On the first evening, we made one group which we designated Buddha and Jesus, questions about Buddha and Jesus and their relationship and so forth. So today, having spoken about the mystery and all the most basic questions yesterday, we thought today that might fit in most morning and afternoon, and obviously in the morning the emphasis will be more on questions concerning Jesus, and in the afternoon more on Buddhist questions concerning Buddha. And I will again read you first the list of those questions that we have for today. There are a few more than yesterday, actually. And I will read them in the order in which I have arranged that particular group so that one, more or less, one question follows on the answer of the previous one.

[01:13]

And then I will pick them one by one as the answer. One Bichard might be a good starting point because it even has the word beginning in it. is what is the beginning of the connection to Zen and Christianity? Probably between Zen and Christianity and so forth. We're not quite sure. The second is who is the most important one? I don't know. Then, who is Jesus in my life? What is the meaning or role of Jesus the Christ relative to mystery?

[02:15]

How can I understand myself as both independent of and part of or emanating from God or the mystic. What is mysticism? Can a Buddhist be a mystic? Where is Jesus in my life? From the perspective of both the different traditions, please, if God is not somebody else, as Merton said. Whom do you call upon when you simply need help? What is Jesus in my life? We had, where is Jesus in... Who is Jesus? Where is Jesus in my life?

[03:20]

Then what is Jesus in my life? What is the relationship between God and love? And how is Jesus in my life? What does it mean to be a Christian? How do you stay connected to and participate in the Catholic Church when it doesn't express or support this understanding of mystery? And then, how is it that there is so much compatibility between Buddhism and Christianity in this room, yet suspicion in so many other realms? You see, it's a pretty wide spectrum of questions. And we might start with that. what is the beginning of the connection between Zen and Christianity?

[04:25]

If I misunderstood this question, then whoever wrote it can ask afterwards and make it more specific, but it said here, what is the beginning of the connection to Zen and Christianity? I thought between Zen and Christianity, but if that misses the point, then come back. And I think this question can be answered in two very different ways. The first is anthropologically, what is the connection between Zen and Christianity and, for lack of a better word, I call it anthropologically, in the sense of both are expressions of a basic human need. need to deal with mystery to deal with life as long as you keep in mind all that we said about the connection between life and mystery yesterday life is the way in which we experience mystery and we as human beings we are those animals that deal with have to be

[05:47]

With mystery. For all we know, very mistaken, of course, but for all we know, a cat or a dog or a parrot or a deer lives life, and in some respects, as fully or more fully than we do on their levels, but they don't have to act right. They don't have to act right. with their relationship to that wisdom. That is our problem, if you want, our biggest difficulty in life as humans and also, in a sense, our glory that we see more clearly or believe reflexively. both our strength and our weakness, that we have to grapple with this mystery.

[06:51]

Sometimes I envy these cats that you are so elegant to me. So that would be, on the anthropological side, we simply say, any form of Christianity or any form of Buddhism, explicitly said, among others, many, many forms, each of these two traditions, but all of them are ways of dealing with this mystery. Ways in the practice of coming into the present moment, because that's the moment where you meet mystery, encounter mystery. There are answers that spread up at very different times and at very different cultural circumstances, answers to that basic question, or set of questions, or tasks more than questions of dealing with mystery.

[07:59]

They have had very different histories, so the history is also colored, they're expressing today. But basically, so what's the beginning, in that sense, that human need. And then you can tackle it historically, and I think on that level it may mean when has Zen and some Christian tradition begun to interact with one another. Well, first thing that came to mind was Marco Polo, the Venetian merchant who traveled to China in the 13th century and came back to Venice, spent many years, and who had some contact with Buddhism.

[09:03]

But I always wanted to read, I think there's something that he wrote, but I've never read that. I was interested very much. And I'm not aware that he said much about Buddhism. So at that time, and as we said, we had a discussion about that at the breakfast table, until the early 20th century, people in the West were so convinced of their superiority, and some sort of big connection with the Christian tradition also was part of that, that they weren't interested in any others. The others were the others, and that was it. Ask anything about them. We talked about it this morning in connection with the Native Americans, the rest of the Indians, the missionaries, not because they were missionaries, that in general...

[10:12]

They were not interested in them. They were not interested in their customs. On the contrary, they thought, we are the Christians, we have the right way of worship, and this is all wrong, and away with it. And also the language. A lot of them speak their language. Spanish is the proper language. It's very difficult for us to enter into that mindset, I think that was also, although certainly, the attitude of anyone Christian. Most people were, in some big sense, Christians in the West at that time, Jewish and Christian. For me, Christianity on that level is simply a derivative of Judaism in many ways. Jesus the Jew, the apostles were all Jews. For a long time in the first century, it was one way in which Jews could be Jews.

[11:19]

And then later on, only after the year 70, they mutually distanced themselves from each other and eventually became enemies. For someone looking at it from the outside Christianity is a form of being Jewish if you want to. So when did that conflict first take place? It's probably interesting just to tell from my own experience because as far as I know That was one of the first encounters between Buddhism and Christianity. That was as late as the 1960s. Thomas Merton also had some contact with Buddhists, with Thich Nhat Hanh and with

[12:30]

D.C. Suzuki? Is that the name? D.T. D.T. Suzuki was a very prolific writer. Actually, probably the first that wrote prolifically in English and was much read, but... was more intellectual than practical. Actually, one should probably also mention in the 1920s in England, there was a great exchange between Buddhists and, or great interest in Buddhism, but I know little about it. But Alan Watts was also involved in that, and Alan Watts wrote about this connection between Buddhism and Christianity.

