This reminds me of one of the summers that I was studying in the Daito-koji monastery in Kyoto. It was a particularly rainy summer with heavy rains like this daily and it seemed like the big rainstorms often came at 830 in the morning just at the time that the Roshi gave his morning teisho, his morning lecture, so that we would be, the monks would be sitting on the tatami on the sides and the Roshi would be up in the high chair and be down there in the high chair and he would be talking and we would be all half asleep as you usually are sitting down there listening to him lecture. He said we couldn't hear anything, didn't use a PA system or anything, and he was, that was Oda Sessō Roshi and he was a very soft-voiced man, never raised his voice and certainly didn't

[01:08]

bother to raise his voice if there was any rain or anything going, he just talked always at the same tone. So, didn't hear anything, all summer hardly. He was doing teisho on the Hekigan-roku and years later after he died I ran on to one of the Japanese guys who'd been a monk then, now he's a Buddhist priest, he's a Zen priest over on the Japan seaside, and I visited him and we were reminiscing and chatting and he said to me, remember those teisho that summer by Oda Sessō Roshi that we couldn't hear? I said yeah, I sure do. He said you know I'm beginning to hear them now. That's a great way to teach. Can you hear me? You can, sort of. Well, if you can't you'll hear it later. I'm gonna read a

[02:16]

poem that was mentioned a little earlier that bears on all of this, it's called Song of the Taste. I stumbled into the science of ecology when I was still an undergraduate in college in biology courses where there was an ecological, there was an ecology section in biology that was basically about energy interactions and exchanges and relationships, pretty quantified. A lot of ecology is, you know, something that you can chart with maps and graphs, but I was fascinated by that and thought at that time if I were to do biology this would be the branch of biology that I would really interest me because it deals with the larger interrelationships. Years later in the 60s, the early 60s, I'm living in Kyoto and studying at the

[03:20]

Daito-koji Sōdō and doing a certain amount of reading and I started reading biology again and then catching up on ecology, which was still a non- as it does now for some, in some contexts, loving nature. It just meant the study of relationships and so I was reading in that field and enjoying it and finally it dawned on me one day in a sense that what these guys are talking about is critters eating each other and that's what the food chain is, that's what the food web is. It may be more subtle than we sometimes tend to put it but I wrote this poem for our our human food so it's called the Song of the Taste. Some of you have doubtless heard this poem. Eating the living germs of

[04:24]

grasses, rice and wheat. Eating the ova of large birds. Eating the fleshy sweetness packed around the sperm of swaying trees, apples. The muscles of the flanks and thighs of soft-voiced cows. The bounce in the lamb's leap. The swish in the ox's tail. Eating roots grown swole inside the soil. Drawing on life of living. Clustered points of light spun out of space, hidden in the grape. Eating each other's seed. Eating, ah, each other. Kissing the lover in the mouth of bread lip to lip. Kissing the lover in the mouth of bread. It's my take on the

[05:31]

sacrament and of course the Christian sacrament, the the sacrament of the wafers and the wine is a very rich metaphor too that connects with this same consciousness, the same archaic consciousness, in a very strong way. And someone, it was you, said well what about the the Buddhist idea particularly in the Tibetan teachings of the preciousness of human life? I have no problem with that because I see no way around the likelihood that each species should be very much concerned about itself and think that it was really great. You know so I'm sure that you know within within Big Mahayana that the

[06:39]

bears think of themselves as the most fortunate life to be born into. Maybe there is a Mahayana out there like that you know that it's sort of over the horizon just partially lost to our eyes but there is a Mahayana that has bear Buddhas and bear Bodhisattvas teaching in the bear realm and raven Buddhas and raven Bodhisattvas in the raven realm and that they are all working and teaching each other in each of these realms. That is implied you know in some of the Mahayana Sutras. It actually is implied. The Lankavatara Sutra talks about how is the Dharma taught in various universes and it goes on to say in some universes it is taught by dancing and singing. In some universes it is taught by flinging flower petals about. In some universes it is taught by

[07:39]

silence and stillness. In some universes it is taught by unspeakable means that we cannot mention and goes on and on it lists all the possible ways that the Dharma is taught in all the universes. So you know there's there's there's the outside chance that there are Yogis, Yogins, Bodhisattvas and Buddhas in all of biology. Philip Wayland did some wonderful sketches that are in one of his books on bears head of bears with a big ring of Buddhist beads of mala you know bear Bodhisattva with a halo. Bharat, India. The Shakyas. The Shakyas were a small nation along the Nepalese Terai and possibly partly into what is

