like trying to explain to somebody who hasn't seen a rainbow, that there's a rainbow there. And so we're trying to find some way to get these drops of water here, the officers and the various other leaders of Zen Center, to refract what Zen Center is, so we can find out what it is. In the simplest sense, Suzuki Roshi came here to America in, I guess, 1957, if that's right. Fifty-nine. What? Fifty-nine? Fifty-eight? Fifty-nine? Okay. Fifty-nine, she says. She was much older, been around much longer than me, so she must know. And a few people, Della being one, and Betty, and a few other people, came and sat with

[01:04]

him on pews. You know, they turned, I guess, two pews together, is that right, and made them into a kind of boat, you know, sort of, the backs went up like sides of a boat, and every climbed into them and did zazen, sort of ship of, well, I don't know. And anyway, they kept, well, I won't continue that at this point, they kept, and then they fixed up the room, and Suzuki Roshi was obviously a very good teacher, and so here we are. Well, what we worked out was finally, a few years ago, was to create a partnership between

[02:07]

the chief priest and a board of directors, or elders, or whatever, and the board of directors consists of the people who've been around for the longest, or who are most involved regularly in the taking care of them. So that's the first level. And then, there are a group of officers whose responsibility is San Francisco and Tassajara, and the relationship of Zen Center as a whole to the rest of society, and to execute the policy of the board and the membership, of the board and the membership and the priest. And then, the next step is, there's what we call the Rokuchiji, which means the six officers,

[03:12]

which probably the most traditional three in a monastery are the cook, the head of the office, and the head of the zendo, head of the practice. So those three positions in some monasteries actually rotate, because it's important to know all three aspects. And the Rokuchiji is... there's one... there's six officers, there's one for San Francisco and one for Tassajara, and they represent the functional level of Zen Center. There's two ideas – I don't know how to explain this exactly, but... We take refuge, as you know, in Buddha, Dharma and Sangha, so that's the primary, probably,

[04:20]

formula in Buddhism. So the creation of a Sangha, what we're doing here, is important, is, you know, you can't have Buddhism without it, at least Zen Buddhism. So there's two kinds of ideas. One is, there's the practice you do for yourself to, I don't know what, feel a little better or be enlightened or something like that. And then there's looking at it... that's looking at it from your point of view. Looking at it from Buddha's point of view, Buddha produces enlightenment. The idea of a cosmic Buddha is, Buddha produces enlightenment. And we participate in that production, so our activity is Buddha's enlightenment. So the job of, or work of a disciple of Buddha is just as much how to work in the office

[05:33]

or work in the kitchen as it is to be in the zendo, because the whole aim of the practice is to produce, ultimately, teachers. And teachers should know how to continue the practice and how to continue the Sangha. So, what I'm getting at is, what does a student see when he comes into Zen Center? Well, there's several possibilities. He can... the two main ones is he can practice here for his own benefit, to work out problems of his own. If he can do that, that helps everybody, of course. In that sense, he can stay one year, two years, three years, and leave.

[06:41]

If his aim is to become a teacher or to practice as thoroughly as possible, then what will happen? Well, in that case, he's liable to practice here for a while, go to Tassajara for a while, come back here for a while, and at some point he'll start having jobs in Zen Center, in the library or in the kitchen or some position. And the moving through those positions is part of the practice. And eventually, if you move through all of them, you end up on the board, probably. It's getting longer and longer, farther away, though. Used to be two or three years in Zen Center and you might be on the board if it looked like you were going to be with Zen Center for a lifetime. But now, you'd have to be with Zen Center quite a long time just to be on the Roku Chi Chi and then an officer. There's one other group which is a kind of, we call it various things, a kind of priest

[07:55]

council or officers at large, people who have been officers but no longer have a specific job. And that's Claude, Peter, Silas, right? And we meet to discuss things. One of the reasons I'm telling you all this is to give you an idea of the complexity of taking care of a group this size. And I must say, personally, I've told a number of people here, but personally, I've had quite a long-running, heavy discussion with Suzuki Roshi over the past two years about whether, really, he didn't really want more to be in a smaller group or working with a few students,

[08:58]

and whether it would be better for me to come back from America and just go live somewhere up in the Sierra someplace. The resolution of that all was, even though Zen Center is not perfect, here it is, right? And it should be continued. So whenever anything, we'd like to have more of the people who sit in the Zendo regularly and our members participate in what we decide, how Zen Center goes. Actually, we're not, on the whole, we're not going anywhere. We're trying, at least at present, I suppose the policy is to not get any bigger. In other words, we want to keep about the same number of students, less would be okay, and limit ourselves to this place and Tassajara.

[10:05]

And if there are Zen groups that grow up around us or Zen students who become leaders of other groups, they're mostly on their own, separate, so we don't become a head temple for a complex of temples. But still, even among the officers in the Rokkajiji, various things come up which we want to talk about, and there's so many people to talk about just to get the feeling of this group of people, that people are always complaining, well, that happened and I never heard about it. So I don't know, how do we make you hear about it? It's partly what the meeting's for. And also to have some ideas from you what we could do. I don't know if having meetings like this every couple of months would be useful or what. Anyway, it takes a... most of the ideas and things we do actually arise from some specific

[11:23]

student, and they get told to some Rokkajiji member or to myself or one of the officers, and then we start talking about it. And just having officers' meetings and advisors' meetings and Rokkajiji meetings, board meetings, meetings with individual people, literally there isn't enough days in one, two, a week. We just meet continuously, it's really incredible. I went to a meeting a while ago of some ecology people who were planning this alternate conference or alternate activity to the UN Conference on the Ecology, and they all wanted the meeting to be short, not too long, because it would get... everybody would get bored and leave. And after about... so they scheduled it from 9.30 to 12, but they actually planned to start at 10, but then they had coffee for half an hour, and then at about 11.30 people started

[12:28]

leaving. Well, I got there at 9.30 or so, and I just sat... 12 o'clock, I thought the meeting was barely... I just sat immovable the whole time. I'm so used to these long meetings, everybody else. Anyway, so I hear complaints from people, you people are always meeting, you know. Anyway, I don't... Finally, I've had to... I don't go to most of the meetings, but I still go to an awful lot. So, maybe what I'll do is I'll just list... I'll read a number of things that have occurred, which some of you know about and some of you don't. And... Well, let's say... It's going to... When I say that we're staying the same, and then when you hear this list, you won't believe a word I say, right?

[13:32]

So, how do I explain that? We've got a certain number of students here that this building contains, and the community around contains, and the Tassajara contains. And when I say we don't want to get bigger, it's we don't want to increase the number of students. We may increase the activity for the students we have. And that actually ends up probably to be less work for the community than if a few people are doing the work and most of the people don't know quite what to do. So, I don't think we're increasing the numbers of the structure. And we may increase the number of meetings, but... This may all sound boring to you or funny, but if you're in it, it's not...

[14:40]

It's something else again. Also, in addition to trying to work with the activity of the students that we have, increasing the activity they already have, maybe making more practice activity, also we have some fundamental problems that Suzuki Roshi was working on and would have continued working on, which is how... Well, maybe I can put it most simply. Confucius says that rites or ritual are at the basis of a society. Well, in Japan and China, the Buddhist community is based on the rites or basic assumptions fundamental to Japanese and Chinese culture. We have to find out how to make a sangha work in this country.

[15:41]

And we also have to respond to things happening in this country. And also, Zen Center works pretty well as a place to practice for the first two or three years, then now maybe four or five years. But at a certain point, at any one time, it sort of levels off. You know, after five years here, what more do you do? Well, one answer is to leave. Go somewhere else to find where they get the next five-year plan. But there's no place to go, unfortunately, so you're stuck, really. You can go looking, and that's interesting. So the thing really to do for us is to stay here and create that. So we create that by finding out what each of us needs to do to practice.

