The Changing Role of the Precepts in Soto Zen Practice

[00:00:00] Speaker A: For more information on Ancient Dragon Zen Gate, please visit our website at www.ancientdragon.org. our teachings are offered to the community through the generosity of our supporters. To make a donation online, please visit our website. [00:00:16] Speaker B: Okay, so now one practice body in the cloud and on the ground synced together and I will pass the mic to Stefan. [00:00:27] Speaker C: Thanks. Hi, good morning, everybody. It's lovely to be here. Well, as. Thank you for the very kind introduction. My name is Stefan Licher. I'm a professor at the University of Chicago Divinity School. I just came here about two years ago and as Hoga CU said, my original specialization is like Japanese Soto Zen or Japanese Zen Buddhism, particularly like the medieval period. I've also kind of worked a little bit on its connection to other Buddhist traditions, particularly the Tendai and the esoteric, the Tantric tradition. So today I have been asked to talk about the precepts, particularly in the Japanese Buddhist tradition, focusing on Soto Zen. But as you'll see, we really have to. In order to understand what's happening with the precepts in Soto Zen, we really have to look a little bit beyond the confines of like the Zen lineage, strictly speaking, and specifically think a little bit about what happened with the Tendai school, like in the kind of 12th, 13th century, and how Zen really grew out of the Tendai school in the Japanese context. I gonna be. I've been instructed that we're gonna talk a little bit around till 11, so we're gonna be droning on for about 35 minutes. I understand there's question and answers afterwards. So if you have any kind of big kind of content questions, please hold them till the end. If there's any kind of really short, quick stuff that you want me to clarify while I talk, please feel free to interrupt. Like if you want me to put down some names or, you know, I'm going too fast or you can't really hear on. Can you all hear me? It's actually a good start. Okay, fantastic. Feel free to button anytime. You don't have to wait for me to say, you know, is there any questions or anything? So talking about the precepts, I think it would be a good idea to just kind of start out with a general idea. What is the role of the precepts in Buddhism? More general. And there is a thinking about precepts, There is a very interesting dichotomy, particularly or very interesting. I wouldn't call it a contradiction, but a tension that you can note, particularly if you come from the Japanese Buddhist tradition, which is that if you look at the Pali Canon, there is a very interesting story told there about the Buddha was kind of getting on in years, and the students, his disciples, all of whom were monks, right? They were renouncers. That was the original audience of the Buddha. Lay people played a certain role, but not a really big one, right? Apart from, you know, giving food to the renouncers. And so the Buddha's disciples were getting a little bit antsy about him shuffling off the mortal coil. And they were like, so once you croak, what's going to happen with us? Right? So they asked him, what have you done to, like, make sure that there's the Dharma, that there's the teaching still around? And one of the things that. One of the phrases that is used most often in Sanskrit and Pali to refer to the Buddha's teaching is Dharma, Vinaya, or Dhammavinaya in Pali, which is like a two part phrase or a two part word. The first word, the Dharma or the Dhamma, I'm sure you're all familiar with, refers to something like the Buddha's teachings, but also the kind of law. The law, sorry, pardon my English. The law that is underlying the Buddha's teachings, right? So that's like what we think of normally when we say the Buddha Dharma, the Buddha's teaching, the Buddha's request. But Dhamma Vinaya also emphasizes this second aspect. And Vinaya in its strict meaning means the monastic discipline, the discipline of the renouncers, right? So the rules that govern the conduct of the followers of the Buddha, as I said in the first place, the monastics, but also in a kind of wider sense, the laity. So the Buddha tells his slightly anxious disciples is like, look, what makes my Sasana, my dispensation, different from the dispensation of the former Buddhas is that I teach the full Dhamma Vinaya. So in the past, there have been Buddhas who only taught the Dharma, who only taught the principles and the kind of content teaching, but they did not teach the Vinaya. So their teaching died out really quickly. And then there were other Buddhas who only taught the rules of conduct. They only taught the Vinaya, but they did not teach the Dharma. So their teachings also died out really quickly. But I actually teach you both. I teach you the Dharma and I teach you the Vinaya. I teach you the law of the teaching, but I also teach you the proper conduct that is coming with that. So my Sasana, my dispensation will last for whatever how long it is, couple of thousand years. They've been waiting for it to disappear for about 1,500 of those. So there is from the beginning a very strong emphasis on the complementarity of rules of conduct and teaching of precepts and Dharma at the same time. Particularly if you come from a Japanese tradition, one thing that you will very, very often hear people say is, like, well, you know, in Japanese Buddhism, the precepts aren't really that emphasized, particularly if you compare it to what's happening, like in what we call today the Theravada tradition, the south and Southeast Asian tradition. So, for example, there is no Vinaya in Japan, strictly speaking. There are no. From the broader Buddhist point of view, there is no monastic ordination because the Vinalaya lineage is broken. It has disappeared. So that seems a contradiction. That seems to be a tension that is right there. So what I will try to do in the course of the next half an hour or so is I will lead you, or I'll try to show you how we ended up with this contradiction and what happened within Japanese Buddhism with the precepts. Focusing in on what happened in Soto Zen with the precepts. All right, so far, does that make sense? So far, kinda like 80%. Fantastic. Okay. So one of the things to bear in mind when we talk about precepts in Buddhism is that there are actually different kinds of precepts, and they have different specific functions. So the two sets that concern us the most are the Vinaya presets, which are the monastic socially kind of embedded precepts, and the Bodhisattva precepts, which I assume everybody knows what the Bodhisattva precepts are, roughly. We're going to go into that a little more in detail in a minute. Okay, so you have these two kinds of sets. So let me start by telling you a little bit about the Vinaya precepts. As I said, in the strictest interpretation, these are the rules for monastics, Depending on how you count them, depending on whether you belong to the female Sangha or the male Sangha, the monastic community, there's something in between 250 and 330. Yeah. Detailing in great and exasperating detail how exactly you are to conduct yourself as a monk or as a nun. However, the Vinaya, broadly speaking, also includes lay people. So in order to join the Buddhist community, there's a two part kind of thing going on. The first is you have to recite the three refuges. I take refuge in the Buddha, in the Dharma and in the Sangha. But you also mostly are expected to take vows which are on the most basic level, the five lay vows that again, I presume you're kind of familiar with. Don't kill, don't lie, no sexual misconduct, don't steal. And actually that's the really interesting one. The don't drink alcohol is not part of the canonical formulations. They smuggled that in afterwards. So a lot of people are really interested in the textual history of the don't booze kind of vows. Right, but we're not going to go into that. So then of course, if you are a very strict lay follower, you can take eight vows. If you are becoming a novice, you take 10 vows. Then there's a special kind of side thing for nuns where they have kind of like an acolyte ship in between being a novice nun and a full noun that's dysfunct at the moment. We don't have to think about that. And then there's, of course, taking the full set of precepts, the 230 or the 250, 300 to 330, depending on your Vinaya lineage, that induces you to become a fully established monastic. So the basic function of these Vinaya vows is that they establish the Sangha, they establish the community, and they establish which role within the community you have by regulating your conduct from the five precepts all the way up to the 230. Sorry. 