So I'll confuse you further. The Zen Centre people who are here with me are Peter Schneider and Jane Westberg and Yvonne Rand and Steve Weintraub and Claude Dallenberg in the back. So first I should tell you something about how the Zen tradition sits, and then... Can you hear me in the back? And then... Can we turn it off? Oh, it's been turned off. Machines are interesting. And then we'll sit for a while. I guess, I don't know how long you're capable of sitting. It's kind of hard for maybe 30 minutes.

[01:01]

And then maybe we can, I'll talk for a little bit about something or other, and then we'll have some questions if you want, and then we'll sit again. Okay. You've probably read the standard descriptions of how you sit. And the most important thing is keeping your back straight. And you can sit either, you can sit any way, I mean, you know. But you're more solid if you sit in a half or full lotus. Half lotus being one foot up, of course, and full lotus being both feet up. And in general, for most people, to keep your back straight with some comfort, you need some pillows underneath you. I know when I started sitting, I needed three, and it took quite a long time, probably took me two years to get my knees to even touch the ground.

[02:16]

So, you know, you just do the best you can and let gravity help you. So it's good to get some altitude anyway. Then you sit as cross-legged as you can, and if you're just starting sitting, you... Well, it helps to sit with a group. Nowadays, I think, it seems that people get into full lotus in about six months in Zen Center, when ten years ago it took them a couple of years, just because you have people sitting all around you pretty well, and that encourages you.

[03:26]

But you can sit anyway, as long as it's like you're sitting so-called tailor Indian fashion. And then to check your position, you can rock back and forth to the side. Usually I go front and back first. You can get a sense, and you let your body move. You don't move your body with your head. You just let your body begin to find a place, because normally you'll be crooked, and you'll be crooked for years in certain ways, and then you have somebody help you by straightening you now and then. But eventually you find out how to center yourself in yourself, and one way you do that is you rock back and forth. and then left and right. You can just let your head rock too. until you find some center.

[05:01]

Then you can check your back by pushing down. You take your hand and however far you want to reach, you push straight down to your side. If you just push straight down and straight up, That place is where your back is good. And curve it in a little. And relax. In Japan it looks, well, often looks like Japanese people sit too stiffly. Maybe sometimes they do, but And they usually don't give instruction, because of the way they teach there, about being relaxed. But it's very important to sit relaxed, so that after you find some posture for yourself, ideally you get a posture which you can hold, maintain, with some effort in straightening yourself regularly, for the period of zazen, whatever it will be.

[06:16]

And don't, during the period, start thinking, well, now I'm crooked, or et cetera. You should just do the best you can, and in the next period, you straighten yourself again. Of course, during the period, you can straighten yourself a little by bringing your back up often, and begin to do this after a while, and straighten yourself up. I used to straighten myself every 10 breaths when I was starting. So, the thing on keeping your back straight is that and curving in a little here, you lift up a little from your hips here. And when you do that, you actually activate the non-physiological energy system. Whatever I mean by that, I'm not going to explain anymore. But anyway, when you're sitting this way, it doesn't work. You can sit pretty well. Actually, you can get any way that you work, gives you calmness is okay, but there's a little more energy in your sitting, even though it's calm.

[07:23]

But you can also push out in all of these things. You can go too far one direction, you can push out too far, push your stomach out too far, and that's a little too much. So, you find out. Anyway, it takes quite a long time. usually five years or four years before you can actually sit with your back right. Then they say in the books giving instruction on zazen that your nose should be in line with your navel, your ears in line with your shoulders, but in actual fact it's pretty hard to sit there and wonder if your ears are in line with your shoulders or your nose. So it doesn't help, I've never found that very helpful. So when you push down, straighten yourself, you can also feel that your backbone and energy is coming right up through the back of your head.

[08:31]

Maybe the sky is resting right here. Then you want to... one problem you have at certain... I'm saying more, giving you more instruction than a Japanese teacher would ever give you, which is probably not so good, but anyway, you won't remember. Generally, you put your tongue at the roof of your mouth. One of the reasons for this is that at certain periods, certain stages in your zazen, you salivate a lot, and that tends to control it. And one way to control it, if you have that problem, is try not to swallow. You keep swallowing, it disturbs your zazen. And eventually it stops, but your mouth does fill up. Anyway, you keep your tongue up.