[16:47]

And then, as a community, we can try to find out how to extend that practice. So, in Japan, they've got things like how the monks support themselves, how the Buddhist community supports itself, how the churches and temples support themselves, or are supported. And they have the difference between career priests and people who just practice pretty well, separated out. And they have how you train as a priest, and how you get schooling, and how you study Buddhist scriptures pretty much worked out. We don't have any of those things worked out. Probably, since Tassajara is the place where you go for an intensive practice in the most traditional form we have so far, this place will be the place where we work out a lot of these other problems. So, what is a city monastery, or city monastery commune?

[17:53]

I don't think we want to start a Buddhist university. Anyway, that's that kind of background. So when I first came back, I had a conversation with Suzuki Roshi. The first very brief one, before I even got off the plane, practically went to put my robes on. He laid out, sort of, in a few words, things we're just now trying to work on. One of them was, he said, Dr. Konsei was in Berkeley. Would you please go to his classes? What he meant, and what we talked about more, was, how do we form a Buddhist university? How do we learn more of what we need to know to be teachers and to practice Buddhism? So we've done several things along that line.

[18:58]

One is, a fair number of us have gone to Dr. Konsei's classes. I don't know, it seems to range about 12 or 15 altogether. And more if you consider periphery people. Also, the University of California, Berkeley, is developing a Buddhist study program. And to participate in the development of that Buddhist studies program, we thought was important. So we asked one person, at least, Peter Schneider in this case, to go and learn some Sanskrit and take classes and be in touch with what's happening there. We could, in the future, depending on how it goes, I have no idea if this will happen, but if there are people who are training to be priests here, or Zen leaders, or whatever, I don't know what word to use, we can consider trying to help them, if not financially, at least making arrangements for them to

[20:06]

study with the best Buddhist scholars anywhere in this country or perhaps anywhere in the world. But that's an alternative, you see, to starting a university. You have people, you use this as sort of base at which people can go. Another thing Roshi mentioned was the whole problem of right livelihood. How do we support ourselves? And this is a very complicated question which I've talked with some of you about. I don't… Because, you see, there's lots of alternatives. Do we beg or do we… which in a group this size doesn't work. Do we perform services?

[21:09]

In other words, funeral ceremonies. In Japan it's mostly funeral ceremonies, memorial services, could be other services, for which we're paid. What happens when you do that is you develop a large membership of people for whom you are a person who makes things sacred for them. You're an intermediary between them. Some Buddhists… Zen tries to minimize the intermediary and emphasize you yourself practice. But in actual fact the ordinary layman doesn't practice and the priest is the relationship to Buddhism for him. Another would be to have a few big donors. But so far we've avoided having a few big donors because what happens then is you get… eventually you get controlled by a few big donors.

[22:13]

So what the basic idea has been is how do we support ourselves by our own efforts. The practicers themselves support the practice. So we have some kind of fee pledge structure here. And one thing we're going to discuss in this meeting is that we're moving more toward the idea of students or practicing students and members. And members will pay a pledge and students will pay a kind of fee, like tuition or something. We also have tried to look at the budget and see how much it costs per student. Actual fact, I guess it costs about $130 per student to operate Zen Center.

[23:23]

And if you take out a month, $130 a month per student operates Zen Center. If you take out… and that's… several things are taken out of that. One is the students don't pay for Tassajara purchase of it, but they do pay for this building. We don't… Excuse me. Also taken out of that is the money that the summer guest season earns. So that brings it down to about $114 per student. And then people just give us money without fundraising. We don't really want to minimize fundraising except for special projects. No one appreciates it and it's a hard job. Actually, really, in an important sense, we've never fundraised. We've just… some of us have been able to be convincing enough about the importance of what we're doing

[24:26]

that people have supported Zen Center for that reason without any sort of fundraising, usual kind of fundraising campaign. But… so the money that's given to us just because we're here is, again, an important Buddhist idea, which is the Sangha is an example. The existence of human beings practicing Buddhism and the Sangha as a community is an example to a society or helps a society by the harmony it creates, is the basic idea. So people in Hinayana countries, Theravadan countries, the monks don't work at all and they're just supported because of their good vibes. Really, that's exactly what it's about. So partly people support us for our good vibes. But also in Zen we have the tradition of working, so… So if you take out what people off… give us, the amount comes down to some lower amount.

[25:35]

And we're trying to… at present, students pay considerably less than that, which leaves us always in a deficit situation. So we're trying to figure out how to do something about it. But one thing, more specifically, is we're… we've been talking about, various forms of working with Right Livelihood practice. And the one we're working on right now, which a lot of you may have heard about, is something that has gone through various names. The No Merit Enterprises. Or Right Livelihood Incorporated. Or the Good Work Company. Anyway, now we're calling it… Oh, another one is the Zen Slow Work Company. We're rather famous for how slowly we work. So…

[26:42]

But right now we're calling it the Work Company. And there's going to be a meeting, in fact, this afternoon, of a smaller group of people about it. And there was one last week on Monday, Thursday evening, Monday evening. And that will be comprised of, hopefully, carpenters, electricians, plumbers, stained glass window makers, roofers, rug layers, basement cleaners, painters. I don't know yet exactly. And what we'll try to do is… have the better… the students who know carpentry well will go out and do jobs. The ones who don't know it so well will work in a kind of shop, preparing the lumber or doing whatever, learning. And we'll try to pay some sort of salaries. And it'll be set up separate from Zen Center. Part of Zen Center, but separate, so that it has its own leaders, secretary.

[27:51]

Another thing is… We've talked about getting a farm for years. And we have two possibilities. One in a beautiful place on the coast, and another up in the Valley of the Moon. Neither of which, by the way, is something we have talked about before, too, of a big farm where people can go live in nuclear or separate households. That's something else, just to raise food. This farm, if we get it, if we do it, we'll have a group of students practicing there, rather like they practice at Tassajara here, not living in separate households. And we may… Well, also, so the farm will raise organic vegetables. And we'll try to work on the farm with a few people who are members of our community,

[28:53]

but who are having some kind of big mental or physical or confusion or suffering, which, you know, it's hard for them to practice here, maybe it'd be easier for them to practice at the farm. So we'll try that, too, combine the two. Both the work company and the Zen farm will try to do them, not just to solve problems of our own, but also so that they exist as model ways a farm can work. So other communes can say, well, that's one way of making it work. And the same with the work company. Some kind of intermediary between usual profit is the only aim company and a

[29:55]

communist commune, somewhere in between. We'll try to work out something that feels okay for us to work in and is based on having a salary but not living, you know, extremely well. See, one other thing is... two other things. One is, someone is in the process of giving us an island off the coast of Vancouver. It's 400 acres, rather beautiful place, I guess. I haven't seen it, but everyone tells me it's really extraordinary. And... Right now, a few people live on it, but the people giving it to us want to preserve it ecologically as much as possible. And so they don't want the population on it to increase.

[31:01]

And if we put a group on it, it would be about not more than 20 people or something like that. But actually, we thought of using it... Well, the example I've used is... Lewis Agassiz chose his graduate students by... He was a famous rival of Darwin. ...as much as possible about the fish as they could and at least one thing that nobody had ever noticed. That's very much like Zen practice. You try to just find out what you are. Well, we may use the island in that sense and allow a few students to go up there, maybe even keeping a running tally of what's going on on the island, to just find out what the island is and their practices on it. This is also related to the fact that in America we're not just a group culture and we need to find some way to have individual practice, not just always group practice.

[32:05]

Okay. That's enough for now. We can have questions about any of these things. Maybe right now a few, if you want, and then later more, but we want to have some other people talk too. So, if you have some questions right now about what I said, please ask. Yeah. Myself, I've been kind of on the periphery coming, when I can, to the Zen Center. I'm going to be going up to Seattle in a fairly short time. I'm wondering if there's any way of either maintaining some kind of contact with the Zen Center. I don't really feel capable at this point of starting one myself,

[33:22]

in Seattle. I'm wondering if there's any way of doing that. One way is, you know, of course, to get the wind bell. I hesitated to mention that because we're making remarkable progress and there's been no issue for some time. We have one almost done, actually, and we have another one, a memorial issue on Roshi. Pretty much all the material put together. Still working toward finding some time to do things. Anyway, that's one thing, you can get the wind bell. You can also be on a mailing list which allows you to come down for sesshins. And there isn't much else you can do, actually.