250. 340. 350. 330 sorry, rules. So they are almost like a legal kind of contract. And these rules are also defined legally. So if you read the commentaries to the Vinaya, for example, let's take the rule about no sexual misconduct, which is tends to be the one everybody's interested in, right? So it's very clearly defined in terms of the object of sexual misconduct, in terms of the intention with which a deed is performed, in terms of the specific circumstances of the deed. So you almost have a checklist you can run down on whether you are guilty or not of transgressing that rule, particularly for a monk, because transgressing it would mean you'll get kicked out of the Sangha. So this is a very legalistic approach that almost works literally like a court of law. Okay. So these establish you as a member of the Sangha in a specific part of the sevenfold division of the original Buddhist Sangha, from lay person up to fully ordained Va. Is that clear so far? Okay, then you have the Bodhisattva precepts. These came a little bit later with the rise of this movement that we now call the Mahayana, although the great vehicle, Although probably originally they didn't really know that they were the Mahayana. Right. That was kind of happening afterwards. But they came up with different sets of vows. The most famous one that we're going to be talking a little bit in a minute are the 10 major and 48 minor precepts of the Indra Net Sutra or the Fa Wanjing, the Bom My in Japan, which interestingly is probably a epic text. It's probably not originally Indian. But also in Indian sources, like in the Yoga Charabhumi, you find like different set of Bodhisattva vows. And these had a profoundly different function from these earlier legalistic Vinaya rules because they did not establish you in a specific social position within the Sangha, within the community. They were open to laypeople as well as to monastics. They could be imparted even by laypeople to other laypeople. And they were defined in a much more diffuse manner that, for example, if we take the same precepts, like same precept about sexual misconduct, as I said, if you look at the Vinaya version of it, it's very clearly defined in terms of like who, when, where, what type thing. If you look at the same precept in terms of the Bodhisattva precepts, it's much more like lustful conduct is the original phrase. Right. But that's not quite as clear as you did that with that person at that point. And we have three witnesses. It's much more internally kind of oriented as a precept. So there is a different quality to these Bodhisattva precepts that defines a different form of, of community. And as I said, mostly. And then specifically once we move over into China, mostly monastics and laypeople were free to take Bodhisattva precepts. That's a very, very important point to keep in mind. Okay, so this is kind of the, the state of the precepts that we had as we move from India into China, in India, exactly how all these precept practices worked. We know how the Vinaya work. We don't really know how the Bodhisattva precepts worked in that manner. But once we start moving into China, things become a bit more, if you want to put it that way, formalized, namely a practice was established over time. And I'm going to skip a couple of hundred years here time wise. Right. So I'm going to skip from about roughly Second, third century, I gonna skip all the way up into the 8th, 9th century here. Basically what happened is that a system was in place where as a layperson, you would mostly take the Bodhisattva vows. You weren't really concerned with like the earlier five or eight sets of vows that you had in the Vinaya. You mostly would take the Bodhisattva vows, specifically the Bodhisattva vows based on the Indra Net Sutra. If you were a monastic, what would happen is you would take both sets of vows. You would take the earlier, the full Vinaya vows, or sometimes you would only take the novice vows actually as well. So you had like both of these sets, but mostly you would take the Vinaya vows and then afterwards, after you were established in monastic, you would take the Bodhisattva. So as a monastic, you had both these sets. So it was a kind of compromise in between. The more legalistic Vinaya defined you as a monk, as a renouncer or a nun, of course, as a Bhikkhu or Bhikhuni, and the kind of more Mahayana oriented Bodhisattva vows. The reason why people started to do that was that in China, this identity as Mahayana, as opposed to like the small vehicle, the Hinayana, became much stronger. So there was a precept practice that tried to preserve the monastic tradition, but it also incorporated the Bodhisattva tradition that was specifically necessary because the Vinaya vows. Because of various complicated doctrinal maneuverings that we don't really have to go into now in detail, the Vinaya vows came to be seen as part of the small vehicle. So if you only took the Vinaya vows, you were not fully established in the Mahayana as a monk or as a nun. You needed both of them. Is that okay so far? Fantastic. There was something special happening with the Zen schools. We're not 100% sure what it is. It comes out in a couple of documents that you find in these famous caves of Dunhuang. But it's not 100% sure. What happened with the Zen schools. Is that from very early on or in the early Zen school, in the so called Northern school, they seemed to have a pretty strong lay orientation because of an emphasis on like meditation at this early point. That got lost then. But what basically happened was that as this split happened into like the northern and the Southern school, the Southern school in specific. Pop quiz question. You all know the Platform Sutra, right? The Sutra of the Sixth Patriarch, the famous text by Huineng, the founding statement of the Zen tradition, if you have heard of it. Have you ever wondered what the platform is? What platform is the patriarch teaching from exactly? It's the ordination platform. There was a movement of the Zen school in China for fundraising purposes to be specifically associated with mass lay ordination ceremonies. So people would gather at a Zen teacher's place and they would receive the Bodhisattva precepts in specific. So there was in the early Zen tradition, a specific relation between the Bodhisattva precepts and the Chan, or Zen school that, however, got lost at a certain point. So by the time we go into, I said we jump this big span of time, by the time we get into like 8th 9th century Zen monks or Chinese cham monks were doing exactly the same stuff as every other monk was doing in China. Actually. They probably didn't even have a separate monastic identity at that point. They were taking the full precepts. They were fully ordained Bhikshu or at least Ramanera novices, and they were taking the Bodhisattva vows. And the vows they were taking were exactly the same 10 major and 48 minor precepts of the Bon Mokyo of the Indra Net Sutra as basically everybody else was taking. So that was the state of precept practice in China around the 8th or 9th century. Does that make sense so far? Fantastic. Now we're going to make the jump over to Japan. What happened in Japan is that at around that time they had received the full precepts from China. They had established exactly the same practice of double ordination in Vinaya and so called small vehicle Hinayana Precepts, Vinaya and Great Vehicle Bodhisattva precepts. They had exactly the same stuff going on that the Chinese had going on. And then a guy popped up who was probably the most significant, although I happen to dislike him quite intensely, but I still have to acknowledge that he was probably the most significant. One of the most significant thinkers in the history of Japanese Buddhism called Saicho. And Saijo really got