There's three people here who you haven't met before, I believe. Carl Wing, who's with Peter ... you work with Peter Gillingham sometimes, or Dr. Schumacher, or Small Businesses, or something like that. And Jane Lehman, I don't know if she's head of ARCA Foundation and other things. And Stuart Brand, who has co-evolved with all of us. This subject of right livelihood I get asked to talk about fairly often, not too often because I don't give talks outside Zen Center, except so far I've talked a few times at Linda's farm, and it's the word right doesn't have much to do with Buddhism. It's in the sense that right livelihood is used to mean any concern with the responsibility of your actions and with the ramifications of your actions. This is, I think,

[01:22]

I don't see why that's peculiarly Buddhist, to be concerned with responsibility and the ramifications of your actions. Mike Phillips, I guess you made up the title for my talk? It's Right Livelihood in a Social Context. I didn't even know I was going to do this. a couple days ago, I thought I was just going to attend, but Mike's title for this is quite good, because when you start thinking about right livelihood, the question comes up, how is it relevant or what is its context? try to talk about is the relevance or context of right livelihood, and it's the Buddhist context, you know, because first I think it might be valuable to start there. And when we yesterday were speaking about, pretty soon, pretty quickly, we're talking about community, we're into talking about the context of right

[02:40]

and its relevance or what makes it work. For example, I think a fairly clear example of this is, I've had a lot of connection with the scientific and engineering community, both through employment I've had and also my family, and I know that many, many, many engineers and scientists have grave reservations about you know, maybe they're happily making that form sometimes, but also many have grave reservations about weaponry, making weapons, etc. And yet very, very few people have had the conscience to stand up and say something. Dan Ellsberg is one of the very few, and Dan tells me that there are a number of other people who took papers and never and resigned, but never exposed the papers, never made public the papers, and that Dan knows these people and they're working on making them, eventually we'll make them public, but a number of people did what Dan did, but didn't step out, and I think it might be, I should talk to him sometime about what gave him the confidence to do it. I know that actually he says he first

[04:06]

got turned around about the war by a happenstance meeting with Gary Snyder in a bar in Kyoto, in which they talked about the war. And I don't know if that puts it in a Buddhist context, but Dan is interested in Buddhism. And I think the main example recently is, was it three people from GE opposed nuclear energy recently? There are three, and it's very rare that anyone's done it, and those three stand out, and when you, as the newspapers brought out later, they all shared a common community, and that met regularly, and which they all belonged to, and which supported their decision. So I think the point you were making, Este, about some kind of community, or during the Vietnam War, how people tried to get a support system and encourage people to act on their conscience.

[05:08]

that some support or community relevance is necessary to make a concept like Right Livelihood work. As long as it's just in the framework of, it's a nice idea, you know, or it feels good to do it, at least the experience of Buddhism is that it won't work. The first, so-called the first holy truth, is that there's suffering But that also means that human nature is corruptible. And it means, excuse me for saying so, that you are corruptible, and in fact probably corrupted. Or, you know, not perfect at least. What we... No, you. I don't want you to share your problem. Anyway, and also in Buddhism we don't have, you know, Buddhism is a man-made explanation of what's going on and it's a little difficult. I'm trying to be, I have a sort of mosaic way of talking about things, you have to be patient with me, if you will, but I'm trying to be as simple as I can because it gets complicated very rapidly.

[06:37]

because our language and our words are so loaded with unexamined assumptions. I mean, it just takes a tremendous amount of time to examine all the assumptions in language, and if any word I use, we won't really share a common meaning for it. So I'm trying to be as simple as possible in presenting this. Again, Buddhism is a man-made explanation, so you don't have any God to enforce morality or to correct things or to test you or shape you up or whatever. It's up to you to do it. So the first, shall we say, enforcer of right, livelihood, is a concept of time and space which is a continuum in which everything counts. There's no escape from it. No matter what you do, there it is. You can't erase it, you can't clean it up later, there it is.

