Yesterday was the last of the 49-day period of observation after Suzuki Roshi's death. Can you hear me in the back? Okay. And I would, I'd like you to know Suzuki Roshi. Some of you haven't had the opportunity to spend much time with him, and I'd like to help you know him better, know what his teaching was, is, but

[01:01]

It raises the whole problem of how do you know anything? And, because Suzuki Roshi is Buddhism, and how do you know Buddhism? How do you know yourself? So, Suzuki Roshi and Buddhism both come from an extremely complicated high on the cultural-ecological scale culture. And so I thought maybe I could talk about a tea bowl. But actually I may not get to it, you know? Anyway, but it's there. If I don't get to it, I'll talk about the tea bowl next Saturday. We used the tea bowl in a memorial service for Suzuki Roshi just the other day, well, two weeks ago now. I've been in Tassajara, so in San Francisco time it was just the other day.

[02:30]

If you had to say just one or two words about Buddhism, to describe what it is, you'd have to say, I guess it's based on everything's changing. And if you wanted to say one or two words about Zen, you'd have to say it's based on non-clinging. It's a practice based on non-clinging. You must have all had the experience of feeling something very subtle about something, knowing Suzuki Roshi, or knowing something, or having some sense of something, and as soon as you notice it or try to grasp it, it's gone.

[03:40]

How do you let yourself just be with things so that you know Buddhism? Well, one way is our practice is what I'd call the long way and the short way, is that we tend to do everything the long way. We could, for instance, at Tassajara, when we start zazen, we could, instead of hitting the han, we could ring a buzzer in everybody's cabin. Just press a bell and the bell would ring and everybody would come to zazen. But we don't do it that way. And when we go to sit down at Zazen, we could just walk in and sit on our cushion, but instead we come in the door and we come in the room a certain way and we come up to our cushion and we bow and then we sit down and then we, well we face it and then we turn around again and then we bow and then we sit down and then we turn around again.

[05:17]

any shortcuts. Actually, even if you're by yourself in your room, you shouldn't take any shortcuts. You just come in at least to bow to your cushion and turn around and sit down and turn around. When you can do this completely, you have a great deal of freedom. In zazen, you have the freedom to sit still. And this becomes a way to practice, to extend your practice into all your activities, because if you notice, when the han begins, whatever you're doing, you already start changing toward that space in which you do zazen. So eventually, each heartbeat

[06:20]

Each, anything that happens can, once you find that a simple sound of the han can move you towards zazen, then finally toward bowing at your cushion, then anything moves you towards zazen. There's some entirely different space around you than most of you realize. It's just ordinary space, but it's a space in which you can be completely free. And it has no name. If you name it, maybe you can call it Tao or Zen or something. But we possess this space when we have no shortcuts.

[07:27]

But what I meant by the short way is during practice we, and actually in your life, you know, you limit yourself to direct experience, not going on a trip with the airplane you hear, but just having the sound as your possession, you know. So, anyway, Buddhism's always talking about things like having merit. But having merit is maybe like being relaxed. If your muscles are relaxed, they don't possess anything, you know? So to have merit is like having your muscles relaxed, maybe. But if your muscles are tight, you know, maybe they have something there. What are they tight about? So I've talked about, like, when you are afraid, you know, you're just completely afraid. Whatever you are, whatever you are at any moment, you're just completely it, but you don't necessarily take action on it. So as you begin to be able to allow whatever you are to happen, you in a sense are absorbing

[08:58]

your possibilities. So when they say a bodhisattva has accumulated so much merit that he no longer needs merit anymore, so he's still accumulating it and he doesn't need it, so it just goes off on everyone. But another way of looking at that is to say, once you've learned to absorb everything that you are, once you have that potential, then you can absorb everything from other people. So at first, when you're practicing, there's no clear line at when you stop absorbing your own problems, and when you start absorbing other people's problems, it's actually exactly the same practice. So you continue absorbing. If you get overloaded, you have to use some intelligence about the situations you put yourself in.

