Zen of the Tea Bowl

(AI Title)
00:00
00:00
Audio loading...

Welcome! You can log in or create an account to save favorites, edit keywords, transcripts, and more.

Serial: 
RB-00435

AI Suggested Keywords:

AI Summary: 

The talk discusses the significance of Suzuki Roshi's tea bowl, emphasizing how its selection reflects both personal connection and cultural depth. Using the tea bowl as a metaphor, it explores the nuances in appreciating beauty, the concept of permission in creativity and spirituality, and the importance of cultural context in Zen practice. The talk also touches upon the role of ritual in Zen, comparing practices in Japan and the West, particularly Tangario, to illustrate the intensity and dedication required for Zen practice. The conversation moves towards the necessity of creating a Buddhist culture within a different societal context, emphasizing understanding and self-awareness through practice.

Referenced Works:
- "The Lotus Sutra": Discussed in terms of its symbolic use of the lotus to signify rootedness in both the material and the divine.
- "Dogen's Writings": Frequently referenced in the context of teachings and questions during Tangario in Japan.
- Suzuki Roshi's Background (lectures by Peter Schneider): Mentioned as an important source for understanding Suzuki Roshi's personal history and his contributions to Buddhism.

Notable Concepts:
- Tea Bowl Selection Process: Reflects depth of personal and cultural connection.
- Permission vs. Transmission: Explored through the metaphor of creating art and practicing Zen, emphasizing the necessity of external validation in some cultural practices.
- Cultural Context in Zen Practice: Highlights differences in ritual and practice between Japan and the West, particularly through the example of Tangario.
- Ritual Integration: Discusses how rituals like bowing and sitting in Zen meditation foster deeper spiritual engagement and self-awareness.
- Buddha Nature: Explored through a personal anecdote about questioning Suzuki Roshi, emphasizing the ongoing quest for deeper understanding within Zen practice.

AI Suggested Title: Zen of the Tea Bowl

Is This AI Summary Helpful?
Your vote will be used to help train our summarizer!
Photos: 
AI Vision Notes: 

AI Vision - Possible Values from Photos:

Side: A
Speaker: Baker Roshi
Location: Tassajara
Additional text:

@AI-Vision_v003

Notes: 

audio in right channel only 1st side. comes in very soft on 2nd side; hid and made inactive in left channel

Transcript: 

Last time I talked to you about Suzuki Roshi's bowl, tea bowl, and how understanding the tea bowl had something to do with Suzuki Roshi and the background out of which our teacher comes. One thing I forgot to tell you is how the particular bowl that was chosen for him was chosen. And that was, on the first visit I went, they brought out many famous tea bowls. And I didn't know anything about how they were chosen, that, you know, the way you looked at the tea bowl had to do with how it was chosen, or anything, you know. Anyway, they brought out There must have been eight or ten famous old tea bowls.

[01:01]

Can you hear in the back? For some reason, the one that was served, I think it was the one served me, but I was particularly moved by, of all of them. And then I looked at all of them and came back to that one. And it had a special pink color, which usually we associate pink with children and bathrooms. And a pink glaze seemed rather funny to me. But Japan has many, many colors which seemed funny to us at first. And suddenly this color broke through to me. I was very moved by the goal. And they all had names which they read off. This was Oscar, and this was Aoi-san, and this was Mike, and various names, historical names, all, of course, Japanese word.

[02:04]

And so the next time I came back must have been about a month or six weeks later. And They brought out a bunch of bowls for everybody. And all the bowls were different. And there were a lot of people there, both times and different people. All the bowls were different, except the one I liked was in there. And I immediately said, oh, Oscar. And I remembered the name. And they were very impressed that I remembered the name. And what happened, of course, a couple months later, is the bull that Roshi got was one very similar to the one that I had remembered the name of. And I'm quite sure if I had not happened to remember the name of, and I had no idea I was supposed to or anything, there were just a bunch of words said at the beginning, we probably wouldn't have been able to buy the bull.

