Good morning, everyone. I feel like my life is complete because I got to be at the full moon ceremony this morning. You online people, you can hear me okay? Good deal. Thank you, everyone, for being here. Thank you, Abbott, Linda, and Greg Roche for inviting me to be with you today. And, yeah, it's wonderful to be here. I feel like I was just here. And I was. Thank you. So I almost feel like we're family now.

[01:02]

So my name is Dana and I live in Santa Cruz and I zoomed up here this morning to be with you and I'll zoom home fairly quickly afterwards. But it's really my pleasure to have a chance to be with you and to talk about Dharma things. So, you know, it's been a project of mine since I was ordained and invited to give talks that I wanted to always think about the world in which we live in relation to Dharma and to have this kind of synergistic back and forth So that I ask of the Dharma and the lineage and the legacy of Soto Zen to help me think about the world. And in return, the opposite as well.

[02:09]

Always this kind of back and forth between what is and the lineage and teachings of the Buddha. So not everybody likes this, you know. I mean, I think sometimes we think, The Dharma is this pure thing, quite apart from our ordinary life. But for me, it's always this kind of interrogative process. So forgive me. If that's not your shtick, you'll only have to listen to me for 25 minutes. So I'm going to speak this morning about wood and about lineage. And it's a little bit of an odd talk. Even in my kind of orbit of thoughts and ideas, it's a little bit of an odd talk. But bear with me. I think there's some interesting things that I want to share with you this morning.

[03:11]

In a way, really what I'm going to talk about is kind of the narrative culture that we live in and how we talk about lineage. in Soto Zen. And I will also alert you to what I think are some incoming changes in discussions among Asian Studies scholars about lineage. But first I'd like to start by remembering this young man named Jason Arday, Professor Jason Arday. Some of you have maybe heard of Professor Arday. He's been in the news lately. There's a lot of controversy surrounding Professor Arday. Professor Arday was a sociology of education professor at Cambridge, University of Cambridge in the UK. He worked at a number of places prior to his appointment at Cambridge. And, you know, Cambridge, of course, it's sort of like, what, it's the UK equivalent of Yale or Harvard or

[04:23]

maybe Princeton or Penn. So his appointment to this extremely prestigious university when he was 37, at the age of 37. Honestly, it's not that unusual to be appointed at the age of 37. That's actually fairly common in the social sciences. It takes that long to get a PhD and blah, blah. Anyway, he taught at Cambridge from 2023 until this year. He resigned just recently, August 5th, amid charges of plagiarism. And he was found dead of apparently a suicide a week or so ago, August 14th. And he was, at his hiring, heralded as a very promising young scholar, an accomplished faculty member, and almost all of the accolades about him never failed to mention that he was neurodivergent and that he was a black man.

[05:34]

Only the sixth or seventh, maybe, black man who was a senior lecturer. It's a somewhat different system in the UK, a senior lecturer at the university. And just to give you some perspective about this, there are somewhere between 5,000 and 6,000 professors or senior lecturers that make up the faculty at Cambridge. Professor Arday was accused of plagiarism by a right-wing journalist, or allegedly right-wing journalist. And apparently during the back and forth, which has been going on for a couple months, my understanding is that there were some exaggerations, improper citations, misattributions, and so on in Professor Arday's work. Nonetheless, the university found itself under pressure from both the media and kind of public popular outcry.

[06:38]

And the university notified Professor Arday that they were opening an investigation and so on. And I think on the day that they notified him there was going to be an investigation, he resigned, and he committed suicide, apparently, about a week later. So probably most of you have had some experience in higher education, or if you haven't, then you know somebody who has. And as you probably know, plagiarism is a very serious offense. If a student is caught plagiarizing, I mean, Lord help us with AI right now, but if a student is caught plagiarizing, say, on a term paper or assignment, depending on the faculty member, it can be a warning. It could be an F for the assignment. It can be an F for the course.

[07:40]

And in really extreme cases, it can be expulsion from the university. But as I say, with AI these days and kind of the amount of so-called collaborative work that is going on, I think it's... I've never really heard of an expulsion, although I'm... Actually, that's not true. I have. But it has to be sort of an extreme case and probably at the graduate level. So bear with me before I start talking about wood and lineage. I wanted to just mention... for you two cases of plagiarism that I'm unfortunately very familiar with. By the way, for those of you who don't know, I was a professor at UC Santa Cruz in the social sciences for a long time. A really long time. People say, do you miss it? I go, no. Not really. But I wanted to mention these two cases of plagiarism that I know of.