[10:28]

Generally, our zazen practice allows us to get stronger as we sit so that we don't overload. It was when I, years ago, I was in Persia and I met a man that impressed me very much. His name was Shukrilla Ali and I would come from the ship. I was working on a ship in the merchant marine and I'd come from the ship and we'd walk through this little village and there were

[11:55]

And it was very hot there, you know, like it was above 120 for the three months I was in that area. And often the hottest day we had was in Nassau, Ethiopia, which was 146. Anyway, it's quite hot. But this was in a town called Bandishapur, Iran. And I don't remember how hot it was there, but it was always above 120. And in the late afternoon, evening, the people came out from their houses and they sat on these wooden platforms, about the size of tatamis actually, and they were usually old sort of versions of oriental rugs, not like you see in living rooms around here, but much

[12:56]

sort of remnants of oriental rugs and things, to soften the wood a bit, and people sat there, and there was this man, Shukra Ali, who's also his son, no, his younger brother was with him. I guess he must have been about 25 or 30, maybe 30 or 35, I don't know. And his table was always the calmest. I couldn't understand exactly why, but There was some presence there, you know? So when we came by, they would invite us to sit down with them on the table. So we'd take our shoes off and climb up out of this dusty, I mean, these towns are unbelievable. I mean, you have babies lying in the sort of dust with flies all over their eyes and just unbelievable sort of kind of situation. But anyway, we'd climb up out of the dust of this incredibly hot town and sit on the table with this man. And we were always going, it was a very tiny town, maybe it had built in a kind of mud flat, existed there entirely to unload ships. And there were the people who were there to

[14:15]

to make money from the Americans and the foreign ships. They had lost some sense of their own culture. There was always something noisy about them. But Shukla Ali had come down from some town, leaving his wife and family, to earn money for one year or something and go back. What was interesting about him is that he didn't grasp anything. I had two strong perceptions of him. One is he treated people the way we tend to treat our pets, with a great deal of love and affection, which we don't show toward other people very often. We're able to lavish a great deal of attention on an animal and we have a difficulty expressing anything toward people, you know. But he treated everybody that way. I thought it would be wonderful to be a pet. And also, we were always buying little things, because we had money. Though I often had the experience of giving everything I had away. I'd come back to the ship sometimes shirtless, because I'd given everything. People obviously needed it more than I did.

[15:45]

Anyway, we'd buy these little things, an old rug or some water. They have water vases that you put water in and it absorbs. The water comes through it and evaporates off the outside and cools it down, so it's quite cool. You can buy them for a nickel or something. And they cool water, and so the way we had cool water in the ship was these little jugs that would evaporate and the water would be quite cool. And we'd have these things we'd set down the table. And everybody else at all the other tables would immediately pick, be curious about them. What have you purchased? What do you have? And they'd start opening and peering in your bags and things like that. And Shukra Ali would never look. I mean, and even if we showed him something that was interesting, he half didn't want to look. And there was some relationship between this He possessed himself in some way and he wasn't curious about things, unless it really was something he could relate to in some real way. There was some connection between this ability of his to not grasp at things and the enormous affection which poured off him all the time.

[17:09]

So the teaching of non-clinging has many, many, many aspects, and no matter how you look at your life, you know, it seems completely dualistic. And the way to unite those dualisms is not to try, but really not to try. So if something is given you, It's given you. And this whole idea we have of doing Buddhism ourselves doesn't make any sense, actually. I mean, you can't give yourself a Christmas present. There's some different feeling when somebody gives you something. wonderful it would be if the thing we most need in the world can be given us. So Suzuki Roshi made himself available to us to know, to give us the thing we needed most, but how to know him is

[19:32]

something else. Buddhism looks very simple, you know, but it's very simple in contrast to a pretty complex culture out of which it comes. And we have the idea that the Roshis went around like just simply not talking and hitting people and things like that. Of course, it would be nearly impossible to hit you. You'd be, how dare you hit me? So, the first, I talked the other day here, I think, and I said that to be a disciple, what you need to do is to put your personal preferences aside.