[34:26]

But if you are there and you start sitting, probably people will join you. But you may want to come down here regularly. That you can talk to people more specifically about, not in this big meeting. One thing I forgot to mention is, we're trying to, we're thinking about starting maybe April 1st, a practice period here in the city, but not like a Tassajara practice period. We'll have assigned seats in the zendo for them. The people participating in it will probably sit three or four periods a day and there'll be maybe a separate talk, lecture with them and maybe some kind of work on a particular sutra or a particular book or something like that, lasting about three months. With more, in other words, there'll be an opportunity, there'll be more doksan at least once or twice a week and there'll be more opportunity to work closely together

[35:29]

with a smaller group of students. That's it. Any other questions? Yeah? No. It'll be limited to people who can participate. Excuse me, if you have questions, could you please speak very loudly so that will make it more open for everyone. What she asked was... What she asked was, will that city practice period be limited to people living in the building? And I said, no. You heard what I said. Is there some possibility of our doing perhaps a mimeographed newsletter kind of thing that came out on a monthly or bimonthly basis and communicated information basically to the community? We could, yes, actually. We've talked about it over the years.

[36:30]

And... It seems to me it would be helpful for this kind of information exchange. How many people would like to see a newsletter of some kind? Or do you just feel like raising your hands? Some of you anyway. Okay. Yeah? How do you plan to not let the censor figure? What do you call getting bigger? More students. Well, if we don't increase the facilities, it's hard to let the... You know. Hopefully that... Well, we could get enormous, you know. So we... We have to use what skills we have to keep ourselves small, I think. And hopefully what we'll produce

[37:33]

are students who are bigger and those students can include more students. So... Somebody will be here and leave and they'll start a group in Philadelphia or Indianapolis or someplace or Mill Valley. Then people can sit there. And for as long as we can, we'll try to keep Tassajara open to these various groups, but it may become more and more difficult. I don't know. Basically, we won't increase the things which allow the number of students to increase. In fact, we're already sort of too big. You know, I was on... I don't like... I don't think we should be involved in...

[38:35]

I have to preface this, in television and such things, because then I'm going to say I was on television. So... So we've turned down German television, Japanese television, U.S. television, all kinds of things, because it just creates more interest and that level of interest doesn't help anybody. But in Japan, the Today Show asked me to be on it, and Hugh Downs... It was his last program. And Hugh Downs turned out to be quite an interesting, intelligent man who was dropping out of television because he was being destroyed, taken over by the archetype of Mr. Television. And he was resigning to focus on his two main interests, which... three, which are music, Zen, and bio-auto-feedback. Anyway, he was quite a nice man, and if I didn't do it, somebody else was going to do it, and they were going to say, you know, come to Japan and study Buddhism, which, for the most part,

[39:37]

isn't helpful to people. So I felt some obligation to go on. Well, we talked a little bit, and then he turned to me, and he said, well, what do you think about Zen? It's getting big, isn't it, in America? And I said, yes, too big. And then I flashed this meeting, and several board meetings, and the discussion about how Zen Center is too big, and I went blank. He looked at me, and I looked at him, and all I could see was board meetings. So he sort of... some of the people who saw it on television noticed. So... mostly board members. So... he turned and asked somebody else a question. Okay.

[40:38]

Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Okay, maybe that's enough questions for now. Um... So, let's see. Yvonne... Oh, I know what I wanted to say is... We... We... Shortly after I came back, we changed officers. We got initiated because Suzuki Roshi wanted really one person to do something else, and he had several jobs at once, and that left a lot of vacancies, so it started us shifting, trying to find how to fill the vacancies, and it ended up with a complete change of officers based on how we were going to take care of the problems, and... for instance, Silas was president, but he was already functioning really as a teacher and giving lectures,

[41:43]

and Yvonne was secretary, but she was really already functioning as president, and so we shifted it around to be more realistic, and we ended up with little different officers. Anyway, Yvonne is the... I guess you all know who the officers are, rather. No? Okay. Yvonne is president. I'll see if I can remember. Lou Richmond is treasurer. And... Jane... Which last name do I use? Westberg is... secretary. And... Niels Holm is director of Tassajara and vice-president. And Steve Weintraub is a director of San Francisco and a vice-president. And... Silas and Claude and Peter are

[42:44]

officers at large. And... then there's the rest of the people at Rokuchigi. And, of course, Bill Pong and Mel Weitzman are heads of the... and Les Kay are heads of Berkeley, Mill Valley, and Los Altos. Anyway, Yvonne, maybe you could talk a little bit about what the board talked about during the last five minutes or year. If you can't hear me, please put your hands up. Wait a minute. He's deaf, so it's okay. You don't count, Bill. I looked at the minutes of the board meetings for the last year

[43:46]

and I was kind of amazed at the repetition of certain topics and also at the range of things that we've talked about. I think probably what I'll do is just tell you a little bit about some of the things which we seem to talk about all of the time and also to tell you about some of the decisions which we made but not, by any means, all of them. We had seven meetings last year. We usually seem to meet about every two months, although sometimes we meet more often if we feel we need to. We try to meet here in San Francisco and at Pasajara. We've, in the last couple of meetings, decided to systematically alternate between the two places because it helps us keep in touch with all of Zen Center more evenly. At every meeting,

[44:48]

we always have to talk about the budget or some aspect of the budget because whatever we do brings with it some question of how much it costs to do certain kinds of things. And we've, in the last couple of years, developed increasingly more ability to keep records, to know what it costs us to do different kinds of things, and to try to understand the way we relate to money at a lot of different levels. So it's been an increasingly greater effort to really pay attention to that kind of thing. Silas is going to go over the budget for last year and Lou the budget for this year. Most of us don't like to talk about money or think about money so much, but the thing that we've found is that it's a way of talking about everything. Periodically, we talk about scholarships,

[46:00]

that is, what positions do we have which bring with them a scholarship for a student here in the Tassajara. At Tassajara, there's a regular rhythm to that because positions change with respect to the practice periods. So at the board meeting, which proceeds, for example, in the February board meeting of last year, we began thinking about scholarship positions for the summer, but we didn't make any actual decisions about those scholarship positions until the April meeting. In April, we chose officers for the year, Zen Center officers. As Baker Roshi suggested, that decision was made in an earlier board meeting this year for circumstances which necessitated doing that. We talked... As is necessary in the spring of last year,

[47:02]

we had to make certain kinds of decisions about the guest season at Tassajara. I'd like to tell you a couple of things about that because one of the things we tried to do for last guest season, which we talked about a great deal in our February and April board meetings, was how to be a monastery, in some sense, where we practice as we do, which is open during the summer months to guests, where people may come and be with us, but have them understand what it is we're trying to do. And we made some changes. We decided, for example, to just serve vegetarian meals to our guests. And we tried, in the information which we sent to the guests last year, to describe our practice as such more clearly, to not continue being a kind of guest resort as much as a place where we were following a particular kind of practice,

[48:03]

but which was open to people to come and visit and participate in Tassajara, which is a very beautiful place, but is also a community of students trying to live their lives and practice in a particular way. So we talked about that a great deal and talked about how we could have students there. That was the point at which we offered scholarships to some of our older students to have positions of work in the guest season which would bring with it some continuity, which an older student can bring with them. We, last year, at Suzuki Roshi's request, together decided that Paul Disko and his wife and baby would go to Japan where Paul would study carpentry, which Paul is now doing.

