Good morning. Good morning. I'd like to introduce our speaker. It's a little awkward sitting here with everybody behind me. But I'd like to introduce our speaker, who is Chippewa Lewis Richmond. Lew goes back a long way. And I was reflecting that I go back almost as long. But there was never a time when I was around since Senator Lew wasn't here as a kind of guiding presence. He was ordained as a priest. Sojin. He has his own sangha, the Vimala Sangha, in Semerfell, is that correct? Mill Valley. And he's the author of several books, one of which he's going to share with us today after lecture. There it is, Aging as a Spiritual Practice. He's also written a number of books, including but I will not welcome you.

[01:10]

Thank you, Peter. Thanks very much. Great to be here. I'd like to elaborate a little bit on my history with the Berkley Zen Center and with Sojin. I came in 1967 when the Berkley Zen Center met at Sojin's house on Dwight Way. I met Suzuki Roshi at that house, actually. I met his breathing before I met him. I was already sitting when he came in, and I could hear him breathing behind me. He was very close to me, like where Colleen is. And that was my first teaching from him, was hearing that, never forgotten that. It was very quiet, but you could sense energy. Suzuki Roshi founded many temples, this is one of them. He founded this temple, he founded the temple in Los Santos, he founded the Zen Center in San Francisco, and there's many ways to imagine how these temples are, but since I formally, this is my home temple in the sense that I started here, it's also formally, because I received transmission from Sojin,

[02:35]

transmission temple, this temple. And if you look, instead of a real estate or number of people or something, you look at the number of transmitted people that have come from a temple, I believe, without counting, this is probably the largest of Suzuki Roshi's temples. So that's how I see it. And I've transmitted some and I tell them, you know, your home temple is here. This is because, dharmically speaking, that's how it works. So, I'm glad to be back in my home temple with my home teacher, first teacher, and best teacher, Sojin, my old friend. A lot of old friends here, I recognize a lot of faces. So, yes, I am going to talk about my effort to connect Dharma with aging.

[03:40]

Let's start by asking you, for you to connect it. I don't want to exclude, I see some various ages here, young, middle, old, I don't want to exclude anybody. And remember, and I talk about this in my book, people in their 30s and 40s and 50s and 60s have parents, even in their 70s. And their parents may be in the throes of great difficulty getting old, even if you're Haylen Harvey. This is an emerging crisis in our country, actually. And there's even a double whammy crisis. I now understand that there's a movement afoot called Mothers in the Middle. These are mothers, maybe in their 40s, who have children at home. Sometimes they have, through second marriage, they have children in college, a new set of children at home, their own careers, and aging parents. They're taking care of all of that. And they call themselves mothers in the middle.

[04:49]

They asked me to write a blog for their website. And they're having a very tough time. So anyway. So how are you all doing with getting older? Let's find out, because that's how I always start. I do workshops in various environments, including non-Buddhist. Last week I was at a large Catholic parish in Concord, 100 people, all reading my book. I said to the priests, you know, you're all Catholics, do you really want a Buddha your Zen Buddhist approach is very compatible with Catholic spirituality. So I thought, well, at least for him, that's true. And it was a wonderful group of people, very lively. So how are you doing?

[05:51]

I'd like to hear from people. Don't all talk at once. Yes? I'm finding myself really irritable and angry, and then also quite amused. This morning I picked up two other people's rock-a-sus because I simply could not see in the light available that those were not mine. I see, so you find a little bit of humor in that. I do, I do. It's quite amusing at times. I don't know that other people find my hesitation, slowness, And just being in the way of using it. Yes, Ross. I have a lot of gratitude for having reached this age, which is older than a lot of my friends who died already, younger, and also an acquired wisdom of just being on the planet and experiencing the knocks and bumps of life.

[06:56]

I feel really happy and quite fortunate. Well, that's right. one aspect, one point of view, it's good. I always bring that out. I start, when I talk about aging, I say aging is marked with loss. I use the word loss to translate dukkha rather than suffering because loss is closer to the actual root meaning. We lose things, we lose our eyesight, as you said, across the room there. said, we lose our youth, we lose our vitality, lots of things we lose, but the first teaching of the Buddha is loss is written into the fabric of the universe. So I start out by saying the loss you experience is the first teaching of Buddhism. You're inside of the Buddha Dharma just by virtue of being older. But then there's the side of gratitude. I always bring that out. There are always things to be grateful for. Someone else? Yes? You do?

