I love to taste the truth of the detective's words. Good morning. Traditionally, the first shuso talk is how I came to practice. So you've all been giving your shuso talks in the dining room and somehow I'm up here. As some people have said, I don't believe I can say when I began practicing.

[01:06]

The Buddhist sutras and some of the old Zen masters suggest that we couldn't all be here together if we hadn't already been practicing together for many innumerable lifetimes. So I have to say that story makes sense to me. It's kind of inconceivable to me that this amazing, wonderful collection of people in this room could all be here otherwise. Can you hear me okay? Great, let me know if it fades. As a child, well I remember years after I've been sitting, I remembered some experiences as a child that seemed to have some relationship to meditation. We used to go, my family used to go to a lake in New Hampshire for a week every autumn.

[02:19]

And I was three or four, maybe five. And I remember sitting at the edge of the lake where our rowboat was, used to be our rowboat, looking out at the lake and then there were pine needles on the ground in front of me And having this sense of just this ground, this wall in front of me, being this vast landscape, it all kind of sparkled and came alive. I remembered that after I'd been sitting a while. Later in school, I used to daydream a lot, look out the window, look at the sky. And I remember later on, as a child, lying in bed at night and looking up at the patterns of light on the ceiling, street light outside, and listening to the sounds of what the house clients hum. Just hearing the sound, trying to listen to the sound, trying to hear the sound.

[03:27]

I was born in Maryland and lived there my first five years. Then our family moved to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where I grew up. I lived until I went to college at 17. I have one younger sister a few years younger. My grandparents are all Eastern European Jews. On my father's side from Russia and on the other side from Poland and Hungary. My parents grew up in New York. My mother is a librarian. When I was in high school, she was a French teacher, not in high school. And as I was bright in school, as a fairly stereotypical Jewish mother, she encouraged me quite a lot, which I feel now gives me some, I got some sense of discipline from that.

[04:36]

but also at the time some emotional insecurity, feeling of being a little out of place or different or not fitting in, needing approval or having to approve something. So I've had to work with that all my life. My father is a scientist. He does cancer research, tissue culture research. And he's, until recently, taught in a medical school, taught pathology. He was an MD, but he never did private practice. So I was interested in science as a young kid, and spent, used to go visit his lab. And a couple of summers in high school, worked in his lab or another lab in the medical school. Another aspect of that was that he had, he was interested in doing, in making kind of gadgets to, systems for studying the biology of cancer.

[05:54]

So, there's a test tube that's used commonly in tissue culture which is called the latent tube. We had, he had often foreign scientists visiting. Some working in his lab. So I met people from lots of different places. Europe and Japan. We even had two Russian doctors who came and visited him. That was in the 50s when Russians were supposed to have horns. Sort of unusual. The main thing I feel now that I got from him, though, is his example of dedication and commitment, in his case, to his research in science. And I feel a major theme for me in coming to practice, and also ongoingly in my practice, has to do with the bodhisattva practice of vow.

[07:04]

Coincidentally, we've been talking about that just now. The question of bodhisattva vow is of great interest to me. Finding our true intention. Suzuki Roshi says, what is your innermost request? So when I was looking to practice again, I had this feeling of being really upset at not knowing what I wanted to do. And we all have unconscious vow too. And we all have many, there are many levels of vow. We vow to be a, a parent, or a teacher, or a carpenter, or a cook, or to make a lot of money, or to be poor, or to eat a lot of chocolate.

[08:21]

There's all kinds of vows that we have, and I think they're all related to, what is this Bodhisattva vow? What is our own personal, but fundamental and earnest request? So my family wasn't really religious, but we did celebrate the major holidays. And I did go to Sunday school. I even went to Hebrew school, which I think helped me be able to have some orientation for my more recent study of Chinese and Japanese. Then I went to Bar Mitzvah. I don't feel like I had a real strong sense of all of that as religious experience in the sense that, or it wasn't satisfying as religious experience later on.

[09:28]

But I did enjoy the chanting. And at one point, my grandmother came to live with us. She lived in the third floor of our house. And she was religious. She was kosher and lit candles and did all those things. So I had some sense of that from her. So even though I don't practice Judaism now, I think in a sense that none of us are really Buddhists. We grew up in a culture where there wasn't Buddhism. It wasn't there in any way. And we all have other backgrounds. So in that sense, I think I must be more of a Zen rabbi than a Zen priest. My first religious conversion was when I was 14. I was walking around one night.

