We love to taste the truth, love to target those words. Good morning. This is the first Saturday of the month, and therefore it's time for grandfather story. I finally see a couple of boys. This is a story about a boy. You don't mind listening to stories about boys, do you girls? Okay. So we'll see how it goes. Okay. Okay. This is a story about a boy who saved the life of a very famous man. And what makes it a real far-out story is that the boy saved himself.

[01:02]

That's very puzzling, so let's check into it. Once upon a time, long, long, long, long ago, there was a king and a queen and their son, who of course was a prince. And that boy had everything you could imagine to make his life happy. They had two palaces, one for the rainy season and one for the hot season. There were beautiful gardens for him to play in, other princes to play with. He had his own horse, his own chariot, his own driver, and he was very, very good at games, and he was very, very smart. And his father was very, very happy with his son, because he expected him to grow up to be a warrior just like him. No, he knew his son would be more than just a king of a little country. He would become a world monarch. Now, as the years went on, the young prince, had there been Olympic games in those days, he'd have won all the gold medals.

[02:07]

And if there'd been TV, his face would have been on every ad. And in the language of today, he had it made. But then something began to trouble him. He found himself thinking more and more about old age, sickness and death. He hadn't seen it at home, but when he took his chariot downtown, he saw such things. And when he asked his driver about this, he was told, oh, that's the way we all end up. Then he asked his father about it. His father said, you're going to be a king, and you don't have to concern yourself with such things. Just the power and glory and winning wars and adding new territory to our kingdom will be enough to keep you occupied. But the young prince found he couldn't stop from thinking about the great problem of birth and death. And one night, he slipped out of the palace, gave away his fine clothes, and set out to find the answer.

[03:10]

He studied first with all the great teachers of his time, and soon he knew more than they did. But the suffering of life was still a mystery. Then he joined up with a group of other men who were equally concerned with birth and death, but they believed if they starved themselves, stared at the sun, never slept, somehow they could have the answer. So the prince did that, and because he was so devoted to that practice, he ate one sesame seed a day. And he got so thin, he said he could feel his backbone through his belly button. But he still didn't have the answer. So as the story goes, knowing he would soon die before the mystery was solved, he took food, he bathed, and sat down under a tree. Now, why did he choose to sit under a tree? He could have sat in a cave, he could have sat in a hut, he could have sat in a house. Well, he remembered that when he was a boy of nine years,

[04:16]

he had sat under a sorbaco tree one spring day, watching his father cut the first furrow in the opening ceremony that marked the planting season. It was such a beautiful day, he was so content, the birds sang and the breezes stirred the flowers, it was as though he and the world had become one. And with that memory, the boy, Prince Siddhartha, helped the man Gautama to live and become the Buddha Shakyamuni. So by paying close attention to everything in your own lives right now, you can perhaps learn to take care of yourself at a time when you grow up. Next time we'll have a girl's story, OK? I guess I can't ad-lib on this.

[05:26]

It's been a very strange week for me. In preparing for this talk, I went on a thinking walk, which I used to do in the days when I had my own radio program. And somewhere along the way I got lost, not in space but in time. And I got carried away by a tide of memories that took me back to the days when I played in fields of violets and wild strawberries. And the turning of the tide of the time into this present moment covered those fields with the wreckage of urban desolation, and I felt like a refugee in my own country. I experienced what the psychiatrist Michael Balint calls the regret of mourning about the unalterable fact of a defeat or fault in oneself

[07:00]

which has cast its shadow over one's entire life and the unfortunate effects that can never fully be made good. Though the fault may heal, its scar remains forever. That is, some of its effects will always be demonstrable. And what was my particular regret? That I had failed in honoring a childhood vow to keep those flowered fields from the ravages of the machines of material progress. Now intellectually, of course, I've known for a long time that even though I sacrificed in that endeavor, my failure was not total until I experienced it in the deepest aspects of my being. At that moment I did not know where Beginner's Mind Temple was, how I could find it, and if I did find it, how possibly could I continue to practice there? Now we are here in this Buddha Hall,

[08:00]

and perhaps you will be able to decide whether I've made it back or not. You know, there are miles and miles of grass roots and just a square foot of sod, and an old man's mind is riddled with intertwining networks of memories. So rather than just wander spontaneously through this experience, I've written it out, and I ask to be able to read it, because I don't want to take on the role of the ancient mariner. I'm not that old. Monday morning, I was putting the finishing touches on a speech that I had wanted to give for a long time, but had not been able to bring myself into focus on. So Monday afternoon I took a few hours off to attend the memorial for Jessica Midford. Now you may have read about it in the Chronicle on Tuesday. You probably know her more if you read the news as Deca Truehaft.

