But that's very mythologized. But anyway, that kind of alertness which allows you to see without discrimination is a dimension of awareness, yes. So the same problem arises with alertness. In this discussion, it interests me because If I were going to really talk about awareness in Buddhist terms, I just to make

[01:02]

five or ten distinctions that don't exist in English and I have to make up ways to say them in English. Because in Buddhism and in Japanese language there are quite a lot of words that cover this territory, far more than English. And then we'd really have problems getting it into German. Did you say that comparing the following words is a growing state of mind, like unconsciousness, consciousness, awareness and being alert? No, alert is... We should be more alert, that's true. But alert in English at least just means more awake. But it doesn't really describe a state of mind.

[02:13]

Awareness is probably the widest word in English. Yeah. Consciousness still has the sense of something you're... Consciousness implies an unconscious. And consciousness also implies control. That those things which we're conscious of, there's an implication we have some control over it. In English, anyway. And awareness is more free than that. In English, I think. You don't agree? You do. Straight from England, you know. But awareness in Buddhism means more than just being aware or mentally aware. It means a presence, a kind of numinous presence, like an attendant being or something.

[03:22]

How are you doing with that one? I think it's good that I don't translate right now. OK. Shall we do meditation? OK. The second question that Beate asked me is, what is reality?

[04:24]

It's a good question. And first, I think we need to know that the question, what is reality, should not imply that it can be answered in words. Because it's asked in words, we may think it should be able to be answered in words. But we should know that some things that can be asked in words can't be answered in words.

[05:27]

So I'd like all of us to meditate just now. A little bit faster today. And a little softer feeling without any loss of strength. without losing strength. Maka Hanya Haramita Shingyo Kanji Zaigo Satsugyo Dien Hanya

[06:41]

Pāramitā jīsho khen goaṁ kaiku doi Saiku yakushāri shīshiki puikuku Satsang with Mooji [...] Oh, that's a good job again. Thank you. Thank you.

[07:44]

Thank you. God bless you. Let us pray.

[08:57]

Let us pray. I knew that they would show up, but some of the way they did it, I knew it would be a problem. But I thought that maybe it was something that I could do, but I thought, well, I don't know. I could not put it on the ground. I thought it would be there, but it was not. Thank you. Thank you. Jai Bhūla Kāchū, Jai Bhūla Kāchū, Jai Bhūla Kāchū, Thank you.

[10:07]

There's two places where for some reason you guys all say it differently than me. One is that Fifth word. In the first line. The fifth word in the first line. And down at the last line, for some reason the third word so gets dropped or something. I don't know why. So we could go on a tour. She could book us and we'd go chant. Maybe you should pass the cards back.

[12:02]

By the end of the day I'll give them to you. Then we can try it once more this afternoon. We have to keep our thoughts from being too dry in the talk. I'm embarrassed I'm not sharing it with you. Excuse me. I'd like to devote most of the day to questions, if you have any.

[13:26]

Because I gave you quite a lot of stuff yesterday. And now we should integrate it or make sense of it in terms of your own individual practice. And particularly I'm trying to teach, as I've said, a Western Buddhism. So I'm trying to say things in ways that can reach you and reach our practice here in the West. And yet sometimes they may not sound like other teachers would say similar things. So if you have questions about that.

[14:36]

And Martin, you had a number of questions. Can you remember what they were? What they are? Maybe you should say it in German. Now, should she translate that for me? Martin, would you please say it in the air? Well, we have spoken already about it, but what interests me is Buddhist ethics, if there is any, and then I'm interested in if it's possible to speak a little bit about it.

[15:57]

a comparison between the ten commandments in Christianity and what you do as precepts or what you do as vows to become a Buddhist. Because the commandments in these different cultures have affected the cultural life and the psychology of being quite in a different way. Okay. I suspect that's of some interest to others. Okay. In Buddhism in general, the rules don't have the same kind of reality weight they do in Western, in Judeo-Christian culture. I particularly notice that in America with Jews who feel that there should be a kind of commandments or rules

[17:14]

that the world knows they should live by. And I've had, you know, felt quite a lot of... I mean, I've been teaching now for... almost for 25 years, and I felt a lot of emotion around this point. Without this kind of rule, how do you stop something like Auschwitz from happening and so forth? Well, it sounds like, from the Buddhist point of view, there's some problem.

