I vow to taste the truth of the Tathagata's words. Good morning. Someone in the front row has a T-shirt on with Curious George on it, which is, I think, the first book that I read to my children, and now I'm reading it to my grandson. So, maybe what I'll talk about today are grandfather stories. Those of you who are here for the first time already have a taste of one of the difficulties that comes upon us when we attempt to practice Soto Zen Buddhism. The question is ceremonies. Maybe you're here for the first time. You heard there was going to be a lecture. Now, when we go to a lecture in ordinary life, there are chairs arranged, or maybe in an amphitheater the seats are there.

[01:02]

You come in and you chat with your friends while you're waiting, or you take out a book or you read a newspaper, and then someone comes out and indicates they're going to talk about a certain subject, and you take out your notebook and you transcribe what's said, and that's a lecture. But already you see we do things different here. We've asked you to participate in this basically simple ceremony of coming together and talking about the Buddha Dharma. I'm sorry if it makes you uncomfortable, but we have a reason for that. Participation in the events of your life, total participation, is what we like to encourage in you. Now, it's difficult. For instance, in one of the ceremonies, perhaps the one most difficult for many of the people in this room

[02:03]

who've been practicing a long time is called the Shosan ceremony. The teacher sits up here in the modern replica of a very ancient and very uncomfortable chair, and the students come up and present their questions to the teacher. Louder? Me? What happened to the PA system? Ah. That's the first one. Generally it's, shut up, Lou. How's this? Any better? I think I'll just maybe hold it in my hand. Ah, where was I? Ah, yeah. Shosan ceremony. And it's very hard for people to come up and ask a question, because the real questions come from down here,

[03:08]

and then the second kind of question comes from here, and the most popular kind of question comes from here. Like you go to an information booth, you know, and you ask, when does the next train leave for Sacramento? That's the sort of question that most people ask, because they feel safe. They don't have to participate in the activity of an exchange. So the other day, the last Shosan ceremony we had, one of the students came up and said, very meaningfully to him, what is a bodhisattva? And those of you who are new here should know that the question of bodhisattva is a very important aspect of our practice. In the latest edition of Tri-Cycle Magazine, the question, what is a bodhisattva, was asked of eight different teachers. And we can start in with a few of the answers. The Dalai Lama's reply,

[04:11]

those who have a spontaneous wish to attain enlightenment for the benefit of all beings are called bodhisattvas. Through wisdom they direct their minds to enlightenment, and through compassion they have concern for all beings. By being aware of what enlightenment is, one understands that there is a goal to accomplish, and also that it is possible to do so. Drawn by the desire to help all beings, one thinks, I must attain enlightenment. Gautama Roshi also replied to that question, and it's in Gautama's direction that I hope to follow my thoughts this morning, because he comes at it from completely the opposite direction. What is a bodhisattva, he asked? An ordinary person, who takes up a course in his or her life that moves in the direction of Buddha. You are a bodhisattva. I am a bodhisattva, he said.

[05:15]

We read about those great beings, Avalokiteshvara, Samantabhadra, Manjushri, but we too have their confidence or faith. And Shakyamuni Buddha said, referring to his many lives before becoming a Buddha, I had a loving mind, wishing for the welfare of others. Bodhisattvas are like that. Well, in this exchange the other day, the teacher, not knowing of Uchiyama's response, just pointed at the student. What is a bodhisattva? You are a bodhisattva. And he said, well, I don't feel like it. So let me tell grandfather stories about the bodhisattvas that I have met long before coming to San Francisco and to meet Suzuki Roshi. In fact, I once thought if I ever achieved a status whereby an autobiography should be written by me,

[06:19]

it would have to be about all these people. So what follows here is just a sampling of literally hundreds of people. Now, you notice in one of these statements the words were used, takes a course towards being Buddha. I've done a lot of going to sea, and there's something called sailing reverse courses. In the days before they had longitude figured out you sailed this way for a certain time and kept a record of every turn you made and then you want to get back home, you turn it around, and then you sail back, reverse courses. So these are some of the bodhisattvas I have met on the Outward Journey, and I'd like to honor them now, in the present. As some of you have heard me say,

