from being kind of monastically defined or self-defined by some kind of monastic standard to be more cultural Buddhist, to be more ethnic, like ethnic, to be more like a lay Buddhist practice. You know, Greenbelt had a kind of lay Buddhist practice that you can go there on Sunday morning and listen to a lecture. Yeah. That's one of the reasons. [...] And that's to me, that's why I have a background in law and law school.

[01:09]

Among some people. Among some people. But that's why I worked on part of it in math and finance specifically because my law school The community has not really created the possible foundation for it at all. It's likely to take a little bit of time. But that's been that. We could just put this in a framework so people can get a handle on it before they leave the community. And of course, in a good community, we don't really like it. It's one of the problems that athletes have for athletes when they come up, and I'm just going to tell you how it can be done.

[02:20]

But it really bothers me to look at how I do it and look at how other people do it. It's just... [...] Well, not just a load of secret, but this is where I got in with Brian Victoria. He pulls out some fairly quite familiar, very good names. and finds substantial evidence for their active participation in the September 10th imperialist efforts from the 1890s on.

[03:38]

And especially, okay, we have the benefit of 20-20 hindsight, and of course, I've never done anything wrong. But you look back at it, and it's chilling. It's chilling. It seems to be that Suzuki came up with the phrase, maybe it's on their own, but I know that the sword that can kill is the sword that gives life. You know? You throw phrases like that around and say that... Actually, in concert with China for the United States' climate conference, It's amazing to see, to see, to see the point where I see them, and I kind of want to see them, because it's a strong foundation. It's a strong foundation, and whether we get it together, we can just do it. And the argument is that we can do it. We [...] can do it.

[04:40]

We can do it. We can do it. You may have people that believe in Egyptology and also do that, but besides that, you can go to Egyptology and you can go to Egyptology. Why is it so frequent? Because if they don't use, if they use any writing line, you need to use it. And once you can write the line, you're throwing people with swords. You can rack your mind, if it's all one university with, if you would like to be taken, you know, hey, the people out of these booths that go around quoting things like that, right? You know, that's something that the story, I don't think it's based upon, it's not based on listeners. There is a passage in the Word of Jesus that says that the real concern goes to enslave and destroy people and kill them, to advance their benefit in order to be able to understand the gospel.

[05:49]

And so that was taking a very short little section of sleeping with his mother, and they decided that that was their, you know, rationale for still keeping her for their own good. But if you know what that means, that is, I mean, that phrase is kind of like this, you know, if you, if you divide yourself, you're going to be able to do it. It would be great if you could come and see. What would that feel like? It would be great if you could come and see. It would be great if you could come and see. It would be great if you could come and see. I don't know. I don't think I've ever seen a lady like that in her life.

[07:07]

And I said, you know what, you know, to be open-minded, you know, from the start down, you know. So you're saying the doctrine is about interconnectedness. The doctrine is about, what you're saying is about interconnectedness, which is, which is definitely something that you can't use as a doctrine, as a, as a, uh, argument, as a rational statement of that. It's just a system. It's a system. It's a system. Not only Japan, but Korea, there's been too much of it. You have on it. Yeah. Okay. Well, there's a couple of emptiness.

[08:17]

I think that the rhetoric of emptiness is the largest emptiness. Whether other religions have similar mechanisms or not, it's easy to do with it. Buddha's doctrine of emptiness allows, I'd say, to be made of these three things. I kind of thought that it could be one emptiness. Okay, I think that we have a, there are a few things that I want to follow up with her to say about Bodhidharma, but I think actually it might be better to move on a little bit and I'll try to get back to Bodhidharma

[09:18]

later on. And if you have the handout that I gave you, if you can find the diagram, too, I don't know if it's in the handout, but the historical stages, it's on right after diagram one. This is by no means a kind of final document. And we've tried to put down here for the benefit of students just the bare essentials or the briefest kind of notations about what these different phases, identifiable phases in early Chan, or at least in Chan, what they were like, what we can use to describe them.

[10:22]

In the Toto Chan, or the Bodhidharma Hui Code period, when I say multiple locations, these folks, these guys wandered around Northern China, they don't seem to have held any one location, although they're associated with two or three different locations. When I say practice based on the Buddha nature, we discussed the principle yesterday, and I think that's what I'm referring to there. We don't know what the guys taught or what they believed about their own witness. We just don't have any perspective whatsoever. Where we know about them, that is, the treatise on the two ethics and four practices is transmitted through traditional Chan or Zen texts. And we also know a certain amount about them from Dunhuang documents. That is, among the Dunhuang collections is a version of the, or a copy of the treatise

[11:33]

And it has some letters after it. And then after the letters, there's some dialogue. Yeah, . Yeah, right. So there's a letter between and a couple of different . And I think I actually translated part of the in my book. And then after that correspondence, there are dialogues, basically, questions and answers between figures who are sometimes given by names or whose names we very rarely can figure out. And I, in the past, I've tended to avoid looking at this material because I can't state it clearly. But I think it's fair to say that Bodhidharma's treatise was transmitted within a community of practitioners. Then they talked about it and had dialogue exchanges on the basis of that, and those dialogues got noted down.

[12:40]

and added to the text that he attributed to Dunhuang. Dunhuang is a pretty out-of-the-way place, so why it gets there and whether there's some difference in what we see from Dunhuang, what was going on in more central locations in China, I mean, that's a question that I don't think anybody's really addressed specifically yet. They're sort of aiming it to that, But there's, then there's a, there seems to be a... Are you saying then that there is a part of time in this community where it's like disciples, disciples, friends? Friends or disciples. I think it's a dynamic song. And that correspondence, parts of that correspondence are also found in the

[13:43]

that she definitely brought, which is a collection of biographies that she first put together in 1645. It's not just general biographies. It's a comprehensive series of biographies. It's called The Continuous Life of Emily of Monk. First put together in 1645, and then modified up until the author is entirely deaf in 1664. She does them a lot. So this early group, we know something about them, but not very much. And I think it's fair to say if people around the year 700 didn't identify with them, didn't say these were our spiritual ancestors, we would have even forgotten about them. It's probably fair to say. There were other groups of practitioners with different styles and different approaches. We have forgotten about these.