[07:57]

The sense of karma or merit or however we want to talk about it is a kind of enforcer and it's an experience we have. Again, because it's a man-made explanation, Buddhism rests solely on your experience and without you experiencing it doesn't have any The second side is, it may feel good to practice Right Livelihood, but it's very difficult. People are pretty idealistic in college and for very, very few people does that idealism last, or people try to help others and with a few notable failures you then try to manage your own affairs and give up. So the next part is, although it may be satisfying to do so, how do you say that you, well let's go back to enforce it, the whole environmental movement is just a version of, in Buddhist terms, of

[09:11]

you can see very clearly now, you know, with science, etc., we can see very clearly how our actions are influencing our whole situation, environment, etc. So in that sense, the necessity is forced on us. And the second side is satisfaction. You feel better doing it. Both of these, where the Eightfold Path comes in is that both of these, to make this an experience, to make this your actual experience is the reason we do meditation or practice, is to intensify or make your experience more real for you or something like that. So it's not so easy to separate one thing off from another. So Zen is only, in the context of Buddhism, is only the school or teaching which emphasizes especially this experience of the satisfaction or bliss. Sometimes we say in Buddhism that there's no learning outside of

[10:32]

that as long as you have a divided or ambivalent mind you don't really apprehend things. So what I've just gone through in a way is the four, so-called the four truths. One is that there's suffering and that people are corruptible and the second is that there's a cause of And the third is that there's an end, and the fourth is there's a path. And the cause of suffering then would be your actions, that there's no other source of it, it's your actions. And knowing that, you can end it, and then the fourth is the path. And the path is the eightfold path, and right livelihood is one of the eight, of the eightfold path. And again, the basic idea of it is pretty simple. First is right views, which means something like an insight or feeling that everything isn't as it might be, that everything is changing, that by your own observation you yourself are corruptible.

[12:02]

So, that's right views. The second is, knowing that, that there's right views, you know, our mind wanders. Nagarjuna, who was the most famous logician of Buddhism, said, how do you make a snake, a curvy snake, straight? And he said, you put it into bamboo, pieces The nature of a snake is also straight, you know, and he means you sit straight, you do zazen, or your backbone is like putting your mind in your backbone or in your breathing. So, if there's right views, next question is, and there's no God, and I sometimes wish Buddhism had a God, it might be easier, but in Buddhism, we don't have that. So, you have to do something yourself that really puts a lot of responsibility on each person.

[13:15]

And so, once you have, shall we say, this insight or perception, it's called right views. Next is, what do you do about your thinking? Because your thinking is always wandering. How do you put the snake in a bowl? So, the next thing is right thought, which means You develop or deepen these perceptions and you express them and you examine your own thinking. And next is right speech. Is that right? Next is right action, right speech. One of them, maybe right speech. And right speech means that there should be a connection between your body and your mind and your speaking. that speaking is for the purpose of communicating with people and some mutual experience, but most people's talking is rather divisive and gossipy or self-expressing something or some internal, interior, eternal monologue going on which comes out. So you begin to see the effects of your speech

[14:31]

And the next is a right action and it's the same as you, you continue this perception in your actions, that simple. And let's see, right views, right thought, right speech, right action. I guess next is right livelihood. Right livelihood is, the first three are your own effort, you know, thought, speech, and action. It's a kind of morality, personal morality, that you make an effort to do. And it means also mindfulness, the practice of mindfulness. Right livelihood Strictly speaking means exposure. It means right mindfulness turned inside out, or social mindfulness, or something like that. That just being aware of your own thinking, etc., you have to be aware of your actions in the whole context.

[15:46]

So it means constantly to, as right mindfulness in the sense of right action, speech, etc., it means exposing the activity of body, speech, and mind to yourself, what you're doing, so you begin to see your conduct. It becomes more conscious or awake, and as you know, the word Buddha just means awake. Right livelihood means your activity also becomes awake, but not just awake to you, awake to others. so you have the willingness to open yourself to others' expectations of you. In other words, maybe this context for right livelihood, which makes it work in a Buddhist sense, is that first you, by right views, you notice what you expect of yourself or what your own heart's content is and