[08:43]

now India and partly into the lowlands of southern Nepal. Some people have described them one scholar described them as almost like a tribal polity with a tribal organization and a political organization very much like the League of the Iroquois which was a very rich political structure. We might call them the Shakya tribe but not even even the Native Americans don't like the term tribe anymore but prefer the term nation and it's a good term it means before the rise of the nation-state what we think of as nations today the term nation had the implication of a coherent and friendly group of people all more or less born together from the root nat, natal birth, which is also the root for the

[09:43]

term nature. So the Shakya, who here knows what the word Shakya means? Anybody? Oak tree, right. The Shakyas are the oak tree people. It's the oak tree tribe. The young Gautama, now we're going to replace myth with what seems to be history. Gautama's father was not a king. He was a high-ranking chieftain. He was the committee head of one of the confederacies like in the Iroquois. He was a man of power and was highly respected. It probably was not an elaborately wealthy society and they probably didn't have particularly fancy mansions, although that's what comes down in the stories now, which is okay. Histories and mythologies intertwine and they're both useful to us. Sometimes we need to look

[10:44]

at what the myth says. Sometimes we have to look at what the history says. It's interesting to look at the history in this case also and see that it was a relatively democratic society compared to some of the Indian nations and kingdoms that were extant at the time. It was kind of a republic. Most of India or much of India at that time already had an established Brahmanic culture of Vedic or post-Vedic religion dominated by professional hereditary priests called Brahmins who dominated a lot of society spiritually and morally, so to speak. The hill country was, as it is still today, full of genuinely ethnic tribal people who

[11:45]

never had anything to do with any of this kind of religion and who maintained their own streams of religious belief and their own cultural practices right down to modern times, including human sacrifice up until the 30s and definitely including ceremonies involving the beheading of water buffalo annually, bison sacrifice, I mean buffalo sacrifice, which they still do right in the middle of Kathmandu every fall and behead 300 or 400 water buffaloes as part of the Durga sacrifices. So, you know, all of these streams of religion sort of run parallel in India. Nothing ever is lost either. But in the case of the Shakyas, it was apparently not a Brahmin dominated culture, and as well as the Brahmins and the implications of caste, which

[12:49]

is of itself a remarkable social device that is so different from anything in China or in the Occident that it gave India an entirely different history in ways that you wouldn't think about at first that comes down to modern times. Caste is, the caste system is the answer to history. It's the answer to all the other kinds of societies, or it's an alternative to history, that have evolved within civilization. It's an alternative civilization virtually. India has nothing in common with China. Probably, if anything, it has a little more in common with the Mediterranean and Europe. I'll give you an example of what caste makes possible. Under caste, tribal people, hill people, are considered from the beginning impossible to

[13:50]

incorporate. You are never going to try to incorporate them in your culture. You are not going to assimilate them. Caste does not assimilate. Caste puts people in rough blocks that have to do with occupation, color of the skin, religious practices, food habits, and so forth, and it keeps them there. As time goes on, it becomes more and more occupationally based, and especially in South India, as you probably know, there are now castes of ironworkers, basket weavers, entertainers, elephant trainers. Countless occupations are caste-based, hereditary occupations. California Indians, the Pomo, the Miwok, wonderful basket makers. The Nishinan, where I come from, of the hills, produced yew wood bows, because they had a lot

[15:01]

of yew trees up there, and traded their yew bows down to the valley, which doesn't have yew, and off over the Sierra Nevada as a trade item, all the way to Salt Lake in Utah as a trade item, yew bows from the Nishinan. India, imagine India. Imagine California as India. At some point, some people roll into the Sacramento Valley with big two-wheel carts, pulled by bulls. They kind of drive anybody else out who's there, and they start growing rice and wheat, and they make little mud walled, mud brick villages all over the Sacramento Valley, and they become India. They become the Brahmins. They become Bharat. But the tribal people are still up in the hills. They're not going to try to do anything with them, except trade with them. So they start trading rice for baskets, or wheat for yew wood bows. 2,000 years later, 2,500 years later, there is a Nishinan basket weaving caste. It is still in existence,

