Good morning, everyone, and welcome. For our new folks, I'm Taigen Leighton, the teacher here at Ancient Dragon Zen Gate. I want to talk this morning about Zazen, which is maybe what I always talk about. Usually I use traditional Zen texts. I won't today. I want to talk about Zazen as creative expression. So doing this practice of just sitting, encourages creativity, especially doing it regularly. For new people, I encourage doing this at least several times a week, stopping and sitting and paying attention to facing the wall, paying attention to whatever's happening in this body-mind beyond our ideas of who we are and what the world is. And doing this regularly encourages whatever creative activities you're involved with.

[01:07]

So there are people in the Sangha who are artists or musicians or writers, but also everyday creativity is supported by the Sangha. this practice, and also things like teaching, administration, parenting, cooking, gardening, all the, whatever creative activity you have in your life, and everyone has something that they, some way of expressing, is supported and encouraged by Zazen. The point of Zazen is expression. Each person, each of us, has our own way of developing our own creative energies and expression of that deeper, ultimate reality. reality that we have communion with through sustained practice.

[02:10]

So I want to give today some examples of creativity and then apply them to Zazen, examples from current films and music. And I'm going to start with a film that's out now called Bohemian Rhapsody. And it's a movie about The group queen and brilliant songwriter and singer Freddie Mercury, Rami Malek, is wonderful in this performance as Freddie Mercury. The film shows Freddie Mercury creating and writing great songs amid various struggles So he grew up in a very conservative Persian family who spoke Farsi, which was the language of the great poet Rumi. He also had a noticeable overbite and extra teeth, protruding teeth. But that was because he had extra incisors and he said that that gave his voice greater range.

[03:17]

He also was, well, he struggled with his sexuality. He was married, had a wife, but then realized that he was gay and then got involved with gay scene and very wild partying in England and was very flamboyant, but that flamboyance was also an aspect, a key aspect of his creativity as a performer. So part of what I want to talk about today is creativity as performance. Later, Freddie Mercury struggled with AIDS and eventually died from that. So the film, Bohemian Rhapsody, shows the creation of, amongst other things, shows the creation of that song, Bohemian Rhapsody. I don't know how many of you know it. It's too long to play here, and it was thought to be too long to actually, you know, it was too long for radio.

[04:22]

They said they couldn't produce, he was told they couldn't produce that song, so they had to switch record companies. Seven and a half minutes long. And there's no chorus. There's an introduction, a ballad segment, an operatic passage, some hard rock, and then a reflective coda. And they say it's, they did finally put it out and it's frequently considered one of the greatest, most popular rock songs of all time. But it's, But I don't know if anybody can, for those of you who know it, if any of you can say what it's about. It's like Zazen in that it's not about something else. So Zazen is just being present in this situation, this body-mind, this life we're here now. This song is, Bohemian Rhapsody is, Well, it's kind of wild.

[05:26]

Well, I should say about Zazen that even though it's not about something else, it has a purpose and a function, but it's just Zazen. But Bohemian Rhapsody as a song is, in addition to the music being all over the place, it's kind of wild. There's a couple of passages that are maybe narrative. Mama just killed a man, put a gun against his head, pulled my trigger, now he's dead. Mama, life had just begun, but now I've gone and thrown it all away." And later he says, I don't want to die. I sometimes wish I'd never been born at all. But then there's things like, I see a little silhouette of a man, Scaramouche, Scaramouche, will you do the Fandango? And then there's Thunderbolt and Lightning, very, very frightening. And then Galileo, [...] Figaro, Magnifico. Five times they say Galileo in the movie. One of the funny parts is that one of the band members says to Freddie McCree, who's Galileo anyway?

[06:36]

So, the beginning of the song, is this the real life? Is this just fantasy caught in a landslide, no escape from reality? Open your eyes, look up to the skies and see. So, that's kind of invitation to Sazen as well. So part of what comes across in this movie and part of what I want to talk about in terms of all the examples is that creativity is a collaborative event. Even with individual brilliance, even people who don't, you know, in a band, of course, there's all the parts. But even for individuals, writers or painters or something that seems like it's a solo activity, really, creation is always a collaborative, mutually interdependent matter. even for someone working seemingly on their own, there's the context, the creative context of Sangha, as we call it in Buddhism, community.