[49:05]

We talked about issues which come up with doing something like having a lay ordination, which we had done the previous year, which we wanted to do again last year, or did in August. One of the things which is related to something that Baker Roshi was trying to describe to you about how Zen Sen was organized, during the year, during several meetings over a period of a year, we talked about who decides what, what group of people makes decisions about how to do different kinds of things. We came to the point where we decided that the Rokuchigi, that is the officers here and at Tassajara, should increasingly have more responsibility for deciding a whole range of things by themselves and with the Zen Center officers, and that the board would increasingly try to be more a group of people who would meet together to talk about the underlying policies, the underlying ideas behind the decisions

[50:10]

that are made on an everyday basis. Beginning, of course, for a number of years, we've talked about the issues of how we support ourselves. In this past year, we've increasingly, more specifically talked about the issue of right livelihood and how we support ourselves, which is now beginning to come up in the specific discussions and meetings we're having, for example, about the work company. As I think most of you know, but may not know the particulars of it, in June of last year, Katagiri Roshi told us that he felt that it was time for him to do something on his own, and in the time since then, what we have come to is that Katagiri Roshi will continue working with us

[51:13]

and being a teacher with Zen Center as much as possible, we hope, on a six-month basis, and that the rest of the time, he's working on establishing a group of students that he will work with on his own in Monterey. He taught the fall practice period and the current practice period, which is at Tassajara, and we hope that we will be able to continue some kind of relationship with him, where he will help us as a teacher at Tassajara and here, but in combination with his also working with a group of students on his own. As you all know, we accepted Suzuki Roshi's choice of Baker Roshi as his successor as the chief priest in the fall, in October, and we had the formal installation in November, and the whole shift of responsibility to Baker Roshi

[52:23]

with the board working with him, which is what we've been trying to work out, especially in our December meeting and the meeting which we're now actually in the middle of, trying to find out how we can work together in some way to continue Suzuki Roshi's work. There are an incredible number of detailed kinds of decisions which kind of hang on those general categories. I think that if students are actually interested in knowing something about the specific kinds of issues that come up in each meeting, we'll try to find ways of communicating more directly to all of you. But one of the functions, I think, of the Zen Center officers is to try to give people as much information about the kinds of things that we're talking about, and the board seems to be encouraging that the local officers and the Zen Center officers

[53:24]

try to act as communicators in that way. Do any of you have any particular questions you would like to ask specifically about the board functioning in the last year? Yes. This is a more general question. How did the board choose... You said you had general reasons to choose so that you would elect a leader. Why did you elect a leader? Well, that's partially because we reformed the organization of Zen Center. In other words, we made a new corporate form for Zen Center, largely out of some feelings that Suzuki Roshi had of wanting to be clearly as the chief priest, as our teacher, the one who was legally at the center of the way things were organized. And in 1968, we formed a new kind of corporation.

[54:28]

It's a very... It's not a particularly well-known corporate form. It's called a corporation soul, where actually the office of the chief priest is what is incorporated. And what happened was that the board was chosen by Suzuki Roshi. That original group of people were people that he chose to be on the board. Then new people have been added very slowly in combination, a choice made between the board and Suzuki Roshi, although we depended very heavily on his decision. We haven't added any new members for a long time, and how we'll do that now, I don't know. I mean, we have a formal way of doing it written into the Articles of Incorporation, in that it has to be a decision which is made by the chief priest and the board of directors. And the appointments are life appointments. But the difference is that the corporate structure

[55:33]

is quite different from the corporate form which was in existence at the time that you're referring to. You also mentioned that the director at Tassajara, that officers of Zen Center are temporary members of the board. Yeah, in other words, I'm a member of the board and I'm the president of Zen Center, but it's perfectly possible that someone might be the president of Zen Center and not necessarily be a board member, but during their time of office they would be on the board. As it is now, for example, the director here and at Tassajara are members of the board while they're in that position. Yes, Ashley, what I said to you is permanent board appointments. There are then people who are on the board

[56:35]

because of the function that they're carrying at any given time. Yes. Pardon me? Yeah. Something that Baker Roshi just pointed out is that that shift which is more towards the officers carrying the functioning of Zen Center, more than the board, is something that is happening more. I mean, that's the direction that we're decidedly moving. The Rokuchiji are the officers here and at Tassajara. There are certain positions. The Rokuchiji system comes out of a traditional monastic system as we've gotten it from Japan and I guess from China, and it works more clearly at Tassajara

[57:35]

than it does here. For example, at Tassajara you have the director and the assistant director and the ino, the person who's in charge of the zendo. You have the work foreman. You have the tenzo. You have the treasurer who at certain times of the year also is in charge of guests. For example, during the guest season that's a very important position. Those same positions here are a little bit more difficult to describe because, for example, the ino is not just the ino for the zendo as it functions for the house residents, but the head of the zendo for San Francisco, the San Francisco zendo. The director here is primarily responsible for the residents for this building. The treasurer here is specifically responsible for the monies having to do with the residents as distinct from the zen center. The zen center treasurer is responsible for the overall money situation. Anyway, they're those primary positions and here in San Francisco we have a couple of other people

[58:37]

who function as that group, but who are not part of the traditional six officers. Any other questions? Ada? It would be certainly possible... At the end of our board meetings we make resolutions and if a student wanted to read the resolutions that we made from a board meeting they could read those. We don't post those. The Rokuchiji minutes we do post. We've never posted the zen center officers' minutes partially because the meetings are... We don't come to a set of decisions very often as much as that we discuss something about how to do something so that it's much more difficult very often to make a written record

[59:40]

of a set of decisions that we've come to. We've very clearly tried to do that with the Rokuchiji meetings here and at Tassajara and in fact one of the things we've found out is that it's a very good way for the officers, for example, the zen center officers to keep in touch with what's happening here and at Tassajara. And we're trying to develop some skills in those ways of communicating with each other in terms of what we're doing rather than to have a small group of people who are always in every meeting which is something we're really trying to work with. Yes? In addition to the three major Rokuchiji yourself who are the other permanent members of the group? The permanent members of the board are Baker Roshi, Silas, Claude, Bill Kwong, Peter Schneider, Dan Welch, Paul Disko, Katagiri Roshi,

[60:49]

me. I think that's all. There have been other people who've resigned because they can't come. Gene Ross. Anyway, at the moment we have those nine people who are permanent members of the board. And anyone else who's on the board then is by function. Probably I would guess that there's always an interest in being on the board and actually you can function more effectively probably in Zen Center by being on the Rokuchiji. The board is for those people who are most familiar with Zen Center. So it'll probably end up to be those people who've held a number of different positions and have finally been officers at large and it looks like they're going to be in Zen Center forever. Then we say, oh, all right. But if the board gets very big, you see, then it can't function at all. So it's mainly to keep track of what we've done

[61:51]

and what we're going to do. The actual day-to-day operation is the Rokuchiji. But we had to make this kind of shift at the point at which Zen Center became so complicated that we could no longer just depend on elections each year, which often elected a completely new person who had been there a lot. And we also had to have skills, somebody who could do the books. But it's interesting to see the development of Zen. The address down here. Well, I think that in the early part of Zen Center we spent two years discussing what the stationary should look like and finally came to this. And we had some designs submitted. And it finally became possible to operate at that rate.

[62:53]

That's Zen's law. We do a little better now, not too much. Yes. I would like to see the board. It's not even I want to see the board. I'd like to see them published or made public or something. Well, I think that maybe the idea of having some sort of a newsletter that came after a board meeting in which we talked about the things that we had talked about in a meeting in addition to other things might be, I think that's a very useful idea. Okay, I think... It's possible that we decided that. The resolutions. The resolutions. But I don't know that it's ever been done. It's a standard. Okay, I think Silas and Lou

[63:57]

want to talk to us about the budget. So before you all fall over, maybe they should begin. Okay. Okay. I started being the treasurer of Zen Center in 1966 and with a short break in 1967, I've been the treasurer to the end of 1971. When we, in 1966, I think we had a total cash flow that incurred. In 1966, we had... I'm a bottom liner man. I look at the bottom line or I look at the total amount and that means something to me because it's a kind of measure of the activity that we're involved in. So in 1966,

[64:58]

we had income of about $7,000 and we spent about $6,500. In this past year, we've had roughly income of about $260,000 and we spent $267,000. However, we have 120 people living full-time and having a room and board and various services that go with that and teaching in Zendo. So if you look at it just as money, $7,000 compared to $260,000, it looks one way, but actually it just means that within Zen Center, we're taking care of more than we were in 1966. When we just had a Zendo, we were paying some support of Suzuki Roshi at that time and $40 a month or $50 a month rent