[09:05]

Now she was the daughter of an English lord, who made her name in this country as a fighter for civil rights and as an author of great skill who exposed the excesses and manipulations of such American institutions as the funeral industry. The American Way of Death was probably her most successful book, and she was working on an update of it almost to the last day. Now in her struggle for civil rights, a high movement was when she was trapped in the Southern Church with Dr. Martin Luther King and his people while an angry mob threatened to break in. She was a member of the Communist Party, and as Herb Cain said, she was the life of any party that she attended. She was witty, scathing in her critiques of those who opposed her, and sometimes of her friends. For instance, after Blanche and I began practicing here at Zen Center, we moved away from our old political life, but one day when Deca bumped into Blanche somewhere,

[10:06]

she said in her unique hallmark playhouse accent, Darling, we must have lunch sometime so you can tell me all about that weird Zen trip that you were on. Well, that never came to pass. I joined the 600 or so people at the Embarcadero, the street center that the Delancey people have built, a magnificent building. To hear such notables as Maya Angelou eulogized Deca's work and life, and it certainly was a unique life. One of her sisters was a famous novelist. Another adored Adolf Hitler and attempted suicide when he refused her. Another sister married the head of the British Fascist Party. As early as six years, Deca began saving money for her running away fund. And finally she did run away. She accompanied her young husband to Spain,

[11:09]

where he was going to fight against Francisco Franco. But young Romilly was a nephew of Winston Churchill, who, when he heard what had happened, dispatched a destroyer to bring the newlyweds back. Later, Romilly was shot down in the Battle for Britain, and Deca and their child came to Washington, where she met and married the Oakland attorney Robert Truehaft. They joined the Communist Party, and in the MacArthur years, the lives of the Truehafts and the lives of the Hartmans came together. Now, I was always in awe of Deca. Now, we both were writers, but I was only a radio hack. She was always in the headlines, and I only once when I refused to name names before the Un-American Activities Committee. She was a brilliant organizer and a public relations expert for the left. I was a house husband, while she went on to her next book. I went into therapy, from there found my way to Suzuki Roshi and Zen Center. But there's one way in which Deca and I were closer

[12:12]

than any other two people you could imagine. Though her father was an English lord, and my grandfather, in whose house I spent my first 17 years, was a German peasant, those two men shared a common belief system. They hated, really hated, Jews and Communists. So, Deca became a Communist and married a Jew, and so did I. Differing in family wealth, we were both, however, children of privilege. And no matter how we might sympathize with the plight of the less privileged, no matter how much of our well-being we may have sacrificed in the common struggle, we never suffered the real poverty or oppression of those that we were attempting to help. So, when the eulogists began to repeat themselves, each trying to tell a more outrageous Deca story, I went outside and inspected the display of memorabilia

[13:14]

set up in an old glass-sided horse-drawn hearse. That was Deca's big joke. She was going to be taken away in a horse-drawn hearse with the horses had feathers in their headdress. One of the things I saw was a picture of Deca that I hadn't seen before. How she looked at the time of her debut, her coming-out party. A cloche hat, fitting like a helmet, and the presence of a Greek goddess. And it was easy to see why she once was called the most beautiful young woman in Washington. There was another picture that I had not known, one that showed such sorrow and longing. I had seen that transformation in another person's face once when I was living at Green Gulch. He had left his apartment beneath the Wheelwright Center and I was up on the deck so I could look down and see him. He came out with his own true face. And then, as though putting on a mask,