[16:48]

you're willing, you find the strength or courage to be open to what you expect of yourself, realistically expect of yourself. Next is, where you come to right livelihood, is you open yourself to the expectations of others, so that how you earn your living or how you conduct yourself in any way is open to others. So it's often said you don't sell alcohol, which means you don't sell intoxicants, or it means you don't sell Buddhism, you don't present Buddhism as intoxicating. don't sell, you don't make weapons, you don't sell poison, you don't sell people, flesh, you know prostitution or something, but it really means that you make yourself open to others. And the third part of that is you can't expect anything of others, in a Buddhist sense again, you

[18:06]

until you open yourself to what people expect of you. And you can see very clearly when you do things, people want you to be better, you know, or they like when you do this and they don't like it when you do that. So if you do that, then that's nice, they want you to be a little better, and pretty soon they want you to be a Buddha. That's one of the problems once you get into this. One thing I should say, too, is that in the Buddhist context, and a lot of people talk, well, everything is one and all that stuff. But in a Buddhist context, right action, right livelihood, etc., means you can make a mistake. It means there's such a thing as wrong livelihood, you know, wrong action, wrong speech. And you can't

[19:11]

can't say, well everything will take care of itself, as I've talked other times. For Buddhism there's no self-correcting system, no self-correcting economics. You can't trust this sort of subversion of, probably subversion anyway, of Darwin that, you know, survival of the fittest, throw in a bunch of egos together and it all comes out to the Someone's example of that was an elephant dancing among chickens saying, everybody take care of themselves and God for everyone or something. So, at the same time, you can make a mistake. Right also means perfect or everything is complete. So one of the problems with this practice or even discussing this is that most of us have a logical framework which requires things to be non-contradictory and one of the first things you have to deal with is simple things like how can there be an end to the universe or does it go on forever?

[20:30]

whatever thing you pose, if you look closely at it, there's contradictions in it, so we need a logic or at least to think about things we have to be willing to entertain what seem like opposite ideas. It's interesting and one of the things they do, the most basic ceremony they do in Japan to indicate the act of will, that it's not a self-correcting system, that you don't eat unless you want to chew, munch on berries and grass, you have to clear the ground and you have to plant something, you have to plant it carefully or else it won't grow. This is an act of will, body, speech, and mind, etc. So that act of clearing the ground, of cutting the grass, what they do is regularly in their ceremonies they will cut grass to symbolize clearing the ground, the intention of people, of civilization, of binding your hair, of binding your waist, and they bind it up and then they have a ceremony and they burn it.

[21:37]

to return it to recognize. You can undo what you do, I mean in a sense undo, that's put together. So right livelihood is that kind of sense and that kind of responsibility. And the next is, because there's a mistake, because you can make a mistake, there's wholesome action and unwholesome action. And you have to be able to, first of all, you know, you must have to, you know, you can't sort of work it out by rules. Really, it only works if you have a wholesome state of mind, shall we say, or not a mind divided against itself. Now, when you face, how do you solve that problem? Again, the way Zen suggests is Zazen, but there are many ways to do it. So because there are wholesome and unwholesome states of mind, there's effort. And because everything changes, there's effort. Again, in Buddhism, we say there's either laziness or effort. There's no in-between. And there's no place you can get where you can rest or you're finally arrived or something like that. Each moment requires some effort.

[23:02]

in a wider sense, the next step, the seventh, is mindfulness, which means a state of mind or presence, in the deepest sense, means a state of mind or presence where there is no media, everything is immediate, not media, there's no interpolation of what this is, etc., or description to yourself or names. and the last is samadhi or concentration, which just means everything is one or non-duality means there's no separation. Although it's like, perhaps a person who believes in God looks at a tree and they also see God. I suppose in Buddhism we talk about simultaneous arising or the double moon or co-emergent reality or something like that, which means that although you see difference and you see distinction, at the same time, simultaneously, you see no separation.

[24:13]

or interpenetration to the interrelatedness, to the extent that actually you're talking about experiencing a kind of medium, almost like you're in an aquarium, you're experiencing everything. So that is the context of right livelihood in Buddhism, and it comes out of because people are corrupt and you can't expect or are corruptible and you can't expect people to behave that we're too changeable, that some kind of practice or context or responsibility is necessary and actively developing that responsibility by a decision because there's no God, in this sense, in a Buddhist framework, to help you. You yourself must work it out and must decide to do it. And you know, the basic vow, if we talk about satisfaction, it's a nice thing to do. The basic vow, or what all Buddhism is based on, is really what's translated as the desire to enlighten everyone or to save all sentient beings.

