In the talk this morning, Taigen had latent sacred tools and monastic rules, Zen rule-bending and the training for pure hearts. Taigen Dan is a Soto Zen priest and Dharma heir in the lineage of Shunryu Suzuki Roshi and a disciple of Rev. Anderson. Taigen first studied Buddhist art and culture in Japan in 1970. Taigen began formal, everyday Sasen Soto practice in 1975 at the New York Zen Center. He was an award-winning documentary film editor before going to work full-time for the San Francisco Zen Center in 1979. He has practiced and lived at the San Francisco Zen Center, Tassahara Monastery and Green Gulch Farm. Taigen lived for two years in Kyoto, Japan from 1990 to 1992. He is the author of the Bodhisattva Archetypes and is co-translator of several Zen texts,

[01:05]

including Cultivating the Empty Field, The Wholehearted Way, and Dogen's Pure Standards for the Zen Community. He has contributed to many other books and articles. Taigen teaches at the Berkeley Graduate Theological Union, at California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco, and at St. Mary's College. Taigen leads meditation groups in Molinas, San Rafael, and San Francisco. He is currently chair of the board of the San Francisco Zen Center. I think all monastics are interested in bending the rules. And I think this will be both an entertaining and profound paper, so thank you. Well, it's a great, great honor to be here, a pleasure. So what I want to talk about this morning is to bring some examples from East Asian Buddhism, mostly East Asian Zen Buddhism, of the pure heart.

[02:25]

So the question is, what are the qualities of a sincere, pure-hearted addict? And how does training in monastic communities or semi-monastic communities help to develop this? And just to start out, part of my inspiration in this paper was my sense early on in my experience of my community in San Francisco Zen Center, that the very senior people, the most experienced practitioners, but most particularly themselves, often accepted, quirky, not some homogenized mold. So how did they get there? So I have three parts to this paper, at least three papers, I'm trying to cram into one. I want to talk about Dogan's monastic rules and some things about that.

[03:26]

And I want to talk about the archetypal bodhisattva Maitreya, the enlightened being, a bodhisattva who is predicted to be the next future Buddha, and how he represents in various ways an aspect of, an example of, a model for the pure heart. And then some of the practices particularly he represents as a figure. And then the third part is to go a little bit into the motif that recurs throughout Zen of the Zen fool, and to bring some examples from that. So starting with the monastic regulations. So Dogan, A. A. Dogan, who was the founder of Soto Zen in Japan, has already been mentioned somewhat by a number of other New York lady yesterday, is known particularly nowadays as a great writer, philosophical and poetic writer of spiritual teachings.

[04:36]

But actually his writings were basically unknown until the last century, except by a few Soto priests. What he's really most important for historically in a lot of ways is founding a monastic order. So he devoted the last ten years of his life, from 1200 to 1253, to developing Eheji, which is still one of the headquarters temples of the Soto Zen school. And he wrote a book called Ehe Shingi, which I translated as Dogan's Pure Standards for the Zen Community. And so he's really, in doing this, was translating the Chinese Buddhist, the Chan monastic tradition for Japan. He brought this to Japan. And a lot of what he has in there is verbatim from the vidya, and from earlier Chinese Chan monastic regulations, including the Chagwang Chinggui, which he quotes verbatim often.

[05:38]

And I had in the paper, I want to try and skip as much of the paper as I can so that we have some time for discussion, but make some general statements about Buddhist monasticism. And maybe I don't need to say so much about that here. Just briefly, that it was the communal institution of the monastic order that was founded by Shakyamuni Buddha 2,500 years ago in northern India. And Buddhist monks are officially designated as home neighbors. So there's the aspect, the physical aspect of renunciation and entering the monastery. But, of course, the inner work of freeing oneself from ensnarement, from social and psychological conditioning is part of that home leaving. So in actual monastic practice, it's obvious that there's so much in monasticism that's common to all traditions. But in Zen, there's great emphasis on taking care of all activities with wholehearted, positive attitude.

