I vow to face the truth and to tell you those words. Good morning. Good morning. This morning, we have a wonderful guest. It's my pleasure to introduce my long-time friend and Dharma brother, David Chatterley. David started practicing in 1966.

[01:00]

silence was the noisiest event at Paso Haro. Thank you. Greetings, everyone. It's an honor to be here in one of my very, very favorite Zendos.

[02:53]

And both in terms of architecture and just the feeling of being here is, I always love it when I walk through that gate and I come in here. It always has a very friendly, low-key, very comfortable feeling. I really like being here. I finished Crooked Cucumber, I mean totally finished it, in I guess early December. Since then, I've just been working mainly on promoting it, which is an interesting thing to do. It's like Suzuki Roshi, he talked about rules and precepts a lot after we got Tatsuhara, and he always had such an interesting way of talking about it.

[04:02]

You know, he was always going from one side to another. That's one thing that really characterized his teaching and Buddhist teaching in general, I think. I think Suzuki Roshi would emphasize really good Buddhist teaching would always, there's always another side. There's always an openness to something that's not being said. He would talk about rules. He would, you know, we were, But back in the 60s, there were so many people that had come there through LSD and smoked a lot of marijuana and, you know, drunk a lot of wine. at North Beach or wherever we were, and yet when he'd talk about the precept, don't drink or don't sell alcohol, or a disciple of the Buddha refrains from diluting the senses, which is a more modern interpretation of that, when he'd talk about that,

[05:27]

he would just skip right over the whole thing about psychoactives, you know, and get down to where he saw the danger in our group. He'd be reading it, and he'd say, don't sell alcohol, or whatever. He'd usually have some older version he was reading. He'd say, this means don't sell Buddhism. Because that was the danger he saw. Not that he was against the idea. Again, always look to the other side. Does this mean you don't? tell anybody about Buddhism, that we don't share our ideas, that we don't make it available to others. No. You could look and see there's a lot of really enthusiastic new students that are running around trying to tell everybody how great Zen is. But anyway, precepts always seem to me to be flashing.

[06:35]

It seems to me like precepts are like a flashing yellow light saying this area of conduct is something. Be aware. There's a lot of karma here. This is the sort of place where you can hurt others and hurt yourself. That sort of thing. It's not so much a cut and dried rule. It's very much the way Suzuki Roshi taught to me. But then if he got too vague and too libertarian in it, he'd be in there talking about rigid rule. We follow rigid rules and it's bad to do this. So always on the other side. But one thing he said, and it's a quote I have in the book, is something like, we should You know, we shouldn't follow rules blindly. We should follow the precepts with a warm heart. That sort of thing is how he led up to it.

[07:35]

And he said sometimes we should pick a rule and break it. And then your teachers or your fellow students can see you better. And you can see yourself better, too, would be an implication of that. Now, this doesn't mean to pick a rule like do not steal and just become a master thief or something like that. You're always responsible for yourself and having a sensible interpretation of of things. In a sense, writing this book on Suzuki Roshi and working on the archive about it when I'm continuing to try to collect the oral history and get it in some sort of order, this is in a sense picking a rule and breaking it. It's just the last thing in the world he would have wanted. But you know, while he was alive, he was always dealing with people overemphasizing and being too interested in enlightenment, Satori, you know, he was always

[08:51]

dealing with what he called a gaining idea. And while he was alive, he had to deal a lot with what they call a psychology transference or projection of various ideas and assumptions on to a teacher, and so he was in a sense always aware of this and sort of de-emphasizing himself and trying to emphasize the teaching. Of course, everybody knows the phrase, that teacher is just the finger pointing at the moon. and he wanted us to keep that in mind. I have this website, cuke.com, C-U-K-E dot com, and I just got it sort of started before I went out and started doing book signings, and I've been speaking to Buddhist groups too for, you know, doing that for several months.

[09:54]

But I plan to get back to it, and I want to build it up more and add more to it. One of the things that I want to point out, one of the things I'll put in it maybe are stories, you know, more stories about, say in this area, about rules and about how he felt, things he said about this particular topic. Anyway, so I picked a rule and broke it by talking about him. But it was also in a way, it was following his teaching and his example to not be too attached to one side.

