at a session led by Katagiri Roshi. It's lovely to be here with you. I was in Luzendo once about a couple or so ago and I was visiting someone in the Bay Area and I came in that door and sat up on the tan there for a couple of mornings and crept away again and I haven't been back since. This is wonderful to come back. So I come to you from the hopeless, useless school of Zen. My first main teacher was Katagiri Roshi. I was with him for about 10 years until his death. His daimyo means great patience, but I think he was really great vow. He never really learned patience.

[01:01]

He said that he got the name because, as we all do, because that was what he needed to discover. But what he knew and transmitted with his body every day was his great vow, his aspiration His aspiration to teach the Philistines in the wilds of Minnesota for 25 years? 25 years in the US. It's a long time. And when he moved out there, everyone else was a Lutheran. There was no inter-anything dialogue. There was no nothing. Just Category and the Lutherans. It was pretty hard. So he showed us through all those years that he sustained himself by living in vow. That's what he named the temple in Minnesota, in Minneapolis, Living in Vow Temple.

[02:06]

And then after his death, I became a disciple of Tosen Akiyama, who had taken over one of those Midwest sanghas that Katagiri had started. He did a lot of circuit writing. It was a very American thing. He went to Minneapolis, and then soon he was going to Duluth, Omaha, Milwaukee. He even went up to Anchorage, Alaska. I once asked him as I was driving him to the airport if it wasn't a lot, all this flying and traveling, and he said, no. When I'm up there, no one asks me any questions. So he liked that part. He was freer only when he was wafting from place to place. And the Milwaukee group became the biggest and then wanted to have their own resident teacher and toes in. took it over. Tozin is a much quieter person. He hasn't written any books yet, although I'm a retired editor, and now that he has more time, too, there might be a book of Tozin.

[03:09]

So Tozin is very different from Katagiri. Extremely different. Same sodos in school. They knew each other, liked each other very much. But Tozin is called Hopeless Tozin. and wears this name proudly. He's a disciple of a disciple of homeless Kodo Sawaki Roshi, and so we're the less school, starting with the homeless. It's been going downhill ever since. He's hopeless, Tozen, because he says over and over, I am hopelessly compelled by empty thought. And he said this, I don't think it was a session you were at, because he was at Hokyoji. He started leading the sessions at Hokyoji when Katagiri was on sabbatical and then after his death. And he sat up there in the session and said, I am completely hopeless. I'm hopelessly compelled by empty thought. I was the Eno, and by the third day or so, a guy came to me and he said, we have to do something.

[04:18]

I said, what do we do besides this, you know? He said, no, we have to do something about him. The man is having a religious crisis before it ever happens. I said, no, [...] no. You don't understand. Just wait a couple of days. And he never got it. He never came back. And Tozin takes great freedom. It's the ground of his great freedom and practice to understand and accept in every pore that he is hopelessly compelled by empty thought. I wouldn't say in itself it makes him happy, but the full acceptance of that is the ground of rather happy wandering. So I had these two very different influences and some others. I've trained a little in Japan and other teachers, valleys and various places, all Japanese teachers, three men, one woman.

[05:24]

And so I'm in the end Tozen's disciple, because we take one line or the other, although certainly we're informed by all of the influences, right? So I got sort of a binary perspective from the Category view and the Tozin view. I'm still putting them together. But I have come out of this as Tozin's disciple. My deep aspiration, which I inherited from Category, is to be useless. That's my direction. No religious crisis involved, at least not today. I can't speak for tomorrow. I aspire hopelessly to be useless. I catch all my bases, all of my ancestors. And my partner of many years who has stood by me through decades and wanderings and teachers and travels,

[06:36]

says that Zen is much ado about nothing. And she's on to something there. She understands the useless function. So from Katagiri I learned that you throw yourself into the Dharma with a deep aspiration to stand up there. And from Tozen, because Tozen likes to be called just Tozen, not a very formal person, and not the son of a priest, and not a priest of a priest. He discovered Zazen in Hawaii, having left Japan a few years after the university to wander to the U.S. and Europe teaching Aikido. And he was back in Hawaii, and he discovered Zazen, went back to Japan and ordained, and got out of there again as fast as he could, pretty much, and came here. So from Tozin I learned to go forward freely, not shrinking from anything.

