I haven't given a talk to non-initiates for years, actually. I stopped partly because if you do, you have to repeat yourself, and partly there's certainly enough to do within Zen Center. And I have to give a talk because Zen Center's in three parts, roughly every other day all year long. And I find that Buddhism is vast enough and the people I'm talking to, what I hear from them, which I speak to, is varied enough that I never have to repeat myself. So, to try to say something to you, which is comprehensible or useful is a little difficult.

[01:03]

Can you hear me in the back okay? Okay. So, and also I don't really know what you know about Buddhism and Zen and so things I take for granted to talk about, like the idea of practice, are actually rather elusive concepts. What is this this thing called practice that Zen people always refer to. So, a number of terms I use, you may just have to bear with me and you can ask me afterwards about them, because I'm not sure which ones I should try to suggest something about. Anyone I pick could take an hour, a month, or something. And also, what I'm talking about is not something that we have formulated or planned to do exactly, but rather it's a kind of process, and in fact a process that we got into by accident.

[02:12]

Suzuki Roshi, my teacher, came from Japan in 1958 about, I guess, and he just sat every day, meditated every day. We call meditation za-zen. Za means sitting and zen means meditation, or it actually means that absorption in which you are one with everything, or there's no subject-object distinction. So, sitting zen, za-zen. He did za-zen every morning and people began to join him. And then as people began to join him, it got pretty soon there were quite a lot of people. And at first we expected there'd be about, you know, maybe one or two people who'd really practiced for a long period of time, trying to realize what Suzuki Yoshi was all about and they themselves were all about.

[03:22]

And then we thought maybe there'd be five or six most people who came, and by this time after a few years there are quite a lot of people who came, would stay a year or two, six months or maybe two years, but then they'd go away. In actual fact, Zen Center is now about where we've tried to do things. Most of the Zen groups in the country have rather stabilized in number of people and in addition we've tried to take steps to stabilize the number of people to decrease the number of new people who come. And so we're trying to stay at a community group of about 200 people, though there's about another, there's about 150 resident people who stay within Zen Center's facilities and eat meals together every day, etc. And there's about another hundred or more who live in the neighborhood, or 200, and come to lectures regularly, either in San Francisco or Green Gulch.

[04:27]

And the number of people throughout the country who correspond with us or who've come to Zen Center for a while, several months or a year or two and left, it's maybe 10,000 people, something like that, and who come to the guest season we have at Tassajara, of course, many, many, many more. So the size of the community is rather large. And this, not only is it rather large, but it's rather, people stay a long time. I asked someone to figure it out once, and I don't remember exactly, but something like more than 60% of the people in Zen Center, the regular people, say out of 150 people, have been with Zen Center more than six years.

[05:30]

about 80% have been with Zen Center more than three years, so it's quite a stable community. In fact, I don't, at least in my own knowledge, I can't think of any group of people except established traditional religious groups where this large number of people, I mean I don't know of any of those either, have stayed together as long as the cumulative experience of Zen Center. This is a fundamental event for us which we hadn't really planned on and characterizes and conditions everything we do. Also because people want to continue their practice for a long period of time and then sometimes they get married and have children, we've had to accommodate ourselves to the existence of a community which has developed around Zen Center. So there's a quite distinct now community, which as late as when Suzuki Roshi, shortly before Suzuki Roshi died, which was a little over three years ago I guess, we just then, Suzuki Roshi and I spoke about, well we finally have to recognize there's a community here and

[06:58]

positively give that some expression in our life. Zen Center is not a residential, even though Zen Center is now a community, it's not exactly a residential community in that if you stop practicing you leave. Now I have a kind of experiment with a residential community which is sort of part of Zen Center. One thing I want to do is list the to give you a sense of the types of things we find ourselves experimenting with. One is the only residential community we have or that we're related to is, at the time of Tassajara, I tied up some land as an alternative to Tassajara in the Sierra and some friends of mine went in on it with me, Gary Snyder and Alan Ginsberg, and now hundred and some acres, there is an additional 1,500 acres tied up by friends and that's very definitely a residential community.

[08:08]

Each person has their own sort of area which they know and use and if you stop practicing or not interested in practicing, no one asks you to move, you stay there. So it's a kind of community based on practice and the nuclear family, but the primary requisite is the desire to live together or to share space in some kind of relationship. But in Zen Center it's clearly, if you stop practicing, given certain extenuating circumstances, when there may be some space given for a year or more of stopping practicing, depending on where the person's at, but in general if you stop practicing you leave the community. In addition, it's not a community like the nation or something, because we can exclude people, and a great deal of the Buddhist rules about how a community is organized have to do with how you exclude someone who is not appropriate for being there.

