It corresponds in its breadth of usage to the English word right. We use the word right in a very wide variety of contexts. If you look in a dictionary under right, it's a whole page of meanings. And dharma means something like right, rightness. Right also has a physical meaning, too, as in upright, to make something, to set it right, or to right something, right something, put back up. And dharma means the rightness of the way things, that the laws or the underlying principles upon which the cosmos, the universe is based, So it means something like the truth of things.

[01:15]

And then it means, of course, the particular teachings of the Buddha, the Dharma that was taught by the Buddha, the teaching is also a Dharma. So taking refuge in the Dharma First of all is the willingness that you recognize that such a thing exists at all. I think for many people a kind of step to be willing to acknowledge that there may be some kind of non-arbitrariness to the universe that you can find out about or either be in accord with or not be in accord with. It somehow seems that the direction of the last several hundred years has been to accept that idea more and more and more in the realm of scientific world, in the realm of physical universe, and to abandon that view more and more in the moral or ethical realm.

[03:00]

which was, of course, just the reverse. Prior to the scientific age, I think it was universally accepted that there was some God's law or some kind of universal principle of how to do things, and your immortal soul depended on knowing about it and acting in accord with it. And as someone I was reading recently was pointing out, a behavior that we would take to be extremely bizarre, not psychopathic, today was considered to be quite acceptable, you know, several hundred years ago. For instance, the idea of burning somebody alive for heresy. Today we think of that as insane, but it was actually a socially accepted practice that was seen to be rather compassionate in the sense that what was important for the society was the status of your soul.

[04:11]

And as I understand the rationale, bizarre as it may sound today, You got somebody to repent, and then you burned them quickly before they had a chance to backslide so that they could draw just the right, you know, moral tone. You know, looked at several hundred years' distance, it just, it all seems completely trashy. But at the time, I think that, you know, the people who perpetrated this were the moral leaders of the society. Well, they got burned anyway. But I think they compassionately did you in first. More suddenly, if you pretend it. That's what I think. Anyway, that's all based on the idea that the important thing in your life is some kind of

[05:15]

being in accord with some moral principle of the universe. And, you know, the details of how atoms behave and so forth does not at all interest people. And now, you know, we tend to, I think, very widely accept the authority of what science, that the body of science tells us, that yes, indeed, things behave in a certain way. Of course, The practical outcome of all that is threaten us all. And the fact that we've figured out those things about the universe and we can manipulate and use them, that they are true, may destroy us. On the other hand, there has come more and more relativity into the realm of human behavior, and so it's actually rather difficult for us to imagine that there is some non-arbitrariness or non-relativity about our own choices and actions.

[06:29]

The dhamma here specifically means not so much the law of gravitation or the identity of attraction, but the law of karma and the inescapability of that. Whether you believe in it or not doesn't matter. The functional process will occur rather impersonally as a kind of inescapable logic to the way we are organized. That's what I've been calling recently our hardwiring, using the computer jar term. You know, the way we're wired together is just a certain way. And whether or not you understand it that way or not, you may have all sorts of other ideas about it, it just happens to be that way. And this is supposed to be the dharma which the Buddha did not invent, but discovered, or got an insight into, and is simply conveying in very much the same way that scientists don't believe that they invent science, that they discover it, or through observation, close scrutiny, repetition, checking things out, come to this knowledge.

[08:00]

So, although there is no God exactly in Buddhism, there is a sense of, some sense of dharna as a kind of absolute, or it's not exactly arguable. Although you may not, it's perfectly acceptable to approach it with a certain degree of skepticism, not expect it to take the face value without question. In fact, the... The whole stream of teaching represented by Zen is more that you're required, really, to replicate the experimental process of the Buddha itself and prove the Dharma to yourself by practice. That you're actually not expected to, or it isn't considered to be enough to simply accept it. because you've read about it or because you've heard it, but also that you have to test it.

[09:05]

So, taking refuge in the Dharma doesn't mean a willingness to question your own presuppositions and beliefs and a willingness to try out the worldview of Buddhism. But it doesn't imply that you accept it uncritically or without trying it out yourself by experience. So you might say, again using the science analogy, that when you study science in school, a lot of how it's taught is that certain classical experiments are performed in the laboratory by you. So you can see how that particular piece of knowledge was originally derived.

[10:11]

And that's considered, that's lab work. That's considered to be as necessary as reading about it in books. And you're not considered to be a well-trained scientist or biologist or whatever unless you've done the five sections and you've actually seen it and you've done the experiment and actually seen how the knowledge was derived and on what basis. So in the same way, there's an experimental, body of experimental lore mostly about meditation and allied practices, which reproduce the insight into Dharma, which the Buddha and his successors are conveying. I can't push this science analogy too far, however, because it's not, you know, part of the Dharma that Buddha discovered is that we live in a non-repeatable universe. So you can't exactly repeat the experiment and get exactly the same results because no two people and no two instances of the universe are precisely alike.

[11:20]

So what you discover is the Dharma as it is revealed through you in your own experience, which is to some extent unique. So that's why Buddhism can't be taught in a classroom, and it can't be taught like you teach English literature or something, because part of the process of teaching it to someone is inducing them to create it themselves out of their own individual material. And at the same time you teach it, you also create something new. So in fact, the process of preaching the Dharma in the West is creating new Buddhism. Even though it's ethically the same, the actual experience of it for us is not the same, because we're not Orientals.