[08:44]

And these are very famous people. I'm not going to name them because it adds to kind of the prurient gossip type thing. But I just want to tell you about them because I think they give us sort of an interesting contrast to Professor Arday. So the first faculty member that I want to tell you about, his plagiarism case... He has a book that's published by the University of California. I was for many, many years an editor of a special series at UC Press. It was at kind of one time kind of a hot series to be in, and so academics who were very kind of hybrid and did a lot of mixed, you know, history, sociology, cultural studies wanted to be part of this series. Anyway, in each of the five editors, we would divvy up the work according to our own specialization. So it was my job to review this one manuscript.

[09:46]

It's about 400 pages. And I recognized immediately maybe half a dozen instances of plagiarism. And I knew it because it was my alley, my academic alley. And when you're... kind of neurotic. I might even be a little kind of on the spectrum here. I recognized the sentences. And part of it had to do with the fact that I loved the book that this young author was plagiarizing from. And I taught it. And when you teach something, you get to know it really well. Anyway, so reviewers, your job is to write comments on the manuscript, right? So you imagine a young PhD with their dissertation or a new manuscript. And so I wrote, you know, you need to change this and this because this is so-and-so's work. Or you need to cite it. Just put in a footnote on it.

[10:47]

That's all it takes, you know. So I submitted my comments and went back to the author. Six months later, the revisions come back. And I noticed that young author ignored my comments completely. So I said, you know, this is still plagiarism. You need to fix this. And I said to the press, not my problem, but he's been warned. This is, you know, we're on legal ground now. And the press said, okay, we'll let it go. And it was published. And then six months, I don't know, a year after the book is published, it's nominated for a big award in history. And the guy from whom the young author plagiarized calls up UC Press and says, what? This is my work, right? It's a small field, you know, maybe like 100 people who are really knowledgeable about this one thing.

[11:50]

And so the press calls me and says, you know, will you talk to the author? What are we going to do? I go, you know, not my problem. The guy was warned. And I can only say that that's a certain amount of... either conceit or hubris or ignorance that made this young author feel like he couldn't, that he didn't need to pay attention to these details. So, what happened? Nah, nothing happened. The book was awarded the award. I think somewhere there was an apology. The original author or the... I don't know how to call it in a certain way, but the author from whom the young author plagiarized called me up and said, Dana, what the heck? This is plagiarism. I go, I know. I know. And he said, I'm going to sue. And I said, you could.

[12:53]

You could, reasonably, because he was warned. But I'm not really quite sure. These are very hard cases to prove. Very hard cases. So, and I, you know, it wasn't my job to do this, but I mollified the original author from whom the young man plagiarized. And I said, you know, your work is brilliant. I've loved it for years, which is why I recognized it. I don't know that he was mollified, but he didn't sue. The award went on. Young author is famous. I don't know. Nothing, right? Okay. Forgive me while I tell you a second case. The second case involves a very, very senior professor at UC Berkeley. And it happens that in academia we review each other's work. So senior people will review junior people for tenure and promotions and so on.

[13:57]

And this one junior person was going up for a review and she had this like brilliant kind of, I want to say, trope or kind of way to describe a historical moment. And I think she took it, she borrowed it from a French author. And anyway, senior professor at Berkeley goes, wow, that is really cool. He wrote a whole book using that same trope. And when he was being reviewed, right before the book came out, the junior author said, wait a minute, that's my stuff. and big deal, you know, big investigation by the University of California, Berkeley. They have, like, misconduct stuff that goes on, and... What do you think happened? Yeah? Nah, nothing. Maybe there was an apology somewhere.

[14:57]

I don't know. I haven't seen it. But there, you know, it was a subject of, like, special conference meetings, and it was all the... talk in this particular field. So long story short, I just wanted to mention these two cases because I think they provide a contrast to Professor Arde's case and the ways in which we think about and do something about what we consider to be infractions. You know, in a way, I think about Professor Arde as not having sufficiently paid attention to the lineage or paid attention to the field. Because when we, as academics, do work, you know, no pressure, but you have to have a national reputation to get tenure. No pressure, you have to have an international reputation to become a full professor. And, you know, the job is that you make some original contribution to the field, and that can be defined so many different ways.