[10:29]

It must have been summer. Anyway, I lay down on a lawn somewhere and looked up at the sky. And somehow I got to thinking, or whatever it was, and I had some realization, some awareness or feeling that the universe must be infinite, that space must be infinite, and therefore time must be infinite. And that was just very clear to me. And then I thought, well, that means that the idea of a creator deity is nonsensical. And somehow I hadn't really thought about that before. But I decided I was an atheist. So I'm not sure what that experience came from exactly, some kind of meditation on space. It was within a year after John Kennedy was killed, which was kind of a, shattered a lot of kind of illusions of the way things were.

[11:38]

And also there was a friend, a family that we were very close to, a very talented family. They were all musicians. One of the sons was my age and a good friend of mine, and one of the daughters was a good friend of my sister and her age. Four or five of them are now concert musicians. And the oldest son was in medical school and worked for my father in his lab. And I still don't know why, but he killed himself. I think it must be hard to understand for people who've grown up in the last 15 years, the sense in the 50s of normalcy. Maybe that wasn't there then, but anyway, I had it growing up that everybody would grow up in a family with 2.4 kids in a garage.

[12:43]

There was a TV show a month before I came to Tassajara called Who Killed Ozzy and Harry? breakdown of the American family. Anyway, that began a period of questioning for me and feeling, just feeling like the world was not right in some fundamental way. I read a lot of things like Dostoevsky and Kafka. They were interesting to me. I listened to Bob Dylan a lot. He was my first teacher. Then somewhere in there, I found out there was a friend's meeting house nearby where I lived.

[13:58]

friends of the Quakers. And they had this program, the American Friends Service Committee, AFSC, had this program for high school kids where they had weekend seminars and weekend workshops. And we did things like going to the Hill, which was the ghetto in Pittsburgh, and doing clean-up and work projects for a weekend. And then at the meeting house, they weekend programs, some on current events, something on Vietnam, but also more general, there was one on what can a person do, where they would have outside speakers come and talk and we'd discuss things and in some ways it was just a great opportunity to get out of the house and hang out with a bunch of kids for a weekend. I cut into that. They also had this other thing happening where they had this friend's meeting, which they'd all just sit around in a room, a very bare room, in chairs, and just sit there.

[15:15]

And then somebody would feel like saying something, and they would. That was kind of interesting. I didn't go to that so often, but I was aware of it. And through their friends I became interested in pacifism and also became very upset about what was happening in Vietnam at that time. I was 65 maybe. And got very involved in the anti-Vietnam movement. And I remember going to demonstrations in Pittsburgh at the Pittsburgh draft board where there'd be half a dozen of us. I got involved somehow with, I was involved in organizing the first large rally against the war in Pittsburgh. We had a march and then a program at the Pitt Fieldhouse. There were maybe half a dozen or so of us organized it. I was in charge of getting people from the high schools.

[16:18]

Most of the other people were students at Pitt or Carnegie Tech. And through all that I met A lot of the left in those days, in Pittsburgh, were kind of old left, Communist Party, and classist. Anyway, those people were very interesting to me. Some of them were very dedicated people. So I wasn't exactly a red diaper baby. My parents were liberal. I grew up listening to Pete Seeger and the Weavers. And my father, I guess, used to He mentioned how impressed he was with France because he'd gone to Spain. But they hadn't been really... But I was very interested in... Mostly because of these people I met who were really dedicated people in some way. Became interested in Marxism.

[17:19]

And it seemed to... It purported to have a... a teaching for how to deal with the suffering of the world. So I feel that in that generation and earlier generations there wasn't Buddhism in the West. There were some people who really had deep bodhisattva vow who directed in that way. So I studied Marxist Leninism and that became I guess the kind of religion at the time. Then there was this funny incident that happened. Dave Dellinger, who was a wonderful old pacifist, who later became one of the Chicago Seven, he was giving a talk at Pitt and afterwards there was a party for him at the house of Skye, who was one of the leaders of the anti-war movement in Pittsburgh.

[18:23]

Right after Dellinger left, the police came. And supposedly it was a drug bust. They couldn't find any drugs there. Most of these old left people were pretty straight. And they found some non-prescription cold medicine. Anyway, they trumped up something. Anyway, that was interesting. I got booked at the police station around the corner from where I lived. They called my parents who were kind of upset. Anyway. Then I went off to college, and that was 1967. And I went to Columbia University, which was a hotbed of radicalism and other things. It was a very interesting place at the time. There are actually a couple of different stories, but I'll tell them one at a time. Of course, I got involved right away with SDS, which was very active then. and the New York anti-war movement.

