Parenting brings life into the world. Yeah, that comes under the subheading of lay Buddhism. Indeed, as it should be. Yes. Yes. I wonder if you could say a little bit about that tension and conflict sometimes. Indeed. As a human intellectual enterprise, science is really remarkable.

[01:04]

And most of it, I think, has its source in a kind of healthy practicality. A lot of it comes out of hands-on work with materials, with tools, with various kinds of problem solving. Some of it is rooted in the fascinating theoretical, mathematical work that was done in very ancient times in trying to figure out the movement of the stars and the evolution of certain kinds of math and mathematics and so forth. Many strains of history go into the making of science, of course, one of them being the Muslim. that goes around North Africa with mathematics, with a higher level of mathematics, and comes into Europe via the University of Salamanca in Spain and then the University of Paris in the 12th century.

[02:08]

Science is not a monolith. The Occidental's history of science includes several false starts, several leads, several possibilities, several potentialities. And for the most part, at the moment in history, we are pretty much stuck with the science that is dominated by the line of Francis Descartes and then Francis Bacon, which is reductive and mechanistic. which is in fact now being shaken up a whole lot in the realm of further thought. The scientific method is worthy of regard. And it's intrinsic in the scientific method that you accept that no answer is ever final.

[03:10]

That's not mathematics, of course. We're talking about science. That if you are comforting yourself at the moment or amusing yourself with a certain picture of the universe, how big it is, whether it's a Big Bang or something, how large it is, how fast a light year flies and all of that, you've got to remember all of that may change tomorrow. Unlike mythologies, which are a story that is a set story, and you can change it if you like, but you don't have to, or philosophies, which are closed in another way, maybe, the story that science tells is always open to revision. It must be open to revision. which gives it a creative edge right there and actually makes it much less sure than we would like to think it is. So people, the secular 20th century people, East and West, say Japanese, Chinese, and Americans and Western Europeans, have a worldview that is fundamentally shaped by a kind of lightweight understanding or images provided by contemporary science.

[04:24]

So that is also our worldview. And we should... we might well want to understand better what that worldview is, where it comes from. And people comfort themselves with the idea, well, now that's the worldview and that's the way the world is. They should understand that the scientific worldview has provided them is unstable and will always be unstable. Yet people get disturbed to be told in one decade that salt is good for you and in another decade that salt is bad for you. or whatever it is that keeps coming down. This week, the doctors are telling us, you know. It's very frustrating. But that's the nature of the beast. Anyway, there were and still are other lines of possible scientific thinking and investigation that are more, as they say, organic, that are more imaginative, that... take certain care and cautions.

[05:28]

Scientism, doctor science, the science of the 60s. Boy, there are some gruesome stories about research, psychological research on human beings or behavioral research on animals that took place totally without any sense of moral obligation to either people or animals as late as the 60s. The 60s, the counterculture era, which is routinely lambasted in the popular press as the source of all things bad in modern society, the counterculture also gave us the gradual reformation via animal rights and other kinds of moral conscience, the reformation of a lot of science. So, you know, it's a tool with mixed capacities and a mixed history, and you have to be critical and careful about how you approach it, to be sure.

[06:34]

And there are a lot of irresponsible jerks out there, you know, working as scientists. But it has a wonderful potential. And sometimes it provides us with just stunning facts. Can you imagine that, a fact being stunning? I think they are. I always thought that was the case. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Well, that's another thing that science does. It boggles our minds. That's almost as bad as Dogen, you know.

[07:37]

For boggling your mind. You know, so it's one of the things we have to take into account. Obviously, we have to take it into account. You have to take it into account like this. Any of you who have children I have raised children, will be called on by your children to explain who we are and where we come from. And 99% of us are going to fumble around and try to describe for our children, to our children, a basically Darwinian evolutionary model of what kind of an organism we are and where we came from. We're not going to go back on to a fundamentalist Christian myth or, you know, what other myths are there? Everybody in Japan and China, when they tell their kids what they are, where they came from, used Darwinian evolution as the story. The Chinese, the Taiwanese, the Koreans, and the Japanese are, if anything, more secular and more engaged with the 20th century Chinese scientific model of the world than Americans are.

[08:52]

Isn't that interesting? There is nobody in the Far East who is arguing that they should also teach creationism in the schools. It's only these stubborn Americans. You've got to give them some credit. Hanging on to their old stories, you know. So part of the whole question of talking about science is we have to understand it as a provider of narratives, which we either critically or uncritically go along with. And the time has come to be critical of those narratives also. And very much here with the kind of critical work that's being done with or toward or against the sciences coming out of postmodernism, postmodern critical theory in the sciences. Which actually takes me to the point I wanted to start this afternoon with. It's carrying on a little further.

[09:56]

with this question of being world-denying because of the implications of some of the language of early Buddhist texts, say. And it runs through a lot of Indian philosophical literature, non-Buddhist Indian philosophical literature, too. It's hard to be sure exactly what was meant in the 5th century BC. But by the 5th century AD, when Mahayana and Sarvastivadan philosophy, Mahasangika philosophy was really emerging, and where there had, by the time that a Mahayana Sangha had also emerged, so that there was now a Theravadan Sangha and a Mahayana Sangha, in India, and by the time that the 12-fold chain of causation view had combined with Abhidharma psychological analysis and had come up with basically the essentials of the theory of emptiness, or the language of emptiness,

[11:23]

that asserts that all things are intimately interconnected and by virtue of that and that they are all compounded and by virtue of that we shall call them transparent or we shall call them empty. And then that became the underpinning of much of the Mahayana schools. By that time, by 500 BC, it is clear that, as they like to say in the universities, the Buddhist project was no longer in any sense to get out of the phenomenal physical world, but was an analysis of the nature of reality. and what it was trying to get out of or get away from or throw some light on was not the phenomenal universe, but was the question of what is the nature of the phenomenal universe.