[12:23]

We have a very different culture in Sochi. So I know this is confusing you to include this aspect, You know, all I need to say is that Buddhism isn't exactly science. I had a dialogue about this with Dr. Abe once, a Buddhist scholar. He didn't really agree with me. I said, you know, Buddhism is a lot like science because meditation practice is like doing an experiment on yourself. You really need to go for it, and you can go. You know, maybe we should emphasize the religion side of it. But maybe he had too technological an idea of what I meant by science. I meant more the original sense that you try something out rather than just take it on faith or believe it because Aristotle said so. You know, for many hundreds of years in Europe, basically, the authority for you as Aristotle, no one really tried it out or tested it very much.

[13:34]

And then people like Galileo, Francis Bacon, dropped things down and watched what happened. And it was all very surprising. I mean, it's amazing to think back and realize that for a long time it hadn't occurred to anybody to do that. And it just wasn't... But it's also equally surprising from an Oriental point of view that in the entire history of Western society and culture, it never really occurred to anybody to do yoga. and sit cross-legged for 10 or 20 years to see what happens. I mean, to an Oriental or Indian person, it seems like an obvious experiment you want to do. I mean, it's, in a way, the most obvious, basic thing. And then here we suddenly appear in this body and mind. What is it? What's going on? Well, let's sit down and find out, and then you do it. But despite of its obviousness, No one ever tried it, as far as I know. I mean, maybe, you know, you could say Christian mystics did a lot of solitudinous prayer and so forth, and this is sort of a movie, but the kind of yoga that we're talking about, on the whole, has never really entered or become a part of Western culture at all.

[14:48]

And so a great deal of what is taken for granted as sort of obvious about the world in cultures which Buddhism flourished in is not part of our experience at all. So we have a great deal of skepticism about it. It's not that we haven't done any of the groundwork. We don't have, you know, centuries and centuries of the gradual infiltration of that body of knowledge into the general mix of things, you know. Just as in our society there is a sort of infiltration into the general body of knowledge of some of the basic discoveries and tenets of science that we just more or less accept without really examining too closely. No one's really very amazed by a television set because it kind of goes along with what science can do, radios, TV. But, you know, it took a long, long time for the acceptance of that method progression to build up.

[15:58]

So in the same way, the idea of dharma, or of a way, or the Tao, some underlying principle of the way things go, is something which I think is rather hard for us to have a sense of. Maybe we find that it offends our sense of individualism or freedom or something. We feel that we should be free to create our own dharma. We should be under some constraint of our thing. But that's a little bit like saying we should be free to apply. the human being should be free to jump off a roof and fly. And there's no reason why we should be restricted from that. And, you know, the reason that we don't think that is because, you know, I suppose somebody tried it once or twice. That was all the experimentation that was necessary to determine that it's not something that the average person should really attempt.

[17:06]

The equivalent simply wasn't there. It's not in the dharma of things for us to be able to apply. And in the same way, certain things that we'd very much like to have be the case, for instance, we'd very much like for all human beings to do wonderful good and behave the way they should, and they don't. And, you know, really one of the story points of Buddhism, practically speaking, is that one has to get through one's head the fact, the inescapable fact of what we call suffering, which means really that human beings don't intrinsically have it together to behave very well unless they're trained. We do not come out of the womb finished. And this is the dharma of our particular nature, the kind of consciousness that we have and the kind of beings that we are, but that we are not finished beings.

[18:09]

And we have to... There's some special work that we need to do in our life to complete our potential, and this is called practice. Again, in oriental society, the idea of living your life without a sense of practice, in traditional society anyway, is rather bizarre. I mean, it would be like not being human or being like some aboriginal hairy creature. I think for us, our image is more that as much as possible, we should live free from all constraints or limitations and do what we want to do. It's just a very different idea. And, you know, I think maybe others have mentioned that in Chinese and other languages, there is no word that corresponds in our English with freedom because it's not an observable fact for those cultures.

[19:23]

Rather, there are words like being in accord with, or the feeling of being one with the Dharma in a way that you feel. Your inward feeling is you feel good, you feel at peace. You have the feeling of freedom, but you don't have some arbitrary ability to do whatever you want to do. I mean, I think for Americans, freedom includes the ability to throw a tin can down, just to be the pick. That's part of what we think should be the good art. Maybe that's on the edge, and now there's some renewed interest in trying to... But, you know, the initiative that's up is really to try to legislate that by greed, basically, by making it valuable monetarily, we're hoping to change people's behavior, rather than, I think, you know, in Japan, it's much more the sense that you don't have a law about it, that would be kind of absurd, but rather you simply train your children to think no one throws things on the ground, just shameful.

[20:42]

You know, you go put things in the trash can, which would be considered low class to any degree, to just throw something down the street, you know. because his mouth had to pick it up. So it's incorporated within what you just grow up with as the minimal acceptable behavior in the same way that you wouldn't defecate in your pants. In our culture, that would be considered pretty weird if you did that as an adult. I think we accept that. I don't think any of us would consider that to be a rational extension of freedom. It all has to do with where you draw the line. But the idea of Dharma is more that real freedom or real liberation really means to find a sense of accord with the Dharma that's all around you, which requires practice.

