I vow to chase the truth about the Tathātā's words. Good morning, everybody. Good morning. Well, this morning, I want to do something a little bit different. I don't really have a regular Dharma talk to deliver this morning, but what I'd like to do is to share with you an essay that I'm writing, so you can tell me how I should fix it, about the stages of monastic practice, even though I know that most of you are not monks living in monasteries.

[01:03]

Still, I think in your hearts you're all monks, and this essay about the stages of life in monastic training might be of interest. So, I thought I'd try it out on you today, okay? So, be patient, it might be longer than normal. Religious texts make monastic life sound like something very deep and very constant, like some life that has been the same for a thousand years, timeless and seamless. In a way, this is really true. Underneath who any of us are is another person, the monk, who is living a true and a perfect life. I believe that all of us have this monk in us. All of us want to live this life of silence and perfection,

[02:11]

and this life does go on in us, underneath our other life. When we're completely out of touch with this perfect life, we suffer a lot. We run around looking for something we can't seem to find, and our lives don't work. And when we're in touch with it, more or less, as we are in a retreat, or even in a few moments of meditation practice, or maybe at the beach, or on a long hike, or alone sometimes under the stars, we feel whole. Then we can approach others in the complicated world with a measure of equanimity. So this is what I mean by the monastic life, the way of wholeness, a sacred way, a sacred place, a clear place, an ideal, in a sense, that lives at the bottom of our hearts and is reflected back to us

[03:16]

in religious experience and in religious literature. But as we all know, ideals can be poison, if we take them in large quantities, or if we take them incorrectly. In other words, if we take them not as ideals, but as concrete realities. Ideals should inspire us to surpass ourselves, which we need to aspire to do if we are to be truly human, and which we can never actually do, exactly, because we are truly human. And that's what ideals are, tools for inspiration, not realities in and of themselves. The fact that we have so often missed this point accounts, I think, for the sorry history of religion in human civilization. Ideals become poison when we believe in them too literally,

[04:16]

when we berate ourselves and others for not measuring up. No one measures up, and no one ever will. That's the nature of ideals, and that's their beauty. So at their best, if rightly understood, ideals ought to make us pretty light-hearted. They give us a sense of direction, which is comforting. And since they are by nature impossibilities, why worry? Just keep trying. The monastic life, as it appears by implication in the texts of any religious tradition, is this kind of ideal. You know, we stay in delighted obedience with our teacher, forty years, living peacefully day by day, hearing the sounds of the bells, deep in meditation or prayer, in the mountains, among the clouds and forests, living in harmony and calmness. Well, underneath it probably really is like this, but up above, in our conscious world,

[05:19]

where we live what we like to refer to as our lives, it actually never looks like this at all. What is monastic life really like? So as all of you, I'm sure, know, I've been living in a Zen religious community for about twenty years, and so naturally I've developed some thoughts on the subject. And although our community isn't exactly the same as a monastic community, it is a residential religious community, in part, where people come to live for many years. And I think what we've experienced and come to understand over time turns out to be fairly typical of monastic or long-term residential religious communities. So now I'm going to tell you what it's really like. We never talk about this on Sundays, but... So you get to hear all the dirt.

[06:21]

So I want to speak of stages in monastic life as a way of describing what happens in that life and what kinds of problems come up. Of course, there aren't any stages, or if there are, the stages happen simultaneously and not consecutively, or in no particular order, perhaps. And one may go through the stages over and over and over again. Furthermore, people, even people who are similar enough to share a taste for religious life for one reason or another, still are very different from one another. And no setting forth of stages could possibly do justice to the variety of people's experiences on the path. And this is another sometimes violent preconception that there is a definite, delineated path and that things happen in the same way and in the same order for everyone. Still, there is a virtue in systematic thinking

[07:28]

and there are some general tendencies most of us can notice and recognize at least to some extent. So I'm going to speak about eight stages that I've made up so that you can tell where I am in the talk by what stage I'm at. In case you get bored, you'll know how long there is to go. So the eight stages are, first of all, the honeymoon. Second, disappointment and betrayal. Third, the exploration of commitment. Fourth, commitment and flight. Fifth, the dry place. Sixth, appreciation. Seventh, love. And eighth, letting go of monastic life altogether.

[08:32]

So the first stage, which is probably typical of the first stage of nearly anything, is the honeymoon, a time when we're really thrilled with the life of the monastery. The contrast to what we're used to in the world or what we're fleeing from in the world is so great that we're in a constant state of ecstasy. We see the people we're living with as really kind and really wonderful the sounds of the monastery bells, the simple hearty food, the early morning meditation, the landscape, the weather, the peace and quiet, the brilliant teachers, the marvelous teachings. Really, we can't think of anything that could possibly be better. We're learning about ourselves at a great rate and we're learning about the Dharma too. So much of what we hear in the talks and in the texts seems to be absolutely true, seems to be what we have sensed inside ourselves all our lives without ever really being aware of it or having the words for it. We feel relieved and resolved and renewed.

