I don't know if they introduced me. I'm Lou Richmond. I, it seems, talk here sometimes now. I used to live here for many years. And I'm glad to be here, thanks to the people at Green Culture for inviting me back after all these years. The last time I gave a talk was in late October, Sagaki Day, Buddhist Halloween. Were any of you here, do you remember? Oh, I'm not a complete stranger then. And now here it is, Mother's Day, so I seem to be fated to give talks on various special days. It's interesting that last time, more or less, the subject of my talk was death, because Sagaki is a memorial day for people who died. I was talking to Taiyo, who was the gatekeeper this morning, an old friend, and we remarked

[01:16]

that Mother's Day is not a, quote, real holiday. You know, and I think actually it was designed by greeting card companies or something. I don't recall the history. But it was a way to make, you know, money. Very American to do that. But since it was Mother's Day and since I'm coming here, you know, that was kind of the formative thought to figure out what I would like to talk about. I don't want to talk about American Mother's Day at all, per se, but the thought of mother and motherhood set off a whole chain of thoughts in my own mind about women, mothers in Buddhism over history, women in Zen Center during its history, which I span most of, and the larger issue of what we might call the feminine in spirituality

[02:21]

and meditation. These are big topics, but I do, when I thought about it, I do find that there is a lot to say, a lot to reflect on in the tradition and also out of the tradition. We're in the process here of remaking the tradition. So in a sense, we at the same time embrace the tradition and follow it. We also have to examine it and closely understand it and change it if necessary. When Suzuki Roshi came here, he very clearly understood and spoke to us, his students, about the fact that he was hoping we would remake Buddhism here. In fact, he wanted us not only to remake Buddhism here, but then take it back to Japan and make it right there. That was his ambition. A little bit big, but he was a small man,

[03:23]

but with a very big mind. Partly because when I come to Zen Center these days, I don't come very often and don't really know people. I've gotten into the habit of, after I more or less tell you what my direction of my talk is, to start with questions. Not exactly questions, but get some input from you as to what's on your mind. I'd like to do that, maybe three or four people, if you'd like to contribute something. Give me a sense of, in this area that I've discussed or presented, what might interest you or what questions you have. Yeah, Steve? Something I've been thinking about is how meditation and Buddhist practice in general, as well as psychotherapy, which is another interest of mine, are in some way very fundamentally feminine activity, emphasizing receptivity rather than activity. Emphasizing being where

[04:33]

we are rather than doing something, but changing where we are, or something like that. Yeah, I actually planned the talk. Did you all hear what he said? Well, he said meditation and Buddhism. Meditation fundamentally is a kind of activity of receptivity, being where we are rather than, how did you put it? Doing something. Yes, that's really the heart of what I want to talk about, is all of this as it relates to our fundamental practice here, which is Zazen. Some way in the back. I'm curious about the intersection of this particular Zen center. I think it's actually interesting. It's something about American traditions all over the world, and then the intersection with American culture and our values around democracy, so we have the hierarchy

[05:39]

of the Zen center, and we have people wanting to have a more participatory role, because they're not... Okay, democracy in Zen center, and the intersection of the traditional hierarchy notion and democracy. Okay, well, keep in mind that I'm not actively involved in Zen center's politics. I haven't been for a long time, and when I was here, I was at the top of the hierarchy, so I have certain particular reflections on all of that, but I'll try to incorporate that. Thank you. Maybe one more. Yes? I have a very ordinary question about mothering in the sense that it's awfully hard to be a mother to another person, and how it seems to be one continuous mistake many times, and how Judaism can fit into that way of being in the world of trying part of that movement. One continuous mistake. Well, I think that's true of parenthood. I think fathers have that

[06:46]

same experience. I certainly appreciate that. Okay, good. Well, maybe that's good. That's enough to help me hone in on where we are today. I wanted to start really with what we might call ancient Buddhism or the old-style Buddhism as we read about in the earliest strand of texts. The Buddha, we don't know actually how it really was. I began to realize as I grew older that there is no really was about almost anything. The Buddha, we have the story of the Buddha, and in the story, which I think is a universal story, he's a prince, a privileged person, and whose mother died at birth. This

[07:51]

is probably true. I mean, that sort of fact seems to me so elemental that it probably is true. I think it's important to understand him as a person, which I like to do, because one of the things that is special about Buddhism, I think, is that we do, in spite of all the celestial stuff, basically we understand that Siddhartha Gautama was a person, was a human being like us. He's a person who lost his ... who never really had a birth mother. I'm sure he had surrogate mothers, but not a birth mother. Dogen, who is the founder of our lineage, both his parents died by the time he was nine, and he particularly speaks in his writings of watching the incense drift away at his mother's funeral as a young boy. You can imagine what this is like. I lost my mother the day after my fourth birthday, so this has always been very personal to me. We have a man, a sensitive, very highly intelligent

[08:59]

young man, Siddhartha, who for his time and place had a pretty good life, probably actually not as good as our ordinary life, but at least he was part of the top of the heap, hierarchically, speaking of hierarchy, and yet he, being very prescient and very, in a sense, modern in his sensibility, he understood that his condition of privilege was rather accidental, and when he finally went out into the world and looked at how people lived, we're talking about fifth century B.C. India, I'm sure what he saw, and what the scriptures say he saw, was a tremendous amount of suffering. His life was pretty miserable, and one attitude, and the attitude of most aristocrats throughout history is to say, you know, let him eat cake. I mean, you know, that's not my life, not my problem, and go back into the palace and slam the door. Well, he was not that kind of a person. What makes him a spiritual hero is he said, my gosh,

