Good evening. A few minutes ago, when I heard the horns starting, I said, great, they've cancelled the lecture, we're going down to the Zendoh. But we're here. And I'm going to do a little differently this evening. I'm going to read through these notes, if I can interpret them, and then spend most of the time in discussion. As I said at work meeting this morning, this could very well be my last lecture in this hall. And Mary Jane, sharp as usual, said, you know, you have said that often before. And I laughed as how she was right. But it's just because I have been in this familiar space a number of times before that I

[01:16]

believe that I have now come to some unknown place. I have run off a map. And that's what I would like to present for your consideration this evening. And if there's any merit in it, we will talk about it. And if not, we'll all go to bed early. Over 75 years of my life is up for grabs tonight. Like Scheherazade, I have been telling myself a new story every day in order to keep alive all of the stories that have been told by me before that. I started that out as a child. I continued it through a profession as a book writer and as a radio person. And then I continued it into my practice. And this lecture, on the times I've given it, took the place of

[02:22]

those broadcasts, not to hundreds of thousands of people, but at least there was an audience there and I was speaking and there was some relationship established. So I have come to depend on these lectures for that sort of intellectual and emotional sustenance. And the style of the talks was always the same. There were little adventures. A funny thing happened to me on the way to the Zen Dose sort of thing. I don't know anything about Buddhism, as most of you have realized by now, but I do know that Zazen has created certain changes in my body, speech, and mind. And if I can talk about that, then I'm able to go into the scriptures and find out a line or two that will verify it. So the subject this evening could very well be the one that I asked Gil Franstahl during

[03:34]

his Shuso ceremony. The Sixth Chinese Ancestor says, from the beginning not a thing is. I reminded him of that and I said, I say that's why we make it all up. And what do you say? And instantly Gil replied, that's why we have to make it all up. So the subject this evening is this activity of making it all up. Okay. The sequence that led me to make the statement this morning about this being my last talk began a few years ago when I noticed that I was having difficulty writing and reading in the way I was accustomed. I first thought it was, you know, old senility that was setting in, but bit by bit it began to show that Zazen was somehow interfering with

[04:37]

the structure that I had built up between my body, speech and mind, and that things were disintegrating, like pulling a raveling on a sweater, you know. Things began to come loose. And that became very, very precise a year ago, perhaps this very night a year ago when I was down at Tassajara and the director asked me to give a way-seeking mind talk, because there are many people at Tassajara who, excuse me, did not know me personally. And I gave a talk and they thought it was great and I thought it was great. And I went home to my cabin in a state of elevation and exhilaration and looked at my notes and I saw that I did not tell them about the incident that was always central to all my stories of coming to my mother's kitchen door one day as a young

[05:40]

teenager with an axe in my hand. I have never told the story of my life in public without placing that situation central to the activity. And the next day in talking it over with David Lewick, I said, you know, my life is over. And he was rather horrified. He says, oh no, not your life, the story of your life. And I said, my life has been nothing but a story. Ever since that day, great chunks of my life have been breaking loose, like these hundreds of miles of ice that you read about splitting off from the continent of Antarctica. And there was less and less of it left. So it finally got to the place where I gave a talk, and we're centering in on the situation now, where I spoke of my experience with the first Buddhist or perhaps Japanese Buddhist or perhaps

[06:48]

Japanese verse, a disaster ignored becomes a blessing. And I explained that the first disaster was getting blacklisted in the radio and never being able to talk on the radio again. That was a disaster. And then the latest disaster was that I couldn't even talk to myself. And I began to envy the people who went down the street talking to themselves. Just the other day, someone passed me on a bike, and I heard him say, God damn it, Lou, I'm not going to stand it any longer. And I turned around, and of course, the Lou and his exclamation was not me, but the coincidence of this voice coming out of nowhere, saying, Lou, I'm not going to stand it any longer. I figured I was getting pretty close to the edge. So now we come to the point. I always look forward to question and answer at the back