[12:26]

This is a big difference. And I think that this probably was the case from the beginning. But it becomes very clear later that when Buddhism and later Hinduism alike say, this world is an illusion, They're not saying there's no reality. They're not saying this world is an illusion. What they're saying is how we see it, how we perceive it, how we understand it is full of illusion. We cannot trust our understanding of it strictly. And we have to examine our mind, discipline ourselves perhaps, watch our consciousness, live a pure life, perhaps, to approach another way of seeing which may be a truer reality and may not necessarily cancel out.

[13:29]

one reality, but gives us a clearer sense of what the world might be. Even so, you know, even with it fairly clearly expressed that the Samkhya project, the project of... the great yoga masters from the 10th century, Shankara, the Shaiva philosophers, as well as the Mahayana Buddhists, was not world-denying per se. Nonetheless, Western observers that came along a little bit later couldn't even make the distinction between questioning the phenomenal universe per se and questioning our perception of the phenomenal universe. They couldn't make a distinction. So they still went on saying that Far Eastern religions are world denying. And, you know, it comes right down to the 20th century. I have had educated Japanese friends, college people, but

[14:34]

who had never had any real contact with Buddhism, on more than one occasion in Japan, say to me, but Buddhism says the world isn't real. Buddhism doesn't like the world. Isn't that right? I say, oh, my God. Aren't you supposed to be from a Buddhist culture? What did you learn? Well, they didn't learn it. Yes. Actually, that there are strands in Buddhism And I think this is true of other religions as well that are anti-life. You know, because once I did hear a Tibetan teacher from Tibet, telling the students here and stuff, well, you know, when you have a dream, you think the dream is real. But, you know, then you wake up. Same thing when you're watching a movie. He says, life is the same way. And I think there is a strain, just like in Judaism, there's a strain that says, oh, it would have been better if we had never been born. No, that's a different thing.

[15:36]

That's not the same thing. To say that life is a dream, and then you wake up, is not saying that life isn't real. It's like saying there are two realities. It's not like saying, we should never have been born. You see the distinction? No. I think that there are some strains in Buddhism that have been caught up in that. But I think that that diverges from the mainstream considerably. Yeah. There are strains even that I'll see when I'm reading Zen literature that do have that feeling for me that I have to struggle with that myself, even as a Buddhist. You'd have to show it to me. Yeah.

[16:38]

What we're getting into is the first part of the truth then. suffering, which again, Western scholars mistook. We say everything is suffering as if that's a negative statement, when it's actually a scientific statement. It's an observable statement, yeah. Well, you know, to add one more step to that, to say that Buddhism is not world-denying or is even life-affirming, you have to then say, and also Buddhism is not dualistic.

[17:50]

Buddhism does not deny death either. Buddhism affirms death equally with life. And this is in the nature of life, and this is the nature of things. And so that is where, then, the realism about the nature of suffering, dukkha, is at the heart of it. Buddhism is rigorously realistic and does say, actually, the nature of the universe is suffering. There is no self. There is a way to realization and that involves forgetting the self. And there is nothing theological or cosmic in the universe for any of us to rely on. And so it gives us the universe without visible support. If you're looking for visible support, that's true. And that's also why when one has to turn inevitably, or not inevitably, if you like, to the contemplation of death and its inevitability, that is also something that Buddhism is very clear, very calm, and very helpful with.

[19:07]

So both sides of that go together. Those two things go together. But, you know, I don't want to belabor that point. I just wanted to cover what I thought was an interesting and perceivable difference, somewhat perceivable difference from early Buddhism into, say, 500 A.D., 1000 A.D., the evolution then of a Chinese and Japanese Mahayana. which becomes farther removed from the negative language or apparently negative language of early Buddhism and gives us the joyous landscape paintings of China and Japan or the serene and realistic but untroubled of China and Japan, Issa's haiku. This dewdrop world is but a dewdrop world.

[20:11]

And yet this impermanent world of suffering is just an impermanent world of suffering. And yet sums up the human dilemma. There's another haiku that goes, walking through the field of flowers on the roof of hell. Well, I'd like to shift over now. Please interrupt or carry on this conversation if you like. Yes. There are people and there always have been who entered into monastic life because they couldn't deal with family and social life, economic life.

[21:26]

strains and stresses of various sorts. Now, is that escaping from the world or is that escaping from a situation you can't handle? In truth, you know, psychologically speaking, for lots of people probably it was just that they were escaping from a situation they couldn't handle. And that's, you know, to be expected and also to be honored. It was well known. See, we're shifting over to East Asia right now. Here we go. It was well known in China that especially at certain periods in history, that there was a strong pressure for people wanting to enter the monasteries. People tried to become monks for a number of reasons. One of them was high taxes. One of them was that the monasteries gradually ended up as big landowners, big landlords, and had more food than the villages had.

[22:41]

So very mundane reasons for wanting to enter the monastic world. In return, the monastic world, and this is true of all the monastic traditions of China, although after 845, only after the great Buddhist persecutions of 845 AD, only the Zen sites survived. So after that, it was only Zen monasteries. But prior to that, there were many schools of Buddhism The monasteries decided to become rougher, more rigorous, colder, less user-friendly to discourage people from dropping in just to get out of something that they couldn't handle. And I think that that continues today to some degree in the style of the monasteries in Japan that are rugged, rigorous, At least at the beginning, they're not friendly to you. After you've survived a while, like boot camp, then they become friendly to you.