[19:32]

I did things like Dow Chemical Company came to recruit for employees at Columbia. So some of us went down to Dow Chemical Company's offices in midtown Manhattan and sat in front of their offices to recruit their employees for the anti-war movement. So I got arrested for that. And probably some of you remember that in 1968, in the spring, there was a big uprising in Columbia, which I was quite involved in. And the issues were that the university was doing war research. And also that Columbia is right in the middle of Harlem, sort of next to Harlem. And there was this gym they were going to build in this park that's sort of between Columbia, which is up on the hill, and Harlem, which is down here. And a lot of us felt that they were kind of taking advantage of the black people in Harlem.

[20:40]

Anyway, there was this big event where we took over the building and then we took over seven buildings and five buildings. And after about a week, the police came in. New York Times had been saying that there were 70 people, just 70 troublemakers doing this. The police came in and 700 were arrested. And they beat up a lot of people and kind of radicalized the whole student body. So there was a strike the rest of the year. And it was a very, the whole thing was very interesting. That week that we were in the buildings was this kind of communal rebellion. was it a steering committee, and there were representatives from the different, and we just sat around having meetings endlessly, sort of like being on staff. And so I spent the night in jail in the same cell with Abby Hoffman and Jerry Rubin and Tom Hayden.

[21:48]

And a lot of, you know, and I was, I knew Mark Rudd was the guy the media sort of picked out to be the leader of the whole thing. And something happened over the next year. That spring was just a wonderful feeling. There were, in addition to the war issues and things like that, there were kind of alternative college things happening, and all these different classes. And a lot of professors were in sympathy with the strike, and they'd have classes out on the lawn. And there'd be just a lot of interesting people who were around. And the Grateful Dead came and performed beyond concert to sort of support the strike. It was an interesting time. But after, during, over the next year, it kind of went sour. Most of the leaders, a lot of the leaders of the Columbia SDS went into the weatherman. And there was just so much anger, you know. And, you know, in some cases, in some sense there was,

[22:58]

Considering what was happening in Vietnam, it was, you know, righteous anger. But it was, you know, us and them. It was very dualistic. It was, you know, the place with the pigs, you know. And it started to feel pretty crummy. And I knew Ted Gold, who was the vice president of SDS, and he blew himself up building a bomb in the village next to Dustin Hoffman's house. So that's one story of what was going on there. The other thing that was happening there at the same time was LSD. And pretty early on in my freshman year, I tried some of that. And that was very interesting, a sense of alternate other realities. I got very interested in what that was about.

[24:10]

Spent a couple of years at the same time this political thing was going on. Did a lot about LSD and things were much stronger. Psychedelics, mostly, although I try to avoid everything. I had some sense of wanting to experience everything, just kind of being out there. But, you know, walking outside and feeling like I could see the atoms, all the atoms in the leaves sparkling. Gosh, if I start telling stories of psychedelic adventures. Partly what I found out was this kind of opening experience, Like I talk about in Zen, it was kind of, you know, all, everything you thought before, forget. It was clear pretty soon that, you know, the Marxist stuff that I'd been studying was just a small part of the truth. I remember, there was quite a scene in the dorms there.

[25:20]

So I was very interested in a kind of, in a scientific way, but I also partied a lot. But I remember one time walking outside and, anyway, somewhere in there I decided I was God. And I read Genesis and it was all happening. It's quite a feat for an atheist. One time when I happened to be home, on occasion I guess, I was upstairs in my room and I had taken some acid. My father was downstairs and he called me down and said, Lyndon Johnson's going to be on TV, it sounds interesting, come down. So I said, I went down. He didn't know I was tripping. And Lyndon Johnson was talking and there were colors everywhere.

[26:26]

Space was doing all these weird things. And then he said he wasn't going to run for president again. And my father said, did you really say that? And then I knew I didn't hallucinate that. And there was one time I was, we used to go to Riverside Park, which is on the other side of Columbia, next to the river. Beautiful park. And nice trees and the river right there. Somehow I found that underneath the park, there's this kind of, there was this big tunnel. there was a way to go down to the river and get into the tunnel. And I've been down there a couple of times and one time I went down there and just as I was peeking, it was kind of dark in there, and just as I was peeking, I saw this light. I was with a friend of mine. It was this little light in the distance. And there were lots of lights all over the place. And then there's like a big area. Then there was this big whoo, and we realized it was a train.

