As you may have heard in the service this morning, Dr. Schumacher died. Ernst Friedrich Schumacher died. Did you notice in the service? He died yesterday, As far as we know, I know, he died yesterday afternoon, European time, Sunday afternoon in Europe, in a train going to, at least in a train in Switzerland. And he'd gone to Europe a day early because of the air controller's strike. So he couldn't fly, so he was taking a train.

[01:01]

And I believe he had a heart attack. And no one... I don't think anyone in this country knows yet, but... Because the details aren't... No one knows the details yet, so no one knows what to release to the paper. But I don't think... I think it will get out, so I recommended they get the best information together and put something up. So, perhaps, maybe it'll be in the newspapers today. Yes, we... We found out because the Swiss police know, and they told the British police, and someone connected with, I guess maybe Schumacher's wife, phoned Peter Gillingham, who's a close friend and was here this weekend at Green Gulch.

[02:15]

And Peter phoned me because for some reason we had Dr. Schumacher and myself and Dr. Schumacher and Zen Center had a pretty close relationship. Why I'm speaking to you about him... I know I'm speaking to you about him because of my feeling for him and my experience with him. and not because of the content of his books or what he did or said. And yet I was thinking I should have some other reason than that to speak to you about him. And it occurred to me, walking over here, that actually

[03:19]

he has had a remarkable influence on... Buddhist influence on America, because his... I guess primarily because his essay, Buddhist Economics, in his book... I said, probably not all of you have read his book, some of you must have. But anyway, the essay, Buddhist Economics, in the book is the one most people remember and has been a turning point in a lot of people's lives and businessmen's attitudes toward their work. And Dr. Schumacher just made it up, you know. He said he never heard of Buddhist Economics, though. He wrote his essay. But he felt it was representative of, it did represent what Buddhist economics would be if it was such a thing.

[04:26]

And I think he's right. So many people now, since Dr. Schumacher's ideas have had such a great impact on our society. Many people now take Buddhism seriously at the level of the formation of our society and thinking, which they didn't before. Buddhism was something some Oriental people did, or some California kooks, or some small group of people. But Buddhism as a way of thinking and way of life was not recognized with the force it is now.

[05:34]

by so many people. Dr. Schumacher for some reason came along just at the right time and he was in complete demand at every level of our society to appear and had quite a long conversation with President Carter a little while ago which seems to have affected them both. I talked with Dr. Schumacher in England a little bit about it, and then other people told me he was quite impressed with President Carter. about him that would be interesting.

[06:48]

I believe his father is some parallel to Dr. Konsei, and he helped support and keep Dr. Konsei alive during the Second World War by getting him lectures and other ways in which Dr. Konsei, as an alien, couldn't support himself. As a German alien in England, And I believe that, I have it rather mixed up, I think his, maybe Schumacher's father, grandfather was one of the consuls from Germany to England. and he took his two sons out of school when they were eight or nine and told them to go into business and they started a printing business and by the time they were twelve or so they were supporting the family from this printing business and went back to Germany then and started and had the Schumacher Printing Company or something and then retired at twenty

[08:05]

or the father became an economist. And then Fritz, Dr. Schumacher, was the son of one of these two brothers, and he came to England pretty early for some reason, I don't know why. I think, anyway. In 1944 he looks like he got Lord Keynes to recommend... Lord Keynes used a paper of Dr. Schumacher's at the Breton Woods Conference, 1944, to try to get the world's currency to float. And it was defeated, Dr. Schumacher thinks, because he wasn't there to And I believe, many of you know Charles Olson's work, I believe Charles Olson, at least if I remember correctly, he said that he resigned from the government when he was Undersecretary of Treasury, when Roosevelt asked him to go represent the US, or partly represent the US, I don't know, at the Bretton Woods Conference.

[09:27]

And he started writing poetry somewhat after that. Then in the 50s, Dr. Shimakawa predicted the energy crisis. This time he was head of the British Coal Board and was trying to find ways to take the many, many people who were becoming unemployed because coal was replaced by oil. He was working on ways which later he described to Governor Brown, which Governor Brown may have, I believe, tried to use on how to find employment for the many people who were building roads here when Governor Brown stopped the freeway system from being continued. Dr. Schumacher worked on ways to find employment for tens of thousands, I believe, of coal miners.

