I vow to taste the truth of the Tathagata's words. Good morning, everybody. Good morning. It's nice to see you. It's so nice, such a full room of people. No one is killing one another. No one is even hitting anybody. Probably nobody hates the person sitting next to them. Everybody is peaceful and quiet. It's kind of a shame to ruin it by talking. But, I guess, regrettably, I will talk.

[01:16]

Today, I want to actually, not really give a Dharma talk, but talk about poetry today. And, in a way, there is a strong tension between poetry and Dharma. Poetry seems to be about self-expression, which seems like the opposite, in a way, of religion, which seems to be about self-transcendence. Looking at poetry from the standpoint of practice, Dharma, religion, poetry can look pretty self-indulgent. It can look like poetry is encouraging exactly that which religion wants to leap over,

[02:24]

our human passions, our human confusion. And from the point of view of poetry, religion can look like restriction, not only restriction in lifestyle, but also restriction in thinking and feeling. Thinking and feeling according to doctrine, according to the way you are supposed to think and feel, like the Buddha taught that we are supposed to think and feel. So, you can have these two extreme caricatures of the, on the one hand, the drunken, self-willed, immoral poet, and on the other hand, the straight-laced, pious, Puritan, religious person. So, how do these two guys meet each other and learn how to get along?

[03:28]

And it is a problem. And it's been my problem for my whole life, just about. The trouble with being human, and it is a problem, you know, being human, the trouble with it is that one has no choice, in a way, no matter how hard you try. You really have no choice but to be yourself. And yet, if you look closely enough, it will be clear that being yourself is unworkable. So, therefore, religion has been created to how to cope with this problem. This is basically what it comes down to, right?

[04:32]

You have no choice but to be yourself, being yourself is unworkable. Therefore, you know, sit down, breathe, deal with it somehow. And the point of practice, Dharma practice, Zen practice, but I think any kind of spirituality, if it's thorough enough, the point of it is that you would leap beyond being yourself into the sky or something. But then, of course, because of gravity, you have to land. And where could you land but back on yourself? There's no other place to land. So I think that spiritual practice is inherently idealistic.

[05:36]

Maybe this is not so of indigenous religions, but as far as the, whatever we would call, non-local religions are concerned, like Buddhism, Christianity, and so on. I think that idealism is always at the heart of them. All religions analyze things like this, that we human beings are somehow in an unacceptable, problematic situation. Depending on the description, different religions say, you know, we're sick, or we need to be healed, or we're in sin, or we're in ignorance, or in completion. However you put it, in whatever tradition, something needs adjustment, fixing, transcendence, and we need to go beyond it, we need to heal. And that's the journey of spiritual practice.

[06:40]

We need to change. We need to develop virtues. We need to see reality, see our true nature. We need to become enlightened. And we need to make effort to go in that direction. And so this effort is by definition an idealistic effort, straining to go beyond where we are, knowing that where we are is not really enough, or correct, or healing. But if we get too much involved in this kind of religious idealism, in other words, if we cannot find a way to affirm ourself the way it is, and see ourself the way it is, as already enlightenment, which we would see if only we could stand with ourselves without healing,

[07:43]

without hindrance, if we can't have that kind of radical acceptance of ourself the way we are, then the idealism of religion becomes a poison, a human poison. And certainly we have plenty of evidence of this. One doesn't need to study history too long to find evidence of this, and one doesn't even need to look at history. One can look at the newspaper of today, and one doesn't even need to look at the newspaper, just look at your own mind. And you can see the poison of idealistic practice. So that's why it seems as if spiritual practice needs poetry. You see? And poetry needs spiritual practice.

[08:44]

Or to put it another way, the ideal needs the personal, and the personal needs the ideal. They complete each other. About eleven years ago here we had a big poetry conference called the Poetics of Emptiness, something like that. We had a whole bunch of poets in this room, doing various things, reading and performing and talking. We had one evening where we had a bunch of poets up here on the tans, performing, and at one point we started chanting the enmei jikku kanan gyo, and we went on and on. We must have chanted it for maybe half an hour, just chanting with the entire room, chanting. And then we abruptly stopped, and it was the frog time of the year.

[09:49]

So when we stopped there was silence, and then the frogs started peeping, one or two, and then ten thousand. It was one of the great moments. Anyway, in the current issue of Tricycle magazine, Andrew Schelling, the poet, has an article in there about Asian, Far East Asian poetry. And in the article he mentions that night, because he was here that night, that weekend, and he quotes me. He says, and at that time I said, I didn't say this, but it doesn't really matter. Some of the best things that you are given credit for you've never said or did. But that's history, that's life, that's how it goes. So this is not what I said, I don't think. Maybe I did. He quotes me as saying, meditation is when you sit down and do nothing.

[10:52]

Poetry is when you sit down and do something. Profound, right? So then he says, so I could have said that, I'm that profound, right? But then he says, with these sage words, with these sage words, he nearly, no not nearly, neatly, with these sage words, he neatly wiped out centuries of debate in India, China, and Japan over whether poetry is a legitimate pursuit for the earnest Buddhist in search of realization. So how he figured out that that statement eliminated centuries of debate, I don't know.