[03:15]

But I showed enough involvement for them to accept that I wanted to buy a bowl. Some level of commitment to buying a bowl was shown. This is particularly interesting in Japan. I mean, if you go to a tea auction of tea bowls, say, and you spot a bowl that used to belong to your family, maybe five generations ago, or you pick up a bowl and you obviously know tea bowls because you're a tea teacher of some unusually good sort, you can say that this bowl really should be mine, because they can tell it belongs to you, either because it was in your family or because you know what the tea bowl is.

[04:20]

And then the price is very different for you than for everybody else. Maybe you can name your own price. What's always struck me as interesting about this kind of thing is You can look at this tea bowl. I would have brought it down here, actually. I thought of bringing it down, but they break very easily. They're quite soft. And even when you use a Raku tea bowl, and you have that little wooden spoon I showed you, you don't click it. You knock the tea off, and you don't bang it against the edge, because they can shatter. They're very soft and they're very low temperature and also they don't get hot in your hand, is that right?

[05:22]

They don't convey any heat through the hole. But aside from all the magic of the secret chemistry of the glaze and kind of it almost looks like hocus pocus, Still, it's a beautiful tea bowl. And why can't anyone make a beautiful tea bowl like that? It looks like the other people who make tea bowls go out of their way to make tea bowls that aren't beautiful like that. You know, they use a shiny glaze. They put on stereotyped flowers. And if they make The edge of the t-bowl is a mountain road. You know, some of the t-bowls have a kind of curved top. I think it's called the mountain road.

[06:25]

Is that right? My wife knows everything. Check up with her. Anyway, it's called a mountain road. And the average t-bowl just, it goes up and down, up and down equally. The good ones, it doesn't go up and down equally. It's rather uneven. So why can't anyone make it uneven? and make your tea bowl worth $100 instead of $50, you know? Or if you're really good, $2,000 instead of $10. Part of it is actually that Rakusan has permission to make beautiful tea bowls and other people don't have permission to make beautiful tea bowls. That may seem funny to you, but it's true. And you know, even in our own society, you see it at work in a very simple kind of form, is General Motors makes lots of cars.

[07:33]

And almost anyone can tell that the cars General Motors designs are going to be more popular than the cars Nash Rambler designs. And you can ask yourself the question, why can't Nash Rambo get with it? They can hire an engineer who can draw a car. Why don't they just hire a man who draws a car? If necessary, that looks just like a Chevrolet. Well, actually, even at that level in commercial organizations, I think something's at work which you'd have to call a mudra. There's a big mudra at work, and General Motors has got it, and Nash hasn't. And Nash can't break through into the big mudra. It sounds silly, but I think it's true, actually.

[08:36]

If it wasn't true, you'd all be enlightened. I mean, when you think about that, you can think about lots of aspects in our society about products. Dresses, watches, etc. You can go to Tiffany's and you can buy a watch, and it's got Roman numerals, and it's got a simple square, and I don't know what the inside's like, but it looks like it costs $150. But it's got nothing going for it except a rectangle and simple numbers. And you go to get a $25 watch and it's got big numbers and it's kind of funny looking, you know? But it doesn't cost any more money to make a simple square and simple numbers. So why doesn't a guy who makes a $25 watch able to just design a watch that looks like a $150 watch and sell it for $35?

[09:45]

There's something that you That's kind of silly. That's what I'm trying to talk about. I actually don't know how to express what I mean, but you could call transmission actually permission, almost as easy as you could call it transmission.

[10:47]

There's one side of it, if you can't go around thinking you're Buddha, you know, you'll go crazy if you go around thinking you're Buddha. There's lots of things you can't do, actually, without permission, and a good part of the teaching in Buddhism is actually aimed at how do you survive as a teacher? How do you let yourself be a teacher without it destroying you? Or how do you let yourself recognize what life is without it destroying you? Or how can you face that it's not what you think it is at all? that if it really was, if you really knew what it was, you... Somehow, there's certain things in this life that you need permission for.