[25:35]

And that really means, if you translate it carefully, it means all beings vow to be all beings. So we already are. So that, if you examine all your desires, examine what you feel when you first fall in love as a teenager, maybe, is you really want to be at one with others. So then that gets all overlaid, you know. So then this right livelihood is only one step in recognizing that as our fundamental desire and trying to, by your own act of will, trying to recognizing that that's what you already are, in a sense, when you clear everything away, and then saying, okay, I will make that my life. and then right livelihood is one step in that, in which you make this effort or mindfulness and allow everyone else to expect it of you. Is that enough?

[26:59]

In this context, do you have any, in this kind of framework, do you have some questions about it, about what I've been talking about? My own feeling is the next step is, how do you ... can such an idea is right livelihood? Is it only going to be forced on us by the oil crisis? Is the petroleum bubble, you know? the karma of our industrial revolution? Or can we perceive it as an insight and then make that relevant to us in our life? Do we need it to be forced on ourselves, or can we have an insight and then take the responsibility of that insight in everything we do thoroughly? You know, some Zen story about disciples watching how his teacher urinated, to see at even a private moment if he was behaved properly, you know. Yes? I wonder, Dave, we're talking about the insight, and we're talking about service, and what you're saying so far is you need the insight before the service works right, and I wonder if there is a

[28:29]

somewhat the case that as you do service, the insight is ... I didn't mean to sound like I was saying ... Bodhisattva means ... first let me define Zazen. Zazen, which I mentioned to some of you, Zen, just as many of you must know, comes from the Sanskrit word jnana, Jhana means penetration or absorption, it doesn't really mean meditation, it means oneness or penetration or absorption. Then it gets turned into Chan in Chinese and then turned into Zen in Japanese and Za just means sit, so sitting penetration is Zazen. And Bodhisattva means Well, again a simple definition I gave yesterday is early Buddhism was involved with the individual who supposedly achieved enlightenment called the enlightened one or Buddha. A historical person who did this. After several hundred years you get a shift to a feeling. This is the difference between really in a simple way between Theravada Buddhism and Mahayana.

[29:53]

or sometimes Hinayana, but Hinayana isn't a polite way to characterize Theravada because it means the lesser vehicle. Anyway, but in history books it's often Hinayana and Mahayana. Anyway, the difference between Theravada and Mahayana Buddhism is Mahayana starts when the emphasis shifts from the historical person who achieved enlightenment to a recognition or feeling that if a person can achieve enlightenment, that potential for enlightenment must always be there. What would that potential for enlightenment be, since there's no deity, it's a non-theistic system? It must be everything in its all-at-onceness, coming and going. So tathagata means suchness, and actually the word for Thus, the root of what, when, that, this, the, is all thus, or this sense of coming and going, thus come, thus gone, which means tathagata. Sometimes I say, what's what? What is what? What is suchness?

[31:08]

So there's this shift to that, so then the largest name for Buddha then becomes, not to Buddha, but thus the Tathagata, or the thusness of everything, and then you get the iconography developing out of that. Before that there were no statues of Buddha, then you get the iconography because there's the I can argue it because there's the wisdom aspect of thusness and there's the compassionate expression of thusness, etc. Well, Bodhisattva means enlightenment suchness. So, the Bodhisattva is one who decides not to become enlightened, actually, and only do service. He decides to put off his enlightenment, his or her, until everyone's enlightened. So it means, in that sense, bodhisattva means the nature of enlightenment is service. So you just start, that's what, you know, you don't, you just start, right? You start immediately. I mean, there's no place to, you know, there's no place to wait, you know. Yeah? Questioner 6 Could you speak a little bit about service and for whom last night we began

[32:29]

to get into the subject of whether we should serve everyone or use some selectivity. You said this morning you would not sell weapons but would you serve the maker of weapons and under what circumstances and how well? Yeah. Can you expand please? There's no answer. Both my, I have an older half-brother who's now in charge of developing this super-duper computer which is going to organize all the computers. And he developed the liftoff station that designed all the equipment at Cape Carnival. And the automatic pilot that guided Glenn around. And my father was in charge of the development