[10:34]

And at that time he predicted one of the remarkable things, predicted very clearly the energy crisis. No one, of course, paid any attention, even though it was quite obvious, if you thought about it, that oil would run out at a certain time. But no one wanted to undo it, wanted to see that. Then when he retired from the coal board, he doesn't like to write, he says, so some talks he had given, and he's a very funny man, a very witty man, were transcribed and put into this book called Small is Beautiful. I guess Small is Beautiful is the publisher's title. economics as if people mattered as a subject.

[11:41]

And then I met him rather by chance. Somebody, it's interesting how these things happen, but the person, one or two of the people who actually led to our finding Green Gulch, also called me up and said, Dr. Schumacher is here and I want you to... I think you should meet him. So I said okay and somebody arranged for me and I... my schedule was such that people arranged for me to meet him somewhere and ride with him in an automobile to another point and have a chance to talk but it wasn't possible to talk, you know. in the car full of people. So, at some meeting in Palo Alto or someplace, I looked at him, he was quite tired, so many speeches and things he had to give, and everybody was coming and asking him questions.

[12:52]

So I don't know exactly why, but I felt he needed some protection, so I went and sat down beside him, when some kind of lunch, you know, paper plates on your knees or something like that was going on. And I sat down beside him, more or less pretending to be in conversation with him, so people wouldn't bother him. So we sat there for about 45 minutes, and no one bothered him and I didn't say anything. And partly he's such an intelligent person, I didn't have anything to say. Anyway, couldn't find anything to say, so I just sat there with him. Then maybe, because maybe if you don't say anything you're supposed to be wise, later, when he came back to the United States, second trip, he asked that I join him in the East in doing something for a week he was doing.

[14:03]

in Vermont, because he didn't want to carry the burden of his work alone. And somehow he felt I would be a spokesman for his, or I shared his work with him. And so, because I liked him, I went and we spent a week together. And then he came and stayed here at Green Gulch. And one night, in a motel in Vermont. Everybody left suddenly, or sort of, I guess they left, or they weren't involved. I think they left, yeah. And just Dr. Schumacher and myself were there. And he suddenly began talking to me about his life and many types of many things he's done, studying Gurdjieff, I think, and many Sufism, many European movements, and about Buddhism, and his decision in England to become a Catholic.

[15:27]

And then in this recent trip he came here, as you know, and he planted He happened to arrive. Someone called us up and said... I didn't ask him to speak here or anything because, again, he had such a tight schedule, I didn't feel to add to it. So, when he got here, he asked if he could come here just to rest. So, again, he came here and rested for a couple days, just a while ago, I don't know, in the springtime, whenever it was. And he wanted to plant trees here, so somebody arranged a tree planting ceremony for him here, which I didn't know anything about, except that I guess at some point I said, all right. So he planted trees here, as you remember, those of you who live here, and it turned out to be Arbor Day.

[16:35]

by chance, I don't know. He didn't know it was Arbor Day and we didn't know it was Arbor Day, but anyway, came here and planted these trees on Arbor Day. So we planted several poplars, is that what we planted? Steve, here? Cottonwood here. Cottonwood here. Quaking aspen. Quaking aspen back by the stream. Did the quaking aspen live? They're living? And some of the cottonwoods are living, right? And now he's written a book which just came out. This weekend, as you may have noticed, Governor Brown was staying here. And what he was doing, by chance, was reading Dr. Schumacher's new book to write a review of it for the Coalition Quarterly. And again, I don't know whether the book is... From what people tell me about it, it doesn't sound like it's...

[17:40]

It exactly expresses a Buddhist point of view, and I don't know how I will feel about reading it, but the basic statement of the book is, the modern experiment of trying to live without religion has failed. And some passages, the beginning passages in the book, quite good and representative of how I think we feel too. So I'd like to read you the initial page, if it's alright. It's called, he doesn't like the cover, but you know, it's called A Guide for the Perplexed. And there's some kind of television screen here with some sort of Buddha or something on the television screen, I don't know what it is. He says, on a visit to Leningrad some years ago, I consulted a map to find out where I was, but I could not make it out.