[13:36]

I'll just tell you a few aspects of my own encounter. I was a Benedictine monk at that time, actually for some 20 years almost, 20 years. Our abbot was at the Monastery of Montserrat in New York, and our abbot was very popular as a speaker and was often invited to give talks, more often than he could go, and so he sometimes sent one of the moors. Sometimes I was sent, and it was... We were usually invited to universities and the students were interested in monastic life. We wanted to know something about monastic life.

[14:39]

And at that time, this was now the early 60s, and I was talking there about monastic life, speaking simply about our Christian and more specifically Benedictine monastic life, and I realized that that was a little narrow because now suddenly these other monks were popping up everywhere, particularly Buddhist monks, and then some Hindu swamis. So I felt the need to, just for intellectual honesty, to inform myself to what extent are they monks. When I say monk, does they include them or exclude them? So that was my approach, my first interest. And then I started reading, and the first book that I read was D.T. Suzuki again, The Training of a Zen Buddhist Monk, is the name of the book.

[15:41]

And I couldn't believe that that was our training. It was just exactly our training. And there was no historical connection between the two. And the third is... west here in, say, California, furthest west, and the other one was in Japan, the furthest east. And there was no connection that we knew between the two. So it made very much sense to me when Thomas Merton says, monastic life is a basic human instinct. Because otherwise, how could we have something that is so similar on both ends? of the world. And I talked about this with friends, and my friend says, oh, well, you should meet a live specimen. So they arranged for me to meet Thaisa, now Irochi.

[16:43]

And I thought... what are we going to talk about? You know, no idea what we talk about. Nick is completely strange of what I'm going to talk about. And so I didn't want to make small talks. I suggested we meet at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and at the Metropolitan Museum because I thought we're going to look at Buddhist art and that would be a nice way to have something to talk about. And he later on told me that he supports his suggestion that we agreed on that Metropolitan Museum because it was one of the few places in New York that he could find. It was right across the park. So he had this window on the other side and the west side. So we met at the Metropolitan Museum. We took one look at one another.

[17:45]

We never went into the museum. We never made five minutes of small talk. We sat down on a bench, and I think we started talking about death. And anyway, we talked. We talked for hours as if we were really interested in one another. And then he said he wanted me to meet a friend of his that lived in Chinatown. I can't remember whether we ever met this friend, but the trip to China down was very memorable because he was wearing these long robes. And I don't remember, I probably also wore long robes at the time. And so when the subway arrived and the doors opened up and all the people said, We were both very politely, please you go first, please you go with our long ropes, and then they get caught in the door as we're trying to get in the last minute before they go.

[18:48]

But we spent hours and hours together and really understood one another very well. And then he invited me to come down to practice at the Zendo in New York City. And I thought it was a very interesting idea that a Christian monk should practice a Buddhist monastery. But I personally was perfectly happy where I was, and interestingly or not, I had my own agenda. So we kept writing and saying, why don't you come down? And then there was a teach-in. Teach-ins were... events that were organized by the students in the university to protest against the war in Vietnam. And the students would call off classes for a day or two and invite speakers from the outside and instead of classes have talks and then protest, various forms of protest against the Vietnam War.

[20:05]

I had been to the University of Michigan where these teachings were invented, where the first one took place, then they were all over the country, and so they invited me to the second one, and I thought that would be interesting to come together with Thaisan, a Buddhist, Vietnam, Catholics and Buddhists, and they would go as a team, protest somehow, and so I told him that, and he was very good to go, and his friends all told him, no, don't go, that's dangerous, you'll be deported, and so forth, he was not a United States citizen. But anyway, he came, and we had to share a room, a small room in Students' Union there, and we felt like, usually, I guess, when you have this share a small room with the strategy and feel a little awkward.

[21:07]

So we felt like two goldfish that had been in that same boat for the last three years. It was an absolute perfect understanding between us. And then we issued some manifesto in a local newspaper or whatever. But we came to know one another very well in that process, and he kept asking me to come down. And every time I told this to my abbot, the abbot was very broad-minded and would always say, yes, that's a very good idea. And I was just hoping he wouldn't say go. He said, I want you to go. I was interested, but not that interested. But they never said that. So nothing ever happened. And then I suggested maybe we should invite this Buddhist monk to the monastery. That was fine with the evidence.

[22:08]

He wanted to come. So Tyson came for several days and gave talks to the monk several times a day, I guess. And they asked him all these abstract theological questions. He gave some pieces and answers. They totally talked past one another. And I thought, this is the end of this project. And I was just sitting in the back. I didn't say anything at all. And then he left again. And Arthur Monk said, well, what he said, we didn't understand, but that's not so important. The way he walks and the way he sits and the way he talks, is perfectly convincing, this is a real monk, and two weeks later they sent him down. So what's important to me is that this was a monastic connection, it was the monastic aspect, and that would of course leave everybody out of that

[23:23]

dialogue between Buddhism and Christianity, except there's the monk in each of us. When I say monastic, I mean this single-minded, laser-beam, intent on what's really important in life, something like that. That's in each one of us, but the monks have this wonderful opportunity to live it out a little more. concretely and so at first I got permission to go down there for a year and another year and another year and during that time there also many of the students in New York came here to Tassajara and that was in 68 or 69 second practice being here and I remember that Thich Nhat Hanh also told me that this monastic connection between Christians and Buddhists was for him basic and was the earliest.

[24:36]

He actually put it in this verse. He said, in Vietnam, we Buddhists monks felt closer to the Catholic monks than we felt to the Buddhist lay people. Catholic monks felt closer to us Buddhist monks than they felt to the Catholic way people. So there was this real deep connection between the two. And that, for me, is sort of historically the beginning of that encounter between the Buddhism and Christianity. More specifically, And then to the question, who is the most important one? It would never occur to me to say a Buddha or Jesus. I would say you, whoever asked the question, is the most important one.