[66:01]

to Sokoji. Last year was the first year that we operated fully with a budget that we made up at the end of 1960, 1970 to sort of guidance. The letter that I sent out last March, I used the metaphor of the budget as a speedometer that we can look at from time to time but we don't have to keep our eyes glued on the speedometer completely. Yesterday in the board meeting, Baker Roshi pointed out that it also could function as a governor. I like that. It does also function as a governor. It doesn't mean that we just go 100 miles an hour in a 60 mile an hour zone and say, oh, we're going 100 miles an hour. So perhaps as years go on, we will add to the metaphor. I think it's helpful to

[67:11]

just broadly review our organization. We look at ourselves as, in a way, six different economic units for accounting purposes and for a way to clarify an area. There are Zen Mountain Center students or the Zen Mountain Center operations as it relates to students. There's the guest season, which is a kind of economic entity of its own. There's 300 Page Street, which is the students living in the building and the maintenance upkeep of the building, support of the residential section of the building. There is the library and bookstore, which is rather small but still is a kind of separate entity. And then there is something we call capital, which means that part which receives donations for Zen Center, all of Zen Center,

[68:13]

for Zen Mountain Center. And last year, the way we were looking at it was that it built major buildings in Tassajara or built a major innovation to the Zendo here. But that was an overall category for expenses that weren't ongoing day-to-day expenses but were large expenses. And then the other category is called Zen Center or Zen Center General, which aside from maintaining communication in a broad general way with all the various, with all the units, Tassajara and Page Street, also has the responsibility of paying, taking care of the teachers' salaries and the functions of the officers, Zen Center officers, president, treasurer, secretary.

[69:14]

Ah, I think Gaurashi said, I'd like to remind you that there'll be an open lunch after this meeting. So that if you're beginning to get... This is really heavy medicine, you know. So I'm trying not to... I don't know how to make this interesting. Actually, that goes under about 300 Page Street. Food budget would... That's a good question because... 300 Page Street budget would... The food budget would include serving your dinner or lunch at this time. So Zen Center is a kind of catch-all. Let's see, I'll go over each unit. Last year, what... whether it was in a plus or minus situation. The student... The Zen Mountain Center student unit

[70:21]

was $3,000 minus for the year. The guest season earned, in excess of expenses, $20,000. Zen Center was minus $20,000. Actually, $21,000 roughly. And 300 Page Street was $1,000 plus. And the library and bookstore, basically because of sales of Suzuki Roshi's book and also partially Ed's Tassajara bread book, was $4,400 plus. And the capital side, which includes paying for Tassajara, was $11,000 minus. So for the year, on a total... out of a total expense of about $260,000,

[71:22]

we were minus for the year $9,700. But we started the year with $17,000, so we still had a little surplus at the end of this year. I just want to go... Maybe I'll go through the operating expenses for everything combined. To give you an idea of where the expenses are going. We spent... Last year we budgeted $32,000 for food. We spent $31,000. The automobile we budgeted $5,600 and we spent $5,400. The gasoline we budgeted $2,800. We spent $2,300. For the phone we budgeted $3,200 and we spent $3,600. Insurance we budgeted $3,600 and we spent $3,400. For the utilities,

[72:25]

gas and electric water here in Tassajara, we budgeted $5,300 but we spent $6,800. So our estimation at the beginning of the year wasn't particularly realistic. For the windmill, we budgeted $9,000 but we spent $3,700. There's a category called general which includes anything that I can't categorize any other way, which is a fairly large... It's tapes and... Buying Zafir for the zendo, candles for the altar, many, many different items that can't come under a category like food or utilities. We budgeted altogether $24,000 and we spent $27,000. Teachers' salaries were...

[73:29]

We budgeted $22,000 and spent $21,000. Suzuki Roshi, Katagiri Roshi, Yoshimura, Sensei, Tatsugami Roshi, Hokusai receives also compensation in that category of teachers. And part of Baker Roshi's grant was also included in that category. The staff, we budgeted $40,000 and we spent $40,000. Medical or Blue Cross coverage, we budgeted $2,700 and spent $3,400. Property taxes, spent $2,700. There was no question of budgeting that because it's charges. We pay it.

[74:29]

For travel, overall travel expenses, we budgeted $4,100 and spent $4,600. Necessarily several trips to back and forth to Japan included in Oichi, coming, going, coming, and going. We made that a fairly large amount this year. We gave donations to other groups of $900. Page Street rent or the mortgage payments, we budgeted $27,000 and spent $27,000 to pay on the mortgage for this building. So that gives you an idea of some of the major categories of expense that we have. At year's end, we had liabilities.

[75:31]

We still owe $20,000 on the Tassajara purchase and that payment is due on the 15th of March. And we also had about $240,000 left to pay on this building. We have various combinations of mortgages and loans where we'll be able to extend those payments probably over the next 18 years. And we had a mortgage on the house next door of $27,000, which again is something that's to be paid over a 10 to 12 year period out of current operating income. So those were our liabilities. Our assets included $7,200 in cash. Zen Mountain Center, 300 Page Street, 310 Page Street and a second mortgage that we hold

[76:35]

which is a gift, which was part of a gift to us which was valued at roughly $18,000. We don't really put a value on Zen Mountain Center, a money value on Zen Mountain Center. 300 Page Street or 310 Page Street. This Buddha sort of goes off the money market. So our total liabilities at this point are about $300,000. But while that's a large amount that we're extending that amount, paying that back over a long period of time and the bulk of it has to do with the purchase of this building. Ah. I think I'll just stop now. I have so much information. This is a very, very condensed way of observing activity flow in a group like this. We pay tax on the house next door

[77:40]

and we pay a tax of about $1,800 on Zen Mountain Center. We're in the process of applying for some exemption there but because we have the guest season or the original character of the guest season we didn't at that originally apply for a complete exemption. I'm probably more and more eligible for a complete exemption or a percentage exemption. Well, certainly a percentage exemption. Yes. What are the groups that you make donations to? Um. We've made donations to the New York Zen Studies Society. We've made donations to Bennett Roshi in an attempt to found a monastery. We've given donations to Blue Mountain Meditation Center. We've given donations to Suzuki Roshi's temple

[78:42]

to the Heiji to Soto the Heiji Betsuin which is, I believe, an auxiliary zendo in Tokyo. We've given donations to the Blue Mountain Meditation Center and we've given donations to the neighborhood camping program. In the last, this is over the last two years now. I'm not clear which which is where. I think that's almost the complete list. All those organizations have given donations to us. Practically. Well, not the neighborhood. Not the neighborhood. Okay. Okay. The treasurer is really always available to if you have a specific question about the budget or about some question about how money works

[79:43]

within our, within Zen Center or the reflection of it you should probe the treasurer. You'll appreciate it actually. There he is. Yes. Silas, how do you feel about this whole budget thing is quite mysterious to me. I marvel that, you know, that we manage to We do too. you know, pay the bills and get everything done. And it seems like a tremendous amount of money but one one thing that hits me about the complexity of our whole structure and that worries me personally in drawing up my own personal budget which I can barely see is, you know, it seems like we have these layers upon layers upon layers of responsibilities that are increasing like as we get more property and more layers of officers we now have, you know, we used to just have a board and now we have a group of TG and officers and a board and all that.