[27:30]

So we went to the side of the tunnel and this train went by us about this far away. I think I did the same since. So somehow in the middle of all that, that was happening at the same time this revolution stuff was happening. And there were people who were more involved in one than the other, but most people were involved somewhat in both. They seemed related. There was some kind of real fanatic lefties and some kind of fanatic hippies who didn't care about the other. At some point in all this, I got interested in Eastern religion. I took a course in the spring in Eastern religion. Unfortunately, the strike kind of But it gave me the opportunity to read Alan Watson, D.T.

[28:32]

Suzuki, and Zen Flesh, Zen Bones. That was a great book. Still is a great book. Lots of good stories. And at this point I was starting to get, you know, there's a thing about these drugs. They don't work after a while. Sort of, you know, you have this peak experience and this opening experience and then, you After a while, it becomes kind of familiar. And then all your stuff comes up, and you have to come down, and that's a drag. And so there was one story that particularly appealed to me in that book. You probably have heard it. The guy who was Zen master goes to visit the other Zen master, and he walks in, and the host says, oh, by the way, which side of the door did you leave your umbrella on? and he couldn't remember, so we realized he wasn't really mindful completely, or wasn't really, didn't really have it, so he ended up staying and studying with a guy for six years.

[29:33]

And that story really impressed me, because I was doing all these drugs and getting really high and then having to come down, and I had this idea, I wanted to be that vivid, that intense all the time. And it was clear that the drugs really didn't work. I mean, there was some opening experience. But there's an interesting theory, actually, about the history of Indian religion, which is relevant to this. There's this interesting book by Johnson, How to Ride an Ox, that the ancient Vedas were, a lot of them were hymns to Soma, which was some powerful plant that was available back then. And at some point in the history of the Vedas, it stopped working, and that's when they developed yoga as a way of, through the body, experiencing something. So that's, you know, and out of that yoga tradition, Shakyamuni Buddha came up.

[30:39]

So that sort of matches my own experience. After a while, the drugs didn't work anymore, and, you know, it was clear that they were A trap. So my sophomore year, we had, I was living in this apartment, the top floor, right next to Morningside Drive, above Morningside Park, with four other guys who were sophomores. We used to trip and look out over all, we could see all over all of Harlem and watch the fires and the sirens. One of my roommates had a rock and roll band, And they used to rehearse in our living room overlooking Harlem. Alan Sanaki, who's a priest at the Berkeley Zendo and married to Laurie Schley, was in that band. He was a corn musician, too. And actually, I've got my roommate whose band that was later on. He moved to Woodstock, and he ended up playing bass on a lot of the tracks.

[31:46]

But by the end of the second year, I was kind of really burned out on politics and on drugs. And I didn't know what I was doing or what I wanted to do or why I was there or anything. I remember this guy, Tony, my roommate, saying to me somewhere in there, you're interested in Eastern religion and you're still interested in this revolution stuff. How can you do both of those? They don't fit together. So that's a very interesting question, which I still have. And I feel very comfortable in Soto Zen because Soto Zen is about looking at the wall and then going back out and working, or getting up for Kenyan, or what's out there in the world. At least my sense of that. So I have a feeling about my own life of going back and forth between the monastery and market street. or politics in some way even.

[32:58]

I'm jumping ahead now, but it's kind of interesting to me. I realized that after that, after the Columbia experience, I wasn't really actively involved in politics for maybe a dozen years until 82 or 83, I got involved in the anti-nuclear movement, and there were a bunch of people at Zen Center who were interested in that. How I felt I could get involved again was that One of the conditions to participate, this was when there were protests at Livermore Lab and Vandenberg Air Force Base, and people had to agree to respect everybody to participate. So the workers in the Livermore Lab who were building nuclear weapons were not the enemy. It's our own ignorance that's the enemy. There's no enemies. So I got involved in that again. Several months before I first came to Tassajara in 1983, I got arrested at Vandenberg Air Force Base.