[25:40]

I better take that seriously and don't push it off on somebody else. Because that's a great danger that you let somebody else do. through what we need to do for ourselves. And I'm not sure, Paul will correct me on that, but I think I remember a word by the Buddha who says, work out your own salvation with fear and trembling. St. Paul said also something very similar. I don't think he said fear and trembling, but he said each person be a lamp unto yourselves. Be a lamp unto yourself. Yes. So don't look at me. Be a lamp unto yourself. That is probably better for me. I think I got mixed up with St. Paul there. And Jesus asked, a good master, there comes somebody up to him, he said, good master.

[26:41]

what do I need to do? And he says, don't call me good. One alone is good. God is good. So he also gets completely out of the way. And St. Paul, as I already said, says, work out your own salvation with fear and trembling. Of course, Jesus has a role, and we will come to talk about that, but who is the most important? but definitely always the one who asks, and then in relationship, and there you come, and I think that was actually the intention of the question, who in your life, for being a lamp unto yourself, who provides the fire for the lamp, is it Jesus or is it Kudasha? That is a... important question, then you make a choice, you make a decision.

[27:45]

But both Buddha and Jesus were trying to get out of the way of anybody who was seeking that way. And that, of course, leads to the next question, who is Jesus in my life? Who is Jesus in my life? And then I have to make us quite a bit of a detour and first make a distinction that says in the question only who is Jesus in my life. But we need to talk about Jesus Christ. To say who is Jesus in my life would be absolutely parallel to saying who is Gautama in my life. Gautama... the prince who lived a long time ago, maybe very interesting to me, but you say the Buddha, the ultimate Buddha, and you say Jesus the Christ.

[28:51]

That's very important. Otherwise, you get on the wrong track. Jesus is simply a strong person at a certain place, very, very limited. And the Christ, meaning the anointed, or the Messiah, the anointed, anointing meant in a special relationship to this mystery kings were anointed because they had a special relationship to that mystery divine mystery as we said and what this relationship is now we have to make together a little detour because that

[30:02]

concerns us. The short answer is it is our self, our self as distinguished from each one's I. Sometimes we say I, sometimes we say I myself, and we really want to emphasize it. If you think, well, are these two? No, definitely no. It's one, I, myself. And yet, why do you say I and why do you say self? Because as human beings, we live in what Rilke calls the double realm. The double realm. That means in one realm, never say two, never split it up. In one realm, but has two very distinct aspects.

[31:04]

It's one, it's not two, it's not two halves, it's really one. But it has two aspects that can be clearly distinguished and cannot be separated. And these two aspects are I and myself. My I has a clear beginning, my conception, birth, and at the end of my death, and is in space and time. And myself, now we have to make some mental experiment to find that self. I think we've done it here before, but one can do it again, and many of you haven't done that yet. You start out by watching yourself. You watch yourself.

[32:06]

I watch myself sitting here. It's very strange, very strange phenomenon that you can watch yourself. But you can watch yourself. And maybe at the same time, you are also watching the watcher. As long as you can watch the watcher, You have to go a step further, a step further, until you are the one that watches and nobody is watching. It's not just a mental exercise, that's a real existential exercise that's not very difficult that everybody can do. Right now you could... Of course, we do this usually because our imagination is very much involved, but we also are aware that the imagination provides the images, but there is something that the images mean.

[33:13]

There is a real meaning. So you can watch yourself and reach the point where You are the watcher whom nobody watches. And that is what we call self. That is the self. And that self is not in space and time, which is a very important aspect of it. Your eye, that you may watch, or you may watch the other people, or the world, or anything, that's all in space and time. The watcher that watches on that is not, maybe one with it, maybe really closely belong to it, especially in this.

[34:14]

Stop around, belong to them, can't be separated, but distinguished. also in this respect that the self is not in space and time. It can't watch space and time. And that has another very important consequence. If it isn't in space and time, it can't be divided. Only something that's in space-time can be divided. So the self is undivided. That means... By this very simple exercise, you're reaching a point where we are alone. If we are reaching ourselves, it's not a private self, it's the self. And the spiritual practitioners have done that for a very long time. Something like this exercise of, I don't know, I got that from Temple also, but...

[35:19]

I'm sure there are many, many other ways of reaching that point, but they have different names. And in Hinduism, it's called Atma. In Buddhism, as far as I know, but Paul will tell us more about it, it's the Buddha nature. And in Christianity, it's Christ in me. St. Paul says, I live, yet not I, Christ lives in me. And that's, of course, not privately in me, but in everyone. Everyone can say, I live, Christ lives in me. That self is Christ in the sense of anointed, in the sense of somehow belonging to the mystery. It won't say anything yet about its relationship with the mystical. It somehow belongs to the Christian. And that means, when you speak about Jesus Christ, that you are talking about a particular human being, Jesus, whom they call the Christ, because apparently that self

[36:39]

that unites us all, was particularly radiant in this person, just as I suppose the Buddha nature was very radiant in the Buddha. You have probably in your life met people in whom this self is very radiant. Very often they are not well-known people, they are some great grandmother or somebody. But there are also some well-known people, and one of them is the Dalai Lama. And that is why when you meet the Dalai Lama, you somehow do not have the sense of strangeness that you sometimes have with other people. But you feel... Almost like in a photograph, a group photograph, and then you say, that's me. You feel that the self shines through.