[07:51]

Even when you sit zazen on your own at home, you're not sitting alone. It's impossible. We are all, everything on your seat right now are all the beings that you've ever known, people you've worked with, family, friends, loved ones, all kinds of beings go into some collaborative effort. And of course, in terms of formal art, music, writing, painting, there are so many influences that are part of whatever any individual does. So later, at some point in his career, Freddie Mercury wanted to go solo, separate from Queen. He did put out one album, but then he came back because the other musicians he brought together to play with, to back him up, didn't give him the same kind of creative feedback as Queen.

[08:58]

So the movie really clarifies this collaborative aspect of any artistic expression. I want to give a couple of examples and I'm going to see if this works. But in the movie, at one point, The bass, they're having some argument amongst the band and the bass player starts playing some riff which he says he just decided on. Let's see if I can get this together. Here we go. So he plays this riff, this bass riff, and then Freddie Mercury says, well, what are the lyrics? And then, of course, he writes them. So I'm going to give you just a sample if this works. you

[10:31]

So I'm not going to play the whole song. But you get the idea. Just from that bass riff, they created this hit song. One other example. At some point, as they were performing, they became very popular. And the audience would sing along with them. And they decided they wanted to include the audience more. So they did this song that would specifically include the audience, so the audience would stomp. So some of you may know the song already, but I'll play a little bit of it. But all through the song, the audience is part of the music. So they're stomping their feet, then clapping. And then at some point, there's a great guitar solo that becomes part of it.

[12:59]

So again, that's just an example of something created out of the wish to involve the audience. And that becomes part of the song. And I don't know if that song has ever been part of his end talk before. But part of Zazen as expression, well, just to add, the movie closes with Queen's performance at Live Aid in Wembley in 85 in London, called one of the best rock performances ever. So it's a really entertaining movie with great music, so recommend it. But this aspect of creativity of performance is part of how Zazen is expression. So I've been talking about this in various ways, that the point of our sitting is not just to reach some understanding a realization or have some fancy experience, and all of that is fine, but to express something of this deep meditative awareness in our everyday activity.

[14:12]

Dogen, the founder of this branch of Zen in 1200s in Japan, emphasizes the expression of Zazen mind. as integral to Zazen and Zen practice. And performance is an aspect of that. So in some ways, Zazen is each of us in our own way performing Buddha on our seat. There's an image of Buddha in the center of the meditation hall, sitting upright and calm. And each of us in whatever posture we can manage is Expressing that uprightness and calm in this body, this mind, amid all of the confusion and amid all of the thoughts and feelings and amid all of the aches and pains or whatever that may come up in the middle of Zazen, the challenge of Zazen is how is Buddha for you. Each of you has your own way of expressing Buddha.

[15:15]

And so this performance I want to talk about more. I want to talk about next example. The latest set of bootlegs from Bob Dylan called More Blood, More Tracks. These are outtakes of the Blood on the Tracks album recorded in 1974. It has songs that even if you don't know that album, some of you may have heard Tangled Up in Blue, Idiot Wind, Simple Twist of Fate. Shelter from the Storm, you're a big girl now. Anyway, there's a new set of all the outtakes. Well, actually, the story of that particular album or CD is, well album then, is complicated. Originally it was done in a studio in New York, and then later on, and actually they were ready to release it that way, and they had the album cover and everything, but then Dylan was home in Minnesota and decided he wanted to redo some of it, and about half the songs are from a couple months later sessions in Minnesota.

[16:34]

And the outtakes from that are not available. No one knows where they are. They're not on this long set of outtakes. So most of this is from, except for the final songs that were on the album, this is all from the New York sessions. And it starts with Dylan solo on guitar, like doing folk songs. that he hadn't done, performed that way since he'd famously gone electric some years before. And then he does them with a little bit of music. a band called Eric Weisberg and Deliverance. Part of the thing of hearing all these outtakes is to hear how he changes, how he developed, how his creative expression developed, how he changed the songs in terms of some being slow and then faster, in terms of the words too. But initially he did this with a band called Eric Weisberg and Deliverance.

[17:39]

But then at the end of the first day, he dismissed the whole band except for the bass player named Tony Brown. It happens that Tony was a college roommate of one of my college roommates in 68, 69, and he had a band that rehearsed in our apartment that included Alan Sanaki, who was here last month. And that band was called the Montgomery's, and they moved up to Woodstock. I visited them some. than, not the Woodstock Festival, but the town of Woodstock. Later, Tony joined Eric Weisberg in Deliverance. Some of you may know the movie Deliverance, and Eric Weisberg played the dueling banjos on that, so that's where the name comes from. Anyway, again, Performance is a key aspect of Dylan's creativity. Of course, he wrote a huge volume of brilliant original songs, which he won the Nobel Prize for.