[11:57]

It would be nice to think that it did, but I can't see it myself. That's what he said. And then he quotes a typical poem, and you find many poems like this written by Buddhists in China and Japan. This is a poem by Bo Jury, who is one of the great poets of Chinese literature, written in the 9th century, a very typical sort of saying. Bo Jury writes, Since earnestly studying the Buddhist doctrine of emptiness, I've learned to still all the common states of mind. Only the devil of poetry I have yet to conquer. Let me come on a bit of scenery and I start my idle droning. It's a very typical poem about poetry. In my own practice,

[12:58]

I asked one of my teachers about writing, and he said, Stop writing. Later I asked another one of my teachers about writing, and he said, Well, you might have to write a poem now and again for a ceremony. But being a bad boy, I didn't listen to them, I'm sorry to say, and I've continued in my folly for many years. So, the question of poetry remains a problem and a difficulty, which used to bother me, otherwise I wouldn't have asked those teachers about it. But it doesn't bother me that much anymore. There's a famous line of Blake, which says, I don't know where it's from, but it's in my head somewhere, it says, This corporeal world's a fiction. All it is, is contradiction, Blake said.

[14:06]

And I, myself, don't see how anyone could put together a life that isn't a life of contradiction, as long as we're in this body. And if someone tells me that her life is not a contradiction, I usually just smile and nod, and wait for the other shoe to drop, as it usually does. So, our life is a contradiction, and there's no escape. But contradiction is only contradiction in our mind, in our thought, in our concepts. If we can relax and just let concepts swirl, without being attached by them, caught by them, then contradiction's okay, and we don't mind, at least most of the time. In the Buddhism of the Far East, in Japan, in China,

[15:13]

you could say, in a way, that the teaching is divided into two parts. The poetry part, and the part that you read about in the Zen books. And we often get caught by religious writing, religious texts, and we forget that they are writing, they are texts. And texts have their own conventions. It's one way, an important way of looking at our life. And in religious texts, there are certain things that are said, and certain things that are left out. And if we only study the spiritual texts, it's possible we may be getting a one-sided idea of how people actually practice. In a way, you could say that religious texts are not about real practice. They're about ideal practice.

[16:16]

And the Buddhist poets in Asia put the realism of their lives, all the longing and the suffering, love and the loss of love, loneliness, ecstasy, confusion, into the poems. Studying Buddhist texts might make you think that we're supposed to get over all of that stuff. But my own opinion is that getting over being human is not our practice. It's not the point of the practice. I think the main thing is not getting over being human, but understanding being human, really understanding being human, really embracing being human. And in that understanding, in that embracing, we're transforming our humanness to real humanness with warmth and without holding back. So, what I want to do this morning is just read some poems for you

[17:20]

from three of my favorite priest poets of Far East. Sagyo, Ikkyu and Ryokan. All three of them were Buddhist priests, renunciate monks, and all three of them were poets. In fact, they're all Japanese and they are probably, I don't know, if there are ten great poets in the history of Japan, these three are certainly among the ten. So, I'll just tell you a little bit about the life of each one and read a few poems and that'll be the rest of my talk. So, Sagyo, I'll take them in sort of chronological order, Sagyo was the earliest of the poets. He was a Buddhist monk before the Zen school came to Japan. So, he was probably a Tendai priest, Tendai monk,

[18:23]

and he was originally born in a high-class family and he was a courtier, probably like a temple guard, something like that, in a time of great political turmoil. He died just ten years before Dogen was born, so this was a time when there was a big change in Japanese culture, the time just before the samurai period of the warlords, when the polite court life of Kyoto was beginning to fall apart. So, he abruptly, at the age of 23, requested permission from the court to leave his post as a courtier and become a monk, and the rest of his life he mostly wandered, traveled back and forth, living in small hermitages,

[19:24]

sometimes in the capital but mostly away. And his poetry, he was really the first great Japanese poet who took up the themes of travel and loneliness, suffering and permanence, and especially the healing beauty of nature. He wrote a lot about the moon. It would appear that he had a practice of meditating on the moon, staring at the moon for many hours. And so he wrote many of his poems. The moon is a subject, and also cherry blossoms. So the Japanese love of the moon and cherry blossoms always comes back to Saigyo's poetry. And the famous haiku poet Basho, who was some centuries later, took his inspiration from Saigyo. So I'll read you a few of Saigyo's poems.

[20:30]

He wrote in the tanka form, which is 31 syllables, usually in four or five lines. On a mountain stream, a mandarin duck made single by loss of its mate. Now floats quietly over ripples, a frame of mind I know. So the mandarin ducks, I guess maybe some people here are naturalists, but I don't know if it's true, but the Japanese thought that mandarin ducks made it for life. And when one of them died, the other one would not mate again. And they seemed to hang out together, just the two of them. So over and over in Japanese poetry, mandarin ducks are an image of this sort of lifetime partnership.

[21:32]

On a mountain stream, a mandarin duck made single by loss of its mate. Now floats quietly over ripples, a frame of mind I know. That wonderful sense of loss and loneliness, and accepting that, just floating on the ripples, loss and loneliness. Another one. The moon, as dawn breaks, glides freely through thick clouds, layer on layer. Then, strata of the past as well, one by one, open before my mind. The strangeness of memory we take for granted, but how could it be, you know, that we would remember in the mystery of memory opening,

[22:37]

like curtains falling away. How the past is lingering in our minds in the present. And how odd it is that when you really are present, letting go of distraction, layer on layer of the past is there right in front of you. The moon, as dawn breaks, glides freely through thick clouds, layer on layer. Then, strata of the past as well, one by one, open before my mind. The first sprig, just breaking into bloom,

[23:40]

what if I would snap it off to use it for a memorial to someone torn away from me? The first sprig, just breaking into bloom, what if I would snap it off to use it for a memorial to someone torn away from me? To appreciate this poem, you have to realize that in Heian court poetry, and maybe everybody knows this, that in Japan, classical Japanese poetry and culture, nature is quite domesticated. It's always peaceful. It's changing, but it's always peaceful. It's never violent, which of course is not so. In fact, nature is often violent, wrenching. Things happen like we just saw in Central America,