[06:41]

Dogen particularly is, well, before I get to that, one aspect of Mahayana Buddhist monasticism, which is worth mentioning, is that there's this sense of an oscillation between periods of training in the monastery and then going out into the marketplace. So not all Buddhist monastics spend their entire life as monks in the monastery. Very often, there's this going out, traveling around to visit other teachers, testing oneself. This was the pattern in China and Japan, and now somewhat in America. In Japan, still, after a period of monastic training, monks or priests go out and become parish priests, so to speak, take care of temples. So this kind of movement between monastic enclosure and the marketplace is at least one aspect of Mahayana Buddhist monasticism. Maybe less so in China.

[07:44]

There's also the aspect of the monastic institution as not just an opportunity for individual development and spiritual awareness and training, but also as an instrument, as a kind of counterculture to the world out there. And this is familiar, I think, in all monastic traditions. So, Dogen, in his monastic regulations, although he quotes the Veda and previous monastic regulations, his clear emphasis is on the attitude of practice. So a lot of his monastic regulations does deal with very particular procedural forms. One of the big differences between East Asian Buddhism and South Asian and Tibetan and Indian Buddhism is the communal monk's hall. So, in the model that Dogen has translated for Japan, there's the monks live in, basically, the monk's hall is a meditation hall,

[08:58]

and also the place where food is taken, informal ritual eating, and that one's place, one has an asana seat where one meditates, eats, and also sleeps. So, I had the opportunity to do one practice period in Japan in this mode, and it's very powerful. And a lot of what Dogen talks about in his regulations are very particular forms of how to take food, how the layout, the formal layout of the monk's hall, there's a particular place, a particular form for that, I don't know if you can see it up here, but there's a particular way that food is taken, and the rituals for taking food, there's a particular set of bowls, and they're unwrapped, and a very formal way of moving around in the monk's hall, and the procedures for that. And he also has a section on the rules of etiquette, and how to introduce and address seniors. So, a lot of very particular rules in etiquette and procedural forms. And yet, what was most remarkable to me in translating this, as I was going, is that, is the particular exemplar,

[10:05]

so the longest section of the work is called the Chi-ji-shin-gi, the pure standards for the temple administrators, and Dogen very much emphasizes the role of those in the monastery taking responsible positions. The Ino, the director of the meditation hall, the chief cook, the Tenzo, the director, the treasurer, the work leader. So, Dogen very much emphasizes the importance of those roles, the responsibility for taking care of the community, and for being exemplary in practice. And what struck me very much was that, of the 20 or so exemplary anecdotes or koans that Dogen cites of great masters, and how they took care of those monastic roles earlier on, maybe half of them involve actions in which the exemplar did something that would be seen as improper from the point of view of conventional morality,

[11:09]

and were violations of the monastic regulations even. So, a number of them threatened to beat up their teachers. One of them actually did. Or some other practitioner. One set fire to a monastery. This was a Japanese monastery. Another throws away some of the community's food. A few of them were shunned or even expelled from the community. And then after each of these stories, the protagonist is praised by Dogen for his sincere spirit of inquiry, and dedication to practice and commitment to the monastic community. So, what's going on here? Actually, I have a paper with a couple of stories of this, but I'll just go into one of them. Fushan Faiyuan was... lived 1981 to 1067, was chief cook in the story. And for background, Dogen talks... Well, first, Dogen says,

[12:11]

So the story begins... There's a little background. Fushan was traveling with another monk comrade, Tianyi, who later also became a noted master. And they visited Sheshan Wixian, who was a master who was famous for his cold and severe style of training. He was very tough and frugal, and feared by the monks. So Fushan and Tianyi arrive, and they enter the Tambario Hall, where you sit for some period before being admitted to the monastery. And they arrived in the middle of a snowy winter, and there were other monks there. Wixian just kind of abused them, and squandered them, and said nasty things to them, and threw cold water on them. All the other monks left. It was very cold. It was snow outside. And the other monks left, but Fushan and Tianyi stayed. And then Wixian said, Even if you beat us to death, we will not go.