enarmored with the Lotus Sutra and went on to establish the Tendai or Tiantai tradition in Japan. He brought it from China to Japan. And one of the things that he had, I was telling you in China already there was like a much bigger division between the small and the great vehicles than there had been before. In India, you remember that in Japan that got supercharged because basically the Japanese were thinking, we're so cool. We are like the Japanese, right? We're so cool. We don't need all that Hinayana stuff. We want a pure Mahayana Buddhism. And in order to establish that, what do we have? We already got the teachings, but what we don't have is we are still having these pesky Hinayana precepts, right? So let's get rid. Let's get rid of all the Hinayana precepts and we're going to establish ourselves as pure Mahayana monastics. And how are we going to do that? Well, we're just going to throw away the Vinaya ordination lineage and we're just going to use the Bodhisattva precepts to ordain both lay followers and monastics. That was Saijo's big idea. So there also was all kinds of sectarian kind of, you know, wrangling in the background to that, because the Vinaya ordination at that point was controlled by Saicho's monastic enemies. I wanted to say frenemies, but they probably. They were just straight up enemies. Right. So he didn't really want to be beholden to them. So in order to establish himself on Mount Hiei just outside Kyoto, he needed to have an independent ordination platform, independent way of doing ordinations. And he did that by establishing a pure Bodhisattva monastic lineage. [00:21:09] Speaker B: Is this kind of like branding? [00:21:10] Speaker C: It's a bit branding, yeah. No, it is. I mean, there is. I mean, there's a way. There's a deeper thing here, which is that the Japanese from the beginning have felt uncomfortable with the idea of monasticism. So if you look at like some of the earliest Japanese doctrinal statements, for example, there is a set of commentaries on the Lotus Sutra, the Sri Mala Devi Sutra and the Vimalakirti Sutra that is supposedly has been written by Shotoko Taishi, this Japanese cultural hero. Right. And there is a part of the Lotus Sutra where it says the Bodhisattva goes deep into the mountains to practice meditation. And Shoto Kotaishi is like, that can't be right. Because if you're deep in the mountains, how are you going to benefit the nation? Mind you, I'm being very careful in emphasizing the nation bit here. We're not talking sentient beings, we're talking the nation. In specific, there is a very strong, what you could call nationalist bent to Japanese Buddhism. I just noticed that I'm switched off with the microphone. [00:22:14] Speaker B: You're on the mic with. [00:22:16] Speaker C: I'm on the mic with you. Okay, very good. So otherwise, my kudos to the cloud crowd for sitting like to the silent movie for. Anyway, so there is Branding going on here. There's also a wider kind of, shall we say, this worldly orientation that you see from the beginning, this worldly slash nationalist orientation that you see from the beginning. But, yeah, it's a good way of thinking about it. It's branding. So that is what Sideshow did. He established these Bodhisattva precepts as the sole source of monastic ordination. And that obviously led to all kinds of difficulties, because, as I told you, the Vinaya precepts are pretty clear about how to run a monastery. The Bodhisattva precepts really aren't. There's a lot of weaving in and out of them happening. So that led. But we're not going to touch on that. That led to all kinds of problems with monastic discipline on Mount Hiei, particularly as more and more aristocrats were flooding into the monastery. Right, but we don't have to think about that. What really interests us now is that this new idea of Sideo, that you could do solely Bodhisattva precept ordination had to be justified in some way or the other. And the way it was justified, not by Sideo, but by his disciple Kojo, was he claimed that these new Bodhisattva precepts that he called the One Mind Precepts, the Ishinkai, these had been transmitted by Bodhidharma. As you all know, Bodhidharma is the founding patriarch, or supposedly was the founding patriarch of Chan in China. So we know Saicho claimed to have brought back four lineages from China. Precept lineage, Zen lineage, Tendai lineage, and esoteric Buddhist lineage. Right. So there was a Zen element in Saicho's transmission, and his disciple Kojo latched onto that Zen element and justified the new Bodhisattva precept practice in the Tendai school by saying, this is a Zen thing. This is the Ishinkai of Bodhidharma. So Tendai was transmitting Zen precepts. That's what we ended up with. Is that clear so far? Fantastic. Then the Tendai people came up with all kinds of funky doctrines that we, again, don't really have to go into the detail, but one of the things, under the influence of Esoteric Buddhism, which had its own set of precepts, the Samaya precepts, that we don't have to go into right now, but basically the Tendai tradition came to see precepts as a kind of initiation rather than an ordination into a discipline. So what came to be seen, this goes back to, like, older ideas about also in the Theravada tradition, in the Abhidharma, if you take vows, this intentional act engenders a kind of subtle matter in your body. So the precepts are present physically if you take coordination, right? So the Tendai people built on that, and particularly a guy called Annen, you don't have to remember his name, but they came to see the precepts really as a form of initiation. So once you had the precepts, you couldn't lose them anymore. They were imparted on you as your patrimony from the Buddha. Once you have them, you got them. There's building on a phrase from the Indras Net Sutra that just by receiving the precepts, sentient beings are induced into the station of all Buddhas. So to receive the Buddha's one mind precepts as the expression of its mind imprints you, as it were, with the mind of the Buddha. So you become Buddha instantly by receiving the precepts, and you can no longer transgress them. And they've pushed this pretty far up to the point that they're saying if the precepts are the mind of the Buddha and the Buddha's mind is like space, there is no violating the precepts. So if I happen to kill, rape, burn, or you know, do other horrendous things with you, that has to be an expression of my Buddha mind. So tough luck for you. I'm not making this up. This was the end point of the conversation that they were having. I mean they never actually. Well, they did it, but they never actually went so far as to say, haha, I'm being great Bodhisattva practice towards you. Let me kill you right now. But that was like, there are like, if you look at the Tendai documents and Soto Zen documents, they're saying, because the true keeping, the precept of not killing is to see that there is no killing in emptiness. Therefore, if you have the precept, you are ontologically unable to commit the crime of killing. That became super important for the Zen tradition because what happened a couple of hundred years after Saizhou, people started to travel to China again. And what they did is they were transmitting Zen this time because zen in the 12th, 13th century had become like a distinguishable, distinguishable movement within Chinese Buddhism, right? So there was a guy called Saicho, sorry, not Saicho Esai, the so called founder of the Rinzai tradition. And he was really interested, this is a bit ironic, he was really interested in restoring the Vinaya, the monastic precepts on Mount Hiei, and he found those observed at Zen monasteries. So what he brought back from China was what he called Zen Ritsu, Zen Vinaya practice. So there was this. And he was building on this earlier establishment of the association between Zen and the precepts in the Tendai school. And he had a really interesting student for a brief time. The guy was really young at that point, whom you might know, namely Dogen. So Dogen grew up in this Tendai tradition where the precepts were transmitted as a Zen thing. Now, when Dogen himself later on traveled to China, he came back and he started to spread his teachings in Japan. He spread it as