[12:27]

And you can't give yourself permission. Or if you do, it has to be at a level of selflessness which very few people can have without a great deal of help. And it's very interesting in the stories of Buddha's life, as I talked about last time, that he said, why, he said, I don't have any need to fear that happy state, something as he entered his period of meditation leading to his enlightenment. He was giving himself permission. So, Zen, another name you can call Zen, is Mahamudra, which is the biggest mudra.

[13:57]

And we take in our practice, only our practice is Mahamudra, and we take only the biggest mudras. Now, this mudra for our hand is called the universal mudra, and it includes all mudras. And this posture is the biggest mudra for our body. So, when we practice Zen like this, we're actually giving ourselves permission to... I don't know what. While I've been talking, while I've talked partly about Japanese culture,

[15:15]

One, of course, is it's Suzuki Roshi's background. Another is it's the background of the Sangha. Buddhism is a religious life, not a religion. And this life we lead is based on Japanese and Chinese models. And another is that culture has a lot to do with what's accessible to us. Language has a lot to do with what's accessible to us. As I said to some people today, if you want to buy, say, silk thread here in San Francisco, you're hard-pressed to go to a store. and find a variety of silk thread.

[16:27]

Maybe you find, I don't know what, 20 colors or something like that, or maybe 50 or 100 colors. But you can go to Kyoto, and you can find a street in which I guess 10 blocks of the street are nothing but thread stores. And each thread store has thousands of kinds of thread. One thread store may have hundreds of shades of purple. There's the disadvantages, too, of course. What's interesting, when you go to do anything in Japan, the numbers of alternatives available to you, no matter what you're purchasing, assuming it's offered, are far more than the alternatives here. But you can't specify so clearly.

[17:30]

Here we can say, we want this and that. In Japan, you more or less take what you get. And you may want things a certain way, or you want the shopkeeper, but the shopkeeper participates too, or the tailor who's making you your robe participates too in what you get. So you have more choices, but you aren't free to make the choices. So here we have a lot of freedom to make choices, but we don't have much to choose from. I saw a movie since I've been... two movies since I've been back, and one was called The Last Picture Show. It's about a town in Texas. As far as I can tell, there isn't any place in Japan, in their most remote country village, which is as one-one-hundredth as primitive as that Texas town.

[18:46]

I don't know if you like being told that you live in a culturally deprived area, and there's no matching grants. But it's true, in fact. We have some great advantages, you know, here. We have lots of the world's problems and lots of the world's possible answers. But we ought to have some idea of what culture is, because we're creating a Buddhist culture. I mean, Suzuki Roshi, you know, was only a country priest. Now, he wasn't a Kyoto sophisticate, and he wasn't terribly well-versed in tea ceremony or calligraphy or... I mean, he picked up all those things on his own, more or less, and had teachers to some extent. But by Japanese standards, he was a rather high-ranking priest from a sort of fishing, farming area, and his grandfather was a local farmer, been a local farmer.

[19:58]

He also happened to be probably a genius. what he was able to do here. I don't mean by that that some Kyoto priest is better than Suwakiboshi, I've known pretty nearly all levels of our society, at least all that are visible, that I can find, and it's just not like Japan. But Japan's also... I'm not trying to get you all to go to Japan. Japan's also very structured and there's no place in it for us.

[21:06]

But if we are to really practice Buddhism here, we have to open up our life here to create a kind of culture for ourselves. I think that requires us looking and seeing and listening and hearing, knowing and being what's around us. I mean, we have to actually look at what's around us. I don't know how to talk about what I'm trying to talk about.

[22:25]

Suzuki Roshi used to say, has said to me, that he was Japanese, so what he knew was Japan. So he taught us the Japanese way. We had to have some way. It doesn't have to be Japanese, but we have to have some way. If you don't have some way, you can't teach Buddhism. I mean, there's no Buddhist aspirin. There's no sort of thing we can do that makes us a Buddhist. Actually, there's not even Buddhism. All you have is your life. All you have is your being alive here. And there really isn't anything else. So how do we, as a community, make ourselves see ourselves?