[33:30]

and the development of the lunar module in relation to the rocket. So, I've had, you know, talked to them quite a bit about weapons and da-da-da-da-da. I can't reject my own family, you know. The painting is a great background for that. Pardon me? The painting is a great background. Well, the man who painted this, Gordon Onfield Ford, was a Dadaist and member of that French group and English group was Mata and other people, and he studied calligraphy. This scrolls by the leading calligrapher in Japan at the present time, Yamada Momonoshi, and he studied calligraphy with a Zen teacher here in San Francisco, and he combined that European thing with calligraphy. and he thinks he's painting inner space, he thinks he's painting when he tunes out, sort of, the kind of things you see, you know, in Europe. And there's a lot of ... most people around here don't like that painting much, but you get so you like it after a while, it demands something of you, the other things here don't demand quite as much, but it's hard to get a feeling for his paintings until you see ... there's a show in Oakland, I don't know if it's still up,

[34:54]

but there's a whole environment of them and it's really very beautiful when you see them in another context. I think most people who didn't like them here when they went there felt differently. Anyway, maybe it is a kind of inner outer space, at least from Gordon Oswald Ford's view. I don't think you can Excuse me for quoting Buddhism. One of the precepts is, do not exclude others from your thoughts. Or the Bodhisattva ideas, you can't say, well, we'll just work with these and not them. That's you, you know, that's also you. But how you do that is, you know, but you also can expect something of others once you open yourself to others' expectations. So you can expect people to quit making weapons or think about quit making weapons, even if you get somebody to think about it. Also, I'm afraid you can't think in, my own feeling is, you can't think in terms of solving the problems of the world in one generation. We have to think in terms of numbers of generations and the sutras begin

[36:17]

Sutras mean scriptures begin usually with son or daughter of good family and it doesn't mean you know you're an upper middle class you know something or other. It means that you come from several generations of people who've made an effort which then allows you to hear the teaching. So it may be that you know Gary Snyder's hanging out with the Indians And then going to Japan, and then Ellsberg meeting him, and then that kind of thing happens. And you can't tell what's going to happen, you just make, you make your effort, and are willing to take, as someone said, risks, because it's a, you're not involved with goals or success. Is there a concept of incentive in Buddhism which could combine with the way one serves? What do you mean by incentive? It's all based on intentions. It's based on recognizing and then an intention to do it. And all of the, the whole Eightfold Path only means the development of intention. From right views, to right thought, to right livelihood, and then into right mindfulness, and then finally into right concentration or Samadhi. Yes? A lot of the impact of what you're saying for me

[37:44]

goes back to self-responsibility. Sometimes I feel like a lot of us ask questions, not just today but yesterday, that really we each have to answer in the actual experience of our lives. Whether we serve someone or not or how we serve them, whether we create a certain kind of job or not, no one can really answer those questions except ourselves in the actual moment of the experience. The last thing Buddha said is, supposedly before he died, no one really knows. Supposedly what he said was, don't depend on me, you've got to work out your own thing. One of the interesting opposites that has occurred that interests me is, you know, I studied the history of science stuff for a while. is, and this is Paul Lee, this is really particularly Paul Lee's interest, a friend of mine, is that in 1828 a man named Wöhler, Wöhler, how do you pronounce it, synthesized urea and this was, you know, really blew everybody out because the idea up to that time was that there was, you know, most people had was that there was soul or something

[39:11]

And in Buddhism, as you know, there's no self, there's no self you can identify and everything's changing, there's no permanent self, and the idea of self is also delusive, it's where unwholesome, ungenerous activity comes from. But up to the time of Wohler, almost everyone believed that the world was divided into matter and spirit or something like that. And when Wöhler synthesized urea from inorganic materials, he made an organic substance, it wiped out that distinction for science. And there was what was called the physicalist oath was developed by somebody, rather I forget, which people were supposed to take. I even heard that Freud took it sometime when he got into id and superego and all that stuff, is that you took this oath which said you would count in snow forces in nature other than those which could be measured. So it threw out ether and all kinds of stuff. But and this seems to have been then you get into you know sort of Skinner and this and synthesized intelligence and computers and synthesized religious experience with drugs, synthesized you know the whole chemical industry, synthesized to fertilizers and all come out of this synthesis of urea.