[07:21]

I was raised in an extended German family by a grandfather who had come as an immigrant, made a lot of money, and wanted to go back to Germany and live in a castle. His family objected, so instead of a castle I was raised in a smaller version of this building. And I was confined to that building. I was too good to be allowed to play with the neighborhood children. There were, as invisible, these electric fences that they have for dogs that you can't see, but the dog can see. Well, there was an electric fence around. I couldn't go out. So one evening, this is out in the country, which is now, of course, city, but then it was country, just when they were beginning to build new houses, I heard a concertina playing, and I crept to the window. It was early evening, and I looked out, and there was a man sitting by a fire playing his concertina.

[08:22]

Now, I don't know how this happened, and I'm amazed that, one, I did it, and two, that I wasn't caught. I slipped out of bed in my pajamas, and I crept outside and sat with the man at the fire, and he played and sang in Italian and gave me dried cherries to eat. And I guess, if you want to talk about bliss, that was my first experience of what bliss was. Unfortunately, some time later, I felt secure enough to mention that, and my parents told me, never take food from strangers. It's poisoned. But there was someone who took me for a moment out of the confines of a rigorous, determined, organized, very restrictive community, and I never knew his name. But the next was a totally different person, a large man, way over six foot,

[09:24]

a couple hundred pounds. He was our minister in the Protestant Church, Dutch Reformed Church, and he wrestled with the angels, and he talked to God right out in public on Sunday mornings. And I was having trouble at that time thinking of what sort of a man I would become in my later life, and I didn't want to be a businessman, I didn't want this to be that, but this man of God was quite an important person to me. It's a long story of why I didn't become a minister, which he thought I should be, but that was 40, 50 years ago. And the reason I'm wearing these robes is because of Dr. McKenzie. I couldn't become a minister for him, and I felt so badly about it for a lifetime that when they asked me in Zen Center

[10:25]

to wear these robes, I said, yes, I will. And then it took me a couple of years to discover I wasn't responding to Reb or to Baker Roshi, I was responding to Dr. McKenzie. So it doesn't really matter, I guess, how you get here, but Dr. McKenzie was a bodhisattva, right? And then, of course, the monks that I saw one day in the monastery as we drove past and asked, what are those men? And I was told, oh, they are monks. And I said, what do monks do? And I was told they spend all their time serving God. And I thought, that's the job for me. You give up everything, they take care of you, you take care of them. But I was a Protestant, and there was no monastic life for us. And by the time I got to know about Catholicism, I didn't want the Catholic Church

[11:25]

any more than I didn't want the Protestant Church. But those monks nudged me in this direction. And now we come to a non-human bodhisattva. I should tell you that in my definition of a bodhisattva, they take all forms. I couldn't wait to get away from home, as you can imagine, and at 17 I started to hike through New England in the summer of 1932. And I always wanted to camp out on Cape Cod, and I did. I located myself on the dunes out there near Provincetown and beach combed. Now along the beach, there would be these large jaws, about this big, the opening, with lots of teeth.

[12:26]

And I was very curious about them and was told by the Coast Guardsmen that they were monkfish. They are a bottom fish that come to the surface only to die. The only time you see a monkfish on the surface, he's going to his death. I thought that was quite interesting. And one night it got very, one afternoon it got very, very quiet and very, very still and very, very dark. You couldn't even see true or light. And I lighted my lantern and I went for a walk along the beach. And my world was circumscribed by whatever light a kerosene lantern can give. And the sea was absolutely like glass. And then I heard out in the darkness shhh, shhh, shhh, shhh. I raised my lantern and there were two spots of light. And I said, I bet that's a monkfish. So I started to wade into the ocean