[23:35]

It'd be nicer if we could give ourselves something that made us feel good and distracted us until we died. And there are practices like that, that distract you until you die. Maybe that's a pretty good one, you know, I don't know. But for those of us who aren't easily distracted or easily satisfied by distraction, we're stuck with Zen. So, how do we see ourselves? That's the question. How do we do it? The other day I was in Dr. Ponse's class and he did what a good scholar does do. He started out talking about the Lotus Sutra.

[24:42]

And the average scholar starts out talking about the Lotus Sutra, and he starts talking about what chapter one is about, or chapter two, or the outline. Dr. Konsei started with the word lotus. If you're going to talk about the Lotus Sutra, start with the word lotus. So we spent most of the period talking about the word lotus. In fact, if you read a book, you know, when you read a book, the first thing you're confronted with is not the information in the book, but the mind of the author who's writing the book. So the first thing you should confront yourself with is who's writing the book. So until you know that, you can't really read the book. Most of us just read the book, you know.

[25:44]

But you should look really carefully at those first sentences in the book, first page or What is at work here, you know? Anyway, so Dr. Konsei talked about why, when a Buddha is presented, is it almost always presented on a lotus. Part of the reason is that if it wasn't on a lotus, it would be a god. It's a Buddha because the roots are still there. than the muddy water and the muddy earth. They go together. The lotus is as much a part of the Buddha as the Buddha is a part of the lotus. In a way, you can't have a Buddha without the lotus. So we have to start with our own roots. And we have to start with, you know, what do we have to start with, you know?

[27:01]

I mean, you know, your mother when you were little told you you should learn to, maybe your mother did, a lot of mothers do, tells us we should learn to sit still. Can't you learn to sit still? Well, this practice is learning to sit still with a vengeance. And that's really all, you know, that's all it is. Here we are learning to sit still. Because there's really no other way to begin to see ourselves. Because there's a space around us, you know? You can't name it. If you name it, maybe you can call it Tao or Zen, I don't know what. But there's some space around us, or that we are the space around us, that we can be free in, you know? Quite comfortable in. And you can get into that space through culture helps you a little and this and that helps you a little.

[28:13]

Actually, only by realizing your nature can you completely have that space. But we can't always sit, and it wouldn't make any sense even if we could. So we take some other practices. So as I said before, when we practice, there are no shortcuts. You come in, and you bow to your pillow, and sit down, and then turn around. Do zazen at the end. You turn around, continuing the same direction. and stand and bow and leave. And the more you do zazen, the more you find that as you start in the door, you're entering zazen.

[29:16]

And there's a kind of... by the time you sit down, you're already... maybe when you first start, it takes a few minutes, five minutes to get into your zazen. But... After you've been practicing for a while, the Han starts you. You already start changing. Whatever you're doing, you're somewhere in your room and you're picking up a book, and the second Han hits, you close your book or whatever you're doing, and something begins to happen to you. So the ritual helps us enter are enter this space. And after a while, you know, with just the sound of the Han can make you enter that space, and the sound of anything can make you enter that space.

[30:23]

Each beat of your heart can make you enter that space. So the ritual of bowing and coming to the Han and coming back is actually a way to bring your practice into everyday life. So when you're bowing at your cushion and you have to sit down, there's a great freedom there. You're not leaving and you're not going anywhere. You're just going to sit on your cushion and right then you have freedom. No place to go. I mean, maybe even we should go so far as if you're an ecologist, say, we should make you poison nature.

[31:30]

That would be too much. Then after you have some freedom from your identity, even limited identity, then you find you have a taste for certain things. Some of us think there's a book way back in our heads which has all the records of our life in it, all the information we'll ever need to know. And we go around planning to look up our life in that book one of these days. Well, we only really respect someone else if they seem to be looking things up in that book.

