Coming around to it a little bit remedially, I don't know what to say. Anyway, I don't know how fruitful it is to speculate on the reasons. It certainly does seem to be a fact that it's taken us, our culture, a long time, in spite of many centuries of contact with the East, beginning with the European explorers way back in the 1400s and 1500s. You know, the Jesuits were the first Westerners to come to Japan in the 1500s. And there are Jesuit tracts about Satori, Kensho, and the teachings of the mysterious Zen school. They wrote about it and they studied it, actually. And they had, actually, quite a lot of respect for it. In fact, the Jesuits' first impression of Japan was that it was a very civilized country. And they had, actually, quite a lot of respect for it.

[01:04]

In fact, the Jesuits' first impression of Japan was that it was a very civilized country by European standards, except for two things which the Jesuits found appalling. One was homosexuality and the other was infanticide, both of which, at the time, were rather commonplace. And they just thought, well, you know, as a heathen country, what can you expect? But they're doing pretty well, given the fact that they haven't heard the good word. And, of course, the Japanese, on the other hand, thought that what they were seeing from the West was totally barbaric. And, you know, they couldn't believe how inferior we were compared to their standards. So these first contacts between these cultures pointed up a rather large... And it is true that by most ordinary standards of health and being well-fed

[02:07]

and cleanliness and all those things, Japan and China were the most advanced civilization in the world for some long period of time, for maybe about 700 or 800 years. They were definitely, in most major respects, more advanced than Europe. So it's true, these cultures are much older and have just developed differently. And maybe developed with less discontinuity, so that the shamanistic roots of these practices, which go back into the Stone Age, were more retained. Maybe it has to do also with the historical development of Christianity, which, for whatever reasons, purged itself of many of those strands within it

[03:07]

which retained yogic practice, like Gnosticism and other things. Those things were historically purged from Christianity quite early, and so did not remain in the dominant spiritual traditions of our society. And they were never purged from India or China, those things were retained. So that also could figure in. I mean, for instance, apparently the doctrine of reincarnation was an acceptable belief in Christianity until the 900s. Although that's not generally known. I've read that. Brother David's confirmed it. But some council in the 9th century decided it was to go, so it went. From that point on, there was nowhere reincarnation to be talked about, unless he wanted to be one of these people that got burned. Anyway, it's interesting to speculate why it is that we haven't

[04:12]

somehow developed this side of ourselves. I think certainly the things that you say are true. I mean, in America, we don't even have the continuity of European culture, much less our animal culture. We rejected, even the extent to which there was continuity from Europe, that was part of what America was, was the rejection of Europe. And it was built by people who rejected Europe by sailing away from it. So we're, I think, just now getting back to realizing what we were left behind with Europe, much less what Europe left behind. Anyway, we're getting a little bit far afield. I'm getting a little bit far afield, but I'm happy to give more questions. Well, if you think in the very long view of thousands of years, I don't really like the idea of the thought of any race being superior to any other. They were doing yoga 4,000 years ago. Now they're building television sets and...

[05:16]

Well, I told you... It takes people for all of that. And we're practicing yoga. It just seems to me that maybe there's a pendulum shift, and it takes 4,000 years to happen, or something like that. Could be. Well, as I said, I mean, do you think you'd like that idea? I'm not saying it's my idea. It's just it's an idea that, you know, if you're honest, you can bring up. A lot of Orientals think that. I mean, there was a lot of... The early Zen teachers basically did not see how people like us could make much headway in Buddhism because we weren't Japanese. I mean, that idea was prevalent even in the 1950s. Well, let's get our cars to work first. All the Japanese have demonstrated a definite superiority at that level. I drive a Japanese car. It's going quite well. This goes back a little bit to when you were talking about being in accord with your surroundings

[06:18]

and coming out of the womb somewhat imperfect and having to train yourself to be more in accord. Is there any idea at all in Buddhist psychology that somehow I've gotten the feeling that there is... of children in some ways being more in accord with things than adults or that maybe you have some sense of accord with things that you may lose at some point in your childhood? Or is there any idea in Buddhist psychology of people becoming less wonderful through mistreatment than perhaps, you know, that maybe they came out of the womb a little bit more perfect than became less perfect through mistreatment in any way? Well, we have to get the right vocabulary to really discuss these things accurately. It isn't a matter of perfect or imperfect. You are born not blank but with clearly delineated propensities for greed, hate and delusion. And the main reason, and anybody who lives with children knows, that it doesn't take them long to start expressing it.

[07:19]

And on a whole, they express it less restrainedly than adults do. I mean, adults, you know, learn that you can't scream and stamp up and down and throw a tangible roll on the floor to get what you want. In fact, if you do, little men come in suits and put you away. The main reason that children appear to us to be somewhat more innocent and so forth is that it takes them a while to get patterned, you know. So their patterns for those behaviors don't run so deep. So they have more ability to let go. They don't harbor things. Harboring quality is something that you develop by karmic repetition. But there is no idea in Buddhism that somehow children are innocent or pure because in fact, observably, they're not. Well, I didn't mean exactly that, but I guess sort of two things.

[08:21]

Partly I meant the idea of the patterns being acquired because it's not so much that they're actually born with the patterns, but they're born with the propensities and the patterns get etched deeper. Is that what you're saying? That's right. And then I meant, is there some idea that they're less subject to or less prone to dualism or to perceive things in a subject and object kind of way? Or is that somewhat acquired? I'm not sure I got this idea, but somehow I had this idea that there was an idea in Buddhism that when you're a child, you might be able to... That's sort of what I meant by being in accord with your surroundings. That children might be able to perceive things differently. Yeah, well, if they do, the problem is it doesn't really count.