[14:15]

he suddenly became the person he'd made himself into and the one he thought other people should be. And I wondered if it hadn't been the same for Deca. Was there some regret that all the effort she had made in the struggle, all the applause that she'd been given in return, was not enough to fill some empty place about which, as far as I know, she has never written? I looked out at the Embarcadero. I remember it before it was a fashionable address for condominiums and restaurants, when, as the longshoremen in their white caps marched in memory of the general strike, men on the curb took off their hats and held them over their hearts as the workers went past. There used to be many freighters laying at anchor, waiting for pier space. Monday afternoon, only a strange Canadian Coast Guard vessel was tied up. And then the Green Street marching band struck up when the saints go marching in, and the people followed them out of the meeting hall. There was laughter and greetings everywhere.

[15:17]

But what I remember was the sight of one lone mourner, Deca's husband of 53 years. When I shook Bob's hand, he looked into my eyes and he said, It's been a long time. So this handful of old lefties showed each other our wrinkles, our hearing aids, our walkers, our smiles of recognition and gasps of amazement at seeing someone you thought dead still among the living. And for an hour or so, we'd been time-warped back into our youth, when we too were part of the struggle for peace and human decency, when the word comrade was a living reality and not a cliché, and where there were good guys and bad guys, and you could tell the difference, when you could lock arms with your comrades and sing the old battle songs. Blanche was here. She could sing them. I can't sing, so I'll just give you one verse of one of them. Whirlwinds of danger are raging around us, all-roaming forces of darkness assail,

[16:19]

still in the battle advancing before us the red flag of victory, which yet shall prevail. So was it just youth that motivated our passion? Are we left now only with clippings in a scrapbook and photos of how it used to be? When I was a small boy, I used to be part of a Memorial Day program in my town, riding to the monument in an open car with a few surviving Civil War veterans. A child cannot begin to relate to such age beyond noticing that among them there must have been one who'd wet his pants. I took a pencil and worked out the age difference in those days, and I realized those Civil War veterans were then the same age that I am now. And I remembered my encounter with Taro Tulku, the Tibetan teacher, when in a flash, as they say, that comes to you when you're drowning, I saw my life, not as I wanted it to be,

[17:20]

but actually as it had been. I said I wanted to be a minister to save people's souls, a doctor to save their bodies, a writer to save their minds, a revolutionary to save their liberties, and in all these things I have failed. What can I do? And he replied without an instant pause, All that you did was your unknowing bodhisattva practice. Now you must continue with the same passion that you had then. Well, I remember passion as a quality that comes hand in hand with hope. In these times as they are, where the words bombs bursting in air now has a different meaning, with myself as I am, watching from the sidelines as the saints go marching in, where will I discover passion for any one or anything? The afternoon was over. The westerly winds began moving through the crowds as they went to their cars. And I thought again of a question

[18:22]

which many people like Decca have asked me. How could a dedicated communist take up a religious life? And my reply to them has always been this. You have the question turned wrong end too. It should be, how could a religious become a communist? Somehow, in the karma I shared with Decca, in our common revolt against our class origins, I had the good fortune to experience something else as a child. Certain amazing adventures into that mysterious place where religious feeling originates. So, when all my avenues for religious experience were blocked by the doctrine of Calvinism, in a church where people could hear the word of Christ inside and stand out on the porch and speak of Lutheran the gooks on the steps, it was a blessing to find people that I could live with who would live and die together. Of course, I was always chided for being a romantic communist, but the party was a refuge that kept my spirit alive.

[19:26]

You could say I made communism my religion and the party my church. And though both Decca and I left the party, I couldn't just make do as she did for the last years. Her motto was, afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted. Gadflies and muckrakers do have their role in an environment where people's magazines seem to set the tone for the news. But greed, hate and delusion are universal across the human spectrum. I caught a documentary about modern gangs the other day, and among the people interviewed was a woman who was one of JFK's lovers, at the same time she was mistress to a Chicago mafia don. And she said, there are no good guys on one side and bad guys on the other, they're all in it together. So, if this is a common denominator, what happens to that long struggle for a better life?