[32:43]

Maybe they're kept in Egypt. Anyway, you find that you have some reference scheme in your head by which you measure everything. And you don't see that kind of thing unless you lead your life in some very simple way, which anybody should be able to do. Get up in the morning, come here to Zazen, you get enough sleep, it's not so difficult, you know. But something interferes. You wouldn't ever see that something that interferes if you didn't have this kind of life. So once you see there's some interference, you can begin to work on that point. Some others of us have a taste for fierce emotions. So some of us are rather crazy, actually, because we, you know, get bored and we want some excitement

[33:48]

We get ourselves worked up, and it's a kind of being crazy. But Buddhism, of course, has fierce Buddhas, just because if we have fierce emotions, then there should be fierce Buddhas, and there are fierce Buddhas. Actually, we have the more you know yourself, the more you find you have incredibly fierce emotions. I mean, you're powerfully moved. And those feelings, if you let them out, can destroy you, unless you find some way to know what they really are. So they don't take form, but you don't make any sense.

[34:51]

So, we carry this stick here in the Zenda to wake us up. And Buddha is the one who is awake. And if we are to see what we are, what kind of situation we're in, what we are actually, what this life we live actually is, we have to be awake to it. This stick is very interesting. Suzuki Roshi made it. And it's a stick he gave me to wake you up. But it's also a stick he gave me that you can sleep with. Anyway, he's smaller than me, so it worked for him. Anyway, if you want to really stay awake, if you want to sit up during sleep, it's a chin rest.

[36:36]

So it's both a kind of pillow and a thing to wake you up. So we carry the stick here because we want the zindo to be alert. So here at Tassajara, in San Francisco, it's rather easier and people don't understand our practice and they get upset if you're hit, you know. But here we should be rather stricter with ourselves. And when you're carrying the stick and you feel somebody needs to be hit, you should be able to hit them, even if they're not sleeping. Maybe they're just thinking or wandering or... There doesn't seem to be any energy in the way they're sitting. Sometimes I straighten someone's back, which is perfectly straight, I know it's straight, you know, but it's lifeless In contrast to here, I thought I'd tell you about what Tangario is like in Japan.

[38:29]

Some of you are doing Tangario, and it's rather long. But Tangario in Japan is a little different, and I don't think we should do it the way they do it, but anyway, instead of being five days, it's about ten days. I guess I was in Tanganyo in Japan ten or eleven days, and you spend the first day, which isn't really counted, sitting on a wooden floor in Seiza all day long, from somewhere early in the morning till they come and get you about 3.30 or 4 or something, I don't remember, and prepare you and they take you up and Then you sit waiting entrance on a wooden floor till about, depending on how they feel, till somewhere about 2.30 to 4.30 in the afternoon. And you're not supposed to move the whole time.

[39:33]

Every now and then somebody comes in and hollers at you. Then you're taken to A really grubby room. It stinks. And the bedding is dirty. Everything's dirty in the place. Tommy's are filthy. I mean, they just... And then you get... And you're not allowed to change your clothes. You're not allowed to wash for the 10 days. And you're not allowed to change your clothes. And you only have the possessions with you. You can't sit in a blanket like some of you are doing. If you sat in a blanket, whip the blanket right off you. And if it's cold, it's cold. If it's hot, it's hot, you know. You prepare. But see, you don't, people don't know, so we can't do anything about it. But in Japan, you know. Most monks know in advance something about it. Some of the Americans who've gone didn't, but I knew something about it. So I knew it was liable to be hot.

[40:37]

And life would be cold, because the time of year I could have been either. And so, you're only allowed what you have, right? So I had a thin plastic insulating shirt, which I tied up as tightly as I could into a little tiny wad, and I put it in my sleeve. And I was also quite scared that they'd search you sometimes, you know what I mean? My daughter had a bad cold, and I had quite a bad cold and a mild case of the flu when I went, but I had to go. I was rather worried that I might get sicker, and I believe in mass hysteria, so I thought I'd take some vitamin C with me. And so I had some vitamin C, and I had to hide it. As soon as I get in there, no one's around, I stuck it way up on a high ledge where no Japanese person could reach.

[41:42]

So, every now and then, if we went to meals, I would take off a vitamin C. That's all permissible, you know, because part of it is, how do you survive it? And you're only allowed what you have, but you can work that out. Anyway, and then you're not allowed to... People, they assign a team of people to harass you. And... So you go into this rather grubby room and you sit there, and every now and then somebody comes in and hollers at you about Dogen or something. Luckily, I could always turn and say, I don't understand Japanese. And that saved me from a number of confrontations. But you begin to really stink after a while, you know, about five days you and other people are all horrible.

