It's a pleasure to have Philip Whelan back for one of his periodic visits to Zendo. I met Philip quite a long time ago. great big beard and a lot of hair and I knew him as a poet who was visiting Sensei and then he stayed on and became a priest and is still a poet. He heads a sangha in the South Ridge of Noe Valley or the North Ridge of Glen Park or something like that.

[01:13]

So thank you for coming, Philip. Thank you. I'm just the resident priest, janitor or whatever. I'm not really the head of the sangha. I'm just there when people come. around and sit in the morning and in the afternoon just a few. And that's very nice for me. I enjoy it very much. The landlord has got the place up for sale now. And so we're going to have to find new quarters for after a while. And we've been looking for space in the Coal Valley neighborhood near where the Zen Center businesses are, where the bakery and the Elias Tatree are on Coal Street. And Tenshin Sensei thought it would be nice if we had a Zendo over there.

[02:17]

So it may be that eventually we'll get there. I don't know. We'll see what happens. Everything changes all the time. But anyway, we started in Fairmont Street in August. And I've been going ever since. Except for the few days that in December and in April that I had to go to ceremonies in Tassajara. It's been open all the time. It's a very interesting experience to Do everything yourself. Take care of the ashes and the incense pots and shave the candles and sweep the floor and do the whole routine, do all the services and do all the everything. It's a marvelous sort of hermit practice with the assistance of people who will come and sit in the morning or in the evening.

[03:22]

Anyway, it feels very good. I like it a lot. I was talking with a friend of mine yesterday, who was just back from a trip to, he was off to Hong Kong and Canton and Thailand, I suppose, Bangkok. He didn't mention what place in Thailand, but anyway, he was quite interested to see how people there were practicing. And he attended an ordination in Thailand, the Ordination of Monks. And he was delighted about how relaxed everything was. The people who were just the regular temple members who had come to watch the ordination were sitting in one part of the place and they were there and they would talk to each other a little bit.

[04:24]

people who were being ordained were sitting in another place, and once in a while they would talk to each other a little bit, and the monks were chanting a little bit, and it was all very easy and pleasant. He said, people weren't sitting like we'd sit, you know, all this rigid thing. He said, it's much nicer, everybody's much more relaxed and calm. So, and people who have visited the Gold Mountain Monastery tell me that Master Hua doesn't approve of this posture either. He thinks that people ought to sit more soft, more loose, kind of come this way. Like the pictures you see in Holmes Welch's book, The Practice of Chinese Buddhism, or the pictures in the Prittmuller book about Chinese monasteries where people are sitting.

[05:30]

Rather, we would think with a bent back or droopy shoulder forward. But, of course, I was trying to explain about how all this was partly cultural, partly a different kind of posture on purpose. that our way of sitting, trying to sit with your back straight, with your chin down and so on and so on, I can't do it myself, but anyway, I try to do it that funny way that Dogen describes. And actually, of course, this is an Indian yogic posture that the Buddhists borrowed from the Shaivites, I think. In any case, Shiva sat this way, in order not to be disturbed. And of course, if people came around and disturbed him, and he'd wake up and stop meditating, then he'd wreck the universe in a great fit of dancing and hula.

[06:34]

And so it was best to probably to let him alone. But they did have to wake him up one time to marry him off to Uma, the daughter of Himalaya. And so there were quite dreadful consequences when they did wake him up. married him off, and he had two children. One was Ganesh, and one was, what, the love god, I can't think of his name. No, love, love, really love, Eros, in Greek. In Japan, he's called Aizen Myoho. He was a fierce looking fellow, all red. He has an arrow like Cupid. Ganesh, of course, was the unfortunate one. Somehow or another he disturbed his father at one point. His father sliced his head off and then he heard his wife coming, Parvati, and he thought, uh-oh, better fix up the kid right away.

[07:41]

So he decapitated a passing elephant and jammed it onto his son's body. There he was, and he was like, hey, hey, hey. Parvati, I don't know what she said at that point, to have this elephant-headed child. But Ganesha became, of course, a very popular deity, and he overcomes obstacles. He's very good at getting through all obstacles. He's also the god of businessmen and records keepers and so on. He gives away candy to everybody. Well, this Shiva business got started because Shiva wanted something and he started meditating. The purpose of meditating, in his case, was to compel the other gods to do something.