[07:55]

of the dining room after lecture. I like to hear feedback. I like to see where I missed it. I like to see where I could have been more precise. I really like it when they ignore me completely, and the group takes over and conducts their own meeting, and all I have to do is sit there and nod sagely and say, that's fine. So we had one of these meetings, and in the middle of it, one of the people there said, Lou, you think too much. And I laughed, and I said, that's just what Katagiri Roshi said. And my last therapist, and my first wife, and my grandmother, she was a peasant from the banks of the Elbe, where she used to herd the village ducks to the river every morning, and I can still hear her saying, the ideas that boy has. If he was mine, he'd get more beatings than he got to eat.

[08:58]

And here was somebody telling me something that I've known all my life. I talk too much, I think too much, I speak too much. Nothing new. But then, that person wrote me a letter. And I want to say before I read it, that this is one of the three times that someone has come out of the anonymity of a group and slugged me. The first time was over 40 years ago. I was in a small discussion group on some aspect of civil rights in the South. This is 1946 or 7. And I must have delivered myself with a passionate statement of some kind. And then the only Negro person in the group quietly said to me, what is your interest in black people?

[10:09]

Something about the way it was said stopped me cold. And it took another 20 years and many months of therapy to find out the answer to that question. But what it did was knock me from where I thought I was going. Another time at the peak of the McCarthy period, we were having another meeting, people debating about what we should do to preserve the left-liberal coalition that was being undermined by McCarthy. And again, I spoke up. And I was interrupted this time by someone who said to me, who are you to save the world? And that's where I took my first step away from politics and began the long traipsing around through the mud and the reeds that finally ended

[11:12]

up in Zen practice. So when I got this letter, I recognized that this was a message akin to those other two. What is your interest in black people? And who are you to save the world? This is the letter. I wish to address several of your questions. This is referring to the discussion in the back of the dining room. I wish to address several of your questions. And please understand, this is not intellectual. The first question is one of competency. You are a competent priest, but you do not have inspiration. The way to receive inspiration is through prayer. I know you don't believe in a higher spiritual source, but you need to question your ethics.

[12:16]

Please see that Suzuki Roshi had a high spiritual source and was able to see everything with compassion. I would like to also address another aspect of ethics. You did not give a good lecture. For the first time in your life, you said you wished you were somewhere else. I believe this is because you didn't like yourself well enough to speak. Please see that yourself needs a long rest, and that your need to question your life in a new way must begin. And this new way is emotional. To be emotional means that you have the capacity of compassion. It does not mean that you think you do. I strongly urge you to follow your instincts in this matter. You have relied on your mind. Now you need to rely on your heart. By heart, I don't mean anything intellectual. Heart is the true being of all things. All things have heart.

[13:21]

Understand that heart is love. As for the meaning of life, I urge you to look at yours from a new perspective. I want you to look at yourself as a man that is searching for God. Please consider this project. I don't know if the person who addressed this letter to me had ever heard me talk about my search for God as a child. I began at age five, reading the Bible to find out how I could see him. If anyone is interested in that, the directions are in Matthew, in the Beatitudes, blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God. So the language that was used was totally familiar to me. This brought me back to my youth, to my childhood, where I had a passionate interest in finding out my relation to God.

[14:25]

But what puzzled me so much was how Suzuki Roshi got into it. Now I could understand that the connection between God and Suzuki Roshi is compassion, but I was puzzled. It was like I was tuned into two different radio stations. I had a Christian station in this year and a Buddhist station in this year and they were both telling me something and I could not, you know, track it. And I wondered where could I begin to engage my correspondent on this question which was evidently of utmost importance to them. So then I remembered that I had read a poem some months ago that Nelson Mandela quoted in his inaugural speech and I thought perhaps that this would be a way to get into it from both sides. This is the poem, unfortunately I don't have the