a precept teaching. So the earliest forms of transmission rituals that we have from Dogen are precept initiation ceremonies that are clearly built on the Tendai school practice at the time. Dogen's twist, however, was that, and there is no evidence that this actually is historical fact, Dogen claimed that this is exactly what he had received from Tendon Yojo in China. So there is again an act of branding going here. He was branding his Zen as a superior, more direct Tendai precept initiation ceremony. And this was the beginning of this Soto Zen practice that continues until today to transmit the Bodhisattva precepts. And here we are again with the Dharma Vinaya, where we started, right? To transmit the Dharma lineage and the precept lineage together. S1, does this make sense so far? You look at me doubtfully. You can grill me afterwards. Okay, Just keep that in for now. So what Dogen did was he created a new form of transmission that built on Tendai precept discourse. And he branded that S. That was like early Dogen. This was like after he came back from China and when he was still teaching in Kyoto, before he moved to Echizen. Although we know that he kept this form of transmission up until the end of his life, because we know that his students, Kon Eijo, his main student, received exactly that transmission ritual, and he passed it on to the second generation Tetsugikkai, who then passed it on to his own student, whom you also might have heard of Kesan Jokin. So this was the beginning of the double transmission within Soto Zenith. However, there was a lot of unclarity. How do these two transmissions actually relate to each other? That became like throughout the medieval period, that wasn't quite clear. And every lineage had its own transmission ritual, and every lineage was having its own kind of explanation of how the precepts and the Dharma hang together. What they also picked up on was this mass ordination ceremony things. So what the Soto Zen school was doing was they would have these like big, big ordination meetings where like whole villages would assemble and would receive the Bodhisattva precepts from the Soto teacher with the promise that receiving these teachings would bring liberation. Because you remember from the Tendai school, we still have this idea that to receive the teachings itself is liberation. So they were using that, again, branding as a way to spread Soto Zen. So you will go to one of these things and you will get a Kejimyaku document, like a bloodline document, where your name was written in the lineage of the Buddhas. So imagine that. I mean, that was like powerful, right? You were literally induced into the line, into the family, into the bloodline of the Buddhas, right? And the thing was, you didn't even have to be human. That could be done for gods. So if Soto people wanted to do an exorcism, they gave the precepts. That could be done for dragons, that could be done for snakes, that could be done for holy ghosts, hungry ghosts and holy ghost, I presume. So imparting the precepts was a big point of medieval, pre modern Soto Zen practice. But we still don't quite know when a certain. In the. Once we move again, we move forward a little bit further. Sorry, just delete from the record that we don't quite know. That is the normal state. But that is not what I actually wanted to, to say right now. So fast forward a little bit more into like the 15th, 16th century when the Soto school, I told you they were all different lineages, right? When they had to like come together and establish like what we today know as the Soto School as like one big overarching organization. Because the government, the Japanese government wanted them to do that. So they had to unify the practice of the precepts all throughout the Soto school, which brought of course, the kind of complex question, how do the precepts actually hang together with the Dharma? How does the Zen transmission line, the Mind to Mind transmission line, and the Precept transmission line, how do they hang together? There was a lot of wrangling within the Soto school about that. Among other things, there was a big fight between two super famous 17th century Zen reformers. The one is called Menzan Tsuiho, who was rediscovering the teachings of Dogen at the time, or not rediscovering, but reframing them as a kind of school wide kind of binding orthodoxy. And then there was Another guy called Banjin Totan, who claimed that Zen and the teachings are totally one Zenkai ichi nyo in Japanese. And he kind of won. He won that struggle at the time. So from then onwards, there was this idea really enshrined at the center of Zen orthodoxy that to take the precepts itself was necessary, but also sufficient for liberation. That was the practice that was the important thing. Okay, now what happened is that as we move on again a little bit, at a certain point we come into the Meiji period, Japan is opening up, it's modernizing. So again, you have to find a new way of transmitting the precepts to your specifically your lay followers. Because the laity was kind of getting more and more important, right? There was no longer established government funding, so you had to engage with the laity to ensure the survival of your temple. So as Soto Zen masters started to think about how do we teach Soto Zen to the laity? They hired this guy called Oji Seiran, who was actually a layperson himself, but a well established Meiji Buddhist intellectual, to write them a kind of catechism. And that catechism is known as the Shushogi, the principle of practice and realization, which is a very throughout Japanese Soto Zen, a very well known text that culls from Dogen's work quotations and puts them together under, you know, a heading starting from practice to realization. The interesting thing is that it doesn't talk about zazen once. It doesn't talk about sitting meditation or Shikantaza or whatever once it talks about the precepts. So according to the Shushogi, the Soto Zen practice and realization is receiving the precepts. It was only over the course of the 20th century that Zazen was discovered as the main practice of the Soto school. Until then, the main practice and the main concern were the precepts. So in a sense, when people are telling you stuff like, you know, Japanese Buddhism marginalizes the precepts. That is true if we think about the precepts mainly in terms of the formalized monastic precepts of the Vinaya, which indeed are no longer transmitted in Japan. They tried to re import them during the 19th century, but that went utterly wrong. On the other hand, if we think about the precepts as a more general topic of concern, then all Japanese Buddhist schools are vitally concerned with the precepts, including very much so the Soto Zen tradition because of its heritage that grew out of Tendai ideas. I'm four minutes late, which is like, you know, first caller that's like Nothing I could go on for. So thank you very much for your attention and if you have any questions, please, I'm looking forward to hearing them. Thank you. [00:37:44] Speaker B: Thank you. Well, thank you. I'm going to have to talk to the mic for a second. I'll pass it back to you. But I wanted to just thank Stefan for, you know, taking us through the whole history of Buddhism pretty much and the precepts. And our tea servers are off and this is super interesting, so they have to come back and I think it would be, you know, so tea will be served. So just receive. And also anybody have questions or comments, you know, you've said a lot. And you know, I'm also personally also kind of interested in the fact that like, you know, this pivot from like being church and state or Buddhist and state, that, you know, Buddhism was, you know, politically very connected. And then when that kind of fell apart a bit, it had to try to establish itself with lay practitioners, let's say. You know, I've even been to some other kinds of Zen temples, not Japanese, but other where they did mass ordinations. Like, basically everybody in the audience is like, here you get the precepts, you know, $5 please or whatever it was. So, so I just, I find it all so interesting and good to know there's all humility around, knowing our background too, which I think is really important. So take it