[13:29]

and I'm up to my waist maybe and I step in a hole. And the lantern goes out and there I am practically in the middle of the Atlantic, not knowing where the shore was. So I just turned around and swam and swam and swam and there was no shore. So I turned at another angle and I swam and I swam and I swam and there was no shore. And I kept that up for quite a long time and finally I realized that I'd come to the end of the road or the end of the trip or the end of the cruise. And I said, okay, this is it. Now this, I had been suicidal in later years but at this time it was not suicidal. I just figured, all right, the next thing for you is to drown. Just as simple as that. You got yourself into this mess, end of it. And just as I was about to blow out my breath and go down, take a lungful of water, I heard, and I thought, ah,

[14:34]

that fish is going to the shore to die, which is the right place for him to die. This might not be the right place for me to die. So I swam in the direction of the sound, put my hands on his back, found which way he was pointed, took six strokes, and I was on the beach. Well, that was enough for one night, you'd think. But at that time, the storm broke. That silence and darkness was the preliminary to a tremendous storm. I huddled under my tarp. The hail came down big as golf balls. I was black and blue. There was one simultaneous flash and crash, and then I just passed out. The next morning, no further away from either mat was my aluminum cook kit fused in a lump. So I figured I was not born to drown or be hit by lightning. But I left the beach and I went into town

[15:37]

and I signed on as an ordinary seaman on a passenger vessel going from Boston Harbor to Provincetown because I wanted to go to sea. I was actually running away from home. That's what I was doing. I was running off to sea, and this was a chance to get my lifeboat ticket so that the Coast Guard would credit me to the Maritime. The people on that boat, the men on that boat, were, by their own declaration, the scum of the earth. One man, tattooed in a way that I cannot describe in public, told me, I have two daughters in convent school. I see them at Easter and Christmas. The rest of the time, I'm gone. These men were very protective of me. For instance, we'd tie up at night over in Boston

[16:41]

and they'd go to the whorehouses on Scully Square. They'd leave somebody on the boat with me so I wouldn't go. That was the kind of people I was working with. So after we got to know each other, one night as we were going back to Boston, one of the sailors, a little different than the others, started to question me, what I was doing. And I told him I was running away to sea. He picked me up by the jumper. I mean, he took one hand here, one hand here, and raised me up and he threw me against the bulkhead. He said, Now listen to me, you stupid son of a bitch. You go home to your daddy and tell him you want to go to college. And if I catch you on any ship that I'm on, I'm going to tear you in half and throw you over both sides. You sign off. Thank you. Next morning, I signed off. That night, the S.S. Romance, can you believe it,

[17:41]

was making her slow way across Boston Harbor, the Great Eastern steaming up to Maine, Rams are amid ships, skillful seamanship keeps the two boats together until all the passengers and crewmen can get off of the Romance and she sinks down to her stacks in the middle of Boston Bay. Only one man was killed. One man was lost. The bow watch, who was hurled from his position into the water and probably the ship went over him. And that was my watch, which I would have been on had I... So you see what I mean about bodhisattvas? They come in all shapes and sizes. So we speed forward now to the war and I'm in a hospital at the maritime base with double pneumonia. My roommate has gone over and hung himself in the men's showers. Pretty low down.

[18:45]

And I'm wandering around, recuperating at the base in the middle of winter and I find a bodhisattva in the library in the shape of a book called I Change Worlds. It was the story of a woman of my class, a generation or so ahead of me who left her privileged life and took up radical politics and I thought, ah, that's something I can do. So in the course of that I came across a sign in a bookstore window which said, So live that dying you can say all that I did was for the benefit of mankind. That happens to be a quotation to Vasily Ilyich Lenin. But it was a bodhisattva because here was someone showing me something that I had to know about myself. So that set up a whole new series of things and of course nothing ever goes right, you know, for very long.

