I vow to taste the truth of the Tathagata's words. Good morning. Happy Leap Year Day. How many people here were born on Leap Year on this day, the 29th? Morning. I was just wondering what you did every time you had a birthday. Wait four years and then wake up for three more? I'm here today in, instead of Steve, the Reverend Steve Weintraub, who was scheduled. But because there was a death in the family, his father died. He couldn't make it. So, here I am.

[01:01]

At a certain point, a certain time in our practice, after we've been doing it a number of years, I think we have enough experience in doing what it is we call the Buddha Dharma. Difficult to describe what that is in so many words, but the practices, the various practices that we do to help us find our place in the world, one has to do a survey, I think, look at those aspects of one's life in terms of practice that seem to have sifted out and seem more important, or should I say more immediate, than other aspects of practice. And at my age, at my time in life, when I have so much to look back at,

[02:16]

as time is shrinking in the future toward an end, there's a lot of history, a lot of karma, to put it in Buddhist terms, a lot of seeds that have been sown. And because of those seeds, because of those events, in a world of such complex interdependencies, it's easy to see now much more clearly how actually interdependent we are on one another, and in all things, in a very complex, ungovernable, actually ungovernable way, and how important it has now become in my life to look at how I behave in this so-called apparent world. However dreamlike this world is, however we may term it in Buddhist language

[03:23]

as being empty of any inherent meaning and so forth, all these complex and subtle philosophies and psychologies that are in the Buddhadharma, what it really comes down to in my life now is how to behave in the world with other people, how careful to be. And in regard to that, in respect to that, I thought rather than talking theoretically today, I would actually like to share with you, take a risk in sharing with you, something that happened in my life, that I've had a long, long time to look at, one of the many things, but I think a singularly significant event that clued me in, even unconsciously at the time,

[04:24]

to what I'm talking about, karma. You know, in Buddhism, for a moment let me say, karma technically is that which evolves out of our intention to act in a certain way. We have some actual intention, and then there's an action, consequences follow from those actions and so on. And it is the involved way of this interaction and its results, the seeds of those results, that we feel, and that have consequences, deep consequences on our lives, not necessarily at the time, but maybe even more so later. I did tell this story ten years ago, when I was at Tassajara during the practice period I was leading as a head student, so-called shuso. It was a rainy night and I felt in the mood to tell it,

[05:29]

and I haven't told it since. I thought I'd tell it to you today. Because I think the kind of story I'm going to tell, which is the story of the heart, and the involvements of the heart, is something that we all, without exception, have experienced and will continue to experience. And the care that we must, I particularly think of younger people when I say this, but the care with which we must go into relationships, and if I'd had the Buddha Dharma at that time in my life, who can say? We don't live our lives in the subjunctive mood, we live it in the declarative mood. But anyway, it is actually 50 years ago this year that this event took place, events. I was a friend of a man whose name was Hap.

[06:34]

We were in the army together and we were in Korea together during the war. He was older than I was, he was maybe, I was 21, he was probably 24, maybe 25. Had been in the army a long time already and had experienced more than I had. We had a casual relationship there, we were both in a medical unit on the line attached to a battalion aid station. And I think I should say that the relationship that men have who have gone through certain experiences, particularly those experiences as veterans in a war, there's always the residue of guilt. Not guilt necessarily because you participated in some more horrific aspect of the obscenity of war, the murder and so forth. I didn't kill anybody, I don't think Hap did either.

[07:39]

It was our job actually to save lives. But the guilt for being a survivor when many of your friends did not make it. And I think that's true of all people, veterans, men and women who go through experiences like this. There's a residual of guilt, and that guilt has some kind of bonding influence on our lives, a karmic thing right there in itself. Anyway, at some point I decided I wasn't going to return to the United States because I had gone through a lot of changes and I couldn't see myself returning to college and to grow back home and so forth. So I got myself transferred to Japan and one day, a very cushy job in a hospital, in an outpatient clinic, one day at the door this friend, this acquaintance, Hap turned up. He called me Boy-san.