[16:08]

and it has a hereditary occupation as a basket maker. That's what happened in India. The southern Indian basket maker castes, who are now pretty civilized, and they live in the cities, a lot of them, were originally a basket making hill tribe, and they got placed in their culture and placed in their skill for millennia. This was already in existence in Gautama's time, probably not anywhere as strictly established as it is now. But an alternative to Brahmanism had already evolved, and probably had been parallel to Brahmanism all along, and had some of its roots in a folk culture, and that was yoga. The forest yogins, who had their ashramas in the forest, and who were non-caste based. You could walk away from your village or your city and go join a forest ashram and start

[17:13]

practicing and learning yoga, regardless of the caste you came from, ideally. Now, of course, there were probably prejudices and favoritism still at work there, but that was the idea of it, and they took up the other habitat. Their habitat was not the agricultural land, was not the good land, it was the forest, forest dwellers. So, in the story of Vyom Gautama, he enters the forest to join the yogins, and becomes a yogic practitioner, and, as the story goes, achieves an insight, an enlightenment, which far surpasses that of any of his teachers, or of any of the known yogic practitioners of his own time. So, he becomes the preeminent yogin of India. That's one way to see it, historically. It's emergent from the tradition of yogic practitioners. The yogic practitioners, in turn, actually are derived from the shamanic tradition.

[18:17]

They are a highly specialized and focused variety of shaman. And the Buddha, in particular, returns his yogic practice to a kind of a shamanic role, because, in many cases, the yogins pulled away from the shamanic role by becoming entirely involved in some kind of liberation for themselves alone, a personal, self-centered seeking for a way out of samsara. The Buddha turned right around and said, I will be a teacher, and then entered into a 30-year, 40-year teaching career, which follows the archetypal pattern of the shaman, who is a teacher and a healer, and who is not in any way involved in personal

[19:21]

self-realization to the exclusion of others. That is not what a shaman does. So, you could also see the Buddha, historically, in the light of being an extraordinary shaman figure who did it without smoke and mirrors, as some shamans do, and accomplished a greater influence on humankind and history than anybody else who ever entered such a path. Quite remarkable. And looking at that, one can make the argument that the teaching that he brought forward was never considered exclusively a human teaching for human beings. Roger Corliss, in his book

[20:23]

The Vision of Buddhism, makes the argument, and I think it's very well put, that Buddhism was from the beginning a teaching for all beings. Not just about all beings, but for all beings. And that, you know, the human life is said to be a fortunate life. It's a good rebirth. One of the reasons it's said to be a good rebirth is because you're not swept into too much party-going, and endless concerts, and endless jet-setting about. That's what the gods do. And who live such a life of pleasure and glamour that they never have time to consider their spiritual condition. That's the life of the gods. The human life is not the life of the gods. It's a modest life. And the human birth does not have with it the capacity of so much power to do harm,

[21:30]

so much power to rule and dominate, that you become obsessed by power. That's what asuras do. The asura rebirth is the rebirth of tortured, demented, but highly intelligent warriors. So that's what, you know, that's what the Pentagon does. That's Washington DC. You're lucky not to be born there, because you become obsessed with other things. That's not a human birth. That's an asura birth. And you're lucky not to be born a hungry ghost, because then you are anxious, needy, and unfulfillable. And again, that distracts you from what you need is a therapist, not a meditation teacher, to get you past your neediness, first of all. So those are the hungry ghosts. And then you can't do very much as a hell dweller, because what can a paranoid schizophrenic do? They're too defensive. I mean, one way of seeing the hell dweller realms is insanity, genuine insanity, as something that you simply can't

[22:35]

break out of. And then the animal realm, according to this, is not a bad place to be. Maybe it's almost too good, like the heavenly realms. They are running around. They don't have to have clothing. They don't have to build houses. They're not ashamed of anything. They never feel guilt. They take every day as it comes like the lilies of the field. And at least to us, see, because this is all said from the human perspective, at least to us it seems like they are totally at peace in the existence that they have. So they're not ill at ease. So here we come back to human beings who have painful lives, such as their teenage children talk back after all they did for them. I mean, there are many frustrations in the human realm. After living with somebody for 20 years,