[19:46]

And once again I'm depressed and once again I am this time suicidal. And enter a bodhisattva carrying a bodhisattva. Mark, are you here this morning? Mark, there you are. Mark remembers the Berkeley Barb, a raunchy newspaper that was published at the beginning of the Berkeley Renaissance. You know it? You probably sold it with my kids up in Telegraph Avenue, huh? I wouldn't have it in the house. So one day my older son comes home and he reaches in his jacket and he takes out the Berkeley Barb. And then he opens it to an ad which says Dr. Alan Colt of the Anthropology Department at the University of California will be giving a free lecture

[20:47]

on Reiki and therapy that evening. Now I had got involved with reading about Reiki and therapy and so I went to the lecture. And I took therapy with Dr. Colt. And actually it was a little intriguing type of therapy. He used mescaline. And while I didn't have the nerve to do what my kids did, I thought well this is a way for the old man, you know, to have a drug trip and also probably get some benefit out of it too. I wanted my money back. All that happened to me was I was cold and hungry and the only visions I saw were stick figures. That shows you how locked up my psyche was. And after it was over, Dr. Colt said, you know what you need Lou is a religious discipline. And now there's Vedanta,

[21:49]

Baha'i, number of yogas, and then there's a new one in town it's called Zen. And I don't recommend it. That's the hard one. Within a month I'm on the cushion, right? So I've told that story many times and it got back to the young man who would have been Dr. Colt's Dharma heir had Dr. Colt lived. He was dying of leukemia which I didn't know at the time. And Tom had a hissy and when he recovered he said you go back and tell Lou this story. When Dr. Colt and I were discussing what we should recommend for you, Dr. Colt said, you know Lou belongs in Zen. He's such a stubborn son of a bitch. So he told me not to do it and of course I immediately went to do it. So here are all these Bodhisattvas beginning to the little Italian man with his cherries and his concertina, right? Finally getting me to Zen Center and Suzuki Roshi and Katagiri Roshi

[22:50]

and Baker Roshi and you'd think I had it made. Here I am securely ensconced like a barnacle probably on the underside of Zen Center. That just sort of came out. You'd think that I could retire now. My life work is over. I've fought the good fight. I've run the good race. Just sit in a corner Lou and take it easy. But like I said earlier it don't last long because all of a sudden I'm back in the soup again and perhaps, oh I've got enough time, perhaps I can bring it all together by taking the last Bodhisattva

[23:53]

in my life as a point of departure, what we call in navigation a fix. That one point where you know where you are so as you go through all of the traveling you can always relate to that one place and this is where I have been for many years now. It was down at Tassajara a number of years ago. Michael Sawyer, a wonderful person. He was just head monk or head student over at Green Gulch. Real human being. Said to me one day down there, Lou, he said, where is your concern for people that you had when you were in the Communist Party? Now I had been asked questions like that a few times in my life and I knew instinctively don't answer because whatever I would have said at that time would have been wrong. But I knew that the question was right because I had felt that. So a week or two ago

[24:55]

I was able to answer that question. And I told him the reason that I had that feeling for people then was I thought I knew what to do for them. I thought through my particular brand of radical politics, Berkeley style, I would be able to help these people get out of whatever mess that they were in. And of course if there is anyone here who shared that with me and hasn't said that that is not possible they should leave the room right now. The entire radical, revolutionary, communistic approach, no matter how wholeheartedly undertaken, how benevolently begun, has, as we've seen, turned into its opposite. So what's my problem then? If I see that, I'm clear of that, I'm free of that, I don't have to worry about it,

[25:56]

I don't have to apologize for it anymore, what's hanging me up? And what's hanging me up is this. I vowed as a child to save the world. I had that vow firmly in hand when I came across radical politics. They didn't sell it to me. I said, oh yes, of course, I agree, I will do it. Now, you take the vows and you all will take the vows and in a few minutes I vowed to save all sentient beings. Now, I don't know any more about saving sentient beings now than I did about saving the world 50 years ago, 40 years ago. Am I going to replicate this confusion now? It's a problem, and one that I will have to do a lot of work with because saving the world and saving all sentient beings,