[16:04]

So, you know, in this kind of world of academia and kind of the culture of the university, I think, I mean, you can see that we apply the rules and kind of expectations and norms often in a very selective way. So when I think about Professor Arday, and again, you know, I don't, I'm using, him as an entree to talk about things related to Zen, which I'll get to in just a moment here. But, you know, my colleagues and I, when we talk about what has happened to Professor Arday, they don't use this terminology, but I do. I say, you know, this is ancient twisted karma. This is the coming together of a number of conditions and causes in which this young man was caught. And I think that's a way for me to think about kind of the long arc and trajectory of racial politics, the university, intellectual work, and so on.

[17:22]

And my colleagues who are knowledgeable about this, or who have known Professor Arde, say, use words like tragic. And by that, I think they're also talking about this ancient twisted karma. I noticed by the way that at Berkeley Zen Center you use ancient tangled karma and I hope somebody will enlighten me about the kind of linguistic distinctions there. So I want to talk with you a little bit about kind of Zen and our culture and the way we talk about our lineage. These are things that are kind of in progress. I don't know if you would call them work or just readings that I've been doing. And the first thing, I'm going to talk about two things. One, I'm going to talk about Paulonia wood or the princess tree, also known as the empress tree, of which apparently if there are kind of gardener, landscaper people, there are some

[18:36]

princess trees somewhere around the Bay Area. And I'm just going to do a little kind of work up, run up to this. You know, this morning in the full moon ceremony, just when we started the first kind of room chat, I just, you know, it's like, I'm so moved by the practices and the collective voice that we have in cherishing and honoring both the things and the people that make up Zen practice. So back in 2008, when about in the run-up to my priest ordination, my root teacher, Catherine Thanis, called me into the doksan room and she says, have you thought about the bowls? And I said, what about the bowls? And she said, what kind of priest bowls do you want?

[19:38]

And I said, you know, I don't really have a lot of money, and so I think the mango wood bowls seem fine to me. We talk about other things. I bow. I'm about to leave. She goes, okay, well, it's settled. You'll get the ones from Japan. And I don't know if you know the difference between the mango wood bowls and the lacquer wood bowls. Oh, it's a huge money difference. But you know, many of you have sat sashin in here, so you see the priest pull out their shiny blacker bowls. That's what you gave Seifu, right? So I explained this to my sister who says, maybe she didn't hear you, she's older. And I say, oh no, she absolutely heard me. If this is her way of saying, you will have the traditional bowls. And she ordered them either from San Francisco Zen Center or maybe directly from Matsumoto-ya in Kyoto.

[20:49]

I don't really know. My sister paid for them, so. These bowls, just enough for eating and begging, have been with me since 2009. And I cherish them so much that, you know, when I, during the 2020 CZU fire, You've all thought about this, right, because we live in climate change, serious climate change right now. And because of where I live in Santa Cruz, which is near a bunch of trees, all of my neighbors have go bags, they have emergency earthquake things, a whole bit, you know. And so what do I take when I'm on mandatory evacuation? I take my ropes, my bowls, my lineage. papers and four t-shirts. I thought my house was going to burn down right away, and then I would be able to go back. So, hence, four t-shirts.

[21:52]

Well, on day five, I'm looking at the bowls and the robes and thinking, those are replaceable. You really need t-shirts. So next time, if there is a next time, and I hope there is not, I would take the bowls and I would take at least 10 t-shirts. So, but just, I mean, I'm saying this to you because these are the things that I cherish and that mean a lot to me, and especially any of the documents that Catherine Thanis wrote for me or provided for me. are extremely important to me because she was such a figurative teacher for me. So a few months ago, one of my neighbors, who's a French Mediterranean specialist, asked me if I knew what kinds of objects were made from kitty wood, which is the polonia or princess tree.

[23:04]

Yeah. Kiri wood, do you know this term? Kiri, K-I-R-I. That's a Japanese word for the wood from the princess tree or the empress tree. And if you look in the office, the tansu that's in the dokusan part of the office, that's kiri wood. And so many of the old tansu... that are from Japan are made of kitty wood. Also, if any of you have ever bought like a high-end matcha bowl, you know, it comes in those little Japanese wood boxes with the kind of tie on it that you're afraid to undo because you'll know you'll never be able to get it back that way again. Those are also kitty wood. Anyway, kitty wood, or the polonio tree boxes, We're part of a trade between Japan and China, Persian merchants and Arab merchants.