[09:41]

We feel as if suddenly and unexpectedly, perhaps in the middle of a great sorrow, we turned around one day, right in the middle of our ordinary life and found to our amazement a brand new life in which all the assumptions and behaviors were different and fresh. This stage can last for some time, but usually not too long. Then we enter the second stage, the stage of disappointment or betrayal. Of course, what happens here, this begins when we lose our sense of contrast with the world at large and now what's inside us becomes stronger than our perception of the newness of our surroundings. Whatever festering problems we have, known and unknown, that were held in abeyance while we marveled at the greatness of the religious life, now come out full-blown. And rather than seeing these problems for what they are,

[10:43]

our own internal contradictions, we project them outward onto the community. We begin to see the truth that there are plenty of imperfections, actually. The food gets tiring. The people aren't as nice as they seemed a few months ago. The many restrictions on our lifestyle that seemed so cute now seem wearing. And we begin to notice a lack of creativity and energy in our fellow practitioners, especially in some of the old-timers and we're sleep-deprived and weary. And then we begin to notice that there are many baffling and unacceptable aspects to the teachings. In fact, on the one hand, the teachings sound purposely confusing and incomprehensible and on the other hand, they begin to sound suspiciously,

[11:46]

in many cases, just like the religion we grew up with and fled from. And then the teachers turn out to be a lot less wonderful than we thought at first. We're seeing them stumble and make mistakes and if we haven't seen it, we've heard about it and if we haven't heard about it or seen it, then the teachers are perhaps a little too perfect. There's something suspicious and even a little coercive about their piety. Are they really serious? Little by little, a sense of disillusionment or betrayal comes over us. Now, all these perceptions, as disturbing as they are, unfortunately, are usually true. So when we bring them up, no one can really talk us out of them. The old timers in the community may get defensive

[12:50]

when we bring these things up, but actually they can't really disagree with us. Yet, even though they may be true, they don't account for what we're really feeling, cheated and disappointed. The only thing that accounts for that is our own pain. We were feeling for a moment better, redeemed, and now suddenly we feel even worse than when we came. And eventually we realize that imperfect though the community is, and it may even be worse than that, it may be toxic even, still, it's us, not it, that is the source of our present suffering. And it can take us a while to come to this, sometimes a very long time, if there are, as there have been in many communities of all religious traditions over the centuries, flagrant cases of betrayal by teachers or other important community members.

[13:51]

But whether it comes soon or only after many years, and whether its causes are spectacular or just quiet and internal, it is something we have to come to on our own, because when we're deeply disappointed with the community, it's hard for long-term committed community members to point out that it's our eye and not the visual object that is cloudy. And they can't tell us this because they know we won't hear it. They know that if they tell us, they will only appear to us to be defending the status quo, and we will mistrust them for it. And besides, many of the old-timers in the community don't understand it themselves anyway, and many of them are themselves confused about the community and where it and they begin and end. So for all these reasons, the older members of the community tolerate us and our views, and there is very little they can do to help us through this stage. If we feel this sense of betrayal or disappointment acutely enough, and especially if a difficult personal incident happens to us

[14:56]

when we're in the midst of this stage, we may very well leave the community in a huff, which does happen, although seldom. And I feel like when it does happen, it's really a tragedy because something important has been cut off too soon. But if it doesn't happen, if we don't leave, then it's likely that after enough time goes by, we will realize what's actually going on. And then we now gradually begin to get the picture that a lot has been going on in our lives for a very long time that we were simply unaware of. We came to the community to find peace, to live in a kind of utopia, expecting that that will make up for the fact that we ourselves aren't entirely perfect human beings. Perhaps we were thinking in the midst of this utopia we will become enlightened and all our problems will end. A few of us actually think these thoughts quite this baldly, but more or less we do have

[15:57]

these kind of fuzzy and unexamined ideas that we bring with us into the community. So as I said, instead of this though, we find that we're living in an extremely flawed community and far from being not entirely perfect, we see that we ourselves are actually a raging mass of passion, confusion, bitterness, hatred and contradiction. And a state of anything even remotely looking like enlightenment or even a little bit of peace of mind is really far away. In other words, we are much worse off now than when we started. And we now have to acknowledge the fact that the job that we've undertaken is a much, much larger job than we thought at first and that it's going to take quite a while. And part of what we have to do now is make up our minds that we're really going to do it.

[16:58]

We're really going to roll up our sleeves and stay in it for the long haul, one or two or three thousand lifetimes. So here's where we enter the third stage and we begin to explore honestly and without too much idealism the actual nature of our commitment to the practice and to the community. And this is a very, very difficult thing to do because now that we are really looking without too much distraction at ourselves we find so many attitudes in us and these attitudes are not always consistent one with the other. We want to practice always, to take vows as a lay or priest practitioner, to devote ourselves completely to the path and we know there's absolutely nothing else that we could possibly do and many of us feel these things sometimes, maybe just once in a while and maybe a lot of the time. But how strongly do we feel them? And how do we know whether or not to act on them?

[18:01]

But even if we do feel these things strongly and even if we do feel clear about a sense of commitment we also have to notice that at the same time there are many other strong feelings. We also want to find the perfect mate and get married. We need a house. We feel we're not complete without a nice place to live. We need a career. We need children. We want to travel. It's very important to us to travel. We want to serve others more directly than we can in the monastery. We are interested in other traditions. We should want to go study there, other teachers and so on and so on. Many, many contradictory feelings. So this is a very difficult stage and this can go on for some time, a long time. And in fact it should go on for a long time. If we make a determination too soon

[19:05]

about how our commitment really is, it's probably wrong. We probably haven't listened to ourselves enough. There are a lot of cases of people who leave at this stage and really shouldn't have and there are cases too of people who make commitments that they regret having made. So it's good to take our time and to seek advice from teachers and other senior and junior students even though the advice doesn't help that much. Because in fact we've got to come to what we come to on our own that's the nature of it. And sometimes following the view of someone else whom we admire can be a big problem. So our elders and teachers have to be very careful to be sensitive to what they're hearing from us and not to impose their wishes and views on us. Nevertheless, the advice can be useful and probably necessary as a mirror to see how we ourselves are thinking. So we cook with that for some time.

[20:06]

And then the fourth stage I call commitment and flight which seems funny, it seems like an oxymoron but I think that's a really accurate name for it. So finally we come to a place where we feel a solid ground underneath our commitment. We accept our wobbling and human mind but we know now that underneath it there is finally something solid and reliable although we know we're often out of touch with it. Looking back, we can see that even though we're still far from perfect that we have changed. We see how much we're the same but we see that there's change too. We are more solid, we are calmer we are quieter in our spirit and less apt to fly off the handle inside or outside at least with the kind of frequency that we did before.