[13:38]

So this is the attitude that's presented at the beginning of the story, this kind of very rigorous training. So the story later on... Fushan became the tenzo, the head cook. And I'll read a little bit from Dogen. The assembly suffered from the coarse and pure quality and quantity of food. One time Wixian, the teacher, went out to the village. Fushan finally stole the key to the storehouse and took some wheat flour to prepare a special flavorful gruel. Wixian suddenly returned and went to the hall. After eating, he sat in the outer hall and sat for the tenzo. When Fuyuan came, Wixian said, Is it true that he stole flour to cook the gruel? He could tell from eating it that this was not the ordinary food. And Fushan admitted it and implored Wixian to punish him. Wixian had him calculate the price of the flour and sell his robes and bowls to repay it. Then Wixian struck Fuyuan thirty blows with his staff and expelled him from the temple. And the story goes on to talk about how,

[14:41]

even though he was expelled from the temple, Fushan remained nearby in town, went on begging around to support himself and kept asking for re-admittance to the monastery. And asked his brother-in-law, and was just dismissed. And Wixian would not allow him that. Finally, even Wixian saw him begging near a building that belonged to the monastery and said, How come you're standing near here? You should pay us rent. And made him beg further. Finally though, Wixian went to the town and saw Fuyuan holding his bowl. Wixian returned to the assembly and said, Fuyuan truly has the determination to study Zen. And he was re-admitted. So, a number of points. It seems that even though this was a violation he stole from the monastic community's storehouse, he did this out of his care for the mosque. So that's one point. And there's also this dedication to

[15:44]

his own pursuing the way, which seems to be central to a number of these stories. The sincerity and dedication and intensity of his own inquiry into the way. And his own intention to find out. So, many of the stories have this quality. And it seems like these rules, the monastic regulations, were being used by the teacher not for the sake of moral propriety, but to test and more fully mold Fuyuan's commitment. So the rules were part of the training, but the point wasn't to just follow the rules exactly. So, as a historical footnote to the story, Fuyuan became the dharma heir of this teacher, Guixiang, in the Linzhi era, in the Silent Age. But my dharma brother Miao told a story yesterday about

[16:46]

Tosu I Ching and Fuyuan Durangdokai, the teacher who hit the student with a whisk. That teacher was a student of this fellow, who was, I think, a head cook, Guixiang. And there's an example here of inter-religious cooperation. So, we're having here a Christian and various Asian tradition dialogue. There's also going on dialogues within tradition. So, Norman Fisher and Miao and myself are from Snuki Roshi, lineage of Soto Zen. Reverend Hongshu is from the Chinese Chan tradition. And Father William and Father Tom Hand are trained in a Japanese Renzai lineage. So, we all have different Buddhisms, in a way, different orientations. I would say the heart is, of course, the same. But Fuyuan gives us an example of inter-religion cooperation

[17:49]

because the Sao Domo Soto line was about to die out. The former teacher, Dayang, had some dharma heirs, but they died before him. And he met Fuyuan, and they had total accord. But Fuyuan had already received transmission, dharma transmission, apostolic succession, whatever, from the Renzai lineage, and did not want to take on the Soto lineage. But he held it for Dayang, and passed it on to Tozu Ijin, the teacher of the other story. So, this is a remarkable example in our lineage of this cooperation between lineages. I just thought I'd mention that as a kind of footnote that this can happen. It actually has happened very often in the history of Buddhism, where there's meeting between people on different lineages and cooperation. So, that also is an example for us. Anyway, there are many other stories about this kind of rule bending.

