Can you hear way back in the back there? If you can't, raise an arm or something. Last time I talked about fire or something like that. And tonight I want to talk about Suzuki Roshi, or rather, what we know or need to know in Buddhism. Friday is the last of the 49-day period and will be the last And I guess, at least in the city, we'll do a little different ceremony with everyone offering incense. And maybe we'll do that here too, I don't know. Many of you start Tangario tomorrow.

[01:28]

And last time I spoke here, I talked about the fact that Suzuki Roshi, at the first Tangario, didn't tell us anything about what Tangario it was. And at least most of you know something now, if you're expected to sit, and you have a little information. But we didn't know anything. And people were quite scared, and we lost quite a lot of students, partly just because they were so scared of not knowing what it was going to be. I think Dan, the only person who was at that time burial, is here now. Who? You mean Ed? Ed, yeah, that's right, Ed was there.

[02:31]

Anyway, it's some kind of problem for me and for Buddhists to know, for us in America too, to know what we need to know to practice Buddhism. In Japan, they know a great deal, which the teacher doesn't have to talk about because they already know it. So, should you know everything they know? I don't know. I know that I got an opportunity to spend a great deal of time with Suzuki Roshi, and I also went to university and studied about Japan and Buddhism and things, and I worked on the wind bell for years with Suzuki Roshi. So I've made it my business to know a great deal to help me understand what Suzuki Roshi was talking about.

[04:01]

And when I look back now on my own practice as it existed then, it was essential for me to know certain things. And a great deal Roshi won't tell you. I mean, you'd ask him questions and he won't say anything. Or it looked like he wasn't telling you. Often he told you, but you weren't aware he was telling you. we have a tendency to make Buddhism too simple, and so I may make it too complicated. Because if you make it too simple, it's actually complicated. But if I make it sort of complicated for you, maybe then you can understand its simplicity. But in Japan, Buddhism is... Suzuki Roshi was a very complicated man, and

[05:24]

Buddhism and Japanese culture is pretty complicated. But it's easy there to teach in a very simple way, a non-verbal way. You can hit people, you know, for instance. Here if I hit you, you know, if one of you said to me, I want to be a priest, and I want you across the fence. You'd be rather startled. Even if I make some mild criticism, or not criticism even, just comment, maybe such and such, then there's resentment. I can feel it for several days. Anyway, so the first context in Japan, which goes without saying, and nobody talks about it, is everybody loves each other. Actually. In a monastery, there's an enormous amount of love between the students and the teacher. And it's true in everything, if you have a tea teacher or whatever, there's this enormous

[06:52]

I don't know, it's not ordinary love, but some affection which includes trust and sincerity and all those words I used to think were sort of terrible, you know, kind of sentimental or something. And so in a context like that, a teacher can be quite rough if that trust exists. Just a dog. I saw Roshi only hit students a few times. But he knew them very well. I've seen him knock students down, standing over them, hitting them. Pow! Pow!

[08:03]

hollering about something. But mostly he didn't know us well enough to do that. And so he did other things. I know in my own case, after I knew him quite well, and he encouraged me to be his student and talked about being with him ten years or so, and said I should become a priest. In the midst of this, where we had quite a close, warm relationship, suddenly he stopped looking at me for more than one year. First I was angry. First month or so, I thought, what? What's wrong with me? I thought. He won't look at me. I'd come and bow. I'd see him in his room. See, there's only a few of us, like five students mostly. And I'd be, we used to, after Zazen, go in this little room that was there and sit with him and have a little tea after Zazen and his wife would bring in something.

[09:30]

And before it was very friendly and then suddenly this wall came down and he would talk to everyone else and I'd say something brightly, no reaction. So finally I just decided to be patient with it. I decided he was my teacher and it was just his tough luck. And I was going to stay with him whether he liked it or not, and he couldn't get rid of me so easily as that. So, for about more than a year, he did this. It was his way of hitting me. And then one day, when I didn't expect anything, he just changed. So where you have an accepted context like that, where there's a mutual trust, and then when there's a very great common cultural understanding, you can be very simple about things that are actually rather complicated. For instance, if someone asks you to do something, and you hesitate in a certain way,

[10:57]

don't respond immediately. What you're doing when you hesitate is putting that person under your control. So if somebody bows to you and you bow back a little bit slowly, you know, someone comes up to hit you and you raise your... you just respond slowly. You're putting the person under your control who's going to ask you, you know. So it's a way of... you have some idea there, you know? Or if you're... when you're hitting with the stick, if you're a girl, maybe you're communicating some kind of affection or concern for the student. Or if you're a man, maybe you're communicating that you're strong. You feel strong, so you try to communicate who you are with your stick. So, if you... In our practice, if we're trying to communicate some unique thing about ourselves, how we carry the stick, or how we do things. Even if it's doing it perfectly, according to the rules, but we're trying to communicate something unique about ourselves, the minute you do that in Japan, you can just walk the person. So when Rinzai talks about, if they show me a subject, I take away a subject. If they show me an object, I take away the object.

