Good morning. This morning I have three things that I want to talk about. And they're not necessarily related to each other. Somewhat. Maybe the first two are related to each other. First, I want to talk about, as you may have noticed, I was not using incense this morning. There's been a long discussion, controversy, about using incense. And the fumes from incense difficult for many people for various reasons, and so it's very traditional to use incense.

[01:13]

Incense is like, we offer incense to invite Buddha to join our practice, and there's something about the fire and the burning process and the smoke, which is very evocative. But for some people it's so evocative. So I finally decided, okay, we won't use it anymore. So the question is, well, what do you use? What do you offer? How do you make an offering? So some people use herbs. I don't like herbs so much. Herbs seem kind of medicinal. So I prefer flowers, dried flowers, dried flower petals, which can kind of open up in the water.

[02:15]

So there's some kind of action there. It seems strange to put something ... well, some people just offer from one container to another, but I think offering water, offering the flower petals in the water has a kind of catalytic action, and so there's something going on. And water actually is traditional for an altar, although we've never used it in Zen Center history, we've never used water on the altar, but in Soto Zen practice, people put water on the altar, a small bowl of water as an offering, and that's somewhat traditional in Buddhism as a whole, but for some reason it never Suzuki Roshi didn't do that, it's Maezumi Roshi who did that in Los Angeles. So anyway, now we're doing that, and I'm offering flower petals into the water, so it's an offering, but it still feels strange, and it creates a different kind of practice for some people who have been taking care of incense bowls and so forth.

[03:35]

And all those beautiful incense bulbs are no longer on the altar. And all this big stack of incense in my closet is... Anyway, so, there we are. Well, people bring me up. People from Japan come and bring me. I've never bought incense in my life. People bring me incense a little bit, but people bring me incense. And then when visitors come, they always offer incense at the altar, and we all bow. So I still have an incense burner up there. And when nobody's in the zendo, which is usually when they come, So anyway, that's been taken care of, and I hope that we're all pollution-free in Zendo.

[04:48]

There are many things I agree with, you know. So instead of filling this Zendo with smoke, we can fill it with clean air. So that's kind of an ecologically proper thing to do, is to make sure that we have clean air as a kind of example. So everything has its two sides, right? So I go for that. The other thing is, that you see there's a new scroll which was given to us by Belinda Sweet who always gives us these wonderful scrolls by 20th century Buddhist monks who are calligraphers. This one is a staff and it's a stick. It's a kind of like a kiyosaku in a way.

[05:49]

And the caption is something like, if you don't behave, you'll get my stick. But behaving means if you're only practicing for your own self-satisfaction and not helping others or not practicing for the benefit of the world, you'll get my stick. That's the meaning. I'll hit you. course hitting, you know, we think of hitting as an act of violence, but actually the stick is an act of encouragement and compassion. And there's always been a controversy, not always, but in America there's been a controversy about the stick because we're not used to such a thing. But when I first started practicing, I remember the first time I came to

[06:56]

So Koji sat down and I heard this bang, bang, and I thought, who's hitting the floor? Somebody's hitting the floor with a stick or something. And it was really puzzling to me. And then I found out that the teacher was going around and hitting people with his stick to encourage them, to wake them up. And he used to carry the stick all the time. when we developed Tassajara, the students would carry the stick. And we had people, eventually, two people carrying the stick, two sticks, every Zazen period in Tassajara and in the city. But then, At some point, people started complaining about the stick, you know, like, it reminds me of when my father hit me, or, you know, sounds like violence, something like that.

[08:06]

So we had a big controversy about using the stick. And in San Francisco, they stopped using the stick. But I didn't want to stop using the stick, because a lot of people wanted the stick. So you always have these kinds of controversies, you know, and it's kind of like, Do we come up to what we think we should be doing, or do we allow, or do we accommodate to what people feel? That's always a big question. Do we have people come up to this side, or do we come over to this side? So we made a kind of compromise and we agreed that we could still use the stick here. But we only use it during Sashin. And I call it the wake-up stick.

[09:07]

And of course you always have to ask for it, you know, just go around beating people up. But it's encouragement or helping people stay awake. But in Japan, a lot of the young monks who are in the monasteries use it as if they just beat each other up, you know. So that's a kind of travesty on a stick, but everything can become exaggerated. But in its proper use, it's wonderful. In Tsugaru, she used to go around and hit us all the time, and we just loved it. because it was so encouraging. It was like, you know, transference of energy. Wonderful. So, this is kind of a body practice, you know. Dzogchen is a body practice, and our whole practice, you know, work hands-on.