[37:48]

So who is Jesus in... Jesus, first of all, is just question. Jesus Christ. Let's all ask about Jesus Christ. And then we come to who is Jesus in my life, and I can say the one in whom I have encountered that self through tradition, through tradition or so, You can have the experience of meeting people that have long died, I think, when it was that experience with relatives or so. Anyway, you can say he's myself.

[38:56]

That still doesn't at all mean that you are a Christian, but I can also say I know what I meant, because that's the way I brought up what it means to say, Christ is myself, or myself is the Christ-self, so I can see the parallel. Somebody says, the Buddha nature is what I have, and not only I, but God, and everybody else. Yes, I understand that we call it by a different name, that's all. And then you can, of course, ask, what do we know about the historic Jesus? This was now Jesus Christ. But about the historic Jesus, we know very little.

[39:58]

I think we also know relatively little about the Buddha, but Paul will tell us that, the historic Buddha. But we know... For sure, when I say no, historically, what historians can reconstruct, you know, very little. But we do know three unquestioned, by any serious researcher, unquestioned facts, and they are enough to see that... They are not for anyone in their encounter with Jesus. It should be enough, it seems to me. The first is we know for sure that he used for the mystery a very somewhat unusual, not as unusual as he sometimes said. It was there in the Jewish tradition, but

[41:02]

He used it with great emphasis, the word Abba. He didn't have the Hebrew Aramaic word, Abba is translated, Father. It's even a very warm way of speaking to call it, Dad almost. He used that, and why is that so important? First, because it shows that he had this deep, warm relationship to the mystery. We have a relationship to the mystery. We said that yesterday. Even though in it we live and move and have our being, we have a relationship, which is very strange. But all that we said about I and thou, is in this mystery. Within the mystery, we are related to the mystery.

[42:05]

And Martin Buber was a Jew, so he developed that from this. On the basis, of course, of his basic human, inside, but on the basis of Judaism. And that is what Jesus lived. He lived, that woman left you. And because he called God Father. All creatures were sisters and brothers. Now is it important? It's already in this world. And all creatures and everything was one great earth household, or God household. Gary Snyder calls his earth household. Jesus would probably call it God household. And that leads already to the second thing that we know for sure about the historic Jesus.

[43:06]

He preached, preaching is mostly just talking, but he promoted what he called the kingdom of God. That is, he was a revolutionary. He was a mystic. because of this deep relationship to God, that's mysticism, and he was a revolutionary because this kingdom of God, this little group of people that he founded, living in an occupied country, occupied by the Romans, was very revolutionary. Little groups of resistance not violently revolutionary but revolutionizing even the not notion of revolution not meaning that now the ones around the bottom get to the top but that the whole pyramid is dismantled and outside of the pyramid we have a network and the kingdom of God that is a place or a

[44:25]

political entity, but it is living with the grain of life, as we said yesterday, with the will of God. That means life rather than death. That means love in the sense of connectedness with all. That's what he promoted. So he was a mystic, a revolutionary Abba. He founded this kingdom of God, sometimes being said, replacing the love of power by the power of love, as he put. Love meaning this interconnectedness of all with all. And the third thing that we know for sure about him is that he preached in parables. The parables of Jesus are quite an remarkable thing.

[45:28]

There are short stories, and they begin implicitly or often explicitly with a question. And the question is, who of you doesn't know this and this and this? Who of you who is baking bread, for instance, doesn't know that A very little sourdough makes an enormous amount of dough rise. Who of you who is sowing seeds in the fields doesn't know that one doesn't pull the weeds up while the wheat is growing, but one waits until it's all grown, because otherwise you trample the thing down, and then you separate and eat from it. So it always starts out with some common sense. Common sense is a very important word here. Observation, and he asks, yes, who of you doesn't know? This is the first level of every typical parable of Jesus.

[46:37]

There are other parables in the Gothic that were even invented later, or some of them were not, they were written down long after they were spoken, so you don't always find this pattern, but if you analyze it carefully, this is the typical pattern. Who of you doesn't know this? Then they only say yes, and this is the second part, usually not to mention. And then the third part is, aha, well, if you know it so well, why don't you do it? Because that has now another lever, It implies that his hearers know from within how the mystery acts, what the will of the mystery is, the will of God, the flow of life. He assumes that they know it. And then he gives them a story, that's how it comes about, and they say, yes, yes, we know.

[47:42]

And then, ah, why not do it? So there are jokes, all of them are jokes that are under here. And that has a very important implication. Because who was he? Who was he historically? And his contemporaries had difficulty saying who he was, he mentioned that yesterday, he said, did you say that? They called him a prophet, but that didn't stick. I've found several times the term prophet, prophet has risen among us, that didn't stick because there was this long prophetic tradition in Israel, but the prophet was typically

[48:42]

a messenger of God, and the most difficult words of the prophet come over and over again in the Hebrew Bible, is thus speaks the Lord, and then comes the message. This is what God says to you, and here's the message. That's exactly the opposite of the teaching of Jesus. Jesus turns around and says, I tell you now, this is what God, he says, who of you doesn't know that already? And then, so places, the prophet has the authority of God behind him. Jesus places the authority of God in the hearts of the angels. That is an enormous change. And you don't have to be a Christian to appreciate it if you claim this as a historic fact. And then you say, something very important in the... evolution of human consciousness has taken place at that point.

[49:45]

That's something really important that has happened there. So this is more or less what we know about the history of Jesus. And now we come to the questions, who is Jesus in my life? And I'd like to put this together with this other question. What is the meaning or role of Jesus Christ relative to mystery? And one could probably briefly say his contemporaries and those who came after them in the tradition recognize in Jesus Christ The mystery shines through then, so to say. Mystery shines through. That's why they're also called the Son of God.