[12:25]

So if you read the stories, and it looks like Rinzai's just bopping people right and left, actually what he's doing is the student responds to him with some situation. Say he shows them an object, some objective situation they think is real, or they think they themselves are real. At the moment they do that, he'd hit them at the moment which would take it away. So actually, you know, you read the stories and it's all very simple. They're just practicing and sometimes they get hit. But what's behind being hit is rather complicated. So if I try to explain it in sociological or psychological or Buddhist terms, it's rather complicated. If I could just hit you, you know, if I was a good teacher or something, then that would be simple. But mostly we can't...

[13:32]

So in Japan, when you're in a monastery, when you're asked to do anything, your response has to be instantaneous, without thinking. Without trying to establish, I want to, I don't want to, or my identity is such, or yes I will, I'll do it slowly. So there's no special kind of practice permitted at all. And likewise, in the city a while ago I talked about having a milkshake. Some of you were there. I said there's several ways to have a milkshake. One way is just the ordinary way of having a milkshake. You just have all the milkshakes you want.

[14:35]

And another way is you decide you won't have milkshakes. So that's like practice here is to decide you won't have milkshakes. Practice at Tassajara is you decide you won't miss Zazen for any reason except that you're really sick for five years or some length of time. You know, you don't actually set a time, but your practice when you're here is to follow the schedule and not allow yourself discrepancies. But you also have to be able to allow yourself discrepancies. So sometimes your practice may be to have a milkshake. That's the second or third. And a third is you decide you won't have a milkshake. But then you find yourself putting the money on the counter and buying a milkshake, even though you decided not to. So, you have a milkshake. Oh, I have a milkshake. That's another kind of practice. So we do that often, you decide you won't, but

[16:08]

miss Zazen, but actually you're missing Zazen. But that's practice, actually. And the fourth one would be, it doesn't make any difference whether you have a milkshake or not. You can have a milkshake or not have a milkshake. It's the same. It's like you have when you're doing zazen, massaging, you actually have complete freedom to move. So if so, you also have the freedom to not move. So your practice here at Tassajara is the freedom to not move. So this is, anyway, this I can talk about milkshakes, but what I'm really talking about is four stages of practice, form, emptiness, form is emptiness, and form is form. But Buddhism will try to express that, Zen Buddhism will try to express that completely simply in something like an eating bowl. After you wash your bowl out,

[17:32]

you take the... somebody brings a little pail, and you dump some of it in, and then you touch the edge of the bowl to the plastic, and then you drink some of it. That's the practice of whether it doesn't make any difference whether you have a milkshake or not. Where form is form, where there's mutual interpenetration. Some of the water goes to the spirits, you know? Some of the water you drink, and the water you wash the bowls out with. So there's some ten-dyed philosophy behind why we do that, actually. So, if you want to practice Buddhism, you know, and you want to do exactly what you're told, assuming your teacher's a good teacher, and you're willing to follow the ritual, then you don't need to have any explanation about Buddhism. But if you don't want to follow the ritual, and you don't like to be told anything, then maybe you need some kind of idea about Buddhism.

[18:55]

If you try to understand Buddhism with just your intellect, it's, I think, actually impossible. But if you're very smart, you can understand Buddhism pretty well intellectually. And if you have a little practice, that helps, you know, a lot. But you'll never get it quite right. Even the greatest scholars who mostly understand intellectually don't quite get it quite right. But if you understand Buddhism as with your body, your body is much smarter than your mind, actually is, then you can understand Buddhism quite well. You don't have to be very smart at all, because you can refer to your actual experience. See, all I'm saying now is you don't have to worry about some of you feel you're not so smart. You don't have to worry about it, because you can understand Buddhism completely. It's better not to be very smart.