[34:03]

And I think Jerome and Tia were there. And I ended up spending a couple of weeks in prison, which was a wonderful experience, with a bunch of other demonstrators. And this was 1980s demonstrators. It was kind of different. That was the same time that Thich Nhat Hanh was here at Tassajara and Baker Roshi was here getting in trouble. I was in prison. I was one of 30 that got shipped out to Arizona. First we were in Lompoc prison in Vandenberg Air Force Base. Then I got shipped to a prison in Arizona. We were in a prison plane with regular prisoners. handcuffs and leg shackles. Very interesting experience. Oh, and then just before coming to the monastery, this time, for the last several months before I came here, I've been working, doing data entry and computer search work for California State Democratic Party Chairman Jerry Brown, former governor, and his finance chairman, Paul Rosenblum, who a dozen years ago was Jusot,

[35:25]

director here at Tasselheim. Anyway, there I was back in, where did I leave it off? 1969. And I just dropped out of school and didn't know what I was doing. And then one evening that summer, I guess I had a job. Guy I was living with, a friend of mine, one night we were sitting around and I said, let's go to California. And he said, OK, let's go to California. So the next day, we arranged things and quit my job. He borrowed his father's old VW Bug and we came to California. And just two anecdotes worth recounting from that. Most of the time, we were around Berkeley and San Francisco. And I ran into another friend from school who was heading to a place in Berkeley, and we stayed there.

[36:28]

But we came down towards, we took an excursion down to Big Sur. And somehow, somewhere I had heard about some Zen monastery or something east of the mountains, east of Big Sur. It had some funny Spanish name or something. I didn't really know where it was or what it was, just something really. Some Zen thing. And I didn't know how to get there or anything. We were driving around Big Sur, and I didn't I just knew it was east of Big Sur. We kept driving. It wasn't like a main agenda or anything. I just had heard about it. We got to Nacimiento Road, and I thought, oh, maybe that's where it is. So we drove to the end of Nacimiento Road looking for a Zen monastery, which, of course, we didn't find. Ten years later, I ended up visiting Tassajara. Anyway, at the end of that summer, we drove back the southern way, went to the Grand Canyon, My friend and I and this guy we met in Berkeley. And we were leaving the Grand Canyon in Arizona, driving towards Four Corners, and I was sitting in the back seat.

[37:34]

I think we named Carlos Castaneda. And somehow the wind got a hold of us or something, and the car started spinning out real fast. And then it started flipping over off the road, and I knew I was going to die. And it was just very... I was sort of watching the whole thing from someplace like up here. And the car was spinning over and [...] over. Finally, the car stopped upside down about 100 yards off the road in the desert. And somehow the windows had popped out and I crawled out the back window and two guys in front crawled out the side door somehow. And this guy, we just passed, drove off the road and ran up to us. Are you okay, boys? sort of dazed. I guess we're okay. Praise the Lord, you've been saved. I'm a minister and he went to this whole trip. Anyway, the car was totaled, ended up flying back home.

[38:43]

So such an experience, you sort of have some change in perspective. That autumn, I went and visited another college friend. That was my first autumn not going to school since I was five. I visited a friend who was staying in Amherst, Massachusetts. Anyway, I spent most of the autumn in western Massachusetts, and that was really beautiful. He lived in this old tar paper shack off a dirt road. Anyway, I ended up spending a couple of weeks in this tiny little shack at the Woodstoke, spending mornings just sitting out in the sun, reading. Then I went back to New York City. The next summer, I just worked in the city for a year, and then the next summer, hitchhiked by myself out to Colorado to live in the mountains, and ended up staying, fishing my tent in this

[39:51]

a place that the hippies call Dream Canyon outside of Boulder. And I had the book Three Pillars of Zen with me, which was like the first book about actually meditating. And so I sort of thought I would try and do some meditation based on that. And I've spent more time really doing wine and mescaline. Anyway, I was kind of drifting around. I didn't know what I was doing. And that next That autumn, my parents, who were amazingly supportive through this whole thing, my father was doing a sabbatical in Japan. They were living in Tokyo, so I had the chance to go to Japan, and I did. And I'd been reading about Buddhism and Zen and stuff, but I didn't really have any agenda going over there. I just, you know, I didn't know what I was doing, and I resisted opportunity to travel. I remember in the plane going over, reading this interview with Salvador Dali, and he was, he's a Catholic, he was talking about faith, and how wonderful it was, and I thought how wonderful that would be.

[41:01]

So I got to Japan and then started traveling, I was gonna travel down to Kyushu, the southern island, and I stopped in Kyoto, which is the old capital of Japan, and I did the usual, sightseeing things, went to the famous rock garden and some of the temples. And then I went to Nara, which is the ancient capital from the 7th century, not so far from Kyoto. And there's a temple right near the train station in Nara called Kofukuchi. And it's got two big, real old pagodas. It's a Japanese Yogacara sect temple, ancient temple. their deer wandering all around in the deer park right near there. And they had a treasure house, treasure storehouse or something it's called, which was kind of like this museum with this amazing sculpture. Some of it from the old Nara period, but a lot from the 13th century Dogen's time.