[14:44]

We have certain descriptions of catechism from the 5th and 6th century. So there was a lot going on and these guys happened to be alive. Who knows why, but they're the ones that we remember. Um... I don't remember. I don't believe it's... I don't believe we have any one of these names in Bodhidharma's group on the 27th century or earlier. I think that's... I don't know the story. I have no idea. So it could have been, but I, and probably would, attended here, not, not witnessed it.

[15:48]

Do you believe that Rudy Diamond was a historical figure? I thought he was not, I thought he was very, very, I mean, he's not really. Okay, I'll take, I'll take two positions about Rudy Diamond. First of all, I think, yes, he was a historical figure. I thought that it would be foolish, not foolish, I would not agree with if you say there's not enough evidence Bodhidharma didn't make it. I don't buy that. But on the other hand, the evidence that we have about Bodhidharma comes from such conflicting sources, or such different kind of apples and oranges, so it's incommensurable, that it's very difficult to say with any precision what he was like. I think it's easier to say how he was remembered as time goes on. well, certainly if you change it.

[16:49]

Actually, we could look, if you like, we're working on a messianic figure, but in the sense that somebody changes. Okay, if we go four pages or so on, I have a chronological... We have the trias on the two entrances and the four practices and the chronological evolution of Bodhidharma's hagiography. One thing that we can say about, OK, I would say Bodhidharma existed. That's a reasonable thing. I would say we don't know precisely what he was like. I would say that people attributed great, kind of mystery, or not mystery, they considered him a great figure, a very inspiring figure.

[17:52]

Whether they made that up, kind of laid that on him after he was already dead, I mean, who knows? What we can say is, we can look, we can see with Bodhidharma more than perhaps any other Zen figure, we can see how his legend developed. So I just put down here when we learn different information about Bodhidharma. So the text in 547 about the monasteries of Luoyang says that he's from some country called Parthia in Central Asia, and that text isn't particularly clear on where the Central Asian countries are. In 645, this is with the first edition of the Chūgatāṅgāna, it continues the lives of eminent monks. We get the basic story of the South Indian monk of the Brahman caste. We get the text of his treatise. We get the story of Pueka's arm being cut off by bandits or rebels, and Pueka burying the 40-diamond Rewa Yang.

[18:58]

By the time the compiler of that text died, or sometime before he died, he had added to his text, and he adds the story about Bodhidharma transmitting the Lankavatara to Hoysa. But someone asked yesterday about the association between the Lankavatara and Hoysa. My tendency is to think, it's like kind of 60-40, probably Bodhidharma didn't have anything to do with the Mata Duttara. You want to nail down what the historical figure, Bodhidharma, did. I would say 60-40, probably not. Why is it, why do they want to answer? Is it something like a... This is a funny thing, because... As Yanagida has noted, and I, you know, and Gennarikor and I both repeat, the texts that attribute, that associate the Lankavatara with them are fairly empty of references to the Lankavatara.

[20:02]

It's like, it's up there as some kind of a label. It has some kind of misfeet to the text. But they don't seem to have been that much involved in actually reading the text or using the text, or somehow they never say why. I mean, so people can look at the text and try to come up with ideas for why they would have used it, but... Yeah, it is, and people talk about, what is it? Can we make an idea to talk about other ideas? And also, you know, there's a type of consciousness in that text. Um... So it's, but it's, you know, and these texts from the early 8th century, they talk about a lancet guitar school, but they never seem to draw anything from the lancet guitar, so. Okay, let me, um, Hang on just a second.

[21:16]

I'll come back to that. OK, so that first reference, the . I would say that's part of the lore that's building up about Bodhidharma. 689, this is from Faroo's epitaph, the text we saw the other day, or yesterday. And that's the first time you get a link, an explicit link, between the Bodhidharma Quay code brief and the Daoshin home run brief. In the continued biographies of eminent monks, this collection of biographies that was done in 645 and then supplemented up until the compiler's drafting doesn't have references to several of these people, like Daoxian and so forth. It doesn't identify Daoxian as being connected with Bodhidharma in any way. It's just something that the compiler didn't state.

[22:20]

Well, does that mean they didn't know it? It's an argument for silence. Then there are two texts that are produced from the Northern school, or different factories or people within the Northern school, And I have them down here for convenience, 710 and 715. It's actually sort of a process, and it kind of feeds towards these. They were written without knowledge of each other. The one, 710, I translate in my book, it's the annals of the transmission of the Dharma treasury. And that one, there, bloody Dharma gets identified with Chalensa. There it says, know that earlier story about Cueca having his arms cut off like banners? That wasn't true. He actually cut it off himself. It says that Bodhidharma was poisoned several times and he decided to go ahead and die. He decided to let the poison affect him at one point. It gives a little bit of a dialogue between Bodhidharma and Surya and the pilgrim coming back from India as they pass each other at the border.

[23:26]

Bodhidharma going back to India and Surya coming back to China. And he mentions that they go, then come back to open what we call the grave and find that it's empty. And I don't, when I say empty here, I think they say it's empty at this point. I think the one sandal is the later, I would say, little frill or whatever. Um, so it's in, then in the text of 715 is a text called the, um, the record of the masters and disciples of the, the luck of the pirate. And this is a text that, uh, Bernard Ford talks about. And it is, this is one of the curiosities of our two dissertations, right? I picked one text and he picked the other text. And if you know Bernard, Bernard loves to work with margins and edges and, you know, whatever is peripheral, but he believes the edges define them. And so his dissertation on this material kind of goes off in various different ways.

[24:32]

And I tried, I'm maybe more dogged in trying to tell the exact thing, and I try to doggedly follow the central storyline. But anyway, the second text, the Records of the Disciples of Sukhothi Sattva and Vamantadattara, this is the text that identifies not Bodhidharma as the first patriarch. I didn't even put it here for that. Well, yeah, it says Gunabhadra, the translator of Vamantadattara, is identified as the first patriarch of Chan. And here, this is the first text, I think, to use these numbers, the first patriarch, second patriarch. So what's happening is the... the structure of the lineage or the basic assumptions of the lineage are fairly well accepted, I think. They're arguing, arguing isn't quite right, but they're perfecting the details and getting the story straight. And between these two texts that come out of different elements within the early Chan confraternity, they have very similar styles, but

[25:40]

But the guy who writes the text, he says this is the teaching of the Lantavitara, and then he doesn't have anything about the Lantavitara, either. And he also, he criticizes some earlier material, and then turns around and uses the material as well. who has to work to fill out the picture, so to speak. As a Texan, I can't say too much about it as an Indian, but there's this rather latest Mahayana text which does have ideas of the storehouse consciousness and also the society of garbage, basically, with a nature idea in it. It's translated by Gunapadra at the beginning of the 6th century, I think, 520s or thereabouts. I may be wrong on the translation stage. It's generally the 400s.