[23:46]

That's part of that tradition, that not only should becoming a Buddhist monk or a Zen monk be a serious decision, it should be a commitment that you don't undertake lightly. And it still is that way. So I don't know. I don't know if the monastery is a good model for people leaving the world. There are many reasons why people do that. And as many people come out of the monasteries who are helpful, friendly, generous, and compassionate as any other sort. And during periods of famine and warfare and trials and struggles, Like the hundred years wars in Japan in the Kamakura era, there was the monks in the monasteries who often, you know, were picking up the wounded off the streets all the time, rebuilding houses, raising money to get food for starving people, making the temples into little hospitals and schools.

[24:56]

And that's been a good part of the history of Chinese and Japanese monasticism is that they've been sanctuaries for people during times of turmoil. That's part three. Sorry. Actually, you know, roughly, this is a little bit arbitrary, it's true, but I'd like to shift for a while with these questions in mind, but in relationship to China and Japan, and I'm going to ground them in my own experience, what I saw and did and learned during the 12 years I lived in Japan and worked in temples and monasteries.

[25:59]

And then the last part of what I'd like to do with all of you is to talk about North America, the Western Hemisphere, what the heck we're actually doing. and share with you my ideas about what works and what doesn't work. And I've got to quit touching myself. If you were wired like this, man, you couldn't get away with anything. God knows all. So remind me to come back to that. I'm pretty sure I'll remember. Anybody else? I saw some other hands. I was just thinking about this in terms of this past conversation. You said something about that there was a little too much Protestantism and Islam Buddhism, or that that's something that you have anticipated.

[27:03]

Is that consonant with this sense that some people have that, you know, Would some strains of Buddhism maybe be somewhat like that? I don't think so. I don't think that's... That's not what you were talking about. That's not what I was talking about, no. That would be a little different, I think. I'll come back to that in a little while, too. Yes? I wonder, let's say, the difference between questioning the phenomenon and questioning the perception of the phenomenon. Which of those is my end? The second one. Questioning the veil of illusion. The veil of illusion, maya. Is that ontologically located in the nature of phenomena itself?

[28:03]

Or is that located in the imperfections of the seer? Of the mind and views? Good question. However, the apparent earlier Buddhist statements are not philosophically so sophisticated as to imply that, but simply imply that the phenomenal universe as we ordinarily perceive it, which may or may not be accurate, is of itself something that you want to maybe get away from. So it becomes philosophically and psychologically richer later in time. And I'm suggesting maybe it was richer earlier. And then another theme that just lies behind that, which I'll just throw out again briefly, is that I think some of the evidence that the sense was rich and complex, even in early times, is the complexity of the Buddhist Sangha, the richness of its interactions and its strong commitment to teaching.

[29:17]

and a strong commitment to supporting and helping not only each other, but people outside the immediate Buddhist community. And then the dynamic of Mahayana, which takes up the dialogue of, well, who is it that can really manage to get enlightened? And as you all remember, at least the story has told us that in the earliest Buddhist times, it was felt that only someone who renounced the world, a male who renounced the world and became a bhikkhu, could hope to be on a serious path toward enlightenment. Then the ladies pestered Gautama. They kept pestering him and saying, we want to do this too, Gautama. We want to sit. We want to become enlightened. And finally, he said, OK. You can do it, but boy, this is going to slow us down.

[30:19]

Now, that's a true story. That's what the early Buddhist texts say. So then the order of nuns, the bhikkhunis, was then created, and then there were bhikkhus and bhikkhunis with shaped heads. And then for a number of centuries, for several centuries, the Buddhist sangha was bhikkhus and bhikkhunis. Starting a little later though, more and more people are turning up at lectures, coming to the meditation hall, asking intelligent questions, who are lay people. and who refuse to become bhikkhus and bhikkhunis. They keep hanging around, but they say, no, I don't want to become a monk. I've got too many responsibilities. I've got an aged mother. I've got a business to run. My kids aren't through college yet. Whatever it is, they kept up their interest in Buddhism and attending and supporting, donating money, donating robes and so forth. But becoming, actually, in some cases, clearly...

[31:21]

deeply understanding, wise human beings. And so the Sangha concept gradually opened up to Mahayana level one, which was that, okay, you can be a lay person and also become enlightened. That's possible. They finally agree that's possible. This is, you know, it may not have been nearly this cut and dried, but this is the way the history of it seems to go. So then the next step was that lay people can sometimes become accomplished as Buddhist practitioners. And out of the spirit of that, a little later, down the century or two, comes which sutra? the Vimalakirti Sutra, which is the great statement of the lay people laying the ground for a serious lay Buddhist movement. That's the way you can read it, one of the ways you can read it. And of course, point by point, especially in the early chapters, the Vimalakirti Sutra takes a Hinayana position and then turns it and shows you the Mahayana position.

[32:29]

Point by point, very instructive. text in the movement of Buddhist thought, and obviously they are self-conscious in the way that thinking has moved, and they're demonstrating for you exactly how it moved. Without denying the Theravadan level of thought, they're nonetheless adding another level of thought. Well, to make a long story short, the next debate that comes up is, What about those brown people that live in the woods and eat meat? Those hunters and gatherers? What about those border people? What about those people over in Assam that defile their teeth and tattoo themselves? I'm not kidding. What about people who practice human sacrifice that live in the forests, the Gauns? They can't become enlightened, can they? And there was a theory for a while that there were classes of human beings that could in no case become enlightened.

[33:36]

What was the name for those? There was a term for that. I don't remember. Do you remember, Mark, the term for unenlightenable people? I think that's a giant term. At any rate, although it was phrased in an apparently harmless way, just saying that there are some people who are beyond the pale and can't become enlightened, what it actually was was racist. It was ethnicity and racist prejudice against border people. And their outlandishness. It was assuming that they were too outlandish to become enlightened. Pardon me? Well, it was like barbarians, yeah. It was like barbarians. And so it actually took another century or two for, and it hasn't been entirely resolved yet.