[18:54]

I want to very much stress, though, that I'm not bringing this up to support an erroneous or misleading stereotype of Zen iconoclasm. So, in the initial quotation of Zen to America, writers such as Alan Watts and D.T. Suzuki kind of emphasized the image of Zen wild men. And there are these stories here and there in the tradition. But Zen is very much a tradition of decorum and faithful dedication to the monastic venture. I'm not talking about relevant individualism that I'm sure was talked about yesterday. But it's worth noting that Dogen, who is sometimes considered kind of fussy and cranky about the forms and spent a lot of time talking about the forms herself, talked about these examples of great dedication and sincerity

[19:55]

and pursuing the way, even when it meant bending the monastic code. So, it seems like what he's emphasizing... And all of these monks were steeped in conventional monastic practice and decorum. But he's emphasizing the development of, first of all, kindly concern for the whole community, which Dushan exemplifies in his sympathy with the hungry monks and the sincere intent of persistent inquiry into the mysteries of awakening. And somehow, it seems like the monastic rules in some of these cases were used as a way of developing that, even when the rules were bent. So, that's the first part of the paper. And we can talk more about that. Actually, there's a lot to talk about in the monastic rules, I'm sure. It would be quite interesting. But I want to go on to Maitreya, who is the great archetypal bodhisattva in all of Buddhism.

[21:00]

Actually, he's in the Theravada school, too. Mettaya is his name in Theravada school in the poem. His name means loving one. So, there's the practice of maitri, or in Pali, metta, that is associated with him. One of the main things about Maitreya is that he was kind of, throughout the archetype, he was kind of foolish. So, a number of the accounts describe Maitreya as a novice disciple of Shakyamuni Buddha, relatively junior disciple. And when Shakyamuni said, this monk, Maitreya, will be the next future Buddha, the other monks were quite surprised, because he was kind of foolish. He wasn't a particularly learned monk. He wasn't a particularly rigorous practitioner. He was kind of naive. You know, what? This person?

[22:02]

The next future Buddha? But the thing about him was that he was very kind, particularly noted for his loving kindness. So, I think he represents a kind of Buddhist model of a pure heart. And there are three particular, well, just about his foolishness, another story about that, just very briefly, from the Lotus Sutra, early in the Lotus Sutra, Shakyamuni Buddha emits a great light from his forehead, and Maitreya Bodhisattva says to the Bodhisattva, What's going on? What is that light? And Manjushri says, Don't you remember? Many lifetimes ago, there was a Buddha, and he gives the name of the Buddha, and the name of the Buddha field, and there was a similar light, which was the announcement of the preaching of the Lotus Sutra, and now we're going to hear the Lotus Sutra again, and then Manjushri, the Bodhisattva, goes on to say that at that time,

[23:03]

I was a Bodhisattva named such and such, and you were a Bodhisattva. Maitreya was a Bodhisattva in that past life, named Fame Seeker, who was named such because he was always seeking after fame and gain, and was also noted for never being able to remember a single line of his scripture. And yet, even then, he was very kind. So, all the negative things about Maitreya, in some ways, emphasize this loving kindness that is all through the stories about Maitreya. So, there are three particular strands of Buddhist meditation that Maitreya is associated with, and I think we can take them as one example of practices leading to this kind of loving kindness, leading to this pure vibrancy of Maitreya. So, the first one is the practice of loving kindness itself, called metta in Pali.

[24:03]

And there's a particular practice that's associated with this particular meditation, which is emitting or sending out thoughts, kind thoughts, loving, kind thoughts, to particular people. And the practice involves starting with people with whom one is already close and intimate and feels this, and thinking of them in one way, Buddhist practices with the inhale, to inhale their pain, to feel their pain, and with the exhale, to send out loving, kind thoughts. And after one has done this practice for a while, with people for whom one already feels kindly, then one thinks of some group of people for whom one has neutral feelings, and maybe a large group of people, and does the same practice. And then, eventually, what one comes through is practice to think of people who one might consider one's enemies, or who one sees as causing harm to someone, and actually do the same practice of sending loving kindness to them.