[18:41]

Because there's no fixed rules and there's no way to get fixed rules. There's no reality out there that that allows rules to be derived from it. I suppose that the Buddhist morality really comes down to one thing, don't hurt others. And, you know, that's understood in a rather general and wide way. I remember a little kid who was crushing snails on the sidewalk in front of my house.

[19:51]

You know, they come out of the gardens. This is in San Francisco in the street. And I said to the don't break things you can't put back together he looked at me in the most peculiar way and then looked at this broken snail and he went out but that would be an application of the Buddhist morality don't hurt others or don't kill Buddhism also doesn't try to be everything to everyone. It is a... I don't know now how big Muslim is, but it's been the largest religion for the largest teaching for the most people on the planet in history.

[21:06]

I don't know how it is now, for example with Islam, but it was the greatest teaching for the greatest number of people on this earth. And so it certainly has covered whole societies. But still, when you get to the center of it, there's no rule book and there's no God. Buddhism doesn't say there... Well, it's not quite true. Buddhism... Some Buddhism would say there's no God. And some Buddhism would say there... there may be gods, but it's not relevant to Buddhism.

[22:07]

God isn't going to help you drive your car or avoid accidents. So that's more or less the attitude of Buddhism toward God. And when you don't have a God, it also means you don't have statements like all is one. All is one is a theological statement coming out of a monotheistic culture. There is the experience of oneness, but that's not the same as saying reality is one. So maybe the comparable statement in Buddhism would be, all is all. So, for those of us practicing, I suppose the first, the real morality is our state of mind. If you become sensitive to your state of mind, there are certain things you do that have repercussions immediately.

[23:33]

As your practice becomes more sensitive, you become more sensitive. And you even start thinking about saying something mean about somebody else. Because you're walking down the street. And you either stumble or bite your tongue immediately. The feedback is real quick. And your state of mind is expressed in little things like this. So if you practice, you begin to let many of the things or habits of you had begin to fall away. And that's Buddhist morality. So I suppose we would... The other side, the prohibitory precepts are don't kill.

[25:06]

Don't take what is not given. Sometimes translators don't steal, but it's better translated as don't take what is not given. Don't lie. Don't slander others. Slander. Don't criticize. Criticize to benefit yourself. Don't put others down to put yourself down. Don't praise self. Don't delude your mind or body. Don't delude the mind or body of others. And that's sometimes translated as don't sell intoxicants. That means you can drink a little if you want, don't get too intoxicated, but don't sell it to others.

[26:15]

My teacher used to say, don't present Buddhism in an intoxicating way. So I'm trying to be sober. And so forth. So the sense of these precepts is not so much don't do them, And there are more suggestions. You don't go to hell if you do them. And maybe bad things happen to you, but it just happens to you. It's your problem. They're like a kind of car mechanics manual. You can put sand in the gas tank if you want to. But, you know, probably it's wiser not to.

[27:32]

If you want to have four or five cars in your yard with sand in their tanks, you know, you're good. You're not going to go to hell for it anyway. Anyway, so there's that kind, so that sense of the precepts is these things you don't need. You don't need to kill people or kill bugs, you know. You don't need to lie. So you practice in such a way that you don't need to do these and when you do them you feel, geez, it's so unnecessary to lie. You feel it. And then the third level of precepts probably is you do what your society does. And that's a specific teaching of Buddhism. Whatever society you're in, fit in. But again, you're doing these things from a practical point of view. So, as has often been pointed out, there's no guilt in Buddhist culture.

[29:09]

You can certainly, but there's shame. You can be ashamed of yourself or feel shame for what you did or etc. But if you decide not to do it anymore, or even the feeling of shame is a cleansing process, and guilt is not, you feel like you're wrong or you're bad or something. You can feel guilty all your life. Having eaten too much as a kid. I mean, I'm being silly. But you can't feel shame all your life for something you said to somebody. So it's similar but different. The dynamics of it are different. Seton, you have more questions about that?

[30:25]

Yes. Could it be said that the Buddhist ethics, if there is anything to say about it, is much more individualized and is much more derived from one's own dynamics, whereas the Christian ethics is more generalized and has an outside-out rule-mechanism? Do you want to translate it yourself? Can one say that Buddhist ethics is more individual or arises out of an individual context and Christian ethics is more generalized? Maybe the opposite. In the sense that Christian ethics are you know, the individuals really affect you individually. And if you're... What's the thing?