[50:47]

Now, we, most Christians, and most people who are not Christians and just hear about it, get completely the wrong idea including most Christians, unfortunately, because this came in through the Greeks, and the Greeks had all sorts of semi-gods that were the offspring of God and the human being, and so this got all hopelessly mixed up and has nothing to do with it. In the Jewish tradition, there was always talk about Son of God, but the Son of God was... First of all, Adam. Adam is the son of God. And Adam means the human. Adam is the earth, Adam is the earthling. And the human is son of God, alive with God's spirit.

[51:49]

You read this beautiful little story that God makes a figure out of earth and then blows God's life breath into it. nostrils of this little creature and so Adam becomes alive so the son of God is the human then also the people of Israel as a sort of collective of humans and the king of Israel is also called son of God as the representative of the people but originally it's the human so And when the first followers of Jesus called the Son of God, in pride, something that we would say, we have been looking for the missing link, and it's us. We have a missing link.

[52:50]

But there's one that has already really become human, you know, with the link between the apes and the humans. But we have now discovered one who is really the human. And that's why they also call it the new atom. So, it is the new human. And in that sense, they recognize in him what all of us humans should be. And that goes very well together with his preaching. And now I think we need a prayer, right? Well, yes. I noticed it. I noticed it. I have not answered or tried to answer one of those questions, obviously. Continue after the break. You can have this part of it. Go on, whichever you want. But let's have a little break. How long? During the break, I still got a question.

[53:53]

that might be a nice next step. The question is early Jesus-Buddhist contact. What about the lost years of Jesus? Do you think he made contact with Eastern traditions? The so-called lost years is that when Jesus appears in the Gospels, he's about 30 years old, it says, about 30 years old, which was the age at which one could, the earliest age at which one could be a teacher. And people have said, well, we don't know anything about the time before, although in the Gospels it says, in his village they say, isn't that the son of the carpenter? So... He was a carpenter. And it's a very popular notion that he went to the East and even in India and other places in the East they have supposedly found some inscriptions or so that might refer to his being there.

[55:11]

But from solid scholarship, this is quite esoteric, and from solid scholarship it is very unlikely. It's very unlikely. And also, it is not at all necessary to explain anything that he says or does. However, there was a very intense contact between the Roman world and China. Not just here and there, someone going between, but one has found whole warehouses of Chinese pottery for export to Rome. So there was a great connection between the two. And one single monk coming from the east to the west is enough to bring the essential message. And so the monasticism, I asked John Leclerc, who was

[56:18]

the great scholar of monastic history in the 20th century. I asked him about this. Did monasticism originate here or did it come from the East? And he said, historically, we cannot point to a link, but it is very likely that it did come. But as a historian, I cannot say more than it's likely. Documents we have not. So there was this connection between the East and the West, but we do not need to invoke the Jesus wealth there. But there is a book, I don't know whether it's still in print, that was called The Buddhism of St. John's Gospel. I think that was the title. And it was quite remarkable the many connections between... the ideas in John's Gospel and Buddha's teaching, so that also, but that doesn't have to be Jesus personally.

[57:22]

There was some connection and some openness to Eastern thought at the time. So, The next question would be, how can I understand myself as both independent of and part of or emanation from God or mystery? I put it in here because it connects with the self. You see, the self is the Christ self. How is that related to the mystery? And the answer must not come from the outside.

[58:24]

This is not a third-person question. You can't observe this from the outside. That must come from the inside. And so each one of us must answer that from experience. And from experience we know, on the one hand, that we... participate in mystery. Mystery is that which we cannot grasp, but understand by being grasped, we participate in that. And all these three questions that we talked about, they lead us into our own depths, and we don't understand, we cannot understand our own depths at all. But we can't, I mean, we can't grasp it, but we can understand it, we live it. We can't get it into a grip, so we participate in this mystery. But we also know that we have a relationship to this mystery. We have a relationship.

[59:26]

And that is in itself a profound insight into that mystery. It's something that we can say about it carefully, that it combines oneness with relationship, within that oneness. Because we know ourselves to be related to this great thou, as we said yesterday, and that is also our relationship to the mystery. So theologians say, first of all they say, everything we say about it even if it is true, is more false than it is true. That is called negative theology. Really, the best thing you can do about mystery is that what its name says is, shut up. Moving in means shut up.

[60:30]

Mystery comes from shut up. Everything that you say is already too bad you have to put into words. But if you try with reverence and with apologies to say something, you can say it is bond and allows within that bond for relationship. And the last that remains when everything else is dismantled is relationship. At the bottom of everything is relationship. And that is poetically very beautifully expressed in the prologue to the Gospel of St. John. John, there are four Gospels. Matthew, Mark, and Luke are called the synoptics because they see things together, synopsis, they are similar to one another.

[61:35]

And then there is John, the fourth one, that is very different from the others, is more a theological elaboration with some historic framework, but it's more to theology. And it starts with that famous prologue, and the prologue starts with the words, in the beginning, paralleling the Hebrew Bible that starts with, in the beginning, God created, and here John says, in the beginning was the Logos, was the Word. As we said, yes, the Word out of silence. In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was vis-à-vis God. In other words, he says, usually was with God, but the Greek says vis-à-vis, was face to face with God. That's already that mystery. It's the mystery In it was the expression of the mystery, from the why to the what, and the what was vis-a-vis the why.