[10:16]

So... the transference of energy in a kind of bodily way is very meaningful, very energizing. But when you have men and women practicing together, it changes the whole paradigm, because, well you can see that, I don't have to explain it, it just changes the way we interact with each other. Men interact with each other in a certain way, and women interact with each other in a certain way, and men and women interact with each other in a certain way. So we're still developing that kind of how do men and women actually interact together in the practice in a way that doesn't

[11:19]

but compromise is actually necessary. How do the men maintain a masculine practice? How do the women maintain a feminine practice? And how do the men and women maintain a masculine-feminine practice? It's a work in progress. So it's kind of wonderful, you know, this is American or Western, I would say, because also in Europe they practice together, a big experiment. The way we practice doesn't occur anywhere else in the world, and it arises out of the way our culture is. That's the stick.

[12:27]

So the other thing I want to talk about is I'm going to go to India and Bhutan in September. I'm leaving on September 6th, and I'm going with a kind of tour that was provided for me. I would never have thought of going by myself. But someone asked me if I wanted to go, so I said, I'll think about it. And then everybody I talked to said, Bhutan, you should come. I said, yeah, maybe I should. So Bhutan is a very interesting place, although I haven't been there yet. I hear that it's a very interesting place. First is India, and then Darjeeling, and then Sikkim, which used to be a kingdom, but now it's part of India, India Annexed, Sikkim, and then Bhutan.

[13:45]

So, Sikkim is in between Bhutan and Nepal. And then there's Tibet, which is above all those. So, it's as far as you can go, if you want to go someplace. It's like halfway around the world, and then if you keep going, you come back to where you started. You're on your way going back to where you started. So, and it's all mountainous and valleys and so forth. So I've been reading about Bhutan and it's a Buddhist country which the monks practice Vajrayana Buddhism and everybody's more or less Buddhist, although now there is some Brahmanism coming in and so forth, but basically it's a Buddhist country and most people consider themselves Buddhists.

[14:49]

And the whole country is based on their understanding of Vajrayana Buddhism, and they want to preserve their culture. It's not a very old culture, actually, 18th century, although people were living there for a long time, they had many interactive wars. Basically, try to maintain as much as possible the Tibetan Buddhist culture of practice, although they're not Tibetans, but because the Chinese have ruined more or less the Tibetan culture and the Nepalese have allowed the Westerners to more or less ruin their culture, Bhutan wants to preserve their culture. They see what's happened all around them. And so they only let in like 15,000 people, tourists, a year.

[15:56]

Very limited tourism. And each person is screened. So they have monks, they have the two basic schools of Tibetan Buddhism, Nyingma, and the Kagyu monks are celibate monks and the Nyingma monks are either celibate or not. They can have families, which is very interesting because it's a little bit like Japanese Buddhism in that way. And their sex life of the populace is very open. They're a very interesting kind of openness. And when you go into the countryside, they have big penises painted on the walls of their houses.

[17:09]

And they have festivals around, although they dress very formally, and there's no sign of promiscuity in the public sector, and they're very formal. It's like the meeting of the sacred and the profane. It's really interesting. Every country has a kind of balance where the sacred and the profane come together. And in the West, we have these certain kinds of sexual mores on the one hand, and they may be inhibiting And then we have the other side, but they have a way of bringing those two together, which seems to work for them.

[18:18]

And this is not the monks, of course, this is the populace, but in the countryside, they have what they call night something. creeping or something, crawling, where the young men go over in the middle of the night to their girlfriend's house and they climb in the window and they climb into bed with their girlfriend, but the thing is that everybody lives in one room. There's no furniture, they don't have furniture. So anyway, and if he's still there in the morning, they're married. So apparently there's no real ceremony of marriage, it's just like, you know. And the king, well there's a king, the country has a wonderful king who is very benevolent, everybody loves the king.

[19:25]

which is not always the case in countries, but everybody loves the king, and he has four wives who are all sisters. He married four sisters, and they have children, they're all very happy, and everyone loves the wives and the children. I can't say there are no problems, but there doesn't seem to be. It doesn't seem to be a problem for people. It's a different way of... It's just a different culture. In most countries nowadays, the goal of the country is prosperity, right? But in Bhutan, the goal of the country is not prosperity, it's gross national happiness, whatever that means, because it's an impossible kind of thing to define.

[20:41]

But they don't want the the economy to be driving people's effort and they've always managed to support themselves and so forth and they do have trouble with the Nepalese and so forth and actually the king at some point wanted everyone to wear the national dress so as to preserve their culture but what that did was alienate the Nepalese who had been living in the southern part, mostly, and that caused a big problem because the Nepalese didn't want to totally become Bhutanese. Everywhere you have these problems of people living together for hundreds of years and then suddenly they're aliens.

[21:49]

So they do have that kind of problem. But I don't think that the Westernized culture, or even the Asianized culture, is going to be I think the Western and Asian cultures are going to soon or later dominate because it's too hard to hold them off. Kids are now wearing t-shirts with the rock bands on them, their walkie-talkies and stuff. So that's gradually creeping into the culture. And that will probably take over at some point. But right now it's still possible to go to Bhutan and to experience that culture before it's too late.