[08:46]

He was going to sit real hard until something gave away. And in the middle of all sorts of difficulties and hardships and so forth, he just sat. And finally he got his way. And so he's always pictured as this ascetic holy man, sitting in full lotus posture, and has lots and lots of hair all piled up on top of his head. Never cut his hair. Presumably, of course, he has lots of magical power stored up there. Anyway, the idea of meditating was a magical act of compulsion. to have something happen that could make a difference in the world. And so he accomplished it. Well, of course, even long before Shiva's time, people were meditating in India, but in any case, the Buddhists took over that posture from the Shaivites, and they also took over these beads.

[09:54]

Like I was telling Rahul and Karl a while ago, they borrowed these things as well. to count everything, to count prostrations, or to count mantras, or to count circumambulations around a stupa, various other reasons, and adapted them to Buddhist usage. Vajrayana practice also emphasizes this straight-backed posture, and of course the more advanced Vajrayana meditators are doing what they call Maha Mudra or Maha Ati meditation, which is very like Sazen. It's meditation without a specific image in mind or without a specific direction of any kind. You just sit with emptiness or empty and try not to be distracted from it by any

[10:57]

memory or reflection or idea, whatever. So this is probably how come the business of straight back sitting came across, but I'm not certain. I'm just guessing about it. In any case, in China they certainly, after a while, were getting into sitting more soft and limp, and then, according to my friend anyway, in Thailand they're in much the same way, although the seated Buddha images from Thailand show them sitting quite straight. They're not leaning like the Japanese Buddhist figures lean a little bit like this. But anyway, my friend was saying these people were having a good time and they weren't stiff like we are, and they weren't all grim and doer and Japanese. And I said, well, look, you know, it's just a cultural difference.

[12:05]

It doesn't have anything to do with Buddhism. It's just the way the people were used to sitting and standing. I said, I doubt very much that you could persuade any Chinese folks to sit Seiza, for example, sit on their knees and listen to a lecture the way we do, or to see a ceremony that way. They'd stand up. And when they were eating, they apparently sat at benches with tables in front of them. And if you visit the Mombuka-ji Temple at the Obaku-zen headquarters near the village of Uji outside of Kyoto, you'll see that kind of dining hall where there's rather high, narrow tables and little long benches alongside where the monks sit down. Although they eat with the three bowls, they don't do it in the zendo. So all these are funny local differentiations and so on. The thing though about sitting straight is in the Tibetan system, they say it's the direct way to enlightenment, immediate enlightenment, right now.

[13:16]

Doing the Mahamati or Mahamudra meditation, they say it's very dangerous, but it's the quickest way to enlightenment, the quickest way to become totally sprung was to practice that kind of objectless meditation. But you should do it with a teacher. You shouldn't just go off and do it. They don't explain too much why. But in any case, that's what they were recommending for swift action. And of course, in the Zen schools, as they developed in China, the business of Zen was to especially in the Rinzai school, was to obtain satori, to get a big kind of intuitional flash by working very hard on a koan while you meditate and keeping, at the same time, keeping this posture very carefully and working closely with the teacher, doing sansen with the teacher all the time.

[14:27]

and doing lots of session and so on. With the object in mind of obtaining this sudden flash of insight, this great experience, and there are many descriptions, of course, if you've looked in such a book as Philip Kaplow's Three Pillars of Zen, for example, There are accounts by various Westerners and other people who had this kind of experience and they tell about how nice it was and how they sweated and cried and one thing or another. Their lives presumably are changed afterwards and it's all great. Our way of doing Zazen is much simpler. And there's no carrot on this stick. The stick instead comes down on your shoulder if you go to sleep.

[15:31]

And there's no carrot tied to it, and you don't have anything to chase. Because Dogen says that people are already enlightened. There's no enlightenment to go out after. It's not over there someplace that you can walk to Tassajara, and the minute you get there and sit down, the enlightenment starts coming on. that you are already there, that wherever it is you are and whoever it is you are, you are Buddha already. And so you're already enlightened and so there's nothing for you to worry about flashes and so on. You might have all sorts of visions or pleasant experiences or insights or so on in the process of practice, but that isn't emphasized. What's emphasized is to just sit and to do the zazen and shut up." That's Kategoriya Roshi's sentence, just shut up. I think it's marvelous advice.