[08:41]

How are you doing Boy-san? Well, how are you Hap? Good to see you back. I'm in the same outfit you are. Where's the action? Now what kind of guy? Hap was one of these bluff, he was an Italian-American, good looking, bluff, good natured and easy touch and someone you're kind of glad to have around in case of a brawl. He was street smart. And so we had this connection and I decided that I would take him to a particular night spot that I was frequently. I was in my, I would say, very solitary, cynical stage at this part of my career. I was a sergeant and I lived in the barracks or in the quarters but I was pretty much a loner and I was hanging out at a club called the Blue Moon. It was a club off the usual beaten path, frequented by both Japanese and Americans, a little better grade than most of those clubs

[09:44]

and also well known for its attractive hostesses. And I wanted particularly Hap to meet one of these women, young women, hostesses, whose name, nickname, he would later give to her, called Dream, called her Dream. She was a very attractive woman, rather tall, full body for a Japanese lady and there was a certain controlled, guarded air that she had that made her particularly unavailable or desirable. As Hap once said, she was the kind that could leave you pale and wandering on the road of sorrow. So I introduced them and the three of us

[10:45]

hit it off quite well in a kind of bantering way. And over time we would go back and forth from our work to this club. Many nights a week we'd go there and drink and dance and hang out. I guess we were looking for some kind of companionship but all three of us were in a rather guarded state. All of us had gone through a wounding of some sort and she had been the mother, she was the mother of an ainoko or love child, father of whom was a young American officer who had been swept up in the Korean War in 1950 and had been lost in North Korea when the Chinese overran the Americans up there in late 50. He was never found. And she had a little daughter. We heard about that. She talked about it somewhat. Green did. I think the thing that was the binding glue

[11:47]

in our relationship also, besides this wounding, was the fact that Hap could make us all laugh in a way that I could not. And so we enjoyed one another's company. But though we both had designs on her, she was not having anything to do with going home with somebody when the club closed at 11 or 11.30, I can't remember which. She always took the taxi alone. This of course made her even more, the inaccessibility made her even more desirable, not only between the two of us, but for many of the men I'm sure there. There's certain people, I think, that are attractive because there's something star-crossed in their lives that you feel. I think she was one of them.

[12:49]

One night, one day, no, one night actually, we went to the club. It was during the summer, it must have been 1953, it was a time when the Japanese hold a festival called the Obon, which is a festival or a time to entertain the souls of the ancestors who have died personally, family ancestors and so on. It's a rather festive time, a lot of jollification goes on at that time. There are fireworks displays, the women dress up in kimono, there are dance pavilions of Japanese-style dances and so on. There's a good deal of gaiety to it in life. And being a couple of gaijins and foreigners, Hap and I were ignorant of some of these experiences, of some of these festivals, and we wanted to be introduced to them because we were both studying Japanese a little bit and interested in the culture,

[13:54]

and we prevailed upon a dream to take us to this festival. And it happened to be the night where you light candles in little boats. We do this at Green Goats, in fact, at New Year's, but it's the same thing. There's little boats, in fact, you buy them, and they have a candle on it, and you send them off on the water of the river there. This was in northern Japan in the farthest city, the farthest island north of Hokkaido in the city of Sapporo. And on the river there, the people were gathered and they were sending out hundreds of little boats under the evening sky with all of these lights. And I remember we went down there and Dream had... Oh, and Dream showed up. Yes, yes. She showed up in a native dress, in kimono, with her hair up, beautiful kimono. And she had with her this child, this little girl, whose name I can't remember actually,

[14:55]

though I have tried again and again to recall it. It doesn't matter. I'll just call her Love Child. That's what she became to us, called. And she was all dressed up like the children do there, with those bangs and things in her hair and a beautiful little bright pink and white and blue kimono on. So the three of us went down to the river, and we had this boat, and Dream sent it out on the water. And I very much looked at her, watched her face in the half-light, with a lot of lanterns and so on, to see if there was any sign of emotion, and there was nothing. But I knew, or I felt that one of the spirits that she was sending on a safe voyage again was the spirit of her, the father of her child, whom I suspect she loved very much, though she never spoke of him. She had also worked on the... She spoke very good English.

[15:56]

She had worked for the American occupation on the camp, and the reason I think she took this nighttime job was for two reasons. One, because being the mother of a half-breed or an Ayanoko, a Love Child, she was not very well accepted in her society. And secondly, because I think she could make a lot more money than working for the Americans. With all the tips and so on she got at this job. At any rate, we had a pretty interesting evening together. We went and had something to eat and something to drink, a little bit, some beer maybe. And then we decided it was time to go home, and although Dream wanted to go alone, this is one of those turning moments. We all decided to go get in a taxi together, and it so happened that Hap was carrying the little child who was asleep by this time, Love Child, in his arms.