[21:07]

Maybe we're not as solid or as calm or as quiet as we had hoped or expected to be but by now we've given up such vain hopes as unrealistic and we are more able to settle for how it actually is with us and to find it good or at least acceptable with a degree of joy. So we feel ready to make a commitment to the practice and to the community and the commitment really can only take one form renunciation. A giving up of self and personal agenda as we come to see that self and personal agenda don't in fact help us to get what we really want and really need in our lives they only cause us suffering and as this becomes more and more apparent to us we are more willing to enter into a serious commitment to the practice. In fact after a while we feel that even without choosing to do so we have already done so. There isn't any other way, we are committed

[22:10]

we have already renounced our life and this is the time when we may take a responsible position in the community or we may take initiation as a priest or lay practitioner and we feel wedded to the community and responsible for it. But as soon as we feel settled in this commitment particularly if the commitment is marked by some particular event like going off to Tassajara or taking ordination then the demons of confusion return with great force. Immediately our old interests and desires come back with fire probably something happens like we fall hopelessly in love the day before we are to go off to the monastery which has happened more than once or maybe we become ordained as a priest and find ourselves

[23:14]

drunk on the floor of a bar a couple days later with our head shaved which has also happened and these things catch us by surprise we thought we had the thing figured out but what we hadn't counted on was the fact that there were still a fair number of absolutely unopened doors in our heart and the power of the commitment that we have now undertaken is such that it violently throws open these doors and we are shocked at what we find inside and we are humbled by the sheer power of our own and therefore of human passion humbled and shocked and amazed reeling with this for some time more ashamed and confused than ever I think it is unusual for people

[24:17]

to enter the monastery for a long stay or to take ordination as a priest without suffering some version of what I've just said and in many cases it's a rude awakening sometimes when this happens we might notice that our teachers and elders seem very knowing when this happens sometimes they even chuckle over it which can either be comforting or maddening depending on our temperament and again at some times at this stage there again is a time when there might really be flight people might disappear in the night running off with a lover walking off down the Tassajara Road in the moonlight all of these things have happened but they are becoming more rare and more often the drama is internal and you can see it in people's faces

[25:18]

a kind of a grim determination mixed with a very pure softness and innocence even if the person is middle-aged or older when this happens because the power and the surprise of these strong feelings that come up is enough to send any of us back to square one with almost no identity left at all and it is in fact the work of this stage to reconstitute our identity and this is why at this time we often feel like children or like babies which of course feels wonderful and terrifying at the same time because we thought we were grown up we thought that taking this step we were advancing and we find that we're starting even before the beginning and this uncomfortable stage is cured

[26:20]

only with the passage of time time is the great healer if only we will let it be time will heal everything this is the nature of time usually we hold on to the past that's the usual human way and because we hold on to the past we don't allow time to do its real work in our lives but those who get this far in the practice usually but not always have enough concentration inside and enough support outside to avoid the entrapment of holding on to the past too much and so they can't allow time to work its magic and after a while just by doing the practice they settle into a new commitment they go beyond the childlike stage and they begin to mature they reconstitute their lives around their new commitments they take on new practices, new studies

[27:23]

deepen their dharma relationships they let go of all aspirations and fantasies and illusions and they are content to just go on day by day with the practice and more time passes and as it passes we begin to slide perhaps into the fifth stage the dry place and we get to this stage bit by bit without even noticing it because it turns out we weren't exactly perfect in our letting go of the past, giving ourselves to the healing winds of time in fact in a subtle way we have been holding on to our life even while we have given it up entirely in renunciation and this time though this subtle fact is not necessarily announced to us in a dramatic way and we may not even notice it at all

[28:25]

we go on practicing sincerely seemingly going deeper and deeper with our renunciation becoming more and more settled in the life of the dharma but this becomes exactly the problem we are too settled and we're getting a little bit dull a little bit bored we've lost the edge of our seeking and searching mind and we're beginning to feel pretty comfortable in our new life we have a position in the community we are seen as an experienced person a respected member we have a good grasp of the teachings or at least we have heard them so often we seem to have a grasp of them and here is where whether we notice it or not we are in a dry patch a time of dullness and nothingness and lack we can't go back to our old life it seems

[29:28]

and yet there seems nowhere to go forward to and here we can't even believe in the notion of going backwards or forwards where could we go forward to? and how could you ever go back? so we are stuck and out of this stuckness fear arises fear of never realizing or even glimpsing the path fear of the world we have left behind and fear of what we ourselves have become and again sometimes none of this surfaces at all we just go about our business in the monastery feeling quite self satisfied and actually dying a little bit more every day up to this point our path may have been difficult at times but it has always been positive and rewarding

[30:30]

we have always been growing and learning but at this point we have actually stopped growing and learning and this is the problem and we have mistaken the laziness or dullness that cover our fear for the calmness that comes of renunciation it's true that our mind is calm but it's a dark, not a bright calm our creativity, our passion, our humanness is beginning to leave us little by little and as I say often we have no idea that this is happening to us and this is the hardest stage to appreciate and work with and often no one, not even the elders and teachers of the community can recognize that this is happening to us indeed, even these very elders and teachers may themselves be in the midst of such a stage

[31:30]

and be unaware of it in this stage what we have seen as the cure for our lives what everyone in the community has affirmed and has devoted their lives to now becomes the poison that is killing us off slowly I have tried to discern the stages the signs of this stage in my own life and in the lives of others and believe me, this is not an easy thing to do it's not easy in oneself because it's very subtle and self-deception is always tempting and it's not easy in others because it's subtle in them too but also because they don't want to hear about it because to overcome this stage