[16:32]

I talk too much, certainly. It's hard to pick up on that idea that there's nowhere to go and there's nothing to get out of it and that you already are as funny as you're going to be right now. Because we like, being Americans, we like to think about how we're going to get better. how we're going to improve with time. If we work real hard at something, we're going to get more and more wonderful. And we have this idea of progress in our culture and in the way we've been brought up, or at least the way I was brought up, is you're supposed to get better. What is it? Émile Coué in about 1922 came up with the idea about how every day and every way I'm getting better and better and better, and you tell yourself that. Or similar ideas, little boys all, are encouraged to believe that they'll grow up to be president one day. Or if they're not president, they'll grow up to be Jan Ignac Paderewski and play the piano quite wonderfully, or something like that.

[17:40]

But in any case, they're not just going to be who they are, they're going to be something better. Well, this is a tiny obstacle that all of us have to work with. The first function of that obstacle is to show us that we are not Buddha. Here is Buddha over here. This particular image is, I think, supposed to be lecturing, supposed to be teaching, that kind of mudra he's got there. And Buddha is this gentleman with these knobs on his head and a bump between his eyebrows and a funny round fat shape. And many images show him with webs between his fingers because in the official descriptions he has webbed fingers.

[18:41]

And on his feet he has magical markings and wheels and things. And there are long descriptions of the physical appearance of Buddha, how his arms hang down, his hands hang down below his knees, and various other strange anatomical descriptions. Rather ape-like, actually. In any case, we look at ourselves and we don't look too ape-like, and certainly we don't have hair that's all made into little lumps, and we don't glow in the middle of the forehead very well, or at least not usually. Well, and so we say, how can I, I can't be Buddha, I'm some, I'm just Joe Schlumpf, and nobody's going to imagine for a second that I'm Buddha. Well, you know, part of the difficulty is that we don't look up and say, there's Buddha over there. we don't recognize who we're seeing outside of ourselves as Buddha.

[19:47]

And that's who everybody else is, actually. Everybody is Buddha. Everybody, or if you can't make that, think about everybody being Avalokiteshvara, Bodhisattva. In any case, what you, the persons and animals and trees and whatnot that you see are Buddha. After a while, it gets a little more possible maybe to think of yourself in some abstract way. I mean, you know, not in any practical way, but certainly maybe in some abstract way as Buddha. And that by sitting, you are manifesting your Buddha nature, like Dogen says you are. He says one is doing zazen, you're Buddha-ing, you're being showing off your Buddha nature for people to see. And that's difficult because how can you say that somebody just sitting still is doing anything?

[20:57]

Absolutely just sitting there collecting dust and probably going to sleep and one thing or another or worrying or wondering about all sorts of things and seeing movies and so forth. That certainly can't be the activity of a Buddha, to sit there wishing that the bell would ring, and your legs would stop hurting, and your back would stop hurting, whatever. That's certainly not what Buddha is thinking about. Buddha is concerned, in this image anyway, with telling people about how to shape up and get sprung from their various kinds of karma, various kinds of past hangups and troubles and so forth. And he said, I did it, I'm just folks and you folks can do it too. And all this is something, for us anyway, is something in a book or it's something that happens in China or happens in India or something like that.

[22:00]

And we are clearly not Chinese or Indians or something. So we have the identity crisis. We look at ourselves and we don't know who we are or what we ought to be. It certainly doesn't match up with the idea of Buddha. But what is Buddha? What is this idea thing? Well, it's something about realizing something, something about understanding something. Buddha just means, out of the word bodhi, which means wisdom, isn't it? Some kind of funny uh... we say wisdom beyond wisdom Prajna Paramita something uh... not in the book uh... a uh... knowing beyond knowing something like that and uh... it's something that you experience something you

[23:05]

learn and experience and the actual experiencing of it is indisputable. understand something and then you spend a lot of time trying to explain it. And the explanations are maybe understandable, but not very useful to people. So there have to be other ways of getting what is this Buddha thing across to anybody. Well, that was the thing that Buddha is famous for, is that he was able to explain what happened to him and how people can do it. how they can become Buddha or realize their own Buddha nature themselves without any further ado. Actually, you have to do this yourself.

[24:09]

Nobody can arrange this for you. He explained how to go about it, but unless each person puts out the time and energy to get at it, nothing will happen. Nobody will know anything about anything except that they are tired or that they wish that they were someplace else or want something. And the teaching of Buddha is very, very simple. And I have a It's about half a dozen pages. It was composed by a Buddhist nun from Sri Lanka and published by some company in Ceylon and distributed free.