[15:31]

author's name. Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small doesn't serve the world. There's nothing enlightening about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you. You were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. And not just in some of us, it is in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fears, our presence automatically liberates others. And then I thought of something that Katagiri Roshi once said,

[16:35]

a monk has nothing to give but fearlessness. And then there's that line that is the heart of the Heart Sutra, when mind is no hindrance, no fears exist. So on this basis, I began to try to respond to the letter. Of course, somebody said, why don't you just accept the 20-20-60 rule of public speaking? 20 percent of the people will like what you say, 20 percent of the people don't like what you say, and the other 60 percent couldn't care less. But I had been somehow grabbed. I could not just disregard the letter. And I've told the story many times of addressing it as a lay preacher, Protestant lay preacher, addressing a poverty-stricken community in

[17:42]

the Depression in 1932, and having people weeping and kissing me and saying, if there's one left like you on earth, we are not lost. I have some experience in the Christian realm in this. But poems, a teacher has said, poetry brings you to the bottom of your heart. And then he went on and said, and Zen knocks the bottom out. So maybe the way out for me is to accept something which I have intellectually said about myself many times, my intellectuality, and drop it.

[18:47]

I have used my intellect in order to find my way into feeling, and it does not work that way. You can talk about the feelings that you have, but you cannot generate the feeling by talking about it. I was talking with someone, I don't know exactly who it was, just the other day. Oh yes, I went and saw my oldest friend, someone that I've known for over 50 years, and we have been arguing and fighting and discussing for 50 years. We still go to see each other. And what he said was very perceptive. You can write about your life no matter what it is, but you don't write in order to have a life. And I think on the continuity that I mentioned earlier, from a child of five

[19:53]

through my professional career, 26 years of Zen practice, that what I have been trying to do is think my way into a life. And what my correspondent noticed was this fakery, this sleight of hand, this dealing from the bottom of the deck to make it all come out right. And one other point, the letter said, you are not a competent priest. Well, I will go to that correspondent one better. I have been masquerading as a priest. This is something that they didn't quite understand. They probably missed the time that I had told the story, and they probably didn't quite understand what I had been doing. Of how it was that I put on this okesa.

[20:54]

I'd like to just read this now so that I don't get lost. You are not a competent priest. And my response is that I am masquerading as a priest. Ever since I was nine years old, I have wanted to be a monk. But Protestants have no monasteries. And later, when I could have become a Catholic in order to join Thomas Morton, who incidentally used to live just a block away from me when I was a kid, I could not accept certain of the tenets of the Catholic Church. But then came the time, after being in the Berkeley Zen for a few years, Mel said, go to Tassajara. And there I was. I had achieved a lifetime goal. I was a monk in a monastery. But then I was asked to put on an okesa.

[21:58]

And I found that I was being directed from being a monk into becoming a priest. And I resisted it at first, in a very intense scene with Pekoroshy when I first said no. But what I did, in order to please him, I really was doing it for the old Protestant minister that expected me to become a minister. Dr. McKenzie, the Dutch Reformed Church of Flushing, New York. He never had anyone of his confirmation class go to seminary. And I learned that I was going to be the one to do that, because I was of a religious nature.

[23:09]

And I didn't do it. And I always felt guilty that I had let him down. So when the chance came along to put on a ministerial robe, I did it for him. So I entered this responsibility of being a priest, a Buddha, with a misapprehension. Eliot would say, T.S. Eliot would say that I had committed the final treason, that I had done the right thing for the wrong reason. So for this correspondence to bring me to an awareness of these things has been a little more than I am able to handle. Would it be possible for me to be a true priest with the compassion that is expected?