[24:42]

a natural event, a tremendous tragedy. So it was quite radical for Saigyo to talk about snapping off that cherry branch. I think it would have been very jarring to the sensibilities of his Japanese readers. It's really, even though to us it sounds quite tame, it's actually quite a violent expression of grief. That first cherry blossom to snap off that first sprig, snap it off, and hold it up as a memorial for someone who's torn away from my life, probably someone murdered in the troubles of those times. Another one. Detached observer of blossoms finds himself in time intimate with them, so when they separate from the branch,

[25:43]

it's he who falls deeply into grief. Detached observer of blossoms finds himself in time intimate with them, so when they separate from the branch, it's he who falls deeply into grief. So one imagines that Saigyo would meditate for many, many hours watching cherry blossoms fall and feeling deeply inside his own grief. Maybe one more. Winter has withered everything in this mountain place. Dignity is in its desolation now and beauty in the cold clarity of its moon. Winter has withered everything

[26:44]

in this mountain place. Dignity is in its desolation now and beauty in the cold clarity of its moon. There's much about the earth and its changes as it is about our own mind and suffering that we can feel in our own mind when we feel its spaciousness of suffering. When we don't try to escape from suffering, we can see dignity in its desolation and beauty in its clarity. So a very different kind of poet was Ikkyu who's equally as well-known in Japan as much probably for his life and his things that he did as for his poems.

[27:46]

So he was born in the 14th century, at the end of the 14th century, 1394 and lived until he was to be 87 years old. And he was probably, they think, also from a very high-born family but he was an illegitimate son of a courtier so he was, she was kicked out of court and before Ikkyu was born and so he was a child in very tough circumstances and as happened many times he was given to a monastery to be raised because his mother couldn't raise him. This was very common in Asia. So a lot of the Zen monks had very tough upbringings. Sometimes, I'm sure, in the monasteries young boys were raised with kindness and sweetness but I'm sure also sometimes they weren't. And this probably was the case with Ikkyu because he was a very bitter guy, actually,

[28:48]

most of his life. Fiery personality but angry guy. So he lived in this monastery from the age of five and when he got old enough to sort of have any sense of discrimination about what was going on he was very bitter about what life was like in the monastery. He felt he had a real sense of spiritual practice, sincere practice but he felt like the monastery life was just full of false piety and spiritual posturing and everybody was phony like a lot of adolescent boys you know, feel. He felt. So he got really disgusted and he left at the age of 15 and he went to he found someone who he had confidence in who was a priest who was teaching in a small hermitage. So he went there and he stayed there until that master died.

[29:48]

And I can only imagine that that he was he really found a father figure in that master. So when the master died he really was in despair and he almost committed suicide. But then he did manage to find another teacher and his enlightenment experience is very famous. He was floating along on a lake on a boat in Lake Biwa and doing zazen I guess and he had an enlightenment experience. And then he came back and when he reported this to the master the master was very impressed and gave him a certificate of Inca you know and Ikkyu got totally mad you know threw it on the ground and stomped on it and left. That's the kind of guy he was. He was disgusted with this certification of his awakening. After that master died Ikkyu was 34 years old

[30:51]

and the rest of his life he just wandered around. He spent about half of his time in remote mountain hermitages and the other half of his time in cities drinking and going to brothels and hanging around with artists and things like that and he was very influential in almost all the Japanese arts. He probably was the person who created what became the tea ceremony was very influential in the creation of the no drama flower arranging painting calligraphy he practiced all those things and is considered the patron of most of those arts because of his time in the city. Tremendous artistic talent and he would go around he was a real bad boy you know would go around in funky robes and tweak the authorities he had nothing good to say whatsoever about the Zen establishment which he considered utterly corrupt. His chief topic

[31:52]

of his poetry was sexuality and he wrote many pornographic poems that I would not read you today but also many lovely love poems and toward the end of his life when he was in his 70s he fell in love with a blind koto strumming courtier Lady Mori and many of his poems are addressed to her how happy he is to be with Lady Mori. So I'll read you a few of his poems. One short pause between the leaky road here and the never leaking way there. If it rains let it rain. If it storms let it storm. So each moment

[32:53]

of our lives you know, we're suspended exactly between the stupidity of our humanness and the perfection of our Buddhahood. That's each moment suspended over that abyss. So Ikkyu's advice is no use worrying just jump. One short pause between the leaky road here and the never leaking way there. If it rains let it rain. If it storms let it storm. Another one. Bliss and sorrow love and hate light and shadow hot and cold joy and anger self and other the enjoyment of poetic beauty may well lead to hell. But look what we find strewn all along

[33:53]

our path. Plum blossoms and peach flowers. Bliss and sorrow love and hate light and shadow hot and cold joy and anger self and others the enjoyment of poetic beauty may well lead to hell. But look what we find strewn all along our path. Plum blossoms and peach flowers. Day and night I cannot keep you out of my thoughts. In the darkness on an empty bed the longing deepens. I dream of us joining hands exchanging words of love. But then the dawn bell shatters my reverie and rends my heart. Probably had to go