[25:14]

And just in a few pages they tell you all that you have to know, or all of the rules, or all of the basic know-how. practicing Buddhism. So it's not all very hard. But still, it causes, you know, lots of questions come up and lots of problems come up that obscure these very simple rules or very simple ideas about how to live and how to take care of yourself and take care of other folks and be careful how you are doing anything. It's very hard to sort out the practicality of it from the rather heady philosophy that goes with it all. The Zen people, the Zen school, of course, tried to cut through the heady philosophy part and say, please, if you want to do Buddhism, what you've got to do is to do Zazen.

[26:21]

get past the theory and get past all the ideas and get into the experience of your own nature and the experience of practice and how practice is Buddha nature, as Dogen says. So you somehow get roped into parking yourself on this round cushion and looking at the wall and saying, All right, what happens next? When does the goody arrive? And, of course, the goody doesn't arrive. The goody is already here, only you didn't notice it. But then how you attract your attention toward noticing the goody is very difficult, because we have a lot more things to worry about. And we have many, many habits looking in various other directions for entertainment and gratification and so on.

[27:30]

Instead of looking at ourselves, investigating who it is we really are, we continue to buy the scenario that we have created for ourselves and that we use all the time as a self-description to ourselves and to other people. and get totally involved in that instead of what's really happening, what the world really is doing, what other people are doing, what we're doing. And so we stumble around and say, what's happening? What is this business about who am I and who's sitting and who isn't, and so on. So we have a wonderful time of confusion and trouble. And quite often we invent marvelous physical manifestations of our own doubt and trouble.

[28:39]

So we have knee trouble and so on. And after a while that all goes away. And then you figure, well, I'm making progress. I'm getting better. I'm able to sit still now, and I don't go to sleep so much. And then, of course, there's a marvelous period I think all of us experience when you sit down and you conk out. It's quite odd that you don't wake up until the bell rings. And that's very nice because you have a siesta, on a little break in the zendo. And some people, some teachers are very encouraging. They say, oh, well, you know, you couldn't sleep. If you were bad, if you had a bad conscience or were a bad person, you'd be worried and you'd stay awake. And so if you're falling asleep, that means that you're probably a pretty nice guy and that you're probably practicing very well and it's all right.

[29:41]

Don't worry about it. After a while, you'll wake up. You should stay awake, actually. Probably would be better if you stayed awake to do Zazen. And so you stay awake and then bore yourself to death. And with any luck at all, you say, well, Buddhism is all very nice, but I'm busy. I can't stay interested in this. I'm going to go off and finish school or become an architect or go to Europe or any number of things. And so people drop out. It's interesting that people often drop back in again, which is very good. Buddhism is rather easier to do than a lot of other things and so eventually people come back because it's easy. How we can look at it sometimes as being easy and other times we look at it as being impossible.

[30:47]

The impossible part of it is that it doesn't stop and we don't get the carrot on the end of the stick. We continue way off past the end. And that's hard to pick up on. The idea of practicing all your life and many more to come is very discouraging sometimes. I, at some point here, I want to get to be the boss, or I want to get to be the president of the Zen Center, or I want to be Queen of the May, or something. Something's got to come out of all this. Or I want to be a perfected being. I want to be all shiny and marvelous. have a hard time seeing that after you get to be a perfected being or after you get to be Queen of the May or whatever, there's still the next hour or the next moment to take care of after you've done one thing, then there's something else.

[32:08]

And we continue to live and I suppose that if one were simple-minded enough, being the president of the board of directors would be enough. You'd say, at last, I have achieved what I wanted. I have been where I wanted to go. And on the other hand, even simple-minded people find it difficult to think about Or am I going to go next after, now that I'm at the top? There's no further top. And so am I going to walk down the hill from now on? Or am I going to stay here until somebody pushes me over or what? And so we have this problem of the encore.

