It's sort of on schedule. Oh, yeah, the sound construction is over in the other room. The next, uh... The next, uh... Well, the next, uh... The next topic is, uh... Is, uh... The next preset is, uh... I do not take what is not given. But, uh... It didn't seem as though we entirely finished the, uh... The, uh... First preset. So I wanted to leave room for there to be further... Discussion of that, if you wanted to do so. I think one general issue about all of this, uh...

[01:11]

First fond is that... Is that, uh... One can't entirely separate one's own individual behavior from the behaviors of the collective. So, uh... Which is to say that, that, uh... Our individual karma merges into the karma of everyone and what everyone does. So that, uh... Decisions about these things are never pure. Never clear. Entirely, uh... Unambiguous. There's always some, uh... Uh, shadow area in which you're in some way, uh... Involved in a complicity of some violation of the presets. So the, uh...

[02:15]

The, uh... What one has to keep coming back to is your... Is... Uh... That arena in the world which is most uniquely your... Your own, uh... Responsibility, which is your own thought. Your own intention. It's the one corner of the universe which no one else can say about you. And that should be the core of one's, uh... Working. Uh... Much more so than what you actually do. And this may seem, uh... You know, trivial in a way. For instance, years ago at Tassajara there was... One of our periodic, uh... Flaps about killing things in the garden.

[03:16]

If you garden, uh... You have to kill things. Because even breaking the soil disturbs the plants and kills them. Much less, uh... You have to get involved in hunting, uh... Snails and earwigs and gophers and things like that. And what has, uh... What I've observed, uh... Is that otherwise quite gentle and... And, uh... Uh... Non-violent people who... Who have nothing but good feelings toward flowers can suddenly become quite violently, uh... Angry at... Something which has just uprooted their... Their, uh... Body of joy. So gardeners are not immune from the wrath of, uh... Resentment. And... But also, if you're going to, uh... Uh, so what do you do in a situation like that?

[04:20]

So years ago at Tassajara... There was a campaign not to kill the earwigs. Let the earwigs eat the whole garden and not kill them. And, uh... So our local priests were consulted on this. And I believe one of them said that one should, uh... As you... As you, uh... Kill each earwig and say to it, Please become Buddha. Please become Buddha. Uh... And this may seem like an artifice or it may seem silly, you know. Or it may seem that from the earwig's point of view... There's not much, uh... He or she or it is not much, uh... Gratified or given much solace by the fact that you... Are doing it with some different intention. Uh, but... Uh... Given the fact that you're going to do something like that anyway... That the thought which you produce around it... Uh, does make a difference.

[05:23]

And this is, in a way, what we mean by the strange word practice. Practice means taking seriously those kinds of differences which, in a sense, no one knows but you. In fact, that might be a good working definition of practice. That is, practice is making conscious and, uh... Working with those events and differences which no one knows but you. Which no one knows when you pinch the earwig whether you're saying to yourself, Please become Buddha. Unless you're whispering it aloud or something. Uh... So, this ethics of intentionality that we've been talking about is... It's based not just on the fact that what your intention was determines the tone or quality of the deed. Again, it's based on the idea that thoughts are real, as anything is real.

[06:31]

Or as unreal as anything is unreal. Anyway, that thoughts are not less real than anything else. Thoughts are not less real than something that you're taking the life of. So, a thought is alive too. And you can kill thoughts. You can kill your own or others' thoughts. In fact, again, a living being or a prana being, as we discussed, is, in its strictest sense, an embodied or physicalized thought. And what you're really taking when you take life is you're taking that energy of thought away or coming at you up. So, this is not just, you know, legalism or ethics.

[07:44]

It's also ontology. It's also a different sense of what is real or what the existence of something is. I think that for us in the West, the part about Buddhism or Oriental culture that's really the hardest to get across or to grasp is that thoughts are unreal and consequential. So, I know the practice of the Amerindians with regard to hunting was that the condition and quality of your thought was the critical thing in hunting. Not the technique or exercise of bringing down the game. That was considered to be secondary. But the main thing was the purity of your mind.

[08:45]

Because it was felt that was the most real thing and the thing that had the most effect on the outcome of the hunt and the outcome of future hunting. I read something interesting recently. Pardon me, non-sequitur, but when this beverage bill didn't pass in California, Proposition 11, and I was reading about the states in which, for some reason, the populace has chosen to pass it, and why we're different here in California. But not only has it had the effect because of the financial incentive of people returning and picking up bottles, but it's also changed people's habits about picking up trash.

[09:51]

People have noticed that in those states, there's been more of an effort just voluntarily to pick up after yourself, and pick up litter, and things like that. It's made people more conscious of it. And, of course, to have a law which, you might say, through greed, motivates people to pick up after themselves is a bit strange in a way. I mean, you might also imagine that you could just somehow directly train people of the value of not littering like they do in Japan, where you're just being considered a poor little pope to drop something on the street. I mean, you're considered so low-class, and all the children are just culturally obstructed by that kind of minimal sense of social responsibility. And maybe it has to do with some underlying conceptual basis of our society of freedom or individuality,

[11:03]

or that our society is based on the idea that the individual, within a certain sphere, can do whatever he or she likes, and it's alright. And that's maybe the idea of rights, that we all have rights. A right to be left alone, or a right to throw a beer can down, as long as you're not throwing it on somebody's head, you can do it. But I'm afraid the Buddhist picture of the world rather lacks this idea of rights, because of the extreme degree to which everything is connected, you actually have no rights at all, you only have responsibilities. And those are, in a sense, your freedom or your rights. The freedom for Buddhists is the sufficiently developed awareness to act in accord with your surroundings, or harmony with your surroundings, to the extent that no or very little ways of karma are produced in it.