[34:54]

to Zazen or something. So the Japanese have always had a flexible attitude toward moral precepts. And Ikkyo was supposed to be a celibate monk as all Japanese at that time Japanese monks were. Later on the stricture against intimate relationships was lifted by the government on purpose to try to destroy the Buddhist church. That's pretty funny when you think that's why they lifted the ban on probably that's what historians say anyway. The Buddhist church was getting too troublesome too strong so they wanted to mess it up. So they said okay you priests must marry that'll fix you. But at the time this was before that and Ikkyo

[35:55]

had taken vows of celibacy but like I say the Japanese always understood them in a metaphorical sense. So you know if he had been a Catholic priest of the same period he would have written the same poem only destroyed it. But since he was a Japanese Buddhist celibate priest he wrote this poem and you know kept it. Day and night I cannot keep you out of my thoughts. In the darkness on an empty bed the longing deepens. I dream of us joining hands exchanging words of love. But then the dawn bell shatters my reverie and rends my heart. Another one like that says even if I were a god or a Buddha you'd still be on my mind. I sit beneath

[36:58]

the lamp a skinny monk chanting love songs the fierce autumn wind nearly bowls me over and my heart is choked with black clouds. Even if I were a god or a Buddha you'd still be on my mind. I sit beneath the lamp a skinny monk chanting love songs the fierce autumn wind nearly bowls me over and my heart is choked with black clouds. Classical Japanese poetry is sung and chanted. So he probably was singing love songs. This is one many poems as I said were addressed to the blind Lady Mori. Some of them are quite graphic but this one every night blind Mori accompanies me

[37:59]

in song under the covers two mandarin ducks whisper to each other. We promise to be together forever but right now this old fellow enjoys an eternal spring. Every night blind Mori accompanies me in song under the covers two mandarin ducks whisper to one another. We promise to be together forever but right now this old fellow enjoys an eternal spring. Then the last one of Ikkyu there are many poems where he complains bitterly about sin temples and so on. This is just one taste of that. Studying texts and stiff meditation can make you lose your original mind. A solitary tune by a fisherman though can be

[39:00]

an invaluable treasure. Dusk rain on the river the moon peeking in and out of the clouds. Elegant beyond words he chants his song night after night. One of the great ironies of Ikkyu's life is that when he was about 82 or 3 the great monastery which still exists Daitoku-ji monastery in Kyoto was destroyed by fire and Ikkyu by that time was so well known that they really leaned on him to become avid of Daitoku-ji because they knew that he would be able to raise the funds to rebuild it. And so out of duty he accepted the post and he was avid of Daitoku-ji for the last six or seven years of his life which probably were completely miserable I can just imagine

[40:00]

poor Ikkyu being avid of Daitoku-ji but he did actually raise the funds and rebuild the entire monastery and died in the process. So that's a little about Ikkyu. He's always been one of my heroes Ikkyu role model. So the last one I'll mention is Ryokan who's still later I always say Ryokan was roughly a contemporary contemporaneous with George Washington. He was born in 1758 and he's also one of my heroes my greatest of all heroes. He was unlike the others he was actually in our school he was a Soto monk and he's probably probably I don't really know but I think maybe that he's the most beloved figure in Japanese culture and

[41:01]

when Yasunari Kawabata won the Nobel Prize in 1968 Kawabata was his writing was very sort of very much coming out of the heart of Japanese culture and when Kawabata accepted the Nobel Prize in 1968 he felt he was accepting it on behalf of classical Japanese culture and he mentioned that the greatest figure an emblem of that culture was the Zen poet priest Ryokan legendary figure Ryokan grew up in a small village unlike the others was not from a high born family was from a small village family his father was the head man of the village and since he was the oldest son it was expected that he would become the head man but he didn't have it in him you know he wasn't the head man type and at the age of 17

[42:03]

without asking anybody's permission he just abruptly entered the local Zen temple some people say that the reason that happened is that he was like practicing to be the village head man and he was involved in mediation between two parties angry with each other and he was so honest telling each one what the other thought of the other one that they completely almost were at each other's throats so honesty was one of his characteristics and innocence and those are not good characteristics for a village head man I guess or a politician of any kind so he went into the monastery and locally and then he met a teacher from another place and followed that teacher and did 10 years of very hard Zen training in a small Sodo style monastery and he had an awakening

[43:05]

experience and got a certification which he did not stomp on he put it in his drawer or something then he stayed with that teacher until the teacher died Ikkyo was 30 I mean Ryokan was 33 years old and he went wandering he wandered around for 5 years and at the end of that time he found out that his father committed suicide by hurling himself into the river in Kyoto and so Ryokan went home for the funeral and never left he stayed the rest of his life in little hermitages around the town where he grew up and was a familiar figure in the village he didn't have any students or disciples or do any temple work he just lived in his hermitage and begged for his food everyday and more or less wasted his time he liked to play with children and many

[44:06]

of his poems are about playing ball with children playing hide and seek with the children and the children he was seemed to be if you believe the poems and the legends more of a child than the children so the children were always teasing him for being such a child and he also like Ikkyu had a wonderful friendship when he was last years of his life he met a nun named Teshin who became his probably his only student and she was also a poet so they had a wonderful liaison in the last years of his life depending on who you believe they weren't romantically involved or maybe they were you know Burton Watson says categorically oh definitely platonic relationship but John Stevens who writes about loves to write about all the Buddhist sex lives said oh no

[45:06]

surely they were lovers and who knows but like actually Saigyo and Ikkyu Ryokan never really published his poems maybe a few here and there and it was after he died that Teshin put together the first collection of his poems and there are many delightful stories about Ryokan which are probably not true but they probably are stories that do come out of his real character I'll tell you a few of my favorite ones maybe you've heard them before maybe you've even heard me tell them before but that's okay somebody once told him that it's good luck if you find money on the road so he was really impressed with that so when he was out begging and somebody put some coins in his bowl he threw them on the road and then of course he found them right away and he said well that wasn't so impressive you're supposed

