Our lecturer this morning is Lou Hartman from San Francisco Zen Center, more specifically from Green Gulch. Lou's a long-time Zen practitioner who began practicing at the Berkeley Zen Dome quite a long time ago. about the sixth century, I believe. Fifth. Fifth. These dates are hard to keep track of. We've spoken here a couple times before, but not as often as we'd like, I think. I'm glad, though, to have you here today. It's customary courtesy of a visiting speaker to say how glad they are to be where they are.

[01:05]

I have to change that a little bit and express my deepest gratitude for the opportunity to once again enter the Berkley Zendo Sitzausen and remember what my life would have been like Had Suzuki Roshi not come to this country, had he not asked Mel to establish the Berkley Sendoh, had Mel not been able to continue to do that, my life, in comparison, might not even still be. So when I say I'm deeply moved just by the chance to be here, It comes from the 5th century. The last time I spoke here was the last time I lectured.

[02:15]

And since, as some of you know, I began speaking in public at age 5, and earned my first money speaking in public at age 12, and went on to raise a family on words. I was pretty good, you know. I could do with Buddhist language what I had done with other languages and bring the audience together and raise them up and lower them down. I even had some people tell me the only time they came to Green Gulch for a lecture was when I did it. That bothered me very much because you're not here to be entertained today. Much better we just sit another period of zazen. But it's customary to speak about practice dharma.

[03:22]

I realized just about the time I came last time that there was something absolutely wrong with the way I was approaching, and I'd never misled anyone, I'd never told anyone wrong. What I said was right, but it didn't matter whether it was right or wrong. It was just mouth-flapping. So I tried the last time I was here to raise a question for myself and for others along the lines of the Zen understanding that in order to practice you need to have both great faith and great doubt. And what bothered me about that was I had great faith and had great faith ever since I was a five-year-old child and had no doubt whatsoever it appeared at the time.

[04:24]

about what I was doing. My life and Buddhism just shook hands and how could I have great doubt? I've been working on that since last I saw you and what it has entailed is continual dismantling of whatever I was before I came into Mel's attic. I haven't answered it yet, but I would like this morning to take one strand of doubt and examine it with you. And this means going back 2500 years to before the Buddha's time.

[05:31]

I want to bypass for you this morning at least any concern for Buddhism or for Shakyamuni or for Maitreya or any of the people whom we venerate and try to focus on the source of my great doubt before I began to practice. When I first came across Zen, as all of us, most all of us do, it was through books. And I was very, very turned on by the books. They pushed buttons that I didn't know I had. And so I read as much as I could. and began to wonder, now, is this something for me? Should I really try to pursue this more than just as a literary exercise? And I began to think this way.

[06:34]

Now, wait a minute. Here's something. It's first 2,500 years old. It comes from Asia. part of the world that has absolutely no cultural relationship with the Western tradition. But most importantly, it comes from an agrarian, feudal society. One common strand through India, China, Japan, up until the Meiji Restoration. Peasants in the fields, lords in the castle. Nothing on that baseline were erected all of the rising and falling cultures of those three countries, all of their internal difficulties, all of their wars, war fought, lived and experienced in a common denominator. And I said, now what does this have to do with modern, technological, scientific, democratic,

[07:44]

commercial society. Now if my researches into great doubt are successful, by that I mean if I've come myself to experience or to become the doubt, as one of you perhaps said in question and answer last time when I began to fumble around with this, Other person said, well, you are the doubt. And I did not know what that meant. But I think I may have a loose end here, and I'd like to tug on it a little bit this morning and see. Let's try to look at Indian society 2,600 years ago. Unlike Babylonia and Egypt, The ancient history of India does not exist in artifacts, buildings, cities, clay tablets.

[08:52]

We know very, very little about it. But a few things are apparently agreed upon by those who study such things. Before the Aryans came into India, the Dravidian culture existed. And since it had very few records, it was pretty well wiped out by the Aryans who came down from someplace in the northern plains of Eurasia. The first thing that I found of great interest was they were free people. They were nomadic people. And when they came to India, they found the cattle were in pens and the rivers were in dikes and the first thing they did was break down the pens and free the animals and break down the dikes and free the rivers. Interesting, I thought, this cultural clash.

[09:54]

This was the time of magic when priests in a religion were magicians and through their ceremonies controlled the natural environment as best they could. So the Aryans established a hegemony over everything that concerned life, and they established, among other things, the caste system in India. But what was happening underneath this period was that the Iron Age was coming in, and with the Iron Age came money, and with money came the beginning of the state as we know it today. Before that, the social organization in India evidently was like Scottish clans, probably the closest thing, or maybe the Indian tribal relationships that we had in this country before the Europeans came.