[18:44]

But he particularly thinks of himself as a performer. He's been on what he calls a never-ending tour For many years, he probably does more performances than most. He's aged 77 now, 78 maybe. But he does like maybe 200 concerts a year or more. But he changes the lyrics and musical style, especially actually for the songs on the Blood on the Tracks album. So for Dylan, performance is a key aspect of creativity. It's not just the song as it appears on the studio album. It's his continuing to perform the songs and play with it. And he calls himself a song and dance man. But his own particular way of mode of creation, he, well, I have a childhood friend who is a concert cellist who's played in orchestras in New York, but also has done solo CDs.

[19:59]

I visited him, I don't know, 15 or 20 years ago in New York, and he told me that for classical studio recordings, They often dub in new notes, note by note. They'll put in a different note for a particular note. So it's constructed in a studio when they do classical recordings. Dylan is the opposite of that, his own way of creating. In the studio, he plays each song through live many, many times. And he'll start, and the musicians often have not had any rehearsal. They have to follow what he's doing without advance instructions, figuring out the key or the tuning. didn't work out with that band but Tony stayed on and most of this bootlegs is just Tony and just Dylan and Tony playing bass in the background and occasionally somebody else brought in his keyboard. So just to say a little bit about Blood on the Tracks, it's commonly thought that the songs chronicle Dylan's breakup and divorce from his wife, Sarah, who I've heard had been his end practitioner anyway.

[21:17]

Part of the inspiration for the songs clearly comes from that wrenching experience, simple twist of fate, idiot wind, tangled up in blue, you're gonna make me lonesome when you go. Dylan has said that actually some of them were based on things he'd read, plays from Chekhov, he says, anyway. But in terms of the creative process itself, These different outtakes show him rewriting the lyrics, changing musical approaches to the songs. Again, the early takes are just himself with guitar and harmonica, kind of like folk songs. Then later on, Tony's bass is added. And then the final version, they're more like rock songs. In terms of practice, what this indicates is the importance in creation of spontaneity, this immediate response.

[22:35]

There's a kind of samadhi intensity to just performing, not calculating or deliberating. He just goes in and plays each song all the way through, and the other musicians play with him. as opposed to the other mode of creativity, which is reworking something. Now he does that in terms of playing it, changing it again and again, but from my own experience with the books I've written, the part I enjoy most is not the original blast of inspiration, but the rewriting and reworking and playing with the material. And he does that too on his tours. And he has a lot to say about creativity in terms of what he shows about that, but also there was an interview on 60 Minutes in 2004 with Ed Bradley and he was asked about the great early songs that he did, Blowing in the Wind and the songs on Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde on Blonde.

[23:43]

And Dylan said, I don't know how I wrote those early songs. They were like magically created. I try to sit down and write something like that. There's a magic to that. And then he says that these songs came out of that deep wellspring of creativity. And I really relate to that in terms of our practice. This deep wellspring of creativity, Zazen practice, regular Zazen practice, and maybe especially Sashin. So some of us are going to be sitting for five days starting on Wednesday here. But sitting all day or doing longer sittings, there's a way in which that connects us with this deep source of creativity, this wellspring, Dylan calls it. And it's not about, again, it's not about formally creative activities necessarily, like writing or painting or music, but just whatever situation is in our life, and this is related to Koan work too, whatever problem is in our life this week or this month or this lifetime, when we settle into that,

[25:02]

source of creativity, responses come up. So the sixth Zen ancestor, Huineng, sort of the founder of Chan in China, talks about the oneness of prajna and samadhi. So when we settle and concentrate, and find that intensity, insights arise, prajna arises, wisdom arises. So this creative energy applies to creative activities and to various kinds of activities. So there's much more to say, I guess, about Bohemian Rhapsody, also about Dylan. I just want to mention that some of Dylan's more recent albums are, to me, in my opinion, on a par in terms of great songwriting with his early albums like Blonde on Blonde and Highway 61. So Modern Times in 2006 or Tempest in 2012 are also great recent albums.