[21:51]

You can't just do it instinctively. So, again, part of what it means to take refuge in Dharma is to be willing to hold to expose your own presupposition about things. And a kind of attitude of radical questioning that can expose these hidden assumptions that we all live with. It partly means also to be willing to question the assumptions of your society, which require a certain energy, and it makes Buddhists, particularly in the West, rather like not exactly necessarily in accord with the dominant assumptions of society. I was going to say, unless Buddhists, Buddhists include rebels and revolutionaries, that may be going a little too far.

[23:00]

But certainly, To be a Buddhist in the present circumstance, it makes you a little bit radical because you're operating at the level of basic assumptions, questioning. And as you can see with the next one, which is Sangha, you end up, through this experimental investigation into Dharma, you end up inevitably creating a somewhat different kind of society called dharma, a society which is based on the principles of dharma. Yeah. Well, I think the lesson is, from a certain point of view, the left-wing culture, when you do it, is not going with the flow of exactly the district of the person, the district of the inertia of the culture. Well... Dharma is something that we have to look over.

[24:04]

This is more to get to that culture. Because the universe is left in a certain direction. Sure. We're going to be divided by what we think we are, aren't we? Yeah, our entire society can be, you know, completely going in the wrong direction. That's what we've talked about. It's not just a matter of communication. It's a matter of communication. No, not to put yourself in accord with what Luke's been praying and believing called the foolish common people. And, you know, this is a phrase that's actually a technical term. And it means, you know, just ordinary folks that don't have much sense of anything and they do all kinds of things that you had best ignore because there's not much consciousness in it. So you align yourself in Buddhism with a vertical and horizontal society, a vertical society of the lineage or the predecessors of those people in each generation who have been through the foolish common people and their doings and come and go.

[25:22]

And that they are the society that you align yourself with or try to do work with. and horizontally, in your own society, you align yourself with those people who are committed to some kind of conscious life. And if naturally enough, yes? The balance in that, then, is to be able to function within that society while you're in a central line with the different societies. And there are two of the problems. If you have to function every day with 30 people or 50 down here, and meet those at that picture, yet in a sense you're allowing outside of your field, your fundamental way to function, you're running through the demo. Well, that's where the whole idea of sangha comes in to help you, because the sangha traditionally, and I want to start with talking about the traditional institution of the sangha, the sangha has never been an exclusive club of some kind.

[26:40]

There's a wall. There's never been a wall in which the sangha is separated from the desire And on the whole, the history of Buddhism has been in the direction of breaking down the wall to whatever extent it existed, rather than building it up more strongly. I'm talking about the idea of the Bodhisattva vow of living in the world and saving all beings, and so forth. I would say that Buddhism started out with more of a sense of a wall than it later came up with. There was more of a sense initially of the world being, the ordinary world being a dangerous place for spiritual practice and then one should in some way retreat from it or minimize your contact with it. This tends to empathize the monastic vocation. And that's what monks and nuns do. And early Buddhism tended to uphold the monks and nuns as the exemplars of those who seek Dharma.

[27:45]

And everybody else is being somehow compromised. More and more, I think, partly at the pressure from the non-monks and nuns in Buddhism, who didn't exactly go along with the idea, there was a different movement in Buddhism, which maybe was parallel to it, which was more in the other direction. to treat the Sangha not as a refuge from this deluded society that you are in, but rather a refuge for the whole society. In other words, it was ultimately there for the benefit of everyone. And of course, for it to function as beneficially, it had to have some function, contact, and role within the society, that is to say, had to participate in the society, in your greatest end. But the advantage, the critical advantage of the Sangha for an individual is that it gives you refuge, it gives you a place in which you can, the inevitable conflicts and tension between the kind of effort you're making

[28:58]

to live a more conscious, developed life, and the inertia of the society at large, which is always trying to pull you down from that, is the Sangha gives you support to maintain itself. And if you look, for instance, at Zen Center, where have all these people come from? Who are all these? I mean, how did they all get here? Well, we don't really talk about this too much, but in fact, the fact that Zen Center exists, and it's fairly well known, not only in the United States, but even in foreign countries now, means that from everywhere, people find their way here. And whether or not they stay any length of time or not, the mere existence of such a place and the fact that there are people maintaining an institutional continuity of Buddhism is extremely important in people's lives.

[30:10]

I'm sure you would probably admit that in your own life. The difference between now and twenty-five years ago when there were only a few scattered books that you'd find hidden away in the metaphysical bookstores, material, exotic things, you know, and now there's all these proliferation of actual Dharma centers where there are people trying to live the kinship. It's just a whole different thing. And already I think you can say that the, you know, 20 years in the time span of Buddhism is not actually very significant yet. But still, even in 20 years, I would say, with the founding of all the various Buddhist centers in the West, it's beginning to have an impact on society at large as well. But it's very difficult for an individual to do much.

[31:13]

What the individual can do is join his or her energy with a samba which can then have sufficient impact to... So you relate the society at large best, I think, through the Sangha, rather than... You know, people often talk to me about how difficult it is for them as Buddhists or feeling some affinity with Buddhism to try to figure out how to cope with your work situation or something, where other people are not that. And I... and expecting, actually, the kind of thing that we'll probably talk about as we go on. But I would attempt to raise your hopes too high on that score, because there's not a whole lot you can do as one person. Just, you know, you against the world, but through the support structure of the Sangha, you can do a great deal.