[07:47]

That's what this completely accepting, being hopelessly compelled by empty, occasionally he'll even say useless, thoughts, is not shrinking from anything. There's nothing that we need to shrink from. Nothing is worse than the fact that we are here bumbling about. So we may as well look and see it completely. So this becomes a ground for going forward without having to hide from what you find. We hide, we forget, but that's the aspiration. But I'm not very good at it, at the useless function. I'm very busy by nature. When I first met you, I was probably being Eno and bustling about. They had me pegged in Minnesota. I was Eno and Eno and Eno. I would bustle about. I loved it. And then eventually I moved out here and bustled about making a Zen center.

[08:47]

So I've been pretty hopeless at being useless. This is the hopeless, useless school, you see. It's not just, isn't it grand to be hopeless and really lousy? Hopeless is also kind of being lousy at. There's that side of hopeless. We can't leave it behind. We can't leave any of it behind. But useless isn't just about being No good. There's that side. Useless is to go beyond utility. It's to go beyond control and manipulation, all the things that we basically do with everyone and everything that we encounter. I'm always moving you an inch to this side and you an inch to that side and can't we change the dialogue a little here and can't I fix something there and endlessly, right?

[10:01]

We're fixing and doing. We wouldn't have a brain if we didn't have an opposable thumb to evolve with it. And so there we are, like this. The mind is doing this and the hands are doing this. This is what we are as a species. We're doing and mixing and fixing and manipulating. There's genius in it, there's poetry in it, there's wonderful engineering feats and all sorts of things. But it's an endless compulsion. And we don't know that there's anything else when we are busy being busy. So the uselessness is about letting go of my whole life being this manipulating, useful doing, accomplishing, getting things together, getting things done, making contact, helping people, being helped back and forth and back and forth, coming and going.

[11:05]

Because all of that busyness, Every bit of the busyness has at its base my game. It's all for me. It's a personal game. It's about how to make my world better and more comfortable around me. If I want to move you an inch to the left, it's because it'll feel better to me that way. That's what the subtext of all of that busy, busy, busy is. It's for me. It's to adorn or fix my universe. It's all personal gain. Along with other things. Along with wonderful and other noble values and everything else. Personal gain. Sliding through there. And we don't notice. So... My aim to be useless is really an aim to not be completely caught by my view of personal gain, me at the center of the universe, and all of you out there to enhance it.

[12:22]

But I say I've been a failure at this uselessness because I love to be busy. What we love as a nation, we love to be busy. Even when we hate it, we love to be busy. Because we don't actually stop it. We feel alive in our busyness. So I... chewed on this, my failure, uselessness for a long time. And recently, only recently, being a sort of a slow study, I had a breakthrough. I realized, first of all, that I cannot work usefully at being useless. This was just one more useful agenda. And it's completely impossible. So that, well like now I have even less of an agenda, right?

[13:34]

I can't even work usefully to be useless. And then I realized that I already am useless. Really. I even needed someone to carry my glasses and books and my incense stick. I really am useless, right? And then I have this housekeeping. You know, the amount of time it takes one of us to sit down is, it's useless. It's really useless. Microphone. Is it useless? Can't even keep a microphone. There we go. I already am useless means I already am home. You can't be thrown out of this house. There's no excommunication from earth.

[14:35]

There's no, uh, being such a bad teenager that you get thrown out of the house. We just are home. That's the corollary of being useless. I already am here useless. Just being here useless is being home on this earth uselessly. Can't be thrown out. Uselessness is really not so bad if you can't be thrown out of home. And the universe that has no need and no use for all my useful ant-like scurrying will also never throw me out of the house for being useful by mistake. No matter how much I carry on and rush around and trudge around, the universe won't throw me out for that either. No matter how deeply I'm deluded, I won't be thrown out.