[09:23]

It's sort of insignificant that that's true. I mean, that is true. Children on the whole aren't so involved in their thinking as adults are because they don't think so much. So in that sense, you might say they're slightly less dualistic in their perceptions. Their perceptions are more, you know... But it's not awakened perception. It's that your misperceptions have not yet awakened, and they're bound to awaken. So it's nothing that you can really look to very hopefully. Children lose it, that's all, quite naturally, as they become more and more interested in trying to get what they want, as all human beings do. And I'm afraid that the idea of children being more pure and innocent is just not really much of a Buddhist idea. If you want to talk about some kind of good impulse in people,

[10:34]

towards generosity or being loving or something, is that belief to be completely acquired, that you come out of the womb with impulses to grieve, hate, and delusion, or the other potential too? Yeah, you have both. And the conditions that you live in determine how it goes for you. You develop according to the law of karma, and that's partly in your surroundings and circumstances and so forth. If you're in good circumstances, you develop well. If you're in bad circumstances, you develop poorly. But it's not like you have to train them to be generous or loving. The impulse is there. Yeah, you have to train them. It seems to me the first impulse after the child is the infant. I think one of the first stages of an infant's behavior is that a child discovers that it's not part of everything else, it's separated, and then it must make demands. And those first demands are called survival demands. So the first sort of push is to make demands

[11:39]

and to grasp and hold on to those things which give the infant, as it grows into it, a baby inside with a security. So it seems that's almost instinctual behavior. What then has to be learned are that there's a take that goes along with the give, and that the first things that happen are that the child can make some demands. The child's main job is to grow up, and Buddhism really is an adult affair, I must say. I mean, I think the main Buddhist idea for children and child raising is that you raise the child in such a way that the Dharma is accessible to them when they're old enough to see it. But practically speaking, from the earliest age I've ever seen anybody practice Dazen, sort of from their own observation and feeling of why you would do it,

[12:42]

is about 15. And that's about... I wouldn't go much earlier than that. I think you have to go through the work of making an adult body and mind with as good of circumstances as your parents and society can provide. And there are examples of these spiritual geniuses who had some great spiritual insight at the age of 7 or 8. But on the whole, the basic situation of children is that they're just rather unconscious, and everything that they do, good or bad, is on the whole not too conscious. And you might say, in some way I've tried to explain this before, is that Buddhist practice is a continuation into your whole life of what you do when you're a child,

[13:43]

which is sort of figure out how to survive, and what the world's all about, and so forth. And most people just don't continue that. They stop when biologically the process is completed. But that's really the point at which practice begins, is that that's when you have the equipment necessary to actually make something good. But in a sense we've figured out our physical survival. So the survival you're talking about is that once we in a sense have figured out our physical survival, we realize that there's a whole lot more than just figuring out your physical survival. So then you have to ask the question, what's going on? What did I get here for? And that's where you sort of move into that. That's right. And so that's why I say it's in a sense an adult affair. And if it comes earlier in your life, it's a precocity. And some people are spiritually precocious. They have a spiritual crisis in early adolescence or something like that. And it's the kind of crisis that for other people happens...

[14:45]

See Jung felt that it was natural to have it in midlife. That was the time biologically when it was natural to begin asking ultimate questions or religious questions. And characteristically in Buddhism, if you look at the literature of when they imagined people becoming monks and so forth, I think they felt it was an affair of early adulthood. That the decision to seek the Dharma was something that would occur to you about the age of 20. And I don't think they allowed anyone to be fully ordained into the Sangha before the age of 18. Well, I think the workshop says 20. 20, that's what I thought. But that's if I considered it was younger than that. They do have these child monks, historically, but that's not considered... that's just, you know, more like church school or something. So the actual decision to practice is one that you have to make yourself,

[15:45]

and it's sort of like being old enough to drink or drive or something, or old enough to vote. You have to have a kind of... the ability to make an adult decision about it. Yes? One thing I have to ask is that if you would like your child to grow up with the right set of attitudes or morals, it seems like you want to do whatever is possible to teach that child about respect or appreciation, or even to wonder, so that you would try to avoid teaching the child boundaries and standards, so that it would naturally have an inclusive mind and it would naturally be able to appreciate how to step foot or stand correctly or to not stomp their feet or turn their legs, so that then practicing, as I was saying, would not be a big difference in their life,

[16:48]

but a big monumental sort of great teaching difference in their life to grow up so that that would be the right thing to do. Well, it would be nice if it were that straightforward. But unfortunately, it's a lot more complicated raising... For instance, Japanese children are raised just the way we say, but very few Japanese young adults have the slightest interest whatsoever in anything having to do with religion, because there's a lot more going on in a child growing up than just the parents. It's the whole society and their peers and what seems to be happening. I mean, amazingly enough, most of us were probably not raised that way, and yet here we are, in this month of studying Buddhism, and in societies where Buddhism has been present for centuries, as somebody was saying, now they're interested in bishop and TV. It's something that has come up in society and culture

[17:52]

and it's not accessible to them anymore. What does it bother you? Karma is very mysterious, and it doesn't operate... I mean, it isn't... You know, on the whole, the whole doctrine of rebirth and reincarnation is not central to Buddhism. It's sort of something that Buddhism took on in India, Hinduism, because of what was happening. But still, there is a sense that it's very difficult to really adequately explain what happens to people on the basis of what you've seen, just their life, this life. You raise one person perfectly, you do everything for them, they become a criminal. You raise somebody like Eleanor Roosevelt, had this horrible childhood where everything went wrong, she was maltreated, and she became a saint. And there are examples that all of us know that, you know, it's just... It's very hard to...

[18:52]

All you can say is that the way in which people develop is not exactly fully accessible to the rational mind. And that's certainly true of children. And, you know, children... I mean, to get back to Flora's question, children vary, very dramatically, in the way that they are. Any of the people who've had four or five of them can tell stories about how radically they differ from the word go. I mean, from the moment they come out, they're just different. And some children seem very non-dualistic and innocent and all that, other children are profoundly dualistic from the first out. Actually, you know, what we mean by non-dualistic thinking is not really what children do. I mean, it's a little bit more like... I really can't get into it in much detail, but it's... The way children are resembles that. Let's put it that way. But it's not for anything like the same reasons.