[16:58]

She immediately took to him, and he immediately took to her. You could see that he was a man who loved children. There's something between them immediately, whereas I was and have been less of a family sort. He was very much, I think, of that type. And so they hit it off in the beginning. He could tease her, and they got on very well. Anyway, she fell asleep. He carried her in his arms. We got in the taxi. He got in the front seat. I got in the back with Dream. And as we came up in front of her house, I had this impulse. I took her in my arms, and I gave her a kiss. And it wasn't just a kiss. It was one of those kinds of kisses. And there was a response. Now, at that moment, something happened between Hap and me, of course. She went in the house with the child, and so it didn't happen. I went back. I forget exactly what happened. But from that moment on, there was a coolness between us. I didn't realize at first how much he was fancying her, I should say,

[18:04]

in a way that he wasn't letting on in our more carefree or careless banter about the situation. But it was a typical triangle, something you'd find in a true romance magazine, the kind of things that make sitcoms and so on. And in some ways, I think I even treated it that way. That is to say, maybe not the kind of circumspection and seriousness that I might have if I had been more sensitive. I actually made some notes of the progression of this relationship, trying to get it right here. So I did go back to the club, but Hap wouldn't go with me. He said, you go ahead. It was that kind of thing. And as men, you know, young men particularly, inarticulate in our sensitivity, not quite willing to bring it all out in front and so on.

[19:06]

We allowed this space to grow between us. And there was this cooling off, and I went and dream-wondered where Hap was. And then I decided myself to hell with it. I wasn't going to go back to the club either. It was enough. I wasn't going to get involved with her. I had other fish to fry in my life. I did not want to take on the responsibilities of a child, if it had come to that. I wasn't ready to get back into the world. I wanted to lose myself. We drank a lot. So one day, of course I saw Hap at work. He got another stripe. He was now a Master Sergeant. He'd been in quite a while. He was doing very well. And he was now head of all the recreation facilities in both the camp nearby and at the hospital,

[20:09]

and the adjacent contingent units. So he had a pretty good job. We didn't see much of each other. I was in the outpatient clinic. And I was meeting other people. And then one day, we did bump into each other, and we went outside, and I can remember we threw a ball back and forth, playing catch in the street in St. Paul. And he brought up Dream, and he said, You know something? She wants you, but I'm going to marry her. And I said, Well, how do you know she wants me? Because she said, You remind her of him. You remind her of him, meaning the one that she had lost. But I'm going to marry her. And he did. He did marry her. He pursued her. I dropped out. He pursued her. They got married in the American consulate. And I would see them occasionally across the room at the clubs and so on.

[21:17]

We didn't have much in common anymore. I can remember the three of them were always together. And he got them moved on to dependent housing, and they were just an ordinary couple. And then one night, this is months later, the phone rang. I was on duty, and it was her in a voice I had not heard before. And she said, I have to see you. I want to meet with you. I said, Where is Hap? Well, he's out of town. My mother is here visiting. Dream had grown up in Yokohama, and her mother had been Catholic, actually. It's strange to say, and that's where she learned her English. She'd gone to Catholic school for a while. Her mother, whom she was very close to, had come up to look after the child. I have to see you. So we set a place to meet, the next night or so, and I went and met her there. And she was in a condition, a mood that I had not seen in her before,

[22:23]

which was that I'd always felt that there was this dam ready to burst, but it was springing big leaks. And she said, I've got to get out of this marriage. I cannot go with him. I cannot stay. I said, Does he beat you? No, no, no. He loves me. He adores the girl's name, Love Child. He adores the child. We have a good marriage, but I don't love him, and I don't want to be with him. And I can remember saying, I don't remember what I said, actually. I probably fumbled around something, and she said, You know something? She said, Take me somewhere. And I said, Are you crazy? She said, No, take me somewhere. And I said, I can't do that. I can't do that, even though I wanted to. I can't do that. And she said, You know, I hate you both.

