I vow to taste the truth of the Tathagata's words. Good morning, I'm going to do something this morning that I haven't done for the ten years that I've been speaking at the Zen Center. I request your permission to read my talk for reasons I think you will find more clear as we get into the matter. I, as some of you know, spent a lifetime in radio and then sort of lost without a script in my hand, something to cling to, and people said that they found this was a barrier. I hid behind my script, I did not speak directly to you, and bit by bit you got me out of the habit of doing it, but I have to revert this morning and beg your indulgence.

[01:01]

When we first got a computer here at Zen Center, there was a sign on the door that said, don't pull the plug or we'll lose the program, and I thought of that because I had programmed myself to talk about something that I'd wanted to talk about for a long time, and right in the middle of the preparations something pulled my plug, and all I have left of the talk that I had intended to give are these bits and pieces, which perhaps will come together in some coherent fashion. The subject was to have been Transcendentalism and Zen. It's funny. It's in this day and age when we are trying to establish how this ancient Zen practice will somehow or other make itself at home in a new country, I thought that the works

[02:05]

of Emerson, Thoreau, and Dickinson, to mention just a few of the names, prefigured an interest in the same questions that we are concerned with in basic Zen Buddhist practice, things like self and other, outside and inside, mind and body. And also you should know that the Transcendentalists were the first ones in America to pay any attention to the philosophy and religion of India. They read the Bhagavad Gita and what Buddhist writings were available in those days in English, and even Whitman, who was not a Transcendentalist, wrote one of his major poems entitled A Passage to India. Now, very, very briefly, for those of you who have forgotten whatever you learned in English back in the good old days, Transcendentalism asserts that reality must be found within man. He can get in touch with it at the bottom of the heart. This reality Emerson called the Eternal One, and for Emerson, who had been interested in

[03:11]

Asian thought since he was a young man, the Christian soul was identical with Brahma, the supreme and eternal essence of the universe as portrayed in Hindu theology. Now, you know, I used to know this poem by heart. My mother was an elocutionist. She gave me things to remember, and I'm not going to try to remember it, but I will read it because it's a good place to start. Some of you may even recognize it. If the red slayer thinks he slays, or if the slain thinks he is slain, they know not well the subtle ways I keep, and pass, and turn again. Far or forgot to me is near, shadow and sunlight are the same, the vanished gods to me appear, and one to me are shame and fame. They reckon ill who leave me out, when me they fly, I am the wings, I am the doubter and the doubt, and I am the hymn the Brahman sings.

[04:13]

The strong gods pine for my abode, and pine in vain the sacred seven, but thou meek lover of the good, find me, and turn thy back on heaven. That was my first encounter with Emerson, and it must have made some impression on me, because I never forgot those early readings. So it was my intention this morning to follow this twisted trail, that finally led me to Zen practice, and 25 years involvement with the life of Zen Center. But while I was assembling these bits and pieces, something happened in the here and now, which not only devastated this effort, but which in the days since have made it more and more clear that I will never get back to something which now only do I realize deeply informed my life. I went back home to Connecticut on my annual, bi-annual vacation to New England. And before that I'd been working with a sister in the Sacred Heart Order,

[05:19]

on helping her prepare a book for a leading publishing house. And how this came about involves Zen Center, especially Green Gulch Farm. Patricia Binkert came to us as a guest student, after Vatican II had so deeply altered the traditional ways of life in Catholic convents. Pat had earlier taken refuge in Sacred Heart after a young life of great pain and torment. She was a brilliant person. Someone called her a Renaissance woman. For instance, she had three master's degrees, one in English, she did her thesis on William Blake, one in science, and one in theology. She was an inspired teacher, very active in sports and the Outward Bound program. But all this came to a tragic halt when her fighting Irish spirit went head-on-head with the Mother Superior, and she was dismissed from her teaching position. Now this broke down the door of her defenses to all her past life problems that she had been able to control by taking refuge in the convent.