[80:45]

And in terms of the future of it for just, you know, like students you know, like $20 a month is, it seems like, it must be a drop in the bucket and it seems like we have commitments to support all this property and all these people and that seems to me like it makes very looks to me like it makes very small limits on what where students can go who are not already supported by Zen Center You know what I mean? People who are supporting Zen Center now in one way or another who are working, who are coming to Zazen when they can who have some long-standing interest in doing something I don't foresee none of the priests it's not going to switch around it's going to become more and more people who are going to become more and more involved and

[81:46]

it takes some total involvement to practice Zazen fully yet we have to we're living and the priests and the people that Zen Center supports don't earn a living they're supported we can't can we do more of that? I mean, can that keep where does that end? Well, they're earning outside with respect to the rest outside I understand what you mean That's a kind of interpolation of trends which ever since that we started actually with Tassajara we're sitting with that problem actually we sat with that kind of problem but actually it's it works it does work out in a way which is our practice to stay to follow it's working out too it is a real problem it looks like a hierarchy actually I'd like to think of more various overlays of practice potential

[82:47]

within the situation of Zen Center when you're going to school obviously you're attending a university or something obviously you can't also hold a major position in Zen Center which requires you to be there all the time something has to give there but that doesn't mean that there's a higher therefore a higher practice going on in one way and a lower practice there's just different practices going on perhaps so but how can potentially yeah potentially but how can a large Sangha I mean you know I realize this is a question that we're going to have to look at for the next hundred thousand kalpas maybe but I'm really wondering whether it will ever be possible for people who aren't already pretty well

[83:47]

entrenched in Tassajara and in transmission type practice to do that to get involved in that type of practice at Zen Center in the future financially speaking this is not the question you're supposed to ask I'm sorry it's really complicated but it's first of all fundamental assumptions one is that if you have more students and more training and more people supported doesn't necessarily mean there's more cost per student because you may you have obviously more students to split the cost right okay but but what we're aiming for is everybody working but at a certain point

[84:49]

you may be required to work within the community I mean at a certain point you'd for instance the most obvious example is we didn't ask Lukyosh to go out and get a job we preferred him to work within that may become may be that the library may become such a big job that it may be necessary to have a full-time librarian who can't live in some other way well if we have a full-time librarian it means the librarian is big enough and getting enough use that the support the support the amount of money per student should be about the same as when we had a librarian who just got meals free or something you know ideally so what what the other the other kind of question you're asking is how does a person come through Zen Center and end up to be able to practice fully well obviously not everyone who's a serious student can end up to be supported by Zen Center this is a kind of

[85:49]

seminary or school primarily so what we try to do is some of the students as much as possible as small a number as possible will end up to be supported by Zen Center but the same kind of student will go out and start his own group and have his own group support him so support him so what we're trying to do is if a student comes into Zen Center as much as possible pays his own way if at some point he can't pay his own way and it's important that he continue his practice at that time we will either generally we extend the scholarship or we extend scholarships based not scholarships but grants I guess we're going to call them based on function in other words he's performing a job we have to have done that's part of practice we're willing to and the community depends on it being done so we're willing to do it so everybody a person who comes and stays a long time may have a portion of

[86:49]

time in which he's supported by Zen Center a minimum $50 a month but ideally we're all working and contributing energy in some form money energy or work energy or cups of rice or something I don't think the aim of Zen practice is to is to end up to be supported by Zen Center I hope not because that certainly wouldn't be practical no, sure wouldn't it wouldn't be good either right, I'm also concerned about our relationship to the rest of society in terms of people having jobs that seems to be something that people find very difficult right, well that's why we're working on things like the Zen Farm and the work company because the work company will increase the cash flow with the students they'll have jobs etc and somehow what we're trying to aim for is the practicers themselves support Zen Center and with a small amount

[87:53]

of money a small percentage just comes so I don't think we you see one way we'll keep from getting bigger is limiting the number of people who are on salary I mean if we end up having ten teachers on salary well then you could have a hundred students per teacher or something you'd have enormous if we limit it to three teachers or something or four teachers then you limit the number of students and then a student who comes say later will be expected to leave and found his own group or do something else I don't know go work for USD or do anything else but also some of the older students may at a certain point just get bored with being around here and they may go teach at a university or whatever so anyway this is a problem we're trying to meet in lots and lots of ways but there's another side of it

[88:54]

which is really complicated which is the bad feeling that occurs just talking about money you know I know there's one one person in fact he happens to be in the audience who told me that he saw me this I may be altering somewhat what he said but he told me that he saw me met me for the first time when I was in a meeting like this talking about money a few years ago and when he heard I was coming back from Japan he hoped I wasn't and anyway I came back I'm sorry but it's very complicated and it's complicated because of this whole idea of of free something for free and who owns what for instance the land that I have in the Sierras we have this problem we've had in Tassajara people coming and camping on it and saying

[89:54]

this is God's property you know God's country well you know it is but the way Gary Snyder for instance has solved that is he says I know this territory I know this tree et cetera et cetera you don't so in that sense because of my knowledge of it it's property so there's a this is a real problem and very great deal of difficulty and hostility in us and part of what we're doing is part of the reason we don't look for great big rich people to give us great big sums of money is that I think and Suzuki Roshi thought most of us think that we have to come to terms with money as part of our practice I mean there's no such thing as a free anything I mean like in the university they have now free universities they're simply not free they're free because we have an affluent society which can allow a professor at one thing to make enough money that he can teach for free somewhere else but it's not actually free

[90:56]

so if we take a place that we want to support ourselves and not depend on an affluent society's overflow and welfare checks and whatever right then we have to find some way to responsibly work and produce the money needed now what actually it's energy whatever form you want to call it so the other side of using university model is if we're going to be a place where a person on the one hand can be kind of church member here coming for services and practice as much as possible also a seminary if necessary we have to find some way to support it and continue to develop the practice but it's not inexpensive and we don't you know we're not you know Zen Center is run fairly frugally and it's the excesses in money that are spent for instance to send Paul to Japan

[91:57]

say this kind of thing raises a controversy but this is maybe it's wrong but that kind of money is based on the idea that over the long range we need certain kinds of things that we have to pay for now and that's still a fairly small percentage of our budget so to use the university model like to go to a good college it costs the college about four or five or six thousand dollars per student now they can't ask the student for that much so what are they asking for two or three many students don't know even that it costs more we're trying to say exactly what it costs per student and then we're trying to see what share what percentage of that we can share what percentage will come from outside donation and what percentage maybe we can say newer students we at older students have to support through more work and more money maybe we have to make it easier for the newer students to get through their money hangups

[92:58]

because a lot of people will will say that five dollars a month is entirely too much to give to to a group you're practicing with wherever it is yet they'll spend much more than that in the movies they'll spend ten or fifteen hours a week here and three hours a week in the movies and spend much more money in the movies most of the zen groups and buddhist groups I know of in this country cost a great deal more to belong to the zen center and they're not open they're fixed you are a member you're not and you pay that must make it easier it makes it easier we're yes when you talk about cost per student you're talking about resident students roughly 185 most supporting students that is for Tassajara here and people who make regular pledges so these are people who are paying pledges residents plus people who pay regular pledges well that $130 figure is for people who are in residence either here or at Tassajara

[94:00]

I think that's actually what you're asking for yes it is another thing is it seems to me our costs for sessions for non-members very much lower than any other well all our costs are actually yes but well we could raise it but geez you know it hurts us to raise it well that's what we're going to maybe now is the time it's getting late to shift to Lu and you're Lu maybe you could say what this year's budget is and what the situation is well they put me at the end so you're all comfortably asleep probably like me actually this year is the last year we have to pay

[95:03]

anything on Tassajara and in a sense this year this year will mark a kind of shift in the way we're thinking about ourselves from a group that's getting started to a group that's established in the sense that we're no longer frantically running around looking for the money for the next payment for Tassajara and growing constantly from a a budget of 7,000 to a budget of 200 or 300,000 I think that this year marks the period of time when we're kind of leveling off and probably this level of operation is one that we'll be able to sustain hopefully for a much longer period of time at this particular level essentially the expenses that we have this year are pretty much the same as

[96:04]

last year there's not really any major expenses that we're contemplating adding some of the expenses in various categories go up just in the nature of things but basically it's the same but related to the shift in emphasis from trying to support ourselves more just from this group this group supports itself rather than relying constantly on outside support which really doesn't work because for one thing Buddhism is growing too not just Zen we got the jump on everybody with Tathagatagarbha but now other Zen groups too are starting monasteries and they're kind of following