[11:02]

And it was time to go over on the other side in a sense because the assumptions were building in the community about who he was. and forgetting that he's... Well, I don't think so much forgetting that he's the finger pointing to the moon. I think that that understanding is pretty grounded in the community and there's not really much of a guru worship thing. On my website, you know what I want to do? Bruce Lee says that in a movie. And I want to get a little sound bite where you can click on it and have Bruce Lee saying, you know, don't forget the teacher's just the finger pointing at the moon. I think that would be so cool. And that can be done. I would also like to get some of Suzuki Roshi's voice on there, just a little bit. Because we've got tapes of his lectures. But basically, I like to read them. But when you read a lecture or when you listen to the Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind tape, of course, we read it in a steady way, generally one emotion.

[12:11]

And when he delivered them, he delivered them changing emotions and feeling a tremendous amount of humor and laughter and coughing. And so it has this, oh, he just coughed and coughed. It was terrible, you know. And sometimes it would just go on and on. And it's actually a problem his whole family has. It might be some sort of genetic thing because he and his grandkids have coughing problems. It's weird. But when we read it, you know, it's very smooth. So I think a neat thing to do would be like to have on the website something you can click on and it wouldn't take too much memory. You could listen to his voice, him talking for a while, just some, you know, three minute thing. And that sort of gives you that so that when you read it, that sort of informs what you're reading and you know that. So that's what I do. I just listen to a little bit of lecture now and then. I like to read them.

[13:13]

But again, breaking this sort of precept by writing the book, breaking this rule, it's very clear he didn't want this sort of thing. I put stuff in the book that shows that, Peter Schneider's interview with him. Other things that happened, his reputation had sort of you know, sort of become maybe a little bit too high, too ethereal, and I think very useful for us to see, you know, that He was just a regular guy from one point of view with problems and shortcomings. So seeing certain faults like his absent-mindedness and his weakness for sugar and anger, which is I think a problem he mainly got over before he came to America and just used it really very skillfully here for teaching, but he talked about how he had a bad problem with anger when he was younger.

[14:18]

Seeing that sort of thing, we can relate to him, you know? People can relate to him again as somebody, oh, I have problems like this, too. But not just as a person with problems, but also seeing his life as a person who made an enormous effort. It's not like he was always floating on some cloud of enlightenment. working very hard and making a very strong effort that really is very inspiring. You can see it coming from a very young age, going all through his life, getting him pretty discouraged after the war and feeling like he couldn't really He never had any disciples in Japan, and his way of talking and the way he presented himself was so low-key. He was very small even for a Japanese, and there's a tendency there to want to study more with teachers that fulfill the idea of what a teacher is, which is somebody who talks

[15:29]

with more authority, possibly like a samurai. And the teachers talked down more. And he had this real, he had this sort of egalitarian way of relating. And people who knew him back there have told me about it. Even when they were teenagers, they met him, they couldn't believe he was priest of the temple because the way he was relating to them in this very, you know, passive and open way and interested in what they had to say. And believe me, Japanese teachers in general, the tradition is not to listen to what the student has to say. I mean, he came here and said, sometimes I'm master and you're disciple, and sometimes you're master and I'm disciple. And that sort of spirit permeated his teaching. uh, and his, his life.

[16:31]

But, uh, so I think seeing his faults is helpful and I really included every negative thing about him I possibly could, uh, that had, You know, but because it's almost one problem with him is he was, he really was such a wonderful person and had such a very exemplary personality and character and wonderful presence and wonderful vibes. You know, it gets just like after a while, it's like too much sugar. I mean, how do you write about this? You know, it's like I needed more dirt and more earth and a little more, what he called the bitter pill to make him a real believable person, but there was enough of that. But the false is one thing, to me the effort is another thing to see his life, to see the effort, the continual effort, sort of the seamless effort. Like he talked about, all the effort he had to make through the war and everybody had to make to keep going and keep their sanity and find some way to live together in this national psychosis of imperial Buddhist Shinto militarism and imperialism.