[24:16]

I know, you're probably thinking I'm just like going off here. This will all come back to a point. So I thought for a long time, for the last couple months, that maybe the priest bowls were made of kitty wood and then lacquered. And I actually wrote the shop in Kyoto, the one guy who speaks English there. And I said, hey, Tommy, you know, is this kitty wood? He goes, no, it's a slightly different kind. Sadly. Sadly. Kitty wood is very prized in Japan. I'm kind of looking around to see if there's any. No. You should go into the office later and check out the tansu. So in my kind of examination here, my deep dive, side trip about the priest bowls and Kitty Wood, it turns out that Kitty Wood was a major part of the trade between China and Japan from about the 9th century to maybe about the 14th century.

[25:29]

And it's in that period that apparently there were these huge ports in China through which that trade was accomplished. And this is sort of chronicled in the biographical so-called travel journal by Marco Polo. Marco Polo was a contemporary of Quezon. And Marco Polo writes about what a marvel it is to see all of the bowls that are shipped from China through Arab and Persian and Chinese merchants around the world. And one of the ports that Marco Polo frequented or stayed at was one of the three ports in China. It's kind of in southern China. which was a major port that had like Chinese merchants, some Japanese merchants, Persian merchants, Arab merchants, and some of these were, the Asians were Buddhist monks.

[26:53]

So one of the hubs for trading was a port that's called Ningbo, which is more on the northern side of China. And that port, like Ningbo, Guangzhou, and Guangdong, which is, you know, kind of more southern China, these are ports that had substantial Arab populations. There were established mosques as well as Buddhist temples, different kinds of Buddhist temples. So Japanese monks traveled to Chinese monasteries really from about, I don't know, I think it's like about the 7th century to, I mean, the one that we know about is Dogen, right? He went to China with his teacher Miozen. And it was in the interest of Japanese monks to go to China to receive the teachings, maybe receive transmission, and they would bring back...

[28:00]

and they would bring them back in polonia boxes. So I don't know if you've ever seen some of these. I didn't really have a good look at the tonsu in the office, but some tonsu are made just for robes. And if, I mean, I'm not suggesting this, but if you want to really make Tommy excited, in Japan, you could go on the Matsumoto-ya website and they sell lacquered kiti boxes, which are really just for storing ocasas, or for that matter, rakasu. So scholars call this trade that, well, I'm sort of advancing a little too fast here. There was a lot of trade between Japan and China. All of it was forbidden.

[29:01]

So it was not, you know, there was a prescription against people leaving Japan and traveling to China except for high government officials. And high government officials often took with them Buddhist monks and Buddhist teachers. And some scholars call this the religious commercial trade that was pretty active from the 9th to really about 14th century. So what are they trading? Well, the Japanese are bringing metal. They're bringing swords. And they're trading for silk, for tea, for spices, which come via the kind of Mediterranean part of the world. And for Japanese monks, those that travel to China, they're accompanying these government officials, and they are then headed to monasteries for training.

[30:08]

But they are a very crucial part of this commercial trade. Which is kind of weird, right? Because we're sort of taught that, yeah, you know... monasteries are, like, this is a life unto itself, but apparently it was a very important part of the trade and this network back and forth. So wood and lacquerware, in addition to swords and gold and silk and spices, were all part of the trade. And this is sort of the kind of the context or kind of the background against which someone like Dogen and many, many other monks ended up in China to study the original Chan teachings of Mahayana Buddhism.

[31:15]

So I wrote my friend who asked me about my bowls and what other things, what Buddhist objects were made out of paulonia wood. And I said, not my bowls, but probably these other things. And it got me kind of then looking into, this is what academics do, we just kind of go down this rabbit hole. And we go, wow, that's a nice rabbit hole over there. Let me look down this hole. So it got me looking at the paulonia tree. So, and this is what I came across. Have you ever seen this? Yes. This is a mon, or a crest. And you probably know that in Japan, many of the, I want to say the important, this is a class system here, right? Many of the important families had crests that were associated with feudal lords. the warrior class, the samurai, and government officials.