[40:30]

But when you explore that fully, the material-only doctrine, once you throw out soul or spirit, the material-only doctrine is exactly the same as the mind-only doctrine. When you say mind-only, you have to think, well, is this mind? But when you say material-only, particularly your own experience, material-only doesn't explain our life, you know, the presence or relationship we have. You can't explain everything. If intelligent beings exist in a material-only world, then material is intelligent. Because the synthesis of urea means it works both ways, it's an arrow which points both ways, so it makes material, inorganic material, intelligent as well. I would really like you to talk a bit about some of your own experience, particularly in the Zen Center in San Francisco, and with particular reference to not only the development of institutions of positive experience of right livelihood

[42:00]

but also conflict and politics and the reality of where that center is and how you and the Zen people involved deal with these issues in practice today. I've heard some about it, but really my own knowledge is not very great. Buddha, Dharma, Sangha is called the three refuges and if you can't take, if there's nothing to depend on and everything's changing and you want to take refuge in a conditioned world, you can't, you know, everything's changing. So we say take refuge in, Buddhism says, take refuge in Buddha, Dharma and Sangha. Buddha means insight or something like that, awakeness. Dharma means

[43:03]

the phenomenal world as changing, as thus and coming and going, and sangha means everyone at once. But sangha in a specific sense means that because you find society is a corruptible, that the best way to the fundamental social action, okay, that's why I'm coming in here, is to join together with like-minded people. and try to live the way you think you should. So the first step in this is not to try to change society but to join with people who feel like you and by an example change society. So I guess you know if again the idea is if somebody comes into a group of people who's quite crazy everybody feels a little upset. If someone comes into a room like Sukhya Rishi who is quite calm, everyone feels a little better. So the fundamental social action in Buddhism is the development of radically sane individuals and further, if possible, the development of small groups of people or communities.

[44:30]

That does not mean you don't try to stop the Vietnam War or try to influence government or whatever, but a meditation group will be more circumspect in doing that than an individual pre-floating in society because there's an incumbent upon the meditation group is to be open to everyone, so you don't want to take stands, but a person can can go out and do any kind of social action they want. So a person can go out and do any kind of social action they want. So we're rather circumspect in our, shall we say, social action, but that circumspection has turned out to be a positive factor. For instance, in the Neighborhood Foundation, which Mike Phillips and Stuart Brand and a number of us here started together, is a separate part of Zen Center. I mean, it's separate from Zen Center, but Zen Center staffs it primarily. It started in the neighborhood because we found, in the simplest sense, we found we were

[45:51]

you know, reducing the muggings from several a week to a few a year, property values were going up and the poor people had to move, etc. So we thought, first thing, let's give the people in the neighborhood a physical stake in the neighborhood. So that was the first idea that started, and then other things continued, I mean, just starting to sweep the streets and plant trees and stuff like that. So, the Neighborhood Foundation's purpose is just service in the simplest sense. So it doesn't have any particular social program and in particular it doesn't have any politics or it's pretty difficult to be involved in service and not end up on the left. But I mean at least people view you as being on the left. this what I'm calling circumspection or decision that we won't be political, though a number of people and the people most willing to participate are often quite politically motivated and involved with a lot of the radical groups in the city. The fact that we are circumspect in that way has meant that the meetings in the neighborhood, even though we get a lot of criticism, the neighborhood gets a lot of criticism from all sides, when it has a meeting it's more widely attended than other people because

[47:16]

everybody feels open to come. So, I think the Neighborhood Foundation has had the most successful community meetings in the city on various topics and often used as a place for other people to meet because it's seen as neutral ground. Is there something more along that you'd like me to say? Well, you had alluded on a couple of occasions to issues where the problems of that neighborhood as a neighborhood required dealing politics confrontation with the city. That's as I understood it. Yeah. Well, I suppose that, for instance, if I was given a choice between working with Nader and working with Alice Tepper-Marlon, I'd choose Alice, because Nader seems to be, though I value what he's done, he's more involved in confrontation than Alice. Alice is more involved in a presentation and hoping the companies will change by the presentation than threatening them. I think in the end that probably works good but I don't exclude, I mean, and confrontation and authority is very much a part of a Buddhist community, you know, you expect something of others and you put them in positions where they shape, you know, they work out or there's danger.

