Well, I'm glad I've given talks before, I'd be nervous. I hope you can hear me over there. Anyway, so I have a new robe, it's a dark brown color, and we decided when we found the fabric, I forget who found the fabric, but you know that I could be Dark Chocolate Sensei, and you know that I could aspire in the future sometime to be Espresso Roshi. Then I have a second robe that's a lighter brown, and that's going to be the Latte Sensei. And I'll be starting in a couple of weeks, you know, for the fall practice period, a little espresso stand, actually, in the first pine room, and you know, a good place to spend

[01:11]

your stipend. And you know, while I'm down there, you know, we can have Dharma Dialogues, like the old tea ladies, over the espresso counter, oh, that'll be the day. But after all, they have those espresso stands now at gas stations and things, why not at a monastery? I don't remember the last time I had such, you know, new, stiff, shiny clothes, anyway, it's been a while. Before we came over here, a surgeon adjusted my ocasea for me, had me re-tie it and straighten it out, tucked it in. He said, I feel like your mother. So, he's not only my mother, but my Dharma brother, my father, you know, we have a lot

[02:13]

of relationships here, so thank you. And as he said the other night, we've been Dharma brothers for many years now. And many people make, you know, actually an event like this possible, my Dharma Transmission. Many people make any of us who we are, and we're all here, you know, making each other who we are. Thich Nhat Hanh, you know, one of his sayings is that it takes 30 apple leaves, 30 leaves in the apple tree to make an apple. So we're all making each other into apples. And fortunately, you know, we get to use the same leaf more than once, so we get more apples that way. And Vicky Shosan helped a great deal with the ceremony, thank you.

[03:17]

And also Shinpo, thank you. Many people have wanted to make this possible for me, and helped sew on my occasions, and my companion Patty and another woman Valerie sewed a rock suit for me, and many of you helped also with the ceremony. And helping here at Tassajara is also helping, you know, all of us. And not just us, you know, but we think of our work here as helping all beings. I first came here to Tassajara in May of 1966, and I was a Zen student at the time. My friend Alan Winter had heard about Tassajara from Dick Baker on his Zen Center ski trip, and he came and got a job here and told me I could get a job here too, which I did in the kitchen.

[04:21]

The kitchen was where the pit is now, and up above that, and where the student eating area is was the bar, and where the kitchen is was the dining room. And where the dish shed was was the staff dining room. So it was quite a bit different, and you could, speaking of running up bills, you know, you could go into the bar and have a Carta Blanca or Dos Equis, and then it would just come off your paycheck at the end of the month. And I couldn't understand, you know, I was just a dishwasher, and I couldn't understand why the cooks drank so much, and why they got angry and upset at times, although actually they were all in all quite even-tempered. And then halfway through the summer, one of those cooks quit, and I was offered the job, and then within a day or two, I was screaming at people. And they started having meetings about, you know, what are they going to do about Ed? So those seem to have continued over the years.

[05:26]

But Suzuki Roshi and some people from Zen Center came down two or three times that summer. My friend and I would sit satsasan in cabin 3B, which isn't there anymore. And everybody came and satsasan in that little room, about ten people. Suzuki Roshi said afterwards we were carrying water and gathering wood. And sure enough, here we are. And we didn't know then that we could buy Tassajara. And that fall, you know, Zen Center had $1,000 in the bank, and an annual budget of $6,000 a year. And there was a fundraising drive in the fall of 1966, too, and we raised in two months about $25,000 for the down payment on Tassajara.

[06:35]

And then that winter, you know, I think some of the people, there was three or four people staying down here. I think they may have been smoking dope or we don't know what, but they were living out here in the mountains having a good time with the hot baths and everything, and they decided that they better get the kitchen torn down, you know, to get a good start on building the new kitchen, because they had heard that before we opened, the county had said we needed a new kitchen. So while we up in the city knew nothing about it, the three or four people down here dismantled the kitchen. The phone wasn't working very well, you know, it was sort of incommunicado. So when I came back to be the cook in May of 1967, we had moved the kitchen into what had been the staff kitchen, and there was a big deck out over the, just an empty deck out over the pit there. So it was rather a small space, the little kitchen we had, and we didn't, anyway, we

[07:55]

worked just as close together, if not closer than the present kitchen, and many more people can work in our kitchen. One of the things that strikes me when I look back at all these years is that, you know, I don't think I've, you know, in some ways I haven't learned anything new all these years. The teachings are the same. The teachings run through our life, day after day, moment after moment, and there's not some new teaching exactly, and it's just a matter of, our life is a matter of receiving the teachings that are already there all the time, and practicing the teachings, putting into practice what we already know. So, someone said, to practice Buddhism is to begin and to continue, and the only difference