[19:53]

It's more like the full possibilities of desire and selfishness haven't yet occurred to them. Temporarily, they seem to be floating in a sea of innocence, but it's not exactly the same at all. It's something that, if it were, you know, then this whole business would be much easier because we could just try to somehow freeze it and keep it from being perverted or distorted. But actually, I think the message here is that this is a profound existential problem for all human beings and it doesn't come naturally to anyone. In fact, that idea is something a little bit like wishful thinking, that there's no real shortcut. And in the texts that you read in Buddhism about this, the proof that they give you is that just point to Buddha himself, who is the spiritual genius par excellence,

[20:58]

and basically he had a terrible time, as did most of the great spiritual teachers, and also that it does seem to be historically the case that those people who developed into the greatest sages worked the hardest at it. And there was hardly anyone for whom it came easy. And there's an interesting point that Suzuki Roshi mentioned several times, and if not Kamui Sensei, the tea teacher here mentions too, she mentions it to me a lot, which is that if you're superficially skillful at something, you have a knack for something, you actually end up having a very hard time mastering it. So in some ways, actually, historically, those who had the most difficult spiritual journey made the best teachers, and had the most impact on people. And those who had an easy sailing,

[22:00]

on the whole, because we're not talking here about some kind of being able to draw, we're talking about seeing through or fundamentally addressing the universal condition of human beings. And from that point of view, the more you suffer, the more you get it. If you're insulated from all that, you get nothing. That's why in Buddhism, the devas, the celestial beings who, for some long period of time, are karmically immune and suffering, are considered to be quite sorrowful creatures because they don't learn anything. They just live in this... And, you know, Buddhism just kind of absorbed the idea that such beings existed without really examining it too much. They say, if there are such beings, they're in a very bad situation because they can't get in touch with anything.

[23:01]

They don't suffer, they don't have bodies, they don't die. And what will happen to them is that eventually this good situation will end and they'll feel quite terrible that they wasted so much time. And what that means for us, practically, is that any human being who's in a situation like that, where they're insulated from all the facts of life, so to speak, are in a very dangerous circumstance because when they wake up to it, they'll have so much remorse and feeling like they missed out that it will be very hard for them to recover. Yes? I just saw The Chosen last night. The Chosen? The photog story. Oh yeah, about the hostage? Yeah. The spiritual leader, the rabbi, the father, comes to grips with that very problem. His son has a very unusual way of introducing him to suffering and to compassion. The feeling that kids don't know how to do.

[24:04]

I was in New York and I almost went into it and I somehow thought it was one of these Exorcist-type movies. I thought it was The Chosen, you know, instead of The Shining. I didn't want to miss it. I'm sorry, I missed it. It's exactly what you're talking about in the book, how the rabbi deals with that. Well, that's interesting. Ruth? Yes? I have a question that came up more earlier here around this business of comfort or this idea of the child reaching out and the survival level that we operate and then moving beyond survival and then questioning our own existence. It seems to me that we can take that further and I have some questions about this in lots of religious contexts about the idea, at least in Western society, that one has to come from a comfortable situation before one really starts looking at these kinds of experiences. So, on the other hand, it then implies that people that come from poverty

[25:08]

or people who have less access to certain kinds of comfort and educational experience are therefore denied opportunities to experience freedom. I wonder if you'd speak to that consideration because we've seen that in other, particularly Japanese culture, in how that relates. Well, in Japanese culture, they have a very strong sense of taking the best possible care of their children. That's why Kono Roshi, this Japanese Roshi we visited, found it very hard to understand how we could possibly try to make monastic practice work with families because, from a Japanese point of view, if you have a family, your first responsibility is to your children, to your wife if you're a man, to provide for them, to give them education and not to deny the things. And he just was amazed that we were trying to do that because, obviously, you can't maximize that if you're living in a situation which is more closer to a subsistence. Although, I think, actually, you may not realize it,

[26:10]

but our kids are living pretty normal lives and I don't think we're denying anything. But, still, I think the value in that society is that you do the best that you possibly can for your children up to a certain point and you just hope for the best. But, you know, this... this business of... it's very mysterious how it is. We're in the middle of talking about this here, about these things. And... Buddhist history has mostly interpreted this as having to do with... sexuality and celibacy or adultery or whatever, anyway, sexual misconduct, which... has meant for the ordained monk, monkish community,

[27:14]

we're expected to be celibate and abstain from all sexual activity. And for the laity of Buddhism, to abstain from inappropriate activity, which I suppose amounts to, if you're married, having relationships outside the marriage. So, from that point of view, it's fairly familiar, a traditional kind of understanding. As I mentioned last week, it was just so taken for granted in India, I mean, it is down to the present day, that if you're a spiritual professional, so to speak, that is to say someone who is... who has taken some vow of spiritual practice, that you're celibate. I don't think that Buddhism as a...

[28:19]

as a community of spiritual adepts or spiritual home-leaders would have been taken very seriously in this time, if that were not so. Part of it has to do with, I think, a fairly universal idea in most cultures, that, particularly for men, sexual abstinence is a source of power. Meditative chants are often kind of outside, they don't have family, outside the realm of ordinary relationships, partly because of the fact that it's supposed to be intensification amongst concentration of power. I think Buddhism is... I've never seen a text which explicitly said that, other than some kind of tantric text. I don't think that in Buddhism that would be the primary,

[29:22]

that would be more of a shamanistic reason. As I've often spoken about, yoga practice has been historically a source of power, power yoga. Buddhism is not really too interested in power yoga, in fact, it rather explicitly abjures one against becoming too involved in it, special powers. It seems that the main rationale, aside from the traditional Indian expectation, was that desires are bondage, because one becomes very attached to them and it distorts your clarity, and that sexuality is almost powerful, the bonding desire, particularly once you have a family, children and so forth, you quite naturally become very attached to them. And that it reduces your... the absolute freedom of a person living in poverty.