[18:55]

From where I stood I could see several enormous churches, yet there was no trace of them on my map. When finally an interpreter came to help me, he said, we don't show churches on our maps. Contradicting him, I pointed to one that was very clearly marked. That is a museum, he said, not what we call a living church. It is only the living churches we don't show." He was incredible, wasn't he? That's us, we're a living church. We try to stay off maps, too. We want to be on the road maps anyway. Those of you who are worried about the plumbing maps here. It then occurred to me that this was not the first time I'd been given a map which failed to show many things I could see right in front of my eyes. All through school and university I'd been given maps of life and knowledge on which there was hardly a trace of many of the things that I most cared about and that seemed to me to be of the greatest possible importance to the conduct of my life.

[20:08]

I remembered that for many years my perplexity had been complete and no interpreter had come along to help me. It remained complete until I ceased to suspect the sanity of my perceptions and began instead to suspect the soundness of the maps. The maps I was given advised me that virtually all my ancestors until quite recently had been rather pathetic illusionists who conducted their lives on the basis of irrational beliefs and absurd superstitions. Even illustrious scientists like Johannes Kepler or Isaac Newton apparently spent most of their time and energy on nonsensical studies of non-existing things. Enormous amounts of hard-earned wealth have been squandered throughout history to the honor and glory of imaginary deities, not only by my European forebears, but by all peoples in all parts of the world at all times. Everywhere thousands of seemingly healthy men and women had subjected themselves to utterly meaningless restrictions.

[21:13]

like voluntary fasting, tormented themselves by celibacy, wasted their time on pilgrimages, fantastic rituals, reiterated prayers, zazen, and so forth. It doesn't say zazen. Turning their backs on reality. And some do it even in this enlightened age. All for nothing. All out of ignorance and stupidity. None of it to be taken seriously today, except of course as museum pieces. From what a history of error we had emerged. What a history of taking for real what every modern child knew to be totally unreal and imaginary. Our entire past, until quite recently, was today fit only for museums, where people could satisfy their curiosity about the oddity and incompetence of earlier generations.

[22:23]

What our ancestors had written, also, was in the main fit only for storage in libraries, where historians and other specialists could study these relics and write books about them. The knowledge of the past being considered interesting and occasionally thrilling, but of no particular value for learning to cope with the problems of the present. The philosophical maps with which I was supplied at school and university did not merely, like the map of Leningrad, fail to show living churches. They also failed to show large, unorthodox sections of both theory and practice in medicine, agriculture, psychology, and the social and political sciences, not to mention art and the so-called occult or paranormal phenomena, their mere mention of which was considered to be a sign of mental deficiency. In particular, all the most The prominent doctrine shown in the map accepted art only as self-expression or as an escape from reality. Not surprisingly, the more thoroughly acquainted we became with the details of the map, the more we absorbed what it showed and got used to the absence of things it did not show.

[23:31]

The more perplexed, unhappy and cynical we became. Then he describes the experience of somebody named Morris or Maurice Nicole. Once in the Greek New Testament class on Sundays, taken by the headmaster, I dared to ask, in spite of my stammering, what some parable meant. The answer was so confused that I actually experienced my first moment of consciousness. That is, I suddenly realized that no one knew anything. And from that moment I began to think for myself, or rather knew that I could. I remembered so clearly this classroom, the high windows constructed so that we could not see out of them the desks, the platform on which the headmaster sat, his scholarly thin face and nervous habits of twitching his mouth and jerking his hands. And suddenly this inner revelation of knowing that he knew nothing, nothing that is about anything that really mattered. This was my first inner liberation from the power of external life.