[48:44]

And there's a kind of, you know, it's like being, in a sense, there's a kind of formalism, but it's a formalism related to increasing danger, like being on a rock-faced mountain with little tiny hand holes. It's very formal. You're very careful, you know. So what we found is that if you have a group of people who decide to stay together, and and we're 200 to 300 people, and way over half have been together six, seven years, and you're not particularly ambitious, and you more or less mind your own business, and what you do looks believable to people. It may not be, really, but it looks believable to people. You start to be believable, so people want your advice on things. they feel you've got no axe to grind or something. And you come to represent a kind of a weight, which way the people in the community think or who we might support becomes important. So we begin to be asked to attend meetings about who the next city attorney will be, etc., whether Moscone should be deposed, whether we should create a non-governmental

[50:11]

group of people in San Francisco who meet regularly, you know. In fact, recently, Barbara Gelada, which means frozen beard, who is the councilman who's most opposed to Moscone, said in the newspaper that Moscone was creating a new political alliance with Delancey Street John Maher, who's a good friend, Jim Jones, who's head of the people's church, we also know, and a couple others, and I'm surprised he didn't mention us, because we are involved, you know, in at least thinking about what we do, like should some members of Zen Center be policemen? You know, maybe we could get the Lancy Street and us and some other people to be a new kind of cop and just take the test and see what, you know. Did you see me with my little blue helmet? Pulling my hat way down so it looked like I had hair. I guess this is the first time she's heard of this idea.

[51:39]

You know, there are women cops. You can try out. You're not excluded. Anyway, the end, the. I've tried as long as possible to deny Zen Center's existence, in the sense that I view it as just a place to keep the rain off you while you're meditating, and the economics of it are, as much as possible, aside from a kind of training in just doing what everybody else does, so we have a bakery and a grocery store and stuff. just to try to not bug people with fundraising all the time, but to try to support ourselves, which is difficult. A lot of students say, oh geez, I'd rather be in a university, you know, to have all of this stuff. I'd rather just work on my calligraphy or something. Maybe they'd like to be in educational television, which only has mobile appear at the beginning of it, you know, and you don't have to really deal with the ads and where the money comes from, you know.

[53:05]

But Lord Pentland, who is a head of the Gurdjieff Foundation, came to see me the other day and he said, now what are you going to do about the international reputation of Zen Center? And I said, what? But anyway, whether we like it or not, Zen Center now has a role in San Francisco. I mean, there's the Grace Cathedral and there's Zen Center and people, you know, it's surprising to me, but there it is. and I've been trying to think through the last year or so, what does it mean? One of the reasons I went to England is to think, to aid to think. I'm not much for math, so I have to try things, you know, even when I went to London I never looked at the math, I just kind of wandered around, bumped into things, it's a physical thing. So I'm trying to try these things out and The only thing I can say right now is the antidote to the unavoidable social power which occurs is exposure, again is exposure. I suppose we can characterize the difference by, for instance, I'm not criticizing the Vedanta Society. The Vedanta Society has several thousand acres up the coast and their view is

[54:30]

This land is synonymous with our state of mind or calmness or meditation and we need it undisturbed like we need our mind undisturbed and that's one way of practicing and the Buddhist way of practicing is to increase the disturbance and remain calm or see if you can be calm. and to increase the exposure. So, by contrast, here at Green Gulch, everybody can come through, we have visitors all the time, etc. So, I guess, yeah, difficult too. Well, the more the question that had a good experience. I think points out the kind of thing he's asking. And part of our problem here is that we have to use language to communicate. So we use a word like political. I started to mention that which it takes place that that we're not really sure about anything that has anything in common. But the example of this was

[55:46]

This person at the Neighborhood Foundation was telling me about the housing program there. And housing is one of the hottest issues in San Francisco right now. There's a shortage and there's a lot of speculation. The Zen Center owns and is buying up a lot of housing in an area where speculation is very high. And they do it in such a way that the tenants don't leave, but they fix up the houses and they continue to live there. And since they're doing this in an area where speculation is very high, they're confronting some major issues there. In fact, we're priced out of the market. We can't do it anymore. It happened too rapidly. We saw it happening and we moved fast. We couldn't get capital enough to do more than buy about 20 units or so, is about the total. But we may be able to work ways with banks to do it. For instance, the price of the building across the street went from $80,000 in 1971 to $250,000 today. This is the Wheelwright Center. We wanted that building, it's one of the most beautiful Victorians in the city, as a place for visitors and guests to come and maybe have a small vegetarian restaurant in it.