[30:29]

Particularly, and of course, in ancient cultures, there's an economic bondage too, to a family. You're responsible for their survival, which means basically your whole life is devoted to that pretty much. The idea of a leisure class was really limited to hereditary monarchy and royalty, and so forth, everybody else had to work very hard. And, of course, the idea that women had to be child bearers and child rearers in most of these traditional cultures could have a married life and also be yogic practitioners, I think would have been inconceivable because of the roles that were expected of men and women in the field, and women took care of the children, and maybe there were 12 or 10 or 8 children of which four survived. So, this particular precept

[31:39]

is one in which I think is somewhat more tied to economics and social structure and cultural mores than some of the others. And I think that in order to get to the root of the precept, you have to go below that level in this particular field. I think at the level of not killing or not stealing and so forth, the root of it is fairly close to the surface, but I think in this precept, the root idea which underlies it is somewhat beneath the surface of mores. I think that actually the root of it is closer to the surface if you understand the layman's side of it, which we know most about. That is to say, if you have a family, what is the limit of appropriate behavior? In other words, what's wrong with having intermarital relationships?

[32:40]

What's the problem? Why not? And what it fundamentally boils down to is that in almost every case such an event causes suffering eventually. And so actually the basic understanding of this is that because this kind of relationship for human beings is very emotionally powerful and something we get very involved in, that it has a very strong possibility of causing suffering. And it's interesting that next week I'll have to Xerox these 14 rules of the 10-F order of Thich Nhat Hanh. Thich Nhat Hanh is a monk who is pretty unusual in the middle of the Vietnam War

[33:42]

founded a new Buddhist order and he rewrote the precepts to suit himself to suit what he considered to be the situation of the modern world. And this particular precept is the last one, 14th. And he entirely turns the precept over to this area that this area is one which is fraught with the potential for causing suffering. He says, sexual expression should not happen without love and commitment. In sexual relationships one must be aware of future suffering that may cause it. To preserve the happiness of others respect the rights and commitments of others. Another way of putting this is that you might say, in our intimate relationships do not act in such a way that would cause deception or manipulation.

[34:45]

So in a situation where we're not just treating them with some kind of celibacy or abstinence which is in a way not really solving the problem as Suzuki Roshi used to say, this was brought up. His phrase was, I remember very clearly, he said, if you do you have a problem and if you don't you have a problem. And in Zen Center itself at first he was rather tolerant of married priests and most of the first people he ordained were already married including myself. He didn't ask me to divorce my wife to be a Buddhist priest. Of course he was married himself. You see in Japan what happened was interesting. This is a whole other twist to the historical and cultural side. Japan nominally follows the custom in Buddhism of priests not being married although Japan with its rather shamanistic

[35:52]

Shinto background is always a bit more relaxed about the stringency of the Buddhist precepts and if a monk had a girlfriend it was not the most horrible thing. In fact it was pretty much tolerated although I think the most serious ones probably did not. But when the Meiji Restoration occurred in the 1860s and they wanted to rapidly become westernized they wanted to somehow break the political and social power of the big monastic institutions which because they were not involved in families were outside the control network of society. Society controls you by family. By who your family is by the family network of the town, the village and so forth.

[36:53]

And that's how you get to people in society. So the monks in fact institutions of celibate males particularly take on a very powerful role in society because they are outside the society outside the network of familial bonding and relatives and so forth. And also the institution can maintain itself economically very efficiently because there are some children and so forth. So these institutions wherever they occur both in Europe and in Asia tended to accumulate great power great wealth because it just lasted century after century. And some lord gave you 100 acres of land or 1000 acres of land in 1310. In the 1950s there it is worth tens of millions of dollars it's just some desert. Kobo Daishi the monk who brought the esoteric or tantric school to Japan

[37:56]

went to the emperor of Japan in the 9th century and asked the emperor to give him a whole mountaintop called Koya Mountain which is a kind of flat mountain top. And the emperor said fine, sure. And there it is to present day it's an enormous religious community more or less in ruins now but at one time it was just vast. And in those days you could just go ask the emperor for some mountain. The emperor owned it all and could give it to you. And you know it's been part of the property of the Shinran sect of Buddhism ever since for over 1200 years, 1300 years. And the real estate that some of the large monasteries in Kyoto is on is just beyond belief how valuable it is. You know Kyoto you're told what the property values in Kyoto are that one square foot of land for housing is worth an immense amount of money and most people's houses are a little bit smaller than this room and so forth.

[39:02]

And you turn the corner and you see Shinji which is about as big as you see vertically right in the middle of Tokyo. And it has a wall around it a great big beautiful gate. The emperor said these big useless gates that they build in temples which are enormous structures usually carved and everything. They have no purpose whatsoever except they keep the city out because no one quite in all these centuries had the gumption to order it torn down to make way for progress. So these temples exist even down to the present day with these vast empty stretches of land between the big main temple buildings not even planted, they're just dirt. Great dirt. And the rest of Kyoto or Tokyo or whatever just goes up around it. So monastic institutions I'm making a point here. Monastic institutions are key but it's political power economic power and so forth. So at the time of Meiji they wanted to create a nationalistic spirit in Japan

[40:05]

and weaken the power of the Buddhist institution. One of the ways they chose to do that was to officially allow priests to marry. And that brought those priests who decided to do that more into the social mainstream and broke down the sense of separateness of the institution. So it's quite common now for a priest to marry particularly after the monastic training has been accomplished. I'm talking about men now. Women, monastics the rule doesn't apply to men in Japan. A nun is not a nun when she marries. But the role of monks and nuns in Japan are totally different anyway. So a priest, a man in Japan has a recognizable social role in the community which monastic women do not have by and large. It's very inequitable. And some of the things that I saw

[41:07]

with regard to how nuns were treated in Japan I think are not too pleasant. I mean it's a real double standard even to the present day. But that's true not only in terms of the rise of the priesthood as part of Japan's society but also true of the whole society as part of Japan. So it's a cultural thing, isn't it? Well it's a cultural value which the Buddhist cultural value has chosen to adopt and actually aggrandize because I would say at the present time there is a loosening up in the society at large that I don't see occurring at all in the Buddhist situation. Women are beginning to make nuns in Japan. There are women executives in Japan. Women are being able to have jobs that formerly were reserved for men.