[24:34]

He also quotes somebody who says, the true nihilism of today is reductionism. And I was trying to say, like yesterday, philosophy rather than novel, which includes more things, is more like Zen. He also quotes Ortega y Gasset, who says, life is fired at us point-blank. We cannot say, hold it, I'm not quite ready. Wait till I have things sorted out. Decisions have to be taken that we are not ready for, and aims have to be chosen that we cannot see clearly. End he quotes. Descartes, who says, Those who seek the direct road to truth should not bother with any object of which they cannot have a certainty equal to the demonstrations of arithmetic and geometry. That was certainly due in Zazen.

[25:44]

And at the end of the book he says, The modern experiment to live without religion has failed. And he talks about people, nowadays people. and he says, young people of varying ages, they feel in their bones that the ever more successful solution of convergent problems is of no help at all. It may even be a hindrance in learning how to cope with the divergent problems, which are the stuff of life. Above all, we shall see then that the economic problem is a convergent problem which has been solved already. We know how to provide enough and do not require any violent, inhuman, aggressive technologies to do so. There is no economic problem, and in a sense there never has been. What he means is there are ways to feed everybody. But there is a moral problem, and moral problems are not convergent, capable of being solved so that future generations can live without effort.

[26:50]

There is no economic problem, but there is a moral problem, and moral problems are not convergent, capable of being solved so that future generations can live without effort. No, they are divergent problems which have to be understood and transcended. Can we rely on it that a turning around will be accomplished by enough people, quickly enough, to save the modern world? This question is often asked, but no matter what the answer, it will mislead. The answer yes would lead to complacency, the answer no to despair. It is desirable to leave these perplexities behind us and get down to work. Dr. Schumacher liked what we were doing too. And he once said that he thought we were expressing Zen, making Zen clear the way it should be. the way he always hoped Zen would be expressed.

[28:02]

Now many of these things I've read parallel what I have been talking about and want to continue to talk about, but I don't know if it's clear to you that it's so. And I have some feeling of leaving well enough alone, just saying something about Dr. Schumacher is enough for today. But we are concerned with that same turning around he's talking about, that same recognition that that Nicole came to by seeing that no one knows anything and the freedom he gained from the external world at that moment.

[29:38]

I can remember a very similar experience myself, though it sounds like the opposite. I was reading a book, Faulkner or someone like that, And it was a particularly abstruse section of the book. And I thought, I don't remember feeling, how can one understand this? And somehow I felt at the same time, it was written for human beings. It was written by a human being, for human beings, it must be able to be understood. And after that, I never had the experience of not understanding something. In the way I had before, at least, of being shut out from it because I lacked something.

[30:50]

This is a change and it's not a function of some ability, but of chance or a shift in attitude or our description of the world. Description means to scratch down, so description may be appearance or affirmation. our description of the world. Sometimes I think we have the experience of having some kind of pane of glass between us and others. This is an image many people have used talking with me. or they don't notice it until they have some change in attitude or perception, like Dr. Schumacher is speaking about, and then they say, I didn't know it, but now when I feel the way I used to feel when it comes back, it's like I'm behind glass or something.

[32:14]

Maybe it would help us to see our words as sculptures. When you say something, tan, tan, like something is cut with teeth, tan, or stick, or any word. When you say it, it's like, it's an object that appears for a moment. If you gave that word more reality for a moment, as much reality as you give to the person you're speaking to. So you, when you spoke suddenly like a word, your words were like balloons, just for a moment, in the air between you and the person. I don't know, we relate, we don't have enough of a sense of dharma, of the phenomenal world as the occasion for our showing Katagiri Roshi spoke of four reasons why a Buddha is born in the world, which means four reasons why you practice or four reasons why you are born, from a Buddhist point of view at least.

[33:42]

One is to open all sentient beings to Buddhism. Another is to show Buddhism to all sentient beings. And third is satori or your experience of enlightenment or enlightenment, some turning around, many turning around experiences. And fourth is fundamental enlightenment that's beyond any categories, kathagirishi, pointed out, the first three are still in the realm of experience. The last one is not in any category. But the second one, to show, means to make effort or to affirm.