[32:19]

you know, five or ten people together as a sangha and do a lot more for themselves and for others than those same five or ten people, each operating alone out there. There was a question. Well, to go back to the unique people of the Oriental culture, to think about doing yoga. I mean, this culture is so old and there's so much population. But after a certain time, it's one that you're generally popular because you play to get exercise or to feel oneself and to get in touch with yourself. Whereas in wet, you have a new world and so you're more open to physical possibilities. It's like, you know, like the Roger Niches, you know, I mean, there are these basic problems that I need to carve out and pull from the closet. You know, whereas we're sort of learning about Well, European culture is pretty old. It's been there for a couple thousand years.

[33:22]

I mean, I suppose you could think of various explanations for the difference. I think, you know, probably the simplest explanation is as good as any, which is that it just didn't occur to us. It's something that has to... Yeah, but of course in ancient India there was lots of, there weren't any people, a huge country. It's just, you know, there's many possible explanations. You know, one possible explanation, which may not make us feel so good, is that there is some racial difference, you know, that those cultures and, you know, genetic stocks had some more affinity to yogic experience.

[34:37]

We're coming around to it a little bit remedially. Anyway, I don't know how fruitful it is to speculate on the reasons It certainly does seem to be a fact that it's taken us, our culture, a long time, in spite of many centuries of contact with the, you know, beginning with the European explorers way back in the 1400s and 1500s. You know, the Jesuits were the first Westerners to come to Japan in 1500, and there are Jesuit tracts about the Torah you can show, and the teachings of the mysterious Zen school. They wrote about it and they studied it, actually. And they had actually quite a lot of respect for it. In fact, the Jesuits' first impression of Japan was that it was a very civilized country by European standards, except for two things which the Jesuits found appalling.

[35:40]

one with homosexuality and the other was infanticide, both of which at the time were rather commonplace. And they just thought, well, you know, it's an even country, what can you expect? But they're doing pretty well, given the fact that they haven't heard the good word. And of course the Japanese, on the other hand, thought that what they were seeing from the West was totally barbaric. And, you know, They couldn't believe how inferior we were compared to their standards. But these first contacts between cultures pointed up a rather large... And it is true that by most ordinary standards of health and being well-fed and cleanliness and all those things, Japan and China were the most advanced civilizations in the world for some long period of time. for maybe about seven or eight hundred years. They were definitely, in most major respects, more advanced.

[36:45]

So it's true, these cultures are much older. They just developed differently. And maybe developed with less discontinuity, so to speak. shamanistic roots of these practices which go back into the Stone Age were more retained. Maybe it would have to do also with the historical development of Christianity, which, for whatever reason, has purged itself of many of those strands within it which retain yogic practice, like narcissism and other things. those things were historically purged from Christianity quite early, and so did not remain in the dominant spiritual traditions of our society. And they were never purged from India or China, placed in school, too. So that also could figure in.

[37:52]

I mean, for instance, apparently the doctrine of reincarnation was an acceptable belief in Christianity until the 900s. Although that's not generally known. I've read that. Brother David wrote it. But some council in the 9th century decided it was to go, so it went. From that point on, there was no reincarnation to be talked about. Unless you wanted to be one of these people that got burned. Anyway, it's interesting to speculate why it is that we haven't somehow develop this side of ourselves. I think certainly the things that you say are true. I mean, in America, we don't even have the continuity of European culture, black and oriental culture. We rejected, even the extent to which there was continuity from Europe, that was part of what America was, the rejection of Europe.

[38:55]

And it was built by people who rejected Europe by failing away. So, uh, We're, I think, just now getting back to realizing, well, who left the time? It's Europe, much less. Well, Europe left it. Anyway, we're getting a little bit far afield, and I'm getting a little bit far afield, and I'm happy to feel that way. Well, if you think in the very long view of thousands of years, I don't really like the idea of the thought of any race being superior to any other. If they were doing it over 4,000 years ago, Now they're building television sets, and they go through all of that, and we're trying to think of it, which is to believe that maybe the pendulum shift, it takes 4,000 years to happen, or something like that. It could be. Well, as I said, I'm thinking that you'd like that, actually. But I mean, it's my idea. It's just an idea that, you know, if you're honest, you could bring up. A lot of Orientals think that.

[39:56]

I mean, there was a lot of the early Zen teachers' faith, but we could not see how people like us could make much headway in Christianity, because we weren't Japanese. I mean, that idea was prevalent even in June of the 50s. Well, a lot of people worry about Chinese building power. I do not. If they do, then whatever. Well, let's get our cars to work. Only the Japanese demonstrated it. Yeah, that's the priority of that, in that level. I drive a Japanese car. That's going quite well. Just to go back a little bit, you were talking about being in accord with your surroundings and coming out of the womb somewhat imperfect and having to train yourself to be more in accord. Is there any idea at all, even in psychology, somehow that's the feeling that there is of children in some way being... more in accord with things than a doctor, that maybe you have some sense of accord with things which you may lose at some point in your childhood?