[26:04]

So I want to move on, though, to another example of creativity. This is another current movie, At Eternity's Gate, with William Defoe brilliantly portraying the great artist Vincent van Gogh. It's also a collaboration with the director, Julian Schnabel, who's also a painter. So another movie I recommend. But it starts out showing Vincent walking through the fields. And then later you see him painting vivid landscapes from the fields and his amazing paintings. In the beginning and at times thereafter, the director, Julian Schnabel, shoots this with this rough, handheld camera, like looking down at the ground as Vincent's walking. And also, the music is... a little strange with discordant chords.

[27:09]

So I have to see it again to decide whether what the director added was distracting or actually really interesting and creative. So I will see it again. But there's a lot of things that, I mean, Willem Dafoe is brilliant in this portraying Vincent. And in the movie, he says many interesting things about creativity and spirituality. He says that he wants to share his vision. He wants people to see things the way he sees them. At one point he says, God is nature and nature is beauty. So that's an interesting way of seeing the aesthetics of what God is and this is what Vincent was devoted to portraying, to capturing in his painting, his brilliant painting. He'd actually tried to become a minister like his father was, and enrolled and tried to become trained as a minister, and it didn't work out.

[28:21]

But still, he was very spiritual. He saw his painting as a form of spirituality. The act of painting, the product, Now, there's a line that apparently was inserted by Julian Schnabel, who's also a painter. He says, at one point, I paint to stop thinking. When I stop thinking, the world becomes a magical, luminous landscape. So if you look at, for instance, landscapes, they're vibrant and alive, psychedelic. But really, to see the world that way is amazing. This thing about stopping thinking, also relates to our zazen, not that we should try and force our mind to stop thinking or feeling, but that there are times when there's a kind of absorption, a kind of settling, and a kind of samadhi, and that happens in creative work too.

[29:23]

So many creative people, and I'd add athletes here too, they experience some intense time of concentration or absorption, which goes beyond thinking, beyond our ordinary way of thinking. So there's that line. So Vincent van Gogh was always sensitive and knew how great his work was, but he was very much unappreciated in his own lifetime, he talked about how he should have been born in the future. He says, maybe God gave me the gift to paint for people who aren't here yet. So I don't know if that one is a lot of the things he says in the movie are from his wonderful letters to his brother Tao, who was his patron as well. And they were very close. I'm not sure if that one is something that Vincent actually said or that was something that Julian Schnabel added. But maybe God gave me a gift to paint for people who aren't here yet.

[30:25]

Vincent van Gogh is famously known as being depressed and so forth. I don't think so. I don't think he was exactly depressed. He was very lonely. There's a point at which he tried to get the painter Gauguin to stay with him in southern France and he stayed there, I don't know, for a little while. And that brings up an interesting contrast. So Vincent's paintings were quick. He would knock out a landscape or a painting very quickly just with this vivid brushwork. And Gauguin really criticized him. He said, you have to go slow and take care and redo the paint strokes and so forth. But this points to the aspect of Van Gogh as a performer. He was performing his paintings. They came out of his immediate seeing in his unique way. So he has very thick brushstrokes. I love the thickness of his paint, of his brushstrokes. And they've discovered that

[31:33]

Under the surface, some of his paintings still, under the surface of these brushstrokes, it's still liquid underneath. Somebody check that. Liquid. I'm sure they didn't destroy the paintings while checking that, but they found that out. So those very vivid, thick brushstrokes that he dashed on, are still some of them liquid under the surface. He died in 1890. So it's not that, so maybe in a way like Dylan, he was spontaneously, instantly creating this vision on these very quickly. He painted enormous, he was very prolific in the, actually not so many years where he was actively painting. He created many, many paintings. several a day sometimes. But like Dylan coming back and redoing the same songs maybe, Vincent redid many times the same subject.

[32:51]

So he painted many paintings of the same fields or of the same cypress trees or of irises or other flowers or of himself, his many self-portraits. self-portraits. So this brings in, again, this question of spontaneity and reworking. So I think this has something to do with how Zazen is a creative activity. There's this immediacy, but then in reflection, What is it we create? And how does our connection with Zazen help us in whatever creative activities we're involved with? So, you know, Vincent was troubled and melancholy and very lonely and had outbursts of anger. I don't think he was depressed. His paintings are so illuminated.