[09:04]

between myself and so many of the people who were here in 1967, and 68, and 69, is that I stayed, somehow, and I kept coming back, and I kept starting over, and now I'm starting over again. Anyway, I think I started being a Zen student, you know, because I wasn't very good at being a hippie. Many people made a career of, you know, for a little while, of being a hippie. Back in the 60s, it was a great time to be a hippie, and I neglected to go to the human being at Golden Gate Park when there was, whatever, 50 or 80,000 people in the polo fields, and Suzuki Roshi even went, and there's a picture of him sitting there with a daisy

[10:05]

coming up out of his mudra. I forgot to mention, you know, part of our fundraising in 66 was the Zenefit, you know, the Zenefit was at the Avalon Ballroom, and we had the Quicksilver Messenger Service, the Grateful Dead, and the Jefferson Airplane played. I think tickets were $2 or $3, and we raised about $1,800 for all of that. Anyway, so we've worked a lot over the years. Tassajar has changed quite a bit. We keep doing things. One of the first things we did was to, what's now the dining room, what had been where the Beck's, Bob and Anna Beck, who were the owners of Tassajar, lived, and we took out

[11:06]

all the walls, and the floor was just an uneven cement floor, so we put in a wood floor in the dining room, shimming the crossbeams and everything. And then for a while, the Zendo was there while we were working on the other Zendo. So one morning, we had breakfast, and when I got here, it was interesting because there was a whole group of, there was about 20 people living here when I came in May of 67, and they had all these customs, they explained to me, I was going to be the cook, and they explained to me how things were done. And I didn't know any better, I was 22. And one of the customs was at breakfast, we served, with the cereal in the morning, we served white sugar, brown sugar, and then some people don't want sugar, so we served honey and molasses, and then we had milk, and in those days, we weren't into low fat yet, so we also had half and half, or cream, we had canned milk.

[12:09]

Some people like it, I can't imagine. So this worked out fairly well when we were at picnic tables, and you can just put out something on each table, but when we were in the Zendo, it turned out to be rather difficult, and we would pass down the row this tray with about six or eight condiments on it, and then each person would be deciding what to put on, and we'd have one tray for every three people. And so then we had to make up however many trays, 18 trays, with all these different things on it to take over to the Zendo. And David Chadwick, if you know David Chadwick, he was here, and we actually had a guest season in May and June of 67, and David was the head of the dining room, and I was the head of the kitchen. And many of you saw Brother David when he was here, and Brother David, when we opened in July of, officially dedicated to us in July of 67, Brother David was the dishwasher,

[13:14]

the first dishwasher. I told Kern and Barnaby earlier this summer when Brother David was here, that their following in this aghast tradition, even to be a dishwasher here, you can aspire to the sacred effort of a Brother David. So one morning anyway, I didn't know what to do, and we were making up all these condiment things, and I felt, I didn't want people to get mad at me or anything for not giving them what they wanted, so I served all these things. And one morning after the breakfast in the dining room there, which was our temporary Zendo, Suzuki Rishi said he wanted to give a little talk, so then everybody, we all had to come back from the kitchen, the servers and people. We went back and we all came and sat down in there, and then he said, I don't understand how you can taste the true spirit of the grain when you put all those things on top of your cereal. You know, everything in your life can't be the way you want it to be. It's not all going to be sweet and cream, and everything is not going to taste the same

[14:24]

according to your idea of what you want, and you won't always be able to make it that way. Why don't you try and taste the true spirit of the grain? Something like this. So then we went back to the kitchen and said, thank goodness, we'll just serve gamasyo now. So that was the end of all the condiments, except now in the summer we get, you know, all these things. So when you stay for the fall practice period, you just get, you know, gamasyo. Pretty soon, I would suspect that our gamasyo will probably change, you know, it's been sesame and salt all these years, and pretty soon we may be having, you know, probably we'll start having kelp in place of the salt, and then we'll add some other, like, protein powder in there with the sesame seeds and, you know, maybe a few other things. Maybe at lunch and dinner, maybe it could have a little powdered garlic in there too for, you know, I don't know, we'll see. Maybe we'll start serving Dr. Bronner's amino acids in place of soy sauce.