[11:02]

They were very democratic. They met in the longhouse or underneath the trees and discussed the matter before the group and collectively made a decision. And the shock is, we're one of these tribal republics. But growing up right across, down in Oakland, the city-state of Magadha was developing. And there is a discrepancy here, nothing happens evenly in a historical time, something comes ahead and something comes behind. So while the Shakyas were still living in the tribal republican mode of life, in Magadha the city-state was beginning, the great city-state that was in some hundred years to control all of that part of India. and then later to go to war with other city-states that were also developing at that time.

[12:04]

So what you had first was the disruption and dissolution of a native endemic indigenous culture, the establishment of the culture of the Upanishads and the Vedas, and then the destruction of that, society by the emergent, call it karma if you want, call it historical development, of the India that was to come after that. Now all that we, most of us know about the Aryan life in India are the beautiful, powerful, deep, wonderful writings in the Panisads and the which move us to this day as poetry. But what we tend to forget, or not forget because we don't know it, but we tend to ignore, is the caste system, for one thing, which still hangs around the necks of the Indian people.

[13:13]

That is an Aryan gift to India. The other thing is that the religious ceremonies, conducted by the Brahmins to maintain the society involved animal sacrifice, and the altars had gutters for the blood to flow down. And what very few people know about is that in the civil authority, tortures of such grossness that would put the Nazis to shame were common in India of Buddhist day. I won't even mention them, I did once in a lecture some years ago and was told not to talk about things like that in Buddha Hall. something which all of Buddhism today is beginning to be concerned with is another legacy that the Indians had to bear and that was the subjection of women.

[14:26]

But finally the point that I want to stress is to remind you that when Shakyamuni entered that world as you and I were born into this one This was the world that confronted him. He was expected by his father to continue to be the head of the tribe, the king or the prince. And you all know the stories of how his father tried to prevent him from entering under the path of a monk. So he was trained in all the arts of warfare and administration. But by the time that he had returned from his searchings as the Buddha, as we know him today, he found that the Shakya tribe was in great danger of being overrun by the king of Magadha and his forces.

[15:43]

On the advice of his ministers, twice the king approached the Shakyamuni boundaries to take over the people. And twice he saw the Buddha sitting beneath a tree. And they had been friends, or they would have been neighboring princes had the Buddha continued in his original direction. And the king of Magadha could not go through with it. The third time, however, he did. and the Shakya people were exterminated. Genocide, which the Buddha witnessed. Now we have quite a different bit of light on the question of Buddhism. We know that the Buddha abandoned animal sacrifice.

[16:46]

We know that under the prodding of his mother, allowed women into the Sangha. But what could he do? What could he do about what was developing in India at that time? He did the best that he could, but he did not alter the history of India. He did not save his own people from extermination. Unfortunately, we don't have much or any Buddhist meditations upon this. We get this at a remove from the historians. Okay, now we go ahead to Dogen's time.

[17:48]

Once again, a historical change is taking place. The Haiyan culture is crumbling. The excesses of the aristocracy are undermining the emperor. So many wars are fought in Kyoto a la Lebanon today that the bodies lay in the streets for weeks. There was nobody to bury them. And Dogen is beginning to practice in that atmosphere. Nichiren, who wore armor under his okesa, is organizing. Shinran, the Pure Land School, is beginning in the Kamakura period. Here are just three attempts on the part of three Buddhists to meet the situation in their daily lives, but the history of Japan continues.

[18:52]

Dogen or Nichiren or Shinran had absolutely no effect on the historical development of the day-to-day life. Maybe in the long run you could say that Japanese culture did alter itself, but in ways that were not social or political. So here are two examples from the history of Buddhism which began to raise the question for me that maybe, maybe Buddhism is not an anachronism in modern day society. If it began in social turmoil, and was continued in social turmoil, maybe it belongs right here and now in the turmoil that we are experiencing.

[20:00]

I have had, as some of you know, some direct experience with that turmoil. When I was at the Johns Hopkins in 32, freshman physics included high particle physics, the stuff that they teach up at the Rad Lab now. So years later, when I read about the bomb, I knew immediately what we were in store for, and began to agitate and work with other people, trying to put a stop, an end to the Atomic age. When I started this work, there were three bombs. When I finally gave up, there were 35,000. And the last I read in the paper, there were 55,000 and counting.

[21:09]

That cost me half a million dollars in income because I was blacklisted for my profession for radical activity. It costs my family a lot of suffering for which my children are still paying. And we are where we are today. So the point that I am struggling with and would like very much to discuss with you I'm 71, and the day I was born, 100,000 men died in massive trench warfare in the First World War. When I was a year old, one to two million Armenians died in the Turkish... under the Turkish rule. And then, of course, there's the Holocaust.