[20:36]

for one year or five years or, I don't know, a lifetime. But it doesn't need, you don't have to be in agreement with your teacher, but you have to be able to put your preferences aside. So, if I ask myself, what is it that you people need to know in order to practice Buddhism or in order to know Buddhism? I don't know quite what to tell you, partly because to tell somebody something changes the nature of the activity. For instance, at Nassahara they have eating boards and at the end of each board there's a cleaning thing. I sit right here and there's these two cleaning boards and the two people bow and they're off and running and the cleaning boards go down and are pushed down and you lift up your bowl and you push it down. It's like a kind of race and the two cleaning boards are going down, you know, so I can sit and watch them. But if I tell, if I said, this is a race, you know, if I say that, then everyone will pick up their bowl and push it, you know.

[21:59]

So that way it's a very limited kind of race. That'd be like ordinary life, we're each trying to, there's some goal so you do it. But it's much more interesting when nobody knows it's a race. They lift their bowl and push it. And maybe actually the winner is the one who, the board that gets there last. No one knows what the, what winning is, right? So then you can tell everybody, this is a race, but don't race. Then you can see this motivation, this feeling come in you, I want to race. So then you can notice that. Anyway, to tell somebody something changes the nature of the activity. So in Zen, we generally don't tell anybody anything. But that actually there isn't anything to tell, you know? But there are some things, you know, like I wanted to know who Suzuki Roshi was. So I found out as much as I could about what they already knew in Japan. And as much as Roshi would tell me, I also worked on the wind bell with him for many years

[23:36]

And I also studied Buddhism and Japanese culture in the university. So I knew a lot. And a great deal of what I knew, when I look back now, was essential for my practice at that time. So how much should I tell you? I don't know. I'm not withholding anything, it's just a matter of what, but certain things, for instance in Japan, one thing that's taken for granted and is never mentioned is that the relationship with life in a monastery, this is when I was talking about hitting, you know, one reason I can't hit you or a teacher can't hit you here in this country because there isn't that tremendous bond of trust. And in a monastery in Japan, or in any teaching situation, between a tea teacher and a tea student, there's an enormous bond of affection. You could really say love, not ordinary love, but an enormous affection and love is in the situation. We never talked, this never talked about because everybody just takes for granted that that's what the nature

[25:03]

of the situation is. So once you have that kind of situation, you trust somebody who hits you. And you can hit them back if you hit them back in the same spirit, but if you hit them back with some kind of resentment, you know, who do you think you are, then it doesn't have any meaning. So again, if we think that it's simply a matter of not speaking or simply hitting somebody, it's much too simple. Actually, when Rinzai, for instance, talks about, when they show me an object, I take the object away. If they show me a subject, I take the subject away. That means that

[26:05]

when he presents, when the student presents himself in such a way that you see he's clinging to an object, then at the moment at which you can take that object away, you hit him, right? Or at the moment you can take the subject away, you hit the person. But that is already pretty, you're pretty far along in practice. If you're at the point at which you're not clinging, at which you know what it means to not cling to activity, not to cling to this or that, you know? At that point, if someone hits you, you can see what they're hitting you for. But if a teacher here hits you, he's hitting subject and object and 18 delusions at once, you know? So, you don't know what happens.