[23:37]

suddenly you don't love her anymore, or she doesn't love you anymore. And there are other things that happen. You have to fill out income tax forms every year. It has many unsatisfactory qualities, some of which are not solved by doing Buddhism, I might add. Unfortunately. Now that's the argument for a fortunate human rebirth is that it has a modest quality about it. It's not a glamorous rebirth. And that enables you to be serious about your practice. The relationship of the Buddhas. Now we're shifting back to mythology. The relationships of the Buddhas to the gods. This is the interesting thing. I've been fascinated, I've been interested in how Buddhism and gods get along in Asian cultures, India, China, Japan, Korea, and so forth. In the history of Occidental religion, the emergence of

[24:41]

both Judaism and Christianity involved in both cases the rejection of a number of previous deities. The Old Testament is full of instructions to quit whoring after strange gods, particularly if they're female. And, of course, Christianity becomes, you know, the first thousand years of Christianity is an exercise in trying to stomp out paganism, and to some degree unsuccessfully. The difference with Asia, in this case, this would be India, China, and all the rest of it, India and East Asia, is that there was never that break in their religious history and in the history of their consciousness. It is a seamless line, a seamless development of various religious thoughts, myths, practices,

[25:46]

and stories in which the earth deities, the goddesses, the tree goddesses, the river nymphs, the spirits, whoever they are, are not rejected, are not cut out of the story, are not declared evil or dangerous. Some of them are just naturally dangerous. And so that all flows together in Indian thought, in Asian thought. Norman and I were talking during the break briefly about, well, who are the gods? It's a good question. You know, how do you have gods in your spiritual oversized ecosystem? You know, to which I honestly have to respond, very hard to answer. One thing we know about gods is that a whole lot of people, practically everywhere, have had some sense of some kind of spirit powers, spirit figures. And yet on

[26:49]

the other hand, the actual encounters with them are far and few between, and hard to pin down. Nonetheless, as images, as some kinds of forces, shall we say it's inside our psyche, like modern psychologists do? Maybe they're inside our psyche. But then, if you take archetypal images, archetypes by definition are images or narratives or kernels of narratives, kind of like proverbs, kind of like snatches of songs, that don't go away. That they stay in human consciousness. They're perennial. They crop up again and again. In other words, they're not private to our psyches. They belong to our group psyche. And so they can sort of migrate from psyche to psyche, maybe. They're not personal to you. And they manifest in sculpture, in painting, or in story, over and over again. An image,

[27:57]

an image of Artemis, an image of the young Aphrodite, the image of the warrior god, the image of the white-haired patriarchal god, the image of the all-embracing mother god. Those are not our personal psychic images. Those are something that belong to all of the human mind, and maybe some other minds as well. So maybe those are, maybe the gods are, in some sense, shared archetypal beings. And I know people, you know, I know people out here in North America who really believe and have felt a spiritual presence at some times in the wilderness, in the woods. And I have felt it myself, although I wasn't about to say this isn't exactly gods, this is just some, phew, weird, what is it? What was the name of that wonderful Irish lady

[28:58]

who believed in fairies? Elsa. No, not Elsa. Well, Elsa Gitlow, who used to live over in the same compound that Alan Watts and Roger Summers lived in over by Muir Woods. Elsa knew this Irish woman, and her name just escapes me at the moment, who was very influential around the Bay Area in the 30s. And Elsa said she would walk with her in Muir Woods, and down. What was her name? Anyway, she would say, Elsa, you see that shaft of sunlight just there? It just came down. She said, that's a message for me. That's one of the fairies talking to me. She had a wonderful way of finding little signs in nature that you would say, she would say, you guys overlook all of this. The spirits of the fairies are telling you things all the time, you just don't know how to see it. Maybe so. I mean, it certainly is true of birds. You learn

[30:04]

to be a good birder and learn what to pay attention to, and suddenly they're all over the place and you never even saw them before. So maybe we need to have more studies in this. But what about the Buddha and Buddhism and the gods? Buddhism never eliminated the gods. They incorporated their shrines into the Buddhist monasteries in India and China, and China, India, China, and Japan. There was an earth goddess shrine right in the front yard of the Daito-koji Zendo, just to the left of the Zendo entrance, a little stone and wood shrine. I said, what's that for? That's for the earth goddess. Once a month, we would go on tour, all of the monks, out of the Zendo, and only one day a month. We would go to every tiny shrine throughout the whole monastery compound. The one at the toilet, the one at the bathhouse, the one at the earth goddess shrine in front of the Zendo, do a little sutra service once a month in front of each of those shrines. And all of these were little gods. Do you guys do that? Yeah, something like