[22:13]

So you would say that I have lived a very bloody life, you know? It is out of the awareness of this at a very early age through my grandfather who was a pro-Hitler, anti-Semitic, fascist American that I began to be concerned with all of the issues of the day. and pursued them so avidly and so completely that my life was threatened. And in those days, if you circulated a petition in my day, you circulated a petition on the question of the atom bomb. It was sometimes worth your safety. You could get beat up on somebody's front doorstep.

[23:22]

Now, if you take an either-or situation, as many times Buddhists are accused of doing, that we retreat from the real world, this question is easily solved. You can pay absolutely no attention to history, passes like a cloud over the sun, or you can throw yourself completely into activity of one kind or another. I found out from my own experience that many times people who throw themselves into some form of social or political activity for a quote, good cause, and I don't question the good cause at all, are not doing it for the good cause. They are doing it to keep themselves from seeing clearly what their lives and the lives of society are really like.

[24:27]

And you know that one of the admonitions that Buddhists are urged to pay attention to is clearly observe, clearly observe Then, if you clearly observe, you will be more able to make the correct decision on what you should do. Also, Buddhism is a middle way. There were some students over at Green Gulch the other day from the Marin, from a Marin prep school, Marin Academy, I think it was called, and like young people, very sharp, very clear and very pushing on certain basic questions. And one of the questions that they asked me, which I was unable to answer satisfactorily, is, why do I pay taxes? If I am opposed to atomics, Nicaraguan invasion, Korea, Vietnam, why do I pay taxes?

[25:39]

Well, I figured, I guess, that maybe the half million dollars that I didn't earn from being blacklisted was a payment in that direction, but that didn't answer the kids. They didn't accept that. Another thing that they came across was a story from some famous Zen teacher instructing samurai not to pull back from using the sword, because there's nothing there. It's all emptiness. So strike, doesn't matter, man's dead before you touch him with the sword, that tradition, you know. They asked me, what about that? I could have said, well, maybe that's Rinzai Zen, that's what I was saying, you know. So, these young people have brought me right back to my question, you see. Right back to my question. But now my doubt is taking on a much different quality.

[26:46]

Doubt to me originally meant, do you believe the statement? And there's nothing in Buddhism that I have heard that I doubt. It's absolutely so. It's gospel. That's not what evidently is meant by the great doubt. The great doubt could come upon me if I don't keep it away in an existential situation. All right, Lou, you've been practicing for 18 years, you sit up on the seat and talk, you have practice discussion with people. How do you answer these kids? Why can't you answer these children except with words? Why can't you talk about it from down here instead of up here. Why not?

[27:56]

And I think that what has kept me from doing this for all of these years is that I have always been able to find a place to hide to take refuge not in Buddha, Dharma, Sangha but in some hidey-hole in my awareness and understanding that enables me to hold on, hold on to myself when I know that everything is being pulled out of me Nothing I can do for my children now. The damage was done when I was so politically active and denying the home demands that children make on their parents, which I made on my parents. My father was not a radical, but he never was home because he was out with the Boy Scouts, he was out with the YMCA, he was out with the church, he was out with the grand jury.

[29:05]

So it was the same thing with me. I was out with a petition, out at a political meeting, but I wasn't home with my kids. Now, I would have told them then and could tell them now, but it wouldn't mean a darn thing, that I was doing it to make a better world for them so they would not have to live in a world where the bomb might fall tomorrow. Oh, what do they want, you know? Isn't this enough that a father should do? Well evidently I was not doing it with what Mel once told me, everything had to be done with an empty heart. I must have been doing all of these things graspingly, for gain, for status, for achievement, for attainment, to do a good thing, to have people love me because I was a good person. And it's very plain to me now as I look back on those few times in my political life where I could have made a decision that might have modified the situation, I couldn't see the situation for what it was.

[30:23]

I had blinders on, I could only look at it from a particular viewpoint. So I would say that if I continue to do that now and look at it through a Buddhist's blinders, I'm going to do the same thing all over again. My Buddhism is not going to save me anymore now from making mistakes as my Marxism didn't save me from making mistakes 20 years ago. So there's something that is going on in my life and everyone's life that demands to be looked at and demands to be accepted and demands to be taken in and not held out. I think I may have told the story last time and the fact that I'm telling it again must mean that it's meaningful to me at least. A young man showed up at Tassajara at Jamesburg on the way to Tassajara some years ago when I was living at Jamesburg from Colombia and he told of an experience where he had gone with

[31:29]

a native Indian into the mountains of Columbia and they came upon vultures devouring a cow and the young man turned away to be sick and the Indian said, no, watch, look, see this thing and he said he was able to watch and look and see the vultures devouring the cow in an entirely different state of mind than he had when he first caught glimpse of it. And had I known that story was going to come upon me this morning I would have brought a poem by Baudelaire where he came upon a carrion dog and his responses to this sight which Rilke then commented on and said If we deny anything in our lives, we fall from grace. So maybe the point that I've come to is that yes, Buddhism is not an anachronism.