[24:19]

I don't know. One thing I do know, and here maybe I can reach out and touch the correspondent briefly, they come again and again at my intellectualism. And so maybe the way to connect right now, leaving whatever future I've got to its own devices, is to remember Dogen's Fukan Sasangi. You should cease from practice based on intellectual understanding, pursuing words and following after speech, and learn the backward step that turns your light inwardly upon yourself. As we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. So maybe the only way to shine that light that my correspondent is asking

[25:35]

from me is to first find out for myself what it is. Basically language is involved here. This is the big question. Three of my haikus were published in a book and received a certain amount of approval. So an editor said, do you have any more? So Sunday I sat down and I wrote out all my haikus. I was going to send them to a publisher. And I have published books, so it was quite a thrill to be back in business of sending out a manuscript. Hi, Tom. But when I got them all down, I threw them in the wastebasket. The ones in Essential Sin are real haikus, the others are good imitations.

[26:36]

So I have some knowledge of this business of words. And having told myself a story for all my life, and now I can't do it anymore, I don't know what I can do besides zazen, which is something you don't talk about. So I guess if I were able to do another talk, it would have to be about something that has happened to me on my way to the zendo, on my way to the budo hall. There would have to be some movement from this stasis. It can't be made up, it can't be

[27:42]

created. It would have to come in the spirit that my correspondent asked of me. And of course, when I read the letter, I thought of the old spiritual. It's me, O Lord, it's me, O Lord, standing in the need of prayer. So if anyone has any questions, I will attempt to answer them. If anyone has any suggestions, I will attempt to respond. And if everybody has been thoroughly dozed off, we'll end right here. Yes, sir. A few minutes ago, you said that you didn't know what to do besides zazen. And that's something that we don't talk about.

[28:47]

I wonder if she could elaborate. John, if I had said anything with my watch, I'd throw it at you. Well, any other questions? I don't quite understand this business of your life has all been a story, and now it's not going to be a story. What I understood was that all we do is make stories. So on the way to the zendo, you'll probably make another one. And unless there's this point where you're going to be this enlightened person that does the main story.

[30:01]

Yes, and you should just sit there for us. Yes. If I had continued that relationship at the time of... If I had been equal to Will in batting it back and forth, I would have said, all right, now what do we make up? If you can, if we make it all up, what do we make up? So I'll ask you that. What do we make up? Whatever we make up, one moment to the next moment. But what do you make up if you have to make it up? See, all this making up is spontaneous up until this moment. I didn't have to think about making it up, I just made it up. Right. Well. But now someone's put a spoke in my wheel, you see? Okay, so that's your story. You want to hear this for the next 50 years? Come on. You'll get tired of the spoke in the wheel.

[31:06]

Yes. What I want to hear is what you feel about your story. I just told you, I've spent my lifetime with my poetry and I threw it in the wastebasket. That's what I think of my story. It was a response to... What do you feel about the story you just told? Oh, what do I feel about the story? I wish I hadn't had to do it. I wish that person had not written that letter. I wish I had not done the... had the response that I had to it. I wish I had thrown it in the wastebasket. I mean, I was knocked loose from something, like those other two times,

[32:13]

where I had a story going about my support of Martin Luther King and his people, huh? When I was going to save the world, this was spontaneous. Genuine. There was no fakery there. I would die for it. But who are you to save the world? Who are you to save all sentient beings, you see? I mean, these are questions that cannot be overridden by any kind of shuffling of the Dharma, right? Yeah. Yeah. As you said that, anyone becomes a priest for the right reasons. Good question. Then, I thought about it. I was on that latch where she, after a while, since we wrote she, started to think she was getting really good at Zazen. And she went in and told him, and he said,

[33:16]

don't ever think that you can do Zazen. Zazen for the Zazen. I think the monk-priest thing is where there is some cross-purpose here. The only way I've been able to express that is two people go to med school. Two people become doctors. One person goes into general practice. One goes into research. A priest is someone like a teacher, like a doctor, working intimately with people, helping them in their lives, right? If you'd been around earlier, you would have heard the stories of my upbringing in a fascist household. I was raised on the same books that Himmler and that generation were raised on.