[31:13]

that. That is the way that traditional Buddhist practice acknowledges a number of older forces that it inherited simply by being human, and by accepting the minds and the spirit of the people who had already been there, and said, we don't have to cut this out. This has meaning. We don't know what it is anymore than they did maybe, but we're going to acknowledge it. And maybe the Buddhists do have more knowledge of it than others. I heard this from a priest in Japan, when I was saying to them, well, what do you think of the relationship of the big gods, the big gods, the heavy-duty gods, to Buddhism? And he said, oh, even the big gods, even the heavy-duty gods, he said, they have problems. They are not sure of themselves. They are not

[32:17]

enlightened, and they know it. They have to work on themselves. Ultimately, they lose their godhood. He says, the gods end up studying under the Buddha, even though the Buddha is just a little human guy or woman. But they end up coming and studying with the Buddha. That's their only choice. And then I think I cited this last year. It's in the Lotus Sutra, or a commentary on the Lotus Sutra. Who is Jehovah? Yahweh. And Allah. The Buddhists of North India had long heard stories about Allah and Yahweh by the 3rd, 4th, 5th century A.D. You know, they knew all these stories. So they incorporated Yahweh into one of their cosmologies. They say it like this. In the formless realm, you know, there's the realm of desire, the realm of form,

[33:19]

and the formless realm. In the formless realm, on the 33rd level, is a very powerful god called Yahweh. Very powerful god. Wonderful deity. Unfortunately, under the delusion that he created the universe. It's a great way of dealing with that. Well, two texts. Here's a little bit of actual sociology of the Buddha's time. It's from the Digha Nakaya Pali text. And being as it's from the Digha Nakaya, Nikaya, it has a strong possibility

[34:22]

of having some historical truth to it. It's really old, really early. Ajatasattru, the king of Magadha, was contemplating attacking the Vajji nation. He wasn't sure if he could bring it off. So he sent one of his ministers to Shakyamuni, who at that time was staying near Vulture Peak, to ask Shakyamuni what his advice was, what his thoughts were, on the possibility of waging war against the Vajji. Shakyamuni and Ananda conferred, and then they agreed to the following points about the Vajji people. One, the Vajji people frequently gather together for conferences, and many come to those meetings. Two, the Vajji people gather in unison, and they act in unison to perform necessary tribal undertakings. In other words, they weren't dominated by a hierarchy. Three, the Vajji people do not

[35:31]

establish rules without precedence, nor do they break existing rules, but they live in accord with the traditional laws established in the past, which, to make a commentary on, is that they were not subject to, that they were very stable, and they weren't subject to charismatic forces that might suddenly change the way they did things. Four, the Vajji people respect, revere, and venerate their elders, and consider the advice of their elders worthwhile. Five, the Vajji people do not forcefully take and confine women and girls. Now, that is very significant to see that around the 5th century BC as a description of a condition for a good society, because the truth is, in India today, as you all know, women and girls are confined and taken and sold, you know, if anything more than they were prior to World War II under the

[36:33]

British, and must have been then to some degree and in some places in the Buddha's time as well, or they wouldn't have mentioned this. Six, the Vajji people respect, revere, and venerate their holy places, and do not forego the custom of offerings, which tells us that the Buddha thought that being punctilious about the details of your own nature folk religion and following it through was admirable, doing it was good. And seven, the Vajji people provide protection, defense, and support for arhats, sages, and yogins, hoping that those who have not yet come will enter their territory, and that those who are there now will peacefully continue to do so for as long as they may desire. And the Buddha said, as long as these seven conditions are observed, the Vajji people will prosper, and no decline can take place. Therefore, I would not advise you to attack them.

[37:35]

Isn't that wonderful? And then another textual sample. This is from the Huayen Sutra, a larger Mahayana chunk of later mythology, which takes on the question of how do we see all sentient beings? Quote, in what manner should one accommodate and serve sentient beings? To do so, one should think. Throughout the realms of the dharmas and the realm of space, in the ocean, like a cosmos in the ten directions, there are infinite kinds of sentient beings, some born of eggs, some born from the womb, some of wetness or of metamorphosis,

[38:42]

some live by earth, some by water, fire, wind, space, trees, or flowers. Countless are their kinds, and infinite are their forms, shapes, bodies, faces, lifespans, races, names, dispositions, views, knowledge, desires, inclinations, manners, costumes, and diets. They abide in numerous kinds of dwellings, in towns, villages, cities, and palaces. They comprise the devas, the nagas, the heavenly musicians, the tree nymphs, humans, non-human beings without feet, beings with two, four, or many feet. Some are with form, some are without form, some with or without thoughts, or neither with or without thoughts.