[20:29]

Well, it wasn't a good week for me because a few days later I had occasion to confront this question in a totally different perspective. I had an errand to run at 4th and Townsend, and as I walked back to Market Street to catch the bus, I saw the flags flying around the park at Moscone Center and I thought, well, I've got the time, I'll stop in and investigate. And that's how I found myself at the Martin Luther King Memorial. I don't know when it was completed, but that was my first experience of it. The centerpiece, if you've been there, you may remember, is a wide waterfall, at least wider than this room is long, and pouring a tremendous volume of water over a passageway beneath. And there are selections from Dr. King's I Have a Dream speech, etched in burnished metal. The thundering roar of the waterfall was like the sound of a great crowd, and for a moment I felt I was among those in Washington

[21:36]

who heard Dr. King say this, We must rapidly shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, then the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered. Those words took me back to the time when I first experienced the spirit that gave rise to this terrible dichotomy in our public life. It was August of 1921. My grandfather had taken me on a riverboat trip up the Hudson on the day line, and this itself was a memorable event because he never had an intimate relation with me as long as I lived in his house. At one point we passed by an anchorage in the river where the freighters, the liberty ships of World War I, were slowly dissolving into rust. Now I had read in the paper, I was an early reader,

[22:38]

about farmers in Kansas burning wheat in an attempt to keep the price up. This was also the time of the great inflation in Germany where you had to take a whole bag full of paper money to the store to buy a loaf of bread. Now it was our custom every month to send what today we would call a care package to my grandfather's sister and her family in Germany. Sugar, coffee, chocolate, tin butter, raisins. And as my mother wrapped the package she would tell me of a cousin exactly my age who, whenever the package arrived, would beg for just one raisin. So the news story about the wheat, the presence of the abandoned ships, my sense of identity with my hungry cousin, all came together in a glorious idea. Opa, I said, grandfather, why don't we take one of those ships, fill it with the grain the farmers are burning, and send it to our relatives in Germany? And instantly the reply came, because it would be bad for business.

[23:41]

Recently I read an article in the New York Times about the maldistribution of food in the world and their conclusion also was that you couldn't do anything about it because it was bad for business. So Dr. King's words lay heavy on my heart and I had to take issue with him. In all respect for his passionate indictment of our vaunted American way of life, it is racism, materialism and militarism that prevent the establishment of a person-oriented society. Computers, machines and profit motors are the tools used by the present-day grandfathers inside and outside of organized crime to maintain the conditions that make our lives, the great majority of the world's people, such an agony. Faithful, stirring, uplifting as Dr. King's rhetoric was, the sound of the waterfall had now changed into the roar of ever-increasing onrush of historical events. As I left the passage beneath the waterfall,

[24:44]

I read one last line. I believe, Dr. King said, that unarmed truth and unconditioned love will have the final word in reality. Well, having exhausted myself for a lifetime in the struggle for victory of the good over the bad by any means, and having failed, I have to grant Dr. King that since all else didn't work, perhaps unconditional love will achieve the final word. But in my life, I have never known that kind of love at a time when it could have been a living experience. I was raised in the spirit of the German pedagogues who educated Himmler's generation. Their belief was, break the child's spirit and do it by any means and do it early. I don't believe Decca's father had read one of those books, but there is one thing I shared with her. A childhood of life and death resistance

[25:45]

to the effort made to break our spirits. We were both survivors, but the price we paid was far greater than we imagined. Perhaps that second picture of her I saw through the glass walls of the hearse caught that moment of sorrow as she too, in Dr. Ballin's words, mourned the one unalterable fact that had cast a shadow over her entire life. Though the thought may have healed, she bore the scars all her 78 years. So there I was at the end of my walk, at the end of my tether. One more spasm of tension and the life support system that connected me with all the here and now would finally disconnect. And like an astronaut on a spacewalk whose umbilical cord had snapped, I would drift forever through that void which has always existed between myself and others. I believe this was also so for Decca. Like her, I have used my words to make connections

[26:46]

that can only come from the heart, or in the words of the ancient Chinese masters, from the heart-mind. My grandmother often said about me in my presence, Idean hateyunga, ideas that boy has. Had she said ideas that boy is, she could have perhaps saved me a lifetime of delusion. But she was not a Zen master, just a former goose girl on the banks of the Elba River. When I finally found my way back to the steps of 300 Page, I could hear her saying, You may be born in America and speak English, but once a German, always a German. So when I managed to get the door open, I went in with the same apprehension a beginner must feel when they come to Zen Center. What am I doing in this place? Where do I fit in? And, most important, what will they think of me? Then, as has happened many times in my life,