[07:59]

Good. I like the loss. Well that's fresh. Because there's so much and I can see better when there's less. How long have you been a Buddhist? I'm still trying. You mean how long have I been way-ordained? How long have you been appreciating... I first came to Tassajara in 1971. So I think your attitude about loss is a reflection of your practice. Not everybody feels that way, but I just want to point that out. Part of what we do in our practice, and the longer we do it, is And in a minute I'm going to quote Suzuki Roshi, because there's a lot of Suzuki Roshi teaching in this book, although it's well-disguised for people who aren't Buddhists.

[09:02]

It sounds like you are, in Suzuki Roshi's words, enjoying your old age, at least in part. Good. Yes, there's a couple of hands in the back. I'll let you decide who goes first. I'm witnessing very closely the opposite end of that spectrum. I'm taking care of an elder woman who's losing her memory and it makes her so acutely anxious because she's floating in this void with no immediate past and no ability to hold on to what's going to happen next. And her loss of her familiar controls is driving her mad. She's lost her long-term memory? She can remember things that happened later. Well, we're medium term memories. And her immediate short term memories. So she doesn't know what just happened two minutes ago. So she keeps losing that really fast. And she is extremely anxious to know what's going to happen next.

[10:03]

And her anxiety is rooted primarily in feeling like without those anchors, past and present, now she is going to make mistakes and be humiliated. So if there's a whole bunch self-claiming also in the panic. So while I'm caring for her, I'm spending a lot of time soothing, trying to help her be happy in the present moment. She's really great when I'm just face-to-face with her, sort of bathing her in calmness. the minute I'm gone or turn away or whatever, she's back in her incredible panic. So while I'm working with her, I'm also dealing with increased health issues myself. So I'm not exactly a mother-in-the-middle, but I really know that dilemma. You're in the middle of something.

[11:04]

I'm in the middle of something, yeah. And I'm finding that my practice is beginning to suffer because in general I'm not I'm not putting it first. I'm not taking care of myself. So I'm working with that as my growing image in practice, and then also wishing that there was some way I could inject her with Buddhism. With what? With Buddhism. I mean, some sense of acceptance, because it's such a terror for her. And I know that we can't imagine fully what that is like until we whatever comes. I'd like you to answer honestly. How many of you here have some fear or anxiety that you might end up at some point like the woman she's taking care of?

[12:09]

How many of you know that fear of losing your mind is one of the five great fears taught by the Buddha? It's in the book, there's a whole chapter about it, The Five Great Fears, and I have a practice from the Tibetan tradition. Every chapter in the book has a practice at the end of it. Most of them are Buddhist, many of them are from Zen, some of them, because I've spent a lot of time with Tibetan Buddhists, some of them are Tibetan practices, so I have a visualization practice for that that you can use in a doctor's office while you're waiting for your test results. I've actually had a lot of experience with that, waiting for the CAT scan to come out, you know, that kind of thing. Well, actually, literally, in Pali, it's fear of unusual states of mind, which would include insanity or dementia. I mean, these are all things known to the ancients.

[13:15]

The fact that everybody raised their hand means this is the human condition. This is not some unusual collection of fearful people here. This is how it is. You had raised your hand, a gentleman with a rock suit, yes? Yes, I thought at this point in my life there'd be less stress in it. Through the professions I chose as a young man, I had a lot of stress. And I thought I dealt very well with it. Now I have stress in my life that I'm not dealing too well with. You're not. And it's very disconcerting. Well, there's been a lot of research. Part of what I put in the book is a whole chapter on aging research, which is already obsolete because there's new stuff every day. There is research on that, on how younger people deal with stress and how older people deal with stress. On the whole, In the broad brush, older people deal with stress better simply because we have more experience with it.