[26:48]

Translations during the 400s tended to focus on Madhyamase, the translations in the 500s. and the Yogacara material is hindered to dhamma. You know, I'm going to guess, in a quick sense, I'm going to guess 520, so maybe I could be off by a specific date there. I can't remember when it might be. So it's about the right time for Bodhidhamma, who has been interested in this so much so far. Could have been. Yeah. Okay, yeah.

[27:50]

The Bodhidharma Hue Cubs group, we have probably half a dozen names, maybe more than that, maybe ten names of figures and kind of leaders in that group. And some of them, a couple of them, are said to have had significant membership sites. But I would say it's a fairly very unusual thing. You can't really talk about membership at this point. It's a very fluid kind of group. The next peer that I'm going to try and get to There's the East Mountain period, or what I call the East Mountain period, which is when Daoxin and Hongran are hanging out in Hongmei. And there we can see a range of growth. We have, once again, we have about, what is it, about half a dozen names associated with Daoxin, about 25 or 30 names associated with Hongran. When we get to the next generation, the Shanshou, we get about 70 names associated with Shanshou.

[28:56]

And we can assume, it's fair to assume, these are the ones whose names are remembered. So there's certainly large numbers of practitioners who don't leave their mark. And we can also see a kind of regular growth. One, you can, in terms of numbers, the numbers are a bit smaller this period, so what in terms of incidence of influence is in the culture? Is the influence of culture, in particular the relationship to the emperor and the empress much larger than somehow trickling out into the culture, or is it still very tight-knit? Okay. Unless they're very small. Okay, let me, let me, well, to finish out, we can look at this, the chronological, this one key, and you can see that Bodhidharma's hagiography, and you can see that it's a fairly simple kind of thing, how there are legends about them going up through, and these religious personalities being transformed.

[30:11]

We have basically three periods to talk about, and I've characterized the Kurdish time period. Then we have what I call the East Mountain period, or the early period, and then the Northern Stone period. I would say that the crucial event in all of it was that in 700, Edward Wu invited Sun Tzu to court. Sun Tzu is a figure that is a quote-unquote loser in the platform of super-verses, right? He was a seemingly important figure during his lifetime. And it was by that invitation to court, when he was invited into the capital, I think there were two capitals, kind of like Washington and New York, and it was from that that a lot of the texts of both Bodhidharma and also the Fifth Patriarch, that they get distributed. That if it hadn't been for that national recognition, that we really can't say what would have happened to these games.

[31:29]

I think that's crucially important. Because it was once they hit the big time, once they hit the Chinese capital, that these guys had to write things down. If you're off in the boondocks, if you're down at Takahara, for example, And in fact, if Tathāhāra were your only, only part of the Zen, and all of your students come to Tathāhāra, you tell them how to sit, okay? Having text is nice and so forth, and you've written some things with it, and I could, you can tell them what they need to know. But it's, it's when you get invited off the, the, you know, the White House, you know, that, and, and, you know, the Zen boom. And people want to know about it. And they can't all make it to Kaza. They don't want to all go off to the Queen's Island. They want to be able to get at it in the capital. That's when Zen becomes its launch on a national stage.

[32:30]

And it's to realize also, as I said briefly yesterday, that this time, Chang'an is the largest city in the world. a population of about a million, a very cosmopolitan city. China at the time was very international. There's trade across the Silk Route to not only to India, but also to Iran and the Mediterranean. If you look at things that are preserved in Japan in roughly this period, I mean, the trade in luxury goods was remarkable. The book that I just saw on Japanese poetry, it has a bleak goblet of glass cut, basically, from the 17th-century Japanese Celestials from the 3rd century. And I show a picture of the thing and I say, if I saw that in a yard sale now, I wouldn't look twice. I wouldn't pay 50 cents for this thing.

[33:32]

You know, if it's translucent, blue, blah, blah, blah, maybe with a silver base to it, and this funky kind of pattern to it. I think it's just... I wouldn't even look twice at it. But in the seven centers, this is remarkable stuff. This is remarkable stuff. The trade across ideas and luxury goods is an impressive thing. And for it then to be not the only game in town, but one of the most highly publicized and popular kind of approaches to religion at the beginning of the 8th century, in the biggest city in the world, I think, is impressive. And that's when the springboard effect took place. Oh, Buddhism had been around... No, I think that, in fact, when Sun Tzu gets into the interior city,

[34:42]

You know, Buddhism has been supported by things and so forth for centuries. And one of the things about Sun Tzu is that you have to figure out, well, or effectively put it in a condition, how can I please make it sound nifty and nice? Now, maybe he didn't, I have no evidence, but he thought about designing a marketable He ends up designing a very good presentation of Buddhism because what he says and all those ideas about Buddhism that we've heard, they're not really about gathering flowers. They're not really about building temples. They're not really about past communities. We didn't even care about that stuff. He cared about contemplation in the mind. And all those things are metaphorical explanations for the metaphysical practice. And that would break it into stars, to take traditional explanations of Buddhism and use them as metaphors for metaphysical practices and practice.

[35:54]

And that allowed him to use stuff that was that people knew, and to reinterpret it for them. It also happened to be a doctrine that was not politically difficult to any kind. It didn't imply that the state was corrupt. It didn't imply that you could give lots of money to migrants, at least on the surface, which doesn't have that. There's no imperative to give money to the sign that allows them to adopt a very noble stance. I'd actually argue that it has a very good effect on fundraisers, and it's very useful in fundraisers. So when you say, when does it become popular? I think that until it's once invited to court, that's when things take off.