[12:10]

So the Buddhist idea is that if you carelessly throw a beer can out of a car window, it affects the harmony of the world, and therefore affects your own harmony. That the thought, or the lack of the thought, is real, and it has a real effect on the world. Now, a corollary to this is that meritorious thinking affects the world positively. If unwholesome thinking is real and has an unwholesome effect, that meritorious or wholesome thinking is real and affects the world positively. Now this is, you might say, the Buddhist's most compelling, or root response, to how does zazen help?

[13:21]

Isn't zazen just useless or an escape? If it were the case that acts are more real than thoughts, then zazen would be, definitely speaking, a waste of time. It would not have any impact on the suffering of beings. Insofar as intended thought is as real as an act, or is as real as a beer can, the activity of purifying the mind, or consciousness, by sitting still, is meritorious action and affects people. And when I say that, I don't mean that there's some etheric strata that your thoughts go into and walk around the world in somehow. That's a little bit too Pollyanna-ish. It isn't that way at all.

[14:25]

This isn't some kind of, you know, theosophic Pollyanna-ism, where there's some kind of, you know... You know, at its extreme, as I mentioned in the lecture, there's this theosophist idea that you have these sages and the invalids that are kind of doing meditation, and taking care of everybody, you know, minding their minds or something. And, you know, I've gotten a letter from somebody recently who's involved in some Sufi group, and apparently many of her friends in the Sufi group are pretty convinced that one needn't do anything about the nuclear issue because the flying saucer people are taking care of it. And if there are people out there, you know, somewhere who are superior beings who won't let it happen, it's all a test or something. So it's okay for you to, you know, retire to ecstasy and let the flying saucer people take care of it. And I tend to get right back to her.

[15:27]

If I were a flying saucer person, I would be very leery of this whole planet, and I wouldn't be waiting. I would be watching very closely to see whether people here were worth saving, whether they did anything to save themselves, you know. And probably I would post quarantine signs all around, you know, do not enter, you know, dangerous, dangerous people or something. I mean, if the flying saucer people really are a superior race, I don't think, I mean, they'd either just not be around or they'd be waiting to see whether, you know, we had any sense at all. So that doesn't wash for me at all, even if such beings exist, which I, you know, I'm not going to deny it. I mean, maybe so, but, you know, it's a complete rationalization. And again, I think it's still based on the idea that somehow your thoughts aren't real, or that you can't really do anything anyway,

[16:34]

and so you might as well just give it to the flying saucer people. So, in a way, you know, it's probably most of us here are fairly developed ethically. The arena in which we have to encounter these ethical points about not killing, I mean, I don't think anybody here is a habitual murderer or anything like that. Although there are such people. The level in which we're discussing and encountering not killing is a rather subtle sort of level. But, there is a quality in the teaching that, of there but for the grace of Buddha go I,

[17:34]

that the main reason that most people are good is because they're in good surroundings and in good conditions to do it, and not because they have made a conscious intention in their lives to do it, and that that same person, put into bad circumstances, will not be so good anymore. And this is the difference I mentioned earlier in the class, that from the standpoint of liberation or Buddhahood, both good karma and bad karma are somewhat suspect. That is to say, as long as your life is not thoroughly awake, or thoroughly imbued with intention, so that each thing that you do is by your intention and not by your karma, even good things that you do are not so good, because they're based on habitual patterns, which may be favorable, but still are rather habitual or habit-formed, and are not fresh somehow.

[18:38]

They're like frozen food. Like the difference between frozen food and fresh food. The practice is to make your life much more like fresh food, so that you go shopping every day for your food, rather than when your activity comes out of the freezer. And, you know, so in a way, to imagine to yourself, well, I'm not... I mean, killing somebody is a far... I mean, I could never do that. And that's between people who are in jail and bad people. This may be a little bit unrealistic, because what you may simply be saying is that the conditions which produce a murderer have not been your conditions up to then. But that as long as you suffer, like everyone, from a prior conception of inherent being, of which you cling to a self, there may be circumstances which arise

[19:40]

in which you would find yourself killing even another human being. And that part of becoming complete in practice is to know that part of yourself, which usually most people only experience in dreams, or fantasy, or some area, which again we think doesn't count, that isn't real. Although traditional cultures quite characteristically consider the dream world to be more real than the waking world, rather than less real. And you might say that one of the defining characteristics of our society is that we all share a belief that the dream world is less real than the waking world. I think that's a kind of underlying attitude. You know, not too long ago I had a dream in which I was... A rather strange dream for somebody who, like myself,