[27:05]

So, we have a big problem in this sense, because if we try to talk about practice, we don't in any way share a common culture. We don't share a common body type, or a common culture, or a common anything, practically. In Japan, they share a common body type, a common culture, and so it makes the practice very different. Here if, say when you carry the stick, a girl is carrying the stick and she, all her life, has the idea that you, when you, you want to express your gentleness. So girls hit not so hard with the stick. And men have this idea, I'm going to, I want people to know I'm strong, so they express their strength. But both are wrong, you know. There's just a back, and you want to relieve that person's tension, or you want to wake them up, or if they're not alert in some way, you want to. But if we try to explain to a person, you're doing such and such, you know. It becomes very psychological and sociological and complicated. While in Japan, when they share a common culture,

[29:18]

There's no problem, you know, like that. And when there's that situation of trust where you don't question what your teacher does, you just, he hits you, so you say, what's that? So, I'll try to talk about the T-Bowl. We come, we live in, if you'll forgive me for saying so, a culturally deprived area called America. It's not better or worse to be here, you know, I don't mean that, I mean I'm here, I'd rather be here than in Japan, though I miss Japan in many ways, but what I mean is something like, you know, in Africa the previous ecological age still exists, a remnant of it still exists, and I'm not an ecologist, so my explanation will be rather

[30:54]

clumsy, but what I mean by that is within any group of plants and animals, each plant and animal creates an ecological niche, if you know what I mean, so that this plant in its shade can support this plant, which can support in its shade that plant, which can support this bug which when it dies it does such and such which it supports this plant and etc., etc., etc. So every possibility or so many possibilities for plants and animals to develop and live together have occurred. So in that you have a very complex ecosystem. Our own ecological age right now is a very young one. And we have very few of the possible ecological niches are developed.

[32:01]

this place in Africa, there are still maybe 90% of the possibilities or something like that are developed. Maybe at a certain point it becomes impossible for it to go on and it falls apart and the next ecological age comes. I don't know why a new ecological age occurs. But Japan and China and India are very high on the ecological scale, culturally in that sense, and we're very low on it. So we have this strange ecological niche called Buddhism coming into America, and what kind of space will it find? Well, Suzuki Roshi taught us Buddhism, but he also taught us Japanese culture, and he knew that a lot of what he taught us wasn't Buddhism. But he didn't see how it was possible for us to know Buddhism if we didn't have some more subtle idea of the possibilities of our own being.

[33:24]

He didn't care whether it was Japanese way or any other way. He happened to be a Japanese man, so he said, I show you my own culture and my own way. But at least it has to be some way. If we don't have some way, we can't do anything. I mean, some people at Tassajara get into, for instance, a kind of nature worship. And one student said to me, Well, if transmission is lost and etc., etc., the sun still comes up in the morning. That's true, but that has nothing to do with Buddhism. The sun comes up in the morning for the sun. If the sun is going to come up in the morning for you, you also have to get up, and to get up you need your own backbone. You have to have your own sun. And our culture needs Buddhism, you know, like Buddhism needs transmission, like a kind of backbone. So, as the sun needs, say, fire, which is hardly independent, say, because it's completely dependent on the air around it, and the sun to burn is completely dependent on

[34:56]

various elements in it. So, actually, to realize ourselves, we're dependent on Buddhism. The sun coming up in the morning is not enough, you know, unless you know your own sun can come up in the morning. So, we have to have some way. And so Roshi told me to go to Japan to know him, to know his culture, and to go to know plays and study the tea ceremony and do other things like that. And this tea bowl is a kind of peak of Japanese culture, represents all kinds of relationships, including many Buddhist and Zen elements, and the whole culture comes together. This is one of the sort of most complete examples of Japanese culture.

[36:25]

At the time of my ceremony last year, just a little bit more than a year ago, generally Roshi gives me some bowl, which he gave me, but also I wanted to give him a bowl. It happened to be a tea bowl, I was a little embarrassed it happened to be a bowl, and so I asked his apologies for giving him a bowl, but what I was doing was saying, It was my way of saying, I give up, you know, to your culture. I don't give up my own, but I also give up to your culture, to how much Buddhism is a part of some very complicated cultural ecosystem which, to survive in this country, we will produce a Buddhist culture. It won't, in the end, be just Buddhism. And Suzuki Roshi was very much a part of this culture, and so maybe I'll talk about the tebowl just to give you an idea of how complicated Japanese culture is. Anyway, this is a kind of, whether you know it or not, it's a kind of boss tebowl, and