[17:59]

When there's hardly anything you can do but go along with it, you just have to die. To be alive back then was to support the war effort, unless you went to jail and then you'd still be working for the war effort. So, you know, going through all that. But that actually was a high point of his life because he did find a way to express himself. And the students he had there during the war, they were the ones he felt closest to. They were basically like sort of like high school. They didn't really have schools classified the same way then as now. Now they're like our school system. It was sort of like post high school, sort of like junior college level, but they call it high school. And boys who would be going into the army after that, they'd live at his temple. And they said, I've been fortunate enough to spend time with some of them and have had other people interview others of them.

[19:09]

They said there was an atmosphere there that just wasn't like anywhere else, that Japan was very depressed and very gloomy and that there were all these slogans everywhere and this propaganda and all the thinking about Western devils. and the emperor being a gun. They said there wasn't any of that in Rinzōen. There wasn't an opposition to the war. It wasn't like anything seditious. They found a way to express themselves and to talk about the situation in Japan and even talk about peace at times and how Japan would be stronger if the war would end. so that it was like a little haven of sanity is the feeling I get from the guys and also how he felt. He was very grateful to them and when he'd go back to Japan from America, you know, but people here would assume I guess that he was going back to meet his Zen students or his monks or

[20:12]

our other priests, and he would do that, but the ones he really liked meeting were these guys who had been his students during the war because they had shared something that was extremely important to him, and those are the ones he considered his disciples. He never had a monk disciple. But anyway, I was just again making the point there about effort. After the war, his wife was murdered and that was a real That really changed his life because he felt responsible for it, and he actually was sort of responsible for it. It's pretty clear, and his whole family felt so. But he'd been sort of forced into it in a way, into keeping this crazy monk in his temple who murdered his wife. But he was the same way here. I mean, he'd always accept people who were what Trump or Rinpoche called mentally extreme.

[21:15]

Suzuki Roshi was totally open. We'd have people at Tassajara that really could not function in the monastery that were part of it, or another. Even ordaining me is somewhat akin to that. And Bob Halpern, who was my best friend, who plays somewhat of a role in the book, Bob was worse than me. He was very, and Shizukuro, she would tell me, he's like this, you know, sometimes he's good and sometimes not. But it was like, ordaining us as, you know, to be priests, it's like, wow. You know, he's really taking some long shots there, you know? And, you know, eventually, I continued doing priestly things with Becker Roche for five years, and then I started living in Bolinas, and I'd come back and, you know, wear my robes and stuff.

[22:22]

At some point, I realized, you know, I really never wanted to be a priest. And I really shouldn't be a priest. It's not my role. But I just got ordained because it was something to do with Suzuki Roshi. And I never, ever considered it. I mean, Reb used to sit me down and talk to me. Do you realize what you're doing? You're taking on a responsibility, a certain role. I had no idea what he was talking about. I just think, God, when is he going to stop talking to me about this? But really, he was right. But anyway, so Suzuki Roshi would, he would allow people to live at Tasa who, you know, when it was clear, it was sort of like beyond hope for them to practice there? I mean, did he not? I mean, this is the sort of thing that some of his students will talk about now. Did he not understand American psyche? Could he not see our weaknesses?

[23:23]

You know, people talk about this with Baker Rush. Could he not see that there were going to be certain problems there? Well, one thing I try to make clear in the book, although I do it just with throwing in little things, very little here and there, Just a little more than hitting, I'd say, is that the problems that Dick had with the community later, you can see he had back then, too. I mean, it was all very obvious in Suzuki Roshi. He was willing to accept a lot of imperfection in each of us and have confidence that we'd that we with the group, with the Sangha working together would still pass the torch of Buddhism on. It's sort of like, if you look at it in terms of like a battle or something, it's like we're all sort of wounded and crawling and trying to, you know, take this hill or something.

[24:30]

It's just like, you know, it's just, He just took the people who were his students and did his best, and he knew we'd do our best. But it seems to me that Buddhism is sort of passed on basically by imperfect. It almost seems to me like it's, he said, we're seeking Buddha. It seems to me like the light of Buddhism is passed on by deluded people and we can only do so well. But anyway, back to the monk who murdered his wife. That guy was really out of it and had no business being there. Maybe it was sort of a weakness of Suzuki Roshi to be accepting of everybody. It really was. I think one reason he was so receptive was that experience.