[15:36]

The universe accepts us awake and asleep. completely beyond how useful we are, or useless. And then a couple of weeks ago, the useless function turned one more time, and I realized that another side of this uselessness is that everything is just the universe happening already. That's what uselessness means to me now. Everything is just the universe happening. Whether I do something or don't do something. Whether you do something or you don't do something. All of it is just the universe happening. And I find this very freeing, except when I forget, which, of course, I do over and over.

[16:51]

So what about you? How do you expand your life? How do you go beyond what you know? That's really the question I want to offer. How do you go beyond what you know? If you just reference your personal experience, what you already know, you can't learn very much. Because your basis is what you already know and feel. To reference everything to your personal experience, I mean to evaluate everything in terms of what you think and feel and know. Your past history, your present feelings.

[18:01]

We get trapped there. My life, as I already know it, is kind of narrow. I dare say yours isn't otherwise. If we say, I sit because it feels good to me, because it feels like this and feels like that, we very innocently and sweetly fall into the pit of personal preferences. And once again, we're still there, we're still where we started out, still in our pit of what we already know. Of course your personal experience authenticates your choices. That's the ground of where we live and stand up. But sticking to that, dare I say clinging to that, cuts out the Buddhas and the ancestors and the history of civilization and all those Zen masters with their antics, cuts out everything else.

[19:22]

But if you throw away your personal experience, then you're wandering off in la-la land, or worse. Then you're dissociated from your life. That's no improvement. Or if you say, well, my own experience isn't enough, so I'll do... What does Dogen say? He says, to drop off body and mind, to know yourself beyond the self, to sip the self that runs through the universe, I'll do that. It's an abstraction. We can't live in a world of abstractions. There's no nourishment there. We turn into hungry ghosts. So if we just stick to the world of our personal experience, It's very narrow, because the world of my experience has blinders that I've carefully erected and don't notice anymore.

[20:31]

I don't know what I'm not seeing. I'm likely to know that it hurts. Very precious information, because that says things are not completely alright in the way, in the world I live in, the world I know to live in. It's not bad, in that sense, to hurt. So just relying on your personal experience is narrow and isolating. And relying on abstractions instead is very unnourishing, unproductive. Driving down here I was listening to a wonderful gospel on the radio in my little truck. in the form of gospel, or in Buddhism, the Pure Land and devotional schools, is one way to go beyond what you know.

[21:44]

To say, I will not just reference my own personal experience, but I won't just dwell in some abstraction. So the heart becomes the bridge to something beyond what we know. And turning to the Buddha way as we bumble along it in our Zen practice is really, I think, an attempt to go beyond what we know without throwing ourselves away, without throwing away our personal experience, without just dwelling in abstractions. But it's still there. What does that mean? The practice of Zen. It's a different practice. Thank goodness for every single person in this room.

[22:48]

The body and mind study of the way means including what you don't know. somehow. But it's hard to see what you haven't seen and don't have a flavor of in your mouth. And it's hard to see what you don't expect to see. People have been doing studies of drivers on the road and how they don't see what they don't expect to see. If we don't, driving on a quiet country stretch, and there are no visible crossroads or activity or houses, we don't expect that there's a stop sign and a road, quiet little road coming through, and we may just not see that stop sign.

[24:01]

Barrel through and have a fatal collision. In the article that I read, they described exactly that outcome. Those of us who haven't had such dire consequences, maybe you're not all as bad as I am, but I can't find a thing I'm looking for unless I already know what it looks like. I have to say, now, what size and shape of jar was it even then? It's hard to find it, because it's not where I expect to find it, because that's why it's lost. And someone else can find it who doesn't have an expectation about it. I don't expect it to be and I won't see it there. This isn't true just of driving, although that's no just, that's a big one, or the things around the house. This is true of life and love and dharma and truth. It's very hard to see what we don't expect to see. And furthermore, seeing what we don't already have in our worldview is threatening, because it threatens our, frankly, precious worldview, our sense of how things are.