[37:03]

If that hadn't happened, the footage army could have been . And the numbers And I'll talk about Hong Lan and his community a little bit. The numbers with... We can see that it's a substantial community, but it's not massive. And they say, like, eight or nine out of every ten spiritual practitioners in China visit the Hong Lan place to spread the meditation. Well, that's a kind of hyperbole, this. Things that are all well known, quite, but let's not, you can't believe it in this day. Remind me, I read a question, I didn't know it once, but it's two things. One is, in the New Testament, he gave the case that when we were just people, like, we're dealing with, you know, you're just a family, like, well, you can, you know, he said that that's partly the case.

[38:06]

The other thing I'd say is There are theories that it's a part of Buddhism, that it happens, and it's actually both wrong, and it's not true. It seems like, it looks to me like the historical gaps in information corresponded to those known structures of Buddhism. And one of the things that I found a lot of theories apart was, it's surprising that there's origins of Buddhism in Vietnam, in Vietnam, in Korea, in North Korea, all over. So you can go through and see it, and including the month, and actually in these months, that supposedly said that they're very high in their petitions.

[39:15]

That is, all those traditions say that the original traditions from here did not come from the 24th century. The actual traditions that we've been following for a long time I don't know how, I can't understand it. It was more of one wondering and more aware of. Well, that's definitely, yeah. I mean, we don't... That's probably the easiest thing we can say, and I can get all three on. It's so likely that there's more that happened that we don't know about than we didn't know about. I mean, Chinese are remarkably good record keepers in comparison to Indians.

[40:20]

So we know a lot, and we couldn't be talking about it without Indians at the end of this talk. That was a beautiful idea. Thank you. Yeah, I mean, you know, if you can nail stuff down to a sensor, you know, you know, but to put a name on something, you know, to argue about if it's a second generation or a third generation, I mean, you can... Anyway, one of the things that's happening here is that the character is so fast. He's identified as a third patriarch. People are like, this is a total mystery. And I would argue just on a kind of common sense approach, this is a guy whose name is used to connect the Bodhidharma Hui coverage with the Daoist and Hong Kong coverage. Was Songkran really involved in this? Was there really a third patriarch who was really in between these two groups?

[41:25]

I tend to think not, but I can't, this is something I can't speak to you. I think there's a lift in the continued lives of Edmund Monk in this collection of biographies, which sometimes name appears at the top of the list, and I think he's just taken off that list. It's a list of students who are settlers in the Longevity Park. And these early, the two texts, early transmission of the landscape from the early 8th century They both agree that Song San is in there. They buy the lineage. So they have real difficulty describing what Song San was all about. And because he was such a cipher, later on in the 8th century, the Chinese Chan figures realized this. And there was kind of a movement in a way to kind of document Song San's biography. And so there's a couple of epitaphs that are written for him in the 750s and later.

[42:31]

And we have this text, which I mean, it comes from some time in the latter part of the Middle East, roughly around 750, give or take a few decades. Yeah, right, right. And I don't think there's a snowball stance in Hell that was actually composed by the historical figures of some time. Actually, there is a historical figure of some time. He was a very prominent monk in the Kuei Dynasty, and sometimes I want to write an article saying that Sung San was actually Sung San. But most Zen studies people don't even consider the possibility that this guy was actually the Sung San of the general lineage, because the images are so very different. He was a kind of an occult figure in his own right, but he was a very fancy, or very high-ranking, kind of political Buddhist.

[43:32]

It's very common in this way in Chinese people's courts. I think it's entirely reasonable that his name would have been on that list, but then the Zen tradition is not going to, it's not going to associate with it at all. They have to make up a Song San who's far more, you know, fits the kind of style of Bodhidharma that they developed. Anyway, What we get then is the Hui Ke group, and then the East Mountain group, what you think of as the 4th and 5th Patriarchs. When we look at the careers of Daoxin and Hongren, we see some interesting things. Daoxin arrives at Huangmei in the year 624, and he teaches there until he dies in 651. Hongren becomes his successor. and uh... pieces they're basically in the same place they move from one mountain peak to another but it's not a major change uh... he sits there until he dies and he's roughly six seventy four six seventy four six seventy five but here we have fifty years where we have a community that's uh... developing in one location and we can say a number of things about this community uh... and i i have i have

[44:56]

substantial disagreements, actually, with me in a couple of ways. And you'll see what I mean here. First of all, we can see the numbers in the streets. There are something like a half-dozen cities that are associated with Stout's Inn and something like 25 or 30 associated with Homeland. Do you have a question? Yeah, and I think that's where, yeah, any, yeah, basically. And I mean, the platforms that you're Okay, if Horan dies in 674 or thereabouts, it's presumably the event that's supposed to take place roughly, you know, just before he dies. The text actually appears to have been written around 780, and that's when it first appears. The first manuscript is a little bit later, but the text probably appears right around 780. So it's 100 years after the events. And people exaggerate. I mean, when Hong Ren dies, I think his biography says there were like a thousand people at his funeral or something like that.

[46:00]

Well, maybe so. But, you know, a thousand people from town. Hong Ren was actually from Huangmei. And he was from a local family in Huangmei. And after he died, his home was turned into a temple. And I actually... I think that Hong Ran, where I say Kwe Ko was the central figure of the Bodhidharma Kwe Ko group, that Hong Ran was the basic figure here. That basically they brought in Dao Tien, who could be kind of Hong Ran's teacher, somebody they liked, and Dao Tien. I'm not dumping on... Well, I suppose Hong Ran would be the best. I think that's kind of covering up for Hong Ran was really the obvious choice. Anyway, of the names, if we look at the names and the biographies and so forth, even though there are like 30, 25 or 30 people associated with Hong Ren as a human teacher, it seems like they only stayed at his place for a few years.

[47:05]

They stayed with Hong Ren for two, three years, and then they'd move on. Faru is really the exception. Second, we look at their biographies. The people that come and study with him, they have various different styles. They're practitioners of the Lotus Sutra. They're people who've had former previous experience in meditation. They're specialists in monastic regulations and so forth. And so he's drawing from the kind of Buddhist monastic community as a whole. Third, in my mind, there's nothing associated with Hong Ren except for meditation. He doesn't do translation, he doesn't do sutra interpreting, he doesn't... there's no reference to any other kind of religious practice. He's a meditation teacher. Excuse me?