[06:20]

So now she was out of it, and in desperation she'd come to Green Gulch to try to hold on. She deeply appreciated the sanctuary of the Green Gulch Gardens, and the discipline of Zazen. But one winter night there was a storm of wind that hurled her over the edge, and we rushed her to the Crisis Center at Marin General. She was there for a year, with frequent suicide attempts, one that almost succeeded. But thanks to her courage and toughness, and the skill of the doctors and the staff, she survived the ordeal of recovery. And because Pat was always eager to investigate the mysteries of life, no matter where they led, she wrote a book. Now it's not the usual Reader's Digest type of story of someone who had vested adversity. It was a gutsy, down-to-earth, detailed, technically and scientifically correct insight into what really goes on in a treatment center bringing someone back from the brink.

[07:22]

The publisher said that they would take the book, but she would have to bring out more of the spiritual qualities. I guess they figured that a nun was automatically a spiritual person. Now that was not an obvious part of Pat's personality. But somehow or other we'd made a connection at Green Gulch, which I can't really remember. Maybe it was Zazen instruction or something like that. Because she asked me to help her out and try to show her how to get out of her book what the publishers wanted. Well, her response to my suggestions was immediate and really amazing. Words flowed easily in just the right patterns and shapes to reveal the religious hidden beneath the clinical. So I went on my vacation feeling I had contributed a little to what would someday be of great help to thousands of others who, like Pat, felt the world as it was was more than they could handle.

[08:22]

So when I got home I was eagerly waiting for a call about the book. And the call came, but it was not what I had expected. There would be no book. Pat had gone to the library, returned home, sat down in a chair beneath the lamp, opened the book and died. Instantly, peacefully, a massive coronary. Now, it's not just her death that made it impossible for me to put together the talk that I had intended. We were not lifelong friends. Her personality was so forceful sometimes you had to fasten your seatbelt just to talk to her. But she could write, and she had something to say. So after the shock was over, I realized that my interest in her book was totally selfish. Once I was going to write a book. In fact, Kategiri Roshi had urged me to do so. Nothing as powerful as Pat's Among the Tigers Wild. That title, by the way, is from Blake's song of Innocent Little Girl Lost. Then they followed with a vision led and saw their sleeping child Among the Tigers Wild.

[09:27]

So I thought I would sort of tag along on her book, maybe there would be a mention among them, you know, the authors credit the help to people that have aided them, that my name might be somewhere in there. So I had prepared not to give this talk, but a Zen teacher has said a real talk has to be about what is immediately in front of you in your life, what is confronting you. So I will try now in the remaining time to relate Pat and Emerson in some way that's meaningful to me now. And maybe if I do that, your morning won't be totally wasted. One of the personal experiences I shared with Emerson was what I have in my past talks described as God-seeing. And here's how Emerson talks about it. Crossing a bare common in snow, Puddles at twilight under a clouded sky,

[10:32]

Without having in my thoughts any occurrence Of good or bad fortune, I have enjoyed a perfect exhilaration. I was glad to the brink of fear. Again. Standing on the bare ground, My head bathed in the blithe air, Uplifted into infinite space, All mean egotism vanishes, I become a transparent eyeball. I am nothing, but I see all. I am part and parcel of God. Now, a child reading that, and someone like me, was tremendously encouraged to realize that there was a grown person, an adult, who shared some of my understandings, and I wasn't as crazy as my family frequently suspected I was. But I couldn't leave it at that. For me, it was a practical question. Okay, so this is the way it is, but how would you live all the time in that spirit of perfect exhilaration?