[23:24]

I hate both of you. So I said, She said, Let's get out of here. So we got out. And then this happened to be in an area that had a lot of inns, what we used to call hot pillows, those little inns where you could go for a one-night stand. And at the moment I had this sense of weakness. I thought, Yeah, why not? What the hell? He doesn't like me. We don't have any relationship anymore. Just then, just at that moment, these are the things over which we have no control in our karma. A cab came up. For some reason, for some reason, did I lose it? We paused for a commercial. For some reason, to this day, I hailed the cab. And, you know, if you've ever been to Japan,

[24:26]

the doors open automatically in the back. And I pooped the door open. And I took her and I shoved her inside and I told the cab driver to take her to the camp. I can't remember the name. Makamana, I guess. Take her to Makamana. And she looked at me and drove off. End of scene. Now it's about 1954, in the fall of 1954. Some more time had passed. I knew there was trouble in the marriage, but I didn't know exactly what was going on. I felt pretty good about myself, not having indulged at that moment. But the world is a curiously complex thing. And I'll just say at this moment that, you know, in Buddhism, although we say do not misuse sexuality and do not kill and do not lie and so on,

[25:28]

in Buddhism there are not so much commandments. They have to do with the conditions at the time. So there's nothing absolutely set. It all depends on the circumstances. I'm sitting alone in the NCO club downtown on a Saturday night having dinner by myself. I don't know why I was by myself because by that time I was seeing somebody who would later become my wife, but I was by myself. It was crowded. It was a Saturday night. They always had a dance at the club. It was downtown in the city. And in the doorway came Hap, Dream, and Laksha. And they were dressed to the nines. They had been shopping. And because there was space at my table, I'd beckoned them over to my table and said, join me.

[26:29]

We'll have dinner together. And they did. And it turned out that they were bound for a, they were leaving to go to Tokyo. He had been transferred to Tokyo. And they were leaving the next day on the train taking the ferry down to, the ferry across the straits and go on to Tokyo where he would be reassigned and then stay a year or two and then back to the States. So this was like the last time the three of us would be together, the four of us actually. And I was determined to make it an interesting evening. And it was okay, though the air was somewhat constrained to say the least. You know how that is. There's a tension in the air, but everybody's trying to be nice. And I would keep looking at her, throwing glasses at her and at him. And it was that feeling of an old triangle that had left some residual of distaste in maybe all of our mouths.

[27:30]

And at that moment, as we were eating dinner, an incident occurred at a table near us. Please bear with me. All of this, I think, will tie together in the end. There was at the table, there was a drunken scene at the table next to us with a woman, an American woman who was known as the Camp Tramp. I'm sorry to say, this is how she was seen. And she was having this altercation with her husband, who everybody liked, who was a warrant officer and who knew that she was cheating. I have no idea what their relationship was, but anyway, that was their reputation. And anyway, Hap got really annoyed and said some things about her. And I can remember, Dream turned to him and said, Why do you say those things? You don't know her heart. And she said it like that. You don't know her heart. So there was really this,

[28:35]

and the sergeant of arms had come over and tried to quiet down the table and made them both leave or made her leave or something. They walked out. It was the last I was ever to see of some of them. And I remember, the funny thing when you get old is you remember the small, the smallest little detail. The big things you don't remember, but the small details. What I remember, we were playing Let's Fall in Love. Remember that song? Let's fall in love. Really kind of upbeat thing. The next day they got on, we had left. It was a stormy day. It began to rain early in the morning. I remember in the evening, I went out. In fact, I think I went back to the club and I got pretty soused. Because I remember when I went outside, I could hardly keep my balance and thought, I've had too much to drink, except that the wind was blowing so hard

[29:37]

that it was almost blowing me over and that lanterns were swinging wildly and so on. It was actually a typhoon. Oh, there's one more dip, one more small detail. One night when the three of us were talking at the club earlier on, we were talking about relationships and Dream had used the phrase Otoku no kokoro to aki no sora. Otoku no kokoro to aki no sora means a man's heart is like the autumn sky. A man's heart is like the autumn sky. Not a man's heart, but a man. Well, the autumn sky is in Japan. They're stormy, they're changeable, they're fickle, and so on. And I took on the name Autumn Sky. It was a joke. Autumn Sky, sometimes she called me Autumn Shy. But I was Autumn Sky for a while. So it was autumn. It was September of 1954. In fact, it was the 15th of September.

[30:37]

The next day I came to work and everybody was in a state, pouring over newspapers and so on. There had been a ferry disaster. 1,500 people had drowned. There were pictures of bodies washing. It looked like Normandy Beach had pictures of bodies washing up on the shore. It was a terrible disaster. Apparently the ferry had gone out, had gotten to clear, and the storm had turned and caught it in its hour and a half between Hakodate and Aomori, which were the two points, and had flipped it over. Boom. Capsized it. Among those 1,500 people were, I think, 75 foreign nationals, including, of course, the people I'm talking about. Now, interestingly enough,

[31:41]