[32:31]

to go beyond it might very well take leaving the community or otherwise doing something very radical to shift the ground and most of us have a hard time after going in a particular direction for 10 or 12 or 15 or 20 years a direction that has involved great effort and sacrifice we have a hard time changing direction our fear, acknowledged or not, holds us back and we may stay this way for a long time maybe even for the rest of our lives now I know this happens to anyone in any walk of life and it may be no better or worse when it happens within the context of a religious community

[33:33]

but a religious community holds very strongly to a commitment to awareness and truthfulness and so when this happens within a religious community even if only to a few individuals and it's not seen and not explored then it becomes a disease in that community and the effect of this disease can be felt in many ways and on many levels there can be a subtle occlusion in the flow of communication an almost imperceptible and unintended dishonesty a jarring or not so jarring sense of disjunction and even though no one may recognize that a failure to discern the effects of this stage which in a few community members is the cause of the disjunction

[34:34]

people who come can very subtly feel after a while that the disjunction is there so it is very, very, very important I feel, for each individual to remain open to the possibility that this dry place may be arising in his or her life and to have the courage to address it when it comes because it will come and it must come and it will come again and again and if one is willing to address it it becomes an opportunity to go deeper a chance to let go a little more to open up a little bit more to time's healing power and the love that will come into one's life only through this way so if one can do it and it is never done alone

[35:37]

it is always done in the company of and with the help of others then there is a great although a quiet opening into the simple joy of living the religious life day by day the monastery may have great controversies and problems as any group of people will have but these no longer have a stickiness that will catch us we can enjoy being with the others but we don't need to feel compelled by them the simple things of the daily round the quiet meditation periods the sound of the bell the daily work the sky and air and earth of the place where we live and practice all of these things take on a great depth of peacefulness and contentment we come to very much appreciate

[36:41]

the tradition to which we now truly belong we feel a personal relationship to the ancients and see them very much as people like ourselves texts that formerly seemed arcane or luminous now just seem autobiographical we have a great gratitude for the place where the monastery is located for the whole planet that supports it and our life becomes marked by gratitude which we delight in expressing in whatever way we can and this is the sixth stage the stage of appreciation little by little this appreciation becomes more ordinary more normal and we begin to take a greater interest in the ordinary practicalities of caring for the monastery and in doing so we begin to notice gradually how wonderful

[37:46]

really wonderful are all the people that we're practicing with we see of course there are many faults as we see our own faults which remain very numerous but as we forgive and are even grateful for our own faults we forgive and are grateful for the faults of others we see others exactly as they are but despite this or maybe exactly because of this we really love them deeply and we are as amazed by the foibles and doings of our own community members as we are by the sky and the trees and the wisdom of the tradition itself in fact after a while you can't tell the difference this is a different kind of love from the love that we usually think of because this love doesn't include very much attachment we are willing to let people go in fact this willingness to let people go

[38:50]

is part and parcel of what the love we feel is because this love doesn't include jealousy or attachment of any kind and we know that we will be with these people forever and that wherever we go we will see only these same people so we don't need to fear or worry and we are willing even to see these people grow old or ill or die and to care for them and bury them and take joy in the doing of this to cover the grave with some dirt and chant a sutra and walk away full of the joy of knowing that even in the midst of our sadness nothing has in fact been lost no one has gone anywhere

[39:51]

only a beautiful life that was beautiful in the beginning and in the middle has become even more beautiful in the end even to the point of an ineffable perfection that the brother or sister that we are burying is exactly Buddha and how privileged we have been for so long to have lived with her and to be able to continue to live with her in memory and in the tiny acts of our own lives in the monastery and we know too very clearly that we go that way as well and very soon and that in doing so we can benefit others and give to others what we have been given in the passing of this brother or sister and this is the seventh stage, the stage of love so the eighth and the final stage

[40:54]

and I have to repeat here what I said in the beginning that there are in fact no stages there is in fact no ending that the stages are simultaneous, spiraling overlapping, both continuous and discontinuous this eighth stage is the stage of letting go of everything, even of the practice and at this stage we really don't see any practice or teaching or monastery or Dharma brothers and sisters there is only life in all its unexpectancy and color and we can leave the monastery or stay it doesn't matter that much we can be with these people or other people or nobody we can live or die we clearly have a commitment to benefit others but what could one possibly do that would not benefit others and we certainly have plenty of problems a body, a mind

[41:55]

a world but we know that these problems are the media of our lives as we live it and so there isn't much to say or do, we just go on seeing what will happen next we have no idea so these stages of monastic life are perhaps not only stages for monastic life but stages for the human heart in its journey to wholeness whether we live in a monastery or not monasteries however do help to bring all of this into focus to bring it up into consciousness and that's why I believe that monasteries should be open to all of us for at least some time in our lives because as I said all of us have this monk inside of us and that's why I hope that

[42:57]

we can continue to make Green Gulch a place where any of you would think of coming to live for one month or two weeks or six weeks or six years because once you spend time in a monastery enough time to where you internalize and make completely your own the schedule and the round of monastic life then you take that deep human pattern and rhythm with you wherever you go and the world itself can really be your monastery when the monastery is within your heart but this takes time and it takes patience it takes some luck and also a little help from your friends so this is my essay on stages of monastic life

[43:59]

I hope it wasn't entirely irrelevant or too long and now I want to tell you about a few more things I won't have time to do justice to them but just let me mention them first of all there is a saintly Catholic nun in San Francisco named Sister Bernie who runs an organization called Witness for the Homeless or Witness with the Homeless she's been working very hard on trying to prevent the government from tearing down the housing in the Presidio beautiful housing which is being razed she feels as if homeless people could live in that housing and she's been organizing strongly

[45:02]

and I've been to some of her events and I just want to tell you that on October 13th which is a Sunday a few weeks from now there will be another protest and it will begin at a synagogue called Beth Shalom at two o'clock on that day that synagogue is at 14th and Clement Street in San Francisco it's run by a rabbi who is my closest friend and has been participating with Sister Bernie so I don't know how you feel about this issue I'm sure it's complicated but to me it's very simple why would you tear down free housing in a city where last year something like 150 people died on the street from exposure so I bring that to your attention among the many other important things going on this is something that we could pay attention to also I want to mention that