[25:25]

So even though part of us wants new and different, and wants to expand what we see, what we know, Part of us is threatened. And when we don't want to see, chances are we won't. So how can you open your life to be broad and spacious over and over? In the hopeless school, we know that when the universe breathes, and we breathe, we may open to a broadness, a great breadth and spaciousness, and then we will close again. And then we wake up and open again, and we close again. The free, hopeless, useless school says the whole thing is just the universe happening.

[26:32]

I open and I close. It's not that I'm thrilled that I close up again, but accepting that it happens, not being threatened by it, it's a little easier to open up again, to see it and to open. For me, the Buddha way has always, it's not that long, 25 years, been a way to go beyond what I know. So many of us start practice with a certain desperation, a strong sense of unease at least because we know things really aren't really right in our life or our life in the universe. We don't exactly get complacent necessarily, but we lose that edge.

[27:37]

We forget. Especially if we want to go to an idea of a life in the Buddha world that's broad and spacious all the time. Because then we won't be invigorated by having our complete life, which opens and closes and opens and closes. This is human life. It's human suffering and it's human life. So we aim at a wider compass without clinging to what we aim for. It's all useless. It's useful and useless. Uchiyama Roshi, Uchiyama Roshi said, one of Sawaki Roshi's best known disciples, said that until you really understand how that practice is useless, your practice really is useless.

[28:51]

Until you understand that it's useless, it's useless. and it always goes on from there on, you can't give up that uselessness even then. To do this, to go through this endless back and forth and opening and closing without getting the bends Without getting disheartened by that, we need the practice of acceptance. Accepting our lovely uselessness and usefulness. Endless acceptance, endless repentance, endless forgiveness of ourselves and others for forever missing a beat, missing the point, forever doing harm, no matter how good our intention and deep our aspiration.

[30:11]

As with uselessness, acceptance isn't to accept that this is fine. It isn't fine that we have the death penalty. It isn't fine that we have so much poverty everywhere. It isn't fine that people suffer, or animals suffer, or the earth suffers. It isn't fine. Acceptance isn't blissing out. or forgetting or denying anything. And uselessness isn't either. Uselessness is not giving up on caring deeply about each other. Acceptance is accepting that things are as they are right now. That's what I learned from Tozin. Things are as they are right now. He was a brilliant graduate of Tokyo University, Marxist economist, and his life comes down to it. Each thing is as it is right now.

[31:32]

Accepting that is the ground for our transformation of ourselves and our world. Accepting our uselessness, we can go forth bravely doing, helping uselessly. Accepting the life of endlessly compelled by empty thoughts. That way you can study your whole life. and be originally useless. It might be easier to say it that way. Originally at our base, useless in beyond utility, beyond a personal gain.

[32:39]

And then on that base we go forth in our great flower of everything we do. Zazen is the inquiring impulse of how do you go beyond what you know? How do you dwell in your original uselessness? The inquiring impulse beyond words. An important part of uselessness is that any answers we find along the way are completely provisional. the questions are generally better than the answers. So a question that's big enough for an inquiry that takes up, that involves your whole life, is wonderful. And any answer is partial, beautiful and partial, and has to be let go as the moment passes.