[10:02]

this is the human condition. The fact that I don't share in a lot of this is an accident, and the current, the conquistador culture he lived in, where he was the member of a conquering tribe, the Aryans who came in and conquered North India about a thousand years before his birth, they invented an entire social structure of caste with them at the top, and basically the religious teaching was, well, if your life circumstances aren't good, that's because of karma of previous lives. So, you know, your next life, it'll be better. So, we the Aryans happen to be privileged. Well, obviously, our karma from previous lives was good, so that's why we're privileged, so that's the way it is. So we're at the top, you're at the bottom, we're rich, you're poor, end of subject. That was not, you know, the Buddha really rejected all of that. He went out into the world, renounced everything, became a mendicant, a poor person, the poorest of the poor, and eventually founded a religious

[11:08]

order, which is the beginning of the Dharma. And 2,500 years later, here we are, following the body of teaching that he began. But there's no question, in my mind anyway, that there were two things about his stance as a religious teacher. One, it was a male-oriented perspective on things, and that was the culture of the time. Women were not, were considered subordinate lesser beings. So in the scriptures, there's lots of passages which demean women. The monks are urged to meditate on the disgusting qualities of a woman's body and all of that sort of thing, which always strikes me when I read it as the defense mechanisms of celibate males, young, who are struggling with the natural impulses that they have. And so, the whole notion of

[12:15]

deconstructing a woman's, a young woman's beauty to them into, you know, the decaying, decrepit corpse, etc., etc. In fact, the monks were even encouraged to meditate in charnel grounds. Maybe some of you who have studied these texts have read these passages. They're quite, to our sensibility, they're quite horrifying. I mean, you sit out at night around decaying dead bodies and, of course, jackals and vultures and all sorts of other creatures come and eat them. And you're supposed to sit there and meditate on, this is the destination of human beings. And women were initially excluded from the Sangha. The Buddha was importuned by, it varies, but maybe his aunt or some important woman to please let the women in. So he said, okay, well, I'll let them in, but it's going to reduce the period of correct understanding by half, to let them in. It's going to cause trouble.

[13:19]

And women were, there's very little status in the early Buddhist Sangha, much less hierarchy actually than there is in the classical period of Buddhism that we derive from. The only status among the men was ordination rank. So if you've been ordained before somebody else, you had a higher status. But all women were below the most junior man. So there was that hierarchy, which I think is rather stark, actually. So anyway, reflecting on this and then remembering that in the Zen tradition, you know, we hit these wooden boards. You've probably heard them, bop, bop, bop. Well, there's a writing. I don't know if they still have the writing, but they're supposed to be writing on them. And the first phrase of the little verse is, birth and death is a great matter. Well, I'm going to give you a little background. Birth and death essentially means the human condition, the existential condition

[14:22]

of being here at all. And it is a great matter. It's the great mystery. And it's framed for each of us by two events, our birth and our death. So birth and death, this is essentially the frame that we live in. And the great mystery is, well, that's our frame, but what's outside the frame? What happens before birth? What happens after death? Who are we? Is our soul eternal? Is it not eternal? These are the great perennial questions. These are the questions the Buddha himself confronted. What's it all about, birth and death? But as I look through my knowledge and study of the early scriptures, and even down to the quality of Zen practice that I studied, yeah, it says birth and death, but it actually, in practice, a lot of the orientation is toward death. There's two ways to understand what we might call the Absolute or the Unconditioned. One is by contemplating death, and the other is by contemplating birth.

[15:27]

In human societies, birth is a happy event. Death is a sad event. So there are a lot of meditations about passing away, about explicitly meditating on death, about, as I mentioned, meditating on the decaying corpse, the impermanence of the body, et cetera, et cetera. And those to me, I think, in my own understanding, albeit this is somewhat my opinion, it strikes me that that's very much the stance of ancient societies where life was extremely uncertain and death was a very frequent occurrence. Babies would die. Your children would die. Your husbands would die in battle at the age of 19. People would die from diseases constantly. Famines would sweep through. I mean, death was, the smell of death, the taste of death, the experience of death was just, permeated everything, you can imagine. And there are

[16:31]

lots of places in the world today where that's still true. I mean, it's not true in our society. And so I think it's understandable that the religious practice would, if it's a choice between trying to confront birth and death through one or the other, to focus on death because it's a little more accessible. We don't really remember our birth. There are no meditations that I know of on meditating on birth. The monks were encouraged to go to the charnel ground, but I don't see a passage where they were encouraged to go into the birth room and watch a baby coming out. I think in our enlightened, I mean, I was of the first generation, I think, where the hospitals allowed the fathers in to see that. I was, I can't remember, let's see, 74, I was 27, and I had a camera. I really was excited about being there. They allowed me in and I watched it happen. And it's a kind of meditation on

[17:36]

birth. And anyone who's actually a mother, a woman who actually gives birth, it's life. It's a tremendous mystery. The fundamental mystery of death can also be experienced at that moment, too, because this being comes out. It didn't exist before and now it does. Where did it come from? Where was it before? What is the nature of its consciousness? What is the nature of its mind? How is it created? My own reflection from studying all the world's religions is I think that it's not just Buddhism that frames the fundamental religious question as birth and death. It's all religions, really. And the other aspect of being a Buddhist, beginning Buddhism, and also the Buddhism that we study, Japanese Zen, is our tradition, is the Buddha was besides being a man and a prince, he was also a warrior. The Aryan culture