[46:07]

to be happy when you find money on the road great happiness would ensue so he found the money and he said well I'm not that happy so he tried it a couple more times and didn't really do much for him but in the course of doing it he actually lost track of where the money was so he really lost it you know and so he spent days looking for it and he finally found it and then he really was happy so he said that is a true saying if you find money on the road you will be happy another time I think a relative of his had a troublesome son and so as a kindly you know religious local religious person they said will you please come to our house Ryokan and see if you can Ryokan's son so Ryokan went over to the house and he you know had the meal and stayed there and never said a word and the father the whole time is waiting for the Buddhist sermon to start

[47:07]

where he's gonna Ryokan's gonna say to the son you know never said a word and he was old by this time and so when he was leaving the father asked the son would you please help him with his sandals and the son helped Ryokan on with his sandals and as he was doing so he felt a warm drop on his cheek and he looked up and there was Ryokan weeping and the son knew why and after that he changed quite a bit kind of a beautiful story I think there is another story about playing with children where he was playing hide and seek and he hid in an outhouse and the children knew where he was but they thought well we'll play a trick on him we won't try to find him so they left the

[48:07]

game was over they left Ryokan still in the outhouse crouching there you know and he's like attentively waiting you know in the outhouse that they would find him and hours go by he's still there and in fact the whole night goes by he's there all night the next morning the farmer comes into the outhouse there's Ryokan so and there are many stories like that about Ryokan but there's one about a thief a thief comes to Ryokan's house of course he had very little very few possessions but the thief took everything you know he's writing brushes and so on probably his one or two books and the thief jumped out the window just as Ryokan was coming in the front door and Ryokan yells out to the thief it's a full moon night yells out to the thief as the thief is going you know if I

[49:08]

could give you the example of myself you know living on a farm I've always appreciated this practice when he would be in the fields and he would see farmers working he would pull out his brush and he would make a quick sketch of the farmer and he would put it on the against the rock and he would make prostrations and offerings to it no farmers we don't eat right so he appreciated that we should all appreciate that every day so his poems he wrote poems in Japanese and Chinese as was the custom and I'll read you just a few of his poems they're very simple usually here's one for children for the children children shall we be going now to the hill of Yahiko

[50:09]

to see the violets to see if the violets are blooming children shall we be going now to the hill of Yahiko to see how the violets are blooming another one those old days I wonder did I dream them or were they real in the night I listened to the autumn rain Buddha is in your mind and the way goes nowhere and don't look for anything but this if you point your cart north when you want to go south how will you arrive Buddha is your mind and the way goes nowhere don't look for anything but this

[51:09]

if you point your cart north when you want to go south how will you arrive and this is a poem about the feeling of Ryokan's life it's a beautiful poem about the long

[52:26]

winter night seems endless when will it be day no flame in the lamp nor charcoal in the fireplace lying in bed listening to the sounds of freezing rain to an old man dreams come easily i let my thoughts drift the room is empty and both the sake and oil are used up the long winter night when i was a boy studying in an empty hall over and over i had to fill the lamp with oil even now the task seems disagreeable the long winter night just suffering you know period just endurance of suffering something

[53:31]

wonderful about it though and here's a poem about zazen this is my favorite poem about zazen practice he would often sit for many hours by himself in his little hermitage in the still night by the vacant window wrapped in monk's robes i sit in meditation navel and nostrils lined up straight ears paired to the slope of his window whitens the moon comes up rains stopped but drops go on dripping wonderful the mood of this moment distant vast known only to me in the

[54:33]

still night by the vacant window wrapped in monk's robes i sit in meditation navel and nostrils lined up straight ears paired to the slope of shoulders window whitens the moon comes up rains stopped but drops go on dripping wonderful the mood of this moment distant vast known only to me so rains stopped but drops go on dripping the moon comes up this is a real kind expression of awakening you know to practice means to stop there's this famous story of buddha who was walking along and the murderer Angulimala wanted to kill buddha so the murderer started

[55:33]

running as fast as he could after buddha and buddha just kept walking in a normal slow pace but Angulimala couldn't catch him so Angulimala Angulimala made some expression of disbelief and you know how could this be and buddha said it's because I've stopped why don't you stop too but when you stop life goes on drops keep dripping so I thought even though it's embarrassing to do so I thought I would end today with a poem of my own because this whole thing is because I have a new book about of poetry which is all about Japan and so I thought I would read one poem from my book and then conclude

[56:34]

this morning this poem comes at the end of the book and it's for Kathy is the title of it Kathy is my wife traveling and bowing record memory I've been far away lately without you now returning I see nothing could move me from that place interior to you forsake of what we've made condition of trust I hear return again there we go long past bodies into light beyond fear or loss where here is not

[57:34]

a place to be away from so you're very kind to sit still for all these poems I hope you enjoyed it they are intentionally penetrating I think this morning I tripled my lifetime sale of books I have actually a number of books maybe six or seven but they're very obscure and one has to be persistent in order to get them so I don't know how many I never I never ask how many copies they've sold I'm kind of scared to ask you know and most of the publishers are out of business or something at this point but I'm sure that today I tripled my lifetime sale so thanks for