[11:34]

Well, I made little progress until I came upon Thoreau. And he put Emerson's high-minded ideas into what you and I would call practice these days. For years, he was my teacher, and his teaching was simplify, simplify, simplify. That seemed to be the perfect antidote for the frantic circle of needless activity which my adult people told me was life. I remembered this the other day when reading about the new information network that is being created by the modern technology, optical fibers, and all that. What Thoreau said when he was told that the telegraph had been put through between Texas and New York City, Thoreau said, what has New York to say to Texas, or Texas to say to New York? And those stories about him on his deathbed, he was a pretty prickly character,

[12:36]

and Concord, the area around Walden, was inhabited with ministers, and they were always out to sort of try to catch him and make a Christian out of him. And so there they've got him. He's on his deathbed, and one of them said, Henry, have you made your peace with God? And Thoreau said, I don't recall we ever quarreled. And another one came at him and said, are you ready for the next life, Henry? And Henry said, one life at a time. So with that encouragement, I thought that I would go out and find what was left of Emerson and Thoreau. So I took a pack on my back, like the basket that still takes the mail up at Green Gulch, and every summer, after I graduated from high school, I went through New England. Found an old map the last time I was home. My trip in 1932, 1,600 miles.

[13:38]

I was looking for my own Walden pond, and I would build a cabin, and I would sit, as Thoreau did. And here, I guess, without me knowing it, is the first time I came across Zazen. It's not mentioned by name. This is Thoreau. Sometimes, in a summer morning, having taken my accustomed bath, I sat in my sunny doorway, from sunrise till noon, wrapped in reverie, amidst the pines and hickories and sumachs, in undisturbed solitude and stillness, while the birds sang around or flitted noiselessly through the house, until, by the sun falling in at my west window, or the noise of some traveler's wagon on the distant highway, I was reminded of the lapse of time. I grew in those seasons like corn in the night, and they were far better than any work that my hands would have done. They were not time subtracted from my life,

[14:42]

but, as so much over and above my usual allowance of time, I realized what the Orientals mean by contemplation and the forsaking of works. For the most part, I minded not how the hours went. The day advanced as if light to light was some work of mine. So, I did get a cabin in Connecticut, but my father, despairing of my future, bought it for me. It cost all of $450. I would love to have built it. I think if I had built that, I'd still be there, so maybe it was a benefit. Two streams on the property, a spring that had never gone dry since the first white man entered the area. We even had a trout in the spring box to keep it clean. It was a few miles' walk to the town of Litchfield, which is anything you can imagine of a classical New England village. And I spent a winter writing plays.

[15:43]

This is very important to note. Here I am, a disciple of Emerson and Thoreau, doing what? Communing with nature? No, sitting down at a typewriter, banging out plays so that I would be known on Broadway someday. One night, in a snowstorm, I found myself outside the cabin with a lantern, going around to see who was calling me. So I realized it was time to close the cabin, and I went to work as a wormhole inspector in the fishing rod factory. And since 1936, I've returned only for family visits. Now something began, I guess it was related to the practice here, that as the years went on, I found that there was less and less for me in that lovely countryside. For instance, the house across the road that once had sheltered the eleven wooded children, now owned by a Vietnamese woman. Their mother used to bake us bread

[16:44]

and bring us huckleberries, and she'd never traveled more than 25 miles from the place where she was born in all her life. I used to spend time talking with an old man about what life was like before the Civil War. I was so young and he was so old, we talked about what life was like before the Civil War. Now his descendants drive Porsches and do real estate and insurance, and instead of foxes barking and owls hooting in the still night, it's the sound of drag racers and boomboxes. The head of the mafia from a nearby city, which was recently voted the worst city in the United States to live in, moved in just across the hill. So, of course, Transcendency is at work everywhere, but there was an Indian summer in my Transcendentalist experience. The one before this. Now each time I make this trip,

[17:44]

there comes a certain day, never designated beforehand, when I realize this is the day I leave for my pilgrimage to the old cemetery in Litchfield where my parents are buried. It's a seven-mile hike through a forest preserve. I leave at first light and arrive as the sun slants in over the cedars and the ancient gravestones from before the Revolution are still in the shadow. I pass the mound where Oliver Walcott's tomb is standing. He was a signer of the Declaration of Independence and a governor of Connecticut. And just down from the knoll is where my folks are buried, their names on a simple stone. So, having done my filial duty, the rest of the day was mine. Now this particular morning I went, as always, to McDonald's Drugstore, which was there when I first came to town, to buy a copy of the New York Times and sat in the Commons before the Congregational Church, which I'm sure some of you have seen on calendars and postcards. Now there was a story