[57:10]

that mana you were talking about. And to help people in the neighborhood with buildings. But we can do other things. So this person, I was asking him, why were they doing that? And he said, well, so people can have control over their own housing. and have some control over the rent and have some control over how the housing is developed and how the neighborhood develops. And I said, do you see this as political? He said, oh no, we're not renting anyone for office. And then I said, well, do you see this as spiritual? And he looked a bit puzzled and said, no, I don't think so. And... I won't ask who you would know. And I thought that was very interesting because the political line of most political groups is that people have control of the decisions that affect their lives and the spiritual line in most growth is that people have control of their lives. And so he was coming from a point where he was doing this action in the neighborhood and saw it neither as political or spiritual because whatever those two words were to him had something to do with the world he structured, of which he was not.

[58:32]

That's right. Yes, polarity. And another example is the grocery store that the Gringotts had. And the political community stores in San Francisco are, in order to be political, they feel they need to serve food that the people in poor neighborhoods eat. So they're trying, they've been selling mostly whole grains and now they're moving towards canned foods and paper products and all that. and to them this is a political act to sell these foods. To sell health foods and things? No, to sell non-health foods. To sell canned foods and, you know, sugar foods and that. And it would be a spiritual act to sell health foods? No, they don't talk about that. There's like... I'd have to talk to a group that's doing that. But the Zen Center has sold Pampers and Pringles and a mother whose granddaddy just pretended to have taught her since the beginning. And I haven't asked anyone, but I doubt that anyone in this room would say that was a political act. And so I think that those are just two perspectives on which I see Inigar's question for you in terms of the actions that you're doing.

[59:53]

and how, when we say, are they political, and your answers too are how you influence city politics. Well, I try not to. Or how you don't. But perhaps here we have a different way of looking at it. Well, there is, I think, there is something. There are many examples I can give, but First of all, our effort is to work out the sort of philosophical basis of it, so we can figure it, have some sense of what to do. I've mentioned this several times, but Gary Snyder's teacher told him, just before he died, he says, Zen is two things, it's meditation and sweeping the temple, it doesn't matter how big the temple is. So, with that sense, we start sweeping in front of the building and stuff like that. At what point does just sweeping in front of the building become a political act? There's no question about it that everything can be defined. You can study history from the great man theory or from economics and everything, or something, or geography and other things influence climate.

[61:08]

But when you tend to stick to a motivation of, say, just service, it's different when you start emphasizing and you're seeing, oh, there's a political aspect to that, so then you start acting, you come out a little different place. And the grocery store, we just offered the excess vegetables from the farm, and what people wanted and ate in the neighborhood and we found out people in the neighborhood wanted more health foods than we thought, so we're shifting actually more toward health food. And in the housing, if we were politically motivated, for instance, We'd probably take more of an antagonistic attitude toward the landlords and tell them they were wrong. Stuff like that, maybe. I don't know. There was a... probably a consciousness of the decisions of the market store, except that the time period took a long time, but almost every product had to be priced, the relative prices. The early discussions, and still dominates the story, was that the milk had to be the

[62:27]

the lowest possible markup, because that was something that people in the neighborhood consumed most of, and there was a feeling that that should be the cheapest product. And then people running the store noticed that Safeway actually was selling a lot of things at cost, and sometimes below cost, as loss leaders. And they adopted some loss leader policies for health food, for things that they thought were important for the neighborhood. Then they found they had to provide certain collard greens in that neighborhood. But then they also have to somehow make the store profitable and have to decide which product that we're going to put a 40% or 50% markup on. Is it going to be Pippin Apples?

[63:10]

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