[09:33]

and your hands can be in one of several positions. Soto, which my teacher is Soto, comes from the Soto tradition in Japan. Soto almost always sits this way, right hand down, left hand on the top, and thumbs together in a rather circle, not flat and not up. Again, the Japanese and Chinese M tradition is what I'd call a body culture, and they're very much concerned with just how your... this mudra is. And if you're thinking too much it tends to go like that, and if you're not... your zazen is not... if you're thinking too much it tends to go like that, and if you're not alert it tends to fall. I had an interesting experience when I first started sitting, because Suzuki Roshi speaks English, of course, but his English isn't so clear, and particularly some years ago it wasn't so clear.

[10:52]

And he said, you should put your hands together and your thumbs should touch with enough weight to support a piece of paper between them. And I thought he said they should be just the width of a piece of paper apart. So I spent about two years learning how to do that. I got pretty good at it. I could feel the warmth passing across that piece of paper. It's a synapse or something. That was a pretty interesting practice, actually. Anyway, then I found out I could rest them together, it seemed like an easy chair. So, Rinzai people, I believe – I always get mixed up on these things – I think they sit with their left hand on the bottom and right hand on the top.

[11:56]

It has something to do with whether you emphasize your left or passive side on top, or the active right side on top. Anyway, I think they sit with the right side on top. But usually they sit actually like this. They feel this is much stronger. They sit like that. It's also warmer in the winter. You put your thumb into your hand and put your hand on it. So actually it doesn't make much difference. You can sit this way or this way. And I think it really depends on So Japanese Zen emphasizes everybody doing exactly the same thing. In China and Korea, I think, they're not quite so particular about that. So I don't know exactly myself what's best, but I think that at some part, sometimes in one's practice it may be okay to sit this way and sometimes this way, but one shouldn't be changing every period.

[13:08]

In other words, if you pick a way that seems to work for you, you've got to stick with it a year or two. That sound like a long time? Now, breathing is... pretty complicated to talk about, and it's better to just notice what kind of breathing you have. There are various ways of breathing, and even the simple practice, it looks simple, of counting your breaths. The first year is counting your breaths. Ten years later, it's, I don't know, another world. It's just entirely different. Just maybe still counting your breaths, but they're no longer like breaths.

[14:12]

They're like whole world systems. I don't know what to say. There's not many words to express the difference. So there's a couple ways of breathing up here in your chest, and there's a couple ways of breathing rather deeply. And it has to do with the spirit, you know the word spirit, it means something or other, and breathing, inspiration and expiration, and has a connection with breath, spirit has a connection with breath. So, anyway, there's a very close connection between your breathing and your mind, and if your mind's calm, your breathing will be calm, and if your breathing's calm, your mind will be calm. So generally we start out trying to have calm breathing.

[15:13]

You don't try to, but if you sit still, your breathing gets calmer. And then after you've got as physiologically calm as you can get, make that separation, then you find out that your mind, mental activity, produces a need for energy in your breathing. So, and how you breathe has something to do with, because if you've ever noticed, when you concentrate on something closely, you're usually doing it with your breath stopped. You hold your breath a minute as you do it. What happens is, if you're doing zazen and you begin to concentrate, if your breathing isn't good, you stop your breathing. when you concentrate. You stop your breathing, you produce vision and all kinds of stuff. It's okay, but it's a little distracting. So, I think that you shouldn't do your breathing with your head, you know, you shouldn't have some idea, my breathing's this way, and then you make your breathing follow that, because your breathing is much bigger than what your head wants to do.

[16:25]

So you let your breathing I think at first just watch how you breathe, and notice how you breathe in relation to what's happening with you, when you're sitting, whatever. And anything, actually, you can notice it in any activity, and you'll see your breathing changes as you change your activity. When you begin to have a kind of feeling for the ways you breathe, that in itself will begin to change the way you breathe. There are, I'll give you two hints on how to work with your breathing. One is, rather than use the head, you can use a kind of visual, an idea, which is that your breathing as you exhale is coming out here.