[18:47]

in the paper that certified something or other that I had been called crazy for advocating many years before and I wanted to celebrate my triumph with a drink. Well, fortunately, the wine merchant was open before time and I got half a pint of brandy. And remember the poem I had once written at Tassajar called Brandy Before Breakfast. The first time was with a woman in Mozart, just now with Maitreya in a fat gray cap. But both times the feeling was the same, this is the way to live. So I had breakfast in the same little hole in the wall that I'd had my first breakfast in Litchfield. The owner had been the cook in those days. We talked about the good old days so long that if his wife came out from the kitchen dragging a frying pan, she stood there and we talked. And then I passed the bookstore and I saw in the window the passion of Emily Dickinson.

[19:47]

Now I don't generally buy hardcover books just because I want them, but this time I did. Took the book home and spent 24 hours totally immersed in Dickinson's magic. Not just the poems, but the life that surrounded her and which proved, as I'd always suspected, that she may have been called the recluse of Amherst, but she knew more deeply and intimately the real life of her times than anyone that I know. The whole thing was what Maslow called a peak experience. It was my whole life beginning with childhood in Emerson and my travels and my writings and my family and my country, all right there in one. So I came back to San Francisco with the firm resolve to write the book that Katagiri Roshi had urged on me. I sat down at the typewriter and I looked at the paper I looked out the

[20:48]

window, I put the paper away and I closed up the typewriter. That was a few years ago and that began a process which I have been tracking for you if nobody remembers, which is good. But it for me has to be entered into the record. The loss of language. Now I've, as I said, been reciting in public since five, earning my living talking in public since then and my language began to leave me till it came down to this poem best exemplifying what I'm trying to say by Rumi, the famous Sufi poet. I used to want buyers for my words now I wish someone would buy me away from words. I've made a lot of charmingly profound images, scenes with Abraham and Abraham's father Hazar who is also famous for icons. I'm tired of doing what I've been doing. Then one image came without

[21:48]

form and I quit. Look for someone else to tend this shop. I'm out of the image-making business. Finally, I know the freedom of madness. A random image arrives, I scream, get out! And it disintegrates. Now it was said of Tolstoy that all his writings were but a journey of ten thousand leagues around himself. And looking back to the day that I first spoke in public, I see that all my talking has been the same thing. Written on air instead of paper which is fortunate because there's nothing left to show my tracks. But it has been an unceasing and in some moments passionate and terrifying experience. What is at the heart of this effort? Now that's where I left my script that I'm reading last night. This morning I was up before the wake-up bell and I began tidying up my study. And as I put Bink's manuscript

[22:50]

back into the box that she'd sent it to me in, I saw that I had not taken out the last of a series of photographs of herself as a little girl. She had used them as divisions between the various sections of her book. And on the back of the one piece that was still in the box, there was a quotation from Gerard Manley Hopkins, the famous Jesuit poet. Each mortal thing does one thing and the same. Selves pose itself. Myself it speaks and spells, crying, what I do is me, for that I came. And it is for the survival of that self that Hopkins talks about, that Bink suffered and struggled and finally was able in her book to say truly, for this I came. In the last pages, Pat tells of how against the desires of the male priest officiating at her father's funeral, she joins the procession in what she describes as, quote, the most venerable