[26:56]

that's not the Buddhist equivalent of saving the world. That is not a simple transmission from one to the other. That's what I thought. I think, okay, I can't save the world, but I can save all sentient beings because I want to, right? Now, how do you do this? This is the big question. And when I said that, I remember a story that I read in my political days when I first was reading about politics, not entering into it, but reading about it. You may have heard, some of you older people, about the Raud Army that fought its way in China through Chiang Kai-shek's troops from the southern part to the northern part and established themselves and then came out, Tse Tung and the whole works. I think there were about 20,000 men in that army and maybe 6,000 made it. They lived under horrible conditions and fought under impossible odds. And the story that got me was

[27:59]

they freed some prisoners of the Japanese who were working on the railroad, and among the prisoners were seven Mongolian camel drivers. Sounds like a dirty joke. They were in chains. The Chinese were not, but the Mongolian camel drivers were shoveling in chains. So they struck off the chains and they served them what little food they had, and then they had a rally, you know, and the commissar got up and said, all power to the people, drive out the Japanese, unite against the enemy, all of that, and everybody applauded. But the seven Mongolian camel drivers said, tell us how. And at that moment I burst into tears. That has been the question for me all my life. People have all been telling me what to do all my life.

[29:00]

How do I do it? You do it this way. You dress this way, you talk this way, you feel this way, you think this way. That's how we do it. So you move on to another sangha and they tell you the same thing only inside out, huh? After a while you begin to wonder what's going on. But it's still the question. How do I do it? How do I save all sentient beings? Well, I met a bodhisattva the other day. No, I met a picture of a bodhisattva the other day. And if you ever get out to the UC hospital area, go in to the library, the new library that they have, and go to the very far end of it, as I did the other day. My daughter was getting her final graduation in psychiatry and the room was stuffy and there was long,

[30:04]

boring speeches. So someone said, well, why don't you go look in the library across the street? You've got about 15 minutes. And there you see the ocean here, Panama Pai is there, downtown here in one big panorama and it is absolutely beautiful. But that's not what I saw. That's not the bodhisattva. They have 3,300 medical periodicals in that reading room and one of them they had put in a glass case and they had opened it to a picture. It was a microscopic picture through an advanced microscope handled by a computer and it was this big and it had medallions as big as my thumb in a lovely pattern. It was the eye of a fruit fly. Now all of you who've left fruit in a bowl

[31:08]

longer than it should be have been visited by fruit flies. They're minute to begin with and the eye of a fruit fly is minute and they're compound eyes. They're not like our eyes. They're many eyes. So I read the script there and it said the blue was this and the green was this and the red was and they gave the complicated chemical name of a chemical which goes across the whole eye of the fruit fly through its many diversions and organizes each separate piece of it into the complete eye. Now it is amazing of course that science has been able to do that but what to me is far more amazing is that this is what the fruit fly did before we found it. And I have this question for myself now in the light of the fruit fly's eye.

[32:09]

If we can take a gene my grandmother almost died of diabetes but then they came along with insulin. You can take the gene the gene that makes insulin put it in a bacterial colony and those bacteria will make insulin. Now if you want any proof that we are all one that there is no real difference between us and anything else things like that I think will enable us to look at this question that the Buddha presented to us with through a wisdom eye of our own. There is nothing in modern science that disabuses us of the basic understanding in our hearts at least that we are all one. It is being proved to us daily by this fantastic development

[33:11]

penetration into the oneness of all things. For instance Lavoisier was the founder of modern chemistry I think he died in 1794 and he proved the law of conservation of matter by separating mercuric oxide into its common elements mercury and oxygen and finding there was no difference in weight between the combination or the original. The reason I bring things like that into the temple is that the history of Buddhism and especially Zen Buddhism shows that it finds its way into the culture of all of the different times and countries the long period of haggling and adapting and misunderstanding on everybody's part but finally each society can