[17:30]

And as you inhale, it's coming in down here by your genitals. So what's happening actually is that you're not using your lungs, but as you exhale, usually as you exhale you feel like you're pushing the air out, but actually as you exhale, you're pushing down here. And when you inhale, you release this, which gives the sensation that the air is coming in down here. We even say through your toes. So that's one hint. When you begin to feel your breathing as if it was exhaling here and inhaling here in a circle, that means you're breathing is fairly deep and has the possibility of being fairly steady. The second hint I'll give you is that when you start your zazen you can inhale slowly and then when you have a full inhale you can push down

[18:53]

And then release. And then just breathe naturally from then on. And don't do that a lot of times. It's not good for you. Just do it once. Wait until you're settled, and then inhale and push down, and then let your breathing go. Another thing is, I think the last point is that you pull your chin in a bit. Just like you try to keep your mudra here, you pull your chin in a bit. And the reason is, and I don't quite understand it, why it works physiologically, but it does stop thinking. That if you're sitting and you're thinking, your chin juts out. And of course you can think with your chin pulled in too, you know, if you want to think. But it has a tendency to...

[20:09]

to cut off your thinking a bit. So if you pull your chin in a bit, it cuts off your thinking. Now, I'm sorry I didn't bring the kyosaku, the stick we use to whack people with. Not because you need whacking, but It has a great deal to do with the atmosphere in a zendo in Japan. Of course, I feel that the willpower trip that Japanese Buddhism gets on, samurai Buddhism to a large extent, is as much a corruption of Buddhism as sexual orgies might be a corruption of Tantrism. But we do need toughness with ourselves to practice something like Buddhism.

[21:14]

And the stick represents that toughness. And I'll tell you, they really hit hard in some of the Japanese monasteries. But it's also based on an idea which we don't have so much, though which is true. Something like Buddhism is usually bigger than anything we can do ourselves, so you need help. Now, in a group culture like Japan, that just goes without saying. Everybody assumes that you can't do anything important without help, so everybody is there to help you. If you don't want the help, they're going to force you, and you're forced. And there's a great deal of coercion, but it's appreciated as kindness in Japan. And in most cases it is kindness. So there's a great deal of pressure on you all the time, poking you and some zendo's hollering and knocking off your pillow.

[22:18]

It's all very traumatic for you. First thing, it's quite exciting. Somebody gets whopped off their pillow and rolled off. You can be, you can sort of sit right up. It has a bad side, too, because you watch the guy with the stick like a hawk. In the monastery I sat for a year and a half, they hit four times on each shoulder. In this monastery you sit facing out, so you bow down like this. Then they take this oak stick they use, because it's winter and it's heavy, and they bring it back and touch their bottom, They stand up on their toes a little bit. Four times. And I can remember, I did a lot in San Francisco. The first time it happened to me, I was down there. Oh my God! It's the first time I really wanted to get up from underneath that stick.

[23:29]

But you get used to it. Also, if you just relax with it, you know, and you just relax and let them hit you, you know, it's all right, you know, it's okay. Generally no one, generally you don't go to the hospital, though occasionally people do, and generally you develop kind of well, oh, you learn how to dress, so that... Anyway, I didn't bring the stick, so you're safe. But here in America, I think one of the changes that will occur in the Chinese-Japanese tradition of Buddhism – I think Tibetan Buddhism is different – is that, certainly in the beginning part of practice, we'll have to create situations where people bring themselves to wanting to sit, without so much help from the group. The group will be an example, and the older students will be an example. when the person is ready to accept help from other people, maybe after several years, then we can start putting pressure on people to help them with their posture and in a more... and what they're doing.

[24:44]

One other thing is, Japanese and Chinese, one of the things I think is that one of the Taoist and Chinese influences on Buddhism is a shift from an emphasis on the chakra system evenly, you know, the various chakras you supposedly have, to an emphasis primarily on this chakra, called the hara in Japanese. most of your energy and breath and mind, your breath-mind is put way down here. And it's also related to will and determination and things like that. In actual fact, it's nearly the same in your practice. Emphasis is different. So I think, though I think in Americans,

[25:58]

we tend to find that our experience of meditation isn't just this area here, but is more evenly distributed, or something like that. I don't know how to describe what I'm talking about. Anyway, certainly at first it's very good practice to when you sit and your backbone's curved in a little, if possible, that you do tend to... your breathing moves down, and if your breathing follows your mind, your mind tends to be here. I think that's more than enough instruction. So, if you will sit... yeah. It's, I think, better to sit with your eyes open and you look out, when you're first starting to find out how to have your eyes, you take a point ahead of you about equivalent to your height from your eyes, the ground ahead.