[46:05]

something that we are wanting to do now in these next months is to change our traditional very very old very very traditional daily service which we do with great trepidation and fear because one doesn't mess with traditions but change the service to reflect the fact that even though in Asia it has not been explicitly the case in reality women have always been at the heart of Buddhist practice and this is not acknowledged in the liturgy of our daily service so we're going to try to make some radical changes in the service and include a lineage of women, enlightened women in our daily service and along with that we have felt as if we should

[47:12]

also have a figure a statue in our zendo of a female figure that really looks like a female person so when you leave today you'll see such a statue on the main altar, a statue of the Green Tara who sits now beside Shakyamuni Buddha she has one foot ready to stand up from her meditation seat and help the world so I'm telling you this because it's a beautiful statue and I hope you'll appreciate it and I'm also telling you this because the statue costs $2000 and if any of you for whom this is moving particularly moving to you or important for you would like to make a contribution we would be very very happy to receive it and it would affirm all that we're doing here

[48:14]

and so maybe the way to do that I wasn't quite prepared to bring this up today but maybe the way to do it is just go into the office and write a check or give something to the person in the office and they'll keep it separate a fund for the Green Tara statue and I'm sure we'll have an announcement of this once or twice more if two or three people wanted to get together and just between two or three of you purchased the statue for us this would be even better well, as they used to say in the old days thank you brothers and sisters you've been sitting a long time may our intentions may our intentions yes in your talk today I related to your talk about

[49:15]

different statues, I can't tell myself and recently I've been gripped with that passion which passion? just to get more involved in my work in investments by myself, working out of my house and I've just been gripped by it the last couple of months and I've been going with it and I've enjoyed it and I've grown from it and I've grown out of it but it's taken me away a little bit because I was intensely involved before more intensely involved with doing practice it's still in my life so I kind of go back and forth and this has been going on for years now yeah

[50:16]

I really related to what you were talking about I feel like I'm in a little part of me is in all those places yeah well I think many of us could share that what you just said because we are all many sided we have many sides to us and that's what I was saying that it's very difficult to keep it all straight and to know where is the proper balance and what is it right to do now and where is it that doing something is a way to bring our practice forward and where is it that doing something is a way to avoid our practice and really and truly there are no easy rules or ways to recognize this we have to really look within ourselves and be honest with ourselves and sometimes we have Dharma friends that we talk this over with that's what I was saying sometimes the advice that we get

[51:17]

while we don't take it or we shouldn't take it can be a kind of a mirror for looking ourselves at what we are doing and it's just hard to be a human being in a way we are blessed and cursed with numerous options in our lives and different ways to articulate our lives and different ways to be so we just all have to struggle with our own hearts and see where is it that the real energy of our lives usually lies and for me if there is any rule of thumb at all it's the motivation to benefit others for me that's the only rule of thumb that really matters so if I look at what I want to do and I see that it's purely for my own self benefit and I don't have a spirit within it

[52:17]

and you know sometimes something that looks very self benefiting you can actually do with a spirit of doing it for the benefit of others which means with some freedom but if I look at it and I see that it really is for self benefit and there isn't a sense of freedom there is a sense of obsession and desperation in it then I figure out that it's probably something that I'm using as a blind for what's really there so I may actually continue with it but I'm aware in the doing of it that it may not be quite what I need and so I'm really observing and really watching and this is complicated in itself but if there is any rule of thumb it would be the spirit of benefiting others the spirit of freedom and letting go within what we're doing and you know as you know yourself there is a way of doing investment that's obsessive and selfish and grabby and then there's a way of doing it that really

[53:18]

is concerned with benefiting others so you have to look and see and you know it's not like it's so clear cut but are we more or less going in that way and how are we doing it so you have to I think constantly be looking and trying to discern how it is with us in our practice and we all have that problem whether we're living in the world at large or whether we're living in the temple it's the same. I'm glad to be in the world and still have that within my heart Yes and I feel emotional about it and I appreciate your invitation to us to come and be here

[54:20]

for a week or a night or a month or six months that's really helpful I think for someone like myself who has maybe the heart of love but wants to live in the world and I don't even know if I have a question but I was also thinking about serving others you know living my life so that it's not strictly on my agenda and maybe to talk some time here would clarify that Yeah, thank you for mentioning that the point about, and I'm repeating it because Sonja asked me to try to remember to repeat it so that it can be on the tape, what people bring up so you're bringing up

[55:21]

this issue of the monk within and how we all have that and how even though we live in the world we can really have the heart of a monk and that we can come into the monastery and know that it can be part of our lives too even though we don't live there for a long time and to me this is a very, very important point and it seems to me in my observation of monasticism in the present time in all the different traditions and all over the world insofar as monasticism is a very special self-contained thing, it's dying insofar as monasticism recognizes that everyone has a monk within themselves and is willing to share both for the internal community and to actually keep the doors open for people on the outside, insofar as that's true monasticism is flourishing as never before and both those things are true at the same time so for me it's a very important point I remember a number of years ago, you know, Gringotts used to be

[56:26]

maybe none of you remember this, but Gringotts used to be a very closed place. We had the Sunday program but basically during the rest of the week no one was ever here you know, we didn't have conferences, we didn't have retreats no programs other than the Sunday lecture which was really supposed to be for the residents and residents would come from the city center to the lecture and some other people would come, but the idea was that you could come, but if you weren't a resident or about to be a resident then, you know so that's how it used to be and I remember in the middle of that we had a total collapse of everything and I remember we actually hired a business consultant to help us, I mean he was also very good on psychology and interpersonal relationships and all that, and we just had various people we were trying to get to help us to try to understand what we were going through, and I really remember so well, we were all sitting around in a group, all the leaders