away. The mic in the room will be passed around by David, our techno, our wondrous techno and online golden hands or hand waving. I think David will call on people. So. [00:39:27] Speaker C: Yeah. [00:39:30] Speaker D: Well, so first, thank you. [00:39:32] Speaker C: Thank you. [00:39:33] Speaker D: Thank you so much. So I'm thinking about, you know, our Chinese ancestors, like, like the experience of, you know, Wan Song and Dongshan. So do I understand right, that that those practitioners would have been, I mean, I'll use this language would have been bound by the 2 or 300 pre of the Indian style Vinaya. And so that's news to me. I didn't know that. [00:40:04] Speaker C: Well, this is a kind of very interesting question because there is still a lot of uncertainty surrounding pre. Modern Chinese precept practices. Basically there's two possibilities here. Possibility number one was, well, first of all, no Chinese monk was ever really fully living up to the like the kind of, you know, precept practice as they would try to do today in places like Sri Lanka or Thailand. That being said, neither did the Sri Lankan or Thai people at the time because this idea of like, you have to follow the Vinaya to the letter of the law legally, that is itself a modernist move in Southeast Asia. But yes, they most likely would have received either the full ordination, the full Vinaya ordination, or they would have received at least the novice precepts. So they would have been bound in some form or the other by Vinaya practice. Absolutely. There is a bit of a problem. We know that in the Song period, for example, there was quite a lot of like. Thank you so much. There was quite a lot of stuff happening, like, in terms of, like, imparting full precepts earlier, people like. People like Shiyi, for example, the founder of the Tendai tradition, Chantai tradition in China, he's often referred to as the Shramana. Hi. And that's probably because he did not receive the full ordination. So there was also a tradition at a certain point in China that you would only receive the Shramana ordination. But as I said, the exact question of precept practice at the time was complex, and it also changed historically from one period to the next. But long answer short yes. Or your Chinese ancestors would definitely have been part of the formerly established Sangha in one way or the other. Although, sorry, and then I. Not in the same precept, not in the same Vinaya tradition as the ones who are out as the one that is transmitted in Sri Lanka or Thailand today. There were like a couple of different Vinaya schools, so they would have belonged to a different one which is still active in China today. [00:42:28] Speaker B: Like the Dharma Vinaya? [00:42:30] Speaker C: Yeah, like the, like, if you go to, like the Dharma Vinaya. So basically within the Vinaya, you had like, different monastic fraternities who would each transmit a slightly different version of the Vinaya with, like, different number of precepts. So the one that is happening today in Southeast Asia is. Well, today we call it the Theravada Vinaya, although it wasn't known as that at the time because it was the only one around. So it didn't need a special name. Right. Whereas in, like, Northern India, what moved into China was like two different sets of. Of Vinaya, One of the associated with the Dharmaguptika school, one associated with the Mulasar. So the Precept, the Vinaya lineage that was like, passed down in China was this Dharmagupta Kavinaya that was different from the Theravada and on slight details, but basically all part of the same Vinaya tradition. Yes. [00:43:27] Speaker E: Stefan, thank you for coming. This is a great topic. [00:43:30] Speaker C: This. [00:43:31] Speaker E: You know, you may know from Hougetsu that there's a class on the precepts going on right now here. But also it's timely because there is a book of dharma talks by Suzuki Shunryu, the founder of San Francisco Zen Center. Recently, about a half to two thirds of the dharma talks are about the precepts. And the thrust of Suzuki Roshi's approach to the precepts is to say if you act from Buddha mind, from big mind, open mind, we don't worry about following precepts literally as rules follow one by one by one by one. And that's sometimes referred to as ignore the precepts, but act from this Buddha mind, Buddha heart, and in doing so, you will in fact comply with the precepts or yeah, we'll say comply with the precepts. And my understanding is that there's some history of that. There's some precedent for that in Tendai Buddhism too. So I'm interested. Is that true? And secondly, to what extent does this approach to the precept have official status within Sotozen in Japan? [00:44:43] Speaker C: Well, that is like two, two different sets of questions. First of all, I would say about Shunya Suzuki's as far as I haven't read that specific set of dharma talks yet, but as far as I'm aware of his general teachings, I would say that whatever Shunryu Suzuki was expressing was fairly standard stuff for a Japanese Soto monk of his learning and his standing at the time. So I don't think he would have been seen as specifically outstanding within his context. As far as whether what's happening in the Soto school today, the official stance is still Zenkai ichinyo, the unity of Zen and the precepts. So to receive the precepts would be seen as liberatory. That being said, and I think this also goes for the Tendai school that I'm going to elaborate on in a minute. Right. So there was always a very, or there was a tradition of, shall we say, transgressive rhetoric surrounding some of these teachings. It would, however, also be countermanded by or balanced, I don't know. However, you want to put that by an emphasis on acceptable conduct within a very conservative, very stratified Confucian society. So what you would find is a mind boggling forward, simultaneous backflip type argument, which is basically, yes, if you act from big mind, you do not need to keep the precepts, but big mind keeps the precepts. So you do keep the precepts, at least to the point that you don't go around slaughtering people. This very transgressive, if you want to put it that way, rhetoric, you can of course find in the Tendai school, and you find it in the Soto school. So for example, there is a. And this kind of, I think, gives you a pretty good idea about how this stuff was argued in practice, right? So there is a. In the Soto tradition, you have a tradition of like secret oral transmissions that are recorded in like various documents, some mostly called like kirigami or Monsan or this kind of stuff, right? And there's a really fascinating document of one of those where it says, if you have Buddha mind, right? If you're a warrior, Buddha mind manifests by you going to war, fighting with. And I think I get the quote about, right, like fighting with swords and staffs is the way of the warrior Buddha mind type thing. If you're a farmer, you express Buddha mind by, you know, tending to your farm. If you're a merchant, you express Buddha mind by fulfilling your, you know, by serving your. Your house, your merchant house. So the very transgressive rhetoric surrounding the precepts very often resulted in a very conservative form of practice in the Tendai tradition. In specific, a lot of this stuff would be passed on as part of like oral initiations. So people would not necessarily. So this would not necessarily have been like a super widely propagated form of teaching, like the, the real kind of up there stuff. What we do know is that specifically, as I mentioned earlier, the form of aristocrats start, or the influx of aristocrats starts, become higher into the Tendai clergy. From like the, the late classical to the early medieval period, there is a general deterioration of monastic discipline going on. There's also attempts to restore monastic discipline throughout the period. So there in these. And these aristocrats would be the ones that control the oral initiation teachings. So there is a lot of stuff that if you are properly initiated or if you have received the proper set of teachings, there is no need to keep the precepts literally. But again, that would be confined within the overall general social expectations of acting like a proper