[14:22]

That's the conclusion. But we also have a lot of stress, serious stress, life-threatening stress that younger people don't have. In a certain way, they're, shall we say, compared to older people, kind of clueless about that. I can appreciate that you might find, I mean the other thing is that when you're young, your body is young, your mind is young, your energy is young, you can step up, you can gear up and deal with a lot of stress. When you're older, we simply don't have the energy, you know, you get tired. I see you nodding, I see a lot of people nodding, so one of the losses is simply loss of energy. And anybody who's hit 60 and clocked beyond that, every year beyond 60, and sometimes it happens earlier, you lose some juice. You really do. You have to sleep more. I take a nap every day. I look forward to it. I go to my nap after lunch really wiped out.

[15:27]

I wake up refreshed. My body needs a midday reset for everything to work. How many people in some way or other are finding it difficult to deal with the stresses in your life right now? Oh, gee, pretty much everybody. Well, you're not alone, Paul, as I'm sure you may have already realized. That should help a little bit. Well, I start the book with a story. I may have been there or not, you know, all these things are kind of lost in the mists of time. But one day, somebody asked Suzuki Roshi, why do we sit? It's a good question, actually, for all of us, you know, young folks, just learning, why are we doing it? What's the point? And he said, he'd been sick.

[16:27]

This is when he had that flu and he was coughing all the time, and he was sick a lot. We were very worried about him. He'd come to lecture, coughing, coughing, coughing. took him a long time. He nearly died from that. And his answer was, so you can enjoy your old age. So you can enjoy your old age. And we all left. We were all average age, probably I was probably, if I were there, 22, 23. I mean, what did we know? We thought he was joking. I mean, it sounded like a joke. It's like, you know, we were expecting him. You know, the great Zen master, you say, why do you sit? And some Buddha's teaching would come out. And that didn't sound like Buddha's teaching, although it was. It was. So you can enjoy your old age. So I want to talk about this pretty seriously, because it's not a joke. And I'm pretty much exactly the same age as he was then when he said that.

[17:33]

And I've been through a lot of illness, as Peter said, two that should have killed me, and one that the doctor said I was guaranteed not to survive. And with apologies to the physicians in the room, it's a nice teaching that doctors know a lot, but they don't know everything. and so they were happy to be wrong in my case, but I didn't look good at all. Let's just focus for a minute on the word enjoy. Suzuki Roshi spoke English really as a second language and he studied it a lot, but his English You know, it's interesting, his English always seemed quite good to me when he was alive and when I was there, but when I listened to the old tapes, his English wasn't really so good, and a lot of times, like a lot of people learning second language, he was translating in his head from Japanese all the time, using words that, for example, the word practice, which has become just part of the nomenclature of Zen, or his lineage of Zen,

[18:44]

I'm sure the Japanese word is shugyo, which is a general word that means shugyo karate. You do the shugyo of karate, shugyo of going to cooking school, shugyo of school. It just means to study or practice. The gyo part of it is the same gyo as in the Heart Sutra. Practicing or coursing sometimes, anyway, applying yourself to something. So that was just, he probably looked that up in the dictionary and that's the word he used and we all use it now without realizing it. But when he said enjoy, He wasn't enjoying, at a superficial level, he was not enjoying being older, having to cough all the time, being sick. You could see it was very difficult for him and he was suffering. You know, when he was dying actually of cancer a few years later, he was in enormous amount of pain.

[19:52]

He actually said to one of us, or when people asked him how he was feeling, he said, I feel like I'm being tortured from the inside. You know, he really didn't like the pain meds, which were not all that great back in the 70s, you know, much better now. But anyway, he was suffering. So it can't, when you say this is joy, it can't be the usual meaning of, hey, I'm really enjoying this, this is cool, this is great. So that can't be it. So what do you think he meant by, so you can enjoy your old age, because you're people who sit? And the question was, why do we sit? And his answer was, to enjoy your old age. So really two questions. What do you think he meant? And for those of you who are older, I want to keep including the people who are younger,

[20:55]

infant is getting older than they were. It's funny, children want to be older. You ask a five-year-old how old they are, and they say, I'm five and three quarters. I'm almost six. There's nothing a child wants more than to be older, be it grown up. There's a certain point in your life, it's kind of an invisible barrier, where you suddenly realize I interviewed a 105-year-old woman when I was 52, and I walked in the door and she said, well, hello, young man. And I thought, wow, it's been a long time since anybody called me young man, but I guess she has a right to, doesn't she? She saw me as just an infant kid. So what do you think he meant, enjoy your old age? It's always just this, don't separate yourself from just this.