[33:11]

Whatever it is we do, however much we improve ourselves or however much we succeed, there's still usually something more that we want, or we discover from that vantage point that there is yet another pinnacle to be reached that we can set out for. Whereas in Buddhism, if you think about Buddhist practice as being endless, in the first place, it's not so bad. You say, well, I'm just going to do this, and I'm going to continue doing it. And so we use this bodhisattva vow, all the time, at the end of all these lectures and things, we say sentient beings are numberless, we vow to save them. That's going to take you a long time, you know, there's a lot of sentient beings around, and even if you're starting right now, if you are able to enlighten one of them, that's going to take quite a lot of doing, and then

[34:15]

That's only one out of countless. And countless really means without number, without calculation. There's just, can't believe how many beings there is. And that's how come it's endless. I mean, it's an endless job to save all sentient beings. There's lots of universes and lots of worlds and lots of everything. And it says that obstacles are endless. numberless, without end, and so forth, that have to be uprooted, is what the Chinese text says, you have to yank it out by the roots, literally. We say, we vow to end them, or to overcome them, or something like that. The Chinese character means, like pulling out a wheat. And then, so that's quite occupying.

[35:16]

Although, of course, in the older schools of Buddhism, for example, in Theravadan school of Buddhism, if you follow certain regime of meditations and an ascetic life, there is a point at which you become arhat, you become a perfected being, and then you can stop. You've filled out all the schedule and all the forms and everything is finished. And you don't have to worry about anything after that. But this Mahayana Buddhism thing is saying, all right, there's all these numberless sentient beings and these endless messy obstacles and then there are all these gates, all these ways of studying Buddhism and practicing Buddhism to be learned. And then there's the Buddha's way, which we say, I vow to attain it or Another translation, I vow to become it. A friend of mine translates the last line as, I vow to follow through.

[36:24]

That is, to continue practicing endlessly. And probably that's why it's all like breathing, why the breathing is so important. You intend to continue breathing, and in the same way, you have to decide to, or that you want to continue to practice. And so you practice and breathe, and it all works out marvelously, if you remember. I don't know whether we will, we American type creatures will continue these borrowed cultural habits.

[37:26]

Many people are very pessimistic about the future of Buddhism here, about how people really are not ready, or people really don't want very much Buddhism except as some kind of thing to replace Presbyterianism with, that they grew up in, so they switch from Presbyterianism to Buddhism. Other people figure that it will simply blend in with American religion and just become another sect. And it will become a peculiar mixture of American feelings and habits and Puritanism, where the approach to Buddhism will be very much like the approach of popular Christianity.

[38:34]

It will be all about things that you don't do, all about how you don't smoke and we don't chew and we don't go with them that do. are all about how certain things are wicked, and you don't do wickedness, and if you do wicked things, you'll go to hell, and so on. Actually, you could have an evangelical kind of Buddhism that would be practically indistinguishable from evangelical Christianity as it's practiced here. You have revivals in the whole works, it'd be great. Actually, popular Buddhism in Japan was for a couple of centuries a rather revivalist kind of religion, where people sang a version of the Nambutsu, or they actually danced a special kind of dancing and singing to invoke Amida Buddha. marvelous preachers who went around and stirred people up all about how it was possible for everybody to be saved and go to the pure land in the West, and that every other religion was bad, but if you just say the Nembutsu and forget everything else, that you'll be reborn in the pure land, and that'd be nice.

[39:55]

And that's where all nice people belong. so that in some way, I suppose, it'll be a funny, it'll be a strange compromise whereby American culture will sort of co-opt Buddhism and naturalize it or melt it down into a totally American and totally innocuous, flavorless, active-less religion, which I think would be too bad, and which is why I think that we should probably have a few more monasteries around. I think it would be clever to change the name. I don't think we should say monastery. We'll think up some other fancy name for it, like Buddhist Parkland or something like that, or Buddhist Joyland or some marvelous thing.

[41:07]

featuring the vegetarian cuisine and all sorts of other things. Make it a little expensive. And get people into really doing some monastic practice for a while at least to keep some shape to the practice of Buddhism so it doesn't become completely automatic, just rote practice kind of thing. Somewhere underneath it, there has to be what the Japanese call shugyo, the idea of hard practice. Somewhere to keep a fiber in the thing, to keep it from going all limp, jelly. Now, I agree with my friend that in many ways we tend to be too formal and stiff in some ways, or the way we look at it anyway, we feel that it's hard or it's too foreign.

[42:29]

Now, on the other hand, when a person who had bent to the new zendo and sat there a few times, sent me a letter from Tassajara saying, how come you still want to do all those bows? This new zendo, you could, you know, why do you want to do those, why do you want to do nine bows? Why do you wear robes and why do you do Why do you keep on doing it this old way? Why don't you do something else?" Well, I don't know anything else. I suppose I could invent some kind of order of entertainment.