[20:40]

who took quite a lot of chances and took quite a stand against war. I was a machine gunner in some sort of combat outfit, mowing people down. And quite know why. I suddenly found myself in that role. And I was quite happy to be doing it at that particular time. I wasn't quite myself. And that kind of residue of some other possibility in your life is... You know, what that means is that, I suppose, in spite of my years of practice, I still have some potentiality to find my consciousness in that mode. And that one has to acknowledge that. But that really is the beginning of real compassion for people less fortunate than yourself. It's realizing that the thoughts which they have given rise to,

[21:43]

which have produced their unfortunate situation, are not thoughts which are separate from their own thoughts. They're simply thoughts which, recently, that is to say this life, or the last few years, or the last few lifetimes, you haven't been in a situation in which it's been too conducive to that. So it tends to be... So, when you put a group of people under stress, and there's an emergency, who people are becomes rather different than when they're just in their ordinary routines. Somebody that you only think is not a particularly developed person may shine. And someone else, when you're really counting on, may fall apart. So when conditions change, we learn a lot about what our real intentions are, what our real attitudes may be. So, I'm kind of swinging around to the question that came up last week,

[22:53]

and then I'd like to stop and let you talk. What is the Buddhist social responsibility for the world we live in, which is riddled with murderous intent at every turn? Not just in distant lands where people are desperate and poor, but right on our own streets. I'm consistently amazed, the more I spend time with quite deranged people, the more I'm grateful how few people of murderous intent actually act on it. I'd say probably 1%, or half of 1%. There's an extraordinarily large number of people going around with murder on their minds all the time, virtually all the time. And somehow I'm restrained from acting it out.

[23:56]

I'm just grateful. And all I can say is that I think the seeds of Buddhahood are very powerful in people, and we restrain all but the most desperate. Even a person who's quite firmly entrenched in a murderous fantasy is restrained from acting on it by some lingering sense of trespass, or, I suppose this is what Kant would call a moral inferiority. That there is, within each person, an equipment for, you know, buddhanature or buddhism, or acting in accord, which is... It's not that it's hard to arouse, but it's very, very hard to suppress. And you really have to work at it over a long, long period of time to thoroughly suppress it so that it has no manifestation at all. Even people who do commit murder only usually commit one in their lives.

[25:01]

Even the ones that aren't caught, and there's quite a few that aren't caught, like the four or five fellows who killed Chris Percy about it. Remember, on the streets here, you know, we know where we live, and we just sit living there, and we probably won't kill anybody else. They can't be convicted because we don't have the evidence. There's lots of people like that. A few such incidents we saw. So it is extraordinary that in spite of the impressingly evil thinking of a large percentage of people, things go as well as they do. The more I know people from the inside, the more I'm impressed at how well things were, considering how badly people behave. So one way to look at the world is not how bad the world is, and how terrible people are, and how much suffering there is, but how little there is compared to what you might expect

[26:02]

given the way people are with each other. So that's the only positive side of things. We should be grateful that there isn't much more than there is. But at the same time, I would say the main issue for most of us, who I think have already, probably for a long time, been working explicitly or implicitly on refining our ethical life. What is our ethical responsibility toward the suffering of others? Both close at hand and far away. And the Buddhist answer really is that you should do what you can,

[27:07]

when you can, but you should recognize that the root of suffering is rather intractable and very, very hard to get to in people, in one individual, much less in society. And that even if it looks like there's some movement afoot to change the society or to improve things, inevitably, and history has proven it over and over again, the same basic dynamics of power and corruption and exploitation reappear over and over again, because the fundamental root cause of suffering is self-cleaning. And self-cleaning is a universal condition, by rich and poor, bright and stupid, revolutionaries and dictators, all possessed this in fairly equal measure.

[28:08]

And so, that's part of the reason why, up till now, Buddhists have been fairly pessimistic about the chances for any kind of structural change in society's large-scale human structures, because the problem is so clearly seen as fundamentally psychological and rooted in the structure of consciousness of human beings. And so, historically, Buddhists have felt that the basic way to deal with it is to, first of all, understand it thoroughly in your own body and mind. And until you understand this structure of ignorance in your own body and mind, you have very little chance of accurately acting on the situation of others.

[29:11]

And that, as the more that you are able to thoroughly comprehend the corruptibility of human beings through the subjective awareness of your own corruptibility through meditation practice, through yoga, the more you are able to seize, first of all, first of all, notice, and then to seize the opportunities that occur to you to do something, and then to be able to act appropriately in it. So, I don't think Buddhism is in any way, you know, quietistic or capricious, very much controlled by the surface of human affairs, and can act penetratively in a way which actually helps. So, I think that the possibilities of doing that,

[30:36]

or having the progress of yoga in the depths of mind, is something that Buddhism really hasn't tried yet. And I think, in a way, it's the great future of Buddhism in the West, to somehow combine traditional yoga practice with a more active mode in society. But, I would think the preponderance of effort needs to be on the yoga and not on the activity, because it's very easy to be very active, and very difficult to be thorough in your yoga practice. And not so many people have the perseverance and patience to do that. And you need, in order to do it, first of all, enough sensitivity to the sufferings of others, to want to do it very, very badly,