[42:55]

And they hit you a lot. At first they just come in and hit you. Every time somebody passes you, they hit you. Until finally, I was completely swollen up here and all down my back. And you know, you... I don't know, after a while it doesn't make any difference, like a toothache or something. And if you just relax into it, you know. I don't know, I didn't mind much. But they hit you a lot, you know. I came in, I've come in several times with you guys and been doing Tangario and I thought, I wonder if I should laugh at them a bit. And I thought, you wouldn't understand, you know. So, I don't know if anybody understands in Japan, but in Japan you, You don't, you know, you just stay, you just don't quibble about things. And they get you, you know, because there's one guy who liked to sneak up on us.

[44:03]

You sit and listen. You're not allowed to change your position or anything. You're only allowed to go to the toilet. Actually, you can change your position if no one's there, but we couldn't change our position if anybody was there. So we'd sit and you'd listen all the time if anybody was coming. And I spent the first three days or four days of time here, I was by myself. I was the first one. So I actually was able to practice rather well. I practiced. And I just did the best I could. But then when I had several other monks with me, one of them was trying very hard. In fact, his leg got all bloody where they crossed in full load. He had these big raw spots bleeding. He tried very hard. But the other monks, they just had a hard time, you know, and they kept moving and shifting and became a kind of... Soon it turned into a kind of game with the...

[45:14]

with these guys sneaking up on you, right? So you'd sit listening with your ears, and your back to them, and the nicer ones would just come, you know, down the stairs, you'd hear them coming, and you wouldn't be sure who it was, and sometimes it'd just be somebody walking by the room, and other times it'd be one of these guys who was assigned to harass you. He'd come in, he'd holler a bit, and hit you a few times, and split But there was one guy who was pretty high up in the rank, and he was one of the people in the Eno's room who was in charge of the people who were in charge of harassing him. And he was difficult, and he got wilder and wilder every day that passed. First he would come up tiptoeing. Then we got so he could recognize us, tiptoeing up.

[46:17]

Then he would come up and come in the room, stand there for a while, we weren't sure he was there or not, and then he'd start hollering and hitting us. Then he'd split. But then he started pretending to leave. He'd go clunk, clunk, clunk, clunk. Then he'd be there waiting. And then he started hitting us again, as soon as somebody moved. One time, he came in, and he stayed for a while, hollering. He makes everybody cry. Everybody cried. I mean, I didn't cry, but that's because I'm old, and they were young, and they were easily harassed. But I didn't, you know. Anyway, I could always say, I don't understand Japanese. I actually felt sorry.

[47:21]

There was one 52-year-old man there. They really gave it to him. And a couple of times I almost interfered and tried to help him. He plugged away and you have to work like mad. Boy, you have to go. And you have to do things like get you to come to mealtimes. half an hour early, and you stand holding your bowls in the air for half an hour, and your arms are aching, and you check your robes to see if everything's correct, and then when you're trying to eat with the meal bowls, you know, you're They try to teach you everything quickly, and you make a little mistake, and everybody hollers, and then you come out, and then you have to stand for another half hour while they quiz you about the mistake you made. Your chopstick was supposed to be, the ends were supposed to be turned that way, and so they were turned that way. And this old guy, they really, they really got to me when they began to, while he was trying to eat, they hit him with their bowing claw, across the face. He was trying to eat him.

[48:21]

But he was slow, and he kept making mistakes. But for him it was okay. You know, I talked to Suzuki Roshi about these things later, and he didn't... Oh, I didn't notice him. It's just the way we do things. It's just the way, you know, Tangario is. It's just a difficult period you go through. But anyway, This guy would come in and came in, hit everybody, talked about Dogon a lot, so everybody was crying. They couldn't answer the questions, you know. He asked questions about Dogon. And when they say, who are you to think you're a practitioner? Pow, pow. Anyway, he did all that, and then he left, and I was pretty sure he didn't leave.