[34:41]

I remember Chogyam Trungpa once giving a talk in Boulder where he followed the old Tibetan line to a group of students and he said, and you should be happy that you weren't born in a border tribe. In other words, to be born a middle-class white American is a fortunate rebirth, but not a border tribe. Because border tribes meant in Tibet, it meant border tribes, and those were people who weren't going to get enlightened. That's what he meant by that, that there are people on Earth who, the way they live, they're just not going to get enlightened. But it's also that there are people who live in a country where the words of Buddha are not heard, are not available. Yeah, that's part of the meaning of it. Yeah, that they're not available. The teaching is not available. Yeah? I've noticed when you're asked a question that you not only answer with a story, but you'll answer with stories that go back 1,000 years or 3,000 years or 30,000 years.

[35:43]

And I've noticed that the effect for me is like every time you're asked a question, like you put on a piece of music, I feel like I'm going down into the stream. We were talking last night about the people who did the cave communities and all of our ancestors. But I've started to wonder if there's some conscious intent if you're telling stories that were constantly going way back into history of trying to bypass our minds and so on. to bypass your minds. I'm trying to get around the back of your front brain and get down there into the back brain. It is not a conscious manipulative device. It stems from the nature of my study and practice over the years as both a Dharma follower and also a writer and a storyteller and one who listens to stories and an effort that I have made to try to take in as much as I can of the human story.

[37:11]

And to, you know, which I admit is just like a tiny, tiny, minuscule part of the story. But like trying to put the picture together. And time is a very little account in this. 500 years is nothing. 30,000 years is probably minimal. there's much more time we could talk about than that, just within terms of human beings. So I consider the 30,000-year chunk of time a modest, manageable time chunk. Although the truth is we don't have stories that we can trust as being that old. We do have a lot of stories circulating around that we can trust as being 12,000 or 15,000 years old. I don't think there's any question about that. And the stories I'm talking about are stories that are out there in world folklore, world mythology, found worldwide. The fact that certain stories are found from Patagonia to the southern tip of Africa, all across Eurasia.

[38:15]

and figuring out how long it must have been around for it to have permeated to every corner of the globe, and I think 12 or 15,000 years is a modest estimate for that, then we know that we have a very large body of motif and story that is very, very old. And that is worth looking at because it reflects the experience and the narratives that human beings have most wanted not to lose. They hung on to them, otherwise they wouldn't still be around. So the very fact that they did not allow them to be forgotten gives them value and significance in modern times. So you can latch on to a few of those. But, and fairy tales will take you into that. Many fairy tales and many myths will take you into that. Stories I'm working with, most of them, are actually, a number of them are historical. You know, they're just constructed out of what we know of history.

[39:17]

Although, you know, the Buddhist mythologies, that is to say the mythological aspects of the sutras, we were talking last night about somebody was saying, who was it? Someone said, I never heard a Buddhist teacher say a good thing about scholarship. I love scholarship myself. I see it as a wonderful way of enlarging how we see things. And no one has done the scholarship that I know of on the mythological aspects of the Buddhist sutras, the great Mahayana sutras. that would tie them in, as they inevitably will, to the oral traditions of Central Asia and Northern India and to a set of motifs and oral practices that probably are far older than Buddhism. And that'll be interesting to see how that works. Anyway, where was I? You challenged me, I answered you.

[40:20]

Where was I before that? Border tribes, yeah, okay. We're talking about the evolution of Mahayana. Mahayana hit the point where it said, yeah, all human beings. But the pressure was on. Why not animals? And I think the pressure began to show up in China. Once Buddhism got to China, that's where you begin to get this. Can animals become enlightened? Yes. Well, you know, pretty soon Mayan wisdom threw in the towel. You know, totally. He said, yes, animals can be enlightened. What about grass? Yes, grass can be enlightened. All sentient beings are capable of entering into the drama of an enlightened universe. And that is a Buddhist muttoning Chanran in the 7th or 8th century, where he phrases it most elegantly. He says, all beings, sentient or non-sentient, are present in the Dharma assembly.

[41:24]

And of course, you know, the sutras, the Mahayana sutras, the early sutras start out, the sutras always start, you know, with a little formula. Where did it take place? When did it take place? Who was the speaker? And who attended? When the Buddha was at Anathapindaka's garden. And that's a Theravadan opening. And by the time you get to the Mahayana Sutras, the Huayen Sutra, which is delivered by a cosmic Buddha, not a historical Buddha, In Thomas Cleary's translation, I think the first 150 pages describes who attended the sutra. In some ways, it's the most interesting part of the sutra. And you know who it is? It is every plant spirit, every grass spirit by name.

[42:28]

every seaweed spirit, every air spirit, that you can possibly imagine, then a whole lot more, are listed as the attendees at the great Huayen Sutra. They are the listeners at the sutra. What a message that is. What a message that they would go on for hours just reciting that part of it. What does that tell us? That is absolutely fascinating, the intention of that opening. And so Chanran has said, okay, all beings are present in the Dharma assembly. And that becomes standard thinking then for Zen in particular. And finally, you know, totally thought of in those terms in Japan. And R. H. Blyth says, with that background in Mahayana openness to all the possibilities of beings, finally what we get is basho.

[43:31]

He says, basho could not exist without that. All of this has paved the way for the haiku of basho, busan, issa, an absolutely unselfconscious openness to the value of all these beings. And of course you see it in other ways in Far Eastern art, East Asian art. So that is what I've just described as a trajectory of the evolution of Mahayana to the point that it is, we would say, it's really very open now, totally open now. Is that realistic? Does it make any difference? Maybe not. We still have to work, as human beings, we have to work on ourselves. even though we don't necessarily always sit down at the same, you know, we don't always sit in the same zendo. Yeah. Yeah.