[09:18]

In addition, Buddhism, Zen communities, aren't trying to do everything, you know, and in fact they're not trying in a certain way to reform society or anything like that, you know. The attitude is quite pessimistic, you know. How do you survive in the prevailing society? Every society is bad for thousands of years and how do you survive in whichever society is prevailing at the time? But also the community is thought of as a kind of prototype that if some people can find a way to live together, many people can find a way to live together. So it's an attempt at that sense to find a way to live together. And there's a Zen story which is, if you were to pick up the whole world, you know, it would be the size of a husk of millet, which is something exceedingly small.

[10:26]

But if you throw it down in front of you, you can't find it anywhere. It can't be seen. It's as hard to find, the story says, as a lacquer pail. It means a black lacquer pail in a dark room. And so beat the drum and look everywhere. Beat the drum means whenever there's a lecture or work, we beat a drum to call people to work. The commentary in that story says Well, it's a very complex story, this man Seppo holding up this husk of millet. What is he holding up? Is the husk of millet holding him up or is he holding up himself, holding up a husk of millet? What is he pointing out? Of course, it gets into something which is rather complex to talk about, the Buddhist idea of dharma, which is that you can't perceive something in its objectivity. So when you're holding something up, there's some statement about also a multiplicity of worlds which Buddhism imagines being on the tip of a husk of millet or the tip of a hair.

[11:33]

There are innumerable worlds with innumerable beings and simultaneously in both directions and interlocking as if there was an antimatter world interlocking with this which because they're in different realms do not impinge on each other. Buddhism has some such model As a result, whether this race survives or doesn't is of no cosmic significance, you know. Just as individual suffering has some different meaning on the social level, so on the cosmic level, our demise or not is not so important. Someone told me there's some pygmies in rainforest where they can't see more than about 50 feet in any direction who share this view, their disappearances, because there's these innumerable worlds. So anyway, Buddhism is quite pessimistic and in addition, the various people who have been speaking here, I more or less agree with them and I'm equally pessimistic or more pessimistic.

[12:41]

Is this on so loud because I'm not talking loud enough? I guess so. I've watched things such as a Japanese mother trying to bring up her children and complaining to me, say, that Japanese men are such male chauvinist pigs and why can't they be like American men who are from their view so much better and treat women so much better. And as they're telling me this, they're obviously bringing up their male child to be a male chauvinist pig. I mean, you know, it's completely, they're doing it simultaneously. They're producing the very person, etc. And much of the stuff I see going on around us, I mean, it's like if a chief of a village sold half his population for some sort of money and cut down all the trees which were the shade for the village for lumber, he'd be considered rather stupid and it seems that most of the things that we do using up our unmade environment is equally stupid.

[13:57]

We're trying to do something in our neighborhood which we call the Neighborhood Foundation and even though we will fix, what we're trying to do is is work with the people in the neighborhood rather than the buildings. And even though we fix up a building with the help of people in the neighborhood and turn it over to some kind of community ownership, still there's no way to prevent, almost no way to prevent an individual deciding to sell it for a higher price and move out of the neighborhood. As long as you have that, as long as people make that kind of individual choice, there's not much you can do. A person has to be willing to decide on other bases and a higher price and so far I don't find anybody practically who won't make that kind of decision. So, anyway, we find ourselves with this community that exists around Zen Center, and so now we've begun to try to figure out in what sense does, how does it exist, and I can just describe it, but also there are many, there are certain ideas in Buddhism that are part and parcel of it, which I have to express in some way.

[15:27]

First, of course, as I mentioned, there's this emphasis on interdependency carried to the extent to which there are multiple worlds, as I said, on the tip of a hair, and multiple worlds going both directions, and multiple worlds existing simultaneously which don't impinge on each other, which gives you a sense of relativity, of nothing else. But there's a profound relationship between the made and the unmade and people, human beings are makers. You know even if we pick up a beat stone we're making it something and you prefer a beat stone that someone's made, someone's given to you or you've chosen rather than one you get in a say a tourist shop. So anyway we're always making things even when it's an unmade supposedly a gift like a beat stone. And there's always the awareness of the background, for somebody who practices meditation, there's always the awareness of the background out of which things arise.