[27:20]

So if there's a wall there, you know, you sort of... In other words, I would be looking out at a point, being this my height, about here. But if there's a wall, it would be about here. So you look at... That's just the general direction. And then your eyes are... Your lids are down, sort of. So you see a little light. But actually, you don't focus on anything. You sort of... Your eyes tend to be in that direction, but you're not looking at anything. Just generally... If somebody walked by, you'd see them. And all your senses, of course, in Zazen are operating. Your ears are hearing, your eyes are seeing, and your mind is minding, and your nose is smelling. Not smelling, but able to smell. Your senses are there, but they don't have objects. So, if something happens, you know it's happening, but you don't take that as an object.

[28:31]

It comes out to be nearly the same as shutting all your senses up, but it's a rather different practice. So, I would try to sit as well as you can, rock back and forth a little and find your place, and after a few minutes, I don't know, 10 minutes or 15 minutes, somebody will come around and straighten your posture. Yeah? Okay, let me say one more thing first. It's very important not to... It's two things. One, it's very important to have physical calmness. Zazen is a shortcut. You don't have to do Zazen to practice Buddhism. But zazen is very clearly a shortcut. It cuts through your entanglements or feelings or desires or whatever.

[29:33]

So though it's very important to have physical calmness in your zazen, it's also very important not to discriminate about your zazen. In other words, you don't get involved in, this is good Zazen or this is bad Zazen. And if you can't sit, stay in one place. You come to a Sesshin, say, at Zen Center. I don't know what the rules are now, but I haven't been there for three years. It's important to stay on your cushion for the seven days. If you can't sit there, stay on your cushion. Just be there in that time and space the best you can. That's much more important than sitting well, and then when you no longer can sit well, going off somewhere else. Because then, in that way, your zazen is just some thing you do when it's convenient for you. And if your whole life is going to pass through your zazen, then you have to sit when you're sick, or when you're well, or when you're in pain, or whatever you are. And so, in that way, you don't discriminate your zazen.

[30:40]

And the more you don't discriminate your zazen, the more you begin to be able to sit through whatever it is. Because, for instance, the very desire to move is a discrimination. What you're doing is you're comparing yourself to somebody who doesn't have to sit there. Or if you sit there thinking about, geez, I wish the bell would ring, you're comparing yourself to who you'll be when the bell rings. And as long as you do that, you have painful zazen. And you stop doing that, and if nobody rang the bell for a kelpa, you'd still be there. Then you can sit quite calmly. So please stand up a little bit if you want. Need more altitude. You need more height underneath. If you can get it. Because your knees should touch.

[31:41]

That's it. Something like that. It's much easier to have your back straight if you've got a little height on you. Nothing that talks. Unless you want to get the sound of the bell. other meditating traditions, sit a little differently than this, please forgive me for adjusting your posture. There's no one way exactly of sitting, so some of you are practicing some other way, I'm sorry I adjusted your posture. Let's take a break now, okay, and then practice is so big, so beyond what one human being can do, like the vow,

[32:47]

to save all sentient beings. Of course, we can't save all sentient beings, but we make that kind of effort, and practice is that kind of effort. So, you're always trying to practice, and throughout your life, particularly if you live as a layman, where it's much harder to practice than as a monk, you'll be trying to find, how can I bring myself to practice, because I feel that need. Someone asked me about what you can do during zazen. It's nice to not have the need to do anything, but if you have the need to do something, you can count your breaths. And it's better, I think, to count the exhales, so that as you exhale, you can sort of have a kind of one going. And a second one, kind of two. And I wouldn't go up to a hundred or a thousand, I'd sort of go to ten and start again at one.

[33:53]

And the third thing someone asked is about being sleepy. You go to a monastery in Japan and the roshi comes in with a great deal of formality. There's a big chair, a beautiful chair, a big flat chair, and he comes in and is very simple. In Zen, most of the rituals are around the man, the man as Buddha, not toward an altar or toward a temple, but around the man. So that's why Zen emphasizes rituals of eating, our ordinary daily life. So he comes in, sits down, and somebody bows to him.