[39:42]

To all these infinite kinds of beings, you should think, I will render my service and accommodate them in whatever way is beneficial to them. Verse. Why should we cherish all sentient beings? Because sentient beings are the roots of the tree of awakening. The bodhisattvas and the buddhas are the flowers and fruits. Compassion is the water for the roots. It's a great little statement there. Certainly enlarges the size of the ecosystem. I like that. Some with, neither with nor without thoughts. Takes care of all of that scale of possibilities. Well, let's open this up to some discussion now, you know, and thoughts about Indian Buddhism in its early days. Yes. Yeah.

[40:56]

Well, of course, the early Occidental scholars of Buddhism, the early Occidental people who came to see Buddhism and also Hinduism, or yogic varieties of Hinduism, some varieties of Hinduism, seeing the literature and some of the practices of India, seeing this early literature and some of the practices of India, declared that these were world-negating or world-denying religions, which is a charge that you still hear fairly regularly about Buddhism. Early Buddhism was interpreted by early English scholars, for example, as being very nihilistic, very negative against the world. And indeed, you know, some of the texts would give you that opinion

[41:57]

if you took the texts at face value. This is a marvelously complex topic, and I'm not going to try to address the whole thing except to just put it in a perspective. There are the early Buddhist texts and the early Buddhist practices, which are to, in some cases, appear to be world-denying and appear to be very similar, if not identical, with the Jain and the yogic desire to escape the wheel of samsara permanently. However, the Buddhist impulse towards community, which the yogins did not have, makes the whole question very rich and different. And this comes to, you know,

[43:03]

what I called this talk about, the Buddhist community, or these talks, or this theme today. So this is a good place to look at it. The Sangha, the third of the three treasures, came into existence right together with the Buddhist career as a teacher. You know, as soon as he started teaching, the Sangha began to come into existence. And it was the design of the Sangha. Gosh, who is the scholar that says this? It's so fascinating. He says, maybe you'll remember who it was. It's just slipping my mind right now. Too much rain. He says that the Buddhist, the organization of the Buddhist Sangha, the organization of the Buddhist Sangha is not casual. It is very richly designed. It is very complexly designed. It

[44:08]

emerged over several decades, degree by degree, especially the Vinaya, the rules, the precepts emerged historically, step by step, case by case. But the structuring of it was based on the administrative and democratic system of the Shakya people. In other words, that Gautama, or Shakya Muni, took the political models that he already knew from his childhood and from his life in the Shakya culture and applied those very workable consensus-based and committee-based group meetings and group decision-making to the organization of the Sangha. And, you know, any of you who have studied this realize that in the original Sangha, this is a workable social organization. And it's very credible, being that it is complicated and

[45:09]

also clearly workable. It's quite credible to think that Gautama just didn't make that up out of the whole cloth, but was working on pre-existing models. With that type of Sangha and its empowerment of the people that come into it is also then the understanding that the new monks and the new nuns serve and help each other. And senseis, sub-teachers, young teachers are given responsibilities and roles from early on. And there is a division of labor within the Sangha that gives everybody a part to play. And there is the assumption from the beginning in the Buddhist Sangha that we are going to teach, that we are going to make our understanding available to others. There's also a sweetness of disposition and a delight

[46:19]

in the details of life that all of this stands counter to a purely world-denying and purely and what really runs counter to the rhetoric, that is the world-denying rhetoric, for example, are the poems and songs left behind by the forest-dwelling sisters and the forest-dwelling brothers, some of which Andrew Schelling has translated some of them, Andrew Schelling and Anne Waldman, some of which are simply about how glad they are not to be in a bad marriage anymore. This is the nuns. But a number of them are about the beauty of the birds and the trees and the life in the forest. Real nature poems, real delight in nature poems that are not in any way world-denying. But then also, in early times and in later times, right down to today in Japan and China, the world and nature are not always seen as the same. World-denying does not