[62:45]

There was a relationship. And then the third statement, and the word was God. The whole thing was the mystery again. So that is the mystery. And that is within the history relationship to the logos. And the logos, we spoke about it here at Bergen and said that might interest all of you, the logos is a Greek term meaning word or more precisely the basis for any understanding. The idea is We have the logos in us, and everything there is has the logos in it, and therefore we can understand. But the exegesis today say that it's very likely that John used in the gospel this word logos in the sense in which it was used by Jews in Egypt, the learned Jews,

[63:59]

And they used Logos when they wanted to, as a substitute for the Hebrew word, Chochma, and that means wisdom, Sophia. So the Logos is something feminine and is the wisdom of God. And even in the Hebrew Bible you have the wisdom as... being there before all times in the Book of Wisdom. I was with God before all times and was the helper of God in creating everything. And there's this feminine element in God. C.G. Jung was also very fond of that idea. He said, you don't really need a trinity, you need a quaternity. Yeah. the second element in it, and that's the wisdom of God, and so forth.

[65:00]

So, when you think about it, if you think about God's wisdom, it's not somebody, it's our personification of an aspect of the mystery, namely its wisdom, how everything is so wonderfully balanced and working out. That means that you part in life, in nature, and so forth. And then they applied this to Jesus. And the prologue goes on and says, and the world was made fresh. That means came into space and time. Fresh means everything that is perishable. This imperishable came into, it doesn't mean at one particular point in history, but we experienced it in meeting Jesus, he says, but it was from the beginning, of course, obviously.

[66:11]

Everything in space and time was already filled with that... mystery that goes beyond space and time. So what is mysticism is the next version, and that is mysticism simply be defined as the experience, not something talked about or talked about, it's the experience of communion with the ultimate. That would be one definition. It's an experience, it's an experience of communion, and not limited. Limitless communion, communion with mystic, you could say in the way you have used this term. And that is given to humans, children more often than adults, but you have these experiences. Maslow calls the peak experiences.

[67:17]

talks later on about big experiences, about the context, but this is our mystic experiences. So every human being has these mystic experiences. And then comes... Did I copy that question from the perspective of both traditions? If God isn't somebody else, as Merton said, whom do you call upon when you simply need help? I think I read it. Well, anyway, that is a good question. But again, it has to do with this mysterious fact. if we can experience ourselves, that within this mystery, which is one, absolutely one, there is a relationship.

[68:23]

And so even though God isn't somebody else, in the sense we have one, in God we live and move and have our being, as we said yesterday with Paul, even though we can have a relationship with him, And not because Paul or anybody else says that, I mean, St. Paul, but because this is experiential. We know it. We are part of, not part of, we live and move and have our being in mystery, and yet we can relate and quite spontaneously call upon that great now which the mystery is to my eye. And there was an index, a word index to D.T.

[69:28]

Suzuki's works that somebody published. And D.T. Suzuki, as I said, was one of the first in English to write to try to make Buddhism understandable to English-speaking readers. And in this index is the word prayer. I was very surprised to find that word prayer in there. And Suzuki said, this is now my own version, it's only a very short paragraph, and he says, in Buddhist context, prayer makes absolutely no sense. There is nobody to whom to pray, nor is there anybody who prays. It makes no sense, but we all do it. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, [...] no.

[70:33]

So, why? Because we have this deep experience, and whom should we call upon but life to help us. And then there's the question, where is Jesus in my life? These questions were all on one page. Where is he? What is he? How is he? Who is he? Where is he in my life? And there is this Christian term intermediary. It's not a term that I particularly like, but... Still, in my life as a Christian, I would say, Jesus gives me access to the mystery.

[71:38]

And that is why so many people pray to Jesus. You're not praying to Jesus. Jesus isn't around anymore. He died. And Rose, which is another story that you won't go into here. But you can sometimes. But We're talking about the Christ. And Jesus Christ becomes to me an access to that mystery. And I can pray because I can't very well imagine this total vow to which my life is related. takes on the shape of Jesus, so to say. That's right, and I'm very interested this afternoon to hear how Buddha is, I mean, I'm pretty sure, but not, I'll wait, but I'm pretty sure that Buddha has somehow the same function in Buddhism, pretty much the same, because that's simply a human need.

[72:54]

And Also, I said already, one of the main teachings of Jesus was love. Love even your enemies, not only your friends. Love in the sense of the yes to belonging, yes to life, yes to belong together. No cutting off, no separation, limitless belonging. So you belong also to your enemies. And you love them. You act. What's done? as one acts, one belongs together. And so Jesus becomes also a kind of focal point for love, to teach you of love. That's God's love present among us. One can see Jesus. You have to remember that there's a

[74:00]

An idealized picture every generation adds and adds to it, but what we encounter today is that image of Jesus as total love and as God's love present in the world. He may have been surprised This one had told him that in his own time. He says, why do you call me God? Why do you call me God? Why do you call me good? Why do you call me God? God is good. So all these elaborate claims that we make for Jesus, not absolutely sure that they fit the historic piece, but that's not important. What is active, what is actual, is what we know, what we experience.

[75:06]

And so Christians experience Jesus, and that's much more important. That is the reality. And that leads right away to the question, how is Jesus in my life? How is he? It means how important this is in my life. I think one can have a great appreciation for the historic Jesus and some notion of Christ and that we are connected and so forth. But it's not so central to my life. But when it becomes central to somebody's life, then I think that person would be a Christian. to the extent. Again, I don't like to see being a Christian, not being a Christian, as sort of black and white, the in and out truth.

[76:10]

Well, there are all sorts of shades, many, many shades, that people who are one-third are Christians, and others are half-Christian, and they are four-Christians. Depending on... What importance Jesus has in your life? And that may change. Don't pin yourself, box yourself in. I have a relationship to Jesus. Let's see what happens in the course of my life as I learn more about him. And that leads right away to the expression, what does it mean to be a Christian? For me, it means Jesus has an important place in your life. And since Jesus can have an important place in my life, a very important place in my life, and Buddha can have a very important place in my life, or rather the teachings of Jesus and the teachings of Buddha can have a very important place in my life.