[18:38]

was very warlike. They were like the Mongols or Genghis Khan or somebody. They swept down from Central Asia and conquered India. And their culture was like the Norman conquerors or the, you know, today we see it in Afghanistan. We're now familiar with that. Probably the closest modern day analog to the way the Aryans were is Afghanistan. I mean, that's a cognate culture to the culture of the Buddha. So he was undoubtedly, if any part of the story is true, a trained warrior. He fought in battles. His confrontation with death was as a warrior wielding a sword, a bow, a lance. And so you find that warrior quality, at least I do, in the story of the Buddha. His whole spiritual quest is very much a warrior-like image of, first of all, he starves himself practically to death, extreme asceticism, in a sense grappling

[19:45]

with death as an adversary, as an enemy to be overcome. And the meditations that he does are really intensely striving. He's going to overcome, he's going to conquer. The militaristic imagery is very, very present if you have a mind to see it. This is a person who attacks spirituality and the quest for understanding of the human condition in the same way that he would have attacked a deadly foe. And then he overcomes. His final foe is Mara, the great tempter, the Satan of Buddhism. And they grapple psychically. And Mara, in the form of various psychic states, brings him hailstones and storms, and then in a very important moment brings him a vision of beautiful maidens coming to excite his lust and distract him from his goal. And he has to vanquish all of this as the temptations of the enemy. Very similar in its flavor to the 40 days in the desert of Jesus, where he grapples

[20:50]

with Satan, and Satan offers him the world, and Jesus is tempted. If he weren't tempted it wouldn't be a story, it wouldn't be real psychically, but he turns away from that. And so the Buddha finally wins. He becomes the Buddha and he overcomes the obstacles. These are all framed in the language of a warrior, as far as I see it. Very much a man's game to pick up the sword, to go after the foe, to conquer the foe, to overcome the weaknesses, the temptations, the lusts. And the Zen school retains a tremendous amount of that, and it was resuscitated in the medieval period in Japan, because the main patrons of the Zen school were samurai, the warrior class, who were like the Aryans, the rulers of that time. And so Zen, in my view, studying the history of that, really took on a lot of that warrior

[21:53]

quality. So where is birth? Where is life? Where is motherhood? Where is sexuality? Where is intimacy in all of that? There is a quality of renunciation and isolation in that quest, which we still see in the architecture, in the actual quality of the Zendo here. You come in, we're very quiet, we don't look at each other, we don't talk, we don't interact, we face the wall. We face our fundamental aloneness, which in a sense is, in a sense, ultimately the quality of facing death. At the moment of death, we are fundamentally alone. And we might say that in replicating the spiritual path of the Buddha, we are rehearsing the moment of death in our life, in order to vivify and to complete our life. And in

[22:54]

the Tibetan tradition, you know, they have lots of very explicit ways in which you practice dying in all of that. But where is birth in this? My own sense is that Buddhism, in the course of its history, from its beginnings as an ascetic, world-renouncing religion, where sexuality, intimacy, family, were all rejected by the core adherents, the Sangha and the lay people, the people with families, the people who lived ordinary lives, were relegated to a very secondary status. You see that gradually over the centuries, Buddhism begins to bring back those things that it had previously renounced. The so-called Mahayana, which is our tradition, begins to emphasize things that in the early stages of Buddhism were not so much in the forefront, like compassion, friendliness, and intimacy, and care. And

[23:57]

so, in a sense, the energy of birth, the energy of intimacy and sexuality, begins to return, and we start to find in the imagery of Buddhism, instead of seeing statues of the ascetic Buddha with his ribs sticking out, a man who is confronting the ultimate, we start to see statues like that. This is, I believe, a Tara, a very voluptuous, bare-breasted woman, or like a statue I saw in the garden of Avalokiteshvara, or some goddess. This is an image of life energy, of sexuality, of eros, we might say, in a more psychological tone. This is an image which comes not from the world of the world-renouncing monk, but from the world of the world, our world, the ordinary world, where people interact, they fall in love, they have families. To

[24:59]

the point where, as the Tibetans put it, there are three turnings of the wheel in the history of Buddhism. The first was the one I talked about, the original Buddhism. Then there was the great vehicle, the Mahayana, where the virtue of compassion becomes all-embracing and all-encompassing. And then in the third turning, which is the turning of Tantra, which is the specialty of the Tibetan tradition, we fully embrace, actually, all the passions that were originally rejected by the Buddha, and we turn those into vehicles for awakening. One way of understanding the cycle that Buddhism has gone through is it began, in a sense, with a heroic confrontation with death, and a way of surpassing or transcending death, and gradually worked its way back to embracing birth. So originally, all Buddhists who were part of the Sangha, the core Sangha, monks and nuns, were celibate. Sexuality was completely

[26:04]

renounced. In fact, the passages about sexuality and the making of the rules about sexuality, although originally, when they were translated, they were quite censored by the early English scholars who were horrified at the explicitness of all of this, they're really quite interesting when you look at it. The case studies or the case law that was brought to the Buddha for judgment had to do with lustful monks, straying nuns, beautiful village women that would come in and cause trouble. Sometimes the sexual object was an animal, like a goat or a sheep. It was very, very thorough in their understanding of all the different ways in which the sexuality they were supposed to renounce begins to come back in, and how the Buddha deals with it. Each time he says, well, no, that's not appropriate behavior for a monk. Well, no, we can't do it with a sheep. No, if it's one woman, if it's two women, one of whom's young and one