[37:56]

exists with the idea that not only does it possess the space inside it for tea, it also possesses the space outside it. It's just as much owns the space outside as inside. And it could be used either in the winter or summer. Winter tea bowls are smaller and keep the tea they're narrower and keep the tea warm, and summer tea bowls are really flat out, halfway in between, this is somewhere in between. So I wanted to go to, I decided, I knew Roshi has always wanted a good tea bowl. He actually doesn't know so much about tea, he has an enormous intuition and feeling for it, but he's never, I think, spent years and years studying tea the way a Kyoto esthete would. But he's always wanted some kind of tea bowl. And this kind of thing, it's much better to have it given to you than to buy it, you know.

[39:14]

You've heard of Raku tea bowls. Well, Raku tea bowls is a technique of making tea bowls. But also, there's a man named Raku-san, Raku Kichizaemon. And Raku Kichizaemon is the 23rd or 27th or something Raku-san in the lineage from the original Raku-san who made the first Raku tea bowl and Hideyoshi, or Sen no Rikyu, who founded the tea ceremony, thought he was great and said, okay, you're Mr. Rakusan. And since then, it's been passed, the tradition. And so, I went in, I just decided I'd like to, I heard about the guy. And I decided I wanted to buy a tea bowl. In my innocence, I thought, I'll buy a tea bowl. It turns out they have never sold a tea bowl to a foreigner before, first. Second, they almost never sell tea bowls to even Japanese people. You have to somehow deserve it or have permission to buy it. How do you get permission to buy it? One way is you have to know tea bowls.

[40:44]

Like to know Suzuki Roshi, you have to know Suzuki Roshi. Doesn't make sense, but to buy a tea bowl like this, you have to know tea bowls. By the way, a great deal of what I'm going to tell you may be untrue. I don't know, you know. Japan is so complicated, you can't find out if the information you have is actually true or not. But I mean, I think it's true. Anyway, the tradition of making these tea bowls is passed down. The glaze is supposedly a secret, and Mr. Rakusan won't tell his son what the chemical formula is until he figures it out for himself. So, Mr. Raku-san Jr., he makes tea bowls for 10 or 15 years, and they're always never very good, and he can't quite get the glaze to come together and the colors to work exactly right. And the father won't tell him anything. At the point he figures it out for himself, then he'll tell him, yes, okay, maybe pretty good, or... He might even, if he's very zen, he might at that point say, you're wrong.

[42:02]

So, he might then spend another five years fiddling around until he says, �I know I'm right.� At that point he might say, �You're wrong again.� Until he's so sure that he's right, there's no doubt. So, this kind of, but if we do that here, if Suzuki Roshi had done that here in America, Say somebody came up and said to Suzuki Roshi, I want to be a priest. And Suzuki Roshi went, whoop, right across the face. It'd make no sense to us. Or a story I've told you before, I think, is that after I'd been practicing a couple years, And I developed quite a strong relationship with Roshi. I saw him regularly. Every day after Zazen, there weren't so many of us, I'd stop and have tea with him and sit in his room and we'd talk about things. And at some point in there, and he'd also incurred, I mean, I'd asked him, there'd been some, without saying it,

[43:28]

agreement between us that I would continue practicing and that he supported my continuing practicing. And it was quite a close, friendly relationship. And suddenly one day he stopped looking at me. He just cut me, I mean just cut me, that's all. And I'd go in with several other people and we'd sit down and he would talk to this person and he'd talk to this person and he would go right by me and talk to this person. And I'd say something to him and he'd look away. Well, the first month or so I thought, you know, this is really, what's wrong with me? And then about the second month I decided, well, I won't use the language I decided, but I thought you, you know, whether you like it or not, you know, you're stuck with me. I'm going to act like your disciple even if you don't like it." But this went on for about one year and two or three months before one day he just looked at me again.