[42:11]

And what got me first were the guardian figures, the wrathful, the wrathful side, and demons The four kings who protect Buddhism and they just, wow. And then there were these disciples, statues of disciples of the Buddha, statues of Bodhisattvas and of Buddhas. I brought along some visual aid. I don't know if this is going to work. I don't know if you can see anything of this from back there. This isn't actually a Kota Kuji. This is a Todaiji. This is huge. But this is one of the guardian figures. There's two on either side of the gate. And let's see if this works at all. And then some of the disciple. This is Masubandhu. And this is one of the patriarchs of the Yogacara sect. And these were in this kind of museum.

[43:17]

And this is Maitreya Buddha of Guji, a statue by the great Unke, who people don't know about in the West, but he's great. He's like a Michelangelo. This is Lhasa Bandhu's brother, Asanga. Anyway, I was just totally, totally blown away by these statues. I was just, wow. It's just amazing. So I walked outside of this building where they had this just incredible collection of Buddhist statues. And there was this other building, which is like this octagonal building. And please move your legs and stuff and be comfortable, because I have a little bit more I have to say. There was this octagonal building. And there was just this one image in it. This is a Kannon, a four-armed Kannon. And that was kind of nice. And as I was turning away from that, there was this little old Japanese lady.

[44:21]

And she offered incense, and she bowed. And suddenly I realized this was not a museum. So if I have to say when I became a Buddhist, it was when I saw that old woman bow. I just totally, phew. So I spent a few months just traveling around to temples and looking at statues and looking at rock gardens and temples and paintings, mostly statues, gardens. And never got to Kyushu. So I thought, well, what should I do now? I almost stayed in Kyoto, decided to, thought about getting a job teaching English and just living in Kyoto. I mean, there wasn't anything else I wanted but just to hang out there. But, and I also, there was a wonderful French woman I met while I was going around looking for temples, so I almost went back with her to France.

[45:23]

I ended up coming back to the States and going back to college at Carnegie Tech in Pittsburgh I studied creative writing with stories and had some feeling of wanting a craft, wanting something I could do. I did glassblowing for a while. And lived somewhere in there, took a filmmaking workshop and decided that was it. And I dropped out of school again, went back to New York and decided I was going to get a job in the film business. So I did that for a while, worked as a production assistant and worked as a shipping clerk in a film lab and in the middle of that met up with a woman I'd known slightly at Columbia before and ended up getting married.

[46:25]

She was from South Africa. So I had this life in New York City again and then Fifteen years and one week ago today, four years after coming back from Japan, somehow I ended up at the New York Zen Center. Somebody had told me about this Japanese Zen priest, too. And I'd sort of been interested in, you know, I had been interested in Buddhism all along, but somebody said, somebody said you should go see this guy. His name is Nakajima Sensei. Coincidentally, he's a disciple of Suwakikota Roshi. Or not a disciple, but he was a student of Suwakikota Roshi, who Shunpo's been talking about. And in fact, he was affiliated with Okamura-san's zendo in Massachusetts that Shunpo mentioned. Later on, actually, after I left, Shunpo-san used to come to that zendo, and people from there would go.

[47:30]

Anyway, the first time that I had Zazen instruction with him, I knew that this is it. It's like Dogen says, if you just sit down once and cross legs, that's Buddha. And I guess I felt that. And I've been sitting every day since. And, you know, I say something like that and people get impressed or think that, you know, wow. And to me, it's just like, you know, I can't imagine going through a day without sitting. You know, I just feel like my hair would go in my palms and I'd grow fangs. all my addictive energies. So, Nakajima Sensei was really interesting. He was totally, totally non-charismatic. He was this little Japanese man. And what amazed me about him was he was just there every evening. They did Sazen in the evening, 7.30. I guess the doors would open at 7, 7.30, and there'd be Zazen from 8 to 9.30.

[48:35]

And he was just there every evening. And it was very informal. It was an apartment on the ground floor on West End Avenue. Two rooms, but sometimes there'd be like three or four people, sometimes there'd be 12. And it was very simple, very basic. Suwakikoto style, Uchiyama Roshi style, just Zazen. And he'd give lectures on Dogen. When I first heard about Dogen, I just loved Dogen ever since. But very simple, he had a sitting robe and he wore a rock suit, but he never saw him in his okesa. And nobody else had robes. Some of us wore hakamas, these sort of, some of the times, kind of Japanese skirt things. Service was just the heart sutra. And he had one-day sittings once a month, sashing twice a year.