aristocrat. To give you one example of this, there is. This also goes together with like esoteric Buddhist stuff. So there is a whole thing that, you know, if you and this actually interestingly plays into Shinran, because Shinran, a lot of people don't know that, right? He threw away the precepts, right? But he also had a dream where the Bodhisattva Avalokiteswara appeared to him and told him, it's like, I gonna manifest for you as a woman, and if you break the precepts with me, there will not be any Transgression. And what this actually builds on certain Tendai practices where they would dress up the novice as the Bodhisattva Avalokiteshvara. And so there was a lot of like, bit like, you know, other forms of Tantra sometimes, although not ideologically connected, there was a lot of like transgressive rhetoric. Up to an extent, transgressive practices happening. They were however, always hedged in within a very specific social framework. And they were also stratified by class. Right. So if you were a farmer and you went around saying, I can kill samurai because I have Buddha mind, that probably didn't fly very well. Right. Does that answer your question? [00:50:20] Speaker E: I think so, yeah. Thank you. [00:50:21] Speaker C: Thank you. [00:50:22] Speaker B: Brian. Behind, I think. Brian, online. [00:50:25] Speaker C: Brian, online. [00:50:29] Speaker B: Brian, if you could unmute. It's trying to. [00:50:32] Speaker F: Here we go. Now you can hear me probably, right. I'm curious about something you mentioned regarding the initiative, initiat use of them in an initiation. When they are imparted, they are an ongoing influence. This is my words, with a life of its own. You become a child of Buddha and you're included in the bloodline. Can you say a little more about that sort of the presence of the precepts as an influence having received. [00:51:01] Speaker C: Sorry, can you say that again? I only heard about half of the question. I'm very, very sorry, Brian. [00:51:07] Speaker D: You might not have heard. [00:51:09] Speaker F: Yeah, I'm sorry, I may have misunderstood you, but I wanted to get some clarification. It seemed when you were talking about receiving the precepts as an initiation, there is a kind of ongoing influence, a presence of the precepts themselves. And I wonder if you could say a little bit more about that. [00:51:27] Speaker C: Sure. So basically, that is, again, this is like a super interesting question, so I'm going to give you the quick rundown on it also because to be entirely honest, I probably am not fully conversant with all the doctrinal details myself. Oh no, scrap the probably. I'm definitely not fully conversant with all the doctrinal details themselves. Basically what happened was that if you start, if you look at the Abhidharma, which is like the first kind of scholastic elaboration of the Buddhist teachings, Right. The act of speaking, of making a vow, any kind of vow, was that it generated a specific kind of substance called avidnyapti rupa, a non discernible or non conceptualizable, subtle kind of unknowable kind of non discernible. Discernible. Discernible is probably good. A non discernible kind of substance in your Body. Don't ask me where this idea came from, but they had it. So the precepts were a kind of physical presence in your body that also went for any kind of vow, including, for example, the Vinaya precept. Right? So that's why you could literally hand them back. So if you became a. If you left the Sangha, you had to hand back your precepts because that would remove that substance and you would no longer be karmically liable for a violation of the Vinaya precepts. If you just wander off without doing that, you would still formally be bound by the precepts, Right. If you are like a fully monastic or fully ordained monastic. So this was the original idea, as I said, I'm not sure where exactly that idea comes from, but it definitely was there. And it's definitely like in the Tibetan tradition and in the South Asian tradition, Southeast Asian tradition, that's still there as an idea. What happened as things moved over to China is that people were as confused about this idea as I tend to be, and it didn't really make a lot of sense. So they started to think about questions like, how are the precepts imprinted in my mind or in my body? And they kind of connected that to this idea from the mind only teachings that you receive certain karmic seeds that are, like, you know, planted in your body through that of. In your body, mind through that action, Right? So what happened then? So there was this idea that the precepts were, in some form or the other, either a karmic or even a kind of subtle physical presence in you. And then things moved over into Japan, and they got even one layer more complicated because I mentioned this guy Anan, who's known as the systematizer of the Tendai teachings in Japan, and he was really into Esoteric Buddhism. And Esoteric Buddhism, as we said, has its own set of precepts known as the Samaya precepts, that you would get during esoteric initiation ceremonies. And these initiation ceremonies would transform you ritually, but also literally into a Tantric deity. So if you go to receive a Tantric initiation, and you can all do that, if you want to go to Japan on Mount Koya, for example, they have them a couple of times a year, and you go in and you get decked out with a crown, you receive the vajra, the vajra scepter of the Mandalike sovereign. So you become turned into a Tantric deity. And that is part of that is taking these Samaya vows, right? So Anand took this model and applied it to the Bodhisattva precepts. So the Bodhisattva precepts were no longer an ordination, not even like something that imprinted you with something, but something that transformed you on the level of your very being. And he came up with this idea of what he calls the Kaitai, the precept essence, which means that underlying the kind of outer form of the precepts, underlying like they're spoken form or underlying your intention, there is a kind of essence that is itself identical with bodhicitta, that is identical with the mind of awakening. So by receiving the precepts, you receive or you express, right? That's always the problem because you have bodhicitta already as part of your own mind, right? So in a sense, the bodhicitta of the precepts, the Kaitai and the Bodhicitta, that's already in your mind, they kind of start to interlock. And that remains because it's like a transformative experience on your, on your very being, on your, on the very karmic kind of stream of whatever it is you are, it remains present throughout your life, regardless of the question, at least in some interpretations. Again, as you can imagine, there's like huge fights about all of this. But I just going to give you the quick rundown that remains present and efficient throughout your life after having, and actually beyond your life after having received the, the Bodhisattva precept. So one of the things, one of the differences, and this is one of the things why, when they tried to get the, the Buddhist precept, the Vinaya precepts back in the 19th century from Sri Lanka, that's one of the reasons why it didn't work. Because the idea was that the Bodhisattva precepts, because they affect you on the level of your being, they persist throughout lifetimes. The Vinaya precepts, because they only engender this subtle matter, the avid nyabti rupa, they actually end when you die in this life. So there is kind of a question of how deep this imprint goes. But they share the idea that when you take a vow, it's not something that only happens in your head. It's not some, oh, well, everything happens in your head, right? It's mind only. But I mean, it doesn't happen in your head in the way we kind of. You know what I mean? Right. So. So yes, you have understood me perfectly correctly. There is an ongoing influence that comes from the sheer force of taking the priesthood That's. Thank you very much. Yes, thank you. Could you say anything about the process today here? When people receive the Precepts, they receive the 16 bodhisattva precepts from Dogen. Drive from Dogen. [00:58:32] Speaker G: How did we get from the 48. [00:58:35] Speaker C: Brahman net precepts to 16? Do you