[43:32]

that would be different or that wouldn't take so long or something like that, I don't know. Basically, I think that what we're doing kind of works and I don't want to mess with it. I don't feel like I have any bright idea to replace a lot of it. And I might have later, but it seems easier to simply go along with the way I've been taught about how you come into a zendo, and how you bow, and how you sit down, and how you stand up, and how you chant, and so on. It all seems very simple. So you have this place that's set apart for this specific purpose, to use for zazen, and it doesn't change. and where you can come back to and it's going to be as it is.

[44:35]

It's very odd that we do this. It's very odd that we have this, try to have this unchanging business, even here using tatami to sit on and having an altar and so on. It's odd. On the other hand, if you don't have these different things that make a form, that make a shape, your attention and your feeling are going to wobble, I think, going to wander away. And so, on the one hand, while I have always been a terrible bohemian type creature who has been against the square world and so on. I think that in the business of sitting, it all works easier if you have a form.

[45:47]

I suppose that the forms will change, but there should be some there somewhere to hold a framework for people to come back to. And it's very odd that we think about unchanging this, because in Buddhism we talk all the time about how there is no permanence, don't we? About how nothing is going to stay, how everything is continuously shifting. That's the real nature of reality. And on the other hand, here we are repeating these forms. bowing, chanting, sitting in this particular way. And as I say, coming back to people can drop out and people can drop back into it. And it stays there for everybody. Anybody can try, anybody can come.

[46:54]

So this stiffness or formality or something give people something to do, since there's no carrots and no payoff and what not, you can bow. Or you can try to keep your back straight and try all sorts of things. You can carry a stick up and down the room. And just try to take it as it comes. Try to stay there. Try not to wiggle. Sometimes it seems like A person learns a lot and other times it seems like total zero taking place and you wish yourself away. So it's always a struggle. How am I going to get there? How am I going to, what am I going to do afterwards and so on?

[48:07]

So we have now, what, we have, there's this zendo and there's uh, Jakusho Kuang-sensei's zendo on Sonoma Mountain, the Ganjoji, and then there's the Page Street zendo in Tassajara, and the Green Gulch, and temporarily the Fairmount, very temporarily Fairmount Street zendo. It's funny cages for to catch you in, to hold you up so you can sit. Sit rigid or sit soft. Anyway, sit. See what happens. Knowing that nothing is going to happen, knowing that you have to do it forever, knowing that it doesn't stop and start, that it's just there. And you can immerse yourself in it.

[49:17]

Stay there. Stay there. I think that somebody told me once that Suzuki Roshi said to put you there and let you cook like good vegetables in a pot, quietly. Make you all nice and soft, ready to ready to use. Anybody else want to talk? I think I'm tired of talking. Anybody have a question or comment? Whatever. Don't you feel lonely out there? No. No. On the rare occasions when nobody shows up, I sit anyway.

[50:20]

I don't think of myself as sitting alone, but I think that people are sitting here and at Page Street and at Tassajara and at Ganjoji and every place around the world. Gary and his, Gary's group is sitting at Ring of Bon Zendo. They're going to build, incidentally, as soon as the ground dries out now, they're going to start building the Ring of Bon Zendo, a new building at Kid Kid Dizzy. And I think there are regular 15 or 20 regular members now, and they have affiliated themselves with Robert Aitken Roshi's group. So he comes now every year to do session with them, do San Zen. So they're going to have a regular Zen Do building now to use this summer, they hope. So anyway, I don't think about sitting alone.

[51:26]

I don't feel lonesome. I've lived alone a great deal anyway. It's a nice feeling once in a while to sit by yourself. I think that people are very shy about sitting, about thinking of it as something very special or something that's very controlled or that you need a zendo to do it in or you need a priest to teach you or to watch you or you need all sorts of things. So what you need is your bottom and a slight support underneath it and then you can just sit and do Zazen. And if you've got some incense to burn the fire, that's nice. But, you know, in the poems of Ryokan, for instance, which are two whole, there are three now, three books of translations of the poems of Ryokan, who was a Zen monk in Japan in the 18th century, and he lived by himself in a little hermitage

[52:29]

and begged for his food, and the villagers would give him food and rice and things, and other friends would bring him sake and they'd write poems together. But many, many of the poems are simply about sitting in this little hut, listening to it rain or looking at the moon shine or whatever, but sitting, actually being there. And he's very happy. He may have been unhappy or unlucky finding food that day or whatever, or maybe he hasn't been able to get up because he's snowed in and things like that and can't go away. So there he is today, sitting and being, continuing his practice. He's a monk. So I, and then also being a priest or a monk or whatever it is that you want to call it, unsui, I feel connected to a tradition to a way of living.