[27:49]

when I have reached the end of my rope, someone or something took me in hand. This time it was a newsletter from Misanji, the Zen Center over on Hartford Street in Castro. On the first page was a message from the abbot, Senshin Whelan, whom some of you know as the poet Philip Whelan, whose latest book was so favorably reviewed in the Chronicle a few weeks ago. It's a very short bit, so allow me to read it to you. It's headed, Living and Dying. Life and death, Philip says, that's what it's really about. We live in the midst of dying and dying in the midst of living. We go through our lives picking up all kinds of things and calling it me. We become very fond of this creation. Life and inanimate matter all glued together. I live at Hartford Street Zen Center. There's a hospice here for folks with AIDS. Everyone is perishing slowly. I can understand a little bit of what they're going through,

[28:51]

that the end is not far away because I'm not very well myself. Guys who are there and terribly ill are alive and know what is happening. That it's the end of all moving. If you stop moving, you're dead. It's very real when you watch your friends fade and perish. Very difficult because we want to keep things as they are. But unless you experience your own death, you are lost. Really, get close to it. What we are actually doing is dying all the time. Dying is an action. Ask, who is living? Who is dying? And when you go to the Zando, ask, why am I here? The business of just sitting is very difficult. Zen wants you to rip yourself to pieces. We sit down, fold our legs and watch our breaths. Sit in a cushion being bored stiff. Then our minds start flashing ugly pictures, sad feelings, weird ideas. Our knees hurt.

[29:52]

We are attacking the structure of the personality, the casing, so we get distracted from what practice is really about. What are the reasons why we do Zazen? The reason is that we are greedy for Satori, for enlightenment, and for our friends to say, hey, I couldn't do that. Keep asking, what is it that I am doing? What am I responding to? How am I acting with others and how are they acting with me? All we know is mush, a great fear. Will we try to get away or closer? All we may have learned through sitting is to handle our own intolerance or impatience. But in the life of Zen practice, you shouldn't come out alive. Mio asked me this morning, what is the answer to it all? And I said, love. In one of our secret esoteric Zen circles, at the bottom of the whole shebang, is Buddha's compassion to save all beings. A passionate drive to end the suffering of stars, of fish, of people, and everything.

[30:56]

Now there's that word again. Tarotoku and Tsenshin Whelan both say we must practice with passion. Well, that was hard enough to hear while I wrote the first draft of this talk, but before I got back to the typewriter, I heard a news story on the air about a meeting in Chiapas, Mexico, of people from every different revolutionary party, group, persuasion in the world. People who represented a rainbow of ways on how to bring about Dr. King's dream of a change from a thing-oriented society to a people-oriented one. The reporter interviewed a young, and from the sound of her voice, a very young woman, who said, this meeting is the most important thing to happen in this modern historical era. We have only 20 years left before materialism will bring an end to the human life on this planet. And from her passion and enthusiasm, I felt she knew in her heart that she and her comrades would be successful. Well, if I live through the next 20 years, I'll be 100.

[32:02]

I guess I'll never know. Whether she or Robinson Jeffers will have the final word on all of this, he's the one who said, you know, the world cannot be saved or stopped, and all its discords can be resolved only into other discords. Once I failed in my vow to save the world, now I have vowed to save all sentient beings. That makes the earlier vow seem like child's play, which it was. Is this new vow just some grown-up game? I have been told that a Buddhist lives by vow, and it is not the possibility of fulfilling the vow which infuses him or her with necessary energy or passion. It is just the vow. But in the words of one of my children, when she was confronted with some mystery of life she was unable to comprehend, she said, how can such things be? So that's my question.