[32:19]

And I think this crest, it has a name in Japanese. This is actually the official administrative crest of the government of Japan. From back then to right now. It still is. Isn't that interesting? Okay. I kind of freaked out when I saw this because I love this. I recognize this as the crest for Sojiji. Sojiji is one of the two great sotozen monasteries in Japan. You might have seen me in the zendo this morning with my rakasu. You know, I always wanted a rakasu like this. because I love the crests on them. So this crest, which is the Polonia crest, is the crest, the official crest for Sojiji.

[33:21]

And this crest is the official one for Eheji. Okay, let me tell you about this crest. Let me just take you down a rabbit hole, one of the rabbit holes that I went into. So actually the crest originally is the family crest of a man named Toyotomi Hideyoshi. Hideyoshi Toyotomi is his last name, was a samurai and daimyō. which, you know, you want to think like upper class, wealthy landowner in Japan. He's one of three major figures in Japanese history, along with this guy Tokugawa Ieyasu and this guy Nobunaga Odo.

[34:31]

Toyotomi was probably more of a power guy than a religious man. So, for example, when he was frustrated that some of his rivals were taking refuge at Mount Hiei, he burned it. He just set it on fire and burned it. And in fact, I wish we had a lot of time. We could watch Shogun together and we could watch which of these figures. I mean, they go by somewhat different names, especially the more recent version of Shogun. We're talking feudal lords and war. The Toyotomi clan crest, or the Polonio crest, the government crest, is used by Sojiji because it was granted imperial status a long time ago. And the reason it was granted imperial status was that the emperor asked Kezan a series of questions about

[35:43]

life and being and how Buddhists look at life. And he was so impressed, so the story goes, by Kezon's answers that he granted Sojiji the Polonia crust. So it's an honor, for sure. But, you know, from a kind of contemporary 21st century liberal point of view, it's also a little weird. Right? Because I was thinking, okay, what would be the analog? Well, it would be as if, you know, like somebody gave us the presidential seal, right? Would we wear that on our ruckus suit? Probably not. Probably not. We like the separation of church and state. Anyway, I will leave this, and I'll just, let me say one more thing about Eheji, which I've never been to, but I hope one of these days I'll have a chance to go. Aheji also bears a government crest. Those of you that have been, you've probably noticed maybe somewhere when you step inside the gates, there's a big etched chrysanthemum.

[36:50]

Ever seen the chrysanthemum crest? The chrysanthemum is always for the royal family. So, you know, and what's just really, all of this just says something about our lineage being very dependent on and wrapped up with the feudal government in Japan, feudal governments in Japan. Okay, let me try not to be as boring and work to a close and we can have some conversation if you like. You know, the stories that we tell about our practice, how it evolved our ancestors, is pretty clear. So, do you here at Berkeley Zen Center chant the ancestors maybe once a week or something? I think that is one of the most beautiful things I've ever heard in my life, just to hear it, to participate in it, to be a part of it.

[38:00]

And in fact, one time at Tassahara, I ran into a student of mine who was spending the weekend there, and she was just sitting, like, down at the coffee-tea area, and I think maybe the Dohan Ryo was practicing doing The Ancestors. And she was just enwrapped, kind of, she was in a reverie, all by all. She's just sitting there smiling like she just smoked something or something, you know. And I said, you know, you could go inside and participate. She goes, no. It's really beautiful just to hear it. So, you know, it stirs in us and even in people who would not consider themselves part of the lineage, some kind of, you know, feeling of being a part of a long line of practitioners. You know, my talking about the Sujiji Crest and the Buddhist commercial or the religious commercial network, essentially to trade swords for sutras, to trade wood for spices, I think is really helpful for kind of expanding an understanding of who we are and how we venerate the ancestors and our lineage.

[39:33]

Personally, I was really excited to learn that Dogen, when he went to Ningbo, which is the port that he went through, and went to Tiantang Monastery, meant that probably, well, first of all, he arrived in a city that had this huge Arab presence, Persian presence. There's Buddhist temples next to mosques. And that whatever tributes, and you know, the Japanese always brought tributes with them. Like maybe the Japanese brought wood boxes or maybe they brought scrolls. More likely they carried scrolls and sutras back from China. But even so, you know, Dogen's teacher that he went to China with, Myozen, he's not one of the ancestors that we list when we chant the Soto lineage. But Dogen's companion, Myozen, died while at the monastery, and Dogen brought his ashes back to Japan.