[16:44]

Almost like Hoyle has some idea that out of empty space a hydrogen atom appears, whether that's true or not is immaterial. Buddhism has much of that kind of feeling. that the background that you there's no such thing as empty space or nothing that there's this unmade-made relationship and when you examine things carefully they disappear back into that unmade space or something like that. So the process of meditation is to identify oneself or find one's own center of balance in that unmade space but not just that level of mind in which nothing arises in which as if perceiving, you know, behind the billboards of our mind, that out of which the mind, the billboards are made, various thoughts and feelings and moods, but beyond that to a kind of emptiness. Just that itself is not, that's too much like quietism, but the moment of expression itself is also emptiness.

[17:53]

So there's this profound relationship between the made and the unmade. So this brings us to, you know, what do you possess? So a Buddhist community is intimately related to the limits of possession. What can you actually possess and how do you possess something? I remember Suzuki Roshi saying, taking his glasses off and saying, these are your glasses, you know, but you know about my tired old eyes and so you let me use them. and there's that kind of feeling of possessions that you don't actually own something and you can't own something you can just you can just use it. The second precept is loosely translated as do not steal but literally it means do not take what is not given and

[19:00]

Again, there's this sense of gift, of not taking things, of what you have already is enough. So many of the precepts in Buddhism are, don't do this, don't do that, but it's the sense of what you already have is enough, so you don't need that, don't also want that other thing. Precepts in Buddhism, again, are a kind of boundary, the precepts only exist when you've broken them. If you are looking at someone say in a passing car or somebody stranger and you see them and you actually look at them, as soon as you think well what status are they or what kind of person, you lose that and you've in a way broken a precept because you're thinking are they good or bad or praising or etc. I mean that's of course we do that but the precepts try to point out that boundary when we create a division or create possession or an idea of something we can possess or someone who can possess.

[20:10]

So again, this idea of made and unmade and what we can possess or use. And the first precept is do not kill. And that's, again, a parameter in our community, but how that's understood is not just simply don't kill something. It also means don't kill what you essentially are by various kinds of behavior, etc. But it means don't interfere with things you can't repair or replace. For example, you wouldn't use unrenewable resources. You try not to use unrenewable, you try not to use gasoline so much or some fuel oil, as Schumacher points out in his book, you try to use wood or water or wind power. And this kind of understanding is expressed in Buddhism physically. A great deal of Buddhism is expressed in, it's very difficult to explain because we're so mental, visually oriented, it's hard to explain.

[21:19]

This kind of feeling, for instance, Dogen Zenji, who was one of the greatest Zen teachers in Japan, when he was washing clothes he would dip water out of a running stream, wash his clothes, and the water that was left over he would take back to the running stream and put back in. He just didn't dump it on the ground. And when we pour water in Buddhist a monastery, you don't walk out the back kitchen door and heave it, you walk out and pour it toward yourself. You don't heave it when you're pouring it toward yourself and there's this kind of physical care or physical expression of your life is exceedingly important in Zen practice and you know in Green Gulch we have what are called tan which are raised platforms for a meditation And some people come along who have long legs and they just step up on the tan.

[22:23]

Visually there's a difference, right, between the floor and the tan, but physically they act as if it was the same because they can step up on it. So short-legged people can't and they don't take that into consideration, but they step up on it. But in the kind of practice we do, you would If something's different, you express that difference in all ways, not just it's a visual idea, you actually get up on that tan differently than if it's raised for a reason. If you wanted it on the ground, it would be on the ground, so then you could just step on it, but because it's on the ground and raised, it's treated differently. And that effort to treat things differently, how you treat things, again relates to things, the made and the unmade or what you possess. Yeah, I'm creating a kind of collage, which I don't know if you get a feeling for it, but I can't express it. I think it's the best way to do it anyway.

[23:25]

I'd like to be able to say more about this physical expression or recognition, it's rather difficult to explain. In Japan, Japan is very interesting, you know, because it's, I would say, while on the surface it's the most westernized country in the world, it's the most un-western. the most non-Western country actually, and it's very much a body culture. I would say that we are very much a mind culture, perhaps since Plato, and India somewhere in between. India is the West for Japan and China, you know, and China is a body culture but with a lot of mind in it, and Japan is very, very much a body culture.

[25:18]

But their attitude toward many things is quite different. They perceive things in a field relationship always. They're not so concerned with if a cup breaks that you've lost something. It's an opportunity then for someone to sweep it up, opportunity for someone else to make another one. That kind of perception of the relationships between things as the real rather than the object itself is characteristic of a body culture, more perceived You can see that in everything they do and their characters. It covers a field and Western people learn Japanese and Chinese kanji or characters. They try to join all the parts. They can't have them floating in space. It feels like they're not attached. You want to make a physical object out of it if you're a Westerner. Also, Japan has the main culture, the main religion is being Japanese. And in the high culture, they're not concerned about getting high, they're concerned about not coming down. So, they don't have any possession around which would bring them down.