[42:07]

The mainstream of women's good hasn't yet hit Japan but it's beginning to. Japanese Buddhism is still very medieval in many ways. So Suzuki Roshi was married in fact he was given this position as a temple priest in a town in a foundational family. He was expected to be married. They said, yeah, please get married so somebody can take care of the temple. Get a wife to do the stuff. And so he actually married twice. His first wife died. And so he married, he ordained married people but at a certain point because of the real problems that people in marriages got into with people he ordained toward the end of his life he had a kind of reaction and at one point said he wanted some of his disciples not to get married.

[43:11]

It was a big blow to a lot of people and it scared several people away who wanted to be ordained. But he got a little discouraged because in many cases the emotional tredeo of people's not so good marriages pretty much got in the way of their being able to practice Buddhism. So as you can see at Zen Center we are emphasizing families a lot and I'd say a big majority of the people who are ordained are already married. In fact, probably for the first time in Buddhist history we've ordained men and women who are already married to each other. Both of them are ordained. Which I don't quite know how that's going to work out. I think we're treating ordination, priest ordination in Zen Center as really having mostly to do

[44:12]

with a willingness to make your practice visible to other people and really rather separate from or apart from whether you're married. Well, there's certainly a big difference. I can't really tell you what the difference is yet because we haven't really done it long enough. But they would both be expected to train in roles which priests train in. You know, wearing a robe and being the head monk at Kasahara. For instance, Dan and Deborah. Dan, well, Deborah. Deborah's now presently the head monk at Kasahara and she's giving lectures and seeing students and so forth.

[45:14]

She's doing it. That's a role which is reserved just for being here. She's doing that and Dan's up here cooking in the kitchen. That would not be the case if she were not ordained at all. And so we have four or five such couples in our church. Now I know that Kenneth Roche up in Shasta ordains married couples but then she asks them to be celibate. At least while they're in the monastery. So I don't quite know how that works out. I'm not too familiar with the details of how they do that. She's gone half way. He's already gone all the way. But the main point I think of this precept aside from the tradition is that our intimate relationships with each other are fraught with the possibility or potential of hurt or sorrow

[46:15]

because we invest so much of our emotional being into them. And so one solution to that is just to avoid it. And the other is that if you don't avoid it to do it with sufficient consciousness and awareness does not help. That you remain aware of the possibility of future suffering. It's not something you're fooling yourself about. And that you do your best to maintain relationships which are non-deceptive. Which you're not which you're not using the other person for the satisfaction of your own needs but you're actively engaged in a reciprocal relationship of mutual satisfaction not without love and commitment.

[47:22]

So I suppose you might say from this point of view that prostitution for instance would not be approved by the Buddhist society. Or by Thich Nhat Hanh that would be the case because it's not a situation of love and commitment. I didn't hear your lecture yesterday but I heard something you did here that you were talking about three roots love, hatred, and indolence which you didn't engage in anywhere else. How does that correspond to this? Well I explained in the lecture explaining how things get between my arms that you know it's the same as greeting which we've been talking about all in class but I've been reading this French translation of a Buddhist text which translates Raga or Lova as love and it sounds very neat.

[48:30]

So I thought well that's interesting that's a much more positive kind of translation I wonder why you did that. Maybe it's wrong but I decided as an experiment to use the word love instead of greed because I knew it would cause problems and we have a big thing about the word love. I think it had been propagandized around actually through mass culture and so on and so forth that love is supposed to be something very positive and Christian love and all that. So the negative side of love is something that we tend to not want to notice too much but love love is actually a word which is so broad that it covers it actually covers both it covers both the very positive side and also the very negative side. So I thought there might be some usefulness in using the word because it would force people to

[49:32]

think a little bit about what they would understand love to be. Actually Buddhism has much more precise terms for each of the various aspects of love. It doesn't have any where it's broad. So we have Raga which means passion passionately dying and we have Lopa which means and we have Tanpa which means cleaning and attachment and we have Karuna which means compassion care and we have Mudita which means joyous joyous feeling for another and we have Vaisala which means kind of what I call 360 degrees of love

[50:34]

where you are even even-mindedly conveying a sense of unlimited love and love and I thought that was like 7 words 6 words those words all mean love in some manner so just you know English I think that our language is not very developed in this particular area we don't have a very precise vocabulary for the various shades that love can lead us into we say we're in love with somebody but if you observe the long-term behavior of these two people that say that they're in love we find out that that seems to include a great many things including probably some hate as well you get you know it's statistically true that if you're somebody who's going to be murdered in this life it's overwhelmingly likely that you'll be murdered

[51:34]

by a member of your own family I don't know if you all agree with that but 80% of all murders are committed within the family provided a relative is committed it's very, very close so this intimate regard or attachment or relationship with each other is is you know cuts both ways this word raga passion also can mean passion the negative can mean passion as well as passion of love anyway I think that the phrase misuse of the senses implies strangely enough if you think about it it implies that the senses themselves are okay otherwise there wouldn't be

[52:37]

any point in discussing their misuse I mean if the senses were were bad to begin with you'd just say the senses period sensory life or sensuous life avoid it or don't do it but instead it says the misuse or wrong wrong for use of the senses I think the implication which I feel is my experience in Buddhist practice is that the physical equipment of our body and mind is not considered to be the fundamental problem as I mentioned Buddhism the Buddha himself rejected Hindu asceticism which did take that view that somehow the body was the enemy or the problem and that one had to somehow weaken the body to allow your spiritual body to emerge I think that Buddhism takes the attitude and this is part of what is meant by the middle way is that the body itself