[25:36]

But you can see signs of it earlier than that. I think maybe he was just born a very receptive person. There's different types of people. And you don't have to be a nice person or a receptive, open person to be a Buddhist or to be a Buddhist teacher. It has to be all sorts of people. He just happened to have been an especially wonderful, likable person. Not much good was said about him. He was mean, arrogant, but he was diligent and dedicated to Buddhism and seemed to have a very good understanding of it. Suzuki Roshi was always very grateful to him, especially as he got older. He said in the last year of his life, he said, when I offer incense to my father, you know, They offer incense once a month to their ancestors, and we continue that some with important teachers like Suzuki Roshi and Boney Dharma and all that. He said, when I offer incense to my father, I feel sad.

[26:39]

But when I offer incense to my master, the tears stream down my cheeks. But when his master died in 33 or something, 35, I can't remember, maybe 33, yeah, Suzuki Roshi then would have been, ooh. He was 29? Well, he was about 30 years old. 29, 30, wow. He said he didn't feel anything. It was like the guy had been so mean to him for so many years, and had really never been very nice, that his master died and he didn't feel anything. Incidentally, that's exactly what Hoitsu told me he felt when Suzuki Roshi died, because he hadn't been a very nice father either. But Hoitsu feels much more warm toward his father now, just as Suzuki Roshi felt.

[27:42]

I'm very grateful toward Gyojin Son toward the end of his life. I mean, Son could not exist as a Zen teacher in America today. I mean, he'd just be totally rejected by the, you know, there's this whole culture that has grown up around Zen here that is, it has to, you know, because there has to be culture and society around our teachers and our groups to give them stability. It's like to, you can see when it started off back in the, In the 50s and 60s and even the 70s, when the groups are too top-heavy and the teachers don't have any checks and balances in the society of the group, in the society of the people who support the group. you know, all the different rings around at the neighbors. When there's not checks and balances on the group, the group can get, you know, it makes it unstable. It makes it, or gives it the potential to be unstable. There's too much responsibility then put on the teacher to have to, to,

[28:46]

you know, keep in balance all the time. So now we have a much, much stronger culture around teachers and around the institutions. But, you know, it's so strong, it's a little puritanical, and I think it will spit out certain types of influences that maybe we should be more tolerant of. Like Sun Shaku is the first Buddhist, I think, priest to come to America, very close to it. You check in Rick Field's book, How the Swans Came to the Lake. He said that there are teachers with good conduct and there are teachers without good conduct and it's good to study with each type. Now, nobody around Genghis Khan's teacher would say he was a person that had bad conduct at that time, because he did everything sort of according to the rules.

[29:59]

But, you know, he had a mistress who was the wife of a local rice merchant back at Zonin. He was mean to his students, so he tended to lose all of them. He was arrogant. I talked to people that said, you know, that the temple owned the surrounding lands. And it was very feudalistic, and I've talked to people that said when they would scoop up the rice to give to the temple, you know, as their tax, that someone would stand there with his arms like this, looking down at them with a scowl, you know, so that they were frightened that they weren't giving enough rice. So according to our standards, All our ideas of what a good person is, and we think that a person can't be a Zen teacher unless they're very ethical, and I have these same sorts of feelings.

[31:04]

It's hard to figure it all out. According to those people, he was a priest as priests should be. That's exactly what they've said to me. Well, he would have no place in this culture, and I'm not really eager to see us foster priests like that. That had to do with Japanese feudalism and another culture and everything. But anyway, at this time, after the war and then after the occupation, I believe Suzuki Roshi, his life was getting sort of in a rut. You know, he'd started these two kindergartens, which were really wonderful. I mean, looking at it from our point of view, it was an exemplary life. But from his point of view, it wasn't good enough. because he wanted to teach Zen as he understood it and as he'd gotten it from his marine sergeant master, and that's very much what Son was like. It's like the movies where the marine sergeant is mean as heck to the guys and then they get in the field and they're grateful to him because they're staying alive.