[97:05]

more slowly the same pattern of growth that we've been following and they'll be also legitimately asking American Buddhists to support them too so the only way it'll work for Buddhists in general is if all the Buddhists support their own their own group otherwise there won't be enough to go around so on that basis we as Bhikkhu Roshi and others have said already we try to realistically calculate for this year how much our expenses are and how much each student would be asked to give if we ask you to support us 100% we could meet all of our expenses in actual fact we do get donations freely given without asking for them to some extent and we have some other sources of income

[98:07]

and the guests too so we don't actually have to ask for the whole amount I think at the end of 1969 we this was before we had this building we raised the maybe it was at the time we purchased this building we raised the daily rate for a resident student from $2.50 a day at Plaza Hart to $3 a day I think that rate increase coincided with the purchase of this building so when we purchased this building two years ago over two years ago we established a slightly increased rate of $3 a day which would apply both for resident students here in Page Street and in Tassajara and we've gone with that for about over two years now and it looks like this year in order to meet

[99:07]

the expenses we're going to need to go to $3.50 which would mean instead of $90 a month $105 that's for the resident students at our two practice places and also see I'm the one that's telling you all the important stuff also this is growing out of the recent meeting we had we'd like to think of ourselves more as a combination of a church in the traditional sense and a kind of seminary or school and in a sense anyone who lives here in this building

[100:07]

or is practicing in Tassajara is a student at our Zen school or Zen seminary and it would be nice if someday everyone could go to that seminary for free that's far in the future, maybe that will never happen right now we have to charge something to cover the cost of operating those places for the students who are living here or at Tassajara the cost includes of course the cost of food and electricity, rent mortgage for the building and so on and so forth but now I think we'd also like to open that category of fee-paying student who is seriously interested in pursuing our practice in a pretty full-time or committed way

[101:08]

to also those who don't live here is it appropriate for me to continue? Sure so we have thought about splitting the non-resident population of Zen Center into two categories one is the category of member that we've always had from which we ask a voluntary pledge of some amount each month which you decide on the basis of your ability to contribute but also we would like to restore or create a category of practicing student who would be perhaps more seriously involved or committed in a course of study at Zen Center and from whom we would ask

[102:09]

a fee like something like tuition $25 and there would be certain additional things that would go along with that that we haven't actually worked out in terms of what each category would be doing but maybe some of the others can explain that I'm just presenting it from a financial standpoint so in a sense it looks like this year we're making a little bit more financial demands on our membership consistent with the hope that we can become beginning tentatively this year a self-supporting group which does not have to rely on large outside donations or other sources of income which are unreliable at best and also isn't as good for us if we continue to rely on that

[103:09]

kind of crutch so we're just putting it to you, this is what it costs and this is what we need and if we do this we'd be able to go through the year without being able to pay for all of our bills and come out at the end of the year still intact, not having to borrow or beg or steal so we still have a actually $11,000 left to pay on Tassajara this 15th of next month and so actually we had to spend a lot of money last year when Suzuki Yoshi got sick the expenses that surrounded that event were

[104:09]

pretty expensive the phone calls alone all over the world to inform everyone when he died cost about $500 very expensive to stay with what we needed to do at that particular emergency time so we used up a lot of the money that we had set aside to pay for Tassajara so we're still running a little short on the basis of that of those extraordinary events we're still running short for our last payment but we're not asking for the money for that payment to come from the students that's going to come from whatever other sources we can muster that's our responsibility, not yours but we are asking that the students support paying off this building which we can do over a much longer period of time and a much more reasonable financial situation to pay off this building

[105:11]

I guess I have nothing further to say unless someone has questions, as I imagine you might maybe you can direct your questions to all of us, not just myself and whoever seems to be the most appropriate person to answer the question can speak up I guess what she asked I could barely hear was what about the possibility of buying a horse pasture well actually if we think in terms of this Kalpa and the fact that that's a pretty good location and maybe there would be sub-temples or something in that area and also the fact that the Forest Service would probably prefer to have us have the land and probably will move toward eliminating

[106:16]

the private land that's in there I think it would be wise of us to try to buy or receive all of the available private land in that area which includes the horse pasture and a mountain piece two more 160 acre pieces and several others in there the horse pasture is a sort of pasture up above Tassajara on the way down the road into Tassajara which was the original piece of land we were thinking of getting and how we do that etc. I just don't at this point know but I thought part of it was that we didn't want someone else to buy it is that a possibility? well sure it's a possibility we have contractually the option

[107:18]

or so called it's called the right of first refusal that goes from 10 years from the time we bought Tassajara so that any attempt to sell we would have the option to meet the selling price ourselves that expires in about 5 years I think it's 10 years we don't buy the horse pasture there's no good that can come from it because I've talked to the rangers and the people around there and there's something big going to happen there if we don't get it and the rangers will do it if we don't they'll build a big camp there so I hope we all support the purchase of the horse pasture laughter well I'm going to some of us are going to meet about that laughter next week or sometime in Monterey probably I just don't know you see there's so many right now we've got to

[108:21]

as Lou said the fall was very expensive and just the whole transition has been expensive and we've got to just find out how to make this next payment right now to complete the purchase and I think it's more important rather than thinking about more land right now what we try to do if we bought the land is probably try to trade it with the forest service to create one big area of a single piece instead of having scattered pieces in the long range we may want to build a larger monastery down there and we may want to actually have the monastery in a different place that valley is rather narrow but that's very far ahead right now we have to come to terms in several ways with more realistically meeting our own expenses and also

[109:22]

trying to if we do that that will also give us a better basis for finding alternative sources of income I don't know yeah yeah the work company you can talk there's a meeting this afternoon about it and I guess you could come there and find out who right now we don't have any particular special person designated a leader designated I think we won't for a while there's going to be a kind of perhaps a group of the people most involved will make sort of group decisions for a while about what to do looking for space and things and as for the farm there's not much to communicate about it at all except leave your name in the office that you're interested in until we actually have a place lined up

[110:23]

to get right now the two places are just in the air and we don't have any money for them one would require one is more expensive but might not require any cash at the beginning, the other one would require some money we don't have any yeah yeah sort of the same something Roshi started yeah um what is Takahatsu or begging as a means of support for priests what do you think of it as a means of support that's a very complicated question I don't know if you and I have talked about it already haven't we? traditionally

[111:24]

I'll try to be very brief traditionally monks way back beg right this was rationalized as based on the idea of merit is that the monk has more merit and you don't have as much if you give to the monk you gain merit by giving to somebody with more merit than you well that's a hard idea for us to deal with but anyway but there's also the side of practicing and begging is a way you explain your own lifestyle to people okay that's fine in the Orient it's harder to do here also even in the Orient as soon as you have a complicated civilization of which you're trying to train people like we are

[112:25]

and not just a few people living in the mountains or a few wandering monks no monastery that I've ever heard of supports itself by begging actually they're supported by rich donors or being land owners or being bankers and by not acknowledging where they were getting their money pretending it's a kind of begging trip right but getting money from all other sources being sort of actually the local lord they were very rapidly corrupted so what we're trying to do is acknowledge those sources of money we need in addition to that now there's another level of begging which is how you I mean not just simple begging for money but how you give yourself the first paramita charity how you give of yourself and receive, giving and receiving the same at all levels how you present, instead of walking into a store or a shop

[113:27]

and holding out a bowl how you give of yourself as you go in there and buy something and receive so there's various levels at which you can understand begging but as for a way of our supporting ourselves it doesn't have much meaning but we would like to try it as a practice and we're thinking about trying it in Tassajara, in some way we haven't got any, have any definite plan we've talked about it with Roshi a number of times each time we came to the point of several times I came to the point of saying well alright, let's do it he didn't so exactly when we'll try it I don't know Thank you very much for establishing the work company and our idea and getting involved and I'm enthusiastic and sometimes I get the chance to run a carpentry I think that

[114:29]

there might be quite a few people who would appreciate adding another section to it when all the energy demands are met perhaps a section for crafts or a section for service self-training because so many people find themselves desperate we already plan to do that and maybe we'll make some furniture and things like that what? 2 o'clock also I should say that we're planning another meeting and this meeting is a women's practice meeting there's a great deal of curiosity among the women about why Buddha rejected them so forcefully or why traditional Buddhism has sort of said well if you're reborn a man then you have a chance well, we don't have to