[34:47]

Maybe affirm is better than appear, even. And affirm Affirm means to support, and the firm part is exactly the same root as dharma, so it means to dharma, maybe, to affirm. That was my strong experience with Dr. Schumacher. I felt affirmed by him. I felt practice affirmed by him. Looking at him, I felt affirmed. He was very present. I remember I was impressed with one of the leading, one of the two or three head firefighters at Tassara, named Troy Kurth.

[35:50]

and when he came the only words I could get to describe his presence before he led all the hotshot crews into Tassara was he was standing in front of me like an object. Well with Dr. Schumacher you felt an object, an affirmation in front of you. And at the same time, one who knew that it was provisional, again to use Kadagiri Rishi's phrase, provisional reality, one we were manifesting, we were showing, in much the sense as I said yesterday, that we create Tassajara and Tassajara creates us. So, to have the consciousness that affirms your words, the word is very real at that moment, just as real as the person and as you, equally.

[37:08]

mantra, zazen, meditation, mandala, they are all ways to show in emptiness or to show in genuine reality, some phrase from Longchenpa says. to compose ourselves in genuine reality or to compose ourselves in emptiness, all Buddhist practices, mandala or mantra or zazen, meditation, all are a composition, a description or affirmation of cause and effect as one great cause that leads to Buddhahood. You have to realize you're not shut out of reality.

[38:36]

And we have to find our own maps. We can use maps, you know, but as Gregory Bateson says again, the map is not the territory. There may be many and many maps that are very useful to get to Berkeley, you know, or to find the plumbing. But no map is Green Gulch. And no map is you. Someone can't tell you what a parable means. No one can tell you what a koan means. By your direct affirmation of reality you can find out only that way. So you hear each word like a sculpture, momentary sculpture.

[39:50]

Dr. Schumacher was a momentary sculpture. And I am, and you are. And we sit to free ourselves from the relevant You know, if you, going back to descriptions, if you drive along in the woods and you pass a lake, you know, you're driving and maybe through the pine trees or through the trees, every now and then a lake will appear to the right or left of the road. or in a motel you may see from the highway some tiny swimming pool big sign saying swimming pool and the swimming pool about as big as the sign but if you're standing to jump into that swimming pool contemplating diving into the lake it's a very different perception

[41:23]

It's not the same lake if you're ready to dive in it as if you see it. So our phenomenal occasion, the situation of our perception is intrinsic, integral with our perception. Actually, if it's not relevant, you know, you probably won't even notice the swimming pool or the lake. You'll be concentrated on the highway. So you... Most of what... It's not just that it's a different perception of the lake, whether you're standing in front of it or driving by it, but you actually won't notice many, many, many, many things, because it's not relevant to your situation.

[42:28]

So in zazen we are sitting to become irrelevant in many ways, to relax situations which require relevance. And then many things will come up, seemingly irrelevant, but actually relevant to the background of our thinking, background of our being. and we can begin to find out the sculpture of you and sculpture of Buddha, that you are for a moment. Firm, the firm part of a firm not only means dharma but also means throne. the Dharma throne, you each are exactly each moment.

[43:43]

But how do you have this creative expression of your life that comes about when you become free from external reality? Then you can open Buddhism. the truth to all sentient beings. You can show truth by your, through concrete reality, through ceremonies, through eating, walking, through the physical phenomenal world we expressed, we show through mandalas or mantras, through the shape of green gilts, we show the truth to all sentient beings. This is one of the reasons Buddhas are born in this world, traditionally we say. To free yourself from external reality and express eternal external reality.

[45:02]

That's enough. To say it better would take more time. Anyway, I'm very grateful to Dr. Schumacher and grateful somehow that we find not just Suzuki Roshi and Gyokuji and so on, Roshi and various teachers, Buzo, the being, the living being from Buddha to us from a so-called past to future, but also at contemporary times we have each other and people we feel some transmission with or affirmation with who, you know, are free enough from external reality too

[46:36]

from maps, from other people's maps to see, ah, quite easily we're going to run out of oil and to have the courage and confidence to present this to people till they pay attention to affirm individual identity and inter and mutual identity. knowing there's no up or down, left or right.

[47:44]

Now what is this Dharma throne is the question of our practice and of your session.

[48:05]

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