[31:28]

If... If a tree falls down in a forest and no one hears it, was there a sound? Some philosophical question like that. Well, if you stood in the middle of a forest slandering others, it might be a sin in a Christian sense, because you as an individual are doing it. But in a Buddhist sense, if it doesn't affect anybody, it wouldn't be anything. You can't have, like I think Dostoevsky has somewhere the statement that to think to kill the father is the same as killing the father.

[32:34]

It has repercussions like that. If you felt that way in meditation, you couldn't meditate. Because in meditation, the more you can sit still and sit through whatever comes up, The possibility of killing anybody, including yourself or your friend, all. Any possibility can come up. You think, oh, that would be very troublesome to do that, and what would I do with the body? And after a while, it's just one thought among many thoughts, and you know what you're doing, and you know what you act on.

[33:38]

And when you're not afraid of such thoughts, like, ooh, you know, Pretty soon they lose their neurotic energy. And they tend to disappear. And after a while you don't have those thoughts anymore. If you do, sometimes you say, geez, my posture must be bad. Or what's going on, but you... So Buddhist ethics are very definitely societal. I should say, you know, maybe you're thinking it, this whole idea of karma.

[34:41]

And karma is sometimes presented as this... I don't really like to get into this, but anyway. Karma is presented as this kind of unforgiving system that everything you do you accumulate and you're stuck with it over many lifetimes. This question is a little hard to answer, actually. Because I have to give you a background. Most of Buddhism, Buddhism makes the assumption, perhaps incorrectly, that on the whole society will be governed by greed, hate and delusion.

[35:45]

And really we should concentrate on the development of individuals. And the development of small groups within a society. And to try to take on the whole society is probably fruitless. Now the exception to this is Tibetan Buddhism. Which tried to make a Buddhist society and a Buddhist government. And they got in a lot of trouble with the Chinese as a result. or partly as a result.

[36:54]

I really love Tibet and Tibetans, and I feel very close to Tibetan teaching. But trying to be a Buddhist and run a government is problematic. And some of the criticism that China made of Tibet is valid. Not all of it, but some of it is valid. Just as... In a somewhat similar way, at least many American Jews are deeply divided over what Israel is doing as a government. Is it a religious state? Is it a democracy? What's it doing? So Buddhism as a whole has decided to be a teaching for individuals, not a teaching for governments.

[37:56]

The relationship to governments, this is rather intellectual, I'm sorry, but the relationship to governments is an advisory role. And to try to change the conceptual base of society. So in order to be a religion for the masses, though, you need something that people can snap into a belief. Once you can give people something like that, then they'll accept the teachings. So from the Buddhist point of view, I'm not offending any Christians, from the Buddhist point of view, that's what the belief in God is.

[38:58]

And in societal terms in China, Japan, Korea, etc., the belief in karma and reincarnation is the same function. So the masses of people in China, not now it's not so clear, but in the past the masses of people in China All believed in reincarnation and karma as a kind of fixed system that controlled their actions. So Zen teaching has two phases. One is its religious face and one is its more elite or shamanic face. And it's not, although, anyway, I'm using shamanism in a... I'm not... Anyway, it's... And what I'm teaching is the shamanic phase of Zen.

[40:31]

I'm not teaching much of the religious side that allows lots of people to believe in it. So there's no teaching in the sutras at all, except in a very peripheral sense. which in any way depends on the teaching of reincarnation or karma as some kind of fixed system. You can leave reincarnation out and the teaching is exactly the same. And in Zen in particular, there's lots of koans about karma and so forth. And there's virtually no reference to reincarnation. In some contrast to Tibetan Buddhist teachings, which are often very similar, but emphasize reincarnation.

[41:33]

So some Zen teachers do believe in reincarnation. But overall, the view of Zen toward reincarnation is that it's your problem. What you do about it. And if you're reincarnated, great. See you later. I've often thought I'd like to be reincarnated as a dog. You can be very friendly with people. And everyone allows you to run around and do what you want. What about the Swiss lady? Belongs to a Swiss lady, not a dog in China.