[23:52]

old boy's club on the planet. Her hair was clipped close and she wore a robe and a cowl and sort of slipped in. This is what she writes. Weak shafts of winter sun refracted through the dark greens and blues of stained glass, suffusing the nave with the surreal aura. Melting beeswax and the sweet nectar from banks of flowers mingled with the aromatic wisps of incense, charging the air with a volatile and evocative mix. My father, I felt, would not have approved of finding his daughter here. Or would he? Now that he had burst the bonds of mortality, he was free as I would someday be free. Free of the pain of failed relationships, free of the guilt of what one had or had not done, free of that dark inheritance of each human person, the inheritance we imbibe with mother's milk, the legacy we assume with the stream of blood that nourishes the growing embryo, that mystery of human bondage which some call karma,

[24:53]

others original sin, and the philosophers among us call the problem of evil. All this was now dissolved. And it is now dissolved for Pat, as Blanche told her in the memorial service that we held at Green Gulch last week. Well, I have a question which I wanted to ask Bink once the work on her book was over. Do we have to wait until we are in our coffins or in a box of ashes on the altar before our suffering ends? Must death be, as it was for Bink before she wrote the book, the long-wished-for release from the mystery of human bondage? Or could we secure our freedom in the here and now? She and I had talked around that question. I mean, she was knowledgeable about Buddhism and I had a certain insight into the way Catholics work on the problem. So we had some dialogue going on this. And interestingly enough, it was her agent who sensed that the victorious

[25:57]

ending of the first draft, which I read, where she is able to face her father's death and recognize his freedom and look towards her own, might only be the end of the prologue that she had still to add to the book maybe a page or just two to indicate in some way her continued practice into an understanding of self that was not what Hopkins had declared to be. I think she had a glimpse of this because she sent me in some papers along with the manuscript a poem which I had given her at Green Gulch and which I don't remember having had passed to her. It's the enlightenment verse of an ancient and anonymous monk. You before me standing, O my eternal self, from my first glimpse you have been my secret love. I'm sure that Bing can probably all of us at least once, if only for an instant,

[26:59]

have had a glimpse of that eternal self, fallen in love with it, and our lives have been altered. But what we want are not the words of poets and philosophers, no matter how beautiful and fine the words may be, but we want it all. We want to see standing before us our eternal self. And that eternal self is at the center of every religion's concern. And what does Buddhism say on this question? Those of you who have heard my Sasan instruction know what the Buddha said. One thing and one thing only do I teach. The nature of suffering and how to end it. This is where transcendentalism and Buddhism come to a divide. Allow me to end with an attempt to show how that divide runs like a San Andreas fault through the landscape of our common concern with well-being and the happiness of all. This morning we had orioke breakfast

[28:03]

in the zendo. This is one of our many formal rituals designed only to do one thing, focus our attention on something that we are in the habit of taking for granted. Have you ever heard the... I heard it was a Scotch blessing. I think it's probably pejorative. Good bread, good meat, good God, let's eat. Anybody here ever heard that or am I the only one? One, two, three, so I didn't make it up, right Alex? Well, our morning blessing on food is a little longer than that. We begin with honoring the Buddhas and also commemorating the innumerable labors that brought us this food. And you're sitting there and maybe something very tasty that you've been looking forward to getting is right in the bowl, right underneath your nose, and you have to sit there and sit there and sit there. But, there is one line in our morning

[29:05]

blessing, food blessing, that is to me most important. We ask, may all be free from self-clinging. It is this clinging to that self, which was for Pat, as it is for all of us, the source of our suffering and also the source of our personal existence. It was that self that directed Emerson in his direction and I in mine. So it was possible that one day he and I, along with Emily, Henry, all the other transcendentalists would meet. But now, no matter how large and capacious such a heart may be, it is still an enclosure. No matter how thin the membrane at the bottom may be, which allows us to sense the pulsation of other hearts, it is still a barrier. And only when there is no longer anything left to give us the mistaken idea, that idea,