[44:33]

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Well, that is very much in later Far Eastern Mahayana, that it's not limited just to sentient beings, that that sense of beings and their presence is everywhere. There's the koan. What is the Buddha? The oak tree at the foot of the garden. There are a number of little places like that in Zen tradition where they break out of the human. Does the dog have the Buddha nature? Okay, that's a dog. Okay, what about, you know, the old cypress tree or oak tree Buddha at the foot of the garden? There are a lot of things like that that Zen has actually put itself to in this regard.

[45:41]

And it's very charming and hopeful. ... A lot is excluded, but the illusion that it's all, everybody's taken care of in the wild like that. I had to listen to a ravine. That would be a good thing. OK. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. your early remark about the fundamentalist need for the pain of our stories.

[46:52]

Now, the remark would be, well, I don't know if that was up to you, but I hope it's kind of what it is. So I was wondering, because I'm a native and grew up in It would be fun to have them sit down together, wouldn't it? You know, maybe after spending some time with Fidel, the Pope could try the Dalai Lama next. You know, that whole Clinton scandal week was really a pity.

[47:58]

I really regret that that happened, mostly because it took all the attention away from what was happening in Cuba. And I was really looking forward to seeing how the press would respond to that, how the public would respond to that, what kind of a story would come out of that, what kind of a message would come out of that. I thought that was a groundbreaking move for both the Pope and Castro. What an irony, you know. The leader of the strongest nation on earth is plastered all over the press under attack for having his hanky-panky with one of his interns. That's the story from the United States. And what's the story from Cuba? Fidel Castro and the Pope are having a serious conversation. Who looks better? The Pope, to give him credit, and you probably saw this in the papers, was paving the way for his visit to Cuba by saying, you know, not everything in Marxism was bad.

[49:04]

He was saying, uncontrolled capitalism in Eastern Europe has caused some terrible things. Castro's Cuba, he says, has some things that we can admire. And he said other things, conditioning, expressed dubiousness about the direction that uncontrolled world capitalism is going. That is very significant to be coming from the Pope. And also it's very needed, you know, it's very needed cautions to be put out there on a planet, on a world which at this point Aside from fundamentalist Christianity and fundamentalist Islam, there is no challenge worth mentioning to the energy of unleashed godless capitalism with the disappearance of socialism as a viable moral alternative. That's what we're stuck with.

[50:07]

Maybe I'll come back to that a bit later. I'm going to take a little personal turn now to complete this story because I want to come back to the United States. But first I want to get myself to Japan briefly. So I'm going to be a little autobiographical. I, for myself, found it... ultimately probably not workable to try to follow a Native American spiritual path. Although I made steps in that direction when I was in my late teens and early 20s. And I sat in the TP circle a couple of times and participated, partook of the good medicine, peyote. And those were very powerful and transformative experiences.

[51:08]

But I also had a sense that I couldn't really be welcomed into those worlds. But my understanding of Buddhism by this time also was such that Buddhism had come out to be something anybody was welcome in. not closed, as we have said, not ethnic, not tribal, accepting anyone. So whereas you are challenged in many ways if you try to enter into a Native American spiritual path, you're not going to be challenged, no matter what your race or whatever, in going into Buddhism. And I appreciated the openness of that, the welcome that that meant. It was extended. And I also appreciated the refinement, the fact that Buddhism had a very refined philosophical position, as well as a long and refined psychological understanding and some very concrete and very practical practices.

[52:24]

And I taught myself how to do zazen before I ever had anybody give me instructions, and I pretty well got the hang of it. Then I met my first actual living Buddhist community of people in this country was the Jodoshin people over in Berkeley, the Berkeley Buddhist Temple on Channing Way, Reverend Kanmol Imamura and his family. who had open seminars every Friday night for anyone who wanted to drop by. And so that's where we had a number of great dialogues and debates with university students, graduate students, Tibetan lamas passing through, Japanese Buddhist priests passing through. Alan Watts often came to these events. Ananda Claude Dahlenberg often came to these events. Jack Kerouac sat in on some of them. Allen Ginsberg came to some of them. They were remarkable, a remarkable little center of Buddhist transmission that was an entirely authentic community, family-based transmission in the Jodo Shin School of Buddhism, Pure Land Buddhism.

[53:32]

I'm still in touch with that family. And I have great admiration for the Jodo Shin school. My wife was, my current wife, was raised in Jodo Shin, down in the Great Central Valley, where there used to be a couple of hundred Buddhist temples scattered up and down California, out in the farming communities. And there still are several dozen down there. Jodo Shin. Ta-riki, other power. Not ji-riki, not self-power. You probably know all this. Jodo-shin, do not try to improve yourself. You'll only make it worse. No self-help. No effort. All you do is feed your ego and get in your own way. Have simple faith that

[54:35]

Believe right now. You are totally enlightened. And everything is covered by Amitabha. Amitabha has paid all the bills. Actually, they don't say you are totally enlightened. They say you're fine. They say you're fine and there's nothing to do except do what you do. And so they have a great community life. And they have great little churches. And they study classical Buddhism. And they acquaint themselves with all these Buddhist stories. But their real practice is, this is what my wife Carol says, I said, what is the practice in Jodo Shin? Because it's not supposed to have a practice, really. But there must be a practice. She says, I know what it is. It's potlucks. They have lots of potlucks. And everybody brings really good food. So with my mind made up that I really wanted to study in Japan, I got myself over to Kyoto and went through a series of remarkable eye-opening experiences, which did not shake my faith too much.

[55:58]

I stayed with it. But it involved certainly learning some things about Japan and about Buddhism that I had not picked up in books or didn't fit the images I got from Dr. Suzuki's books, certainly. And it caused me several times to really doubt what I was doing there. It caused me to doubt whether or not Buddhism had ever had a beneficial effect on Japan or maybe all of Asia. I have a more forgiving and a more maybe subtle sense of what the Buddha Dharma did in the Far East now. And in retrospect, I learned some things that I didn't even realize I was learning. like good etiquette, good manners, an appreciation of etiquette, a real appreciation for it, something that hadn't occurred to me to really study and look at closely.