[57:28]

and old timers, and he said what is it that really makes you feel positive and happy about your life here and your practice here and we had never really thought about it, you know, and everybody said the same thing, more or less, they said well you know, it really makes us happy when people come because when people come they bring great energy to us and we see in them how wonderful it is what we're doing and we forgot when they didn't come and we didn't notice it so much but when they come they make us see how wonderful the practice is and they also bring a lot of energy to it, so that really makes us happy and really kind of seems like a great thing so we realized then that that's what we had to do that we had to open up Green Gulch more and more and at first the idea was we would open it up so people could come on Sunday and retreats and all that but now we realized that we should open it up so people could actually be residents, you know, for short periods of time

[58:28]

we've always had that possibility we've always had a guest student program but we've never really gone out and said to people you know, it looked like the guest student program was only for people who saw themselves as becoming full-time residents, nobody else would think of doing it but now we're going to people and saying no, no, this is for you, it's for everyone, you can come for a week and so on, and you'll hear more about this when we start raising funds to build housing because we don't have much space right now but what we would like to do is clear out more or less this Cloud Hall area and have all the regular staff living in little modest little places here and there, they do now but there's not enough of them and then hopefully we'll get to the place where there won't be a problem for space where there will be more space and people can come and be a guest student for a week or two weeks

[59:28]

or come for a practice period, we've now begun having last year we started having a brief practice period three and a half weeks so that you know, someone could actually imagine arranging their life so they could come for three and a half weeks and do the whole thing from beginning to end and we do that now in January and we'll do it again in 1997 this upcoming January, and then we have six week or seven week practice periods October through December and February through I think end of March or early April and you can come for those or just come anytime and spend a week or two weeks or whatever as a resident of Greenville, just get up in the morning with the wake up bell and do the schedule we also have the guest house where you can come and be more on your own schedule in other words, if you stay in the guest house you pay a little bit more and you have a much nicer room and you then can join us for whatever activities you like or, you know, not join us at all

[60:32]

or join us partially, because people do need R&R and the monastic schedule is a little demanding, because it starts early and it ends you know, nine at night generally so there's that possibility too but before you... I feel like, Athena, I don't know this isn't exactly a question in your essay today what affected me was that it was so intimate and so global so specific and so not and that there isn't anyone who couldn't follow that eight stage trip on any element of their lives from relationship to work to family and that if you could stand back and see that everything you enter into is just

[61:32]

a manifestation of that eight phase process it helps you remove yourself from it and see it as a way of becoming the journey of the heart and that, so my mind was just it's more than a practice period worth of discussion and that ultimately when I left I thought, well what am I there's so much I want to say or ask or say to Norman but what I'm left with is the feeling that with most of your talks, or many I'm left with completely undefended, I mean your talks leave me with loving kindness that I don't need to defend myself and get really emotional I always feel that with you that what you are and allow is kindness in that journey well thank you for that the Dalai Lama is fond of saying

[62:36]

my religion is kindness do you ever hear him say that or see that he writes that and I feel that that's really just good Buddhadharma I think that is, Buddhadharma is to come to a real true acceptance of what we are an acceptance which is not a resignation like oh well but seeing that any one of us is the nexus point of the whole universe that it had to be this way, it's just perfect even though we know, and I certainly know very well my own limitations and faults and so on and I just feel like as I understand it, that is Buddhadharma it's not easy to come to that in our lives but we have to come to that and if we do, we can really be happy and in a quiet way, we really want to benefit others so I think that's the whole thing, that's why we sit, that's why we offer incense

[63:39]

that's why we hurl ourselves to the ground bowing and chanting and studying texts I'm giving a class in this very complicated text called the Hokyo Zamai which is all about the mind only school of Buddhism and the dialectic between the relative and the absolute and blah blah, etc, etc, on and on, and it's only about that that's all it is, saying the same thing over and over again recognizing that our very limitations as the people that we are is our perfection, is our Buddhahood that's all it's really saying, that's all that Zen as I understand it, is saying over and over again in various ways I didn't realize many people have said this, and I thought that these eight stages would be of some relevance I thought maybe they would be of some relevance to your lives as non-residents, and I thought that there was a chance that you might be able to really relate to it, but it sounds like more than I thought, people can relate to it, which is good it's great to hear that

[64:40]

First, then Patricia What you announced at the very end of the lecture was very touching for me, that there's going to be an innovation, that they're going to name women that have received enlightenment and I started thinking also that the other aspect that attracted me to Gringotts is the fact that priests who get married can have children because I feel that when they are in that sort of a relationship, they are really close to seeing themselves, because you see yourself through your mate, and also I'd like to ask you a question you being married and also being at the stage in your practice that you are as you talk about the eight stages, I was relating with a relationship with a woman or maybe a woman could think of a man, because first they know each other it's a honeymoon, and then they start seeing this and that

[65:42]

so I start seeing a parallel and I was wondering, you having done both what do you think about it? Somebody else mentioned that too, that they saw those stages in a relationship and I hadn't thought of it that way, but yes, I think that really is true and maybe I'll make a few comments more about the changing of the liturgy and also about being married and relationships it's hard to change the tradition it should be hard, traditions should be very conservative I think religion is inherently conservative and that's good and so even though I'm personally not so conservative, I think, but then who knows I really think that the tradition should be conservative but in this time, I've just gotten all agitated about this one

[66:43]

particular thing, because a young woman came to see me and in a really nice way without any blame or complaining at all just expressed her sorrow and pain and tears over chanting this lineage that we chant every single day, which is all men and suddenly I was transformed in that encounter because although I knew this and so on and I'd always thought, well we've got to change this and everything never before did I really have my heart turned and I remember it was quite hilarious when I said this in the board of directors meeting at the Zen Center which has many women on the board and I said this, I forget how I put it but all the women on the board burst out laughing because I was making this profound thing