[33:04]

How can there be vows to attain the unattainable? How to do the impossible? How to believe the unbelievable? In the past I had questions to which I gave my total allegiance, and in the attempt to answer them came up with the evidence, at last, that they couldn't be answered. Why should I even try again? Well, in an envelope of quotations which I've collected, there's one from Kategori Roshi's Return to Silence. It may not be an answer, but it may point in a direction. This is what he says. When you really want to know who you are, or what the real significance of human life, of human suffering is, very naturally you come back to silence, even if you don't want to. You return to an area of no sound. It cannot be explained, but in this silence you can realize, if only dimly, what the real point is of what you want to know.

[34:06]

Whatever kind of question you ask, or whatever you think, finally you have to come back to silence. This silence is vast, and you cannot know what it is. Did you catch the strange contradiction there? He begins by saying, if you want to know, goes on to say what the real point is of what you want to know, and ends with, you cannot know. You question, you seek answers, and the answer is there are no answers. But that is only if you continue to try to use your intellect and your intelligence in this great research into the significance of human life. When you become the answer, and I've been told this by people I trust, when you become the answer, then you are in some totally different space. You're in the area of no sound, where your true life and the life of the universe become one. Here is how that illiterate woodchopper we've come to know as Hui Neng,

[35:12]

the sixth Chinese ancestor, speaks of this great awareness. The capacity of great mind is like the emptiness of space. To sit with a mind that has been emptied makes one fall into the emptiness of indifference. Space contains the sun, moon, stars, constellations, earth, mountains, rivers, all grasses, all plants, good men and bad men, bad things and good things, heaven and hell, they are all an empty space. Self-nature contains in it all objects, all objects without exception of self-nature, seeing all human beings as they are, and all non-human beings as they are, evil things and good things. Self-nature abandons them not, nor is it contaminated by them. The more you sit, the emptier your small minds become,

[36:16]

and they share in the moment of that great mind that is beyond our comprehension. Kierkegaard said, modern man trembles at the brink of this abyss. Daisetsu Suzuki says, let him plunge in, there are all things contained. When we plunge in, as we say in the full moon ceremony, immersing body and mind deeply in the way, we demonstrate the essential quality of the Bodhisattva way, he or she does not abandon beings, and we are each one such being, so that means first that we do not abandon ourselves, because, as Suzuki Roshi said, before you can take care of others, you first have to take care of yourself. Now, how can I take care of myself in this strange place that I've come to? What can I take as my guide out of this endless maze where I've trapped myself?

[37:17]

The closer I seem to get to freedom, the more I have entangled myself. But that story I told the children may have come to me before I recognized the fact that it was not designed for them, but somehow a concealed message to myself, which I wrote before I did all of this exploration. Old men are said to enter their second childhood. Indeed, there was a time in Japan when there was even a ceremony at a man's retirement where it publicly agreed that he could return to the life of the child. Now, I've long known and have often told the story about sitting by a brook when I was maybe five years old, experiencing the dropping away of body and mind so that I no longer looked out of my eyes at a separate universe, but experienced a moment of no boundaries. I and the swallows and the water and the trees were all one being.

[38:19]

Could I become passionately involved in that effort now, not to return to that moment, to experience it in this moment, which our teachers tell us is eternity? In order to take that tremendous step demands a total sacrifice of the small self, which we have worked so hard for so many years to perfect. Once I said to Katagiri Roshi that we really should put a line from Dante's Inferno across the zendo door. Abandon all hope, ye who enter here. And he said that would be a good statement if you really did abandon all hope, because then, he said, you would also abandon its opposite, despair. And you would then be in that field we speak about when we put on our robes in the morning, great robe of liberation, field far beyond form and emptiness,

[39:23]

far beyond good and bad, far beyond man and woman, far beyond all the dichotomies. In this sense, liberation is to be free from any and all ideas that are designed to discriminate the totality of life into a never-ending sequence of opposites that continually battle with each other. And by so doing, as the robe chant said, wearing the Tathagata's teaching, we are preparing to save all sentient beings. Or, as Philip told Mule, in one of our secret esoteric Zen circles, at the bottom of the whole shebang is Buddha's compassion to save all beings, a passionate drive to end the suffering of stars, fish, people, of everything. And may I add that everything includes you and me. Thank you.

[40:17]

@Text_v004
@Score_JJ