[31:40]

and feel that you have to do it, feel compelled to do it, for the sake of yourself and others. At the same time that you have that extreme sensitivity, you have to have the ability to accept it, and realize that there's very little you can do about it. And that combination is tough. It's easy to accept it if you're inured to it, and it's also easy to be sensitive to it and want to fight it. Those two things are rather frequent and common in human life. What's rather uncommon is that one can be extremely sensitive to it, and also have a broad sense of acceptance, that there's not a whole lot one can do in the short run. And that most of your work has to be for the long run, that you try to create favorable conditions for future generations

[32:43]

to move in the direction of liberation. And that there's not a lot you can do to change things on a large scale, and that when something appears to you on a small scale, you're ready. So, to the best of my understanding, that seems to be the Buddhist attitude about, you might say, indirect karma, or collective karma, or social karma, which all of us participate in, without being able to affect it all that much. And, again, that the most fundamental way to affect it is the way that appears to us to be the least effective, which is simply to think differently in the privacy of your own consciousness. Thank you. Well, maybe that's enough for now.

[33:47]

I was expecting, or hoping, that you would probably have some thoughts about this yourself, to share. Yes. Well, I just have a couple of questions. One is about discounting this idea that there's a vibe, or some sort of coding that we can send around the world, that there's a Buddhist way. Because that's not really the Buddhist way of thinking about it. Well, I would count on it. It may be so, but, yeah, go ahead. Well, there's been some studies that I'm not familiar with in detail, but I know that there's been some scientific data collected that shows this when there's a meditation center in a neighborhood where people meditate regularly, the crime rate goes down considerably. But, the idea is, if you go to the TM people, and they were meditating, then our crime rate has to go down.

[34:56]

It has some. But, of course, we're one block from the major center of heroin trade in the whole Bay Area, so, we have our work cut out for us. Maybe it would have been much higher, except for us. That's possible. We may have actually cut it in half, given what might have been the TM people. Also, the fact that we chased them down the street may have had more effect than we meditated. Well, but, we wouldn't be chasing down the street if we weren't meditating. I believe that's true. I think that creates some collective courage. But, it's true, you know, it's definitely safer on our block, because we watch our block pretty closely. Well, I don't discount it completely, and, in fact, I thought you were going to refer to this business about mortgage in the 80s and the 100s. Well, I'm thinking about that, too. I do think it is observable in history, and in our own age, that ideas do tend to crop up simultaneously in widely different places

[36:01]

among people who are not connected with one another. Like the idea of practicing Buddhism is something that, you know, I mean, very frequently I'll talk to some guests and they'll say, well, where are you from? And I'll say, Amarillo, Texas. And I'll say, well, how did you find out about this? Or, when did you start thinking, well, when I was a teenager, you know, I didn't kind of go along with what everybody else was doing, and I sort of had this thought that maybe you should meditate. I mean, just, you know, people, when you actually get their stories, you find out that they sort of come up with it on their own, and many people do that kind of at the same time. You could say that's a kind of, you know, field of awareness which permeates the society at a different level than speech or media or talking. But I wouldn't, you know, I wouldn't make too much of it like, you know,

[37:03]

refining thoughts with people, and that's all. I think it's very easy to use that as a kind of excuse or rationalization for your own limits of your own energy. Let's put it this way, that the existence of such an effect or such a reality, it does not excuse you from acting in conventional ways when the opportunity arises, that's all. So, you know, if someone needs some help, there's a car accident in front of them, you don't drive by thinking, well, the meditative vibe will take care of them, you know, but, you know, you have to sort of drop all that and act like an ordinary good Samaritan and get out and help them. You know, that certainly may exist, but if it does, knowing about it is not necessarily going to be all that helpful. It's better just to, in fact, maybe better just to do it and not know about it,

[38:04]

and let whatever effect of that happen without arguing too aware of it. Maybe I'm saying that you should approach such an idea with an underlying attitude of humility rather than excitement and pride. Does that make sense? Yeah. I mean, there's also a sense when we sit with, we don't just sit for ourselves, but we sit for others, and it's not so much that, you know, if I think my father's going to get over his cold, that's not quite so literal, but there is a sense that I'm not just taking care of myself on this thing, and that I'm not just, you know, that myself included in that. It's another side of it. Well, that's what I meant by thoughts are real, and your intention, your formed intention to drop everything and sit has an effect. It definitely has an effect. But it's not an effect that it helps you particularly to know about too much.

[39:08]

It just has an effect, that's all, because everything has an effect. The only realm in which it's helpful for you to know about it is if it gives you enough faith and confidence to keep doing it. Other than that, it's probably not too, because one of the main problems with spiritual practice, one of the most intractable problems, is pride. Pride is a really difficult problem because it redefines itself at every level of the path. In other words, the more you advance on the path, the more food there is for you to be rather self-satisfied about how well you're doing. So, pride is the flip side of any kind of transformational change that you go through. And I would say, probably, if I can make a sweeping generalization here for a moment, that the differences between the various spiritual traditions

[40:10]

and how well they work for people does not have so much to do with the effectiveness of the technique, but how well the tradition that that comes from has worked out the pride problem. I would say that, in my understanding of Buddhism, Buddhism has paid a lot of attention to the pride problem and been very careful to work out the dynamics, the psychodynamics of pride. And my observation, my superficial observation of other spiritual traditions is that they do not have quite the same degree of sophistication or awareness of how to deal with that. And so one can slip when you slip. And the problem with pride is that, and it's one of the later precepts, the problem with pride is that it cancels out all of your progress and leave you off worse than you were before. So it's sort of like one of these pinball machine pitfalls.