[20:45]

So Suzuki Roshi wanted me to know him. And one of the ways he wanted me to know him was he wanted me to go to Japan and to see his culture and to know his culture. And what I found in Japan was something more subtle and complex than anything I could have imagined possible. And within that very complex culture, Buddhism is a very simple expression of it. But you have to know what's behind that simplicity. I mean, if you look at a Japanese Zen garden, it's just maybe an expanse of sand with one or two stones in it. Or I can talk to you about milkshakes. But if you think that

[22:41]

Zen is just to have some nature practice, just to have sand and a stone. Because behind that expanse of sand is a mandala. So you start out, the famous thing, at first you think a mountain is a mountain, and then you think a mountain is not a mountain, and then you think a mountain is a mountain. There are many levels. In fact, that whole tripartite that three-part thing, there's a whole Rinzai Koan system that's partly arranged according to those three steps. And the simple Zen garden is the third step. And the Zen temple are just buildings, but the ground plan of the building is probably a mandala, as our bowing cloth. that we have. It's basically a mandala, which you make yourself. It starts out just bigger, and you fold it to your own. The meaning of that is that it's the Bodhi Mandala, which is that actually any place is a mandala. But when we bow, we create a small mandala for ourselves to bow on.

[24:05]

But Zen says, okay, but actually any place you are is a mandala. Any place, which is the idea of the Bodhi mandala, which is that you can be enlightened in any spot. So if any place is a mandala, you don't have to express the mandala, but the mandala is there. So there's a context in Japan in which simple Zen exists which conditions the whole practice. So what I thought I would talk to you about specifically is a tea bowl that I got for Suzuki Roshi.

[25:25]

Last week they did a memorial tea service for Suzuki Roshi in San Francisco, and this tea bowl that I got for Suzuki Roshi was used to offer tea to Roshi, and then another bowl that he liked was used to serve tea to me and to Oksan, his wife. And it was very interesting to see the tea bowl used. You know that traditionally in transmission ceremony, a bowl is passed. I knew Roshi always wanted a good tea bowl. He visited a number of kilns when he was in Japan. So I thought, Maybe I could find some way to get him a good tea bowl and give it to him as a present at the time of my ceremony. I was a little embarrassed because he's supposed to give me a bowl. I'm not supposed to give him a bowl. So I had to ask his permission first. But I gave him the bowl. It was my way of saying, I've given up to your culture.

[26:56]

I'm completely open to your culture. So here's a peak. In Japan, the sort of peak of Japanese culture are tea bowls. So I'm going to show you. This is just an ordinary tea bowl. This is just one I have in my room. Most of you know what a tea bowl is. I'm going to talk a little bit about, if you'll forgive the rudeness, I'm going to talk about the prices of tea bowls. Because the prices of things in Japan are very much a part of the culture, and an important part, because they're not a measure of rareness or desire to possess, I don't know how prices are fixed here, but if you have an embroidered robe, say, one of these very beautiful robes that you've seen Tsukiyoshi wear, easily, the case alone can be $2,000. And that seems extraordinary. Why such a fancy robe?

[28:24]

If you wore them all the time, that would be terrible, maybe. But in Japan, which is probably the oldest existing ancient culture in the world now, now that China and India are rather disturbed, and Tibet is disturbed, and it has ancient craft traditions. So what you have when you have a robe like that is you go up to a seacoast town somewhere, or a back street in Kyoto, and here are little ladies whose lifetime work, and their mother and grandmother's lifetime work, with the husband supervising, usually who do other work, is making these kinds of robes. And they work every day, seven days a week, all day long, and you go by the looms, and their looms are going at 11 o'clock at night, and when I'm on the way to Zazen at, say, 5.30 in the morning, they're starting up. And they just keep them going all day and tending them. And they get paid very little money. And it's just an enormous amount of work, of painting colors, gold, putting gold on paper, cutting the paper in little strips,

[29:46]

weaving the paper into the cloth, so you don't know it's paper. It's just an extremely complicated weaving art. So they do it. I mean, and if you didn't buy it, some group of people in the village would give you one. So, anyway, the prices of things are startling. Most startling I've ever... I was with my wife in a tea store, and we were looking at tea objects. And I finally said to Virginia, you can't get a really good tea set that you'd really want to keep all your life for less than about, oh, $300 or $400 an item. Actually, more like $600. I gave up, you know. But it sounds silly, but actually, for instance, in the tea ceremony, you are handed a bowl.

[31:15]

and you drink tea of it, and then you show it to the next person usually, and then they pass it down. And whether it's a beautiful tea bowl or an ordinary tea bowl, you look at it equally. So by the time you have been taking tea ceremony, for 10 years. Everything in Japan takes 10 years to learn, whether you're making sushi or tea bowls or studying tea ceremony. So for 10 years you've been looking at tea bowls, so you've handled, I don't know what, 10,000 or 20,000 or many, many tea bowls. So you know the difference between tea bowls, good and bad tea bowls. Indiscriminately you study the tea bowl, without saying good or bad. But after 10 years, there are lots of people in Japan who know the difference between 2,000 different sticks, spoons, and probably arrange them. Say, oh, this one's worth $3, $4, $5, up to $2,000. And the things also take value, of course, according to who owns them.