[34:23]

And evidently, I don't have compassion experiences at an age when we usually begin our compassion. As I say, acts. I was struck when you said that your correspondent told you that you were an incompetent priest. Because when you read it, I heard Swaren say, you're a competent priest, but you have no passion. No, incompetent. I'll show you the letter if you want to see it. Well, that's what I heard you say. Well, that was... That's what made me afraid it slipped, the way you read it. We all heard it. We all heard you say, you want to relate to the letter.

[35:26]

Well, let's see. The first question is competency. You are a competent priest, but you do not have inspiration. Well, competency is not where it's at. It doesn't matter whether you're competent or incompetent. Inspiration, though, is what was missing. And being competent, anyone can get up here and do the ceremony, you know. Anyone can learn to do that. You can be competent at a lot of these things. If your heart is not in it, your intimacy becomes obvious. Your lack of intimacy becomes obvious.

[36:34]

I mean, I don't want to make that the central point, but I have been frequently called for my coldness, my separation, my lack of intimacy. I mean, this was nothing new. I've heard this same thing from people all my life. Okay, all right. All right, we got one, two, three. Okay. Even though you are distant and emotionally unavailable to a lot of people, you are still an extremely valued member of this assembly. I personally would be extremely sad if you never sat at a seat again. You don't have to say anything.

[37:38]

I'm not. What are you? I want to know why you wanted to feel connected with God when you were a kid. What was the reason for that? You don't remember that story? I remember the story. I certainly do, yes. But I see what you, you know, the spin you're putting on it now is that once you had this, which was a great experience. You should have dropped it. Then you looked for God. You looked for God. I called it God. You called him God. Excuse me a minute. It went like this. I'm going to have to tell the story again. So this is getting strange, right? As soon as I left this fascist, German, hateful house and went out into the country,

[38:43]

I was in another world. And there was a very sharp dividing line. It was the hedge. Okay. So I'm sitting on a rock by a stream in the evening. The sun is setting. The tulip trees are towering. The swallows are flitting over the water. And all of a sudden I disappear. I flit with the swallows. I flow with the water. I sit with the rock. I tower with the trees. I glow with the sun. And after a while, I say, wow, you just disappeared. And I thought this was a glorious thing to tell my mother. She would really approve. But between the time I'm sitting on the rock and the time that I'm running into the house, I stop. And I should have stayed at the stopping point. I said to myself, if you disappeared, who experienced all of that stuff?

[39:49]

But instead, I called it God and wanted to see him again. And that's how I got involved in the Bible and religion and Zen Buddhism and all of the rest of the stuff. I kept my mouth shut, not told anybody about it. We'd all be better off. So that's why it was an experience. You drop it. But all my life I was trying to have the experience again, with the result that I denied myself to the experiences that I was having, because they weren't like the experience that I had then. So my family and all suffered from it because I never was there for them. And the same thing for being a priest. 15 minutes ago, you said large chunks of my life and myself are dropping away like icebergs. And that only happens, it's awesome. It's possible, yeah. Yeah, I would say that that is where the breaking off took place.

[41:01]

I couldn't keep the ball in the air anymore. I couldn't think about God, etc., etc., which my correspondent is urging me. And if I couldn't think about it, it was gone. I couldn't think about your life, it's gone. I mean, we make it all up, as you said. So when you stop making it up, you die. Yes, you do, because that's all that lives, is this concept that you have. You're a figment of your own imagination. Don't rush me, kids, don't rush me. I'm curious about the parts of your life that you don't think are important, that we all love and appreciate. I guess not to be crude or rude or brutal. As long as I can remember, I have wanted to be alone. Not for any misogynist reason, not for any dislike of people.