[67:44]

like, well I noticed that and they burst out laughing like, oh you finally noticed this we've noticed it for 30 years and I'm glad that you finally are so intelligent that you finally noticed something that we've seen for 30 years so now this is getting into maybe a little too much detail, but this is the controversy of it is that there's a lineage. Zen is very big on lineage really big on it we changed the word patriarch to ancestor but still it's very big on lineage Buddha's before Buddha and Buddha and this person and that person we actually name every single person from Buddha to the present day that passed the lineage down and that is a very important and central part of Zen so what I'm proposing to do and I'm letting people know that I'm going to do it no matter what

[68:45]

even if it's just an experiment that's why I'm getting away with it, well just an experiment we'll try it for six weeks, we can always change it back what I'm going to do is stop the lineage just chant the lineage but then stop in the middle and say have the chanter say and to the many enlightened women known and unknown whose courageous practice sustains us to this day they'll chant that and then we'll recite a lineage of women enlightened women from early days of Buddha's time as if it was the same lineage as if these women were actually in our lineage and this is the part that people have a problem with because they say, well that isn't our lineage it's lamentable that there aren't women named in our lineage and so we should have another dedication to women over here on the side and acknowledge important women but you can't say that those women are in our lineage but my argument is that you can

[69:45]

because first of all we know from historical scholarship that many of the names in that lineage are fake that's true, that because it was so important for the Zen people that there be an unbroken lineage from Shakyamuni Buddha to the present, where there were some breaks they actually stuck people in there that's true, we know that that's just a historical fact why did they stick those people in there? they stuck those people in there for spiritual reasons because spiritually it was really true to the Zen ancestors that the lineage was unbroken, that this was really true and even though they couldn't say here or there what bridged the gap from this person to that person they knew that it was unbroken so they added names so that they could chant it as if it were unbroken and so for the same reason I would say that the lineage in reality, spiritually has always included women that there are women whose teachings are completely unknown that have been actually in that lineage

[70:48]

and have influenced and been handing the Dharma down and then there are all the women who have practiced side by side with men enabling men to be the big shots like if you go to Japan to any small temple, including the temple of Suzuki Roshi the present Suzuki Roshi, who is my Dharma grandfather you will see that Suzuki Roshi is like a little child, his wife winds him up and he does all these things but his wife runs the temple so if we were going to put him in our lineage how could we say that he was there without her? It's really the truth so therefore I say on the same argument that it is permissible to do that and what I want us to do is begin to study the teachings of these women, and there's a really good book which I recommend to you I think it's called Early Buddhist Women by Susan Mercott and it's a translation of the poems Enlightenment poems of these women whose names we're going to be chanting in our lineage

[71:49]

and we're going to make those teachings, not only their names but their teachings part of our... bring them up and have classes in them and talk about them and so on, so that we will see them side by side with our male Zen ancestors so I'm really excited about this because I think it's going to really make a difference to the way that we practice and the way we understand our practice as far as relationships and being married and so on, it's a very big problem it's really hard to be married anyway and it's hard not to be married and it's hard, especially hard to try to practice Buddhadharma and be married, and do justice to be married and do justice to practicing, at least in the way that you practice as a resident of a temple it's just a big problem but I mean, being human is a big problem, I don't see any way around it there isn't a perfect way

[72:51]

I would say that while it is true that you do learn some things about yourself and the Dharma and how the world is and what loving kindness is and all that from being in an intimate relationship I think that's very true, I certainly could say that for myself and I consider my wife to be one of my most important Dharma friends and most important teachers and I always go to her with things that are really important to me and she gives me good advice and she really understands but you can't say that's true for everyone and I think there is also a place that I honor very much for celibacy and it's rare that people have that talent but for those who can really be celibate without becoming a sourpuss, which is what often happens to celibate people, they become mean or cut off huge parts of themselves

[73:53]

and I hear all we have to do is ask anybody to tell us their favorite two or three horror stories about what happened to them when they were in a Catholic school and so on at the hands of celibate monks or nuns who were mean there are good stories too, but there are also a lot of negative stories we know that that's true and the history of celibate monasticism throughout the world is a very checkered history full of things like in male monasteries, pretty young boy acolytes who were actually more than acolytes to the older monks prostitution, etc, etc and then celibacy being kept but it being twisted in people's lives however, I have also met monastics who are celibate who are wonderful people, loving people whose love for everyone that they meet comes from the fact that they don't have an intimate relationship with one person in their lives

[74:55]

and that's true and there's more freedom in a certain way in that kind of a lifestyle than there is when you're married there are limitations when one is married to one's ability to be with students and be with others my wife and I have to have meetings to make a calendar to where we can have dates together so that we can actually see that we're spending time together because if we didn't do that then we would hardly ever see each other because that's what it's like to live in a religious community and then I'm sure that the fact that we do that and the fact that emotionally there's that for me in my life may I mean, I've never asked them about it much but I'm sure some Green Gulch students would feel well, but you're not really available to us enough or as much as you could be either in terms of time or emotionally if you didn't have this relationship in your life and I think that's true so there's problems either way

[75:57]

but for me I was given to that life and we have children too and I've never had a moment's regret over that it's been a wonderful experience to have children and it's difficult and does call forth one's resources it's a lot easier to be this wonderful person to people that you see occasionally than it is to be a wonderful person to someone that sees you all the time and this is for me a great area where I have to work very hard to reach down and find real compassion so thank you yes Patricia, sorry In terms of renunciation and solitude and living with other people it seems like there are a lot of similarities between monastic life and prison life and isn't Sun Center doing some outreach