[27:07]

of whom's old, one of whom's high caste and one of whom's low caste, that's no good. He goes through all this explicit stuff. If it's two men, no, we can't do that. Two women, no. And finally, he says, no sexual expression at all, just blanket rejection of it all. He doesn't just start with that. He goes through, the Indians are very thorough in their exposition of all of this, like the Kama Sutra and so forth. Every position, every possibility is explored. So in a sense, what you have is a catalog of all forms of human intimacy expressed sexually, including family sexuality, but not limited to that, the sexuality that produces a child, and a rejection of all of that. And then gradually you see that that energy begins to come back and is absorbed and incorporated into the teaching. And so here we are today. I'm coming back now from the broad historical strokes to the specific situation of Zen Center. Zen Center was brought here, founded by Suzuki Roshi,

[28:12]

who was a Zen priest from Japan, married, with children, who came here, although we have to understand that until the 19th century, Buddhist priests in Japan were not officially allowed to have families, although just as we're discovering with the Catholic Church, most of them kind of did. They had girlfriends or lovers. I mean, they had an intimate life, but it was secret. But they were officially allowed to have families in the 19th century after the Meiji Reformation in Japan. It's interesting, the historical difference. We're discovering now, with all of this scandal about the Catholic Church, that Catholic priests weren't celibate until about 1100 A.D., and apparently the main reason why the Church made them celibate is to avoid priests passing along property to their children, you know,

[29:14]

the temples and so forth. It was not a theological thing at all, and as Gary Wills, who's a writer and Catholic, points out, all of Jesus' disciples were family men. They had wives and children, so if they're supposed to be the model of the shepherd and the sheep, celibacy isn't quite matching that. The opposite would happen in Japan, that the priests were officially celibate for exactly the same reasons. They didn't want priests to develop families and then pass along the property. They wanted the property to be retained by the churches. But in the 19th century, they realized that a celibate, officially celibate priesthood was a political force, and they wanted to incorporate the independent political force that was powerful. You know, in the 12th century, the big monasteries in Japan, if the monks didn't like what was going on, they would pick up these spears and march down the mountain by the thousands, and threaten the emperor. And, you know, the monasteries got their

[30:18]

way, and this happened in Tibet, too. There were wars between the various monasteries. So to take the fangs out of all of that, as I understand it, they allowed the priests to marry and have children, and thus be incorporated into the regular society. So Tsukiroshi came here as a married priest, but I think still retained the notion that if you were really serious as a Zen priest, you didn't marry. That was still the ideal, still the model, and he talked about it. In fact, when the first group of us were being ordained, and I was the last group, and the last group that got ordained by him, he saw the difficulties that some of us had with our new marriages and things like that, and he explicitly said, look, I want my next set of people after you to be celibate. Well, that scared some people off right away. There were several of my colleagues who were thinking about being ordained who scuttled away on that score. And to tell you something that probably most

[31:24]

of you, even that live here, don't know very well, when Tassajara was first bought and founded, Tsukiroshi's first thought is it would only be for men, because his only experience was of a male-only monastery. He had no idea how you do a monastery with men and women, because the Japanese are a little bit more practical about such things than we are. The understanding is if you put men and women together, particularly young ones, you're going to have lots of trouble. If you think of sexuality as trouble, that's what you're going to get. That's just natural. So his idea was men only. Well, I think there was a big argument about that, so he let the women in, kind of like the Buddha. The Buddha said just for men, and reluctantly the women were allowed in. We young hippie types had our own ideas about things. So for example, I think there was a point at which, this is

[32:27]

a little before I came, some of the students convinced Tsukiroshi it was an American custom to have mixed nude bathing. We have these baths down there, and so Tsukiroshi kind of accepted that. He said, okay. He was a very accepting person, so that's the way it was for the first few months, and that was great. Then he found out from other people that wasn't an American custom. In fact, it's a lot more of a Japanese custom than here, because in Japan nudity is not synonymous with sexuality, or didn't used to be. So mixed bathing was not considered a sexual affair. It was just a practical matter of getting clean. So there was a time in Japanese history when mixed bathing, men and women, was socially acceptable and not thought of as anything special. Well, it wasn't that way for us. It was very sensual to do that, and so we were split off, and there was a men's side and a women's side. And in the early days, men shaved their heads. All the men shaved their heads, because we

[33:33]

were thinking of ourselves, had this fantasy of being Zen monks on our way to being Zen masters, and the women, of course, didn't. I don't think any woman ever shaved her head in Zen center until much, much later when women began to be actually ordained. And the first 15 ordinees of the 16 people that Suzuki Roshi ordained were men. There was one woman in my group, and that was the only woman. Then it began to be more equal. So the only point I'm trying to make is that even here in this institution, the starting point of figuring all this out in America built on a lot of old patterns that are very ancient, that go way back into the origins of Buddhism. Celibacy, renouncing family and the world, renouncing sexuality and intimacy in a kind of ordinary way, et cetera, et cetera. And I'm including, when I talk about birth and reproduction, I'm also widening that to include, I use the

[34:36]

term sexuality and intimacy, because as we know, human sexuality is not in any way limited to reproductive sexuality or intimacy. There's lots of different kinds as cataloged in the ancient texts. And all of that is set aside, interestingly enough. So when it says on the Han, birth and death is a great matter, I feel that historically, Buddhism has been very skewed toward death as a great matter, but birth is, well, is a difficult matter, complicated, so let's set it aside. And I think now, in American culture, I'm starting to reflect on your question in the back. In this culture, which is democratically oriented, which has had a feminist revolution, which is not at all patient with the ancient notions of a male-dominated spiritual tradition, where there's lots of hypocrisy and celibacy is the norm, but if you actually look at what happens, it's not. As a friend of mine who's