[41:17]

If your ball falls into it, you lose points. It's like a sand trap. And it's a big black hole you can fall into. So anyway, that's the issue. Such ideas can become food for prideful feeling, in a sense, and self-righteousness. Yes? It struck me, when you were saying that self-clinging is the cause of suffering. Maybe it's my own... I sort of look at it like ignorance is the cause of suffering. And that self-clinging is suffering only if we're ignorant of the broader aspect of self. And that if we're really aware of the self, of the interconnectedness of everything,

[42:20]

of the broader oneness that self's a part of, then clinging to self is no problem. But it's the ignorance that's the cause of the suffering. But if we recognize self as being very broad, then the problem's not there. Well, I don't know whether it makes any difference. I mean, self-clinging is the cause of suffering as far as I'm concerned. Practically speaking. And ignorance is the same thing. Ignorance of that is also... So maybe I'm just talking definitions. You know, you're just using slightly different words. But self-clinging is a problem. Even if you have a very big sense of self, if you're clinging to it, it's a problem. One has to, you know, rid oneself of that basic dynamic of dualistic clinging, which is not even accessible to most people.

[43:25]

As I say to people sometimes, the most that the average person encounters is if you step off a curb you didn't see, self-clinging goes off all over your body. And you can actually feel what it's like. Because, you know, your whole body just reacts. It can take you hours to calm down. Because you have a very primal mechanism about falling. And, you know, your heart beats faster, and your blood pops, and all these things happen. That's self-clinging. You shouldn't walk down the street for years and never experience that. Unless the conditions point it out to you. The only other way that you can get access to it that I know of, is to sit still. And stop following the circus track of your chronic ideas. And then you'll begin to actually see it functioning.

[44:28]

So in that sense, ignorance of that is the genesis of it. But the dynamics of a fixed self to which we cling is not the cause of suffering, but the root cause. There are many, many causes of suffering. That one just happens to be the underlying cause of all the other causes. You know, I think Buddhism and Marxism actually have a kind of kindred spirit. Buddhism is dialectic. It understands the human process as a dialectic process. But it does not understand it as materialistic. You know, I think Marx understood the cause of suffering as fundamentally economics, or the allocation of material needs of human beings. And that's true. I don't think Buddhism would disagree with that. It would simply say that that is not the root cause. Because the root cause of that is something deeper,

[45:30]

which will reappear in any kind of society, whether it's communism, capitalists, or whatever. And I think that history is proving that to be the case. I don't think communism has solved the problem of self-cleaning any better than our society. It's just simply a different form of it. And if there are any diehard Marxists in the audience here or elsewhere, I suppose we could have a nice argument about it. But what I hear is even the Marxists in the Soviet Union are quite disillusioned. They're not really thinking of Marxism as the basis of their society anymore, because in a sense it's failed. But I think it was definitely a major insight in human history to realize that suffering is not the will of God. It's not the will of God, exactly, but it's the way people greedily adjust things for themselves,

[46:36]

and somebody's the loser at the other end. And that's the basic dynamics of taking what is not given, which is to forgive people. And I would say it's simply that it didn't go deep enough to understand the depth psychology or the psychodynamics of why that is so, why human beings inevitably do that, even though in the aggregate it turns out to be against our own better self-interest, because it brings us all down. Larry, do you have something to say? Yes, I see another example of stepping off the curve question. Dr. Roshi once said that he thought people need to have a certain goal to be a bridge just to find out if they really want to live. And in that second and a half there, we might get quite a clear answer to that question. And I thought it was unusual. I've never heard anybody talking to someone who jumped off the bridge and lived and asked them if they had an answer. Oh, there's been some research, because there are about 15 people. And one of them came to Zen Center, a young fellow.

[47:37]

If you're in good physical shape and you're young and your musculature is well-developed, apparently you can survive. There was a young boy who was a teenage swimming star who jumped off for a very trivial reason. He was upset about his girlfriend. He survived without much injury because he was in very good shape. And they have done some research, and I've seen reference to it, to the research in other articles, but I've never actually tracked down the research. But they have interviewed people, and I know one thing I remember is that none of them have ever tried to commit suicide again. But it seems to have solved something quite fundamental for them. That's good enough. That's good enough to collect as a torturer. And, you know, several of them discuss it as the greatest thing ever, I mean, the greatest event of their life. Obviously. Yeah, because, I don't know, it may be that for some desperate people,