[33:52]

And this movie, At Eternity's Gate, there was a recent animated film, also really great, called Loving Vincent. They both portray his death not as a suicide. So he's famously thought of as having committed suicide. And actually, there's a Vanity Fair article that these go back to that indicate that he was shot by some neighborhood bullies. The people around him when he was doing these wild paintings didn't get it. He was painting for the future and he was a weird guy. He certainly was, to these villages where he was painting in southern France, he sort of seemed strange. So kids teased him and bullied him. The forensic evidence is that he was actually not a suicide. He was actually shot in the stomach where nobody shoots themselves to commit suicide.

[34:59]

So he died in 1890. He was only 37. So just looking at these examples of Freddie Mercury and Bob Dylan and Vincent van Gogh, I want to say more a little bit about Zazen and how Zazen, this practice we do, provides access to creativity. It's a way of seeing ourself freshly, Of course, sometimes the old tapes go through our head, and we see our habits of thinking and our habits of reacting. But beneath that and around that, we have this opportunity to see this freshly, to see other options, to actually look at our life creatively. And zazen, unlike the examples I've given, is not dependent on painting or songwriting or music or any particular activity.

[36:10]

There's no product, like a painting or a song or a recording. But the product is our lives, our bodies and minds. Doing this zazen practice regularly, I mean, it may not always seem so, but we have access to a kind of flexibility, a kind of spontaneity, a kind of play and playfulness, and a kind of concentration that allows us to express whatever comes to us to express creatively. Just in closing, just anecdotally, when I lived at San Francisco Zen Center in the 70s and 80s and early 90s, many of the children who grew up there, there were a number of children who grew up like at Green Gulch Farm and other parts of San Francisco Zen Center, many of them

[37:11]

maybe even all of them that I knew in those generations, later became actors or tried acting, something about performance. So again, we have in our sangha many people who do various formally creative activities, playwriting or acting or improv, music, painting, writing of various kinds. But also, I want to point at this aspect of zazen which encourages some fresh, playful, creative possibilities. So I thought this might be longer with all that material. So we do have a little bit of time. If you have comments or responses or questions about any of the examples I gave or just in general about creativity and Zazen, please feel free.

[38:14]

Yes, Danny. In England, we played the same kind of thing for a long time.

[40:02]

Thank you for telling us about that. And you used a couple of words that I think are relevant to all the examples I gave, which energy and commitment, one has to be committed to. Well, like to Zen practice, but to performing, to creating. And also, there's an energy involved, and that deep wellspring of creativity involves this source of energy as well. So thank you for that. Other comments, responses, additions? Please feel free. Yes, Aisha. Thank you for a wonderful talk. I just wanted to say something on behalf Yay. the meanings of our thoughts.

[42:33]

As we get practice with that, it leaves room for other possibilities to arise. And that, I think, has everything to do with everyday creativity or fundamental creativity. Good. Thank you. Yes. Yes. how to take care of all the things in our busy schedules in a creative, energetic, committed way. Other comments, responses, examples? Yes. Bohemian Rhapsody? Yes. So I was killing the man he had been. And very exuberant, yeah.

[44:04]

Wonderful. Yeah, it's a great movie, yeah. It's a great movie, and it shows that he's very much to be who I am, no matter what people may think. And that, even to yourself, that's the best way to serve the world. Yes. And he said, that's what I am. I'm a showman, I'm an artist. I want to make people happy. He was afraid to give that to people, even though he may be also Yes. And just to say thank you for that, because that does help inform the song and all the different parts of the song. Yeah. Thank you. Yes.

[45:12]

Yeah. [...] I know I have personal and personal comments about this, but we can love. It doesn't matter if it's sex. I love my girlfriend. Yes, yes.

[46:47]

Thank you, thank you very much for that, yeah. So, you used a word early on, when you were talking about, you used the word arrogance. I don't know that that's really what it is, but in some ways, I mean, all the people that I've mentioned, Freddie Mercury, Dylan certainly, Vincent in his own way, had to have a kind of commitment to being themselves. And so I don't know that that's arrogance exactly, but it's being willing to express something, to step up, to... being whatever it is that's on your seat right now, and really just doing it. And I mentioned in a talk I gave last month about the three refuges, that when I finished the end of my Dharma transmission for a three-week ceremony with my teacher, Reb, at Tassajara, the last thing he said to me before I headed away was, don't run away from yourself.

[47:55]

So. So it's about time to stop, but if anybody else has something you want to add, we can keep going a little bit. Anyone? Okay. So.

[48:16]

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