[115:31]

I mean we in Zen Center think women are pretty special and and in fact we're ready to be taken over at any time and well we try to preserve a little bit of our illusion you know even the Catholic Church has seen this coming and they're establishing Mary not only as the secondary figure after Christ but a co-redeemer and I know that International Masonry and other such organizations have been planning for over a century for the takeover by women expecting it to occur so it's not just recent women's lib

[116:34]

this whole movement of what do we call it, lady power as anyway we'll have some kind of meeting about it, sure I'd like to say something about something that Lou mentioned which I think maybe we need to talk about a little bit more fully what we're suggesting when we talk about people being members of Zen Center and determining for themselves some sort of pledge which is a reflection of the amount that they are using Zen Center the amount of participation that they have and also what their income is, etc. and also suggesting that for those people who want to be fully participating practicing students that's a different

[117:35]

idea and I'd like to suggest a little bit more about what's in that when we talk about people who are fully practicing here we mean using the Zendo coming for lectures being able to have doksang frequently being able to use the library fully participating in our practice here as it develops in whatever ways it goes so that if somebody becomes a full practicing student they may or may not live here in other words it would be a way of recognizing those students that we have who do in fact practice with us fully but live outside of the building someone if they went to Tassajara would at that point if they hadn't already been a practicing student at that point they would then be shifting into that category so what we're saying is that for those

[118:35]

students who are here fully we're asking of them a specific monthly fee which is different from what we've asked before but it's part of suggesting a different kind of possibility there's some details of that that we still are working with so I'm not sure that I would like you to ask questions about that if you have some I'm not guaranteeing well it's up to the individual if he wants to say he wants to be a practicing student he identifies himself that way it wouldn't be our saying to you you have to be a practicing student but we may no you may is that alright Al I'd like to add one clarification to that that is to say the students who are residents of our two practice places are already paying a fee actually far in excess of $25 a month

[119:36]

the arbitrary breakdown that we've established and we're continuing to establish is that of the now $105 a month that we're asking students to pay $60 of it goes directly for room and board kind of expenses the balance of it goes to offset all the general expenses the city center incurs so actually a resident student is actually already paying a kind of student fee so there would be nothing additional we would ask from any resident the fee that we're talking about would be for a non-resident student who wishes to practice with the same degree of intensity that a resident student at Tatsahara or the H Street building already already does and it's a way of formalizing that that parity

[120:37]

between resident and non-resident practicing students in a way in which we and you can both recognize fully that parity does exist and this hopefully will break down some of the feeling that has existed in the past that residents get all the breaks and it's rather difficult to practice with a non-resident this would establish very definitely the kind of practice privileges so to speak that you would be entitled to as a practicing student so there would be no sense of how much you're entitled to you would know definitely from both sides what the situation is it's a way of making the relationship more definite and it's up to the individual person to decide how they want to relate it wouldn't be required that a person be one thing or the other and in any case the zendo as it has always been at Zen Center would remain

[121:40]

open to everyone practicing students Zen Center members and non-members lecturers also that spirit would remain intact and hopefully will always remain intact one of the ideas in this is of use membership tied to use and student being a student tied to use so what we're trying to arrive at is what part of Zen Center can we offer for free if nothing is actually for free what part of it can we offer for free well the zendo anyone can use the library maybe will be for members maybe eating in the eating here or sashins is a reduced fee for members there's some recognition here that actually using the place a lot

[122:40]

is where the money goes and another side of it is a problem Suzuki Roshi had and he went through various phases of thinking well I will go to Arizona with six students and abandon Zen Center or he was going to come to Japan and spend several years just with me or he was going to Japan and spend time with four students because Zen practice requires working closely with somebody you establish a relationship with I don't think any I mean a very close relationship I mean just look at the Rinzai thing you see a person in Dokusan for maybe five or ten minutes that's all right but you see your teacher five or ten minutes

[123:40]

once in the morning once in the evening often maybe three times a day during a sashin six or eight times a day for ten years or fifteen years you know after a while it's the same old face you're going to see the fifth year for the third time every day every day every day that kind of relationship Soto even emphasizes more in a kind of apprentice system so how we do this is you know like I can for instance become a psychiatrist and see anybody but it's a passage student can come and see that he can enter be some kind of student for a while and then maybe have an assigned seat be in a practice period within sitting practice period and develop a relationship Soto Kitasahara etc. so

[124:41]

what we're trying to do is but I also and Suzuki Roshi didn't refuse anybody so one way of doing that is to say well yes yes but you have to develop this kind of relationship with Zen center before so Roshi unfortunately in the latter part of his life became weaker and weaker and was less able to see people and so what we're trying to do is figure out as you can see a way to increase the possibilities of practice here and Suzuki Roshi in the end decided that Zen center should exist and maybe it doesn't make none of us are perhaps satisfied with Zen center including me and the officers

[125:46]

and including Suzuki Roshi maybe it would be we'd feel much happier with a group of 6 or 8 or 20 students practicing in a small situation where everybody can share equally in the same work etc but perhaps on the other hand this situation which we none of us like particularly over a 10 or 15 year period is a much better practice situation in the end I think Suzuki Roshi decided like that I mean I know he did decided that this place as it exists with its contradictions and difficulties is an ideal practice place so how do we continue it and also make within it opportunities for practice available some smaller things which were on the agenda which I just mentioned one there's a bookstore discount of 10% now for members you want to buy books through the bookstore and we may have some classes here somebody may teach a class on the life of Buddha

[126:47]

on this or that we don't know yet exactly but if you're interested you can let us know and we have had recently large people who are members of the larger Buddhist community related to Zen center come Allen Ginsberg's come and read and Gary Schneider has come and we've had quite a few people one or two a month for the last three months generally I don't think it will be that many Allen in fact sat here the other day with four musicians and sang a blues cycle based on the four holy truths and the eightfold path and whether we want to continue this kind of thing which we do not just for Allen because it benefits us to have Allen here or some people don't like it too but it also benefits Allen and other people to come and be with us for a while so it works both ways whether we should to what extent we as a city

[127:48]

practice monastery should be open to such things it's really up to your reaction and interest and things like that I think we're going to have to quit aren't we? There was one thing that David mentioned that would probably be of interest to most people this was a suggestion of Baker Roshi's to have some Tangario that is one day, all day sitting for people who are new students who are coming to live in this building so we're going to be beginning that as people come to move in for people who haven't practiced Tangario before in order basically to focus the students focus attention to their commitment to becoming a member of Zen Center and to Zen practice so we'll begin to have one day Tangario as an entrance to this building for those who haven't sat Tangario before

[128:49]

I'd like to not retroact in other words, if you already live here you don't have to do it if you've also been to Tatsubara Excuse me you mentioned the meeting for the work company today to several people in the audience I thought it would be a point to mention that in the last meeting we decided that the meeting that was going to happen today was specifically for people who had working experience or were working I understand I didn't make that clear and I tried to imply it though the meeting this afternoon isn't for everybody but you can go to the meeting to find out who to talk to or to leave your name or something the meeting is specifically for people who have some work skill already not for those who are interested in learning and so it's a smaller group of people than met the other a week or so ago which I guess 20 or 30 people

[129:54]

30, 40 people met then this group today will probably be about 8 or 10 or something I want to thank you for sitting through all this stuff we don't like sitting through it I'm sure you don't and I'm sorry and I also I came back from Japan I've been away you know for three years and I'm amazed at how well you and the officers have taken care of Zen Center somehow I feel very thankful to the community for supporting the Zen Center in every way they do and for the officers in trying to do all the work which is not so much fun and we don't get many volunteers for and

[130:55]

particularly for Silas who has held almost every position in Zen Center and has been the treasurer plus other officers at the same time has been the treasurer since Tassajara started and has seen us through this whole development from having no monastery up to having a monastery and a place to really practice Buddhism thank you very much

[131:20]

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