[25:05]

So, this is one of the three modes of Maitreya's practice. The other, which has come up already here in this conference, is patience. So, Maitreya specializes in kshanti paramita, the perfection of patience. It might also be translated as tolerance or forbearance. And the ultimate practice of patience in Buddhism is anatpatika-dharmak-kshanti, the patience with the uncreated, unworn, ungraspable nature of all things, of all dharmas, with the ineffable tolerance of death. So, the story about Maitreya, sometimes he's depicted as the future Buddha in the distant future, sometimes he's depicted as the Bodhisattva who now sits up in a meditation heaven pondering how to save all beings. He's already predicted to be the future Buddha,

[26:08]

we know that, and yet now he's just a Bodhisattva trying to figure out how he will become Buddha. And the best-known images of Maitreya are these very delicate Korean and Japanese statues of Maitreya pensively sitting with his finger to his chin wondering how to save all beings. I don't know if any of you have seen the statue of Koryu-ji in Kyoto. There's another one, Shibuji in Nara, they're wonderful, sensitive statues, kind of delicate. Maitreya also sits Western-style, as we sometimes call it, with his legs down, not in a lotus position. So, part of the reason why Maitreya really has to become an expert in patience is that we know he's going to be the next future Buddha, but we don't know when. So, some of the sutras seem to indicate, there's one from Kermit that says 4,456 of the common era that Maitreya will come. But most usually, there's longer periods,

[27:10]

30,000 years in the future, and one of the major texts says that Maitreya will come 7,560,000,000 years after Shakyamuni. So, this is the difference. Sorry. And yet, the history of Maitreya, which is fascinating, and I won't go into it now, we can get into it in discussion maybe, but there's been this continual, particularly in Chinese history, and Korea also, there's this continual yearning for Maitreya, there's still graffiti-printed scrawls and Hawaiian rocks saying, come, Maitreya, come. Many rulers and political figures in Chinese history have claimed to be Maitreya or avatars of Maitreya, Empress Wu included. And there are persons active in the world today who claim to be Maitreya. There's a fellow in England who's been out here to California. Have you met him? No, but his signs are plastered all over GTU.

[28:11]

Yeah, yeah. And we don't know. Maybe he is Maitreya. That's right. We don't know. We just don't know when Maitreya is coming. So, this not knowing is a very important aspect of the practice of patience. We don't know. So Maitreya, as he sits up in the meditation heaven, is looking to the future and considering future generations, not just the next seven generations, but centuries and centuries to come. So part of this practice of patience and part of this practice about knowing is just to bear in mind the future, that what we do as monastics, as practitioners, as spiritual people today, in some sense, has great implications for many generations in the future. So Maitreya's practice of patience is not passive.

[29:15]

We need to learn in meditation. We sit and wait. Sometimes we just wait for the bell to ring. But we have to sit and wait. And this practice of patience is a kind of active aspect of it. So this is the third aspect of this meditation offered by the Maitreya archetype, is the phenomenological study of consciousness. And this goes back to the Yogacara branch of Buddhism that Mother was mentioning. So Maitreya is associated with Yogacara school of Buddhism, of early Mahayana Buddhism. And it's very complicated, and I won't go into it in detail, but I did want to offer a little bit from Yogacara or Maidoli school. We've had a number of discussions from Sister Vrushakana and Sister Pasqueline, and other people have talked about models of consciousness

[30:16]

and what do we do with thinking. So just very briefly, first of all, Yogacara psychological teachings are yogic teachings, the name Yogacara. So these are teachings that came out of meditation and that one uses as meditations. These are meditations. So there are many aspects of this, but the one I'll mention is the eight consciousnesses, which is part of the Yogacara system. And the first six are the senses, the dhatus. So there's eye, ear, nose, tongue, body or physicality, and mind, as a sixth sense. And then there's a whole discussion of how that works. There's the eye, the eye object, and then subconsciousness of a visual object.