[42:54]

I mean, if I'm returning as a dog, I don't want to belong to a Swiss lady. Well, it depends on the Swiss lady. Anyway. Some other question about this? Yes. Yes. What is the difference and the similarity and the relation between Zen and psychotherapy? For example, in psychotherapy you try to work through and express whatever happens, whereas in Zen you try not to react on it. Not quite. In Zen practice you allow whatever is happening to be expressed fully but you don't act on it.

[44:04]

In general that's right-handed tantra. So you don't have the alternatives. You either repress something or express something You can allow yourself to feel it completely, really thoroughly, not have to act on it. And in practical ways, I think if you're angry, you can just tell somebody you're angry. Instead of being angry, you tell somebody you're angry. And you do express it in that way. And you can also... And the practice of mindfulness gives you the ability more to be fully angry and express it, and yet do it in a way that the sting isn't there, or the venom isn't there.

[45:18]

So I used to get really angry at my wife or my daughter. And I did it on purpose. So that my daughter would be aware of people getting angry and it's okay. So I'd be as angry as I wanted but it was a little bit like showbiz. And then after that I'd stop and do something else, you know. And my daughter got used to it. And you could ask her if you want to write to Lisbon and see how she survived. But that doesn't answer the questions about psychotherapy and Zen. And you asked about primal therapy. Can you tell me what primal therapy means to you in about three or four sentences?

[46:40]

Yes. I'd like to think for a few moments. All right. My friend here has been asking this question since the first day. Yes, I know. In primary therapy, I only know it from books, they try to activate certain brain regions where old painful memories are stored. And then the pain that could not be felt at that time, is then experienced by the memory. And by experiencing, i.e. being really felt physically, this memory is dissolved, depending on how much one of the... Your three sentences are running out.

[47:45]

Oh, that's good. Okay. in his sense primal therapy means that in the therapeutic process certain brain areas are reactivated where there are painful memories are stored and you go through this pain once more again and you get in touch with it and you actually physically feel it and then you can let go of this pain and the result is kind of a new being which is a More in touch, relaxed. I'm not clear about all this.

[48:51]

I'm pausing partly to give you guys a chance to think. I suppose my general attitude is that in Japan Buddhist monks go to acupuncturists and moxie treatment where they burn things on you. So, my opinion is that, for example, in Japan monks go to acupuncture and they get all kinds of strange treatments, for example, that they... What is that? Yes, something is burned away. Ah, yes. Yeah, I'm glad we got that cleared up. And there's many... And there still is the extended family network in Japan.

[50:08]

And there are many cross-generational relationships that are possible. where you can talk things through with somebody who's not a friend or a family member. So it's hard to say, if you look at Japan, what people learn from Buddhism or Zen and what people learn from their society and work through in other ways. This has to be figured out here in the West. There are some Zen teachers who forbid their students to go to any other Zen group. And there are Catholic churches in the United States which forbid their members to go to any Protestant church.

[51:11]

I don't understand that. And some people don't like their students to go to psychologists and so forth. And 25 years ago it was a problem actually. Because at that time most psychologists in the United States at least thought that Zen, if not the work of the devil, was certainly the work of the deluded. I was testing her as a translator to see if she could say that. And then, so the first, actually the psychologists were against it, and they would say, sitting is bad, the posture is going to hurt you, and your mind is going to go awry, and so forth.

[52:39]

A friend of mine was told by a psychiatrist in those days that if he sat for more than five minutes, he tends to make people go crazy. So in those days we had to protect our students from the psychologists. And then the next stage was the psychiatrists and psychologists were competitive. Your system, Buddhist system may be good but ours is better. And then we had to tolerate that for a while. And now... Now there's so many psychologists who are interested in meditation or want to include, it's almost too much.

[53:59]

I've had psychologists get me to do a program with them. In order to do a quick three-day study and then the following weekend they're offering Zen teaching. Along with their psychology. They probably should see a therapist. Anyway, but now there are so many psychologists who basically understand what meditation is about. And some of their patients meditate. And some compulsively wash the dishes. And some beat their spouses. You know, it's just one more thing.

[55:07]

So I usually recommend that any student or friend or anybody or myself who could benefit from working things through psychologically or with one of the many psychological processes I recommend that they do so Again, as I think I said, the only important thing is if you want to practice Buddhism, that Buddhism is your home practice. Or you could be a psychologist, and being a Jungian could be your home practice. Okay, so that's my general attitude. More specifically, is Zen a complete teaching which means you wouldn't need to do psychology?