[34:58]

They bring him a cup of tea, he drinks the tea, and he begins to talk, and all the monks fall asleep. And the Roshi talks just as if, you know, no one was there at all. Of course, no one is there. But when you practice in a monastery, You get so that you can actually rather... I wouldn't say you're listening, but somehow you're alert. Somehow you know what the taste show's about. And occasionally one of the old monks beside you. On the other hand, the greatest enemy of zazen is sleepiness.

[36:05]

particularly a problem when you're sleeping to avoid your practice. And at a certain... I think for most Americans, anyway, when they do zazen, about the second year they often go through a crisis. And the crisis either takes the form of absolutely clear, good reasons why they should stop Zazen immediately. And it's absolutely convincing, there's no doubt about it, and most people stop. So, at that point you need some confidence or faith or you've got to be in love with your teacher or something's got to keep you there. Ideally, if you have some insight that this is a way that your weak nature is fooling you, because your weak nature is rather strong.

[37:15]

The second enemy is, instead of convincing yourself you should stop right away, you simply fall asleep. So you can be perfectly wide awake and you've just had ten hours of sleep, and you sit down in your cushion and you fall asleep. And that's usually at the point when your practice is beginning to unsettle you or change you or something. Actually, not really any change occurs, but something happens. So, it's very helpful to have somebody around to prod you to keep you awake. There are ways to learn how to keep awake yourself, but... Actually, there isn't much difference between being awake and being asleep. It's nearly the same consciousness. Most of us make a big division between them. The more you practice, the more you're conscious throughout the night and you are aware of all the levels that are present in sleep during the day.

[38:36]

So it's not so different. At that point, it's not so much of a problem if you are a little sleepy during the day. a lecture, particularly when they're allowing you to sleep in a monastery only three to six hours a night. In the Zen tradition I would say there are two kinds of Buddhism. One I could call mercy Buddhism and one transmission Buddhism. And since some of you may be interested in the difference between Rinzai and Soto, the difference is...

[39:43]

There's a number of differences between Rinzai and Soto in the degree to which they're corruptible, and the degree to which they have failings. But on the... Actually, there's, of course, very little difference, but... In Japan they talk about it a lot, but that's like two clubs arguing. But there's a little difference in... We talked about the positive differences in emphasis. And Soto tends to emphasize... Well, I didn't say something specific, let me give you a kind of example. If a Rinzai teacher is presented with a hundred students, potential students, he will try to take You'll try to make it as difficult as possible for the hundred, and hope that maybe ten or twenty stick around.

[40:49]

And then, out of those ten or twenty, he'll work very hard, and the monastery as a group will work very hard, to push him through. In a Soto teacher, Moore, he would have a hundred students presented to him, and he would think, well, two hundred would be all right. And he'll take it just to what extent he can, as many students as has come. However, his idea will be he wants to transmit. That's the real job of a Zen teacher, is to transmit. So he'll want to transmit to one or two. But he feels that if he doesn't do anything but be there, The one or two who make it will be much better than if he pushes. So, maybe out of the hundred the Soto teacher takes, two or three will end up to be pretty good.

[41:58]

And out of the twenty that the Rinzai teacher takes, maybe ten will turn out to be pretty good. It's a different way of teaching. Actually, I don't think you can say that the two or three that Soto produces are better than the ten that Rinzai produces, though there's some discussion about that. Actually, life is pretty much the same for all of us, and if you're practising really, it's pretty much the same. The difference is also seen in the use of koans. In Rinzai, a student comes to the teacher and you present the student with a koan and you get him to work on it. And you tell him, now I'm presenting you with a koan, work on it. And he comes to you twice a day or so and presents himself with his koan.

[43:02]

A Soto teacher won't tell you he's presenting you a koan. he will create a situation for you or respond to something you say, with sometimes a traditional statement, a traditional koan, just mixed into an ordinary sentence. And the student is either alert enough to know it or not alert enough. And the Soto teacher feels that if he's not alert enough to know it, he shouldn't know And if the student is going to present his understanding to the teacher, he has to do it in a way so the teacher almost doesn't know the student is presenting his understanding to the teacher. Of course, teaching this way, unfortunately, nobody knows what's going on. So, we're always talking about Buddhism and the more I practice Buddhism, the less I like to talk about it.