[22:06]

Is that enjoyable in your experience? It's not something there and here, it just is. But he actually said enjoy, he didn't just say old age is, or just don't separate yourself from old age. He actually said, so you can enjoy your old age. So I'm really probing the group. I would say, not fight. Appreciate? Appreciate, maybe. Let's just stick with not fight. Not fight is not exactly what he said. He didn't say, don't fight your old age. He said, so you don't fight it. He said, so you can enjoy it, which is a little more positive. Relax. Relax with it? OK, that's good. Yes, be right behind you. I just think that if I hadn't come to sitting, I would not have the openness of mind to just keep noticing things and have a larger space than I do now.

[23:10]

I think I would have maybe closed down. Closed down. So, to you that enjoyment is the spaciousness that's come from your meditation practice that keeps you open to things. Well, joy is a positive word, so I'm looking for positive tones, and I think that's a positive tone, certainly. Who said appreciate? What is your name? Ken. He might have meant appreciate. if he knew English better and was looking for really the right word, maybe he would say. To your mind, what does that mean, appreciate? I think it could include bad stuff, but it just means that you understand what is there Yeah, Alan.

[24:35]

Well, I hear something more active in the word. Enjoy, yeah. And I think where that goes for me is, the purpose of practice is so one can continue to have fun. To really have, to inhabit your life in a way that's enjoyable, that's fun. rather than being caught by the loss. But to have fun is an active principle. How many of the people here knew Suzuki Roshi or met him? Okay. So, do you think it would be fair to say that he laughed a lot? You knew him? Would you think that's a true statement? I mean, that's what I recall. He laughed at me a few times.

[25:37]

He laughed a lot and he didn't stop even when he was dying. He laughed more than anybody I've ever met, really. He just laughed all the time. He seemed like he was always ready to laugh. I'll tell you a great story. I think, Sojin, you were probably there. This was downstairs. the crazy guy who used to come and hit all the bells and yell and stuff. Well, he was there. And the real hard-timers, you were probably one of them, were sitting down in Zazen full lotus in the front. The wikis were sitting on pews. Anyway, the crazy guy, so-called, was sitting right up front, very close to Suzuki Roshi. And Suzuki Roshi was standing. It was the regular pews and everything. He was giving his talk, giving his lecture. And the crazy guy started to mimic him in a very sort of crude way. You know, if Suzuki Roshi would nod his head, he'd go. You know, if Suzuki Roshi would look around, and he'd see everybody with their shashu, and he'd do his shashu, kind of clowning around.

[26:47]

But there was kind of an edge to the guy. It was like he never quite knew what he was going to do. And I remember having a fantasy, this guy, maybe he could curse Suzuki He pulls out a knife. He had all these paranoid feelings about the guy. Suzuki Roshi ignored him. Completely ignored him. So you'd think. He just gave his talk. Then at one point the guys decided, there was a candle up there, and the guy decided, do you remember this? The guy decided he wanted to blow out that candle. So from his seat he would go. He was a real attention grabber. And these Zen people just wouldn't buy it. They weren't paying any attention. Anyway, this candle thing was big and he was making noises and stuff. Suzuki Roshi always accepted him and let him sit with us and let him yell in the middle of Zazen. That's kind of instructive because we get so buttoned down in Zen, we forget.

[27:52]

As Alan said, that's a kind of fun. Also, not more than fun. appreciation. What Ken said is he appreciated this person for who he was. He was probably stoned on acid or something. Anyway, the lecture came to an end, Suzuki Roshi did the formal vows, and then he started to leave, and he whirled around faster than you could blink and blew that candle out. And then he walked up the aisle and he was laughing so hard. It's the first time I literally ever saw somebody who was laughing so hard they could barely stand up. He was just, he was just convulsed. He thought it was like incredibly funny. Who was he laughing at? Us? The guy? Himself? Reality? I don't know. But he was, he was, I never saw anybody I thought, well, if this is Zen, I like it. This is fantastic.