[44:53]

But, I mean, just imagine if, with one of you, suddenly I started cutting you, you know, I stopped looking at you and you'd come up to speak to me and I'd sort of ignore you and listen politely and say, and go on, you know. I think you'd be quite offended pretty quickly, you know. But Roshi couldn't hit me, probably. Maybe he couldn't hit me or, but, and maybe he, I was lucky I stayed, maybe, but I was maybe kind of desperate to stay. So anyway, the chemical formula supposedly is not known. That may be hocus-pocus, but that's the way you do things in Japan. Second, the clay is extremely old. They keep the clay, and they keep working it, and it's all very secret about what they put in it. And it actually has in it the ashes of the previous Rakusans.

[45:56]

Hi there. So, anyway, so I went into the, first of all, they live in a little house, and the house happens to be a national treasure in Kyoto, but it looks like any other house, and it's just got a little fence and you go through. And they have once a month or twice a month meetings which you go and have tea with them. And it's very relaxed, pleasant atmosphere and Rakhusan the potter comes out and his wife does most of it and they have these girls who are in training who come out and offer tea. First, you have to know that such a man as Rakosan exists, which most people don't know. Then you have to know where he lives, and then you have to be invited to one of his things, which not anyone's invited. Then when you go, you have to stay there, you have to come regularly for a period of about three months, and after about three months,

[47:32]

Maybe there's some signals passed, but it's okay for you to ask that you might want to buy a bowl. But there's this three-month sort of period before you can ask. And you don't pick the bowl you want. While you've been there, they've been watching how you've been handling the bowls. And on the basis on which you've been handling bowls, they decide which one you should have, what they should make for you. And then after they've decided, you've decided, there's some agreement, you see, they have to give their permission too, you know. So once they've decided, then you wait maybe three years before the bowl is delivered, So that's just to buy a tea bowl. Of course, you can go in stores and buy ordinary tea bowls, but one thing that's interesting in Japan that I've experienced often is I went there, you know, you're going to buy something, you're going to pay for it, and you say, I want it to be this way, and when it turns out to be different, you think, well, you know, you don't have to take it. Well, you have to take it, you know, there's no choice. If you don't take it, your relationship with them is finished.

[48:59]

What exists in Japan is an enormous range of alternatives from which to choose, but you don't have much choice. Here in America, we have very few things to choose from, but a great deal of choice. I mean, to give you an idea, one person here got some silk thread from Japan. If you try to go buy silk thread here, you can find a store with maybe, what, twenty or a hundred or so different colors. In Japan, in Kyoto, there's one street which specializes in silk thread. There are other places too, but this one street, on ten blocks of it, is nothing but thread stores, for ten blocks. Hundreds and hundreds of thread stores, and with thousands of colors, and you can go in one store and It may specialize in 500 shades of purple. I mean, there are just possibilities available that just aren't, but there are possibilities here that we haven't… What's interesting about America is that we have lots of undefined possibilities. In Japan, everything's defined. So, anyway, here I come.

[50:23]

And I knew a lot about Japanese culture by this time, had been there two and a half years, and had spent more than a decade before that studying the culture. But still, I just wandered into this place and said, I want to buy a tea bowl, you know. Well, I mean, when I said this, and this group of people were having tea, there was some sort of big silence. And then there were some titters, you know, and then people patted me on the back and said, yes, it's very nice, you should buy a tea bowl, and ha ha ha. So, I also knew it was going to be expensive, because, and if you'll forgive me for talking about prices, I have to, you know, because it's an important part of it. In Japan, things can cost a great deal of money, not in the same sense they cost money here, But the sense in which a Persian rug costs a great deal of money. I mean, you think of the hours a person puts into making a oriental rug, it should cost much more than it does. But there are people there whose lifetime is, say, and the lifetime of their parents and their grandparents and great-grandparents was, say, making a certain kind of silk brocade. So they do it and they get