[48:40]

you need to go that far to connect with yourself. That's true. Or you'd be faster than Darwin. Well, it would have to be, let's put it that way. If you want to count, I'll give you a few seconds. That's true. But, you know, a lot of people do things that you might say are death-defying for the same reasons that he said. That is to say, to find, to somehow find the ground of their being, or where they are. It's fairly effective. But the problem is that it doesn't, it's rather dependent on the technique. In other words, you only get there when you're at that point. So it requires you to go again and again into this, you know, climbing mountains or driving fast cars

[49:41]

or taking drugs or something. And it tends to wear you out fairly fast, physically. You know, you don't maintain a body and mind which is able to sustain effort for very long. So you might say Zazen is a kind of slowed-down, more healthy version of driving racing cars. It has some of the same effect on you, but it's much more manageable. And it doesn't require some effect to be put upon you from the outside. In other words, you're doing it from the inside, and so the effects are lasting. As Hikiroshi once said to somebody who asked him what the difference was between Zazen and some other technique, he said, Zazen you only have to do once. In Buddhist practice, you only have to do once. Whereas in other things, I think his feeling was, you have to keep coming back again and again.

[50:42]

It doesn't somehow... Because it's not something you're totally creating for yourself, it's something that you remain dependent on. It's a self-claim when... My lifetime has shown me a lot on a social level about how people manage their physical health. Is it self-claiming when people want you to appear to be more suffering than yourself? An example would be, it becomes a collective practice that if I could be given a talk somewhere and be real bright and alert and clear in thoughts, and at the end of the speech, people will come up and talk about my husband must be really compassionate or have courage or how did I get there today or was I ill very much what?

[51:43]

The other day, a man said, I was at a sit-down dinner where you have to be very careful about what you're eating. He nudged me, he was a judge in the room, and he said, what about this medication? And I was eating my soup and he said, what medication? And I said, what? And he said, the medication. And I said, what do you mean? And he said, well, what are you on? And I said, well, I'm not on anything. What are you on? So that's not an uncommon story. So for my life, I see people wanting people who are physically inconvenient to suffer in some way that they may not be suffering. For instance. A very high percentage, which makes them very afraid to encounter somebody who appears to be. Is that something?

[52:44]

It's certainly one form of it. It's a rather subtle form. Oh, I think he's very low down. But you know, people, I think what you're experiencing is people are just not quite sure how to respond and they're responding as best they can. But something you're perceiving, which maybe they don't, something limited in the way that they're responding. I think they may not know themselves. They don't understand how to use the body. That part doesn't mean that much. So people who are ill or dying often have that same experience, that the people who are trying to relate to them and help them really are just mostly relating to their own anxiety and not that what they need in this situation is something quite simple and direct and not something which is

[53:47]

so fancy or convoluted. Poor dear. And maybe it's partly because we have lost the naturalness or knack of that kind of situation in some way or other. It becomes a cultural thought-out and a cultural mindset and it varies from culture to culture. It's interesting that in most cultures where Buddhism has coexisted with some other religious tradition it's the Buddhists who were responsible for the death situation, the dying people and the death and sickness and so forth. And the folk culture took care of the happy stuff, the wedding and christening and birth and puberty and all of that. And Buddhists were left with the area in which self-cleaning comes to the surface in spite of one's best efforts. So that's particularly true in Japan

[54:52]

where Shinto and Buddhism are kind of fused. And Shinto takes care of the purity of life and Buddhism takes care of the dark side. I saw a movie once, a kind of classical Japanese movie. Japanese movies, to our taste, the traditional style are very static. They have a tendency to just put the camera in the room, just leave it there for an hour while people talk. And the whole drama of it has to do with the way someone picks up a teapot or something like that. It's a big thing. And so they're totally subtle to Western tastes. And in this one movie, this young boy's grandmother had died. He was a young adult, maybe 19. And they were doing a service for her and chanting the Heart Sutra, which we chant every day, and chanting it in the Hall of Karma, usually inside with bells and stuff.

[55:53]

And I thought to myself, how beautiful, that's really nice. And just as I thought that, the boy in the movie said, I hate that sound. He ran out of the temple and sat on his steps and buried his face in sand and covered his ears. To him, that sound, that Buddhist sound, was the emotional resonance with his grief. He hated that whole Buddhist thing. Kind of a wake-up for me, because I realized the traditional Japanese attitude about these things is rather less romantic or idealized. And for them, it primarily means a funeral, a death, connected with grief. Yes? The whole thing of stepping off the surge, or whatever, where do you draw the line between a basic survival instinct and self-cleaning, so that you don't...