[48:07]

No, no, about him specifically. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, yeah, well, first of all, I don't buy the platform picture, the historical document. Yeah. And, yeah, well, I can't say that he didn't have special interest. I wouldn't say that. And so, I can't tell you, I won't accept, in that sense, I won't accept the platform sutra's testimony. It was not that simply. But I wouldn't, I won't deny the guy his interest, or, you know, his attraction to particular texts. It's just that he wasn't there to teach the dhamma. He was there to teach, he said he was there to teach meditation. That's what people came to. They thought of him as a meditation instructor of particular gifts.

[49:11]

They came and studied with him for a few years, and then they went on. Yeah, yeah, yeah. There's a, there's, at least, let's see, this is, we're talking the 7th century here, in the, one of the contemporaries of Bodhidharma, a rough contemporary, there's a guy named Sung Cho, Sung Cho was a meditation specialist, and he's contrasted at some point with Bodhidharma as a different style of meditation teacher. At one point, Sung Cho helped out a Dharma instructor, a guy named Hui Yan. It's a different Hui Yan from the one we talked about here. Hui Yan was a scholar and an exegete, that is to explain three things and so forth. And he lectured on them. And at one point, I think Hui Yan was, this particular Hui Yan, was a Type A personality.

[50:14]

And he, at one point, he had a heart problem. He had what I would call, it's got to be high blood pressure, and maybe he was having other kind of cardiac events. And he went to Sung Cho for help, or he remembered, I think, that he had studied some meditation. He'd kind of been forced to study some meditation when he was a kid, sort of thing. And he decided to go back to that. He calmed himself down through the practice of meditation and realized that that was good for him. But he went back to teaching. I mean, you know... Well, and... Yeah, but there's a lot of Dharma out there, and people... The meditation teachers tend to argue that the Dharma is there in order to support meditation practice.

[51:15]

People who focus on the Lotus Sutra, for example, or focus on the Nirvana Sutra, they have a much greater faith in simply teaching the Dharma. So what I'm saying is that that, nothing like that kind of focus on keeping the Dharma is apparent in the materials about Holger and the East Mountain Boys. It seems to them, you know, real meditation is focused on the style of which we've been practicing. The last one is... kind of a sling, kind of a dividing line of almost like a doctorate. I don't know, it seems like the platform future sets up the whole mini and myth of origins in a way. It's kind of creative, it's that whole story. And it also seems very, it's extremely polemical, so it seems to, and it's very political in a way, so in some ways it's polemicized against, you know, the so-called northern school, but then it also seems to have a polemical aspect against institutionism and against Taoism.

[52:33]

I don't know if I'm reading that in there, but it seems to take its time. Yeah, I don't, there may be some in there, but I would say that mostly the platform sutra, there's We're getting kind of ahead of ourselves in a way. Is this kind of like the place of the institutionalization of that? I don't know what that means. What do you mean by institutionalization? Do you mean in a Weberian sense that these guys are finally getting fuddy-duddy and no longer... Well, this has been a... in terms of something that's solid and established, that we're an actual true world, we're an actual living, we're here, we're not just people practicing and meditating and people talking about the actual existence of the real institution that we're talking about. Well, I don't know about institutionalization in any sense.

[53:35]

At least that's not primarily how I think of the platform. I would say it's kind of... gives the overall outline that Zen kind of matures in this East Mountain period. The people we associate, identify as the Northern School, they take it to the public in a big way, and to the fancy people, the court society, in a big way. Shen Hui comes along in 732 and attacks the Northern School. I mean, he gives the Northern School its name. He's the one who first uses his name. And he creates this very unusual kind of situation. People don't like how personal Chen Hui was in his past. There's something a little bit, how do you say, unsavory somehow about his style. The platform future comes along and resolves the crisis.

[54:39]

that Shen Wei creates by his factionalism, by his sort of name calling. He creates a crisis. The platform future comes along with 780 and it resolves the crisis by adopting some of Shen Wei's ideas, which were very, I think, inspired and very, very useful, very kind of malleable in a certain way. And it resolves the crisis in a way that leaves Shen Wei out of the story. Okay, so that I regard the platform future as a gem, as a religious document, and also as the kind of a putting, the kind of capstone text of what I would call the early jump. And so whether it institutionalizes or what, but it kind of settles the story in a way that everybody can be kind of happy with, and it creates an image of Huineng, that people can use and keep being a remarkable, wonderful thing.

[55:45]

So whether that, I don't know whether that institutionalized it. It certainly kind of sets the, set a template for how, you know, this is how we're going to think about this earlier period and this is how we're going to think about then, you know, from now on and so forth. Yeah, I think there's a difference between Shunhui and the Platform Sutra. There are enough cases. When did the United States research from 1967? There's enough where you look at Shunhui's specific ideas, and then you look at ideas in the statements in the Platform Sutra, and there's enough

[56:59]

difference there. There's some, there's a substantial doctrinal difference between Shonhoi and the platform sutra. So some scholars, Suzuki fiddled or kind of flirted with the idea. Uehaku, a great Japanese buddhologist, flirted with it. I think he believed that Shonhoi wrote the core of the platform sutra. Boucher, I think, believed that Shonhoi wrote the core of the platform sutra. I don't I think that's not valid anymore. Now, when I get a Blessing's Heart from 57, it comes out with one 600-page book, which argues, among other things, that the platform picture was compiled by an Oxford school figure. And that's the interpretation that I tend to still follow. 20 years later, what is it, 1985 or so, he publishes a 400-page journal article. I mean, seriously, it's a at least 400-page journal article with Blakeney.

[58:08]

He was from the Institute for Humanistic Studies at Kyoto University. He was head of the institute, and I don't know why he didn't publish it. But there he has a different interpretation for kind of where the platform feature comes from in terms of true names associated with it. But he doesn't go back and comment on his earlier theory. So we have kind of two theories, you know, the early Nagita and late Nagita. Well, for this kind of argument, there's really only the Dunhuang version for what's on it. And the later versions add a lot. It would be fun to study. I've actually translated the Ming version later on, one of the Ming versions, for the Mimasa translation project. And now that Solyam Polsky has died, I would like to go back and do a comprehensive translation of the three major versions of it.