[40:57]

Or is there any idea in due to psychology of people becoming less wonderful through mistreatment than perhaps, you know, that maybe they came out of the womb a little bit more perfect and became less perfect through mistreatment in any way? Well, we have to get the right vocabulary to really discuss these things accurately. It isn't a matter of perfect or imperfect. you are born not blank, but with clearly delineated propensities for greed, hate, and delusions. And the main reason, and anybody who lives with children knows, that it doesn't take them long to start expressing it. And on the whole, they express it less restrained than adults do. I mean, adults learn that you can't scream and stamp up and down and throw a tantrum and roll on the floor to get what you want. In fact, if they do, they have little men come and seat them and put you away. The main reason the children appear to us to be somewhat more innocent and so forth is that it takes them a while to get tattered in it.

[42:08]

Their patterns for those behaviors don't run so deep. They have more ability to let go. They don't harbor that. The harboring quality is something that you develop by... karmic repetitions, but there's no idea in Buddhism that somehow children are innocent or pure, because in fact, observably, they're not. Well, I didn't mean exactly that, but I guess sort of two things. Partly I meant the idea of the patterns being acquired, because it's not so much that they're actually born with the patterns, but they're born with the propensities, and the patterns get etched deeper. Is that what you're saying? That's right. And then I meant Is there some idea that they're less subject to, or less prone to dualism, or to perceive things in a subject and object kind of way? Is that some sort of crime? I'm not sure that I got this idea, but I somehow had this idea that there was some idea in Buddhism that when you're a child, you might be able to

[43:20]

That's sort of what I meant by being in accord with your surrounding, that children might be able to perceive things differently. Yeah, well, if they do, the problem is it doesn't really count. It doesn't really, you know, it's sort of insignificant that that's true. I mean, that is true. Children on the whole don't. are darn so involved in their thinking, not the adults are, because they don't think so much. So in that sense, you might say they're slightly more, less dualistic in their perception. Their perceptions are more, you know, but it's not awakened perception, it's that your misperceptions have not yet awakened, and they're bound to awaken. So it's nothing that you can really look to very hopefully. I mean, children lose it, that's all, you know, quite naturally as they become interested, more and more interested in trying to get what they want.

[44:32]

That's all we do. And I'm afraid that the idea of children being more pure and innocent is just, you know, not really much of a good idea. If you want to talk about some kind of good impulse in people, children, or otherwise, like towards generosity or being loving or something, is that believed to be completely acquired, that children, that you come out of the womb without any, or say, if you come out of the womb, it doesn't cause us to be hate and delusion, or the potential for that, or the other potential too? Yeah, you have both. And then the conditions that you live in determine how it goes. Yeah. You know, you develop according to the law of karma, and that's partly your surrounding circumstances and so forth. If you're in good circumstances, you develop well. If you're in bad circumstances, you develop poorly. But it's not like you have to train them to be genocidal. I mean, the impulse is there.

[45:33]

Yeah, you have to train them. I think to me the first impulse after the child is the interest. I think one of the first stages of the interest is when a child discovers that it teaches It's not part of everything else. It's separated. I mean, let's make demands. And those are demands. We do want survival demands. So the first thing you put is to make demands, and to grasp and hold on to those things which get the infant, you know, as a group into, I guess, a baby and a child within security. So those are all what we see. That's also sexual behavior. What then has to be learned are that there's a faith that goes along with the gift. And the third thing to note are the child, you know, when you gain them. The child's main job is to grow up. And food isn't really an adult fare, I must say. You know, it's, I mean, I think the main Buddhist idea for children in child raising is that you raise the child in such a way that

[46:44]

the Dharma is accessible to them when they're old enough to see it. But practically speaking, at the earliest age I've ever seen anybody practice sadhana, sort of from their own observation and feeling of why you would do it, it's about 15. And that's about, I wouldn't go much earlier than that. I think you have to go through the work of making an adult body and mind with as good a circumstance as your parents and society can provide. And there are these spiritual geniuses who had some great spiritual insight at the age of seven or eight, but on the whole, the basic situation of children is that they're just rather unconscious, and everything that they do, good or bad, is on the whole not too conscious. You might say, the way I've tried to explain this before is that Buddhist practice is continuation into your whole life of what you do when you're a child, which is sort of figure out how to survive, what the world's all about.

[48:10]

And a lot of people just don't continue that. They stop when biologically the process is completed. But that's really the point at which practice begins, because that's when you have the equipment necessary to actually make something. But since we figured out our physical survival, so the survival we're conscious about, is that once we, I think, figured out our physical survival, we realize we think something the physical law more than the figuring out the physical survival. Because then you have to ask the question, what's going on? What did I get here? And then that's where you sort of move into that. That's right. And so that's why I say in exemption I delve into fear. And if it comes earlier in your life, it's a precocity. And some people are spiritually precocious. They have a spiritual crisis in early adolescence. And it's the kind of crisis that for other people happens.

[49:13]

Jung felt that it was natural to have it in midlife. That was the time biologically when it was natural to begin asking ultimate questions or religious questions. Characteristically in Buddhism, if you look at the literature of when they imagined people becoming monks and so forth, I think they felt it was an affair of early adulthood, that the decision to seek the Dharma was something that would occur to you about the age of 20. And I don't think they allowed anyone to be fully ordained into the Sangha before the age of 18. 20, that's what I thought it was. They do have these child monks, historically, but that's not considered, that's just, you know, more like church school. So the actual decision to practice is one that you have to make yourself, and it's sort of like, you know, being old enough to drink or drive or something, or old enough to vote.