[44:25]

It seems to be my job. So, what we're usually talking about is, one, to encourage people to practice. And two, we're trying to say, what is reality? And as I told Zen Center yesterday morning, some years ago a man we called Bishop Yamada used to come to sesshins. Sesshins are intensive periods of meditation, extended periods of meditation, usually seven days long. usually at the end of a seven-day shishin for the last three days or so. His name is actually Yamada Reorin Roshi, and he's now number two man, I think, in the hierarchy of the Soto sect in Japan, which makes him a kind of arch-cardinal or something.

[45:28]

Anyway, he's a very nice scholarly man and a very good Zen master. Suzuki Roshi would have him come up and participate in the sesshin near the end. And one day, maybe like the fifth or sixth day of the sesshin – fifth day, I guess – there were some questions being asked, and near the end of the question period I put up my hand and I said, And he stopped and said, I'll answer that tomorrow. So the next day, we came in and he said, OK, everybody please sit in zazen, compose yourself, and sit still. And he actually at that time had us close our eyes.

[46:31]

So we did that, and he said, after a while, ten or fifteen minutes passed, he asked us to direct our attention inwardly as we could, and after ten or fifteen minutes he said, this is reality. I didn't know quite what he meant in some ways, but I didn't know any questions to ask, so I accepted what he said on faith, because he was gravier than I was and more together, and I didn't know. My experience, rather, my experience of what he said was, of course I had some thoughts some mental activity, but between the mental activity there was some space.

[47:52]

And that space was empty. It was a kind of alive emptiness, but a kind of emptiness. And so I thought, this is reality. And I accepted it. Now, Zen practice isn't just sitting, doing nothing. It's actually, though I accepted what he said on faith, simultaneously it's necessary to have some doubt. And the doubt is not the doubt of being sure of yourself, or the doubt of being completely unsure. I doubt if I can do it. I doubt if there's any such thing as Buddha nature. but that when you look closely at your experience, when you have some almost real sense of what you are when you're sitting, of what you are in your activity, still there's some gap, and that gap is where your doubt is, and that doubt we call a great doubt or which you really arouse,

[49:13]

And when you're almost sure of yourself, that's when your teacher presents you with something. That's when the sutras say, ah, Buddha's non-self. And when you look at the sutras, you see there's some difference between Buddha's non-self and your self or non-self. At that point, again, you have some doubt. So practice is a kind of, like Buddhism is always like this, it sounds like a contradiction, but there's faith and doubt simultaneously. And when that faith and doubt come together as a kind of real focus, and questions, the question you ask yourself or the doubt you have comes together, question and answer, faith and doubt, becomes one kind of situation which holds you, in a way, that is you. Just continue that, you have some patience to stay with that.

[50:20]

Something will melt that or bring that to a conclusion, but you don't try to solve it, just stay with it. You don't ask yourself lots of... You don't worry about the questions that you can't answer based on your practice. This is where you, as scholars, will have some problem if you're also practising, because there's quite a difference between the answers that… Buddhism supplies thousands of answers for any problem you might imagine, and at any stage of your practice Buddhism says, ah, so that's the question you're asking yourself. If you're a simple person, buckle it, and you don't ask yourself many questions, good. But if your mind is overactive, whatever question you ask yourself, Buddhism has an answer. But you don't need all those answers in advance.

[51:25]

And the trouble with being a scholar is that you have all those answers in advance. Your knowledge of Buddhism surpasses your practice very rapidly. So, it's good to know the difference between the knowledge you have that comes out of your practice and the knowledge you have because you're a scholar. My teacher always says, a wave follows wave and wave leads wave. And when your study and practice are one, that's what happens. Your study opens up. your practice, and your practice opens up your studying, and the two go together. And you don't have any problem of what to study because it's there. It may be good to have a certain number of years in which you don't study at all, but certainly there's nothing wrong with studying, and it can activate your way.