[40:43]

And what did he bring his ashes back in? Well, it was very traditional to bring someone's ashes in polonia boxes because the boxes are light. They burn like this. And so for cremation and for carrying, this is a very convenient thing. So I like this, I don't know, in my imagination, you know, he bought boxes maybe from a Chinese merchant standing next to an Arab merchant or a Persian merchant and took his cherished new objects including papers and scrolls back to China. So when I reflect on this kind of long line of Buddhas and ancestors to which I owe gratitude. I don't know. It's probably just me, but I really like the idea that there is this diverse and kind of thriving commercial network of different kinds of merchants from the Mediterranean, from the Arab world, who made up these places of contact between Japanese monks as they were on their way to Chinese monasteries.

[41:59]

And I'd be the first to admit that my own kind of narrative bias about this is that I like this idea that in the lineage, that there were a lot more diverse, like ethnic, racial, national diversity in the places of contact. I don't know. I like it because I feel like, oh, maybe I can really belong, you know? Or maybe that's part of a true history. that is a little bit messier than I have learned it. But maybe it's a good thing to think about widening kind of the lineage, the soto lineage. That's my bias. I'll tell you what the scholars I read say. One of the scholars I read, you know, the circle of Asian studies scholars who read and write classical Chinese and so on, is pretty small. I don't think there's more than maybe 20 or 30 of them.

[43:03]

And one of the scholars that I've been reading is a guy named Griffith Folk. You know his name, I bet. Cool guy. Kind of works on really what we call the medieval period. You know, in Japan we often talk about like according to the dynastic rules. But Griffith Griffith Folk, Professor Folk, is recently saying, let's talk about it in terms of kind of a more Mediterraneanized or medieval period in Asia, in which there's a lot more contact than we think there is. And what Folk is saying is, he says, you know, actually I think the lineage question is wrong, or the way what Soto Zen does with the lineage is wrong. And I'm like, what? Wait, this is, you know, transmitted correctly, properly, from Indian to Chinese to Japanese.

[44:05]

He promises to kind of think about it in a different way in a new book that's coming out, and so we'll see. So maybe this is less, this is more kind of open in terms of kind of where I want to end. But I wanted to just say that, you know, these questions that often we don't have about lineage are maybe interesting for us to think about. Because we are in the project of creating new ancestors and being new ancestors as we practice. And sometimes it's messy, you know. I'm personally a big advocate of the truthfulness of a mess. And does it make a difference, say, if, you know, the monks were engaged in commercial activities?

[45:08]

I don't think it does, myself. Does it make Chan practice less pure? In my opinion, no. I'd rather know the truth about swords for spices and all of that than not. Does it make a difference, for example, that Dogen was, I mean, I for many years thought he was one of the first Japanese monks to go to Japan. But actually, Japanese monks had been going to Japan for 300 years before him. Dogen is certainly maybe one of the most consequential. Does that change my own commitment to and how I think about the teaching? Actually, it doesn't. It just widens it. into a view of how the world has been a part of kind of Buddhist lineage for a long time. So why don't I stop there? Now, I'm going to ask you, invite you to ask questions, but please don't ask me anything about Mediterranean history.

[46:19]

I'm a 20th century person. That's my knowledge, and I'm actually really here just to report from the scholars that I'm reading who are really out of my field. But thank you very much. I'm gonna put my hearing aids back in. Lena Roshi. Thank you, Dana Roshi. This was lovely. And I was reminded of being at a Sakya Dita conference, a Women in Buddhism conference, something like a dozen years ago. And one of the presentations, because it was a conference, so there were many parts, and part of it was papers, like you're talking about, that are relevant. And because it was held in Java, in Indonesia, the local, the big local temple was Borobudur.

[47:24]

Wow. almost built like a stupa, kind of like a mountain, and there's all these carvings around it. And what this person was presenting, a man was presenting on, was the idea was that the silk, there was this mystery about the silk route, because it's just camels going over mountain passes and the desert. But this was said to be an enormous trade route. And how did this happen? It seems... impossible or mythical or whatever it was. And they found that the Silk Route was also by sea. And he proved it in a couple of amazing ways. One, they built a boat like they used to have. They found the ruins of it and they built one and they sailed it. And it only took, I think, 70 days to go with the monsoon winds from somewhere over near Japan to the other side of Africa, like around the horn.