[31:18]

So there's three aspects to each of these. But the sixth consciousness is interesting because it's the mind's mind objects, i.e. thoughts, and then their awareness. So I think it's helpful in meditation to think of this as a sense faculty, to think of our cogitation and the thoughts that come up as sense objects. So I think we're used to identifying with our thoughts, and many meditators get very upset when they find out they can't control their thoughts and that there are all kinds of thoughts coming up. But to see that as part of the scenery, just like the visual field, just like the sounds around us, I think it's interesting for meditation that Uchiyama Roshi, a modern Soto master who actually Hongshu began his practice with before he found his Chan master,

[32:20]

Uchiyama Roshi has this example which I like a lot, that while we're sitting in meditation, the stomach continues to secrete digestive juices. He says in the same way the brain continues to secrete thoughts. So the practice then is just the thoughts are there and we're aware of them, like we're aware of sounds or visuals or the floor or the wall or whatever in front of us. So this is, for me, a very helpful model of what we do with our thinking, which is the thoughts are just more sense data and we don't have to hold on to them. We don't have to. Now there are times where the technique of cutting off thoughts are useful, but in this way of looking at this practice, this particular practice, just to let the thoughts go. So this is maybe one difference between Soto and Tendrenza. Anyway, I just wanted to throw that into the discussion of what to do about thinking.

[33:22]

So those are the first six of the eight consciousnesses. Then the seventh is Manas, a different use of the term. This is the faculty we have for imagining ourself as separate from the other. So this is described as part of the human consciousness apparatus. We see a self separate from you all out there. This is something that consciousness does and it's inculcated very deeply in our language. We talk in terms of subject, verb, object. So our language enforces this aspect of our consciousness, which is to see the world out there as a bunch of dead objects and we're trying to manipulate them. We're trying to verb all the objects to get what we want or get rid of what we don't want. Or we feel like objects being verb by subjects out there, trying to protect ourselves. So this is the center faculty. There are possible transformations of this.

[34:26]

But the eighth consciousness, very important, Alaya Vijnana, the storehouse consciousness, is another description of how karma works. So we've got a particularly appreciated, Sister Varsha, description of karma. And sanskaras are, in Buddhism, the aspect of consciousness or the aspect of ourselves, this aggregate of stuff that we are, that holds on to tendencies and predispositions. And based on our karma, based on everything that's ever happened, based on what we've ever done, body, speech, or mind, our thoughts and our speech, and so forth, we have particular potentialities. We have a range of possible responses to the world. And we can either,

[35:27]

and some of those are wholesome and some of those are unwholesome, and we can act to support the wholesome ones and strengthen those seeds for, or we can act to strengthen the seeds of unwholesome conduct. So this Alaya Vijnana, this eighth level of consciousness, which is, of course, a metaphor for some aspect of how it is that we are aware, provides us with a model for looking at how it is that we're caught in the world of conditioning, how it is that we're influenced by our habits and our dispositions, and how to work with that. So this Yantra psychology, again, was developed out of contemplation and is, we can see, as the activity of patience for Maitreya. So Maitreya, again, there are many stories, a whole lot about Maitreya

[36:28]

associated with the Yogacara school, but the emphasis here is that the aspect of meditation that is self-study, is yogic study of awareness, of consciousness, of who we are. So Dogen later talks about this in terms of, he says, to study the way is to study the self. To study the self is to forget the self. To forget the self is to be awakened by all the myriad of things, and then the body and mind drop all in. And this body and mind dropping away is Dogen's expression for full awakening. So it's interesting that this Maitreya figure who is noted for being foolish has this very sophisticated psychological practice. So this yogic study of awareness, yogic study of our interaction with the world, our interaction with our thoughts, the point in the meditation practice, in our lineage anyway,

