit would be something like buddhakar, buddhanis. This is a term that comes up all the time, although not necessarily in this text. But you also have, along with this gosvara idea, you've got tathagatagarbha idea, which in a way carries the family back to the pre-natal stage of an embryo. So those ideas are very early in the Mahayana. They're not very late. First of all, in quotes, in the Pali text, there's one instance of a kind of precursor to the nature of self-examination, but maybe in the beginning sometimes to the ending. Thank you very much. I think this has opened up a lot, and I think there are a lot of questions and comments that were lost in the rush to present all the material,

[44:44]

and I would like to invite you back, and I would invite help in conceptualizing what Karl could do for us today. So thank you very much. Thank you. Yeah, we don't know whether to clap or not. Yeah, we don't know

[45:01]

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