[42:11]

It's just that you're all centers of energy and it's all like this. I'm tuning in on everybody and it shadows me. So if I can just go somewhere where there's some space, what I wanted to do, it was a house down the Pescadero that I discovered, and as soon as I saw it, I said, I'm going to start a no-toy Zendo. Nothing but Zazen and work, no lectures, no dokusan, no reading, and the only people who can come there are those who have chips from their teachers, so they don't have to be a teacher. And Mel has never been able to figure me out, I don't think, because I have caused him great sorrow. But when I told him that, he said, that's great. Then people could go down there for a couple of days or a week, they wouldn't have to go to Tassajara, but they could get away, and they could just be doing sitting. So here was something I would love to do, that I could do, that would be socially useful, and now they've torn the building down.

[43:15]

Well, I'm talking about doing Shia, or, you know... Yeah, I know, [...] I know. What do you know? I know that you've got to pull your weight in the boat, right? You just don't live here on the sufferance of others, you contribute as best you can. I used to think I was contributing by talking, you know. So, it's just kind of a game after being here? Sort of, yeah. So, I can't... all of this stuff now that you're asking was once very well organized, and I could have answered, you know, I could have given you the proper response. No, I don't care. So, it's a great confusion. Oh, look, if Blanche wasn't in the position she was in, I'd be gone tomorrow, okay? Huh? Okay? Yeah, but as I say, she's here. Look, we should be somewhere,

[44:18]

a couple old folks out in the country, you know? And look where she's gotten. So, she tells me, she says, look, I'm not going to serve a second term. After four years, we'll go to the country. And I think, in four years, I'll be 85 years old, it'll be the year 2000. Come on! My life has now suddenly been absolutely trapped. I can't even imagine anything except doing tomorrow what I'm doing today. I have no leeway in my personal life. And this is original. This is an original experience. The large chunks are still breaking off. All right, but this will break off, too. Maybe I won't show up tomorrow morning. I mean, that would be unusual.

[45:20]

You heard the story once about when I was asked by Baker Roshi what I was going to do for my second lecture in Shuso. And I said, well, they liked so much what I told them the first time, and there was so much of what I didn't tell them that this time I'm going to tell them what I didn't tell them last time. And he said, no, that just lets people know you're sitting in the front, well, you're sitting in the first seat. From now on, just talk about what's in front of you. Well, I don't have much chin, but it must have stuck out because he said, look, look, it's okay, it's okay. You're the head monk. Talk about it while you want, but stop writing the book. I was furious. I was consumed with anger. I had never been so angry in my life. Because of the deteriorated, deprived and abused atmosphere

[46:34]

in which I was raised, to have an emotional life was something that I aspired to. We didn't have it in our house, but I read about it in books. And I thought that by becoming a writer, I could generate that kind of life for myself. And I got pretty good at it. I was able to fool a lot of people. I was quick, so I could create an artificial emotional response that very few people could see through. This is what got me about this person. This person saw through all my efforts to be a compassionate, loving person. Because I watched how other people were compassionate and loving and imitated them. But I really was not feeling it, you see.

[47:35]

So the intellectual approach was to do the very thing which this person wanted me to be. So this is where these two things come in some sort of relationship. I had it turned inside out. As I say, you can write about emotion, but you can't generate emotion by writing. This is basically what I'm saying. Of course there is a place in this practice for intellect. But it doesn't necessarily... I don't see intellect as a primary priestly quality, you know. As a monk, it would be all right, you see. And if I took this case off and just wore my rocket suit, I think all these problems would disappear. I would not have to think of myself in the role. For instance, we are now in the Elders' Council trying to establish a set of...

[48:39]

not rules or regulations, what do we call them? Guidelines? Descriptions. When a person now would come and say, I want to be a priest, they will be told, this is what is expected of a priest. And they've also very skillfully worked in a cut-off. If after three years, I think it is, of priestly training you don't want to continue to be a priest, that's okay. But in this case, we sort of made it up as we went along and all of a sudden I discovered that I was a priest. It was a Buddhist bait-and-switch, you see. I think they got me out of the mountain. And that's got to be it. Thank you very much. See you later.

[49:31]

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