[57:02]

I never had, in my own course of development, a unique attachment to Zen. I never considered myself pure and simply a Zen Buddhist. I always thought of myself as a Buddhist. And I always had a wide range of Buddhist schools and practices that I admired. and that I, you know, given enough time, you might want to study that or do that. I was very drawn to Tibetan practice, although I never got very far that direction. But then I always thought it was one of a number of practices that are interesting and potent and in a style that I could manage to follow along with. And so even though I jumped into Zen, it was not with an exclusive sense of all the rest of these guys are turkeys and that there's nothing to be learned from them. To the contrary, I've always thought of myself as a Buddhist.

[58:07]

And to go back to what I started with this morning, I always thought of myself as an animist at the same time. So one of the things I first did when I got in Kyoto, which was an old practice of mine, within two days I went out and climbed the highest mountain in the area, Mount Atago, got to the top of it 4,000 feet by trail, forested all the way, and paid my respect to the landscape, to the larger landscape. oriented myself, the four directions, the guardians of the four directions, noted the directions of the rivers and the lines of the mountain ranges. Then I went back to Kyoto, and I was already able to read a little Japanese. I'd studied Japanese at Berkeley for two years before I went over there. So I was able to pick up in the bookstores some simple handbooks for trees, flowers, and birds that were in Japanese.

[59:17]

And I had an old bicycle, and I was living in the temple at Shokoku-ji, and I had a couple of days a week where I could go out and bicycle around town if I wanted. I was not living in the monastery at that time. I was in training as a... I was learning Japanese more, and I was in training as the Anja of Miura Isshu Roshi. I was his personal attendant for a year. And he was gone two days a week, and I could go out and bicycle all over if I wanted to. So I went out with my bird book, my tree book, and my flower book, and I acquainted myself with the basic neighborhood of the Kyoto Hills, who the non-human neighbors were. And I was able to do that all in about four or five months. But I still felt somehow not really quite at home. And it troubled me that I was feeling sort of off base. One of the things that helped for me to put myself at home in Japan, Japan does not have very many clear nights, you know, it's so foggy and hazy and misty there.

[60:30]

But we hit one clear night And it was July. And I saw the summer constellations, Lyra and Vega, and the Great Square, the W of Cassiopeia, and a number of other summertime constellations. When I saw those, I knew I was on the same planet. It's amazing how stars make you feel at home. I realized that these are the same stars you see in the Sierra Nevada. Yep, I'm here. Still the same world. But what finally got me into harmony with Japan was a very simple move. It just hit me one day. I haven't paid my respects to the Kamisama, to the gods, the little deities. So I got on my bicycle and I rode to 15 or 20 of the major Shinto shrines around Kyoto. Most of them are on the edge of the hills.

[61:30]

There are something like 3,000 Shinto shrines in Kyoto. So I went to the main ones, the shrine of the Kamo River, the shrine to Makie, and so forth, and went into each one and clapped my hands and introduced myself, so to speak, wordlessly, and said, I am here. I hope to behave well. Please welcome me. That did it. After that, I had no more problem feeling that I was welcome in Japan. So that was the Shinto move. Shinto, you know, is not just a World War II militaristic religion. That was what the military government did to it, but it's a grand old folk religion is what it is. And of course after that I felt perfectly at ease with the little tiny bits of mixtures of Shinto that we saw around the Zen temples or all the other Buddhist temples all over Kyoto, a marvelous place to visit.

[62:35]

Or when I went out and I did Yamabushi practices in the mountains down in Wakayama Prefecture, which was a real mixture of Shinto and Buddhism, a really interesting old kind of Buddhist shamanism. that is still going. That was another line of development for me into being at home in Kyoto. The biggest shock in a way for me was that all of the Zen priests were married and that the temples were all full of kids. That it's a family life. Somehow, I hadn't really gotten the picture while I was in Japan. I mean, while I was still in America. And after 10 years of watching that and being around it, the Roshis are the ones who don't get married. Or if they are married, they hide their wives somewhere.

[63:37]

On the Roshi level, they don't have a family life, except in the lay lineages. But practically all the other priests are married and raise children in their temples. You know that. So the challenge for the Japanese Buddhist world, Zen and all the rest of them, really is one of the main challenges right now, and they recognize this right now, is to admit to themselves and admit to Japan and the world that they are family people. and to make that a plus, not a minus. As it is now, it's kind of like a semi-hidden minus. They don't like to talk about it. Consequently, the wives and the children are second-class citizens. Somehow, the idea lingers on that temples shouldn't have wives and children in them. But they do. So that is what has to be overcome.

[64:42]

That's one of the things that has to be overcome to bring health to contemporary Japanese Buddhism. And there is now, I understand from one of my friends over there who's a Zen priest, he says, well now there is an organization of the wives of Zen priests. So a nationwide organization of the wives of Zen priests that is agitating for proper respect and for a real role, for an acknowledgement of their role. So that is also a healthy thing. What questions would you like to ask about Asia, about Japan? Yeah. Relationship between China and Japan via Shingon.

[65:59]

I've tried to track that. and see what those connections are myself. And I have a few Shingon friends. Incidentally, there's a woman in Portland, Oregon, Susan Echo Noble, who recently returned from 14 years of training on Mount Koya as a Shingon, I guess you'd call her a nun or priest. She's a lovely person. and is going to be starting a Shingon Sangha up in Portland, Oregon in the traditional Japanese Shingon style. The Shingon people today are very interested in Tibet. They're finally really studying it. The Tibetans have only recently, in a sense, learned that there is another branch of Vajrayana that they had barely known about surviving in Japan.