[48:25]

So this was like amazingly fast to do that. And that's like, so proof of theory, right? And the other was they found a workshop. They've known of a series of places that have particular stone or gems or whatever. And of course they would put craftspeople there to make things out of it. And they found a perfect match between this place that was fairly close, like somewhere over, kind of up by Japan, to some place like way over on the other side of everything that was the finished piece and a chip off the finished piece and the stone matched exactly. Wow. So they could tell, yes, this actually happened. And if you go to, and I got to go to Borobudur, and there are large, you know, images. It's like watching, you know, it's like a film strip, sort of. And there's carvings of boats.

[49:29]

And in the front of the boat are very clearly Buddhist monks. And they would stop at the monasteries because the boats could get food, have lodging, refuel. So there was this relationship. And this was being brought up in terms of teachings, you know, like how Greek teaching, how Mediterranean culture permeated what we think of as like purely Asia and there's no contact. But there was contact. And besides just the fascination with the story and the slideshow that he did and that he had done this, that just opened up to me that it's very much what you're talking about. We think it's this one lineage in this one place. And like the lineage is more like, you know, it's this one stream. It like it goes like, you know, and even ours goes out, you know, and then comes back together.

[50:33]

But he said, really, it's more like the Mississippi River, you know, that's on this floodplain where it's winding and it's picking this up here and this over here and this. We'll never know all of it. It will always be a mystery. But knowing that it's so much bigger. So thank you so much for bringing that. Thank you for that. That's a Sakya Dita conference, right? Yeah. We have a question online. I think outside the U.S. and outside kind of our communities in the United States, There's a whole world out there and not necessarily articles or knowledges based in English that are about the Maritime Silk Road and then the Overland Silk Road. And that the amount of contact and who knows how interactions and contact influenced everything from how we think about the other as well as even principles or teachings in Buddhism.

[51:46]

Who can say right now? I certainly cannot, but thank you. Maybe somebody else has a comment or a question they'd like to... Good morning, around the post. Good morning. I was really excited that your talk would include wood, because from my perspective, a beautiful wooden column has been... delivering the Dharma talk, which I made a little drawing of. I think I have a couple of questions that are floating around unformed. One of them is I just really appreciated you naming that tangled is something that you are unfamiliar with, I guess, as a word to use, because that's always been such a resonant word for me when we do the recitations here. So if you have any thoughts or a rabbit hole or a riff on twisted and tangled, and I guess how those feel for you.

[52:49]

And I also wonder if you have any more to share on the truthfulness of a mess in connection with Professor Arde. I really appreciate you bringing him into the room and speaking to that. But I wonder if, yeah, if there's anything more to say on it. Thank you. Thank you. I feel slippage here. Hang on a sec. I don't have any more to elucidate something like twisted and tangled. I like both. I learned it always as all my ancient twisted karma. And I often think about when we see something that we think is intractable, that we cannot find the right place to sit in terms of a position on, whether it's a controversy or a social problem or a historical problem.

[53:55]

I feel like those are often a coming together of a lot of different causes and conditions. You know, in the case of Professor Arday, I believe he himself said something like he was poorly supervised. as either an undergrad or a grad. Now, to those of us who have taught or who have attended kind of the modern university, that's almost unthinkable. But I can say that in graduate training, I've seen it happen. And, you know, we so often go to the top layer of an issue, like it was his fault because he, you know, he plagiarized and then he didn't attend to it. Or it's his fault that he exaggerated, that he couldn't speak or whatever the claims were and that he learned or he ran 100 miles in 100 days every day. I mean, I find it not so helpful to get down into the weeds of the details because I think all of those are claims about that come out of our ancient karma that we enact in real time.

[55:13]

in a problem. So I don't know if that's helpful. I will just say a lot of my colleagues, as I said, are like, this is tragic. You know, I think it was on Wednesday that there was a vigil in the UK. 30,000 people went. And I think a lot of speakers spoke against the university. spoke against Nathan Kofnus, who is the person who made the claims. And while I think, I mean, I understand why people do that, and it's tragic that Professor Arday committed suicide, but I think when we try to go to like blame this side or explain this side, we're not doing what we're taught as Buddhist practitioners to do, which is to go deeper. and understand the roots of behavior and action, karma, so to speak.

[56:20]

That's probably not very helpful, but thank you. Thank you. Are we at time? Helen, can we talk at tea? Okay. Well, you know what? He's the boss, so. I'll just say the talk left me reflecting on the sense of freedom that arises when we're willing to see the truth. Thank you.

[57:04]

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