[50:21]

You have to have a kind of, the ability to make an adult decision. Yeah? But one thing I would like to ask you is that if you would like your child to grow up with the right set of attitudes and [...] the right set of attitudes avoid pushing the child's boundaries like children or so that it would naturally have an inclusive mind and it would naturally be able to appreciate how to step forward and stand carefully and not stop and be like another way of it. So that when you practice it, it's not going to be a big difference in your life, but it's beyond manual.

[51:26]

Well, it would be nice if it were that straightforward. But unfortunately, it's a lot more complicated. Japanese children are raised just the way you say. But very few Japanese young adults have the slightest issue whatsoever in anything having to do with religion. Because there's a lot more going on and a child growing up with the parents, you know, the whole society and their peers, and just what seems to be happening. I mean, amazingly enough, most of us were probably not rated that way, and yet here we are, in this month, studying Buddhism. And in societies where Buddhism has been present for centuries, as somebody was saying, you know, we're interested in video games and DVDs, it's something that has come up in the society and culture, and they're not, they're not acceptable to them.

[52:36]

Kind of is very mysterious, and it doesn't operate, I mean, it isn't, you know, on the whole, the whole God is rebirthed in the incarnation, it's not central, but it's sort of something that's what it's in, took on from India in the way that he did with what would happen. But still, there is a sense that it's very difficult to really adequately explain what happens to people on the basis of what you see in just their life. You raise one person perfectly and you do everything for them and they become a criminal. You raise somebody like Eleanor Roosevelt, had this horrible childhood where everything went wrong, she was maltreated, and she became a saint. And there are examples that all of us know of that. It's just very hard to... All you can say is that the way in which people developed is not exactly fully accessible to the rational mind.

[53:43]

And that's certainly true of children. And, you know, children, I mean, to get back to Flora's question, children vary, vary dramatically in the way that they are. Any of the people who've had four or five of them can tell stories about how radically they differ from the word go. And the moment they come out, they're just different. And some children seem very non-dualistic and innocent and all that. Other children are profoundly dualistic when it comes to out of it. So... Actually, you know, what we mean by non-dualistic thinking is not really what children do. It's a little bit more like... I really can't get into it in much detail, but it's... The way children are resembles that, that way. But it's not anything like the saying, It's more like the full possibility of desire and selfishness haven't yet occurred to you.

[54:50]

They seem to be floating in a sea of innocence, but it's not exactly the same at all. It's something that, if it were, you know, then this whole business would be much easier because you could just try to somehow freeze it and keep it from being... perverted or distorted, but actually, I think the message here is that this is a profound existential problem for all human beings, and it doesn't come naturally to anyone. In fact, that idea is something a little bit like this, that there's no real shortcut, that there's And in the text that you read in Buddhism about this, the proof that they give you is that just point to Buddha himself, you know, who is the, you know, spiritual genie of our life and basically had a terrible time, as did most of the great spiritual teachers.

[55:53]

And also, it does seem to be historically the case that those people who developed into the greatest sages worked the hardest at it. And there was hardly anyone for whom it came easy. And there's an interesting point that Suzuki Roshi mentioned several times in the Nakamura Center, the teaching should have mentioned it too, which meant it to me a lot, which is that if you're superficially skillful at something, you have a knack for something, you actually end up having a very hard time asking for it. So, in some ways, actually, historically, those who had the most difficult spiritual journey made the best future, and had the most impact on people. And those who had an easy sailing on hold, because we're not talking here about some kind of like being able to draw.

[56:57]

We're talking about seeing through or fundamentally addressing the universal condition of human beings. And from that point of view, the more you suffer, the more you get it. And if you're insulated from all that, you get nothing. That's why in Buddhism the devas, the celestial beings who for some long period of time are karmically immune and suffering, are considered to be quite sorrowful creatures, because they don't learn anything. They just live in its... And, you know, Buddhists just kind of absorb the idea that such beings existed without really examining too much. And they say, if there are such beings, they're in a very bad situation, because they can't get in touch with anything. They don't suffer, they don't have bodies, they don't die. And what will happen to them is that eventually this good situation will end.

[58:01]

And they'll feel quite terrible that they wasted so much time. And what that means for us practically is that any human being who's in a situation like that where they're insulated from all the facts of life, so to speak, are in a very dangerous circumstance. Because when they wake up to it, they'll have so much remorse and feeling like they've missed out, that it will be very hard for them to recover. Yes, I know. I get from the Chosen. The Chosen? Oh, yeah, about the Hasid. Yeah, the spiritual leader, the rabbi, the father, comes to grips with that very problem with his son. It's a very unusual way of introducing them to compassion. I was in New York, and I almost went into it, and I somehow thought it was one of these exorcist-type movies.

[59:06]

It was one of those. It was, you know, until the Chinese... I didn't have so many ideas. No, sir, I missed it. Well, that's interesting. Really? Yes. I had a question a little earlier here in your business of comfort, or this idea of the child reaching more of a survival level, but the operator that you are, and then moving beyond survival, we then question, it seems to me that you could take that a little further, and I have a question about the conloptic or the context. about the idea of Eastern Western societies that want to have a comfortable situation before when you then start looking at this kind of thing. So on the other hand, it then implies that people that come from poverty or people who have lost access to certain kinds of comfort rooms as patient experience, and it will deny opportunities to .