[32:47]

Yes, Buddhism belongs right here in the middle of the ship, only I don't know anything about Or rather, to clarify that, I know a lot about Buddhism, but I don't know how to practice the Buddhadharma in the face of carrion, in the face of Lebanon, in the face of that plane that might be here. And until I can do that, I really have no authority to speak on these matters. Now, I know we don't need authority. I know we should question authority. It says so on all the bumper strips. That's not what I mean. I used to speak with authority because I felt that I was convinced of the truth of what I was saying.

[33:48]

I should stop. Tell you one old story again. forward to what I am fumbling with right now. I was going to be a minister in the Protestant Church, specifically in the Dutch Reformed Church. That's the Church of South Africa, by the way. And I was pretty good at it. On the basis of the science at the Johns Hopkins, I devised this wonderful talk on the scientific proof of the existence of God. of which I remember only the title, fortunately. I spoke Sunday nights to the young people's groups, and I was a great hit. Probably not with the kids, but with the parents and the ministers. So I had a talking, speaking engagement list this long, and every Sunday night I would leave the Johns Hopkins and go and speak in church. I still had my baby fat, I was 17.

[34:56]

I wore a coat with a blue velvet collar, a full large scarf, a Borsalino hat that's a fuzzy fur hat, yellow pigskin gloves. I didn't have spats and a cane, but I think that was the next thing coming along. And in those days, the depths of the Depression, 25 cents in a cab anywhere in Baltimore. So I called a cab and it was a bitterly cold night and the cab driver gave him the address, and he says, you don't want to go down there, Mac. My name wasn't Mac, but it didn't matter. I said, why not? He said, that's the worst white slum in Baltimore. And I said, well, I got to go down there and preach tonight. He says, your funeral. Right. So we got in the cab, we got to church, and they were so poor they couldn't heat the chancellery, they had services in the Sunday school. Big wood stove, pot-bellied stove.

[36:00]

Now I've been giving my money to the poor ever since I went to Sunday school. I can even hear, sing the song that we hear. Hear the pennies dropping, one by one they fall, every one for Jesus, he shall have them all. But I'd never smelled poor people before. And as they came into the room, you could. Their waters, hot water, had been turned off probably. Well, I've had enough theater experience to know that these people would not understand the scientific proof of the existence of God. I mean, so, this minister gave me a big run-on and said, this young man has given up a day of his university life to bring us the Word of God. And there I am, in front of all of these people. And I knew the Bible very well because it's the only real book that we had in the house when I was a kid. And I found a text that I knew, and it was the loaves and the fishes, where Jesus feeds the multitudes on a couple loaves and a couple fishes, 5,000 or so people.

[37:03]

And I used that as my text and I began to preach. And I don't know what I said then, and I don't know what I said now, but when it was over, women were weeping, men were kissing me, embracing me, and saying, if there's one left like you on Earth, we are not lost. And I walked home in a sleet storm and got double pneumonia and never went back to church again. Now, I'm going to go back to Green Gulch. It's exhausting. But I feel that I'm at the same place now as I was then. Something has come up that I don't know how to handle. And if it is the great doubt, I'm in for a rough time, because that means I have to go back, not just to the beginning of my Buddhist practice, but I have to go back through all of these various practices to pick up a trail where once it was all together.

[38:05]

And you know what it says, We share the karma of our times. This is not an escape. Buddhists are not expected to hide out. But how do you live then? How do we live in the phenomenal world or in the vernacular, the real world? Katagiri Roshi may have given me a clue. He said, we must experience form is emptiness. He says that's the easiest of the two to do. Life generally teaches us that in time, whether we are Buddhists or not. Then we have to experience emptiness is form, and that's more difficult. And then, he said, to vibrate between them.

[39:09]

That's the middle way. instead of lumping back and forth from one side of the course to the other, bang, bang, to begin to be able to go from side to side and yet go straight. And if I live long enough, you still here, I'll come back, tell you if I have had any success. It's customary to ask for questions at this time. Yeah? I was talking with a close friend of mine yesterday about this very thing, and she is has been working the last few years with battered women group because, she said, doing this kind of search in herself that you speak of, she felt that peace could never come anywhere unless we could solve the problems of violent families.