[58:34]

everybody's generosity in buying books so I didn't realize that I would be signing books at the tea I thought we would do it now so I was gonna read a little bit from the book to encourage people to buy it but now I don't have to do that so we could do whatever you want do you have things that you'd like to bring up yes I really like you talking about his EQ yeah what a relief since I'm taking a precepts class right now and I struggle with it a lot I like your remark about him taking the precepts metaphorically I would like to hear more about that well the Japanese are not

[59:38]

necessarily admired for this taking the precepts metaphorically and actually in Asian Buddhism the Japanese are considered by most of the Asian Buddhists all over the world Chinese Vietnamese Thai Burmese everywhere the Chinese Buddhists are considered shabby this is one of the reasons why this and the Buddhist establishments complicity with the militarism of the Japanese government in the 20th century is another reason why so that's the downside of it and I think that in Western Buddhism in the last 20 years there's been a much stronger sense of really trying to be aware of conduct

[60:39]

and be more serious about it on the other hand it's very easy for anybody especially Westerners with our history of puritanical mind to get into a very heavy judgmental right and wrong kind of mentality around any kind of moral rules and this is pretty much counter to the sense of morality in Buddhism in Buddhism morality is in the service of liberation you know in Judeo-Christian tradition right and wrong is ordained by God and it's a harsh and judging God so if you do something wrong you're crossing the big guy you know and that's bad and dangerous but in Buddha Dharma ethics and morality is practiced to end suffering we notice

[61:39]

that conduct that is not ethical creates suffering for oneself and others and creates and has momentum toward more suffering one realizes this by looking at the mind and so one naturally feels well I wanna behave in such a way that there's freedom and happiness for myself and those around me and that's the fountainhead of morality in Buddha Dharma but that's a very flexible and non-judgmental so to speak approach so that like there's a famous saying of the sixth ancestor that I always think of where he says I see my own I see but I don't see and they say what do you mean you see but you don't see and he says I see my own mistakes but I don't see the mistakes of others so there's no sense of judging others conduct but rather making the effort to have good conduct oneself so

[62:41]

so there's something to be said for the Japanese ease and non-judgmental style of conduct in relation to morality it's just like in Japan there's no such thing maybe it's changed now but up until recently there was no such thing as alcoholism in Japan there were only people who liked their sake you know with all the same consequences that we're familiar with but they just didn't look at it as alcoholism so there's something wonderful about that way of looking at the world and there's something also not so great about it so we have to find our own way but I think a figure like Ikkyu is really important for us because they're also like the fifth Dalai Lama in Tibet

[63:47]

is almost exactly the same kind of person as Ikkyu and his poems are all love poems the prostitutes and stuff like that there are figures like that I think in Western spirituality as well and they remind us to keep kind of straight and be aware of what's going on and see that life is complicated and morality is not simple well I think that the vows see it's an interesting thing in old Buddhism there were many specific vows and in Japanese Buddhism the vows that people take including in America the vows that we take are much broader

[64:47]

and so the idea is that these vows are koans you know the precepts are understood to be koans because like the first precept is vowing not to kill well immediately you realize there's no way not to kill you always kill and all the precepts are like that you know how do you understand these precepts how do you practice them they're koans and we all have to try to come to an understanding by ourselves so that's how the Japanese understood them and so for Ikkyu I think Ikkyu was genuinely a renunciate but he felt that the way that he lived his life was consonant with his inner quest for renunciation and freedom and there's a tradition in Buddhism you know the tantric tradition that he was more or less following which is the transformation of seemingly immoral acts with

[65:50]

transformed by one's purpose and by one's sincerity into positive actions and I think that was his understanding so he would have thought he would have felt I think I'm keeping my vow was about sexuality was not to harm someone sexually and I'm not doing that he would have thought I think he would have said my practices in the way I behave sexually is my own way of trying to understand the enlightened the enlightened side of sensual nature something like that but who knows what he would have said maybe he would have said well I'm just a failure as a Buddhist monk so it's something to think about how to be how to practice ethical conduct without shutting yourself down how to practice ethical conduct with a spirit of love instead of narrowness yeah Claire was that you?

[66:50]

I wanted to ask you a question about your conflict you did have about Ryan Kirby since many of your poems seem to be a beautiful capturing of a fatal moment of awareness and since Buddhist practice seems to be in part about being in the present moment fully aware where is your conflict in writing poetry? well I really don't have much of a conflict no when I was when I was in my years of most intense years of training I really wondered about it and I wondered see I had to find a way to poetry that was consonant with my practice so in the beginning if you think of poetry as writing about something like this happened

[67:50]

or I saw this or experienced this and now I'm going to write about it that seemed odd to me in a way after a while practicing it seemed as if I was my practice was being in the present moment and letting everything go why would I be carrying around all the stuff that happened before so that I could write poems about it it seemed like a ridiculous way to live I couldn't do it anymore that was my idea of writing and so I began to experiment really with ways to write that were absolutely expressions of the present moment and not about stories from the past or anything about myself so I had most of my writing is actually improvisational and experimental and with that kind of once I hit on that approach to writing then it really wasn't a problem for me anymore although it's in a way you know like I feel very shy about like

[68:51]

promoting books and this sort of thing you know all the things all the literary things like I never apply for literary prizes or try very hard to get my books published or any of that I feel kind of like oh I don't want to have a literary career you know because it's not appropriate for me in my life so all everything that I've done in that way has been just by chance or off the cuff you know what I mean I think that the poets who the real poets should you know get the prizes and have careers and all that so there's that kind of conflict but about the writing itself per se not so much conflict really especially at this point yeah yeah yeah I've thought a lot about the idea of art as self-expression or art as a spiritual inquiry and it seems to me that over time as my practice of making art seemed less separate