[67:04]

The Chinese Shingon was wiped out in the great Buddhist persecution of 845. And what came back into China as esoteric Buddhism later, during the Mongol dynasty, during the Yuan, was basically Tibetan Shingon, Tibetan esotericism. So the earlier transmission was lost in China, apparently. It only survives in Japan. And the differences, well, one thing is this, and paradoxically, the Vajrayana that went to Japan is early, and it's earlier than most of what is in Tibet. It went at an early time, 7th, 8th, 8th century AD, which is just at the very beginning of when Tibet is beginning to get esoteric Buddhism from North India. the Tibetan branch has some tantras that the Japanese don't have.

[68:07]

has some of the later tantras, like the Kala Chakra Tantra and the Chakra Zambara Tantra. In Japan they have the tantras, but they have taken a different direction in their practice and they don't necessarily use them very much. They have developed a big emphasis on visualization and work with the syllable A. And they've stressed certain key deities. Oh, here's what they've got that they use that is not touched much in Tibet at all. They have the two huge mandalas, which are called the mandalas of the two realms. Two huge paintings for instructional purposes. Each one with over a thousand figures on it. One is called the Vajra realm. The other is called the Womb realm. There's a specific set of sadhanas, practices for each of these two mandalas. The study of these two mandalas is a 30-year practice.

[69:12]

And that's what people go through in serious Shingon. And those mandalas are not used in Tibet. So, you know, there's a lot to find out yet. And, to all purposes and intents, it seems as though no sexual yoga came in to Japan. Or if it did, it may have come in, but the Japanese shut it down real quick. There are some sexual yogic, sexual tantric texts, I understand. I've read about it. that are locked up and tied up, wrapped up and kept in a couple of temples. And what's written on them is Abe Karazu. It's a medieval Japanese. Not to be opened. Ever. Abe Karazu. Now, this is a story that is good. It's not finished yet. We'll find out more about it, you know, 10 years from now, maybe. Mm-hmm.

[70:15]

I haven't got time for that. It would be fun, though. No, I don't want to open up the abhika. I'm not going to open up anything that says don't open it. I tried that already. Bad luck. 10 to 4, we're going to take a break at 4, so let's see what we can do to finish a little bit more here. Then the last section we're going to talk about right here, 20th century, millennial, edge of time, etc., practices on Turtle Island. Yeah? Can you talk about that a little bit? What's your take on the politics of our society? In America or in Asia? Well, I mean, you know, the PRC leader was just a couple months ago. He kind of quickly said, oh, it's a longstanding promise.

[71:21]

Yeah. I mean, everybody's got their own. I mean, they've made up their own history. Yeah. He thought he saw some kind of cracks in the wall. I was sorry. First I heard something like that. Well, I can only guess, you know, that the Chinese leaders are being given an ongoing education in the fact that they live in a larger world and that whether they think so or not, people are going to have opinions about China. They tried to shut down a lot of that stuff, saying, well, you're meddling in China's internal affairs. That never stopped anybody from talking about things. Yeah. And they seemed to think for a while that they could just declare that this was their business and nobody else had any business to think about it even, and that it would go away.

[72:21]

Well, obviously, the Tibet question isn't going away. And it may not go away. It may never go away. We have not seen the pain, the problems, the unresolved injustices around Native Americans go away here in North America. Even though, you know, 100 years ago, people said, well, that'll be over soon. That'll be all resolved. Well, it's not. These kinds of things don't become resolved easily. And you just have to look at history and see how long the memory of freedom lingers or the memory of injustices linger. Take the terrible struggle between Bosnians and Serbs based on centuries of history with each other. So China may well be waking up to the fact that Tibet is not a problem that will solve itself in time easily for them. And that the United States and other European and non-Chinese countries are not going to stop talking to the Dalai Lama just because they say so.

[73:30]

But it comes down to the question of what will the next administration be. This administration has been in power ever since Tiananmen Square. There are a huge number of people in China that have not forgotten Tiananmen Square, that carry it very much in mind. And the Chinese leadership knows this, that when there's a shift of power, the whole Tiananmen thing is going to come up. It's all going to be opened up again. Probably, my guess is, a bunch of Chinese leaders are going to go in the slammer. And they will be called criminals of Tiananmen. Just like the Gang of Four, Mao's widow, she's still in the slammer. You don't hear much from her. But they are still in prison. That's the way the Chinese do things. And so they may well just put this bunch of people in prison and start with another administration. Actually, I would hope that they don't do that. I would hope that they have a decent national dialogue and allow themselves to change their minds in public.

[74:39]

and then allow themselves to give the Dalai Lama and his people at least a little bit of what they ask for, which is not political independence. but is the genuine freedom to practice their religion and to have more genuine autonomy and to have certain numerous prejudicial policies that are punishing the Tibetan people daily taken off the books. It would be easy, and it wouldn't cost China anything. My guess is that Tibet costs China a lot of money, that they're losing money on China, pouring people into it, trying to get people to move and live there, trying to develop it for their own purposes. And Chinese don't want to live there. It's a harsh climate. a peaceful settlement with the Tibetan culture could be done and it could be non-threatening to the Chinese and the tourist business would flourish and the Chinese could take their cut.

[75:42]

So what's the problem? I would hope that it works out somehow like that. But you know what the Dalai Lama says. I've heard him say this. Probably he's said it many times. When asked, you know, what are you going to do about China? He says, well, the best thing we can do with China is convert them to Buddhism. What a wonderful theory. And maybe, you know, maybe that'll happen. That actually just might be what happens next. Not right away. Daniel? You mentioned the Yama Bushi. And I was wondering if you could say a little bit more about your experience with them. I mean, you already had your relationships with mountain spirits and so on before you even went to Japan, but maybe how that impacted your sense of incorporating that into the Buddhist practice, if that had much to do with developing the mountain.