have something you could say about that? Yeah, and it's very short and to the point, which is that we don't really know, basically. However, we can, as you can imagine, we don't know, but we can guess, because otherwise we would be out of a job. What we can guess at is that. So as you point out, in Sotozen, still today, they use the 16 precepts. And one of the interesting things about the 16 precepts is that the refugees are. Count the refuges. Sorry, not the refugee. The refuges, like take refuge, Buddha, Dhamma, Sangha, are counted as part of the Precepts. Then you have the three Pure Precepts, do all good, don't do evil, keep the one pure, or however you want to translate that. And then you have the 10 bodhisattva precepts, the major bodhisattva precepts from the FA1 Jing from the Indras Net Sutra. Right. So that's the set that Dogen did not know, or we can assume with a very high degree of certainty that that was not a set known in China. We do know, however, that other Buddhist traditions that also come out of the Tendai precept lineage, for example, the Jodo tradition, the Pure Land tradition, not the true Pure Land one, so not the one that's like big today, but the Jodo one, they use similar sets of precepts. And we know that within, there was like a whole faction within the Tendai section called the Precept initiation faction, the Kai Kanjo. The Pre. Yeah, it means Kanjo literally means pouring water on your head. Right. And Kai is the precept. So they were using the Precept similar to the way they came to be used in Sotozen as a specific initiatory practice. So there's a specific ritual that you go for. Now, that ritual that they use is not the same as the one Dogen used. However, they also have a tradition of abbreviated precepts. And although they don't count them as 16, they do use the set of Refuges, Free pure precepts, and 10 major precepts of the Fabanji. So most likely putting all of this together, but as I said, there's no smoking gun. Most likely, what happened is that Dogen either received from Mjozen or constructed based on his knowledge of Tendai precept initiations, this set of 16 precepts, and used that to transmit his dharma. That's the most likely explanation. The problem why I'm saying the obvious kind of hypothesis would be that he got it from Josan, he got it from his teacher who was also a student of Eisai. So there would be a kind of line that's running through here. There's two problems with that hypothesis. First, there's no evidence that Esai himself used precept initiations. The second problem is, although Dogen talks up Miozen a lot, there is no independent evidence to show that Nyozen actually was a particularly high ranking or important student of Eisai. He's omitted from like all the official lists. We have no independent confirmation of Miozen apart from Dogen. So if he were a student, that's now the counter argument I'm giving. If he were a student who is important enough to receive a high level precept initiation, he would be mentioned somewhere as an important student of Eisai. So we simply don't know. Ultimately we can conjecture that it's probably related with Tendai precept rituals, but ultimately we simply do not know where Dogen got that tradition from. [01:02:42] Speaker D: There's a question in chat from Enoshi who asks whether you have any short thoughts for us on self affirming Buddhists, those that didn't necessarily go through group precepts or through some formal platform. [01:02:59] Speaker C: You're forcing me here to take off my scholar's hat and put on some other hat. And I'm not going to do that. What I can tell you is that there are traditions that you can self ordain with the Bodhisattva precepts. So you can take them on your own in front of a Buddha image. And there is actually a ha ha. No, it's actually not quite. It's actually not quite as super easy as you think. So there is like this idea that. And there was like established already in China a practice about this where there's a guy, I'm. Anyway I can give you the reference afterwards where you can basically go on a vision quest so you can go and perform for example prostrations or various forms of austerities. That's where the Haha stops in front of a Buddha image and you would receive a sign kind of a visionary. Like literally a visionary sign like Buddhas or Bodhisattvas would appear to you, and they would confirm that you are now self initiated into the precepts. That has always been a life possibility throughout the East Asian Buddhist tradition. There has always been a lot of arguments around that for the simple reason that, as I said, imparting the precepts very often was a fundraising matter. So from an institutional point of view, as a Buddhist monk, you weren't particularly interested in getting people to self ordain. [01:04:36] Speaker B: Thanks, David. [01:04:39] Speaker A: Thank you, Stefan. So I wanted to go back to Zazen a little bit. Through this expansion and contraction of taking precepts across time, is it understood that Zazen is playing some kind of role, whether in the background or more in the forefront among the people of the community that are interconnected for this broad taking of precepts to actually work with the essence you're talking about? [01:05:11] Speaker C: That is a very, very good question. And that is, as I said, one of these, or as I was trying to say, what happened in the Tokugawa period. So roughly 17th century, right. There was like a Menzan, for example, would have argued exactly that. And he actually did come up with a meditation practice for lay people, which is what we call Shikantasa today. And it was that, that Sawaki Kururoshi, the kind of big reformer of Soto zen in the 1950s, that's what he instituted. Like, you know, he took what menzang kind of had done and kind of started to promote that at Komazawa University, the Soto sectarian University in Tokyo, he started to promote that for the medieval period. That is a really kind of complex question, because it hinges on the question, did they meditate? And we simply don't know. It's the natural assumption that they did. However, we know that, at least at the very beginning, Zen was not associated specifically with meditation practices in Japan. So for example, any who's like an early Rinzai teacher, also known as Bennen, often you hear it as one thing, any Benen. But anyway, he never mentions meditation at all. And like one of his successors, Muju says that it was actually Dogen who was the first to institute meditation practice as a communal practice practice in Japan. So problem is later on, right? So Dogen wrote on meditation, Eijo wrote on meditation in the Kojo Komyo Samaegi. But the problem is Eijo's writing on meditation are pretty heavily tendai flavored. So he uses like tendai, original, whatever was original Awakening teachings at that point. He uses that kind of terminology. Right. Then of course, you have Kazan who writes the Fukanzazengi. Sorry, the zazen youjinki, like the big manual on how to do meditation practice. And then you have daiyu in the generation after, two generations after, and that's it. After that, if they meditate. They did meditate. We know that because meditation is mentioned in some kirigami documents, but as a secret initiation and as a return to the womb. So, for example, your kesar is the placenta, and as you kind of wear that, you return to the womb, and you're reborn from the womb through meditation practice. How that translated into a form of practice in which a wider community would engage, we simply don't know. Now, there is in. If you look at, like, monastic regulations at Shingi, at least at training temples, there was a time reserved for meditation practice. What it is they did during that time, we simply don't know because there's simply no documents remaining. We know that once the Tokugawa period, with people like Menzan, there is again a new impetus to kind of, you know, either, however, you're cynical. It depends on how cynical you want to be about this stuff, right? To either invent a practice of meditation or to, like, revive a practice of meditation. We don't know because we have this kind of gap in between where, as a scholar, I have to say, I simply don't have any textual evidence to tell you what happened