[40:35]

Violence that comes out of families is projecting, in her view, onto the world. and not knowing what else to do. That's where she decided to start. There's some people in Sin Center who have entered in completely into the AIDS program in the same spirit of helpfulness. And it shows in their practice. There is a dimension and a quality to the kin and the zazen of the people who go regularly to sit with the AIDS people that is noticeable. So that may be a door whereby you would totally enter, leaving nothing of yourself outside, and then see.

[41:42]

how Buddhism will help for you. I guess maybe remembering how I tried to do that. I don't feel burned out. That could be, that's very good. Yeah. I think I will reply by saying this, I don't care what Buddhism says. I don't care what anybody says. I have been a sayer ever since I've been this high and have had it. Sorry to be so abrupt, but yes, Buddhism has a lot to say on that, but I'm not handing out pamphlets.

[42:46]

Now, if what the Buddhism says, enables you to integrate yourself and your work, that's fine. But there is a magazine, I can't remember now which one it is, it came into the library. Could it be from the Robert Aitken Sangha? In which someone concerned with these social problems has decided to establish a a Buddhist principle for all of this, and it sounds just like the Marxist analyzing, showing what has to be done, what should be done, and it's fine, and I could give it to anybody and say this is the Buddhist position on it, but I don't want another pamphlet. What am I going to do right now, you see? I think, I guess, I'm leaning, I'm not taking it away.

[43:53]

I've talked so much that don't talk to me anymore. But I know some people that I could give that to with a whole heart. Everything is right. He's absolutely right. But how are you going to organize that? How are you going to make that a reality in the present day political situation? No, no indication whatsoever. I just wanted to say, I've been reading a little bit about personality types. This is an idea that came from Carl Jung. And one of the things he had to say was that one of the dimensions of personality is whether the person prefers thinking or feeling. Thinking processes versus feeling processes. You have to sort of, in the Jungian theory, you have to learn to listen to the other part of yourself or develop the other part of yourself, which I thought was very interesting.

[45:03]

typically get involved in that sort of thing. Because I've done it myself, I'm not seeing that things are wrong, asking how they can be changed, and sometimes getting involved, although I haven't done as involved as you. But I think that it can be a trap. It can be a trap. Yeah, I'm putting one out now, save Lou Hartman. Well, one of the things that I have found in my own life, and I see everywhere around me, we are getting back to what I said earlier.

[46:37]

We are in a time of change comparable to the one of Buddha's time. This whole business of entering the new technological society, the undermining of all values, I mean, the more I read about what is being revealed about the shuttle explosion, I'm almost tempted to put armor on underneath my Okasa and go out and bash somebody. Things are in a bad way. But I think what is going to happen is that out of this turmoil something will emerge, and saving the old is not going to be the way out, or even capable of really saving what it is that we want to save, because everyone has got something precious that they want to save. And it's not that. That is, to me, I don't think is the way that I'm looking for. I would like to know how to move through this dissolution, this destruction, and come out with something on the other side.

[47:46]

And it may be that, as the monasteries did in the Middle Ages, Buddhism might be making its greatest contribution in this historical era to maintain, to save, certain things which then, like seeds, could be planted after we have finally gotten out from under this mess that's been about Well, what is the date that they pick? I guess they pick 1914. It was the end of the whales and everybody else. So we've been living in this transition now almost a hundred years. And how we move on is something that no one has figured out yet. Not figured out, you can't figure it out. No one has shown the way. and yet each of us has the potential and ability to modify what comes out of it and I think maybe the thing that I want most to make a point of is that if you will do it with an empty heart and not to save something you can perhaps more correctly choose what it is to do you will not act from a personal bias you will see the whole scene you'll know more correctly what to do

[49:11]

But if you're just focused on one thing, you will lose it. Buddhists are open to everything. I remember how horrified I was to have Baker Roshi say that if Richard Nixon sat down on the cushion next to you, bow. Me? Bow to Richard Nixon? Well, this is what I'm getting at. Can we bow to Richard Nixon? Could we bring Mr. Reagan in, ask him to talk to us this morning, and accept it, and not get our political biases up? This would seem to me a Buddhist way of then going on to make certain decisions, which might mean just, you know, I don't know what it would mean. You'd have to bring Mr. Reagan, Mr. Nixon, and all of that right in. Not do it this way. Yes.

[50:14]

Thank you. I was trying to find, remember whose story that was. Okay, I think that is the message for the day. I'm sorry you had to sit for an hour before you got it.

[50:45]

@Text_v004
@Score_JJ