[76:52]

Yeah, we've got a little time. I'll say a little bit about Yamabushi, the Yamabushi groups. The word Yamabushi means those who sleep in the mountains or those who hang out in the mountains. The more formal term for this, I don't know what you call it, it's not a sect really, it's a brotherhood, is shugendo. Shugen-do means, do is way. Shugen means hard practice or austerities. The way of austere practice. It takes its origin around the 6th century AD, at least theoretically. with a semi-mythological, semi-historical figure who came out of the folk movement in Buddhism at a time when most of Buddhism was still very elite and very much with the aristocrats in Nara and Kyoto, in Nogyoja.

[78:11]

His father was supposedly a Shinto priest in Shikoku. And he took up a special relationship with a mountain called Mount Omine, 6,000-foot peak in Wakayama Prefecture, not terribly far from Nara and not very far from Mount Koya. But this is long before Mount Koya was... This is some centuries before Mount Koya was settled by Kobo Daishi. He started a practice, a relationship with the mountain and with the spirits on the mountain and in the mountain. And apparently trained followers, brought followers with him. And they built a temple on the top of the mountain or a building and developed a kind of mountain walking, mountain climbing meditation. that had, as time went on, some Shingon, some Vajrayana elements became mixed up with it.

[79:14]

And so what we have now in this century is this shadowy brotherhood of figures who blend into the landscape most of the time, and they are lay people. They're not priests, most of them. Some of them are priests. To be a Yamabushi is to be a Yamabushi, whether you're a lay person or a priest. It's another category. And when they're visible, they wear this remarkable costume. Has anybody ever seen a yamabushi in Japan? A real one. They have a little patch of deer skin hanging down behind to tuck under them when they sit down. They wear old-style pantaloons of yellow hemp. They wear beads around their neck and a funny little black lacquer cap. And they carry a conch over one shoulder, a big conch horn that you can blow. And they have a staff with rings on it that shakes as they walk.

[80:19]

They have another little carrying bag. And they're just a totally unique looking bunch. This has been their costume for centuries. When they're ready to get together, they all put on this costume. They meet, like literally today, at the train station in Osaka. So you come into the Osaka train station, my God, there's 200 yama mushi here. And they stand in big circles, or circles within circles. They ring their staffs and chant the Hanyashin-gyo to pass the time. And so like there's this almost deafening Hanyashin-gyo coming out of the Osaka train station. Isn't that really dramatic? Then they all pile onto the train and they disappear over towards Wakayama Prefecture and they're off for a five-day practice up on Mount Omine. which is like lots of hiking, lots of climbing, deep into this old-growth forest, where they blow the conch, and they climb cliffs, and they chant the shingyo, and then they chant mantras, and their patron bodhisattva is, or guardian figure, is Furo Myo, Achala, one of the fierce deities.

[81:27]

They have a whole elaborate history and a whole elaborate practice. At one time, they were far more common in Japan than they are now. And they were suppressed and oppressed and actually made illegal for a while during the Tokugawa period. because they had too much political power and they were controlling many of the mountain passes and letting people pass from province to province, whereas people were supposed to go through official barrier gates and show their passport. So they were subversive. That was another thing about the Yom HaBoshim. I was invited to go out with them. The head monk at the Daitoku Jisodo, when I told him, after I started working at the Daitoku Jisodo, oh, yeah, I went up on Mount Otago. He said, you went up on Mount Otago? I said, yeah, the third day I was in Japan. He said, I've never been there. He says, nice place, huh? I said, yeah, he's a wonderful place. He said, you must, you're a mountain man. You must like the Yamabushi. I said, what are the Yamabushi?

[82:30]

He said, I'll hook you up with them. So he did. And I said, well, you know, I'm also a Zen student here at the monastery. Do you mind if I go out with the Yamamushi? He said, no, I wish I could go with you. So he gave me his blessing, and I went off with the Yamamushi, where they took me up on Mount Omine and did things to me, hung me over a cliff upside down. by my heels, by a rope around my heels, and made me climb a cliff freehand, which fortunately I could do. It's a fourth-class climb. And blow conches in this wonderful dirt-floored building and other great Yama Wishi practices, which include a variety of the fire practice, the fire ceremony where you burn things. And so I used to go back from time to time and visit the Amabushi and then go out on some of their longer walking trips.

[83:30]

And Daniel was raising that. I think one of his questions was behind that is, well, does that have some effect on the way we started having mountains and rivers walking Sesshin here in California up in the Sierra Nevada after I came back at the group that I worked with? And yes, it does. Although, you know, we started it in North America in September of 1966, I think that's the date, when Phil Hoyland and Allen Ginsberg and I first did a Yamabushi-style circumambulation of Mount Tamalpais and chanted certain chants at certain points around the mountain. That was our experimental launch of Yamabushi practice in North America. And you'll find it described in the poem in Mountains and Rivers Without End called The Circumambulation of Mount Tamalpais. And that practice is still going on, generally led by the mountain sage, the man who has circumambulated Mount Tam far more than anybody else now, Matt Davis, who lives in Mill Valley.

[84:42]

And he often circumambulates it at night. He says he likes to do it at night and be back by dawn. There will be a circumambulation of Tamalpais on March 8th. There will be another one on May 17th. There's usually one on the equinox, March 21st. I don't know how come all these people here at Greengals don't get out there and do that. They're a different sect. If you want to go on a circumambulation, you get to the lower parking lot at Muir Woods about 8 in the morning with your lunch and be prepared to walk 14 miles, get back to your car by 5.30 p.m. that day. But you'll be back. Okay, we'll take a break now.

[85:32]

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