[33:45]

So really, the inquiring impulse of Zen means we cultivate the big questions like, how do you go beyond what you know? Never resting on the laurels of now I know something. What a trap, always. How do you go beyond what you know? Hopelessly and uselessly. So I think today is a wonderful and an awful day to be human and here we are together. Does anyone have any questions or anything? Or I would dare not say, not answers, suggestions, thoughts. Yeah. Thank you very much. Aspirations are inspiring. Oops. I'm reminded of what I learned in art school

[34:48]

that it was the investigation. Each time you begin an investigation, you don't know where you're going, but you discover yourself on the way. It's a wonderful way to discover uselessness. And then we cling to what we make. I used to cling to those outputs. And then we have to throw them away. The question that you put, how do you go beyond what you know? Well, I was just noticing the different words you were using that go around that. And at one point you said, the heart is a bridge to beyond what you know. So then I thought, wait a minute. The heart? If your knowing isn't in your heart, and if the heart is an antidote to your knowing,

[36:06]

then where is what you know, you know? Bridgewhip. So then I thought, well, are you locating knowing in some other part of the body, like brain? And... Is knowing like an enemy? Is that like you indicate a split? Where your heart is antidote to some kind of limited knowledge? or do we know with our heart too? So why do we have to go beyond? Even though we are all originally here, originally and completely part of this universe, as a human, with my body-mind, heart and mind all one entity.

[37:09]

I forget and I act in ways that are contrary to that, that are dissonant. This is the problematic side of a human gift of a mind, of a heart mind. And so endlessly we wake up to having become dissonant with this beautiful universe and aim back at according with it. What I was saying about... I'm sorry, I wasn't clear. I was trying just to mention that there are faith-based practices that say, do this, but I don't know enough of them to try to be critical. It's a little bit different path, where you don't, in some sense, take your mind with you. You don't bring it home to you. There's something that remains beyond you. as I heard the gospel, songs. There's something that I have faith in outside and beyond me as I hear gospel, and it will remain outside and beyond me, bigger and so forth, and I reach toward it.

[38:21]

That's my very limited understanding of that, that there's a way in which it remains beyond, and I take my refuge in it being beyond. And what we're trying to do in Zen is go beyond what we know without leaving home. So widen the sense of what it is to be me, what it is to be alive, what it is to be here, rather than to have to go somewhere else. And then we get all tangled in our words. All of my words are so provisional and partial and will undoubtedly mislead. They do that. It's like, mm-hmm. When I first started going to Milwaukee, I'd moved to Minnesota as a Category student and practiced with him.

[40:00]

And Category was a very graceful person. And I had the feeling from his manner and bearing that he was a person who was pretty much aware of that when he's different and useful and that trudging and could keep open and broad and there was a kind of a flow. And then I became Tozin's student. And when Tozin goes up a flight of stairs, it's like that. He rushes and he's quick and he drops things and he loses things. And I was in Japan last fall. finishing my training, and he came and led the rahatsu session at my zendo, and sat down and let the chant, and realized he'd left his notes, jerked up, knocked things over, rushed out of the room, went and found his notes and came back faster than anyone could know. It was such a relief to discover that someone can practice with tremendous heart and soul, great consistency and steadfastness, and hopelessly,

[41:08]

There's a kind of cherishing your clumsiness. That very coming and going, so we slide back all the time. Our job is to see it over and over. I sit Zazen. I'm less useful, thank goodness. It's like my playpen, it corners me. And I can't be so very useful because I'm sitting still. And so it helps me remember that I'm here anyway. And I forget. We forget all the time. But I find the forms extremely useful because, like you, I forget all the time. And I think I could go forever and never remember again, unless I heard a whole lot or had the forms around me or my sangha. That's one of the very wonderful uses of sangha, to remind each other by being together, by who we are and how we are, of what we're trying to do.

[42:22]

You said you studied with three male, or men, and one woman teacher. When I... I started sitting alone in the woods in New England. There wasn't anyone around. I just sat down. There was a wall. It wasn't there, you know. And Suzuki Roshi's book, and someone gave me that, and Zafu and I sat. by myself for several years. And then I started looking for a teacher, because all those books I read said you really should have a teacher, and I was pretty dubious. So I started looking and met Katagiri. And when I met him, I discovered that there was a zendo not far from me, over a couple more hills in the Berkshires. And so I sat for some years at Valley Zendo with Koshi Ichida. who was one of Uchiyama Roshi's disciples. I received my name from him, Jisho. And about the time I left to go to Minnesota, because I'd become Katagiri's student, he went back to Japan.