[30:05]

the mistaken experience that there is a self here and another there, will this suffering of self-clinging cease. Here's how Dr. Shohei Ando, professor of American literature at Okayama University, put it in 1970 when he lectured on Transcendentalism and Zen at the San Jose State. Transcendentalism asserts that reality must be found within man and can get in touch with it at the bottom of the heart. This is called the eternal one, or the perennial source of life. In short, the world of Transcendentalism is a relative world of one and many, with the temporal and the eternal, the finite and the infinite, the mortal and the immortal, man and the oversoul, meet at the bottom of the heart. In Transcendentalism, the soul is a solid foundation on which man is supported,

[31:05]

but it is unsearchable and unanalyzable. Man is only receptive of the light of the soul. He cannot see the luminary itself. Zen, however, does not regard anything corresponding to Emerson's God or eternal one as reality, because the bottom of the heart, where he saw God, is entwined with the remnants of egotism, attachment to the conscious self, which makes it difficult for us to go out of the prison of that self and ascertain thoroughly what reality is. Accordingly, as long as we stay within the framework of a conscious self, we are only receptive of the light coming from reality, but we cannot see the luminary itself. The third Chinese ancestor in Xinjianme wrote this, While we are only illuminated by a light, we lose sight of reality. And so the professor says we must

[32:09]

exhaust ourselves until the bottom of the conscious self is broken through and we are freed into the universe. Then he tells a story of a disciple who approached Master Taozong, who was weighing some flax. And the monk said, What is, Buddha? Taozong pointed at the flax and said, This flax weighs three pounds. For Taozong, everything in nature, including the flax weighing three pounds, was essentially regarded as a source of light illuminating the entire universe. Earlier on in the poem that I read that Emerson wrote, I am the doubter in the doubt, I am the hymn the Brahman sings, we have an equivalent again from Buddha's literature. No god, no

[33:11]

Brahma can be called the maker of this wheel of life. Empty phenomena roll on, dependent on conditions only. And again, Taozong, the essential self does not belong to the world of time. One moment is ten thousand years. There is no far or near. Ten directions are in our presence. Maximum is minimum. There is no boundary. Minimum is maximum. No circumference is visible. It's only a book, right? Only a professor lecturing to some students at a university. So we've made a big circle, gotten nowhere, back at the beginning of things. What is very discouraging to me,

[34:12]

to use a light word, is that I have been aware of all of this more than thirty-five years ago, and I did nothing about it. I've read this poem a number of times before, because I guess I knew it meant something to me. I was trying to find out what it meant. And finally, I think I got it from Emerson. I got a clue from Emerson. Somewhere in all of this book, Emerson is quoted as saying, Henceforth forever I forego the yoke of men's opinions. I will be light-hearted as a bird and live with God. Wonderful. I think that line, I will live with God, may have been the seed for this poem, which I wrote in the middle of my political life. When I was young, I lived with God, and in my innocence I loved him, beard and all.

[35:12]

But he was old, with a sense of sin and jealous in a very nasty way. So every time a youthful I would stray, he'd drag me home, take down his book, and read to me of love that others gave. Once God caught me in a field with Homer, who also had a beard, but his was red. God let out such a roar that Homer fled, but when he stuck out his sacred foot for me to kiss, I clutched it to him, he stood up and hurled him down. He struck his head upon a common stone. God was dead. I buried him there among the wheat. The work was easy for the weight was light. Then I went home and burned his book, and on his altar wine stayed six days drunk, to wake up sober in an empty room. Can we live without words? Or rather, can we find a way how to live with words and not be caught by them like those vines that you see in the jungles of Indonesia that grow around

[36:14]

the temples and even finally take over the face of Buddha statues? In the morning, we frequently recite one of the sutras in which it says, hearing the words, you should understand the source. Don't make up standards on your own. How do you do this? It's not enough to say zazen because it's meaningless unless you do it. But Rumi has another poem in which he may give us some direction. If you want to be free from your obsession with words and with beautiful lettering, make one stroke down. There is no self, no characteristics, no personality, just a bright center where you have the knowledge of the prophets and the ancestors without the need of books or interpreters. Thank you.

[37:28]

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