[15:29]

But I believed, you know, the teaching. I decided at one point, I decided I'm not going to go to Japan. I'm going to prove it's possible to practice Zen in America. We've always been a, and the Zen teachers from Japan used to come here and they'd say, you have a kindergarten monastery. They were right, of course. But when I was going to, when I went to talk to Suzuki Roshi and I asked him for some advice about cooking, and many of you have heard this, but, you know, this kind of teaching, as I say, is nothing new. When you wash the rice, wash the rice. When you stir the soup, stir the soup. When you cut the carrots, cut the carrots. And I tried to practice that. And it annoyed me, of course, that other people weren't, or didn't seem to be, from my point

[16:52]

of view. And when I complained to Suzuki Roshi that other people were, seemed to be talking a lot and taking long bathroom breaks, he said, if you want to see virtue, you have to have a calm mind. I thought, that's not what I asked you. I wanted some advice on how to get those other people to behave. But I kept my mouth shut, you know, and decided just I better receive this teaching. And I started trying to see virtue in the people I worked with. And, you know, as soon as I would, especially if I criticized anybody, I would remind myself to look again and see virtue, see if I could find some virtue. And my classic story now is the day that someone went to get 18 cups of black beans and didn't come back for 20 minutes. And I finally realized he was still gone. I went out to his seat, to the storage shed, and he was looking at each bean to make sure

[17:54]

it was not a stone. This is pretty aggravating, but I decided he was being very thorough and careful. I explained to him that he could use a white plate and put out a whole, you know, plate of beans and look at them. Anyway. But I had a very hard time as a student those first years, and I couldn't sit still in Sazen. I had many involuntary movements. It went on for several years, and I was angry a lot and, you know, many different things. And then, you know, compared to other students, it seemed like, you know, there were other

[19:06]

students who could sit, so there were, you know, most students could sit still. I didn't understand how anybody could sit still because I couldn't sit still. So everybody could sit more still than I could, even the worst student could sit still where I couldn't. And, you know, many of the students were smarter than I was and more brilliant and, you know, many things, and all I could do was just to stay and keep working and keep practicing. After I, after the kitchen, you know, I got retired after two and a half years in the kitchen. Oh, you know, I want to tell you another thing about the kitchen which helped me a lot. It was a very important time for me and, you know, after, I forget when, but I was the tensor for two and a half years, and after some number of months, the kitchen crew got

[20:10]

together and there was a kitchen rebellion, basically, and they said, we don't want to work with you anymore, you're too, you know, dictatorial and you don't give us any credit. And you decide everything and you treat us, one woman said, and then we had this big meeting and the officers of the monastery came and Peter Schneider was the director and they said, you know, we're not just another spatula, but you treat us just like another spatula and you don't recognize that we also have taste and our own sensibility and you want us to do everything your way. And then one woman said, you treat us just like you do the bread, and then she said, and then she thought about it and she said, oh, you treat the bread really well, really lovingly. You treat us worse than you treat the bread. And after that meeting, at the end of the meeting, Peter Schneider said to me, would

[21:14]

you like to change the way that you do things or would you like another job? That was pretty simple. And I said, I don't know how to do anything, I don't know how to do things differently. And he said, well, why don't you try it out for a while? And I came outside, down at the bottom of the steps there by the, you come down, there's the new railing. And I didn't know what to do. And I sat there crying. And Trudy Dixon came along.

[22:25]

Many of you know that Trudy Dixon had helped, mostly editing for Zen Mind Beginner's Mind, and taking Suzuki Rishi's talks, and Trudy had cancer. And she asked me what was happening. So I told her. And she said, Ed, I have faith in you. And I said, I don't see how you could. And then she just said it again. So after that, I started looking at people differently, and in the same way that she

[23:40]

had trust and faith in me, I started having trust in other people. And I had started cooking, trying to show what a good cook I was, and what a good Zen student I was. All these things, you know, are compared to other people. If you want to be a good cook, other people have to be not as good. If you're going to be a good Zen student, you know, other people, you'll find some fault with them. But there's a saying, you know, we say each one is best. Or sometimes, you know, it's like every day is a good day compared to what. If we understand like that, then, you know, everyone can be a good student.