[52:30]

It gives you a vocabulary for activity. You want to avoid programming, particularly in Zen. Zen is very against any programming. This is one difference with, as somebody said, shutting down the senses, say, like as yoga does sometimes. It creates a kind of duality between when your senses are there and when your senses are not. or any idea of, I'll do it this way, because that's your head telling you. So, Zen tries to be as unprogrammed as possible. Maybe for us, in some ways, too unprogrammed. I think, actually, the ways of Buddhism of Tibet and India may have some answers for our practice that we need. Because Zen and Chan practice, China and Japan, are for what I would call a body culture, and they don't think so much and conceptualize the way we do, and we need some antidotes for our mental activity, which in some ways I'm not sure Zen provides, because it's really a practice for a different tribe of people than us.

[53:45]

But I think that, of course, I think that the non-verbal tradition of Chan and Zen is powerful one, and I'm interested to see if it can work here in America. I can remember when I was working with two Japanese priests, working on translating a chant that we do in San Francisco, and I was able to they would give me all versions of English and Japanese that they could think of that this meant. And then, based on my experience and their experience, we tried to find English language which worked. But to some extent, a large extent in some cases, I really just had to do some research on the particular points.

[54:49]

and find out what the book said about it, and then go on the basis of that. And at that point, I was not choosing the language on the basis of my own experience, but on the basis of scholarship. And I find now, some years later, when I look at that chant, there are certain points where the English doesn't feel right, and they're usually the places which I found through scholarship. And I'm not being critical of scholarship at all, just that I could find language which was a little more home when I could base it on my experience. So, of course, one has to... And I think, actually, scholarship's better when you know that difference. What do we do in addition to Zazen?

[56:12]

We, in Japanese Zen, we do some chanting and some ritual. And the chanting has a is on the one hand a practice that you do, and on the other hand it's something you do for the so-called layman, and in that sense it's a kind of magic that you do for them. And it's also closely related to Buddhist finances, because you're paid for performing services in traditional Buddhist countries, and it's the economic base of Buddhism. I'm mostly interested in chanting as a practice, and I'm interested in ritual. And the ritual is another kind of problem that we're going to have here in American Buddhism, because I think Confucius is right when he says that at the very center of culture is ritual.

[57:17]

Buddhism in Japan is based on a ritual which is central to Japanese and Chinese civilization. And if we're going to have ritual which works for us, we're going to have to find out what our own mandala is. Right now we have to have some way, and so we have the way pretty much as it's brought from Japan. I'm very wary of making changes. I don't think any changes are necessary, but slowly our own America itself is developing and we'll find some way. I went to Japan primarily to study the culture. I've been there the last three years. Not so much to study Buddhism. I think it's much better to study Buddhism here in America. I think maybe other Asian countries are more open, actually, to foreigners than Japan is.

[58:26]

Japan has been isolated from the world and from China, even, except for a few people that have gone back and forth. There's never been much in the way of population movement for many, [...] many centuries. And so Japan is extremely tribal. And going to study Buddhism there is a lot like going to the Hopi Indians and saying, can I join your rain dance? They look at you, what do you want to join our rain dance for? Or when American businessmen go to Japan, they're treated like they went to the Indians and asked to distribute their maize, corn, for them. It doesn't make sense. And you can practice Buddhism in Japan, of course, if you're lucky and you are young and starting and innocent. and you are willing to spend 10 or 15 years, and you've got some language ability, and you happen to find a teacher who isn't fed up with having foreigners come around and just cause trouble, and who is open to trying once with a foreigner.

[59:30]

And that works, and it's worked for a few people. Very few, but it's worked for at least one. Walter Nowak, who lives in Maine. So I think that here in the West we have not, you know, the three so-called three treasures, Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha. I don't think we have much trouble with Buddha or Dharma because we have the problems that anybody practicing has with Buddha and Dharma. They're rather common to everybody. They're problems, I mean, you know, what's Buddha and what's Dharma, but it's the same problem you'd have in Japan or anyplace. But it's a different problem with Sangha, because Buddhism is only, as Dr. Komzey said the other day, is found in its tribal situation here in the world in actual form. It exists in Tibetan form, Japanese form, Chinese form, and there's no such thing in some ways as universal Buddhism.

[60:38]

And Zen, particularly being based on everyday life, It's just at simply one with Japanese culture. In fact, in some ways, the religion in Japan as being Japanese is not recognized as a religion, but it's actually maybe the religion. And a facet of that is Buddhism. But anyway, Buddhism is at one with Japanese culture. So one has to make sense of, we're going to have a sangha here, how does a sangha work here?

[61:13]

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