[59:17]

platform, so there's the Tsung-Huang version, there's two Japanese daishoji going, and there's, what is it, koshoji and daishoji, that are kind of, you know, like Song Dynasty versions, and then there's two Ming Dynasty versions, which are very similar. I'd like to do a, what do you call it, a synoptic translation of the whole mess, and Because it would be fun to watch how the text grows, what's happening to it as it grows. But it doesn't really relate. Those later developments don't say much about the origins of the text. . Yeah, I thought of, this is the, for a long time, organized the conference, and I was involved in organizing, I thought I was involved in organizing it, unless he's less so than the one I got there, actually.

[60:27]

And they published the papers on that, and I thought of taking selective articles out of that and ask it in the editing room and publish it somewhere else in the media. The Foil and Sun people have no conception really of how to deal with how it works. It's too bad. Very wealthy. They do some great things. They're, they're, they're foregoing about serving. They have a Chinese Buddhist dictionary. It's a great, great dictionary. Um, but they have very funny style with their acting and dealing with conferences. They want to do a conference and get the conference record out like the next week. Scholars like to be able to think about what they say and edit things and pay attention to detail. I just found, two weeks ago, a student brought me something and said, hey, I heard you got an article with me from the same, from Portland Times.

[61:35]

I'd given a paper. They'd taken my paper and published it and included in there, you know, I had in the original paper, following part to be translated by my student or something like that. You know, I had it in caps, you know. And they just left it in there. And all these notes to myself, you know? Yeah. Anyway. Okay, so we'll get to the platform future, hopefully. We've probably got to take a break. Let me just finish, if I can, about these mountain boys. So I have them have... have a community. It doesn't have to be a very large community. When you think of the numbers, there's 30, 25 to 30 students over the life of a 25-year teaching career, even if you figure maybe there's one step a little bit towards the end. You know, it doesn't have to be more than 10 to 25 months at any particular time to have that kind of, to produce those kind of numbers.

[62:43]

It doesn't have to be you know, a huge kind of thing. Louis Hockadoo also argues that it was here that the Zen style of kind of a day without, the Zen style of work as practice developed. And I would say there's no evidence for that whatsoever. Could have been, could have been that we all, you can't go on the basis of the platform future, which is 100 years later, And in fact, if you look at the platform sutra, right, Kuenong shows up as a barbarian from the far south. He's put to work as a temple servant. So the fact that he's put to work implies, in fact, that the monks weren't working. So the notion of Zen monastic discipline and the development of that particular style of practice is something that you can't argue from for you. We do have one text that's associated with the fifth KPR.

[63:50]

It says it's only included in the Donghong material. It may have been distributed in Korea as well, but it's not really found in Chinese text. It says at the end of the text that it was, uh, compiled, you know, Hohenrand, quoting, supposedly quoting Hohenrand, and he says, this text was compiled for me by my feet. Uh, and that's the way then text, you know, traditionally got, or eventually came to be, uh, compiled, is that the old man starts to get on in years a little bit, or after he dies, he put together, you know, a list of his things, and that happens with Hohenrand's text. Now, did that happen before he died? you know, does his text date from, is it actually a transcript of his actual teachings? I don't know. But apparently it's the way that Shenzhou and his friends, that is, Honglin's disciples, how they remembered him when they celebrated and popularized his teachings in Shang'an beginning in 700.

[64:58]

So we're down to a fairly small gap there. You know, in fact, it just clear that Pongren's first generation of disciples compiled this text to represent his teaching. And maybe there is some difference between what he actually said, but I don't think it's very significant. And that particular text, and we can talk about the text when we come back from break, but that particular text, I think it is just a very sweet text in the way that it emphasizes effort over and over again in the treasured text. It says, make effort, make effort. It's rare enough to be born as a human being, but to be born with a chance to practice Buddhism and to see liberation is very, very rare. So go for it now. But then it sets up a style of religious practice that by the design of the practice tries to keep students from clutching at the goal, from aiming at going through results-oriented, aiming at nirvana too much, grabbing for the moon.

[66:15]

And I just like the effect of the delightful combination of the parrot and the stick thing. . I don't get any revenue from pushing my book either. You think really? Chris Query published a book called Then Dawn, which I reviewed quite negatively, actually. I mean, they could be so much better so easily. Because these are, I've never met Tom Clary. I met Chris Clary at Harvard. You know, I have to practice more in order to meet him.

[67:21]

I see, I see. Well, I mean, these guys, I mean, Chris certainly, his Chinese is very good. They could be, when I say they could be so much better, I mean, and the problems with them all, I think, are typical, probably greater than if other stuff they've done. They never tell you where the text is from. So they don't tell you what to translate. Okay, you don't want to scare off readers who say, ooh, Chinese characters, ooh, you know, dangerous. Well, you can put a page at the end of the book. It doesn't have to have the Chinese characters. You can say what edition, what text, what pages do you translate? They don't tend to do that. They tend to avoid doing that. I think some kind of... spiritual elitism. And that, you just translate your name. It takes time.

[68:22]

This stuff is not easy. It ain't easy stuff. Now, I haven't looked at his translation of the Avatamsaka, but I've had people say that, and my impression of the stuff he's done is sometimes he has very felicitous rendering to things. His rendering can be very good. And sometimes he's picked off the wall, and he doesn't take the time to look things up. And with the Avatamsaka, too, I've been told that he will kind of translate through things that are amazing. When I have a mantra... where he sees something and he doesn't realize that it's somebody's name, and he translates it as if it's a subject, an object, or something, a grammatical part of it. But it's done. I mean, could the other guys have been reading in it? Because that's why they're... Well, yeah, okay. That's the law. It's the only... Yeah. Yeah.

[69:23]

They're very prolific, you know, but... Well, like, in this Zen Don, I can't, well, there's also, oh, there's also a guy named Bajo, who I think he's translating. And his was okay, actually. I mean, I have differences in thinking about how to render things, but that's the kind of style, and he was working earlier and so forth. So that, in very extreme, it might be Bajo's translation. P-H-O-D-A-J-O. Um, but Cleary translates, and Vendani translates the record as a master's disease that belonged to the car, part of it. But he goes from a 1940s Chinese edition, printed edition, that, and, you know, I need to publish an edition and translate, Japanese translation, annotated, you know, lots of explanation in 1977 or 72 or whatever. And Cleary doesn't use that because he doesn't like Japanese, so I think.