[56:33]

Basically I think it's a silly question. you should do whatever works for you whatever helps you you know it's like does a tree mind whether it gets rain from a water or a rain does a tree mind whether it gets water from the rain or from a hose garden hose wouldn't it be silly this tree saying I'm a purist don't water me However still I think most if you really are practicing Zen seriously regularly with a teacher probably

[58:02]

most things you can work through through Zen practice. But doing some psychological work might speed things up. But you have to be careful you don't do too many things. And if I were to teach Zen and offer you a diploma at the end of three days, we wouldn't have been able to find a room big enough in Heidelberg. Or if I promise you that... you don't have to change your life, this just adds, then again, you become very popular.

[59:06]

Or if you say completely unbelievable things, your audience increases. But if I teach in a way which asks, if you're going to practice you must change your life. You must be ready to change your life. You can't just add to what you've already got. You've got to look at what you are and be ready to change it. Then you have a much more limited number of students and hopefully more serious and amusing. At least I get less bored. Or not bored at all today, anyway. That's me. It's actually my cousin. I recognize her.

[60:32]

Let me say one more thing about psychology. I think it would be useful to look at the conceptual base. If you look at a particular psychology like primal therapy, And you look at it the way you did, conceptually. And it interests you. Then you can try to do that in your meditation. You might try to... You might do that and do primal therapy. You might do it just by trying it in your meditation. Because I'm pretty sure, and I think it will be if it hasn't been demonstrated, that meditation activates much more of your brain.

[61:41]

that relates the two sides of the brain more that relates the two sides of the brain more to the extent there are two sides which I think is somewhat overemphasized but also develops more the coordination and rhythm that's carried from eye to hand, hand to there's a rhythm in a person's body which moves two different sides of the brain to the eyes and something's picked up here and then transferred here, etc. All of that becomes more natural if you practice meditation. And you can develop and you can see the psychic knots you have And you can try to explore them.

[63:00]

So you might do the primal therapy too. Yes. He looks at his question differently now and wants to ask one more in the sense, is primal therapy maybe preparation, something that prepares you for Zen and that actually in Zen more happens? Yeah, definitely more happens. I think. But it may, I'm allowed a little bias, but it might be preparation, it might be part of your development.

[64:11]

I don't mean less preparation and then send-off, but I mean, can you imagine it like two roads and they go parallel at the beginning and then the send-off road continues and the primary therapy road ends at some point, because the therapy has reached its goal, so to speak. You could see it that way. Do you want me to translate this? Oh, I don't know. How do I know until I hear? I'll tell you after you translate. Well, he didn't like my translation of preparation. He said maybe it's like too... I didn't know how to translate the word forfeld. I said I'd try to say it in English. I don't want to... Yeah, go ahead. Could one see it like this picture?

[65:17]

Two streets. The one is the Zen street. Yeah, yeah. And the other is the primal therapy street. And for the first time they go parallel. Yeah, and then they merge. The Zen street goes far ahead. And the primal therapy at one point has reached its goal and stops. Well, Zen has been around for 20... Buddhism's been around as a specific teaching for 2600 years about. So it has an unfair advantage over therapies. I mean, the most brilliant minds of China, Korea, Japan... and India and I really do mean the most brilliant minds because those cultures didn't divide themselves into science and government etc.

[66:26]

in the same way that all thinking tended to feed into this stream of Buddhism And it's an accumulative teaching, not a revealed teaching. And it's consciously accumulative. It doesn't have violent reformations which throw half of it out. So it's an extremely developed teaching of two and a half millennia. So it's a teaching for all of our lifetimes and you can never reach the bottom of it or the top of it. It's one of the, I think, great creations of humankind.

[67:28]

And its creation is not finished. So in Asian countries, different roads, as you put it, come in at various points. And in this society, we'll have other roads feed into it. And I would say that in fact right now in Western society, psychology, sociology, most philosophy and certainly logic, and molecular biology, quantum mechanics, and so forth, are all disguised forms of teaching Buddhism in our society. Probably politics and economics are not. In other words, the conceptual basis of those teachings or sciences are so close to Buddhism As people begin thinking that way, their thinking is quite open to Buddhism too.