[37:29]

is just to sit upright and be present with all, and to face it, and to remain still. And there is definitely a kind of power and kind of both concentration and insight that comes from being willing to be present with all of the stuff, to be patient with it all, to not know what to do, and just to keep sitting. So Dogen says, talks about body and mind dropping away, but the starting point is to study the self, to study the way is to study the self. And that's really enough, I think, for us just to study the self. So Dogen also says, and this is my paraphrase, but he says, deluded people have delusions about enlightenment. Enlightened people are enlightened without their delusions. So I'll move on to the third part of the paper, which is this motif throughout Zen history

[38:33]

of the Zen fool. And this is a direct link to Maitreya, because the first person I want to talk about is Uday in Chinese, Hotei in Japanese, and you've all probably seen him if you've been to Chinese restaurants. Do you have any statues of him at your temple? Every Chinese, every Mahayana monastery in the dining hall, the central image in the dining hall is the fat, happy, laughing Buddha. So this is based on the 10th century actual historical Chan monk. There's a little picture of him in there when he set up the book. But I know you've all seen him. This is the fat, jolly, laughing Buddha. And I use the Japanese word Hotei more because it's very interesting that in Chinese temples, correct me if I'm wrong, but I understand that he's not called Uday. His name is called Hirofei, Maitreya. Formally, he's considered an incarnation of Maitreya. So here's one image of him.

[39:35]

Anyway, he apparently was an historical 10th century Chan monk who wandered around the streets. I guess he'd been in the monasteries and trained and so forth, but he wandered around the streets with his big bag full of candy and toys and played with the children. Anyway, this is kind of scruffy Buddhist Santa Claus. Some of you know the 10 Oxford pictures. The final picture usually shows Hotei holding his big bag and returning to the marketplace with empty, mist-stained hands is the name of that picture. Anyway, Hotei apparently, just before he disappeared into the sky, as the story goes, said something to him about how he started to appreciate Maitreya. Maybe we could pass him around.

[40:40]

There's no guarantee that rubbing his belly will bring you luck. We will either confirm or deny. So anyway, I could say more about Hotei, but I won't for right now, just to mention the connection to Maitreya. There's a long tradition of often hermit, recluse monks, former monks outside the monastery. Another example is Hanshan, the famous Cold Mountain, whose poetry is well-known in the West. He apparently wasn't ordained as a monk, but it was a layperson who hung out near the monastery. I won't say so much about Hanshan, but just this image of marginal people in the monastery, around the monastery, who remind us of why we're here, I think is very important. I was going to quote Thomas Merton, who talks about the marginal role of the monk. The monk is a marginal person

[41:43]

in this very eloquent way. And I don't know if... My own experience in a variety of Zen monasteries in America and Asia is that these people are around. And they're very helpful. But I wanted to focus in terms of this last part and try to conclude with saying a little bit about Ryokan as another example from Japan. He lived 1758 to 1831, Japanese Soko Zen monk. And after he finished his training, he went back to his home village and lived in a little hut outside of town and lived by mendicant practice doing alms begging. And quite an interesting fellow. He was a very skilled meditator, a very elegant calligrapher. His calligraphy was very prized and very valuable, even in his own lifetime. Great poet. He took for his spiritual name Daito, or great fool.

[42:44]

And there are many stories about him which confirm that. It's also like I'll tell you, he wandered around playing with the children. He always carried balls or other toys in his robe sleeves. Frequently broke from his begging rounds to join the children's games. So there's so many stories. I'll just tell a few. One night he was playing hide-and-seek with the children. It got late, and the children were all called to dinner. The next morning, a farmer entered his barn and saw Ryokan hiding. And he said, what are you doing there? And Ryokan said, shh, be quiet, the children will hear. So maybe he was so absorbed in samadhi that he was unaware of the man's passage. Being very foolish. Anyway, there's another famous story of Ryokan sitting in his hut looking through the holes in the roof at the moon or maybe out the window. And a thief comes in, and Ryokan has nothing. He gives him his blanket, that's all he has, and then writes a poem afterwards