[77:27]

It's so important that I can tell, maybe somebody can say, I can tell which is more important. So they're perfectly compatible. What's the problem? And then, of course, that follows the question, how is it that there's so much compatibility between Buddhism and Christianity in this room, yet suspicion in many other realms? Because if you look at the essence, as we are trying to do here, there is no contradiction but if you simply usually the opposition comes from people who have never met the others have only heard the name so they are the others and humans tend to be a little afraid of anything that is foreign to us so there is at least that degree of opposition and then the final question

[78:30]

How do I stay connected to and participate in the Catholic Church when it doesn't express or support this understanding of mystery? Well, first of all, let's not confuse the Catholic Church with the hierarchy. It's a very different thing. In Europe, German-speaking Europe, about a decade ago or so, started a movement among Christians, Catholic Christians, because over there, especially last year, most are Catholic, started this movement. They called themselves, We Are Church. We Are Church. And they had hundreds of thousands of members. And they sent, the bishops, send regularly pastoral letters, we call them in English, and in German it would be Hirtenbriefe, which means shepherds letters.

[79:42]

So we at church sends to the push-ups sheep letters. They ask for those things that the church wants, but the hierarchy doesn't want. So one has to distinguish. I don't belong to the hierarchy, I belong to the church. And within that church, in the course of history, there are many, many great teachers who are very steep in that mystery. Think of Master Eckhart, think of Teresa of Avila. John of the Cross, many great mystics and teachers, hundreds more that are not so well known. And they are church too, so they are, to me, much more important than the present-day hierarchy that can also change.

[80:45]

Actually, we are very lucky right now, Pope Francis is an excellent pope. I hope he lives long enough to make enough changes, but... So that changes over the time. It's not so important. What's important is the tradition within which you stand. And you can choose those with whom you have communion, deeper communion within that tradition. Those many people have not died. It doesn't matter. They are alive in their communion of saints, et cetera. their life through their writings to you, and if you feel close to them, you can stay. But then, of course, there's this outside pressure that I also gather, the telephone calls, how can you stay in this church? My only explanation is, from the inside,

[81:54]

you can change it. From the outside, you are simply an outside critic. And in baptism, every Christian is anointed, there is again this christen, this anointing, this Christ image, as king, queen, as priest, who was not the ordained priest in a very special way, functionaries of the organization, but everyone is priest, everyone is king, and everyone is prophet. And the prophet is not somebody who predicts the future, that is a misunderstanding. The prophet is somebody who is attuned to God's will and speaks out for it. stays in the community and speaks out.

[82:57]

And both are very difficult. It's relatively easy to speak out and then quickly get out so that they won't hit you. And it's also okay to stay in and not to speak out. Lay low, but to put these two together, speak out, and stay in. That is the great difficulty of the prophet. And that is our calling. So if you are not in there, then you have a free choice. But if you find yourself in there, I personally feel that you have to just... Take upon yourself that calling and make something out of it. I have quite a number of friends who were particularly around the 70s and so.

[84:07]

They were quite remarkable teachers within the church, very progressive. But then it just got too much. The bishops beating down on them and so forth. And so they got out. And the moment they got out, they were outside critics and really not very interesting. Nobody was reading that much anymore. They just didn't have the leverage that you have when you are inside. So that's why I am in the position in which I am. But the important thing is... not sort of a kind of membership and in and out. The important thing is for all of us, to what extent does that help you? To what extent does the teaching of Jesus, to what extent does Jesus help you in your life? That's really basically.

[85:09]

Ending on very personal note. Mm-hmm. And I think we still have it. Yes, we do. Thank you for your words. So you said, when you were quoting D.T. Suzuki, you said, you know, no one pray, no one pray to, but we all do it. And then you said, whom should we call upon but life? And to me, that assumes that life has some kind of agency, that life could do something. And yesterday you spoke about the current of life, but I'm really curious because the traditional conception of God is that God's will, you know, God has a will and you're supposed to do it. But I wonder what you mean when you say that whom should we call upon but life?

[86:13]

Like what does that, Yes. I've heard some of you, but... So you quoted P.T. Suzuki. I understand that part you got. But then, your comment on that was, well, who can we call upon, but life? Yeah, yeah. Implying, seemingly, that life has an agency. Agency. Agency. Yes, I have never used that term that life has an agency, but life is an actuality that we are constantly in contact with. And this may be some aspect of life that we overlook, that life gives us every moment, everything. gives it to us.

[87:14]

For instance, we sleep, and what you might expect is that when you fall asleep, you stop breathing. But life makes you breathe all night long. That's why you wake up again. The fact that this heart has been beating for so many decades, if I use another muscle, it's a muscle. If I use another muscle, for two hours. I can't use it anymore for two days. It's so sore. It keeps breathing for 90 years. So life gives us constantly something. And of course you might say, if you turn towards life, that really doesn't that is a personification or so you wouldn't call on life. I use here life in the sense of mystery, and within mystery we have worked it out, we have talked about it.

[88:22]

Within mystery we realize that we are both part of it and related to it. And where we experience the mystery is in our day-to-day living. So this is how I meant it. But the connection was a little strained, so thank you for asking. Yeah, I had a question yesterday too, when you mentioned that stream of life, the direction, and what helps me a little bit nowadays is to, coming back to the poem of Mary Oliver, you read, and I think the second last sentence was just refer to the right distance of the sun, something like that, this morning? Yes. And for example, yeah, to me it helps to feel into what that stream of light or the direction may be, just knowing, but just feeling into it.