[51:55]

tiny wages, but when they finish with one Buddhist robe, kesa, it may cost two thousand dollars or more. So, if we think of it in art, you shouldn't afford such a thing, but you have to think of it in the terms of, here is an entire village making this thing and they want someone to have it to wear on special occasions, and some other village wants their priest to have it for special occasions, so they will all give a few dollars and they get together and they give it to the person. So I knew this was going to cost money. But I had several things going for me that helped. One is I came dressed in robes, which immediately makes you, you have to take the first seat in a tea situation, so I had to take the first seat. And to see a foreigner in robes is already marvelous, you know. It's a wonderful event. And then I have a daughter who speaks Kyoto dialect about perfectly, and that was wonderful for them, and she ended up being the whole time in the kitchen.

[53:15]

with everybody chatting and she became good friends with the Rakusan's wife. And also there was a woman from San Francisco there who's a friend of Oksan's and Suzuki Roshi, who happens to have a friend who's a friend of, I think this is right, of Rakusan's wife. And also I have another friend, Nakamura-san, who lives in our house with us, who's a sort super-cultivated lady and tea teacher, who is a friend of, who knows Kichizaemon, Raku-san, and is a friend of, close friend of the three, three of the head Kanchos of the three Rinzai schools, Zen schools in Japan. So that gave me a great deal of entree, you know. Anyway, they agreed to sell me a bowl. They sold it to me for half price. The half price is, by the way, I had to have some friends help me, but half price is $750 for this bowl. And... Smash.

[54:43]

So, its price, the price of one very similar to it was $1,500. And at present, because of Suzuki Roshi owning it and things like that, its price is much higher. I mean, because in Japan, who owns it and who likes it is part of the ball too. And a bowl like this is quite delicate. In fact, when you do tea ceremony with it, the little wooden spoon, bamboo spoon you use, you don't wrap it against the side. A bowl like this also doesn't, it's quite cool to the hands. It doesn't transmit the heat. Anyway, they, given all this, agreed to, well, I should tell you how they, how I happened to get this one. One side is ...

[55:50]

his son had gone to Italy and taken several bowls with him that he didn't think were the best, but his son was just going to use them. Then when Italian newspapers found out that Raku-san's son was there, they came and took photographs of him and the bowls, and they were rather embarrassed that not the best bowls appeared. So they wanted to give Roshi a very good bowl, because maybe it's the first one in America, I don't know. So he gave him one that was a favorite, And, but second is, the other side of it was, is that the first time I was there, they bring out all these famous tea bowls. You, of course, can't buy the famous ones. They're maybe several hundred years old. And whenever you pick up a tea bowl like this, you keep one elbow on the ground. So if I was going to hold it, I'd hold it like this, look at it, and always over to Tommy. So, they presented these tea bowls, and they were marvelous, but one of them with this kind of color, which I, you know, this strange pinkish color I'd never really appreciated before, and it came through to me that time. And I really liked the tea bowl, and it had a name, I don't know, Oscar, Aoki, or some name. Actually, it was a Japanese name, of course. And the names were mentioned very quickly as they presented them, and then it went away, you know.

[57:25]

When I came back about two months later, a month and a half later, they brought out a completely different group of bulls except that one bull I liked a lot was there. And immediately I greeted it like an old friend and said, oh, and I gave the name. And they noticed immediately that I remembered the name. And I think because I remembered the name had a great deal to do with the fact that they were willing to sell me a bull. that we got a bull very similar to the famous one that's like this. So, this whole process of getting permission to buy the bull, you know, and of understanding the steps

[58:26]

So, Tsukiroshi wanted me to understand, and afterwards we went out in the car and he said to me, something like, you may have not liked all aspects of Japanese Buddhism, but you understood the culture. It was very moving for me to see this used to offer tea for Roshi a couple weeks ago in the memorial tea service. Thank you very much.

[59:15]

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