[35:37]

a woman, once said in a discussion that some Buddhist teachers who are friends of mine were having about this, she said, well, as far as male celibacy is concerned, I agree, males can be celibate. And then she stopped for the comic pause and said, for about five minutes. That's probably, I mean, also true of women, too. She was making a point about men, because we were discussing men teachers who've gotten into a lot of trouble in this area. And you know, Zen Center is, in its own history, has a lot of that, too. So, Buddhism historically gradually brought back these energies into the fold, and we see that in later Buddhism, but even in Zen Center, we ... I'm coming back more to Steve's question now about how all of this relates to our core practice, how we practice meditation, how we understand that birth and death is a great matter. How do we confront that? Well, in a way of illustrating

[36:43]

this, I'll tell you a story about one of my colleagues at Tassajara in the early days. You know, it was a big ... we have this thing called oryoki, which many of you who've come to retreats here know it's a special formalized way of eating, which is done in Japanese monasteries where you have three bowls. You all know this, oryoki? Anyway, Suzuki Roshi wanted us to do it this way, because that's the way it was done in his monasteries, and so we all learned the very elaborate ... it's kind of like tea ceremony for eating. You lay out the bowls on cloths and so on and so forth. And the diet, the food at Tassajara was monastery food, which was basically, it was, you know, plain rice in the big bowl, soup in the second bowl, and a little vegetable in the third bowl. Well, just as, you know, celibacy is a kind of, you know, veneer for real behavior, which isn't, there was this thing from the

[37:48]

very beginning at Tassajara, and you folks who've been there can tell me if this still is a big deal, called town trips. You know, and all the people who lived there could order things on the town trips, like cookies, peanut butter, you know, Twinkies, you know, whatever. And these stashes of real American food, nourishing food, food with fat in it, it was very cold down there, was kept in the rooms. Then we went into the zendo, and we ate this very, you know, ascetic diet. So the real diet that we all ate was a combination of this ascetic diet and all this junk food that people kind of bought to supplement, you know, this really not very adequate diet. So, is this still the case at Tassajara, that there's town trips? No longer. No longer, okay. Everything's all pure now. And so, there were lots of things that happened, like midnight raids on the kitchen, for example, which, of course, happens in

[38:48]

all monasteries. What happens in monasteries like this is there's mischievousness sets in. You know, if you don't have women around, this is, I'm speaking from a man's point, if you don't have women in the monastery to be mischievous with, then it's food, and it's other things, and it's clothing, and it's whatever details you can put your hands on. So there were kitchen raids where people would sneak into the kitchen and try to find the, you know, the butter. And in fact, Graham Petchy, who was one of the earliest Zen center priests to go to Japan, and actually went to Eheiji, which is the main Japanese monastery, he and Philip Wilson, who were there together, were starving, practically, because they're both big guys. Philip is huge, you know. He's a football player at Stanford. He was just a huge guy, and Graham is six foot four, and, you know, very formidable. And, you know, the diet was designed for, you know, much smaller men, et cetera. And they also didn't have the Japanese skill, which they noticed all the other monks had, to shovel rice into their mouth without chewing it. Just, you know, get as much as you could. So the average

[39:51]

monk would eat three, four bowls and get sheer volume, you know, and Graham and Philip couldn't do it. So they got a hold of some butter, and they stole it somehow, and they had it in their, sort of, sleeping bags or whatever, in their sleeping room, and they were kind of surreptitiously eating it, you know. And they were caught by, as it happens, Kobinchino, who became one of the early priests at Zen Center, a wonderful man, but at that time was an upholder of the strictness of Eheji, and he scolded them tremendously. You know, you're here from America, you know, you're supposed to set an example, and look at you. You know, you're bad monks, you've stolen butter, you're secretly eating it, you know. Well, so the universality of all of this came through at Tassajara. We had these raids on the kitchen, and then one friend of mine, who was a very, very serious person and felt very guilty about his raids on the kitchen, decided to do something which I thought was quite wonderful, and I love this story. He had all of his town trip stuff, you know,

[40:54]

his Reese's peanut butter cups and chocolate and all these things, and he just couldn't feel right about secretly eating it at night in his room, so he took all the stuff at midnight, got out his oryoki bowls, went into the zendo, and spread it all out, and put it all into his bowls, and, you know, did the whole oryoki ceremony, and ate his junk food, you know, in the full monastic situation. Now, to me, that is exemplary, exemplary of, you might say, the non-dual union of the renunciate, the death side of practice and the birth side of practice, which includes all the appetites, all the lusts, you know, the sweetness of chocolate, the silky quality on the tongue of peanut butter, the smell of the flower on the altar, all of this, you know, the voluptuous woman who actually is the embodiment of wisdom,

[41:56]

Pranayama Paramita, to whom we pay homage every morning when we chant, homage to Pranayama Paramita, the perfection of wisdom, the lovely, the holy, the embodiment, the visual embodiment of Pranayama Paramita is this beautiful woman. The statues of her are some of the most beautiful works of Buddhist art, and who are the models for these beautiful, beautiful statues? There must be young women of marriageable age, tremendously attractive, and there they are. Wisdom is considered a woman or a feminine quality in Buddhism. There's a famous passage in the Vimalakirti Sutra, which is a very unusual work in Buddhist history. Do you know this Vimalakirti? Vimalakirti was kind of an Indian investment banker. A rich man had concubines,