[49:37]

During one-day sittings, or even seven-day sashings in that building, there was no orioke or anything, actually no food served. We'd go for lunch, we'd go up to Broadway, which is just a block away, to the diner, and come back and sit again. Very informal, but just those During sesshins, he wouldn't even sit facing out. He sat facing the wall. No stick or anything. Sometimes there'd be a stick, but he'd just sit. His English wasn't so good, which is one of the reasons why. Nothing ever happened there. No businesses, no residential communities. He's retired now to Hoboken. He has a wife and two kids who are in college. He worked downtown in one of the Japanese companies. I once saw him in his business suit on the street. If you passed him on the street, you wouldn't notice him. He was invisible.

[50:41]

So that's sort of how I got in the door. And I guess I could say something about how I ended up becoming a priest, otherwise I'd stop before I ever got to San Francisco. So I was doing this life where I was working as a film editor, finally. I worked for Bill Moyer's journal on NBC News, and I would be sitting every day. I had this parallel life with my wife, who was into Muktananda, and she wrote educational film strips. So occasionally I'd go check out Muktananda, and she'd come and check out Nakajima Sensei. At some point, well, in 87, through this, she went back to school at one point. After hearing about Dogen, I decided I needed to know more about what this guy was about. So I went back to school and got a BA and took some Japanese and studied Japanese and Chinese culture, just to try and understand how the background was for all that.

[51:49]

In 78, she decided to go to apply to law school. And the place she got in was San Francisco. And so we moved to San Francisco. And part of it was that I knew about San Francisco Zen Center by then. Shortly after I started sitting, I read Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind, many times. So I was interested to come to San Francisco Zen Center, too. And about six months after we moved out here, we split up. She got into law school and does certain things, too. She's married to a lawyer and has a nice house in the suburban, too. Pretty wonderful sons outside Sacramento. And that's the life she wanted. And I was becoming clear to me that I wanted to be a monk, so that didn't really fit together. And I was working at... I didn't have any trouble finding work here. I edited a documentary about Chinese and American history.

[52:52]

And there's not that much documentary film editing work, actually. I worked in TV news some too. And the end of 79, I've been sitting, I think the first thing I did when I came to San Francisco was drive by San Francisco Zen Center. So I've been sitting at Zen Center for a year and a half, and there was this rehash of sashimi. And I was working then for Channel 7 editing TV news. And this was just when the buildings were, when the businesses at Zen Center were kind of booming, and Greens was getting ready to open, and there was a lot of energy around that. And I was feeling kind of torn apart, like, you know, things didn't fit together. And then I was in the newsroom when the Jim Jones thing happened, so I had to edit a lot of the stories about that. And then I was probably one of the first people in San Francisco to know that Moscone had been killed,

[53:58]

before we even knew that milk was killed, because the Channel 7 newsroom, Channel 7 news was just a couple blocks from City Hall then. And I noticed that around those events there was all this energy, and I noticed that in myself too, that that business is partly, largely kind of geared towards disasters, and there's a kind of excitement about disasters, and I didn't like that. So it was Rehatsu Sashin and I had to edit the news the first day of Sashin and I was just feeling like my life didn't make sense and I really wanted to be in Sendai, I wanted to be sitting. And I remember going up on breaks to the roof of the building there and sitting. Anyway, I got to Sashin and I've only told this story to few people before.

[55:01]

Although a lot of people saw it. I don't know if they saw it. Anyway, the first day I was on a serving crew, and I came around, and I just had this kind of turmoil, and I just wanted to totally be in the center. That's all I cared about. And I came in with a pitcher of water at the end of the meal, and went around to Baker, if she's taunted. Tom Gerdau was the soaker. I don't know who got fooled, but anyway, Baker Roshi was just sitting there with his bowls, and I came up with a pitcher of water to serve him. And Baker Roshi was, most of you probably haven't ever met him, but he was big. And everybody thought he was big. And so he was. And he was. He's kind of an amazing man. And I got there with my pitcher of water. And he had his bowls there, and then he picked up his Buddha bowl and started cleaning his Buddha bowl with his sips.

[56:03]

He hadn't wiped his bowls yet. And I just stood there with this pitcher of water. In the middle of his endo, while he cleaned his bowls, everything went away. And other things happened during that session. Part of the upshot was of which was that I told him I wanted to quit my job, and I ended up going to work at the bakery. And shortly after that, I told him that I wanted to be a priest. And then various things happened in my own karmic stream and in Zen Center's karmic stream, and I ended up getting ordained 6 years later from Tenshin Roshi.