[24:43]

And I had wanted to, when I thought about it, I realized that I wanted to be a good cook and to prove what a good cook I was, and for people to like my cooking, it would show that they liked me. And if enough people liked me enough, maybe I could like myself, wouldn't that be convincing? And I realized it was going to be up to me to find out how to like myself, not up to others to convince me. And after a while, I decided that the most important thing was to encourage other people to be cooks, not to encourage other people to do what I said, but to actually take some responsibility for their own life and circumstances, for deciding what to do with the ingredients

[25:49]

that came. There's not any recipe or directions. And someone is a cook actually looks at things and studies things and dreams up what to do with the ingredients that are there. It's different than doing what you're told. So, it was very important to me that people didn't like the way I was treating them. It helped me to understand that we all need to become cooks. And that also part of that, I realized the important thing was to find a successor. And I needed to be, not show how important and indispensable I was, but to make myself completely dispensable. And then, because when you're really important and indispensable, you're stuck, you're

[27:00]

completely stuck. And then people ask you stupid questions all the time. Should I put more salt in this? I thought you wanted, you know, some responsibility to be able to decide these things. Why are you asking me? So, I had to stop answering questions and let people take on the responsibility. And to learn how to trust their own taste. To trust your own experience, you know, deeply and intimately and to be able to trust it and act on it. It's not very complicated. When I wrote the Tassar Bread Book, I tried to convey this understanding of empowering

[28:04]

people to cook. And many people seem to have understood that message from that book. You know, I've gotten letters over the years, and the book used to have the Shambhala's address in it. So, the first couple of years, I got several hundred letters. And in fact, I just got a letter about a month ago from a woman who's 19 who lives in Pennsylvania, and she'd never been able to make bread, and she'd tried many books until finally she got mine. And she made bread. And she really liked the spirit of that book. And when I wrote that book, Charles Brooks, who did sensory awareness, you know, with Charlotte Silver for many years, and they contributed the money to build the yurt up past the baths. And Charles Brooks said to me, Ed, we don't need more cookbooks, we need more cooks.

[29:08]

He understood that. And I said, well, this book is, I'm trying to do that in this book, I'm trying to make cooks with this book, not make, you know, not make recipe followers. So I put his quote in the book to try, you know, to encourage people to understand this point. And Suzuki Roshi also had said to me, when you cook, you're not just cooking, you're working on yourself, you're working on other people. Many people worked in the kitchen in those years, and I decided that working in the kitchen was the same as anything else that we did here at Tassajara. Many of the other people in the kitchen didn't agree with this, you know, so at one point, because we missed morning Zazen in order to cook breakfast, they said we should have our own Zazen period in the middle of the morning, so that we get as much Zazen as everybody

[30:13]

else. I didn't like this idea, but I went along with it. So we used to have a special period of kitchen Zazen, five or six people, you know, we'd sit Zazen in the middle of the morning, which otherwise would have been our break. And I remember, you know, how cold it was sometimes, and I had a sweater and, you know, my hands would be there like, they'd be like these two ice, this like huge ice cube at the end of my wrists. And I thought this is stupid. Anyway, fortunately, the kitchen crew people finally wanted a break at the, you know, in the middle of the morning instead of more Zazen. Anyway, fortunately, the kitchen crew people finally wanted a break at the, you know, in the middle of the morning instead of more Zazen. And people wouldn't want to stay and clean up in the kitchen, you know, if there was a lecture happening or something. In those days, we didn't talk to the kitchen about, you know, how to schedule things so

[31:16]

that they could come to talks. So I just decided that working in the kitchen was the same as anything else. And I think that's true. After I worked in the kitchen, the next thing I did was I worked in the lower garden. And we hadn't had much of a garden, actually, and I and two other people, we dug up the garden from one end to the other, from one side to the other side, and starting up at this end, going down towards the pool, and we tossed shovelfuls of dirt. We had a screen set at an angle, and I tossed the dirt against the screen, and the dirt fell through, and the rocks rolled down, and we put the rocks in wheelbarrows and took

[32:19]

them over to the creek. And I did that for many weeks. After the kitchen, it was, you know, not a lot of stress or tension, not much in the way of performance anxiety, not much to prove, not much to demonstrate, no way to show off. And gradually, sometimes the rocks, sometimes we used a second screen, you know, we shifted out the big rocks first, and then we had a screen with finer mesh to shift out the next layer of rocks. And some days, the other people who worked there didn't show up and had other things to do, and so I worked in that field by myself. And after we'd finished that field, a couple months' worth of work, then we started building a little rock wall by the side of the garden, and we gathered rocks and started to work

[33:33]

on that wall, and then occasionally Suzuki Roshi would come by and kind of watch us from a distance. And one day, I told him I liked doing rock work, so after a while, he invited me to work with him. And Sochin and I worked together with Suzuki Roshi. One of the places we worked together was the wall on the creek outside the Kaisando. Alan Marlow worked with us, too. Remember Alan? Alan was married to Diane DiPrima for a while, and he had studied with Trungpa Rinpoche. He was kind of a wild person in some ways, but he was also quite devoted to Suzuki Roshi. And I remember the three of us working with Suzuki Roshi on that wall, and we used these big rocks, and there's the cornerstones on the little tiny, there's some little tiny steps by a tree there, and these big cornerstones.