[32:37]

Anyway, what I'm trying to do is give you an idea of the culture Suzuki Roshi came from, that he wanted me to know. You know, I knew it was complicated, and it got more complicated as I was there. I found there were secret stores that won't let you know that they're stores. You have to have permission to... Somebody has to clue you in that it's such and such, but they won't clue you in until you can perceive the difference between this pickle and that pickle, or this cookie and that cookie, or this piece of silk and that piece of silk. So you just mostly don't, most people go to Japan and most Japanese people in Japan don't know much about Japanese culture except that they live it. Because there's a great deal of it that's secret, not exactly secret, it's only secret if you can figure out that it's there to find out about. And that's true of a great deal about Zen, that a great deal of it isn't secret. But it's there for you to figure out that it's there. Zen is of all forms of Buddhism the least programmed.

[33:53]

the least, the most simple looking, partly because it's the least one, least willing to tell you anything. It won't tell you to visualize, it won't tell you to do this or that. So anyway, this tea bowl, I don't know, is probably worth five or six dollars. So, Suzuki Roshi has always wanted a good tea bowl, so I decided to try to get him one. And with some help from friends, I thought maybe I could manage to pay what it would cost. So, Roshi had gone to visit... You've heard of Raku tea bowls, which is a technique of making tea bowls. But also, there is a man named Raku-san, who's the, I don't know, the 23rd generation. Remember what generation? and his name is Rakku Kichizaemon. Then Hideyoshi or somebody, or Sen no Rikyu, liked his bowls and he's Mr. Rakku, the great-great-grandfather, and it's been passed down the tradition. Now, I don't know if everything I'm going to tell you about how he makes bowls is true, because it's very difficult to find things out. Maybe not exactly this way, or only this way sometimes, or whatever.

[35:23]

All I wanted to do, anyway, was buy a tea bowl. So I just, even knowing a great deal about Japanese culture and being pretty sensitive to its nuances and getting an entrance to a lot of things no foreigner's ever had entrance to before, I still, in a sense, blundered in, expecting to buy a tea bowl. Well, it turns out that This Raku-san has never sold a tea bowl to a foreigner. And he seldom will sell a tea bowl to a Japanese person. He sells only to the people he wants to sell to. Also, the way you pick a tea bowl, the way you buy a tea bowl is you For some reason or other, know that the house exists, a little ancient national treasure house. It's just in a side street and looks like any other house. You have to know that exists first, and that such a man called Rakhtasan exists. Then you have to have an invitation to come to his twice-monthly little informal tea parties. They're marvelously relaxed, but super formal simultaneously. They're only relaxed because if you know tea ceremony,

[36:48]

tea ceremony totally. So, anyway, I got an invitation to go, or actually we didn't, first we heard about it and we just went and knocked on the door. They happened to be having a thing that day, so we just went in, you know. Well, the way you get tea bowls is if you go, and you have an invitation to go, and you don't say anything, most of the people don't ever buy a tea bowl, don't have permission, I guess there's some signal given, you're permitted to buy. I wouldn't be able to read the signal. And you look at tea bowls, and they watch, as they bring out famous old tea bowls and serve you tea, they watch the way you pick a tea bowl up. And after you've come several times for some months, then you have permission to ask. It has to be at least three months since your first visit. Then you can't pick a tea bowl. They have noticed how you've handled tea bowls, and they decide which one you should have by the way you've been picking them up.

[38:03]

That's pretty complicated, huh? Then you wait, if they agree, you wait one year? Three years? Three years. You wait three years before the tea bowl is delivered. During that time, Mr. Raku has the clay, which is hundreds of years old, that he keeps going, and it has the ashes of the previous Rakusans in it. We don't have any shop in existence, you know, which is… You go to get a scroll mounted, you need 200-year-old glue, and there's no scroll mounter in America, picture-framer, who has Weak old woo. Anyway, there he's got this stuff, right? He's got all this, and he puts their secret formulas, he puts grass in it, I don't know what, you know, various things, in addition to the ashes. And the formulas for the glaze and things are secret. He won't even tell his son what the formulas are. And until his son, who will be inherited, discovers for himself what the formula is,

[39:38]

and how to do it, he won't tell them the complete secrets, because unless you can find it out for yourself, it's not worth knowing. So it's like Stradivarius violins. Scientists have been taking apart Stradivarius violins and trying to understand them, but no one can make one, and it seems to require being a member of the Stradivarius family and a long apprenticeship before you can make such a violin. No one's been able to duplicate a Stradivarius violin, as far as I know, according to a Scientific American article ten years ago. Maybe recently. Anyway. But Zen is a lot like that. No one's going to tell you the formula, you know. Anyway, so there's the T-Bowl, right? So I came in and I said, I want to buy a T-Bowl. My first visit, you know, there was complete silence. Everybody smiled and laughed. Of course you want to buy a T-Bowl, huh? And I said yes and I wanted to buy one and so on.