[53:39]

is not the problem it's the use to which our intentional or karmic mind makes of our equipment to raise the problem that includes sexuality it includes all of our senses because Buddhism is based on a kind of empirical idea that everything exists for a reason so the body that we have there's good reasons why we have the kind of body we have why we have eyes why we have a body that can feel the spirit of pleasure and pain why we have a tongue that can taste food if we didn't have such organs we probably wouldn't survive more than two minutes and therefore there would be no Buddhism there would be no human realm there would only be the realm of bodiless, disembodied consciousness but in fact having a human body is considered to be

[54:39]

an essential prerequisite for being a Buddha which means having senses and that in fact liberation is accomplished through the body through the senses there is no experience of awakening or enlightenment that I know of in the Buddhist tradition which took place in a trance state it's always in relationship to some sensory experience you hear a sound or somebody says something to you or in one case there was a Zen master who was enlightened when he saw peace process and so forth even Dogen who had his big transformation while he was sitting in the Zen Doge when his teacher was shouting in his ear half the person sitting next to him said in Zen we often give our most

[55:39]

important messages to the person next to the one who wants to hear about it Suzuki Roshi would often bawl out the Zen Richard Baker in front of everybody actually for somebody else's benefit you take the person that you know doesn't care too much when you say it to them because if you say it to the person involved it's a little bit too they resist it too much they have too much resistance they don't realize for a few weeks that it's actually we were talking about this one and they go I really got it boy I'm glad it wasn't me so this Dogen's teacher was shouting at this guy next to him about sleeping in Zazen which gave Dogen some insight so Charlotte wanted

[56:44]

to know about this because you know her work emphasizes the wakening senses and Buddhist literature does tend to veer into a kind of rhetoric in which it sounds like the senses are a problem but really it was in school mostly and even then it's there's a certain context to that kind of statement because practically speaking they are a problem for most people the main problem is that is not that we have senses but that the experience that our senses give us have a great deal of believability such that we imagine that they're real and that we can identify an ego or self in relationship

[57:45]

to our sensory experience that's the problem so in its widest sense this precept refers to what we call in Buddhism vikalpa which means dualistic discrimination or an identification of a world which is separate from or outside the boundary of oneself and this is the use that most people put their senses of their body to it's a misuse in that it's using the senses to aggrandize the sense of separateness from the universe instead of to use the senses as a vehicle for identification and oneness with the universe I remember once I was giving a lecture about this and for some reason an image from a book

[58:45]

swam into view which now that I and my son is reading the book it's reminded me of but it's the book The Prince and the Pauper by Mark Twain and there's a charming little little incident in there you know the story is that this poor boy and the Prince of England become switched accidentally and the poor boy they think the Prince has gone crazy and thinks he's this poor boy but they still think he's the Prince because these boys look exactly alike and and the whole plot of the story at the end turns on the fact that at the time that the Prince seemed to have gone crazy that is the two boys switched the great deal of England also disappeared no one could find it so it kind of slowed up the state business and they knew that the Prince had it but the new Prince was a bit mad couldn't remember what he'd done with it of course because he didn't he wasn't he wasn't the Prince and the real Prince was out in the world you know out in the poor sections of London trying to get back his throne and

[59:46]

at the very end at the coronation of the new King the poor boy is just about to be crowned the real Prince comes in and there's these two boys in front of each other in Westminster Abbey and the test to see who's the real Prince is where's the great seal so the Prince the real Prince directs in his shabby clothes he points to one of the great lords and he says you go to my room and and there's a little drawer and it's in there and so this Duke or something goes to the room there's a funny little incident where the Duke listens to this boy dressed in rag ordering him to bow and looks at the other little boy with all these robes on and he carefully bows right in the middle between the two so he's not you know he's not and then and then the whole crowd Mark Twain is so skilled but the whole crowd kind of turns a little bit towards this little boy in rag because he seems so authoritative and they all say

[60:46]

and he's the one the lord goes and he comes back and he says he bows and this time he's bowing more towards the boy on the throne because his heel is not there so he's just bowing right in front of him and then the little boy is in the throne doesn't really want to be this king at all he's barely leaving because the real king has come back so he prompts him and he says now think hard I don't want to tell you but you remember when we were playing together in your room he tells him prompts him and then he remembers oh he stuck it in the in the arm of a suit of armor that was standing in his room so the lord goes back and sure enough there it is and the point of the story is that the impostor boy prince had been using the great seal of England for his own uses he didn't know what it was and he said oh that's the great seal I didn't know that's what you were talking about because I knew where that was I've been using it for something they asked him what he'd been using it for and he sort of

[61:47]

gets real embarrassed he doesn't really want to say and the new the rightful prince who's just been recognized says it's all right don't worry tell them so he says well actually he says I was using it to crack walnuts so he had the great seal of England didn't know what it was he was cracking walnuts so somehow that image stuck in my mind as you know the Buddhist attitude toward the body is that it's not that there's anything wrong with the body but that most people are using it to crack walnuts to do something which is rather you know childish and silly in comparison to what you might be using it for which is something quite important or solemn so I think this really is the basic feeling of this precept is that the senses themselves are neutral at least in theory but in practice the seductiveness

[62:47]

of the sensory world is so great that almost everyone inevitably succumbs to the illusion of fixedness or reality of ourselves and the world which the senses in combination provide and part of what meditation practice provides is an experiential validation of the fact that the sensory world is something constructed it's mostly put together in the brain basically and that it's not it doesn't have a reality independent of our own interests and desires now this is a very radical idea for the web it's a just now beginning to come into