[32:12]

I think he wasn't just a teacher of form and how to be a priest and how to be a duty-bound Japanese priest. He was also a good teacher of Dogen and fundamental attitudes of Buddhism that Suzuki Roshi picked up on and that were really, really a part of who he was. So the point I'm making here is after he sort of got into a rut, he stayed away. He got to where he didn't want to be at the temple. He was telling young neighborhood guys who he knew and he'd confide in that he wanted to get out of there. He didn't want to spend his whole life just taking care of families and doing ceremonies. And he wanted to go to America and he wanted to teach Buddhism and he said he wanted to teach peace. But it was actually the people in Japan that he was teaching peace to around the temple.

[33:19]

A local politician there told me that the first he ever heard of ideas of international cooperation and global, you know, think, globally, act locally, that sort of stuff came from Suzuki Roshi, who was near the temple. So he didn't give up. He said, it got so bad, it's the idea I get. And we all get it, right? See, this is something we really relate to, where we feel like we can't get out of it, you know, almost. Oh, I wish, you know, I've ruined my life or I've wasted my life. I wish I could do something. There's this great quote I used that he said, when you're at an impasse or you're at a place where you feel like there's some giant mountain range like in Nepal in front of you and it's impossible to get through, he said something like, have faith or take heart. Don't worry or keep trying because there is a path there.

[34:22]

You will find there is a way to get through it." And that's what he had experienced. He finished fixing up the temple, which he really, really felt obligated to do, as a continuation of what Gokujin and so on had done and what he'd done with him through the years, and got this opportunity to come to America. And he came to America, and it was just like a Walt Disney film. He arrived in America, and bang, people are interested in Zen. It was like a dream come true. And all these people had read D.T. Suzuki and Alan Watts and Paul Repson, so there was more of a romantic idea of Zen, the idea like you're a deluded being and you run into a master and you ask a question and they say quats and hit you with a stick and you get completely enlightened and you never have any problems again. There was some idea of that. The group of people who were interested in Zen had come out of, a lot of them had come out of the beat thinking, which somewhat out of transcendental thought, Emerson and Thoreau influenced by that, but you know, like Ginsberg and Kerouac and Snyder.

[35:41]

And so many of them, a lot of their original studies had been in existential thought, which was getting a little nihilistic. And then they found Buddhism sort of informed that, and then there was like a door opening, ah, you know? And they kind of interested in that. And then Suzuki Roshi came and met all these people interested in Oriental culture and Oriental religion and interested in Zen and interested in sitting. And then little sitting groups, you know, Zincinero Rose and Tonsahara. And it sort of gave the whole country permission to sit the way he emphasized it, the way he emphasized practice. Maizumi Roshi said there had been things trying to happen. There'd been people trying to start sitting groups, but they just didn't. nothing worked, he said. And then Suzuki Roshi came and sort of established in our culture the attitude or something that was sort of like he opened a door and then not only could his sitting group start but others sort of took hold. Now that's a theory that would be hard to prove and I always quote my Zumi Roshi when I say that, but that's sort of the way I see what happens.

[36:51]

So anyway, we're all here now and if anybody has any question, I'll answer it until it's time to stop. Yes. Thank you. I know people were interested in Zen and reading those books, but how did anybody ever know that he was there? Because he just came here and he didn't say, I'm coming and I'll see you at Zazen on Monday morning. How did somebody find out about him? Yeah, it is pretty simple. He arrived in San Francisco to be the, actually his role was to be assistant priest to Sokochi Temple. The former priest, Tobase, was still, it was still his temple. But they didn't want Tobase to go out, to go back. Actually, Tobase was, I don't make a big point of this in the book because I didn't, you know, I didn't want to embarrass people, I didn't want to antagonize anybody or embarrass any relatives, he has a few relatives around here.

[38:03]

You know, they felt like the temple had gone downhill somewhat with Tabasi. He didn't take good enough care of it. And also, there was a nun that he had brought with him who was his lover. And they were sort of tired of that there. It was very much what Suzuki Roshi's master did. And it was a traditional thing to do in Japan. But they asked for a married priest to come over to take Tabasi's place. And they'd been asking for a long time for a married priest. And that's why Suzuki Roshi married Otsuna. I mean, he just said to his mother-in-law, I've got to marry somebody, because I filled out a visa that said I'm married, and I'm going over to America, who should I marry? And his mother-in-law said, well, the mother of his former wife said, well, you have to marry Mitsu, of course, nobody else. And he went, oh, of course, yeah. And she said, oh, okay. And I asked her, did you want to marry him? And she said, oh, that had nothing to do with it.