[70:26]

And, uh, So it was a new manuscript discovered in a new time. So he's using an old text, and then he starts, like, 200 and some odd characters into the text. He just, like, chops off the beginning of the text without any explanation for why. And another stuff that they do, they tend to do anthology, and they tend to pick what they love. And, you know, if you want to pick just the groovy stuff, and just make it, you know, the stuff that you think is inspiring, that's an editorial manipulation of the text. And I don't think that's fair to the reader. The traditional Chinese approach to that, exposition, the traditional Chinese approach to bringing out some text that we is pretty formulaic. You give a little, you give a little biography, and then you give the story of their liking, and you just, when you give examples of their teachings, and you use it, maybe they'll give one major presentation, that person could be representative of what they did, and that's what, how they died.

[71:44]

So, it's kind of a formulaic thing, you know, which I think, to call it, You can't detect the main things in there. Yeah. Well... So what you're saying, Andy, is we dropped off that formula part. Well, you think that's what you guys are saying? I think you attempt to read out some of the... In the back of the group, the group that corrects it, they go in and they actually... to present a lot of the information from that . And I always thought that it was a little bit unfair that that stuff kind of got locked off as kind of a footnote at the end, instead of putting some of the stuff about that people in context and presenting it that way, because that's what seriously kind of breaks the thing, that period. Yeah, I think there's something also that like in some of those collections, they present anecdotes, they present stories of interacting with schoolmasters and students without context.

[73:18]

And I think that that's significant, that they're giving you the story that's in a bare-bones form. My students have never heard of Marshall McLuhan, but this was a hot medium. And what this material is used for so much within the tradition is teachers and students imagining, visualizing what happens. And the fact that they leave off the context is, I think, important to kind of allow that practice to happen, because that's You know, in any... I spoke the other day about how Dogon could use koans. Well, clearly, you know, however you use koans, whether it's in a Hakone style kind of regimen, or if it's in a Dogon style of explanation, at the very least, you know, they're visualizing how enlightened masters behave.

[74:23]

And it's important, I think, that they don't give context. So that you have to do it on your own. It's like listening to the radio rather than watching TV. Radio, you've got to imagine it that way. But, okay, so if queries are going to recreate that material, fine. But it's not, there's a great difference between creating material that can be used by Zen communities, say, and explaining what happened in the dynamics of the evolution of the Zen school. And I'm doing the latter. I mean, that's my trick, is to try to explain the social, historical dynamics for how Zen evolved as a religious movement. You know, I need to notice things like they're leaving out context.

[75:26]

But I don't want to make choices for my readers and pick just the stories that I like because I think they're gruesome. And I want to get away... See, I think that what you're calling a traditional Chinese style of presentation, if we do that in English, that's... I call that... Well, I call it the string of pearls. method, you know? One fancy pearl on a string, you know, bead on a string. And that's not the way that, in late 20th century America, that's not how we understand religious movement developing and spreading and growing and changing. It's two different tools. Very different purposes, yeah. Well, we actually should take them. OK.

[76:41]

Well, the point to where to go now is to then mention briefly the teachings that are associated with the euthanasia teachings, period. And really the primary document that we have to represent those teachings is this Treatise on the Essentials of Cultivating the Mind. And I printed out something, but then we neglected to. I'll photocopy it for you. I've already mentioned one of the passages from this treatise. And I'll read a couple of passages and comment briefly.

[77:47]

First of all, the passage that I mentioned the other day was the treatise, quote the sutra, or quote the treatise on a sutra that says there's a diamond-like Buddha nature within the body's essential being. Like the sun, it is essentially bright, perfect, and complete. Although vast and limitless, it is nearly covered by the layered clouds of the five suns. Like a lamp inside a jar, its lamps cannot shine. And then it goes on and says, he used the bright sun as a metaphor. It is as if the clouds and mist of this world were to arise together in all the eight directions so that the world would become dark. How could the sun ever be extinguished? And then follows the rhetorical question, without the sun being extinguished, why would there be no light? And the answer is, the sun's light is not destroyed, but merely deflected by the clouds in it. The pure mind possessed by all sentient beings is also like this, and simply being covered by the layered clouds of discriminated thinking, false thoughts, and descriptive views. If one can just distinctly maintain awareness of the mind, and not produce false thoughts, then the dharma sun of nirvana will be naturally manifested.

[79:00]

So one thing that's going on here is we have a direct continuity the treatise on the two entrances and the four practices. That is that the Bodhidharma's treatise, and when I operate Bodhidharma in a question mark, the treatise that's attributed associated with Bodhidharma, where it describes the entrance of the principle or the entrance of the absolute, whatever you want to call it, it has the same concept as the Buddha nature. And it uses rather similar language. And it also contains that little code word or sign that you're not going to notice, they use it only. So that the existence of the Buddha nature is the important thing, that's the primary level of importance. The false thoughts, the discriminated thinking, they only or merely exist. And implying that they're on a

[80:03]

kind of lector order of significance. So in that sense, there's a direct continuity. This particular text then goes on and describes an attitude towards meditation practice, which I find very appealing in its formulation. As I said before, it repeatedly enjoins the practice to make efforts. It says that over and over. But then it describes meditation practice in terms of basically three elements. First of all, it uses this concept of maintaining the mind. And the character is literally meaning to protect the mind, to guard the mind. And when I translate that, I tend to put into brackets to maintain awareness of the mind. And that may or may not be justified.

[81:05]

The point being that you're supposed to... that the existence of the Buddha mental within you as the kind of central fact, most primary fact, of your existence. And maintaining that awareness, that consequence, is, according to this treatise, that's the kind of part of one's practice. In order to do that, then, the text describes two different techniques. One of the techniques is to visualize the stud. And I think there's a clear connection between the metaphor, the sun and the clouds, and the meditation technique of visualizing the sun. It actually draws this technique from one of the Pure Land texts for meditation on Amitāyus, Sūkhya, where the Buddha described 16 types of meditation practice. And the first one of those practices is to visualize the setting sun,

[82:06]

as a kind of golden disc, suspended like a huge drum, you know, and I don't know if you guys have one, a big drum, you know, suspended from a stand. And you visualize that sun, and basically what you're doing is focusing on oneness, and putting that notion of maintaining awareness of the true mind kind of into a metaphoric kind of practice. The other type of practice he describes, or the text describes, is simply to watch the mind, the movement of the mind. So instead of looking at the Buddha nature side, It also says, you can also concentrate on the flickering transformations of the mind. And it uses terms like the glittering, kind of the constant changes, or whatever you say, the ordinary consciousness.