[49:30]

I was sitting there, and I kept listening to hear if he was breathing, and he got very good at breathing, really silently. And all the other monks were doing the same thing, right? We're all sitting here, trying to find out if he's behind us. You should go to Japan. Anyway, maybe 25 minutes went by, and this guy still stood there, silently. Finally, some kid over here, he was the greenest one, He thought, he must be gone. So he moved his legs. And then this guy over here, he thought, He moved his legs.

[50:38]

He waited about four minutes. He moved his legs. And he got away with it. So he must be gone because he didn't hit him, right? So he moved his legs. And then this guy moved his legs. And everybody moved their legs with me because everybody thought he's gone. And about the fourth guy moved his legs, somebody... He'd been waiting all that time. So, one of the differences in Tongariro in Japan is Japan is much more of a group culture than we are, and there's a great deal of Tongariro is an initiation into the group, into a willingness to listen to somebody holler at you about dojo, a willingness to participate in certain ways. But the other side of it is the ability to sit there and

[51:41]

deal with what you are for five or ten days. And the idea behind it is, if you can't do that, you shouldn't be practicing Buddhism, because Buddhism is, at least Zen Buddhism. Because Zen is a practice for people who, at minimum, can do that. Though you in Tongariro may think at maximum, you know, it's the same. We perhaps need a little more of... We have too many walls around us and we don't let people into them. Perhaps we need a little more of being willing to let somebody come up and hit us. We're not willing to let somebody come up and love us or hit us or lots of things. So, we start from trying to find out just what's here when we sit here, removing as many of the distractions and obstructions as possible.

[53:13]

And when you finally do, and you're sitting, then you begin to wonder, what's this guy talking about? Siddhartha, she always used to say, Buddha nature, da-da-da-da-da-da, Buddha nature. I can remember the time I went up to him and asked him, what is Buddha nature? I said, you're always talking about it. Of course, before I went up and asked him, I already had in my mind lots of answers I wouldn't accept. If he said it was like a soul, I wasn't going to accept that, and if he said this and that, and I had lots of ideas from Buddhist books. But it was important that I was able to cut through all the books and stuff, and cut through my own thinking I knew what Buddha nature was, And it was pretty easy, in some ways it was easy, because Suzuki Roshi obviously knew a great deal more about everything than I did, certainly about Buddhism.

[54:25]

But to be able to cut through all that and say, well, maybe, you know, why don't I just ask? So I went up to Roshi and I said, what is Buddha nature? He didn't give me much of an answer. He said something about it was difficult. That's a prop. I can't listen. Let me try and remember. I can remember the atmosphere and mood of it exactly, but I remember I can see exactly where it was, standing in the doorway at Sokoji, coming out on the Bush Street. Talk to me something about continuing to practice. Anyway, whatever happened, he did something which precipitated in me, gave me permission to look at the question again, to look at the question in a way which I was able to resolve a lot of my doubts.

[55:45]

I was able to look at it in some way that allowed me to come much closer. So I would bring questions to Roshi, often presenting him things when I could, And when something really deeply had settled in me about some particular thing, but mostly he wouldn't say much to me. Sometimes I'd go to him and I'd say, won't you criticize me? Please criticize me. Tell me there must be something I'm doing. Please give me some criticism. And he never would.

[56:48]

I mean, even though my posture was bad and everything was bad, you know, he wouldn't. So in the end, all I could do was criticize myself. But he made me... I guess he maybe thought I was going to stick with practicing. Finally, I had to criticize my own practice. And I brought him. The end of the 49-day period is this Friday, tomorrow, and Peter Schneider in the city has given two lectures on Suzuki Roshi's background, personal history of what temples he was associated with and things like that.

[57:57]

Maybe we'll bring some of that out in a memorial issue for Roshi. I'd like to, those of you who didn't know Roshi very well, I'd like to try to find some way to help you know him. I'll try. And if you knew that space I've met that surrounds you all the time, you'd know him completely. Thank you very much.

[58:46]

@Transcribed_v004
@Text_v005
@Score_84.2