[69:54]

from just the rest of my life that the idea of self-expression sort of was no different from my everyday conduct right and looking at self-expression yes I'm a person I'm here and my conduct all the way through my life is an expression of myself and I was just wondering if that was something that you thought about a lot of I guess you were talking about it a little bit a moment ago but that whole idea that that your your work in fact the fact that it's more experimental you know than just a the idea that you are asking these questions rather than expressing them yeah well that's a good way to put it yeah yeah that and I see it like that I see my writing more as like you were saying a spiritual exploration more than as a form of self-expression yeah that's exactly it and also the other point that you made I agree with also that one of the things that I found

[70:55]

that was problematic about writing as self-expression is that writing as self-expression as I understood that seemed to go along with a sense of the that writing was important and the rest of one's life wasn't writing was privileged or art was privileged so that you saw you know a million stories especially in the west of these you know brilliant artists who were beating up their husbands and wives and drinking too much and having terrible you know personal lives and that didn't seem possible to me so I really felt like I was doing something quite different from that that my writing was coming out of my practice which yeah was the whole life rather than the writing was the important part and the rest of it wasn't so it's yeah it's an all of life is an exploration really right all of one's life is an exploration one's approach to to everything to one's relationships and one's ethics and one's art it's all an exploration

[71:56]

yeah and then when when you have to think about how you're going to publish or how you're going to make money and the whole idea of the kind of acknowledgement and judgment that you see that's the part that seems like other to me yeah right all the rest of it is just my life right right and then that part and I think that that kind of that kind of thing about not wanting to chase after that because you can't relate to it you know it's something that has happened with me my whole life yeah and yet in order to continue making art right you're stuck with it because in order to continue you have to you need to be supported right like you know I have never in a way I don't really care about publishing anything but I know that if I don't publish anything I won't can't go on to write that's the end of the work is when you publish it right that's that's just the way it seems to be you know so I have to publish so I keep trying to get my books published I don't try that hard you know but I keep trying

[72:57]

because that's part of the process even though it's sort of like too bad that it is but it is yeah yeah so yeah we can commiserate you and I Andre is an artist painter so yes I just wanted to add that I was telling you outside that I also write I'm really kind of surprised about the topic because I am a writer and specifically working with books and poems and so I don't come to very often but I'd like to I've been in San Francisco for a while and I'm really delighted with the topic of the book and working on my first book and wondering who will publish it do I have to self-publish it yeah I have to self-publish it because my teacher encouraged me to and so much of what you said has been helpful because I I'm in recovery and I used to

[73:57]

abuse substances and I was physically and sexually abused and so a lot of my poems are about that the trauma but then there's sort of like before and after where after I got into recovery my life became more spiritual I practiced Reiki and yoga and meditation and Ayurveda all sorts of things now and I feel like becoming a more spiritual person as time goes on those poems seem like they really almost seem like night and day in a way they're just like a cut-off point and so I'm I'm thinking about separating the book into two sections but I don't know why I'm wrangling on this but I'm not sure if I have a question I guess I just want to comment that I've been writing ever since I was a little child and it's been sort of therapeutic mostly I've been journaling and I have two huge boxes full of journals and I may find that that is the bulk of my work

[74:58]

as opposed to something like that but I definitely feel like it's good to write about if you have a spiritual experience or any kind of experience I think it's good to write about it but it is for me it's especially important to be spiritual and to recover from the trauma that I have and I think that my work can possibly help somebody else who has had experiences like me I don't know I guess I just wanted to affirm what you've done because I sense that you have a few options and I know I do and probably most writers do I think it's good to both write and publish sometimes I think I have published everything I just read a lot

[75:58]

of my journals and I don't know what's going on but that's so personal that I haven't done that but I wanted to congratulate you and thank you for the topic and maybe tell them from me too because I recently inherited some money and I've been living off the money while I was working on the book and I had a lot of conflict about that I should be out there in a 9 to 5 job and not working on a book because it's self-indulgent but hearing you speak made me feel like no I really have to do this I know underneath all my insecurities there's this drive I'm going to do this because I'm encouraged to because it's the right thing to do and writing can be a spiritual experience yeah so on

[76:58]

we go one step at a time yeah thank you David for yesterday I heard that a friend of mine who had a brother who was working on the roof that was his job and he called and he died he had a broken arm so since then I'm really wondering and thinking how can I be helpful for this person from New York in teaching me and get what can be said when someone loses someone that close how do you do that and how can you help them well

[77:59]

you know in dharma the knowledge of impermanence is always primary we know that each moment is impermanent and that all meeting ends in parting all arising ends in passing away all life ends in death and that to appreciate this and understand this is the deepest truth of being human so if we can hold this in our hearts and just be there when someone has a loss with the sense of knowing that loss is an important part of life not a mistake you know but just an important part of life and just with that spirit with that attitude that we can accept the loss although we may feel a tremendous sadness about it we can accept it and understand

[78:59]

it in that way then just to be there without saying anything even you know because sometimes you can't say anything you just feel the pain of it children family you know actually one never recovers from that one integrates perhaps but never forgets about it so if there's someone there who just can accept it and be helpful that's usually a comfort to people but they have to do the best they can so I'm sorry

[80:01]

that that happened it's awful yeah yeah I find myself that to be able to practice is a great consolation you know you have somewhere when you do zazen you know you have somewhere to take your own feeling you have a big space to put it into so for me this is a great comfort at the time of loss I can sit in zazen and just be with it you know I feel fortunate that I have that practice to contain it because I think when you don't it's very difficult when there's no spirituality to contain death and loss it's very difficult to deal with it and sometimes you know a person who has a spiritual practice and comes into someone's life even though they don't say or do anything like I was just