[34:35]

One of them was about 40 feet up above the upper barn, and somehow he saw it up on the hill there, and he said, I want that rock up there. We couldn't imagine why he would want that rock, and we got it, and it just fit right in place. And for a cornerstone, you want the corner narrow, and then to hold it, anchor it back in the wall, the back of it is heavy and big, and then it stays there right on the corner. It goes flat across the, across the front facing you, it goes flat, and then coming back into the wall, it slopes down. And there's two stones quite similar like that there. So, we moved a lot of big stones and placed them in that wall. And Suzuki Roshi was, it was really nice to work with him. He was, he wasn't in a hurry, but at the same time, he didn't, he wasn't fussy.

[35:36]

And he did things thoroughly and carefully, but not, you know, as I say, not fussy. And I was still trying to work like I used to work in the kitchen, so you have to slow down to work with rocks. They're bigger, they're heavier than you are, so you have to slow down. So, I slowed down a little bit. When Sochin was Shuso, there's a question and answer time at the end of the practice period for the Shuso, and I asked him, what's the difference between human nature and Buddha nature? It was something that, you know, I was very interested in. Human nature, you know, we make mistakes and we can do good and bad.

[36:42]

We have various tendencies. And Buddha nature is somehow sacred or, you know, perfect or holy. And he surprised me, you know, with, I thought there was some difference between human nature and Buddha nature, and he said, there's no difference. It was very helpful for me. After, let's see, when was it? Oh, you know, we started building that foundation for the Kaisando in 1970. The fall practice period of 1970, I worked on the foundation of the Kaisando. We were going to build a house, a new cabin for Suzuki Roshi, and the two front areas that extend out from the Kaisando were going to be a kitchen and a bathroom. So, I worked on that.

[37:44]

I remember Mark Alexander working on that with me, and now I can't remember his name, but I later went on a river rafting trip with him. Sid Waller. Sid Waller, yeah. He used to be your friend too, yeah. And it was during that time while we were working on the foundation of that house that Dick Baker had Dharma transmission in Japan. December 8th, 1970, it was completed. And then that foundation was there for about 15 years until Paul Disko and others worked on building the Kaisando. So, I want to tell you just a couple of other brief stories or sayings.

[38:58]

You know, any particular teaching, as I say, when you receive the teaching and practice it, you know, it will change your life. There's no doubt about it. And I remember Karage Roshi, there's three sayings I remember, because he used to say some of these over and over and over again. He used to say, Zen is to settle the self on the self, any point. To settle the self, which is, oh, you know, where we have so many ideas and sense of how things should be or what we would like, and how do we settle the self or who we are on the extreme, you know, changeability of everything, the way the world actually is. And how can we be settled in the middle of that?

[40:07]

And that self is also the self, the self that we settle on. In Zen, because in Zen and Buddhism, you know, we don't say, you know, to settle the self on God or, you know, to be one with God. We call both the self, to settle the self on the self, to settle the small self on the big self. And Karage Roshi used to say, actually I remember many of his sayings, but he used to say, let the flower of your life force bloom. And one summer when I was the Tanto here, many people, when he came to visit, people would talk to him and they'd say, I'm very tired. And he'd say, that's the flower of your life force blooming. Don't you think? And they'd say, oh, I thought it was my just being tired. And he'd say, that's the flower of your life force blooming.

[41:13]

And they would feel very happy after that. To know that it's not just being tired. And then other people, you know, someone else went to see him and said, I'm angry all the time. And he said, it's the flower of your life force blooming. And I remember, you know, Suzuki Roshi said, the important point, he said many things about the important point. If you read, you know, Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind, you'll see the important point is, sit up straight. And so many important points, but one time he said, the important point is to find out what is the most important point.

[42:19]

So I decided to find out. And after, you know, I thought, gratitude. One day it would be gratitude, another day, sincerity. You know, it would be forgiveness or kindness or compassion or wisdom. Working hard. And I decided finally, the important point is to find out what is the most important point. So I keep trying to practice that. To find out. I didn't know about taking an interest in people. You know, I think I've told you, but I started cooking because...

[43:25]

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