[69:05]

But there are, you know, Martin and Dieter are working with Bob Hoffman in the quadrinity process. Martin and Dieter are working with Bob Hoffman in the... I call him Bob Quad. Quadrinity process, I call him Bob Quad. Anyway, that seems to help a lot of people. And it's also a very specific process that you do over a certain period of time. And you work with parental programming. And something like that might be very useful to do and practice Zen. Amen. Anyway, I could get more involved with the differences between dream analysis and how you utilize experience.

[70:17]

In general, I would recommend that you all do what you like. And trust what you like. And try not to hurt anyone to benefit yourself. Okay, let's take a break. Pause. I'll come back. You want to talk about it right now? He has another question. It was touched in the beginning, but... Why don't we come back after? Let's have a break, and then we can talk. And I would like to say that some people have told me... I know... You don't have to translate any of that. I know that for some of you, 25, 30 minutes of sitting and time is a little long.

[71:21]

But I want to give you the, even if it is a bit difficult, I want to give you the memory that you've sat 30 minutes. So when you sit at home, it'll be easier for you to It's harder to sit at home, so it'll be easier for you to say, well, I have sat 30 minutes. But a couple of people have asked me to talk more and sit less. But I think we're talking a little too much myself. But also I do want, and one of the questions that's come up a number of times is how do you continue without a teacher and what is a teacher and so forth.

[72:26]

And I probably should respond to that. But in the meantime you can see who's first to the toilets. Feel better? Okay, I think there's a little more energy left for or maybe quite a bit of energy left for continuing our discussion. Though I think some of you feel and maybe all of you feel it would be good to be quiet too. But we only have today And you have lots of time to sit by yourself.

[73:45]

And we're not doing a sesshin. So I think we should continue the discussion a little bit. But I want to end with sitting. And I'm so proud of all of you sitting so well. So I want to see you again soon. And then we meet in the afternoon and that's sayonara. All leaders saying... So, you had a question in the back. Yes. The question was, if I am a Buddhist, a Christian Buddhist, and there is the danger that a group or a Russian people should be deprived of their existence, then the question also arises for me,

[75:03]

It's the Auschwitz question. Being a German Buddhist, What do I do when I see that there's some violence going on, like a pro-chrome or something? Pro-chrome? Like a holocaust. A holocaust, yeah. And… Polgrim, oh. Polgrim. Polgrim, yeah. Shouldn't I kind of just fight myself in order to prevent that? It's not only the program, but it's the fact that there is a group or a government who says there is a national group which has not the right to exist.

[76:22]

It's a difference. You mean the present government says that Former government. The fascistic government said the Jews had the right to live. And I myself, if I would have been at that time a Buddhist, a German Buddhist, shouldn't I have fought for God? Yeah, fight against. Yeah. I think so. I think so. My teacher Suzuki Roshi faced some of the same problem in Japan. I first felt it when I was working at the University of California. And I was assistant head of the Department of Engineering and Sciences.

[77:35]

What was it? I was assistant head of the Department of Engineering and Sciences. And this was... 25 years ago or more. And one of the big programs that my department was promoting was to teach engineers and architects how to include bomb shelters in their buildings. I thought it was nonsense. I'd already five years before refused to serve in the American military because they had nuclear weapons.

[78:36]

I mean, I considered going in the army and sort of being troublesome from inside. But I considered going in the army to cause trouble from inside the army. But I decided that I could not serve in any way in an army that had nuclear weapons. So anyway, I refused to serve. So by the time five years later, when I was in one of the many programs I was administrating, It was this bomb shelter program. I was convinced that bomb shelters were ridiculous as far as nuclear weapons are concerned.

[79:49]

My little girl, when she was three, asked me about nuclear weapons. And she asked me if they go through blankets. And I had to tell her, of course they do. So my solution was to, I refused to process any single piece of paper in the office that had to do with that program. So I had about 25 PhDs and the whole mess of secretaries working for me. So there was enough other work to keep me busy. But this was the biggest single project of the whole department. The large sums of money from the federal government.

[81:10]

People said, you'll lose your job. I said, I can't do this job then. I simply refused to do it. But I had the luck of being good enough at the rest of what I did But they didn't, I would have been a problem if they'd fired me. So they didn't fire me. So they tried to root everything around me. To root. To all the things having to do with that program they tried to send through other people, not through me. Since I basically ran the office, it became so troublesome that eventually they dropped the whole program.