[34:11]

talk about Buddhism in its own way and not either violate the principle of Buddhism or deny its own actuality but it does take time. So Jane Hirshfield some of you know maybe some of you heard her read her poetry here is a modern poet and she has used Lavoisier's statement nothing is lost nothing is created everything is transformed as the colophon for a poem called The Wedding it's a long poem and I'm not going to try to read it all but these lines from it I think are applicable to our situation today Imagine nothing created What might it look like? Try to envision such a peace or think of a world where nothing is lost its heaped paintings

[35:12]

its studded statues keeping their jewels now see this world where all is transformed quick as a child cries and then laughs in her crying see how each thing meets the other as itself the luminous changing mirror of itself mercuric oxide dipped from flask to flask first two then one wedded for life within that vow Imagine nothing created What might it look like? Try to envision such peace or think of a world where nothing is lost its heaped paintings its studded statues keeping their jewels now see this world where all is transformed quick as the child who cries and then laughs in her crying see how each thing meets the other as itself the luminous changing mirror of itself mercuric oxide dipped from flask to flask first two

[36:13]

then one wedded for life within that vow Poetry gets you very close to where it's at but you can't go from poetry into what poetry is trying to tell you you have to go there without anything so let's go back in a few moments left to something that some of you Zen students might have wondered at the Dalai Lama says where does he say it? oh, here he says it the Dalai Lama says being aware of one what enlightenment is one understands that there is a goal to accomplish now we recite the heart sutra every morning and it says there is nothing to attain and Dogen Zenji

[37:15]

the founder of this particular way of practicing Buddhism has it the other way around you don't have to get enlightened at all because you are already enlightened that's one thing you can get you can get rid of anything that keeps you from the direct experience that you are Buddha right now but you don't have to go anywhere you don't have to get anything so here the question comes again how? how can you get to where Dogen Zenji says it's a wonderful place the Dalai Lama says it's a wonderful place Uchiyama Roshi you're out there suffering in the cold you want in, you want to be with the warm stuff how do you get there? well, you're there already and if I could stop there then you would all be entitled to ask for your money back which you haven't paid yet the box is out there in the dark

[38:17]

well, the one thing all Buddhists believe the same all Buddhists honor the same thing but how Buddhism is taught differs from school to school so here are a few lines from some of our directions what we're talking about this enlightenment is naturally real yet inconceivable so it is not within the province of delusion or enlightenment in other words, you can't talk about it so how will you know if you can't check it out in a book if you can't run it through a computer you can't have it analyzed at the chem lab how will you know that you are Buddha? well, when erroneous imagination ceases the acquiescent mind realizes itself

[39:22]

okay so what are we doing rushing around to this Zen center and that Zen center taking trips to India and seeking out shaman and all the very many things that people are doing why do we do that? because what we're looking for is not within the reach of feeling or discrimination so how could it admit of consideration in thought just to depict it in literary form is to relegate it to defilement I have been defiling Buddhism I've been defiling the sutras I've been defiling Shakyamuni by sitting here this morning and talking as I have you should therefore cease from practice based on intellectual understanding pursuing words and following after speech and learn the backward step that turns your light inwardly to illuminate yourself and how we do this, of course, is Zazen

[40:28]

many of you here have had your first instructions some of you have been sitting more than a few weeks a few years that is the entryway there I can't say that I know how to save all sentient beings but I have a pretty strong conviction that were I to further my Zazen practice I might find out and that's an encouragement how long that will take Suzuki Roshi said, life after life it's not a quick fix you don't get it all done over at once but the intent to do that the desire to, as the Buddha said help all sentient beings is where he started and if it took him endless eons to get there

[41:30]

I can't complain I read about a lost city in Sri Lanka which I'd never heard of and I had very little detail on it yet in which there are 500 statues of the Buddha but they are a progression through his past lives in animal form as well as human form so maybe these genetic things that we pick up are part and parcel of what's going on in our karma but I should make an attempt to tell you what enlightenment is a little verse, just a few lines enlightenment is like the square root of minus one imaginary, but useful in solving certain personal equations thank you

[42:29]

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