[47:26]

necessarily mean nature-denying. The world, in a lot of Asian language, a lot of Asian vocabulary, the world is the human realm in particular. It's the realm of politics, commerce, and urban life. That's why they call it the dusty world, because they didn't have any pavement on the streets and the cities were dusty. So to leave this dusty world, Chinese poetry, Taoism, Chinese Buddhism, to leave the dusty world is not to get out of the phenomenal universe. It's to get out of town. So, you know, what are they doing? There's a language, there's a symbolism that almost suggests that the mountains are already a sort of a divine realm, a godly realm, a realm of peace and beauty. Hence the deification of the Himalayas,

[48:27]

habitat of yogins, habitat of Buddhist sages in India from early, and that imagery undoubtedly carries over to China, in which the mountain zones also became the habitat of sages from well before Buddhism in Japan, setting the realm of nature into a slightly different category than the human realm. And although we, with our knowledge of ecology or our actual nature study observation of what goes on in the natural world, can be conscious of predatorship and maybe know a whole lot more about it than we want to know, for ordinary observers of the natural world, at least in Asia, you don't see, actually, you don't see much of the predatory behavior taking place. And so the natural world, the forest and the mountains don't look harsh most of the time.

[49:35]

They simply look beautiful. I'll tell you where I was really shook up on that one, and that was in Africa. Living and traveling in Africa, in the back country of Africa, as I did in 1944, I was going to quote, yeah, I was going to quote Richard Nelson. Yeah, I started talking about Richard Nelson and I forgot to quote what I wanted to say. Richard Nelson and I were at this meeting with young people talking about animals and how beautiful animals are and so forth. And Richard just said, as a caution, he said, I want you all to remember there's also a lot of pain out there. And that's right. And in Africa, that's where you see the pain. You don't see it exactly with your eyes in North America very often, once in a while. But there are so many animals and there's so much going on in Africa. The howls of the hyenas, the roars of the lions, the barking of the leopards

[50:39]

go on all night. And in the morning there are some dead buffalo that are being chewed on by the hyenas. Or sometimes you see it right in daylight. And it's going on constantly. It just never lets up. Now, there's where you see what Jack Kerouac called this merciless meat wheel going on and on. And it tests your sense of the beneficence of the ecosystem. It really is a test to see that and say, how do I relate to that? I'm working on that. How do you relate to it? There is a lot of pain. Paul Shepard, who died a couple of years ago, thought a lot about that. And he came down on the side of the predator-prey relationship scholars,

[51:40]

field workers, and some native people who say, this kind of stretches the credibility, but they say, this view says that the prey finally, willingly gives itself up to the predator. And that there is an understanding there. There's an agreement there. And that it looks harsher and scarier to us than it is in the real world out there. That would be a nice thing to keep in mind when you go to Africa. But what does the Jataka say, the Jataka tales? How the Buddha, yet to be born as the Buddha,

[52:44]

fed himself to a hungry mother tiger because he couldn't bear to see her little cubs wailing because she was short of milk. A hungry mother tiger needs food for those babies, so he fed himself to her. And that's all it says about that. That's just an instance of how deep the Buddha's compassion went. And there's a little shrine. I can't remember what it was like, but it's very, very simple. I don't even think there's an image there. And there's a Nepalese family

[53:48]

who lives there. It's kind of shrine-takers. It's a Buddhist monastery, sort of remembering this event. There's this little shrine. It's outside. It's not even closed. And I asked about it, and they said, that's the shrine to the tigers. Not just to the Buddha, but the shrine to the tigers. And there's this family keeping up this shrine. My goodness. I love it when you know that's one of the great things in Asia. You read these tales and stories and events in books, and it sort of sits in some vague space in a storytelling world, narrative world, narrative space. And then you get to Asia, and you're walking around, and suddenly you say, here's where that happened. Really?

[54:51]

Oh, my gosh. Oh, that's just so great. That's the advantage of living in an old culture, where your old stories come right in your face, with shrines and buildings. I visited the Temple of the Sixth Patriarch in Guangzhou, in Canton. Huaineng's Temple. Huaineng's Temple. I mean, that's a long time ago, 7th century AD. I stumbled onto it, and I could read the Chinese in it. It said, a little historical thing, this was the Temple of Huaineng, the Sixth Patriarch. Beautiful little building, not too small either, bigger than this, three times the size of this. Although there's many temples in China much larger than that. And in very good shape too. So I went into it, and on the walls, or no, not on the walls, but on standing screens, standing up on legs, on three sides, was the whole life story of Huaineng