[28:54]

All of us kind of had an attitude about this guy, not that different from what you're saying about getting older. It's like, I don't like this. There's something creepy about this. There's something bad. I wish it wasn't happening. There's a story I like to Seinfeld fans from the 90s. Okay, do you remember the episode where Elaine decides she wants to get a cartoon published in the New Yorker? Anybody remember that? And the idea for her cartoon is there's a pig at the Macy's complaint counter. And the pig is looking up at the man behind That's his complaint. I mean, this is a place to complain. That's your cartoon.

[29:57]

It's very funny. But it's such a good Buddhist teaching. Basically, that's the human condition, right? I wish I was fill in the blank. And back to your point, your name is? Jake. Jake. What is, is what about just being the pig that you are? What about that? What about enjoying being a pig, even more active? What about enjoying being a pig? rather than saying, I wish I was taller, I wish I was an antelope, I wish I was this, I wish I was that, I wish this crazy guy was not here messing up our serious Zen thing. And Suzuki Roshi wasn't in that world. He wasn't in the world of where we were, and it was a teaching I've never forgotten, because it really was a lot like the old times Zen stories.

[31:00]

He was still physically young enough to make a move, to whirl around, blow out that candle, walk up the aisle, be barely able to stand because he's laughing so hard, and all of us just sitting there saying, wait a minute, what just happened? What just happened? So I think it's not just of abstract teaching, we sit so we can enjoy our old age, he was talking about his actual experience right then, right now. And also, I think a little bit, I know you're worried about me because I'm coughing all the time, but I'm okay, a little bit of that, I'm alright, don't worry, I'm enjoying this moment, I'm enjoying being here with you. So more and more, I go back and read Zen Mind Beginner's Line, I go back and read the unpublished archive, and maybe you experience this too, more and more I realize he's talking about himself.

[32:07]

He's talking about his own actual experience. You don't realize, for example, there's a passage in Zen Mind Beginner's Line that begins, I don't know whether he literally said this or whether Trudy or Richard put it in, but it starts out, you may know the chapter, I have discovered that it is absolutely necessary to believe in nothing." That's unusual language. He didn't just start out and say, you know what, it's good to believe in nothing. No, he didn't say that. He said, I have discovered, like it was very hard-won knowledge for him, that it is, he didn't say it's important. been nothing. The more I have lived with that phrase over the years, whether he actually said it or not, and the more we all know about what happened in his life, the incredible tragedies of his life, even the horrors, because there are some things, like for instance what he saw in Manchuria in 1944 when he was posted there as a chaplain, what he heard in confidence from the soldiers, we don't know that.

[33:24]

But we do know that war crimes at the scale of what the Nazis were doing were going on there. Anyway, I have discovered that it's absolutely necessary to believe in nothing. This would be an example of, this is a very personal statement of his awakening, of his It's not just, hey, this is cool, I'm enjoying my old age. It's no. I'm bringing my lifetime of practice to this experience of being old, of maybe dying, of having everything that I love and care about, including these young Americans who are fulfilling my life by actually taking an interest in Zazen, which nobody in Japan at that time was doing.

[34:25]

He was in Japan an unknown priest in a small provincial temple in America and now all over the world he's known as a great world teacher of a vision of Buddhadharma that is planetary. Had he lived he would be in the company of Thich Nhat Hanh and Dalai Lama and those people. They'd be very comfortable with him and he with them because He told us many times that he was not coming here to bring his Soto Zen Japanese sect to America, he was coming here to bring the essence of Buddha's teaching here in Nadi. So I'm sure you heard this from him directly, bringing the essence He said once, you have seen the worst of my country, I'm bringing you the best.