[43:00]

slaves, many wives, etc., etc. He was a totally worldly man, but in the sutra he is presented as the most wise man in the world next to the Buddha, wiser than all of the Buddha's disciples, and yet he's a totally worldly man. He's kind of like Rupert Murdoch or somebody in that context. And the sutra is making this point over and over again, and in that sutra Shariputra, who is the embodiment in the ancient Buddhist texts of the highest wisdom, is set upon in that sutra as a kind of dunce, doesn't get transcendental wisdom at all, always sticking to the letter of the law. And in fact, literally, there's a point in the sutra where these beautiful flowers rain down from heaven in celebration of the great telling of this sutra. And the flowers fall on Vimalakirti and they fall off, because Vimalakirti lives in the world and is completely subsumed by all the pleasures and distractions of the world, but is not

[44:06]

caught or stuck by anything. Whereas the flowers stick to Shariputra's robe and he can't get them off. There's kind of a comic, this is one of the few sutras that actually has some comedy in it, so he struggles to get the flowers off and he can't. He's very upset. He sees that they're not sticking to Vimalakirti. Anyway, there's a great passage in the sutra later on where the talk turns to the doctrine, which was well-fashioned in Buddhism at that time, that a woman could not attain enlightenment unless she were first to be reborn as a man. This was the teaching. And so, Shariputra is there, I don't remember, I was looking for my copy of the Vimalakirti and I couldn't find it. I have too many books, so I need to organize that. But I remember from memory when I studied it. The Goddess comes and confronts Shariputra. She's a beautiful, beautiful woman. And they talk about this and she queries Shariputra

[45:06]

about how can that be when the nature of mind is formless and ultimately there's no masculine or feminine in the nature of mind. And Shariputra tries to answer. At some point the Goddess performs magic and makes them switch bodies. So suddenly Shariputra has the body of a beautiful woman and she has the body of Shariputra. Can you picture this? This is like Las Vegas comedy show or like Saturday Night Live or Monty Python. This is very bizarre. And then she says, okay, Shariputra, what do you think now? Are you any different or not? Are you the same person? He looks at this body and he says, he's completely phonixed, you know, because this whole doctrine that somehow you have to... to attain enlightenment. Well, suddenly he's a woman, but he's still Shariputra, you see.

[46:42]

So he's completely blown away and she then expounds in the sutra very beautifully about how the actual wisdom that we're searching for in our practice is not dependent on the limitation or physical form of body of man and woman or anything. I'm going to run over. There is a doctrine in Zen. I'm skipping around as I always do, but believe me, it makes sense to me, so I hope... There is a doctrine in Zen in which there are two kinds of powers of practice. One is called Joriki, which means in English something like self-power, the power of one's self to

[47:49]

achieve awakening. And the other is Tariki, which means the power of the other. And typically this is used in a scholarly sense to distinguish between schools like Zen, where we set out consciously with the notion that the Buddha was a human being, I'm a human being, the Buddha attained enlightenment by his own efforts, I can attain enlightenment by my own efforts. That's contrasted with such schools as the Pure Land School or the Nichiren Shu, where one gives oneself over to the power of another, like the power of the great Amida Buddha, or the power of the Lotus Sutra, to achieve spiritual advancement for us. So in a sense we surrender. The minute we sit down in meditation... I mean, Steve, you pointed out that there is a receptive quality to the meditative experience, in the sense that we're not doing anything

[48:52]

in particular when we sit. We're sitting still. But what happens in our mind depends on the what we do with it. In a sense, by sitting down we confront the basic issue of birth and death, the quality of being here and then not being here. Who are we really? What are we really? And there are two ways to approach this issue. One is to approach it like a warrior, and, in fact, the patron saint, you might say, of the Zendo, traditionally, is Manjusri, a bodhisattva who wields a sword. And this is supposed to be the sword that cuts through delusions. So Manjusri is a kind of fighter, warrior. You don't typically see statues of women with swords, although sometimes you do. A sword is typically the implement of

[49:54]

a soldier, a warrior. So there is a kind of warrior quality to sitting in the Zendo. I don't know if... Do we still use the stick here at all? Or has that gone away? No? Not so much? It means a little bit? No? Not here. Good. I used to think I was... I used to have fantasies of burning all the sticks. But the stick is when they used to hit people on the shoulder to wake them up. That's supposed to be called the sword of Manjusri. That's Joriki. Joriki is, you know, great effort, you know, don't waste time, fire, your head is on fire, you know, make every possible human effort, sacrifice everything to attain enlightenment in this instant, don't waste time, death is around the corner. That whole quality, that warrior quality, is one side. The Tariki side is more what Steve suggested, which is, you know, that sitting is a kind of giving up of all that, of what Suzuki Roshi

[50:57]

called gaining idea, looking ahead to something that we're going to be in the future, and the whole point of the process is to get there, what I like to call the conveyor belt to Buddhahood. You know, you put yourself on the conveyor belt, and that whole notion, you give that up, and you surrender or sit really in the notion that right now, without any further ado, we are already complete. These are the two sides, and some of you may know, I recently recovered from a very, a dire illness. I had a brain infection, and my brain became quite damaged, and I could barely move, and my mind was not too functional in a whole lot of different ways. And I think it's fair to say that I'm very much a self-powered type person, and I approached Zen practice from that point of view, very much a heroic model