[43:46]

saying, I wish I could have given him the moon. Another story, more interesting, more challenging, is that Ryokan in the morning used to go out and sit in the sun outside his hut and take off his robe. He would carefully pick the rags out of his robe and gently place them on a nearby rock. When he was finished, he would just as carefully put on his robe and place the rags back in. So I'll hand this to our first friend, Donald King, a wonderful Japanese literature, a great master of our century of Japanese literature. In Japan he's considered so as well. And he told a story in a course in Japanese literature and said that no Westerner could take seriously such a person. But this love and care, even for insects, even for animals, is part of the Maitreya motif. There are many stories of not just vegetarianism but extreme care for animals in the Maitreya lore.

[44:48]

Thank you. Okay, so finishing up, another more comfortable human example of Ryokan's love and kindness practice occurred when a relative asked Ryokan's help in dealing with his developing son who was becoming a delinquent. Ryokan visited the family and stayed the night without saying anything to the son. The next morning, as he prepared to depart, Ryokan asked the boy's help in tying up his sandals. As the lad looked up from doing so, he saw a tear roll down Ryokan's cheek. Nothing was said, but from that time, So, this concern for a younger generation, for children, this playfulness is part of this motif. I just wanted to read some poems by Ryokan. These are translations I think would cost a ton of money. Without desire, everything is sufficient. When seeking, myriad things are impoverished. Plain vegetables consume hunger. A patched grove is enough

[45:54]

to cover this bent old body. Alone, I hike with the deer. Cheerfully, I sing with the village children. The stream beneath the cliff cleanses pioneers. The pine on the mountaintop fills my heart. Another one that describes his practice of his begging rounds. Spring air feels rather soft. Winging amongst staff, I enter the eastern town. So greening willows in the garden. So restless, floating grass over the pond. My bowl is fragrant with rice of a thousand homes. My heart has abandoned the splendor of ten thousand carriages. Yearning for traces of missing food, step by step, I walk begging. So, in his very simple life of voluntary poverty and reclusion and meditation,

[46:56]

Rilkan also talks about his loneliness and the difficulties of it. So, one last poem. Rags and again rags, wearing rags all my life. I somehow get food at the side of the road. My hut is left to overgrown mugwort. Gazing at the moon all night, I chant poems. Getting lost in flowers, I don't come home. Since leaving my nourishing community, mistakenly, I've become this hollow old horse. So, in conclusion, my honor post to this, to the Buddhist-Christian dialogue is not to try and bring up so much from the other side, but to present one side and hear the echo. But just to mention a couple of examples that seem very parallel from Christianity. Of course, St. Francis and his simplicity and so forth,

[48:00]

voluntary poverty. I'm sure most of you know a lot more about him than I do about St. Francis. Another example from America I wanted to say a little bit about is John Chapman, 1774 to 1845. Maybe he lived around where you live, Sister Mary Margaret. He was in Indiana and Ohio and western Pennsylvania. You've all heard of him as Johnny Appleseed. He fits a lot of the Maitreya motif. He wandered around living in the wilderness. He wasn't attached to... He could have made claims for the land that he used to grow his apple fisheries, but seemed to not be possessive of that. Also famous for playing

[49:01]

with children and his extreme kindness to animals. There's stories of him nursing an injured wolf or carefully extricating from his pant leg a yellow jacket that was stinging him. Warning a rattlesnake he killed unintentionally. He was also a vegetarian, which was quite unusual in that time and place. Even though he's known as kind of foolish, his attire is also kind of simple. He was actually a Swedenborgian preacher. I don't know so much about Swedenborgian theology, but apparently there's a lot of visionary aspects to it. He helped to establish a significant presence in Frontier, Ohio of the Swedenborgian church. And he fits in many ways the Maitreya archetype, including just the basic thing of tree planting. So consider him for the future. Attacking trees, which is also an old Buddhist practice. So I can sum up

[50:02]

what I want to focus on. Thank you.

[50:07]

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