[22:55]

So it's rather unique. And everyone I've ever known, it's interesting when I say Bhutan, people crawl out of the woodwork and they say, oh, I was there. I was there in 1970, blah, blah, blah. and it's the most beautiful place I've ever been in my life. And without exception, everybody says it's the most beautiful place I've ever been to. And the people are just wonderful, you know, and everybody is very happy and seems to be, you know, happy enough. So, But we don't hear much about the monk's life. A lot is written about the secular life, but not so much about the religious life. But they do have these big festivals, and they do a lot of dancing with masks and things like that, just like the Tibetans.

[23:59]

And so I will be interested in what their religious life is like, as well as their secular life. Apparently they have an airplane that flies in. We won't be going on the airplane to fly in, but There are only about a dozen pilots in the world that are licensed to fly into. It's probably the scariest flight so far in the world. It's an airport. It's not in Bhutan, I think. I'm not sure where it is, but it's close, where the airfield is not long enough for the plane to take off. but it's built over a drop of 20,000 feet or something.

[25:07]

So the airplane goes... So, I'll be back sometime in a minute. Hopefully. I will take the airplane out though, out of... So do you have any questions about any of those things that I've been talking about? how that actually is.

[26:17]

Yeah, well throughout the Buddha's Citrus you have stories of people offering various things, like the woman who offered, when the Buddha was, I think it was Dipankara Buddha, he was coming down a road which is a And so this woman who was lined up on the road laid down on the ground and put her long hair over the road so that Buddha could walk on it. So that's considered an offering which has made her into some wonderful person. I can't remember what her reincarnation was. Shakyamuni? Yeah. Yeah, yeah. And the offering ... and Dogen talks about offering a ...

[27:24]

a hair or a stone or a blade of grass or anything. So yes, anything that's offered, it's not the thing that's offered, it's the offering, it's the spirit of offering which is the important thing. So that's why it's fine, but incense is wonderful as well. But it's really true that it's the spirit of what the offering is. So Zazen is a wonderful offering, because when we say Zazen, letting go of ourself and it's Donna letting go and offering ourself to that which can't be described somebody in the back before that's okay

[28:33]

I really can't hear what you're saying. Did you take the robes with you? Did you participate in any ceremonies there? To take the robes? A robe? Am I going to take my robe? Yeah. Yes. I bought the stick. What was the cleavage point between using the stick every day and not using it every day? Well, it was just... When we said it was okay to use the stick, it wasn't decided how we would do that.

[29:43]

And then nobody took that up. Except me. And so I just decided that we would do it during Sashin. Because it's a kind of compromise. And also, people are not so sleepy. Well, they do. They are, but... In daily Zazen. As much as they used to be. I don't know why they used to be so sleepy. Why they're not so sleepy now. But anyway... Let me start later. Yeah, maybe that's it. We used to start at 5 o'clock in the morning. Yeah, it's a real issue.

[30:50]

But using it during Sashin, so Sashin is where people are, you know, it's not new people, Sashin is people, so when new people are coming in the window, and then you start using the stick, you know, like, they wonder what's going on, right? Although, we were all new people when we entered, right? But it's just a, I don't know, just a feeling of compromise. use it when it's really necessary and not just use it all the time, or when it makes, you know, the biggest hit. Paul? Sir, are there any plans during your visit to Bhutan for plans in advance to meet with Yes, yes. That's a good question. So the person who's leading the tour, it's a Stanford tour.

[31:53]

And if you're familiar with Stanford tours, these professors lead tours all over the world. And so this one is a professor who has been at Stanford since 19—as long as I've been them and 64 and so he'd been all over the world and Bhutan is his baby and he goes there every couple of years and he is a friend of the king and the king has made him a citizen, natural-born citizen, and so he's a kind of and he sees that as one of his major roles as being an advisor to the king and the king listens to him and he knows the people in the parliament.

[32:56]

The king, he's like the third king in this particular line and he wanted to kingdom to the parliament. He wanted to create a parliament and have a parliamentary kind of government, but they wanted him to be the king. So he made this kind of compromise there, but he's always been willing to just turn it over, but they want to keep him doing that. So there's both things going on. we'll meet people from the government. And I'm monks, you know, and I'm sure we'll have access to the monasteries, which usually people don't.

[33:59]

India? What are you going to do in India? Well, India is just kind of traveling through. You know, there's the black hole of Calcutta. I hear it's not the black hole anymore, just Calcutta. And then there's Darjeeling. There's another little city that is pretty hard to pronounce. But there's a train that goes from either that little city to Darjeeling, over Darjeeling to Sikkim. It's a very old train, 120-year-old train or something. And it's featured in the PBS series of old trains. It's one of those old trains. And they spend time in Sikkim. which is, although it was annexed by India, it still has its own feeling, a special feeling.