there. There is, of course, a kind of idea that a Zen master is uniquely qualified in order to pass on the precepts. As far as I'm aware of, that is nowhere specifically linked to his meditation practice. It's mostly linked to his insight. However, he. Again, maybe, if I may close. If I may, you know, dial back my cynicism a couple of notches here, basically. It's not really easy to make kind of like, general judgments here that probably were. We know, for example, that Soto monks were going into the mountains and doing forms of ascetic practices in the mountains. We know that people were meditating because they were always, in all schools of Buddhism, people trying to revive various forms of practice, including meditation practice. So it's probably there were people who were meditating, and there probably also was a mass majority of Sutton monks who never were meditating, which basically is a long way, very roundabout way of saying it's exactly the same as it's today. [01:10:08] Speaker B: Thank you. [01:10:08] Speaker C: Does that make sense? [01:10:09] Speaker A: It does make sense. Thank you so much. [01:10:12] Speaker C: Yes, sir. [01:10:13] Speaker G: So about Sazen and Soto Zen shushogi you mentioned. And that was around the beginning of the 20th century. [01:10:23] Speaker C: Yeah. Late 19s. Yes. Yeah. [01:10:25] Speaker G: And that specifically, Shhoggi does Not mention meditation. But I think there was. Well, I. I believe there was meditation going on throughout. [01:10:38] Speaker C: Absolutely. [01:10:39] Speaker G: And more or less. And. And then, you know, Menzon talked about. About zazen after Shou Shogi, you know, Sawaki Kotoroshi popularized it, as you say, in the mid 20th century. So there's a little period where the Shhoggi period where it's just not there. But anyway, I think meditation was part of the practice throughout. Whether how significant it was, we don't know. [01:11:12] Speaker C: I think that is a very prudent way of putting it. As I said, in my more cynical moments, I'm like, well, you know, we just don't know. In my less cynical moments, I'm like, well, you know, it's probably all right to go with our gut instinct to assume that some form or the other was happening. What happens? We do know. I mean, if you give me this opening, if you allow me to just run through the door here. Sure. If you do know a little bit more, that was happening in the 19th century, at the late 19th century, because there was a zazen boom happening. So zazen became a practice that was promoted for lay practitioners in all schools of Buddhism. Like, for example, the Shingon school started to, like, popularize its practice of, like, visualizing the tantric syllables, the syllable r. And specifically, the Zen schools started to open up, although that was a matter of controversy, particularly in the Rinzai school. Right. They opened up meditation practice, but also studying koan to lay people. So all of a sudden, as a layperson, you could go to a Zen master and you could do that if you were like, you know, a daimyo or a shogun before. But if you were a farmer and you were interested in koan, that wasn't happening. Right. Although, I mean, actually, now that I say it, in the late Tokugawa period or in the Tokugawa period, we do have evidence that Zen people sold their koan instruction. Like you could buy your koan record, but putting that to one side. So as a more kind of generally accessible discipline, that definitely happened from the Meiji period onward. And as I said, there was a zazen boom, not only for Zen, but also for what we would today call like a form of mindfulness based stress reduction. So they had like, all kinds of, like, secular forms of meditation for mental health, but also, I mean, they didn't call it mental health, obviously, but also to turn themselves into good subjects of the empire. So there was an idea that you could perform meditation as mental hygiene to become a modern Japanese person. Right. There were also a couple of pretty funky ideas surrounding that. Like, there were. You might have heard of hakuin. So Hakuin had this whole thing about like, as a practice, complimenting koan stuff of kind of qi meditation in order to cure sicknesses. That has a long tradition in the Buddhist tradition. So he has like this practice where you like, imagine key like butter melting on your head and then it kind of covers your whole body and it's associated with various breath exercises. And in the. In the late 19th century, there was a big boom of this kind of stuff. Like the most famous or notorious, depending again on your level of point of view, was a guy called Hara Tanzan who assumed that zazen literally was a brain state. So enlightenment was a nervous fluid that was produced in the brain. Delusion was a nervous fluid that was produced around your hip and like, your. This area. And as you know, they rose and they mixed. And the idea was like, to cut it off, like meditation samadhi. He literally link it to like a medical operation where you cut this flow. So these kind of ideas became really big during the Meiji period. Not as funky. Not all of them were as funky as that. But I think I, like, I would agree with you if we're saying that we definitely see a spread of meditation practices among like, a wider variety of audiences from that period onward. And then of course, that kind of carries through to what Sawaki Koro was. Was then doing. So I don't want to be like the. I don't want to be as, you know, nasty as to say, no, it is all made up. No, because we simply. The point is we simply don't know. But it is, I would assume, not unnatural, or I would say it's not unnatural to assume that some kind of that stuff was happening. And if you want to have an analogy to that. So you realize about the droning on bit. Right? That's why it's good to give me cutoff points. So, for example, there was a lot of time, like, there's a scholar called Robert Scharf who would make that point very strongly that there was no form of awakening practice or meditation practice in any Buddhist tradition prior to the modern period. And he kind of had to eat his own manuscript a while ago because he was saying, oh, nothing of that stuff happened in like, the Theravada before the Vipassana revival of like, the late 19th century. And then all of a sudden people started to discover all these, like, meditation texts from, like, you know, kind of like 8 17th, 16th century kind of stuff. However, these meditation texts were a pretty funky form of meditation involving all kinds of visualizations, recitations, whatever, that had nothing to do with what we call vipassana today, although they use the same term, samata vipassana. So, as I said, I'm wearing my scholar hat. So whatever I can tell you is preliminary, and I can base it on some combination of educated guess and, you know, whatever we still have on paper. [01:16:48] Speaker G: But if I may, the lack of documents about Zazen does not mean that there was not zazen being taught. [01:16:58] Speaker C: Exactly. [01:16:59] Speaker G: And being displayed and demonstrated by teachers and students and so forth. [01:17:05] Speaker C: Exactly. It doesn't. It does not show the opposite either. [01:17:08] Speaker G: Right. [01:17:09] Speaker C: So that's why I'm saying I'm wearing my scholar's hat here. I can give you what I can see in my sources, but I would feel loath to speculate too far beyond that. Apart from, as I said, saying that, to me, the assumption that they were doing meditation in some form or the other does not appear to be outrageous. [01:17:37] Speaker B: Okay, well, this looks like about time to wrap this up. It's wonderful. I want to thank Artenzo and Servers for providing us with sustenance to allow Stefan to his words to flow into our consciousness. So thank you very much. [01:17:59] Speaker C: Thank you all. Thank you for wonderful questions and deep. [01:18:04] Speaker B: And broad offering to us. And I think what will happen now is we will do the bodhisattva vows and then come back and have announcements so, you know, be at ease. But our intention equally extend to every being in place. With the true merit of Buddha's way, we vow to free the living. Chance are irresistible. We vow to cut through them. [01:19:46] Speaker E: Dab.