[56:01]

with big pictures painted of him. And then the text written below in Chinese. Huaineng is a young boy carrying firewood. Huaineng standing by a temple with a load of firewood on his back, listening to the teacher speaking, you know, from inside. And it went through the whole life of Huaineng. You know, it was quite remarkable. And that was 1983 in China. I came out of that really boggled. You know, I've seen Huaineng's temple. Went back to the hotel, and one of these bright young interpreter women, 25-year-old fluent interpreters that works in the hotel, is there, and I started chatting with her, and I said, I went to see the Temple of the Sixth Patriarch today, Huaineng. She said, oh yes. And then she quoted the verse about the mind is not

[57:01]

like the mirror, and there is no dust to blow it off. You know, how does that go? She knew it all by heart, actually, both points. I said, how do you know that? She said, oh, everybody in Canton knows that. So I realized, you know, my sense of what goes on in these cultures, I just don't quite have it yet. I've got several threads or probes out there. I'm going to come back to the main line that we're on right now, after lunch, and that is to talk a little more about the question of how an apparently anti-phenomenal world, anti-natural world line of practice and thought ends up being in many ways, later in history, in many ways very world-affirming

[58:01]

philosophy and practice, which I do believe Buddhism is, and in particular Zen. So how did that happen? I'd like to follow that through a little bit, and I think that part of the key to it is the Buddhist sense of Sangha, that tells us from early on that they weren't exactly doing what they said or believing what they appeared to say, that there was some qualification within that. But for the remaining few minutes here, I want to come back to a point about ecosystems and ecosystem consciousness. These interesting tapes that Mark Gunnerman loaned me or gave me from J.M. Kutzy, where his speaker step-by-step goes through a number of the arguments involved pro and con in animal rights and ways of treating animals, says, and then there is

[59:04]

another way of dealing with this, is the ecosystem view. The ecosystem view no longer sees the species themselves as unique beings that are uniquely valuable, each organism, but sees the system and sees the roles in the system, the niches, as the main story. Consequently, native hunters, archaic hunters, with some kind of a view like that probably, could both love and respect the animals and birds and fish, but at the same time had a sense that their use, that taking their lives and eating them, was not in contradiction to a spiritual way of being in the world. And that many people today, modern people,

[60:15]

are trying to see the natural world in that light. And this is one kind of answer that is brought to the animal rights movement when it is said by such people that your concern for the individual animals and their deaths is exaggerated and you should look at the systematics of it. So far, so good. Then Coetzee says, he says, I suspect this view, or Coetzee's narrator says, I do not like this view because I think it is, for one thing, abstract, rational, platonic, that it substitutes a theoretical sense of system for the actual flesh-and-blood beings. And I do not think that this is an answer, this can be used as an answer to the question of

[61:18]

what is our relationship to animals. I think that's a very interesting answer. And of all of the animal rights discussions that I've heard, I've never heard any of them take on the challenge of the ecosystem view and try to deal with it. I think that that is a pretty good way of responding to it. But I do not believe that for many people, I mean, I think that is probably quite true for graduate students, academic science professors, and a lot of Occidental thinkers, that the ecosystem view is theoretical and abstract. For natural peoples of subsistence cultures, I don't believe that's true. I believe that they can and do feel the fabric of the natural world as a real organism,

[62:18]

as a real thing. And you see that described so beautifully in Nelson's book, Make Prayers to the Raven. And I've seen it myself out there in the field in Alaska with people for whom this was their legacy. I believe that it's no abstraction for them, and that their sense of the reincarnation of bears and the reincarnation of salmon is a real belief that this is the lives of these beings. And it may well be that that is the truth. And I do not think that it's an abstraction or a platonic theory in the case of Buddhists who might turn their mind a little bit that direction, because it is part of our training, part of our teaching from the beginning to understand interconnectedness, to acknowledge interconnectedness, to imagine, visualize, feel. Actually, we don't have to imagine it. In Zazen,

[63:21]

one of the things you're doing, whether you know it or not, you don't have to know it, it just happens to you, is that the complex interacting nature of the world via your own complex interacting goofy mind is made available to you, self-evident and inescapable. That's what you see, and maybe that's what you try to get out of. Is Zazen a strategy to escape the ecosystem of consciousness? Come back next week for the answer. Okay, we're going to have lunch now.

[64:04]

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