[56:53]

I guess the desire to survive, I'm wondering if that's equated with self-cleaning. If it is, then why don't we slip into a flow, heading away? Well, obviously it's not, because if you meet someone who's practiced a long time, I think what ought to, anyway, you'd be struck by is their vitality, and the fact that they seem all there, quite alive. So somehow, in some odd way, the more you can be free of self-cleaning, the more you survive, and the more you bide, the more you have a life to pursue it. And... I would say that the difference is not between those who want to survive and those who don't, but those who... Every action is distorted or limited by

[57:57]

a clinging to survival, and those whom that's not the case. I guess the question goes on to, I think for most of us, we're fairly privileged, so that we can make the distinction between self-cleaning and survival and what have you, and we really have the quite good fortune to be able to try to work on the whole self-cleaning problem for people for whom existence is bare and minimal, and it's more a matter of survival than self-cleaning. In doing the whole problem of what do we do, what do we, who are privileged, do about this, the whole idea of thinking and meritorious thinking versus activity becomes... It's hard for me. I'm not quite... I can't do that without feeling that I'm once again exercising my privilege. Well, Angelo de Cattaro, she, in Mexico,

[59:03]

went up to Oaxaca and talked to Pepe Cattaro's soybean shop. There has to be, I guess, some activity. They weren't eating very well, so he tried to give them some different knowledge that had helped him in a way to be greater. Well, maybe you are exercising your privilege, but what else do you want to do with it? Well, I guess there's more than one way to exercise it. There's more than one way to do it, and I suppose that, just in terms of what we were saying this morning about the great problems all over, realizing that I can't... I'm not going to be able to change them, probably. But that, in some respects, provides a very nice app so that I can always sort of focus on my Zazen and my thinking. And when I'm moving, when, as a result of Zazen,

[60:04]

perhaps a decision comes up as to what maybe a stand I would take, by saying that whatever I do is not going to have much effect, gives me sort of a way to slip out of taking a stand. It's, you know, making a lot of particular progress. But it seems that it's very easy to say, well, if I do this, nobody's really going to notice. It's not going to make much difference. You know, because I personally can't change very much. What's a specific example? I'm kind of getting lost in the generality of it. I guess, for myself, I could relate it mostly to my working environment, you know, where I can sit. I do a lot of that. But I can go to work, and I can make, for example, a decision about a loan to a country or to a government that will allow me to quit suppression.

[61:09]

I could also make the decision not to do it or to quit doing that job because I believe what the bank is doing is unethical and immoral and, directly or indirectly, taking lives. The answer I can come up with is it's not going to make any difference. There's going to be someone who steps in right behind me, and I'm not really going to have any effect. As a matter of fact, the general reaction is you pour diluted beans. You know, you usually perceive this as some sort of a radical, cringy type person who they really don't want around anyway. So I suppose that, you know, if in fact this is true, that we can't make that much of a difference then we've just provided ourselves with very good excuses for not really going out on a limb for something. Well, yeah, we may not be able to make much difference at the other end. You know, if you've decided not to give a loan to

[62:13]

South Africa and somebody else does instead, maybe you haven't affected South Africa at all, but you do affect yourself and the people that are around you. And if you do it skillfully, you may not be perceived as a you know, a good, good man. That, you know, a great deal of the causes of those kinds of material sufferings that the world is experiencing the root causes are right here in our own country. And we have a lot to say about that. And even even affecting the opinions of one or two of your close friends is not an insignificant thing. You know, during the Vietnam War there was a real effort and a few women who happened to be the wives of Henry Cabot Lodge and all the other people in the early days who were running the war, they actually tried to influence their husbands' opinions. And that's a, you know, big example. Their small example is endlessly and I think that every

[63:15]

every little bit does help. But to go back to your earlier point about privilege, I think if from a Buddhist point of view, if you're privileged you should accept it. You should use it. And not, you know, somehow being guilty about it then pretend that you're not or only, you know, if you have the privilege and time and space to do Zazen then I think you should do it. I think that's what if there's some poor person in the world that's what they'd like to do. And so that's what they'd like you to do too. I mean, if if it's a choice between doing it or not doing it I think that you should do it. But keeping in mind that there are many people many hundreds of millions of people maybe who don't have that, don't have time. Their practice is survival.

[64:18]

And one would hope that by changing our lives a little bit and in small ways in the long run we will have an accumulative effect on the course of things in such a way that you know, so many do-good projects of the so-called privileged world and the underdeveloped world have totally backfired. They just don't work at all. They become very self-congratulatory too. I mean, it becomes sort of an ego thing. Well, they just don't work. And I think the so-called agricultural revolution which you can hold on together has had tremendous difficulty in my day because it doesn't relate to the culture that it's measured in. It's very difficult to actually talk about it. Because it's very hard to get your motives clear and figure out exactly what you're doing. So every once in a while in the lecture here somebody trips up and says

[65:21]

you lecture as me or they lecture as them but they aren't giving enough they aren't reminding us of how privileged we are here in Marin County and that we should have more awareness of the suffering masses of the world. I don't know, to me that's a little bit like what she was saying what about medication? I don't think there's any reason to take some special attitude about it. I think we just need to be ourselves. And that's probably the most honest attitude and probably the attitude that if that poor person were in the room with us would feel the most comfortable with in a way. They don't want you to be somebody different just for them, it makes them less. They want you to be yourself and to do something useful with that. So I think my point was when I said guilty but I think you just answered it which is to be yourself