[77:00]

similarities between monastic life and prison life yeah, it is kind of similar in a way although opposite in a way too yeah, what we're doing I say we, but it's a few individuals are working in the county prison in San Mateo County Prison in San Bruno and the I guess the county jail in San Francisco to have ongoing meditation class with prisoners and I've been there myself to participate in a class once and it's pretty incredible pretty amazing and the people in prison really get it they really understand that

[78:04]

if you take care of your mind good consequences could come from this and if you fail to take care of your mind disastrous consequences could come of it and particularly working with anger and how to contain themselves because they know that getting angry at a fellow inmate or a guard could really be bad for them so we do the sitting practice and we discuss the Dharma particularly as it relates to these kinds of issues try to understand and have the Dharma most of the people in those jails, the vast majority are in jail for drug abuse of one sort or another and so we talk about that and how it relates to being able to find a space within your own self of actually looking at what's going on in your life rather than running away from what's going on in your life with substances, which is what happens in their case because they have conditions in their lives, many of them that are perfectly worth running away from

[79:05]

so how do you admit and look at difficult, difficult conditions fully without having to run away but it's really moving actually to see the kind of talk that goes down and what happens and I really admire our people who are going in there and doing that work and there's much more of it that could be done but so far, as far as I know, that's the one project that's been going on for a while and it has been very, very successful in the prison. Yeah, Patricia. How does this work with my

[80:08]

sensation in my life and the other thing that always comes up to me, ever since I was a child is how I experienced my own spiritual sense of God and always wanted to hear it carved out in those step-by-step things and the only time that I ever felt a true, true companion with that one of the times that I felt a true companion with that was around Thomas Merton's descriptions because in my own experiences solitude and being alone is very full and has a great company so to speak, you know and when you said in your talk you always need to be with people part of me felt that space

[81:09]

that's true but where's the kind of my truth and I always feel very nervous when I say this because I have this experience of that not being spoken about and yet when I was a child I would love to go to the temple, the Jewish temple by myself on Friday nights and my mother really validated I would go on a direct visit to God and yet the community obviously is the dialogue part but I guess I don't know if there's other people here amongst me that experience that sense of truly you can go in you can go out and so I wanted to make the space for myself to share that with you today because you invited us to listen and also give you

[82:13]

a comment so I hope I'm making sense No, you are, yeah No, I appreciate that bringing up this side of solitude and aloneness and certainly Merton speaks of this a lot and this is a fine point and I agree with you completely I think that the nature of monastic life is aloneness even though we live together each one of us I mean when we really look at who we are that is aloneness already because as long as we're on the social level yakking with each other and making our mutual concerns the focal point of our lives and not also looking within, we're missing something, we're not going deep enough so I think that that is very very true now this is a fine point if I can see there's a difference between true solitude and aloneness because aloneness can be this

[83:18]

I don't want anybody touching me because I don't want to really express who I am, I don't really want to look at that so solitude can really look like that but true solitude to me is the opposite of that true solitude is everything is included in my aloneness and so we don't really come to true we could say in this case true solitude is the same as enlightenment so enlightenment always comes with a sudden recognition that the other is ourselves and we are the other in that sense it always takes another person another something, maybe not a person even but the sky or a bird or something because it takes our recognition that we are not separate and alone so in that sense monasticism always involves others but it has to involve solitude and there are two styles of monasticism Aramidical and Cenobitic

[84:21]

Aramidical is the model of that is the desert fathers in Christianity who lived by themselves in caves and practiced alone and this is repeated in some kinds of Catholic monasteries and in some kind of Buddhist monasteries where people practice on their own in huts by themselves usually with some relationship to a teacher or guidance but basically the practice is solitary then there is Cenobitic monasticism in which the lifestyle is to live together and do everything together which is more the Zen style but either way there is always a relationship to others and there is always got to be some solitude and I think we are really suffering for a lack of solitude in general as a human community and everybody needs that's why I think we love nature so much because if you go into nature long enough you are quiet, you are alone you go on a hike if you hike long enough pretty soon nobody talks anymore

[85:23]

and you don't even see the person who is behind you or in front of you you are just walking by yourself endlessly in the quiet and so that's why we like to hike, that's why I like to hike and I love to be alone, I seldom get to be alone but yesterday I was alone, that's how come I wrote that essay I finished it, because I started it three months ago in a moment of being alone and then for three months I wasn't alone and I had a day alone and I thought well I could write a Dharma talk or I could finish this essay if I don't finish the essay today I may never finish it so I'll finish the essay and give it as a Dharma talk but I had the most wonderful day just being completely lost in being alone so it's wonderful and very very important we need those kind of days to recharge our batteries and I think that there is a kind of equation between what we call religious experience and those moments of being alone and after all even when we're sitting on our cushion facing the wall, we're alone even if the room is full of people

[86:25]

when we really come down to concentration we're really alone so I agree with you and that's a good point to maybe bring out more in the essay, the whole issue of aloneness solitude and of course as you know from Merton's career he struggled mightily because he was in a cenobitic monastic tradition and he struggled mightily to have a hermitage but it's so interesting don't believe what you read in books because Merton was constantly going to Louisville and sitting in coffee shops and having visitors all the time so in the midst of his solitude he basically had a lot of people in his life and I was wondering about the value of what the feet were in that moment in my mind it wasn't one of the discoveries it was just the beginning

[87:27]

yeah, that's right, seasons in our day and in our life his hermitage is about one minute away from the monastery, very close it's right there, you walk out of the monastery and walk across the field and there it is there was a second thing I was wondering about which is, I hope you can give me some of your treatments and you mentioned that you were dealing with I wanted to ask if you had been thinking of doing one for artists yes, that would be interesting I've been doing a series on poetry too I didn't mention that one but that would be interesting to do hello, thank you for coming you're welcome, let's see, somebody who hasn't spoken I was thinking about what you were saying about thoughts and awareness and what you said you wanted to talk about in turn when you asked the question

[88:25]

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