[60:12]

I wonder if you've seen that in other particularly Japanese culture, I never read. Well, in Japanese culture, they have a very strong sense of taking the best possible care. That's why Kono Roshi, this Japanese Roshi we visited, found it very hard to understand how we could possibly try to make monastic practice work with families, because from a Japanese point of view, you have a family, your first... responsibility is to your children, to your wife, to provide, you know, give them education, and not to deny the things. And he just was amazed that we were trying to do that, because obviously you can't maximize that if you're living in a situation which is more closer to a subsistence. Although I think, you know, actually, you may not realize it, but our kids are with normal lives, and I don't think we're denying that. But still, I think the value in that society is that you do the best that you possibly can for your children up to a certain point, and you just hope for the best.

[61:20]

But, you know, this business of... It's very mysterious how it is that people... Then there's the question of who stays. It's the kind of game that we play sometimes, that I play, to see if I can predict from first glance who will stay. I'm getting pretty good at it. Baker, she tends to be quite good at it. Partly you sort of get the knack of who seems to be the kind of people that would stay. Or the people that if they go, you sense they're moving back. But it isn't exactly intelligence or anything. It's not something you can exactly put your finger on.

[62:22]

It really has a lot to do with just the underlying intention to do it, which somehow gets awakened. And if you're the kind of person that just isn't satisfied without somehow scrutinizing this aspect of human life, then you just are drawn again and again to practice and you enter it. And so there are lots of people who are initially drawn to it and then it lies valid for 20 years, 30 years before it resurfaces and so forth. But don't you, isn't there a type of soil that would be more nourishing to a seed, like in terms of society? Could society hold certain values over certain others in terms of compassion and cooperation over maybe aggression or drastic things of yourself?

[63:33]

The seed might be more likely to bloom in seeds. And also, can't there be people within a society who may not actually be here with us, but they have very Buddhist feeling. They're still a member of a broader song. It seems to me. There are certain things in the world that help to nourish the sun or the conditions that we can work towards. In America, we've seen a very unlikely place. You follow the Buddhist and what you just said, but here it is. You know a lot. And it is true, the last form of Sangha that I wanted to mention is the so-called Maha Sangha, Great Sangha, which is everybody. Well, the historical sangha, that is the monks, nuns, laymen and laywomen. And, you know, the second kind of sangha is your sangha, the people that you're actually practicing, your companions on the path, whose names you know, particular people that happen to be with you.

[64:43]

is functionally your Sangha, and that's what actually supports the development of practice. I mean, there have been... Buddhism and the Sangha have been around for our entire lifetime. I don't think it's been very stimulating or supportive to many of the fierce Buddhist syndromes. It's not something you can have much impact on, although technically you can get it with the Sangha. If you're a friend, start to practice, then you may start to practice. So, practically speaking, the Sangha means the people that you're acting with, the flesh and blood, whoever that may be. And then, the widest version of the Sangha is all beings, not even beings, frogs, toads, are the Sangha. That's the song in which you feel your vow to liberate all beings.

[65:49]

Yes, the... You said it all makes no sense. Children don't have much to talk to. And I interpret that as they're not as involved in the other part. That's a very good version of that. You said most people don't think much. And I think that's a good one. I don't think much. Well, I think what, you know, Einstein said, if someone asked him if he ever carried a notebook around so he could write down his ideas, he'd say, young man, I've only had about three ideas in my entire life. Yes. Great. I think what Vaigaroshi is talking about is intentional... Thank you. It's almost like bowing. And the inner dialogue that runs through our head all the time is, you might say, more like the fruit of our karmic paths running tapes.

[67:07]

It isn't a current, it isn't karma in a strict sense. It isn't a current intentional act in the present moment. So it has very little power. It has only distracted power. It doesn't have motive power. And the kind of thinking that produces something is a thought like, I've got to do something about this liquid issue. Whatever happens, I've got to do something. That's a thought. Because it has implications, it's consequential. You change your life on the face of it. Whereas, you know, just sort of lying in bed, gosh, it's scary. You know, you get up the next day and you're still being a person, not doing anything different. So I think you can tell by the consequence whether it's... And I think children... Like my kid, particularly, is just constantly in a fantasy world.

[68:09]

He'll just sit there and tell stories to himself, even loud sometimes. But it really isn't thinking exactly. It's more like an inner movie or something. Well, we don't have a very accurate language for all these distinctions. It's true. And so it's hard for us to talk about it, but I think you can observe the difference very well. It's interesting how there's a funny story that Lou Wells tells, which I kind of like the story. Lou Wells is a poet, you know, a well-known poet. He wrote Ringbone. As an example of what poetry is, The difference between language of poetry and ordinary language is that he was walking along in a tour of one of these hot springs places, like at Yellowstone, where there's little railings and these bubbling pools and wild water that are kind of dangerous.

[69:14]

And there was a tour guide, a young person, maybe a college student, who was giving a Uh, think now in this pool, this is called the self-respecting means of doing it. He was just doing it very mechanically without much sense of thought. And while he was doing it, a little kid started to climb up on the railing. And so suddenly in the middle of his dialogue, he, he blurted out in a very different tone of voice. Who's kid is that? And to Lou, that's like a poem. That's like a real thought or something that cuts through the undercurrent of mechanical, you know, memorized habitual talk. That's the difference. He wrote a whole essay about it. Whose kid is that? That, to him, was the essence of what it means to write a poem. is to somehow maintain that tone of intentional language.