[35:14]

And it's supposed to be kind of a very sophisticated little country, countryette. to speak more about that, because here's a country living at a time when change is happening really quickly, and they're attempting to, and they're a Buddhist country, who's attempting to sort of stop the change, or to at least limit the amount that comes in. Well yeah, that's interesting, I see what you're saying. changes. All these three things have in common change, and cultural change, and mixing of cultures, and cultural exchanges.

[36:22]

So yeah, they do all have all those three things in common in that way. And first, when our Zen teachers came to America, we took on their cultural, I don't want to say baggage, but their cultural way of doing things. And then the pendulum kind of swings back, and our culture is starting to modify that foreign cultural influence, but it also swings all the way back to Japan. And because this, although it may not look like it, there is influence from here back to Japan going both ways. And it causes them to question some of the things, the way they do things, which they know about, which they can't change.

[37:34]

It's very hard to change anything in Japan. But they see that, and they see the problems. So, it swings both ways. And you can't, in Bhutan, a place like that, you can't keep the world out. the world's going to modify, but the outside world will wash over a place like Bhutan, but then the wash comes back and there's an influence from Bhutan that's good for the world. So, things will be destroyed in the process, but something new will come out of that process. When I traveled with a friend who had been to all these various countries like Thailand, Burma, so forth, she said that Bhutan was the most spiritual place that she had ever been to.

[38:39]

And regarding changes, Tibet has undergone a lot of changes since 1975. But when I went in 1998, more than 20 years later, The people were very, very beautiful from within. We went up a mountainside to use the bathroom at a school, elementary school, of all grades. And the bathroom that they showed us was a six-foot square piece of land encased by bricks, a brick wall, about five feet tall. with a door opening, but no door. And that area was the bathroom that the children had used and we were welcome to use. So despite the many influences that have come into Tibet for 20 plus years, the people still remain very beautiful and very

[39:50]

their approach to life. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think that's right and that's one of the qualities that people experience is that kind of unspoiledness. Yeah, yeah. Did you have your hand up? Or are you just going like this? about the relationship between trying to keep the culture from changing too much and having a king. Is it necessary to preserve, in order to preserve a culture, is it necessary to have a single ruler? Well, you know, that's a good question because

[40:55]

If you look at any culture, say like a democracy, we think that there's no ruler in a democracy. Think again. When you have a king, you recognize the ruler, and you know where you are. But when you have a democracy, it's very easy to manipulate people in such a way that the president becomes a ruler. I can't say whether it's good or not, but if it works, it works. So, we have this idea that there can be better and better governments. but the governments are no better than the people.

[42:03]

You can have a despot, who is the ruler of a country, and that person would be extremely benevolent, and everybody prospers, the country prospers. Or you can have a country where you think you have communal rule, and you can have a disaster, Because the ruler, the person they set up, sets the example. This is why we have somebody called the king. The king is supposed to set the example. And in Bhutan, the king lives in a house on a mountain which he built himself, a log cabin that he built himself, and mostly he just acts like an ordinary person. And so, people just follow that example. So, it's kind of a wonderful thing.

[43:11]

So, when we feel that the majority should rule, right, this idea that the majority should rule, and so we elect somebody from the majority, but that's not always true. But it seems like it. It's supposed to be true. But anyway, the majority doesn't always have the right idea, understanding. So, it's not my opinion, it's always been, and this is my opinion, it doesn't matter what form of government you have, the government is no better than the people. Yeah? has five wives. Four, five. Four, okay. So, I'm still thinking about how he's setting the example and then, and also, they're all happy and then you hear they're happy.

[44:22]

Maybe they're not. Yes, that's what, is there any way you can talk to them when you are there? I'm not supposed to go looking for women. Maybe. They do speak English. English is the foreign language of choice. And it's taught in schools. They do have schools. They want education. They're very much into education. beginning to form education. There are less girls going to school than boys going to school. The girls do go to school, but there are less of them in school than there are boys. And there's probably an imbalance between the sexes.

[45:31]

in a lot of ways. Are the decorations mostly phallic or is there equal, you know? Well, I'll let you know when I go back. Lots of questions when you come back. Yeah, I will bring pictures. But I did hear somewhere that they are both. But still, heterosexuality is... Well, the reason, I think I heard it, the reason that they do have the penis is because they bring good luck. Good luck's in there. For some. Not for everyone. some West African cultures, the phallus is part of the religious ritual and culture.

[46:40]

So it's the accentuation of that symbol, yeah, that's right. And it was also, you know, in European history, like in the 18th century, it was also a symbol in the way men wear their clothes. Anyway, I didn't want to talk about sex, but it's just interesting that the different way of thinking about it, different attitude, you know, totally different attitude. So, when I get back, I'll hopefully know more than I know now. Thank you.

[47:45]

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