[82:18]

And I brought this up to Suzuki Roshi. And he said he opposed the building of bomb shelters in Japanese cities before the Second World War. For the same reason I did. Even though there were no nuclear weapons then. He opposed them because he saw them as primarily psychological preparation for war. So he was actually giving anti-war peace speeches paid for by the government. Before the Second World War started, one branch of the government which was opposed to the militarism sponsored him to give peace speeches. In Japan before the war, that was dangerous. Americans in the street or Westerners would be stoned and things like that.

[83:40]

The public would throw stones at people. And then even during the war the beginning year he was still giving those speeches. And then he was stopped. And then they tried to get him to join the war effort. And he finally did go as a chaplain to Manchuria. Because he felt he should just help the people of his generation if not the war. And then in the latter part of the war they tried to get him to join as a bureaucrat or something in the war effort. And there was no support for temples in those days. And he refused to leave his temple and he refused to wear the simple kind of robes or western clothes.

[84:42]

He just went about his life and wore his robes. And villagers began bringing food secretly and leaving it. So that's one side of how Buddhism responded in Japan. But it was certainly the minority. Most of the Zen Buddhists really joined the war effort And I've heard various of them give speeches. How they ran to their war office every day and Zen practiced to help them have the strength to run. I've gotten up and walked out of such talks.

[85:46]

But some of these people who talk that way are actually my friends. That's complicated. My brother is the... I have a half-brother who designed the automatic pilot that guided Glenn around the world. He developed the automatic pilot that guided John Glenn around the world, the first astronaut. And he was in charge of the development of the whole Cape Canaveral liftoff station. Yeah, and his specialty was the Atlas rocket. The Atlas rocket. I don't know what she said.

[87:00]

And the Atlas rocket did bring the first astronauts up, but it was mainly the early ICBM. Anyway, my half-brother was one of the main creators of that rocket. And my father was... in charge of the development of the lunar module that landed on the moon. And he was involved in weapon systems too. And my brother still is working on complex weapon systems and huge computers that can track the movement of Russian generals all over the world and stuff. So it's our family that does it. I argue with them sometimes. So I went to Auschwitz a few weeks ago.

[88:45]

And it was a horrible experience for me. I don't know if I should talk about it, but I've seen many films and books and stuff. But to be there made me really sick. I was with a group of people friends but I had to be by myself and I found myself walking with my mouth wide open in a kind of silent scream and my body was saying in a mantra like this couldn't happen but it did This is impossible, but it happened. And it's much more familiar to those of you who live here than with me. But I actually got sick and stayed somewhat dead for a couple of weeks afterwards.

[89:50]

And there my friends had a little ceremony and they lit candles and so forth. And we'd been brought there by this taxi driver who we'd met earlier. And they did this service and they began reading from the Bible. Sie haben also diesen Gottesdienst abgehalten, angefangen aus der Bibel vorzulesen. And, you know, I'm sorry to tell you this, but they were... I'm sorry to tell you about my reaction, but... Es tut mir leid, euch meine Reaktionen zu erzählen. They were singing, God is joy and God is love. Sie sangen also, Gott ist die Freude und Gott ist die Liebe. And God has fed us the hungry and clothed us the poor. Und Gott nährt die Hungrigen und kleidet die Nackten. And then they passed bread, and we were breaking bread. And I said, I will break bread, but I can't listen to, God didn't feed us the hungry here, because it's the poor here.

[91:16]

And I get up and no one could do anything. Then somebody read something from the Bible. We should examine ourselves. And this Protestant priest who was there said, I'm only asking that we examine ourselves as God says here or suffer eternal damnation. I said, you know, I'm willing to examine myself, but not at the threat of eternal damnation. They couldn't perform the ceremony, so I got up and left. And then the taxi driver got up and came into the... We were in Birkenau at this point, and the taxi driver came, which is nearby, came and went into this room with me. And he went over, he pulled me with him, he got up when I left, and he pulled me over to this spot and he put a candle there and a little half handful of bread.

[92:34]

And he said, this is where I lived for two years when I was 17. This bread was as much as we got in a week. And he was arrested.

[92:54]

@Transcribed_UNK
@Text_v005
@Score_73.68