[89:25]

Yeah, to me those examples help knowing and being interested in how come that there's a sun which or the Earth, which has the right distance to the sun, sun getting warmer, Earth being able to raise the resistance of this tiny temperature frame where life is possible. So there's a, scientifically this is true somehow, at least it's very, it's known that there is a very wise interaction in the universe which makes life possible. We don't know, but there seems to be. And this to me, referring to far out, like cosmology, helps me to feel into, there is something which brings meaning into it. And this constant connection between things is like a pulse, like a dynamics which is there.

[90:34]

And I say this also when going deeper into the cell level or knowing that our brain is beating already when the brain is not yet developed. It can't beat without the brain being burned in the embryo. There's so much awe, I think, which does not have understanding, but we can feel into it. And that's what often helps me. outside of terms, of traditions, just to feel that there's something a lot wiser, a lot so dynamic and so, you know, not far than them, which is what gives direction. In saying all that, it sounds like you're just affirming the point, Am I getting it right? Yes, I'm thinking myself into that.

[91:38]

As you kept talking, you talked yourself into affirming the statement that you initially were going to question. Yes. Yes, I mean, if you imagine this, we're talking about light. It has kind of a flow or a trajectory. Initially, brain was in the question, but if she talked about it, she kind of like, yes, I agree with that. But I heard you refer also to the mind and the brain, and this is not directly to the question, but when we speak about watching ourselves and being the watcher who nobody watches. Be very careful in this context that it isn't your mind that does the watching.

[92:45]

The mind, like everything else, but if more so, participates both. It isn't... time and space, and somehow touches something that is beyond time and space. But I'm very aware of the fact that mind and consciousness also belong to what both the Hebrew and the Greek Bible calls the flesh, that means that which is perishing. The mind too, but it touches upon something. That's all we can say. It touches upon it which goes beyond it. If it were more than touching, it would grasp it because the mind always grasps. So the mind cannot grasp it.

[93:47]

But we can understand because we belong to it. touches us, it speaks to us. So I just want to make sure that we don't make a split between body and mind. That is not at all the split. There is no real split, but there is a distinction, and the distinction, the mind also belongs to the body, to that aspect of us. I don't even say part, but aspect of us that is in space and time. Yet, it and everything else touches, touches, has a notion, has an incline of that which is beyond space and time. That's a lot.

[94:49]

Meaning is already a lot. Does that make sense? It's difficult to make these fine distinctions, but... Well, I'd like to follow up on what you just said, because I think it's really fascinating to me, too. Because, as you were talking about the universe, the universe is, you know, we're all a result now of the Big Bang. The Earth rotates on its axis every 24 hours. We... you know, circle with the sun every 365 days. The moon pulls on the tide. Brother David was talking about us waking up and there's our automatic mirror system that we can thank for that. These are all physical facts that we have come to understand and that we continue to understand. And would it not just be possible to say that these are just the realities of existence and they carry no specific

[95:52]

meaning other than just that. They don't carry beauty or wonder or anything like that. It's us who carries that. And it's us who are able to bring to the phenomena of the reality of life this kind of wonder that you talk about and the appreciation of its magnificence and its beauty. So I think it's important for me to be able to separate that out, the fact of existence from what we bring to existence. But I think it's a wonderful subject. Brother David, Charles was saying that following up on Miriam's description of this unfolding universe and how it has within its unfolding a particular expression of being, And the human contribution to that, we relate to that with a sense of duty, responsibility, morality.

[97:00]

But Charles was asking about that and highlighting for himself the fact that owning that and not attributing that to the universe. The universe doesn't have a morality. It has a causality. But, of course, we are part of the universe. So on our side, this is our morality and our ethical desire for community and for growth and for creativity and all that. That is how, as humans, we express what the grass is expressed on the level of grass. or the birds and the level of birds. So it's our human expression, but it's all of one piece. But it's very important to distinguish it. It's very important to distinguish it.

[98:04]

But only to the point of distinguishing and not separating because we are still part of the whole thing. We are part of the whole thing. But we bring much to it. We bring much to it. We bring a lot to it. Yes, yes. We bring a lot. And both positive and negative, because we can contribute so much to it, we also can easily destroy what we do. Great responsibility. And the word responsibility is again so beautiful because it means we are responding to this. What are we responding to when we are responsible? Are you going to address a little bit later about evolution as our part in cosmology and where we're converting to? Are you going to be talking a little bit more about that?

[99:04]

Because that's injuring to say that, yeah, we are probably at the highest level of consciousness in cosmology, and where we as humans are going, along with creations. Well, I think much of this will come in under the heading of practice. But in our context here, we can say it's our responsibility to constantly attune ourselves to what does life really want, moment by moment. What does life really want from me? And life always wants more intense aliveness. more variety, more interaction between everybody and everything, this weaving, everything depends on everything. So we know quite a number of aspects of what life wants and can attune ourselves or refuse and go against it.

[100:12]

Life wants a great variety, for instance, and we do... things that diminish every day many species that were there for hundreds of thousands of years, and now they are gone forever. Things like that. I was just briefly amazed when you were talking about the prologue to the Gospel of St. John. I was thinking of... Song of the Jewel Mirror, Samadhi, Him with the Perfection of Wisdom, Dogen's Fascical on Zenki. It's all the same thing. Different words. Tom was saying that when you were talking about the prologue to the Gospel, that he could see a strong correlation to that, to certain Buddhist texts that we chant on a regular basis. I'm looking forward to hearing about that this afternoon. That's a wonderful idea.

[101:16]

Does this mean we're ready to break?

[101:34]

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