[35:32]

OK, you've seen the worst of my country. So there was one of the things that we didn't realize, maybe until we listened to him say things like that, is he wanted to heal the wounds of war. We were the bitter enemies of his country, they with us. Japan lost a million young people. In a country of 50 million, think about that. We lost 250,000. Put that together, and the two countries together lost, and then you add the wounded. And when he came in 1957, that was pretty fresh. He got yelled at and spit on in the streets for being a Japanese person. And his teaching was so personal and so heartfelt. So when he says, and the whole book really is an elaboration of what he means by, we sit to enjoy our old age.

[36:35]

I'll connect it with one final quote from him and then we'll stop. And then I'll be outside hanging around. My wife Amy is here, who started sitting with Sojourner. when I did, she goes back as far as I do. She's been with me the whole time. We were at Tassajara together, the Bitsen Center in Greenbelch together. She's a representative of those days as much as I am. She'll be helping to sell the books if any of you want them. What I had is the hardcover, so I brought that, this version. It's really well done, I think, very nice. This is a flower that's gone to seed, but it's still beautiful. A lot of times he would look at us and say, don't be so serious. Remember him saying that all the time? Don't be so serious. Don't be so serious.

[37:39]

And he would laugh. Do you remember hearing him say that? Don't be so serious. But every so often, maybe somebody, one or two times I heard him say something along the lines of, what you're doing is already serious. You don't have to add anything to it. Life itself is serious enough, so relax, don't be so serious. This goes back to what you said, Alan, is that human life, birth and death, is the great matter, right? That's what it says outside on the Han. Does your Han say that? Yeah, birth and death is the great matter, life. Another way to translate it is life is pretty serious, actually. That's the first insight of being Buddhist is, you know what? Life is serious. So have fun. Don't be so serious. Take it easy. You're already in the midst of seriousness. So I know I haven't heard from all of you, but I know that all of you who are older are facing something serious.

[38:40]

It's inevitable. And eventually, sooner, sometimes, later, other times, unexpectedly, you'll face the end of your life, which is serious. I think we would all agree that's serious. But actually, you face the end of your life every time you exhale, as Suzuki Roshi taught. Exhaling is your dissolving into emptiness. And by some chance, by some miracle, which we don't understand and don't need to understand, the next breath comes. One day the breath will go out and it won't come back and you'll have spent all these years sitting here cultivating your practice and it won't be so serious because you've been doing it. This is the great power of our practice, which is not evident.

[39:43]

It doesn't blare at you with a megaphone, but it has plenty of power, plenty of power. One of the things I think about the answer, so you can enjoy your old age, is it's when you're older that you start to really appreciate the horsepower of this practice. When you're younger, it still has horsepower, but you may not understand the full reach of it. But when you're older and you can't remember things, and you can't see things, and you can't hear things, and you're losing your memory and every time you can't remember somebody's name, you get a moment of fear and you think maybe this is it, maybe it's starting. Or as Sojin and I were talking about, a dear friend in this case, Steve Stuckey, who is my Dharma brother, fellow transmitted priest under, now is up in Rohnert Park as we speak, dying quickly in a lot of pain, a lot of pain.

[40:50]

And when I met with him, not so long ago, maybe 10 days, it was beautiful to recognize our 40 years of traveling together in the Dharma. And I shared with him, since he wasn't there, watching Suzuki Roshi. was for a young person to see that, it's like, isn't he upset? Isn't he scared? Isn't he like, oh my God, I'm dying. That's how I would be. But he wasn't. And when I walked into the room and looked at Steve, he was just like that. He was the same way. And I shared with him, I said, you know, our practice has a lot of power. And I'm coming into the room and seeing you, I'm remembering Suzuki Roshi and I'm realizing It isn't just him, it wasn't like he was some superman that could do that, it's the practice itself that does that, and he could do it, he is doing it, you can all do it, and you can enjoy it to the last breath.

[42:12]

So, once again, thank you for giving me a chance to come around. Pay my respects to my old teacher and to all of you and to the long life of Berkeley Zen Center. May it long continue. See, temples can live for hundreds of years. They're much better than people. This temple may be very, very, very young and maybe some of you who are younger here will inherit it. Who knows? Anything can happen. Thank you again and I'll look forward to meeting with you, talking with you, signing your books if you want me to outside.

[42:52]

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