[57:06]

And Reb was sort of, I was fortunate because Reb was sort of my teacher from the very beginning when I first came to Zen Center. I took classes with him. So he was my teacher really along with Eiki Roshi from the beginning of being at Zen Center. Sorry for talking so long. That's the end, but I have to say something else about this last year. Mel said my life has been busy. Some of you were at City Center. in 1988 when I was Tenzo. So some of you know something about this. And I just want to say without going into details a little bit because some of you know about it and just so you'll know where I'm coming from.

[58:19]

I got involved in the situation while I was Tenzo where myself and another person were became subject to harassment and kind of campaign of harassment by somebody who was associated with Sin Center. Anyway, I won't go into details, but it included death threat and theft and being followed and vandalism and culminated in Rohatsu Soshin two years ago with me and this other person each being given a warning, being called by this person's psychiatrist and told that the psychiatrist was legally obliged to let us know we were in danger, which is pretty serious.

[59:20]

So in the middle of Rohatsu Soshin, which I was 10's out for, I moved her out of the building in the middle of the night and started moving my stuff out of the middle of the night and had to do that secretly and have basically until recently been living in hiding. And nobody had sensed anywhere I was living, because I thought it would be dangerous, not just to myself, but to other persons. The part of it that was really... This person who did this, I actually don't blame. He was kind of crazy, very crazy and disturbed, and he's got his karmic consequences to pay. What was most upsetting to me about it was that I not only did not feel supported by Songha but I felt that a few of the local practice leaders in the city, I'm not talking about the abbots, in significant ways encouraged the harassment. So this past year I've had to work through a lot of stuff.

[60:26]

Also I should say it was a very difficult situation and They were inexperienced. And anyway, I've had to work through a lot of anger and a lot of question about what is Sangha. So Blanche brought up the question, what is Sangha? And this past year, I've been sitting every day on my own and occasionally with a few small Zen dojos of three or four people at a time. And here I am back at Tassajara. sitting up here. So I've sort of had to invent my own Sangha this past year. So, I'm just talking about my opinions now, what I feel, just so you know where I'm coming from. I don't think Sangha has anything to do with institutions or buildings

[61:32]

or robes, or forms, or... Not that I don't love the forms here. It has a lot to do with the human heart. And I'm very, very, very impressed with the way-seeking mind in this room and in this valley. And I'm very, very happy to be here. I think I... feeling about from all this is that I think I agree with what Maureen Stewart says about residential communities in that Zend America book. I don't think it makes sense. The way she does her Zendo in Cambridge and the way Nakashima Sensei did her Zendo in New York makes a lot more sense to me. Except in a place like Tassajara, where we're here for a limited time, whether it's three months or three years or 30 years.

[62:38]

And we're just doing this. And Tassajara is a really special place. There's a line in the Bluetooth records somewhere. I forget which case. If anybody comes across it, please tell me. Commenting on one of the participants in a dialogue, it says, he has his own mountain spirit realm. She has her own mountain spirit realm. We all have our own mountain spirit realm. If you walk around Tassajara, if you walk around the hills around here, if you just sit in this end over here, we all can find our own mountain spirit now.

[63:46]

And when you find it, it just gets deeper and [...] deeper. And you go back to the city and it's still there. I wanted to finish by reading something from Ehe Dogen Zenji, which I came across a week or two ago from Ehe Goroku. I think it has a lot to do with this question of bodhisattva vow. The world-honored one Shakyamuni said, when one person discovers reality and returns to the source, space in all directions vanishes. Master Gosso Hohen said, when one person discovers reality and returns to the source, space in all directions nudges and bumps. Zen Master Engo said, When one person discovers reality and returns to the source, space in all directions adds flowers to brocade. Zen Master Busho Tai said, When one person discovers reality and returns to the source, space in all directions is just the space in all directions.

[64:57]

My late teacher at Tendo, Tendo Nyojo, said, When one person discovers reality and returns to the source, space in all directions vanishes. This was said by the world-honored one, but it does not yet escape talk of wonders. I would say otherwise. When one person discovers reality and returns to the source, a beggar breaks his bowl. Then Dogen says, these five venerable ones are like this. I am not. When one person discovers reality and returns to the source, space in all directions, which discovers reality and returns to the source. Thank you.

[65:51]

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