[81:01]

saying just to be there bringing that perspective without even speaking about it can be helpful to someone so that's what you have to do I think yeah well maybe I will read a couple parts in the book and then we'll close for a few minutes this book is called The Narrow Roads of Japan and it's actually it's there's a book called The Narrow Road to the North by the haiku poet Basho probably the most famous book in Japanese literature so this is a kind of take off

[82:02]

on that book and I'm not very and the funny part about it is this sort of conceit of the book is that it's very un-Japanese you know I don't have a very I'm not very knowledgeable about Japan nor do I I mean I consider myself to be a Western Buddhist practitioner so it's actually a book about how odd Japan is and how odd Japanese Buddhism is and it's written like Basho's book it's written in prose sections and then little verse sections Basho's Narrow Road to the North has a little prose part and then a little haiku I don't use haiku I use a four line verse form and I don't count syllables it's not you know syllable counting is not translatable across languages it seems to me so I don't try to count

[83:02]

syllables anyway I thought I'd read you a little few sections of it just for a few minutes October 15th this is on page 28 October 15th in Yaizu which is Yaizu is the town where Suzuki Roshi was had his temple and I was in Yaizu visiting with his son who's now the you know who's now in his mid-50s and is now the abbot of that temple moving tatami and screens for tonight's shamisen and storytelling performance being shouted at by Japanese people who keep

[84:02]

talking louder even though I can't understand a word they're saying can't even say sorry I don't speak Japanese and they were when I didn't understand what they were saying they would just talk louder like how come this guy doesn't understand you know with headache and feeling woozy this is almost too much they think that since I am tall I ought to be able to change the lightbulb without a ladder even though it is 12 feet from the floor water through the pipe and into the carp pond below 34 abbots of Rinso-in 34 plaques in the kaisando 34 gravestones above the pond hearing sound of Japanese speech so quick and energetic so theatrical without a shred of any meaning makes me sick wash today little machines

[85:03]

wash on one side spin on the other steep steps up in two tiers to kaisando make it seem very impressive simple beauty of bare tatami room screens that open out onto view of steep moss-covered rock and single ancient well-pruned bush this kind of simplicity costs a lot takes servants to make work Rinso-in a dusty temple Hoitsu says one of the men calls him Bosan I think one bad boy in the family and forthcoming

[86:11]

all sorts of food probably some of it makes me sick washing machine small because the country is small truth by paradox our language creates truth by logic thesis antithesis synthesis assumes progress the Japanese assume the old days were best or at the very least we are our ancestors thirty-four four plaques and Shungo who is Hoitsu's son will take over the temple eventually we sit around drinking tea and laughing all the time getting tired of this habit girls' names are Narumi and Kayoko mama's name is Chitose food in baskets and plastic bags on the floor chopsticks in a cup on the corner on the counter heroic roof line talking to statues Chinese style is to lacquer

[87:11]

the dead body Japanese make a statue and put the ashes underneath what connects whose control runs the sentence superstition not holding anything back bamboo brooms for the leaves outside a stone from Tassajara in the little garden out front photographs of these things wouldn't mean much so many photographs even the good ones all look alike gardener on an iron stepladder a small iron stepladder carp in pond really huge so pond is small why write these things down for whose pleasure or edification mine just goes on up to a point the surrounding people and objects make me what I am like an outline that describes an area inside and I miss my wife and children certain tendencies seem to crop up sound of tire on gravel

[88:12]

people are leaving late and night we anticipated drinking huge cockroaches spiders bees moths then the next part is verse carp eat the cabbage I throw them light green bits on dark water pillow like a bean bag and small also as a brown pillow like a bean bag and small also as a bean bag is but not so small many screens everywhere opened up admit air and light and space shamisen and voice rise and dip and waver in the air small bowls for Gohan mother's bowl father's

[89:13]

bowl children's bowls calling home at three here it's eleven there in the meat of the night of the previous day so the fun of these verses is that the last line is very long and the first lines are very short so I work very hard on these, getting these exactly, precisely how they were they may or may not say too much but that wasn't the point for me this is one of the many possible ways to write a poem this one way for now is it connected or disconnected all our language our speech our stuttering which we can't understand one of my chief themes over and over again in all my books is the impossibility of language that language doesn't really say what you think so I'm always writing about that poets are concerned about this problem

[90:14]

is it connected or disconnected all our language all speech our stuttering which we can't understand is a depth not a physical space but a holding to what it is to be human warm and alive spent flower petals on tatami at foot of one of a hundred ceramic vases sentimental looking everything different unexpected after a long long dark plane ride I appreciate thinking withdrawn in words once in a while Hoitsu performs many memorial services today each one is one each decisively occurring justice one way in the end little to be said to be added to what has been must be again said in the end

[91:16]

little to be said to be added to what has been must be again said it's a good place to end don't you think thank you see you next time have a nice rest of the day yes I'd be happy to who shall I say it for my name's Matt M-A-D D-G-E D-E-G M-A-D-D-G-E and I just wanted to tell you that I always really appreciate my name speaking oh that's sweet thank you I'm really happy that I came today thank you thank you I was in Japan this spring and I stayed in Japan and I stayed with some friends who live in a 500 year old Zen temple

[92:19]

oh yeah so I'll be able to relate to some more yes yes yes so I'll be able to relate to some more yes

[92:23]

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