[52:02]

of practice, where I felt that on my own steam, in my own power, by making great efforts, I could accomplish my spiritual goal. Well, suddenly, just like Shariputra suddenly got turned into a woman, or became a woman's body, I suddenly found myself in the body and mind of a four-year-old, because that was about my level of functioning, and I couldn't do anything. I had no self-power. I could barely lift my hand and lift my head. I couldn't even sit up. They needed to, you know, two people needed to wield me to sit me up, which was a very frightening experience. My mind was pretty dysfunctional. I couldn't even see very well or hear very well. And I had also the emotional quality of a very young child. I felt totally incapable of doing anything on my own, and all I could do was essentially

[53:10]

cry out for help, for others to come and help me. And my wife of 32 years, some of you who are old-timers may know her, Amy, in a sense became my mother. And emotionally, I thought of her as my mother. I needed her as my mother. The whole dynamic of how I was with my mother as a very young child suddenly psychologically came into play, and in order to survive at all, I had to embrace a sense of surrender to a feminine other, a specific person. Just like a young child, you know, depends and surrenders and loves their mother. It was quite an extraordinary experience, really a great teaching for me, and the subject of this book that I wrote about it, called Healing Lazarus. Lazarus was raised from the dead,

[54:13]

as was I, and the whole notion in the book is that Lazarus has to be reborn as I was, and literally reborn and have to re-experience growing up from being a young child to an adult, which in my case took about two years. So a year and a half ago, I could barely function and certainly not talk with reasonable articulateness, as I hope I'm doing now. And not only did I have to thoroughly understand with great suddenness and shock the quality of other power of yielding to, you might say, the deeper effort or rhythms of the universe rather than my own, but I had to shift my whole locus of attention from, you might say, death to birth, because the whole experience was like a birth experience. I mean, maybe one of the reasons

[55:14]

why birth is not used as a spiritual object of meditation in the way that death is, is we don't really have much experience consciously of our birth. As adults, we're really oriented more toward, we move forward in time toward our inevitable end, but I had the very unusual and rare experience of getting born again, not in the Christian sense, but in the literal, physiological sense and emotional sense, and having to rebuild in my brain my entire personality. So a very tough lesson for a self-power guy, you might say, and one in which I came to appreciate not just the, you might say, the symbolic or metaphorical quality or power in spirituality of the mother, but literally, I had to relive my whole emotional relationship

[56:18]

to my mother through my wife, who very gradually became my wife again as I grew up, you know, and I got old enough to have a wife, and she became a wife. But until then, she was really my mother. She would come to the hospital every day, and I would just wait and wait like a young child for mother to come. So I probably have a unique personal perspective on mothers and motherhood and the quality of the mother in Buddhist practice because of what I went through. Sometimes the prājñāpāramitā or transcendental wisdom is termed in Buddhist scripture as the mother of all Buddhas. So what we sometimes call emptiness or formlessness is actually conceived of as the matrix or the womb that produces awakening. And it's

[57:19]

interesting, as I was driving over, I remembered something I hadn't remembered for a while, is when the Chinese translated the Heart Sutra, which we recite every day, which among other things says, form is emptiness, emptiness is form. Well, that's how it's usually translated. Those words don't make it for me. They never have. So maybe I'll use these last few minutes before my time runs out to reframe those concepts a little bit more accessibly. Form means everything that we experience, including our body. It means our body and the whole material world that we experience—sight, sounds, touch, sensuality, sexuality, intimacy, physical sensations internally and externally. So form really means physicality, me as a

[58:30]

physical being. And emptiness—translations are always so difficult because we think these words are what it is. It doesn't say emptiness. Originally it says shunyata. Shunyata is a Sanskrit word that means swollen, actually. The way a gourd or a dried squash is swollen, it has—you know how a big squash can get there really big, and you rattle them and the dried seeds rattle. But if you open it up, there's no pith. It's all empty inside. So the actual word shunyata means something quite untranslatable. And the Chinese, doing the best that they could, and with their predilection for concrete rather than abstract

[59:36]

images, used the character for sky. So when we chant this, one of the ways it could be translated is, a body is sky. Sky is body. Whatever is body, that's sky. Whatever is sky, that's body. Body and sky. Have any of you ever just had the experience, either as children or adults, of just lying back on a warm summer's day and just watching the sky? In the Tibetan Dzogchen tradition, they actually, and also in Hindu yoga, they actually have an elaborate meditation practice and teaching in which you actually just get up on a hillside and you just open your eyes and look at the sky. So part of what this sutra is saying, and remember it's being spoken by Avalokiteshvara,

[60:36]

the Bodhisattva of Compassion. It's not being spoken by her, but it's about her, and the subject of the sutra is Prajnaparamita, who is embodied as a woman. And it's about the dialectic or the unity or the non-duality between ourselves and sky. The sky is so mysterious. If we actually look at the sky with an open mind and with the kind of receptivity that Steve spoke of, what are we looking at when we look at the sky? Either the night sky or the daytime sky. If we're spiritually attuned to what we're actually looking at, the sky is an extraordinary, dizzying mystery. You look up and you're looking up at the entire universe. It's actually there on this planet. We look up and the sky is, maybe there are some clouds that come into the sky, maybe not, but the sky appears to

[61:43]

be totally different from this world that we live on, this planet that we walk on, this body that we live in. But the sky is a part of who we are. The sky is, in the words of the sutra, actually our fundamental nature. We come from sky, we return to sky, and the sky is the mother, the mother of all of us. We are, in a sense, inwound and birthed by sky. In the fundamental text by Dogen, and I'm going to come out now about my feelings about Dogen after the last thirty years. I don't like Dogen very much. I know this may be heresy for those of you who are studying him, but Dogen, I don't feel enough eros in Dogen. Maybe in his own life he was more of a human being, but he's like the Ignatius Loyola to