[83:14]

And what it says is, don't get upset about it, don't try to do anything, just watch it. Watch the movement of the mind, and if you watch it, eventually, you'll disappear. And that... So it says, it talks about regulating the mind and concentrate the mind, regulate the breath, concentrate the mind so it's not within you, not outside you, not in any intermediate location. Do this carefully and naturally. And I think my impression of this natural is we do this with attention, but you don't want to squeeze, strangle the baby from squeezing the two hearts. View your own consciousness tranquilly and attentively so that you can see how it's always moving, like flowing water or a glittering mirage. After you've perceived this consciousness, simply continue to view it gently and naturally without it assuming any fixed position. Do this tranquilly and attentively until its fluctuations dissolve into peaceful stability. This flowing consciousness will disappear like a gust of wind."

[84:14]

And that moment of the disappearance of the fluctuations of consciousness is representative, in fact, of a moment of, or equivalent to the moment of insight. But it also says, in addition to saying work very hard at getting through this, it also says don't grab at it. That will make it all the greater way. So in that sense, The fact that this text was carried into Chang'an and made one of the central pieces of the early Chang'an northern school missionary efforts, propaganda efforts, I think it's a very impressive thing. And what's the name of this again? This is the treatise on the essentials of cultivating the mind. It is found at Dunhuang in several versions.

[85:21]

I think there were something like six or seven different versions transmitted in Korea. Not maintained, not used within the traditional Zen records. I don't get a dollar, and I don't make a single penny off of royalty, so I've been advertising. The Northern School and the formation or something like that. I have the one library copy, but it'll be back soon. Don't you think? [...] So these guys coming into the capital in the first decades of the 8th century, they carry with them the style of meditation practice. They carry with them a style of metaphor, of explaining Buddhism in terms of, or takings

[86:33]

ordinary Buddhist statements and interpreting them as metaphors for meditation. Let's see if I have... At one point Sun Tzu has a text where he comments on the bath. And there is a sutra on bathing. And Shakyamuni says, come on, give us a break. The Buddha is not interested, really, in monk cleaning their physical bodies. This wasn't part of his viewpoint. What he's really talking about is the whole process of spiritual practice and enlightenment. And he goes through this long list, and he talks about the fire that you use to heat the bathwater is the fire of the priest's guts. The water that you bathe in, I'm not going to be able to get all six of these correct, but that's the water of wisdom that clears away defilements.

[87:40]

And it talks about the toothbrushes that you use, it talks about the incense powders, it talks about soap. And Shenzhou describes all of these things as part of referring to different aspects of spiritual practice. The one passage that I do have here that I think is about a votive lamp. And Shenzhou writes, lamps of eternal brightness are votive lamps, and none other than the truly enlightened mind. When one's wisdom is bright and distinct, it's likened to a lamp. For this reason, all those who seek emancipation always consider the body as the lamp's stand, the mind as the lamp's dish, and faith as the lamp's wick. The augmentation of moral discipline is taken as the addition of oil. For wisdom to be bright and penetrating is likened to the lamp's flame or to its brightness. If one constantly burns such a lamp of truly such light, true enlightenment, its illumination will destroy all the darkness of ignorance and stupidity.

[88:48]

And for me, in addition to the metaphoric or metagogic aspect of that, it's that last sentence, if one constantly burns such a lamp of such light, true enlightenment, its illumination will destroy ignorance. That is, there's an emphasis on constant practice. And when I look at the teachings, the writings that are associated with the Northern school, they're very weird. They're very formulaic in different ways. In a certain sense, they're mechanical in ways that render them unappealing, especially in contrast to later Zen writings, which are very, very appealing. But the teaching that they're presenting is basically the Bodhisattva ideal, that one should be constantly in meditation practice and constantly acting on behalf of other living beings. And they describe this in terms of the mirror, that an enlightened person is going to respond to the needs of sentient beings in the same way that a mirror responds to the object placed in front of it.

[90:02]

Now, they do visualize, kind of imagine some kind of idealized mirror that sits high up in the heavens and can reflect the entire world. But beyond that, they also talk in a more kind of down-to-earth way. When you put an image in front of a mirror, when you put an object in front of a mirror, the mirror is going to reflect that object immediately. It's not going to say, hmm, I don't like that object. I'm not going to reflect it. And it doesn't say, when you take the object away, it doesn't say, oh, that was such a nice object. I'd like to keep that. In other words, the mirror responds instantly. It responds in perfect harmony with the needs of the object and the state the needs of the sense of being. It responds without self-consciousness. And it responds without attachment. And that's how of Bodhisattva, or how a Buddhist is supposed to practice, meaning according to the ideas of, like, St.

[91:08]

Dillon and the normal schools. Now, one of the things I'm leading up to here is, what do we do about the description of the Northern school of how they taught a gradual doctrine? It's a typical story, right, in Zen literature. is that Chuncho and his friends taught that you should rub the surface of a mirror and eliminate illusion, eliminate death from the surface of a mirror, in the form of a gradual practice. And I would say first of all that that's not the way that Chuncho and his friends thought of themselves practicing in their best moments. That is, when they write their own best description of their religious, their understanding of the Dharma, they didn't write it that way.

[92:09]

That is to say, they didn't write in that kind of a gradualistic or progressive approach to enlightenment. In fact, that was certainly not what they emphasized. There is an awful lot of variety in these early time materials. In fact, they revel in new expositions, new metaphors, new styles of presenting the Dharma. And it's not hard at all to find treatment and meditation practices that are done in terms of gradual or successive progressive stages. You know, those things are around. And you can find formulations within northern school writings, but Yeah, okay, they use that kind of progression as an explanatory device. But I think that when they're saying what they want to say most clearly, they don't, Yusonjo and his immediate disciples don't talk in that kind of gradualistic way, because at that point in time,

[93:23]

The notion of... well, it doesn't fit the buddha-maker approach to Buddhism in certain ways. It was old-fashioned. And you're not going to find these guys selling themselves in the fanciest society in the world, the most critical Buddhist audience in the world, and saying, oh yeah, progress gradually until you get to be a Buddha. It's not...

[93:55]

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