[63:47]

its own with modern developments in physics and so forth and still I think most people find it to be a very bizarre idea that somehow the world that we see and experience is a large part of our own creation and language language is a very important part of this creative world language is what helps leave it all together language is the connected thread that ties together the senses I know there's a theater workshop person who one of the exercises he has people do is to run around the room and shout out the wrong names for everything and he asks them how they feel afterwards and everybody reports a kind of heightened sensory awareness that lasts quite a while because by freeing yourself from the learned

[64:48]

thread of linguistic identification you restore something of the lost freshness of a sensory world which is unmediated by language I would say that Buddhism goes further than that and then unravels that too to some extent and then you can see that that the boundaries between things are created by your own interest and convenience and again it's not that this constructive world is wrong but that it is not reality itself it is it is a convenient construction which has its uses and which has its limits as well so one of the final places that Buddhism came to in later times as expressed in a

[65:48]

passage from the Vimalakirti Sutra is that the nature of greed hate and delusion is nirvana itself that is to say the fundamental nature the fundamental reality of our of our constricted sensory world is actually the awakened world itself since you are are entirely the same world another phrase that comes to mind is this very earth which is the pure land which is another thing stated which you are going to be teaching there is nothing we are not in the wrong place there is nothing wrong with the world we inhabit except that we are continuously misinterpreting or using it in the wrong way like pranayama so getting back

[66:51]

to the specificity of sexual life I would say buddhism in theory has a neutral if not neutral favor attitude for marriage and intimate relationships but in theory is rather cautious I mean but in practice is rather cautious because the observable outcome of how people live their lives is such that this often turns out to be the biggest problem area of your life so that's all I had to say I leave that to you to if you want to have further discussion I don't consider myself the expert on this stuff you've all

[67:51]

lived your lives and you have something to contribute the last thing you said about the nature of the human being is what is the impact on the bowl there is the right way of thinking the right way of beginning trace well the thing the passage from which is the nature the actual nature the real nature of the three poisons is Nirvana itself liberation itself the The practical extrapolation of that leads directly into Tantra Buddhism, which is that therefore you can find your liberation in those, right in the middle of those phenomena that you don't necessarily find a way to find by suppressing or avoiding those,

[69:00]

but rather by somehow penetrating right through them. I've been turning over the question of pre-marital effects, or teenage effects, and it seems to me that the problem there would be when are people capable of making that commitment, and it's such a grey area, and it's such a place where you avoid it altogether. Zen Center hasn't come up with a plan against that problem, yet, probably. We don't have to be old enough. We haven't had, the teenagers that we've had somehow, it hasn't been a problem for them too much, but somehow I think the real problem is not, I think the real problem is that the way our society has developed in the last few hundred years, a physical maturity and social maturity is a big gap.

[70:04]

I think that people married at a very early age, and they married into a network of social support, which provided them a mature backdrop. So you can have a 14 or 15 year old couple married and live in a household with one of their families and start producing children, and it all works, because you have two or three generations of extended family support handlers who tell them what to do. They're not ready to figure it out themselves, and they don't have to go set up a household, and have a job and go to college and all that. It's just another part of the situation. So we've developed an artificial situation which we can't quite deal with, because the biological maturation just happens.

[71:05]

It's programmed in based on some other kind of life, and we're doing something else. So of course there's a problem. I think there's a problem with the whole problem of what to do with people, human beings from about the age of 12 to 20, who are totally underdeveloped. I mean, it seems to me the more I observe it, we're providing them with something totally unrealistic. A kind of fantasy world to wander around in, and it seems to me that they just live it. Nobody's quite figured it out. I mean, more than an individual can do to figure out what to do, unless you have a very held together type family framework, but the society just won't do it. College is the world outside college. That's the real world.

[72:06]

It's literally fantasy. Well, college is fantasy at least, and the reality is that it's a terrible fantasy world. I think when you're a little younger than that, you're not even... and mostly you're just afraid of it. You kind of avoid it. So I think that the sex side of it seems like only one part of the whole problem. It seems to me that in the teenage world, in the world now, in the teenage world, largely a matter of market expectations, and this is the result of market forces and the recognition in cold terms of the demographic aspects of the market, something that I'm fairly familiar with. I already know the market. All the magazines deal with demographic analysis, deal with segments of the market as profit and loss. The major industries in this country are rising at all, including the new computer industry, on the basis of that market.

[73:06]

I think it's shameful to have a misuse of resources, a misuse of human intelligence. I happen to be one of those who has looked at the computer for a long time and am impressed by this achievement of human mind. And I feel that it is a great disservice to this achievement to see this instrument, an extension of human intelligence, which could so remarkably over our lives, which could so remarkably over our lives, be marketed and huckstered the way everything else is marketed and huckstered in this culture. And this is the root, to me, of the exploitation. And sexuality is only part of the exploitation. So what you're saying, basically, is that teenagers, because they're vulnerable, are easy victims to the underlying theme of greed and consensual abasement. And because they have so little preparation and judgment,

[74:10]

they're the most easy to fool. And their parents are equally easy to fool, because the parents abet the process. They may not be able to help them, in some instances, because they may not be equipped to. But frequently, the parents who not only are the targets, but also the parents who design the targets, the parents who are the marketers, who are the advertisers, who are the product developers, are equally helpful. Well, Buddhism is... I've thought for many years that... I sometimes say this, that if society at large, if we live in some way in a tolerant society, such things have been sort of allowed to exist. If society ever quite figured out how radical Buddhism is, they'd probably run right into it, shut us down, because the values that Buddhism espouses are not the values of our society.