[53:34]

And part of that way is sitting. You know, the most part of it, of that tradition, is meditation and doing zazen. And so I don't feel cut off or lonesome or whatever. I didn't feel, of course, years ago when I worked in lookout stations in the Forest Service, I didn't feel lonesome either. Maybe I'm just naturally a hermit. It's possible. Yeah? Do you think people are different who are attracted to Zack today than they were?

[54:39]

No, I don't think so. I think I think it's possible that more people today come to Zen Center who maybe haven't read Alan Watts or haven't read the Suzuki Daisetsu's essays or something like that, which used to be the introduction that almost everybody had to Zen Buddhism thirty years ago, twenty-five or thirty years ago. Nowadays there are so many places for people to go and look at or go and try to sit in and so on that people usually hear about it from friends who are already there or hear about it and then they write off for information or phone up and say, what are you doing?

[55:45]

Can I come? What's happening? Do you give lessons? And so there's a much more direct directly available scene than there used to be. When in the early 1950s, the only place that I know of at that time that was operating was the first Zen Institute in America, in New York, which had been founded by Soke-yan, Ruth Fuller Sasaki's husband. And Nyogen Senzaki was teaching in Los Angeles. Not very many people knew about either one. I think that we found out about the first Zen Institute through Alan Watts personally, and also through their publication, the Zen Notes pamphlet that came out once in a while.

[56:58]

And people found out about the existence of Nyogen Senzaki partly through people who had worked with him, who had met him. and so forth, people like Ananda Dallenberg and Albert Sajjo. Albert had sat with Senzaki quite a lot. He met him first in the concentration camp in Wyoming. And then later, Albert, of course, went in the army and was in Europe and came back and worked with him later. But anyway, that was the only thing going, almost. until the later fifties when Topase was the priest at Sokoji. And a few people came and got interested in going there and working with him doing Sumi painting. And some of them would kind of hang around to think about the possibility of doing Zazen maybe, but I don't think they did very much, if anything.

[58:01]

So, you know, Buddhism, or Zen in any way, was still pretty theoretical in those days, or literary. It was all in books, pretty much. There were rare individuals, like Tobase, who would come around, or like Hasegawa Sensei, who taught at the Academy of Asian Studies, and Watts himself, of course, who knew something about it. But it was... We, you know, it's all had to do with Sumi painting and with calligraphy and with funny stories about guys yelling quats and hitting each other and little poems. And so, you know, it's all kind of decorative, chinoiserie kind of number. Gumps, Gumps' Good Taste Cost No More and so on. But gradually, through these various contexts, some of us actually started to sit, and especially Albert was very helpful because he had learned to sit from Senzaki Sensei, and so he could show us how you had to sit, how you had to prop yourself up if you wanted to sit for any length of time.

[59:30]

and how to chant the Heart Sutra in Japanese, and how to do kin-hen outside, rather fast outdoors, and how to drink tea in the Sando. So he taught us those things. And then, of course, Gary shortly after that went to Japan and began studying first with Miura Roshi at Shokoku-ji, and then later with Oda Roshi, his main teacher at Daitoku-ji. And so he found out a whole lot. When he, in his first trips back here, he passed on a great deal of the Dharma right away, which is very nice. But, so gradually it all became, it was all getting more involved with actual sitting and actually looking around for teachers and figuring out what was, what you were going to do about it. That it was not just something in a book, but more something you did with your actual body and with your actual mind and emotion and so on, rather than something decorative or some sort of intellectual idea.

[60:40]

But at the time that I was ordained, for example, I had really no idea about what the life of a priest was like. I had seen many in Japan, And I had also been able to meet a number of different Zen masters and abbots and whatnot in Japan. But they were Japanese, not as much different kind of thing. I knew that I wanted to be a monk. Outside of books, I had no idea what it would be like. And so it's been very interesting to

[61:23]

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