[62:46]

me of Buddhism, so strict and so ... Anyway, he did write some beautiful things, and one of the core texts, called the Phakansazangi, where he describes what we are to do when we do Zazen, he essentially answers the implied question we all have when we sit, which is, well, what am I supposed to do? As Steve said, we're not actually doing anything. The way he describes it, the way it's often translated is, think non-thinking. Think non-thinking. This is indeed going to be my final point. Maybe. Well, this is not something that can be explained. In fact, it's one of the things that Dogen

[63:48]

was really good at, is using language to destroy language, to get you outside of the whole realm of language. This enterprise of Zazen is not about language or thinking or thoughts or ideas at all. In fact, it's not about anything that we can conceive of. But it certainly isn't about thinking, and even to use the word mind, which implies to our ears the thinking part of our being is not quite right. Again, it's very important to understand the translations of things. When we say mind, Zen mind, beginner's mind, Zen Shin, Shoshin, Shin is the character in Chinese and Japanese for mind and heart. It means the same. It means both. When the

[64:51]

Japanese say the character in Japanese, they say Kokoro, which is here. It's not here. It's here. And think non-thinking is really the mind's linguistic way of pointing to the heart. The heart doesn't think. The heart, if it does anything, feels. And I've said for many years, and I'll say it again, that Buddhism is really not much about thinking or about ideas or about teachings. It's about feeling. It's mostly non-conceptual in its essence, and all the efforts to talk about it, all the efforts to say something, even my efforts today are really quite beside the point. And when I woke up from my coma and couldn't talk, and my mind was in an extraordinarily altered and damaged state, I look back now and I think

[65:57]

that what was intact, what was intact besides some fundamental essence of sky that was with me even in the depths of my coma, when everybody saw me as being nearly dead, was some feeling that I couldn't even describe it today. But when Amy came into the room to sit next to me each morning, and I lay there unable to talk, unable to do anything except maybe raise one finger and say, this is yes or this is no, and she would talk, and I would just motion to her just to please talk to me, keep talking. I just wanted to hear her voice. I felt in a sense most deep in my practice at that moment. I had come back from the dead, really, and I was barely alive. I was alive only in the most, only the way a baby is alive. We look

[67:01]

at a baby and we're so happy, but what can the baby do? It can't talk. It can't express itself. It's totally helpless. It can't eat feed. It can't do anything. The mother has to do everything, but the baby is a human being. It's alive in its most fundamental essence. That baby grows up to be all of us, and we are still that baby, and we are still that baby. At the moment of our dying, we will be that baby. So I guess my effort today is to resuscitate or bring into view and help us. Our responsibility as Americans trying to do this practice is not just to do it and accept it, but also to study it, to challenge it, if necessary, to change it. There's lots of old wood in this tradition. We see the Catholics

[68:04]

going through it, and if we think, well, that's them, we're immune from all of that. Not so. That's true of any old tradition. It's like a forest. If you walk in a forest, you're very struck by two things. One is the grandeur of the forest, the beautiful trees that rise high up in the sky, twinkling at the top, but you're also struck by the tremendous amount of dead wood that nourishes the forest by decaying and helping the next generation of trees to go. I tend to ramble, so forgive me, but the Forest Service, they had an idea for the last 40 or 50 years. The thing to do would be to clear out all of that junky underbrush and make the forest more pristine. So now we have forests that burn the way they are not supposed to, and forests that are diseased and various things. We've upset the natural rhythm. Walking in the forest can be a great meditation for those who are involved in something like an institution like this, which already is

[69:08]

growing well beyond its roots. When I come here as an old-timer, I walked out just before the lecture to look at the garden. That hedge that surrounds the center tree down there, what do you call that area? The herb circle. That hedge was this high when I lived here. Now it's above your head. It's beautiful to me. None of you who live here can be struck by it unless you're old-timers, and even then, you just lived here while it grew, so you are struck by it. But I come here and I think, that's the little hedge. Just like the child's a baby, and you remember that, but then suddenly he or she is 25, or my son is 28, and you look at the hedge. This is human life. This is the quality of birth and death and what is framed on either side, the sky. So I don't know if I've exactly made sense. Oftentimes

[70:13]

when I talk, I wonder what I said afterwards. Maybe in question and answer you can help me know what I said, but I'm trying to express something a little beyond what I would traditionally have said 15 or 20 years ago, where I would just give some talk about some scripture. Because I feel very much like Vimalakirti. I'm a businessman, although I'm trying not to be. I'm a musician. I'm an author. I'm a family person. I don't have concubines. That's not our social milieu. I haven't thought about that for a long time, whether it would be nice to have concubines. But it's made a big point of in the Vimalakirti Sutra that he has all these concubines. So I suppose in great contrast to Buddhist monks who don't. But I feel that the role of Vimalakirti as embodied in our society, as embodied in me,

[71:15]

is to bring together the tradition and the social reality of today and make of it something fresh and new, which I feel ultimately was Suzuki Roshi's purpose in coming here. Against all advice, they thought he was crazy to do that, but he did. And he hung out with the various unwashed, bearded, long-haired people that came to his door without discrimination or judgment, for which I am grateful. And here we all are, still coming to the places that he began, listening to people like me who knew him well, and struggling to figure out how to put it all together. I'm just glad to be here and glad to be with all of you. And I look forward to talking with some of you later, more informally, and find out if anything I said made any sense at all. Thank you.

[72:19]

Thank you.

[72:25]

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