[75:12]

And when you bring up some issue like that, it's very clear that... Although I think Buddhism, you see, would not take the idea that, I think, it seems like most communist countries, from our, one of the first things they do is shut down all the amusement parlors, and ban all the western libraries, no, not at all, no. You know, I think that it's still a very dualistic, almost Judeo-Christian kind of... You can't stamp that thing out. What you have to do is... Again, this is, I think, the point that I made earlier, that greed, hate and delusion are based on something which is fundamentally sound. That is to say, people's desires have a reason, and what you want to do is not somehow crush them, or pass laws preventing them, but rather to re-channel those desires in a way in which you can truly satisfy them. And the problem with most things that people

[76:16]

go for, sex, or video games, or drugs, or whatever, is not that they're bad or wrong, it's just that they're just not satisfying, actually. That's why they're addicted, because the satisfaction doesn't last, so you have to keep going back. In a way, spiritual life is, you might say, to reach through the veils of all of that, and find something in your life which actually satisfies you, and which renders all that other stuff unnecessary, because it isn't as good. This is something that I think, if you read books about Buddhism, it sounds very puritanical and rigid, but actually, the point, I think, of Buddhism, and probably any authentic religion, is to give people what they really need. And Suzuki Roshi said, your innermost desire, he used a phrase like that, what people really want the most

[77:16]

is transcendence. You want everyone to feel a kind of limitless sense of love. And if you can have that, I don't think you need, there would be no market. There's no market for distraction in a society where everyone is pretty satisfied. So, the reason there's a market is because people are very unsatisfied. So, we have some responsibility as Buddhists, I think, to investigate that. And not to just say it's wrong, it's bad, but also, how can we give people, teenagers or whatever, what they really need? Which I think is, for teenagers, they need to feel like they belong. That there's a world in which there's actually a place for them. And that they can see where they can go,

[78:16]

and what they can do to build themselves. I think to the extent that that's missing or lacking, there's always room for distraction. I think, maybe you have an idea. I just want to tell you, I've had some of the kids, they're really, really at the center of it. And what happened, the teacher had a lot of young disciples, who got really well, and very healthy, and had a great deal of trouble handling their sexual energy. And he didn't just allow them to get married. He arranged for it. If they didn't have anybody they wanted to marry, he paired them up. And from what I saw, all those couples were very happy. There was a huge baby boom. A year later. I think in that sense, we allow the pairing to occur automatically. We don't make any special effort to pair people up, it seems to happen. Just one extension of that point. You speak of teenagers finding a place,

[79:17]

but I think the extension there is that for most people in society, a place is not clear. And I think that the teenager is only an extension of the dissatisfaction and the placelessness in society. What are your feelings about whether or not getting married and having children actually might be helpful to a priest? Because it sounds educational, but it's very basic human activity. It's a great deal of fun. We've learned about it by yourself. I think that in Zen Center, I don't think it's any accident that the people that Suzuki Roshi decided to ordain were already married. I think that it meant that they had reached a sufficient level of maturity or growth in their life that they were married and had children. Their life had settled

[80:18]

in some way. I think that in our society, I think the Catholic Church is finding this out by default because so many of the best monastics are leaving the Orphans because they feel that family life would fulfill their spiritual task and that a lifetime of celibacy is not what they need. I think that not only does it help the individual to have the basic experience of being married, but also it can be a guide. If your marriage is working, people can observe how you're doing then it can help other people. Or encourage people anyway. In fact, we say that in our marriage ceremony. We say, your marriage will encourage others. I think that a marriage that stays together is encouraging to other people who are having trouble with their own. Well, it is possible. Well, the suspect

[81:20]

is that celibate people don't require self-sheltering or marriage counseling or whatever. It's interesting that the parish priest was not required to be celibate for many centuries of Catholicism. It was a kind of political decision in some council or other when the monastic orders had the preponderance of political power according to Brother David. And I think the idea that a parish priest whose mission was to serve the laity be celibate is kind of a silly idea on the basis of it because they have no experience about that which they're supposed to advise people on. And I think that it's probably been to the detriment of Catholicism that the leadership and, you know, it was a surprise to me to discover how late that idea came in to the Church. A lot of these things that we think of as written in stone were I was also told that reincarnation was an accepted belief in the Church for many centuries too

[82:22]

until it was decided against by some family. So, I think our practical experience as Zen Center is that given the society we live in and the kind of people that we happen to be that having a family can be a very useful thing. It does take a lot more energy there's no question about it. And if you're young enough and come to the practice you can spend some time a few years anyway just by yourself that's very useful. It isn't always possible, but it's very useful. I wonder if... I was just wondering not so much the question of the teenage aspect, but people our age if

[83:22]

at certain times they even discourage sex where it's not common or if you just sort of date them could the way in which we live be part of the social? Well, I think you'd have to ask people who are involved in the single scene how satisfying they really find that it is. I think the Buddhist attitude would be if there isn't at least a possibility of some something in the relationship it's strictly a kind of gratification quality maybe it's not so satisfying and also has the quality of being ridiculous, you have to go to such a relationship again and again

[84:26]

because it doesn't grow it doesn't... I think the I think part of the undercurrent here is that sexuality does not exist in a vacuum it's tied to everything else in our life and it doesn't it isn't it's more complete or satisfying when it draws in other aspects of our life maybe there would be somebody who from their own experience would would disagree but the experience I've had with various people is that most people who go quickly from one relationship to the other are pretty lonely actually it doesn't seem to dispel if the arrangement the two people have is that it's going to be tonight and you're never going to see one another again

[85:29]

there's a lonely quality to that which grows on you the longer you stay in that kind of pattern I think if you've got people to be honest with themselves, me and people who are doing that are in the background hoping that something will click it may be a big social experiment which is a kind of a dialectic or dynamic outcome of a kind of puritanical backlog that we're experimenting with the release of so in that sense it may be a necessary stage to go through but I think any trend like that you just have to watch it and see if it lasts if it's really satisfying in a deep sense it doesn't last and I think if you examine history what you find is that such behavior is a peripheral

[86:31]

of certain social classes or certain eras and it's not, you don't find if you've studied this history of family and sexuality you don't find any society or culture which has maintained a stable pattern of casual, promiscuous behavior over a long period of time it's a kind of fringe behavior that always seems to be there sometimes a little bit sometimes a lot, sometimes just the nobility, sometimes more impulsive science and maybe with contraception maybe with contraception maybe with

[87:08]

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