[43:37]

And he died earlier this year. And then when I... Katagiri had suggested that I spend some time in Japan, training. And Tozen thought it was a good idea too. So I've trained under Aoyama Roshi at the women's... There are a lot of men's training monasteries in Japan, in the Soto school, and there are three small women's ones. One is quite good-sized, relatively, and that's led by Aoyama, Shundo Aoyama Roshi. There's a couple of books out in English. She's very impressive and a lovely person, so I trained with her. So those are my teachers. Did you feel there's any major difference, The one woman teacher taught Buddhism versus the way that the Japanese teachers taught. She's Japanese too. They're all Japanese. Yeah. Not significantly.

[44:50]

The differences for me were more that she's in Japan and completely wedded to the Japanese establishment. So the only place in the world I'm not out is in the Women's Monastery in Japan. She wouldn't be able to deal with it. And so I rather painfully stuck myself back into a closet for the sake of the fact that I'm going into someone else's world. So the differences for me have been bigger that way, but she's a wonderful person and a strong teacher. Her teaching is much more anecdotal. There are some differences. She teaches in a much more anecdotal way, but she's very formal and formidable, perhaps more than any of the men I encountered. As it happens, all of the male teachers I've had have been very I say, closely connected to their anima, to a sort of feminine side.

[45:54]

So they had no, they all liked, there happened to be men who liked having a lot of women students. And Katagiri thought women were naturally more religious, he said one time. And they were all completely accepting of me as a lesbian in 20th century America. So for me, the bigger differences. The only American woman I encountered was Maureen Stewart. When I wanted to move to Minnesota from the home we had built in Massachusetts, because I wanted to ordain with him and he wouldn't do that long distance, Joni said, couldn't you find someone here? We live here in New England and for many years our life was there. So I couldn't imagine that, but I went to visit some other teachers and I found Maureen. And she was wonderful. She was another formidable lady with a big heart who encouraged me, in spite of her own bad experiences with Japanese monastic Zen, encouraged me to go on to Minnesota and ordain with a category because she could see it was just right for me.

[47:08]

Because it was Joni's turn. We moved to Minnesota and she agreed to go for two winters and we stayed for nine. And it was her turn to choose next where we went and she wanted to find a place that would suit for making a zendo. Because she understood that was my path, and she had decided she was into being the priest's wife. She's basically retired from other work, disabled and retired. Although she's an artist, so she's behind it. And we couldn't go back to New England because the climate would have been too harsh for her. Otherwise, we would have. And my father's in Southern California and said, couldn't you come to Orange County? There was no possibility, so we started looking further and further north. But we also wanted a place where I knew that being a lesbian wouldn't make Buddhism weird. It's hard enough for Buddhism to find its place.

[48:19]

I don't need to carry a message of weirdness by being myself. I am, but not because I'm a lesbian, just because it's me. And with all that, found Sebastopol and are very happy there. Myriad influences, you know, myriad conditions and all the people I knew who had come like Alan from California to Minnesota to sit with Katagiri. So I had many friends already in the Dharma out here. And we never gave up our tourist visas in Minnesota. Is there anything else? You don't need to go, but yeah, yeah, that's very nicely put.

[49:42]

Yeah. We need to be careful about not trying to get beyond the hurt. It's hopeless to get beyond that. And useless, because as you say, it's precious. But it carries us. I used to hurt for very narrow reasons. And my hurting didn't encourage me or didn't have room to see beyond this much. And I was very cut off from other people. So I could hurt that way and be stuck in it. And the hurt and feeling stuck was something from which I needed to find something bigger to try to throw myself into. But not to abandon her. No, you would not be alive. How would we know another person's heart if we didn't know our own her? Thank you. Yeah.

[50:44]

We can continue the discussion outside. Outside after tea? That would be lovely. Is that okay?

[50:49]

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