[39:08]

But anyway, Mrs. Suzuki is a very strong person. I'm sure she wouldn't have done it if she hadn't wanted to. But so he arrived in America to be this take this low-pay, no-status job in this small Soto-zen, very poor Soto-zen temple, about 60 families. His temple in Japan had about 600 families, and he'd had jobs in other temples. So he landed in this Japanese-American community, which back then was really separate from the non-Japanese American community because it had only been 14 years since they'd gotten out of concentration camps from being thrown in there because they were Japanese Americans, they'd lost all their money, they'd had to scrimp and save and get new jobs again. and working for a dollar and a quarter an hour to save money so their kids could go to college, trying to rebuild everything over again.

[40:14]

They had a tremendous amount of resentment against what was mainly the Caucasian community. So how did these people who sat with him find out? There had been some activity at Sokoji when Tobase was there. He had classes and sometimes Dr. Kato, who was running it, Kato Sensei ran it from the time Tobase left for a year and a half until Suzuki Roshi got there. Kato worked with Alan Watts on The Way of Zen. He would translate everything for Watts and every week they'd meet. Kato would work all week long and every Friday they'd meet and he'd give Watts all the information that he wanted translating certain things. Then Watts would work on that all week and Kato would work on new stuff. Kato taught at the American Academy of Asian Studies. All these people were interested in oriental thought and religion and culture. The first week Suzuki Roshi arrived, Kato took him to his class there and introduced him to his students.

[41:24]

They said that they knew all over San Francisco that there was a new Zen master in town. At North Beach, they said, at the Art Institute, people were talking about it. And then there was the East-West House and the Hyphen House, which is the hyphen between East and West, were two communal living situations started basically by beat poets and artists to study Oriental religion and culture. They were right by Sokoji. So there were hundreds of people aware that he was there right away, but there were only a very few of out of this loose subculture, willing to get out and sit. They'd come, talk to him in the afternoon and say, I want to study Zen, I want to go to Japan and study Zen and get enlightened with a Zen master. Just this term, Zen master. this sort of making a bigger deal out of the priest than, I mean, making it all, you know, it just comes from these Rinzai books. I mean, he was just a priest in this temple, you know, and everybody's relating to him as a Zen master, you know, it's just, and there's more of a way of thinking of it that way here than like in Japan.

[42:35]

I mean, in Japan, think, there's, what, 17,000 Soto Zen temples, and they've, There's a shortage of priests, but basically the idea is they've each got a priest. Well, you don't think of all these people as Zen masters, but basically that's that if one of them comes to America, we call them a Zen master. It would be like calling every parish priest and minister a saint or something, I don't know. But anyway, so he had this, the people were projecting right as soon as he arrived, all these things on him, like that. And of course, he was interested in being a Zen master and a Zen priest. He was, I think, actually a Zen master in a sense, but not according to the way Japanese people saw it. He was just another priest. But anyway, people were aware of him right away, and out of all these people who were interested in Zen and Oriental religion, every once in a while, one of them would be interested in sitting at 545 in the morning.

[43:40]

I mean, that's what he would say to people when they come. He'd say, well, I sit Zazen, so many people will say this, I sit Zazen every morning at 545 and you're welcome to come join me. So he didn't offer the sort of Zen they've been reading about and hearing about. He offered a daily practice. the opportunity to sit with painful legs and wandering mind, as he'd say. And he'd offer the bitter pill in a sense. I mean, he was very charming and it was wonderful to be around him and people loved that early culture, especially the early sort of coffee clutch, more social Zen center at first. But basically all the people who were doing it were people who were willing to get up and sit Zazen early in the morning and sit periodic sessions. So there wasn't a heck of a lot of candy in there. So it was a small group, but a strong group that developed around him, and eventually there was this end center and all that. Yeah. Is our time sort of up?

[44:43]

I mean, it seems like it's going on a little. We just asked Sojin how he heard of him, and this is what David just described. How did you first hear of him? Well, he'd say the fifth person he ordained, but it's, yeah. Well, no, the third was Gene, would be Gene, and the fourth would be Graham.

[45:24]

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