[70:18]

And that's what makes a great poem, too, is that you can get one line like that pretty easily, but to get a whole poem that doesn't slip back, where usually what happens in a middling poem is that you have two or three lines, usually the first one, that it inspires you, but then because your level of craft is not up to it, you end up writing a commentary poem. Rather than maintaining, you know, to be or not to be that, it's just whether to know or not to be that. So each word, kind of, you just keep going, wow, you know, it doesn't stop. And those are the things you remember when you do MRI and become part of the mind. There's something else, Joe. I would say that the Lewis Tarot had a whole poem from out of one line. This mark was a blue gem. That's right. On the whole, kind of a boredom. That was what started. He looked out in the middle of the night, and he had to fly. I wrote a whole turn paper on that.

[71:24]

My crowning achievement was a psycho-historical examination of Lewis Terrell's state of mind. My crowning achievement was a In practice, when we talk about emptying the mind, we're in fact talking probably about dealing with the garble. What are you calling that? The taste of... The inner dialogue. The inner dialogue. When you talk about emptying the mind still, you're talking about trying to dispense with the inner dialogue and perhaps free the mind from intentional thinking. Is that what emptying the mind's about? I don't... Well, first of all, I don't think that we generally would use the phrase, emptying the mind. Oh, I'm sure you did. I think you might say that it's through the process of sitting, it may be that the mind will empty out.

[72:27]

That's a little different. you don't make the conscious effort to do it, because if you try you'll find that it rather defeats itself. But rather you may come to, without really realizing how, you may come to, suddenly, a state of consciousness in which you're just not doing anything for a while. And, of course, the minute you notice it, you start doing it again. But this state of mind we call samadhi. And it comes to you, rather than something that you produce. It comes to you by not doing something else for a long period of time. I think that, physically, there's something in the book about waves of traffic, and it was in relationship to the fact that your mind has continual thoughts. And I guess that brings a question to my mind, the point is that you get rid of the thought, but you disengage from it, so that they time and go. I guess most of the time when you're playing the tape or when you're practicing or wherever, you tend to run with whatever's coming and going.

[73:33]

That's right. It seems to me that it's unrealistic to expect those waves to stop. It's just to let them kind of go. Well, it's not unrealistic to expect them to stop sometimes because that's the way that you can notice that there's something more fundamental than the waves. But it's unrealistic to expect that water will not come waves much of the time. But the point is, if there's no wind, you'll experience clear water sometimes, and then for the first time you notice that there's water, rather than just waves. And the problem is that most people, of course, identify themselves with the waves of their mind, not with the mind itself. So we need to have some experience of our mind directly. But... And once you've had that, your experience of waves, or even distracted thinking, will not be so difficult for your life.

[74:36]

It won't have the same... It won't catch you in quite the same way because you're not identifiably... So there is a kind of yogic practice in which you consciously attempt to cut off all thinking. But it's not considered to be a Buddhist form of meditation. And the reason is that it's more like a God's meditation in Buddhist parlance, or a deva's meditation. That is to say, it's one of these celestial realms where you feel very, very good And there are certain gods of David that actually live in that realm permanently. It's called the formless heaven of no thought. And again, they're considered to be sort of sorrowful figures because they don't have to grapple with the problem of thinking. That's sort of like being a thief, but who is it? A little bit.

[75:37]

And a lot of early Western interpretations of Buddhist literature thought, well, that's what Buddhism must be about. It's awfully dead, pessimistic, sort of. It's the grim pessimism of the East that is sort of somehow tied in with the poverty of Calcutta or something. I think that was a way to dismiss the East. But in fact, this is, I mean, it's very likely that, you know, there may have been lots of Buddhists that got into that. It's one of the common mistakes in meditation practice. Because it's illogical. You think, well, thought's the problem, so let's stop it. That's a very, you know, childlike way of thinking about it. And that's partly why you need teachers to identify with this vertical sangha, which is vivid to you in the the written records of the teachings and the lore that's handed down is that you don't have to go through those kinds of mistakes. The historical Buddha spent about four or five years, it seems, perfecting such practices before he decided that it was not ultimately grappling with the basic problem.

[76:48]

It was rather a kind of athletic, spiritual technique to reach a certain very specialized state of consciousness, which, you know, I saw a picture in an old life magazine of one of these yogins, and they're a few of them even today. They can bury themselves alive and have one hand sticking out for three or four days. They don't seem to breathe or have a heartbeat. those kind of supernormal capacities can be developed. Medical science doesn't quite have an explanation for how someone can survive like that, but they even wired these people up to use genes and so forth, and they stopped. They shut down, and kind of they suspended animation. But it has almost nothing to do with Buddhism, any more than...

[77:48]

running a 9-800 yard dash makes you a good person. It may or may not. It depends on what use you're making of that ability. It's conceivable that the world's most deadly criminal could run a 9-800 yard dash. You know, it doesn't have any... So food isn't this fundamental. It's fundamentally ethics. That's why this class is... good introductory class, because really the purpose of Buddhism is to make people who behave like the Buddha, not necessarily people who have some extraordinary spiritual powers. They may incidentally have such powers. Is it going? Yeah. Yeah. Oh, wait a minute. The white piece is off.

[78:51]

Oh, you're all going to sit in the back. Sorry. I'm going to have to go rest. I'll see you when the food falls.

[79:01]

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