[41:04]

But I had one big help, is that my daughter has learned to speak Japanese perfectly, in a Kyoto dialect. And she was in the back room of the place, because she began talking to everybody, and pretty soon she was back in the kitchen with the servants, and she was back there with Kichizai-mon's wife. And she took a great liking to salad. Well, that helped a great deal. And then we explained that I wanted to buy it for Suzuki Roshi, and the conditions, and she'd met Suzuki Roshi, and he'd met Suzuki Roshi. So it was a possibility, I should come back, or maybe we can't talk about it now. And I got two different women to help me, to intercede, who happened to be personal friends of Kichi Zayamon's wife. And I had another woman helping me who knows Kichizaemon and is also a close friend of the three top Rinzai, head of the three Rinzai sects in Kyoto. So I had a lot going for me. And I came back and I said, they said, okay, we'll sell you a tea bowl and there's three months and three years and et cetera. And I said, but the ceremony is three weeks from now.

[42:32]

Well, anyway, somehow they made a bowl, and they made an especially good one. He may have had it already made, I'm not sure. He probably had it already made. I don't know how many bowls he turns out in a year. He gave me a special price. I guess in dollars it represents about $750, which is half the usual price. $1,500 is the usual price. and immediately after selling it, the price goes up $500, $1,000. And if somebody like Suzuki Roshi has owned it, the price is much higher. I mean, you can imagine that somebody might want this bowl of the Suzuki Roshis. In Japanese culture, you can imagine it very easily, but you can imagine that one of you might want to possess something that belongs to Suzuki Roshi. would be willing to pay something. But in Japan, it's very clear, if some Roshi or some famous tea master has owned a bowl, it's part of the bowl, just as much a part of it as the glaze. A boss tea bowl, which some of them really do have a boss feeling, the bowl alters the whole room.

[43:55]

It has such authority in the way it stands that the room just becomes the outside of the tea bowl, that space which comes up to the tea bowl. They're wonderful things once you have a feeling for them. So situation I went to the. Pulse, late one afternoon, came down from his temple on the train, and Nakamura-san, this close friend of mine, my tea teacher and the woman who's the friend of the Rinzai Kanchos, went with us. She knew a great deal more about tea bowls and Suzuki Roshi, but Suzuki Roshi had a

[45:07]

a feeling for them, an obvious awareness of what it was that allowed Ruchi Daimon to sell it, because normally he doesn't sell them to people. He also gave Roshi, he said his son had taken a not such a good bull, just ordinary bulls, ordinary for Rakshasa, to Italy with him when he went to school, and many people finding out he was the son of Rakshasa, asked to see his bowls. So pictures of the bowls appeared in European publications. And he was rather, he was sorry that a better bowl didn't. So I guess Roshi may have the first one that's come to America. And he wanted him to have a good one. So he has this very nice bowl that's both able to be used in winter and summer. And the shape of it, winter tea bowls and summer tea bowls are a different shape. And there's some that are sort of in between. And after picking up the bowl, Nakumura-san stayed and talked for a while about something, I can't remember what, and Tsuruki-roshi and I went out to the car, and we sat in the car, and he was amazed that I'd gotten permission to buy the bowl.

[46:41]

And he said, you understood something about Japanese culture, after all. So, one of the stories about Buddha's life is that after his period of asceticism, he said to himself, supposedly, I have no need to fear that happy state, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But what's interesting about it is he gave himself permission to... He allowed himself, he gave himself permission to, in a sense, be enlightened. And what your teacher does is give you permission to practice Buddhism, gives you permission to have access to yourself, actually. And what Suzuki Roshi gave all of us was permission to know him. One thing... I mean, Suzuki Roshi was Buddhism. He gave us permission to know him and to know Buddhism, if we knew how to know him.

[48:13]

One thing he gave all of us was a... He inspired us with a confidence and expression of our own best self. But our own best self isn't necessarily Buddhism. And how to take our own best self that one step further. Thank you very much.

[48:52]

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