[66:22]

and then do something useful with it. I don't think I was operating out of a sense of guilt. I was just saying there's something has to accompany meritorious thought and what accompanies it is doing something useful. Well, meritorious thought will lead to meritorious activity quite naturally if you persist in it because that's the first of all the activity is intentional. Thank you. You can envision a kind of spectrum that we started at the top of let's say martyrdom and moved down to being a revolutionary to being a reformist and then part-time reformist all the way to the other end to being a hedonist. And in a way everybody has to make a choice as to where they fit into that. And I think maybe some of the questions are asking whether there's any cop-out tendency involved in Buddhism. Any what? Cop-out tendency. Because it is true that

[67:22]

development crisis can backfire but the playing of that will also be a cop-out because there is this interrelatedness that exists not only in spiritual terms but very much in economic and political terms. And I'd like to be sure that everybody is deciding for themselves. But what worries me a little bit is that is whether the tonality of that is is something of a tonality of disinvolvement in the interim period while the yogis leave Jinjur. If you're asking is there a cop-out tendency in Buddhism I think the answer is yes. The tendency is there. Kind of inevitably because it's the pride problem I'm talking about. I mean any time you start to change yourself it takes time it takes money you're not doing something else you're in a sense

[68:24]

wasting your time. So you have to compensate for that by an even more developed awareness of what it is that you're about or what it is that you're supposed to be doing and I'd say that that tendency is endemic to all spiritual life and it has to be you have to be aware of it all the time in each stage of your practice. And Buddhism actually doesn't have a great track record as far as up to now as far as widespread social change or social action or things like that. It has much more of a tendency to influence the society by inner osmosis and by affecting the thoughts and feelings of the leaders of the society. So the fact that the tendency is there doesn't mean

[69:24]

that Buddhism is somehow fatally flawed but simply that every effort to do anything has weaknesses that one has to counteract and combat in various ways. But I think there will always be people practicing Buddhism who are escaping from something or other. And I don't think that this is necessarily wrong. I think that some people are escapers. Some people are martyrs. Some people are revolutionaries. I mean some people are not martyrs. They're just not cut out for it. And they shouldn't try to be. And some people need some period of time of escape in order to mobilize their resources enough to be turning to somebody else. So you can't stimulate that because otherwise they'll be nothing. They won't be able to develop themselves at all. So the last thing I would

[70:25]

say is that I don't think you can judge the effectiveness or the long term effect of a movement by Buddhism in a very short space of time. I think you need to observe it the way you observe a forest or something like that, which you watch it grow over a long period of time. And you see how it's fitting in to the ecology of the society as a whole. And it remains to be seen whether Buddhism and these other Eastern religions will remain a kind of fringe fad and a fashionable alternative to Christianity which it presently is tending to be or whether it will hook into the mainstream. And I think Thuchy Patel who is Thuchy Patel at present Buddhism is not the mainstream at all. It's on the edge but it's edging toward the mainstream. I think

[71:26]

the very serious interest being paid to Buddhist meditation by Catholic monastics is is significant in this way. I just talked to a Christophelian priest in the late fifties or early fifties who was trying to resolve and so forth. A conversation indicated to me that the fact that there are such people like him who are looking to Buddhism to provide some experiential basis to spiritual effort within the Christian tradition is something that is meaningful and important. Because I think

[72:26]

Christianity has maybe gone more in the other direction emphasizing the necessity the moral necessity of social action but having lost the yogic basis for it. And so one doesn't have any governance on because it becomes an end in itself. And the discriminated wisdom of how to exercise it in a way which actually works is significant. So I didn't mean to imply that the failure of development projects is an argument for not doing them. It simply points out that those who are in charge of them are inadequately guided or inadequately informed about what's actually going to work. And that seems to me to be the main contribution that Buddhist ethics and meditation practice can make is by providing

[73:26]

a deeper understanding of how people function in their deep life. We might have a somewhat better chance of tuning our efforts to help in ways that are actually going to be effective rather than just be projections of our own sense of wanting to help. Do you have anything else? The bell's starting to ring. Yes. So what does that apply in terms of yogic practice for yogic ethics? What's the term? I take it it means fitting, but Yeah, well I kind of use the term to include things not more than fitting. And I use it for lack of a better language because probably most yogis lack the term

[74:28]

and the experience of these things. The word yoga means to join, or to get, the thing that is good, or to be, to be, to be communicated, to be defined. And I suppose the simplest definition is to get the thing that communicated, the simplest definition to get the thing that The effort

[75:37]

to develop consciousness intention, treating your own consciousness as something that you can change rather than something that just happens to you. So treating yourself, any practice which treats your consciousness actively rather than passively, or which Ted treats softly, I think could be included in yoga. So mantras mantras are probably the most universal form of yoga. And I think even in Christianity we have mantras for prayer. Mantra is is you know, efficacious sound, or sound which is which is

[76:38]

made into something potent. And even singing a hymn together is a form of mantra yoga and that kind of low key or eluded to until there's that quality to it. There are many different kinds of yoga and in my other classes I sometimes delineated five or six different main uses to which yoga practice can be can be put. Healing, power, wisdom, and so forth. So that's generally what I what I mean. I don't mean just sitting but underlying attitude that allows sitting to be effective. Or the reality

[77:43]

that sitting is effective is yogic reality. And it's just not something our society knows much about anymore. Shall we end? Any of you guys have questions maybe you can see them.

[78:04]

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