DREAM survived. They began to bring the bodies back to the hospital where I was working in the outpatient clinic, and it was my job to meet the train and set up ambulances and so on to meet the train with the remains of those that were found, foreign nationals, that would be sent back to our hospital for further identification, be put in the morgue, prepared for shipping back to the States, and whatever. That is right in the center of that. DREAM was found. She was brought back to the hospital with badly broken bones and her face was swollen. She was almost unrecognizable. She was put in intensive care where she would stay for quite a long time. The next day, the day after, we were dispatched to pick up the boxes or the body bags,

[32:42]

took them back to the morgue. The first one I unzipped was the body of Lovechild, whose eyes had been taken by the fish. And Hap was never found. Now, in the months, in the weeks that followed, it often occurred to me, even before she left the hospital, you can imagine how she felt. She was overwhelmed with guilt that she had, in her feelings toward Hap, had drawn this kind of karma onto herself. She had now lost both men in her life, in fact all three of us, and her child, and she was still alive. I didn't actually talk to her that much. She didn't want to talk very much, but that much she said,

[33:45]

it's all my fault, it's all my fault, it's all my fault. The same night that they brought her in, they brought in the so-called Camp Tramp, her husband also went down with the ferry. She was screaming, Was that goodbye? Was that goodbye? She was hysterical. We had to put her under sedation, and the next day she tried to slit her wrists, and we put her in restraints. Now, I often look back at this story, and thought, if that night, or if the first night, I had sat in the front seat, and they had sat in the back, I would have kissed her. Something would have transpired, perhaps differently in the relationship. If that night I had actually gone, the second time, and the taxi hadn't come by, I had actually done the wrong thing

[34:46]

and gone with her to the hotel, maybe she would have left him, and the child, in half, would have left. Who knows? Who can say? I think the upshot of the whole affair gave me pause, as I say, for many years to look at those turning points in her, those moments, those insignificant little moments in which the opening of a door, the turning away, or the turning toward somebody, maybe the last thing we say to somebody before we ever see them again. Those are the things, the practice to make us aware, to sensitize us, to become so present in the moment,

[35:49]

that though we cannot control the flow of events in this ungovernable, unimaginably, unimaginable, mysterious world that we live in, even though nobody can control any of that, still, perhaps, what our training is about, I think, what our Buddhist training may help us, desensitize us to, is to the awareness, an acute awareness, an ever-deepening acute awareness of how we deal with one another in our most ordinary day-to-day affairs. We're all going to die, we're all going to pass away, it's all going to be this endless tragedy in the world, and we can't avert it. But maybe, possibly, you know, certain things can be avoided before they ever take place

[36:51]

by sensitizing ourselves in a certain way through practices that we take on willingly in our karma, the responsibility of our karma, the responsibility of our life in our dealings with one another. I've been thinking a lot about that lately. It's 50 years, it's a long time. And, of course, there's been a lot of other stuff to come up in one's life, certainly maybe just as crucial as that particular story. I never saw her again. The day she left, her mother came to take her away. I went to see her, I went downstairs with them to the back entrance. A taxi came. We didn't say much to each other. I think I helped carry some of her stuff down to the car, to the taxi. But I do remember, ironically enough, I sometimes think that there's somebody

[37:54]

who works for special effects in the movies of our lives to rub it in a little bit, the scene. Some kind of Bertoluccian director. A procession of young girls coming by with a teacher in front. That would have been just about the same age as her daughter, coming by in their little uniforms, just as she got in the taxi and drove away. Kind of one of those clips. I didn't even think of that until later. It stuck in my mind and came up, bubbled up, as it were. So Hap was never found, and neither was her first husband, and neither are millions of others that are daily lost with all the attendant sorrows. Hmm. Oh, karma.

[38:58]

Some days you only want to get out of bed. Right. Don't know what residual seeds there will be planted on. But we have to go forward, and we have to go forward carefully with one another. Was that goodbye? Imagine that poor woman. I often think about her. Who knows what her story was, you know? To be despised that way, to put yourself in that position, and then to have this relationship with your husband that was an humiliating one, and yet when he left, it was so terrifying to her, so terrible for her that she wanted to die herself. The guilt both of those women had. We are a guilt culture, aren't we? The guilt that he and I had,

[40:03]

what happened, I felt, about being survivors. The ones who want to survive can't, and the ones who don't want to survive go on. It's amazing sometimes. Hmm. Well, I think that's pretty much my talk. Yeah. That's why I practice. I practice for them, too. I practice for all those who never made it. And they're not very good at it, actually.

[41:08]

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