[26:26]

So, you only have something that someone's given you or made for you or something that you feel some developing, changing relationship with around you. So, out of that feeling comes the simplicity or few possessions. It's not so Zen, but it's high culture in Japan. not have anything around you that bring you down, so you have to eliminate an awful lot of things, right? Certainly crappy things. So, maybe I ought to backtrack a little and say that there are three ways, modes of expression for a Buddhist or areas that we define as ways of expression and also ways of … a relationship that goes both ways, and they're called Buddha, Dharma and Sangha.

[27:33]

And I don't want to go into detail on this, I don't think it's important for what we're talking about. Buddha means the absolute and Dharma means all things. and inanimate or it has the sense of what's dissimilar, seemingly dissimilar to us and Sangha has the relationship of a peer group or what's similar to us, other people. And all of these things, Buddha, Dharma and Sangha are from the point of view of non-self, the point of view that when you examine things carefully there's no self to be found, there's no self nature or there's only interrelationships. So Dharma, it's also interesting that while Dharma means things, it also means teaching. It's the expression of emptiness, we can say. So Dharma is, you know, sometimes there's a famous Zen saying about inanimate objects teach the Dharma, and Tozan, who's a famous Zen master, said to someone, you know, it's actually a long story, but he's in

[28:41]

short he said, but I don't hear it, you know, and his teacher answered, although you do not hear it, do not hinder that which hears it. Whether that's clear or not, I don't know. Anyway, so how do you not hinder that which is actually acting. So Sangha, so what what Zen Center or what our community is informed by is this idea of Sangha. So Sangha, so we're rather different from other communes in the country. We're not exactly a commune since we're not a residential community but a practice community but we have many similarities to communes and we arose out of the same energy perhaps around 1966. Zen Center started in 1960 about but we started Tassajara which began the formation of a living together under the same roof

[29:43]

eating the same food community, really, for us in 66 or 67. But we're different from other similar groups like that for the most part, but because we're informed by a rather ancient tradition. In fact, Dr. Kunze, who's one of the two or three most eminent Buddhist scholars, says that Buddhist institutions, the Buddhist Sangha, are older than any other institution in the world. there are, I guess, there are Buddhist sanghas which are continually existing, older than any nation or any other such continuous group. So we assume, I don't know whether we should assume it or not, but we sort of assume that Zen Center will be around 100 to 200, 500 years from now, so we're not in a rush to do anything. Despite predictions we're not going to get by the year 2000, we assume that we'll be around. we sort of assume that Zen Center will be around 100, 200, 500 years from now, so we're not in a rush to do anything.

[31:26]

Despite predictions we're not going to get by the year 2000, we assume that we'll be around. So, Sangha also has the concept of a community which is not local or not just this particular age, that it's a community identified with people in past and future. And there are various futures which are calling us, and a past which changes as we define it, you know. And all, both past and future, are here in the present, and actually time and space, again in relationship to made and unmade, are your own creation. you know, without some activity there's no time and space and that activity also comes from you. So you can't really be out of time or I have no time. You are time, it's just your own mental relationship to it that causes you to feel out of sorts with it.

[32:32]

Again, what I'm trying to talk about is what has brought the particular community of Zen Center together, which is both similar to and dissimilar to other attempts at community. Now, there are other things that are making Zen Center a community, which are, one, this thing I talked about, there seems to be an effort throughout the country to do something like this. It doesn't seem like, you know, our Constitution and our government seem to recognize the biological unit of an individual and recognizes the state as a corporation and corporation. It doesn't seem to recognize anything in between, no other unit. But there seems to be a seeking for some other unit. And it seems to me, I don't know, I can't calculate it, I've never tried to calculate it exactly, but it seems to me that the individual, you know, baron of one's own family, trying to supply all the needs and create a separate little world for one and one's family, is at the standard of living we want to live at a rip-off, that there aren't enough resources in the world to go around to create that.

[33:56]

You'd have to live extremely simply for it not to be a rip-off. Maybe that's one of the forces moving toward this in-between, somewhere in between the individual and the state. What kind of unit? How does it function or vote or express itself? The other is that, you know, we're talking about disaster a lot and we don't know, you know, maybe you can guess at the future, predict it to some extent, but one way of predicting the future is I don't know much about the stock market, but I guess stocks discount future earnings. So you can look at a stock now and you can see something about what's going on in that company. And I think we can look at what we're doing now and you'll find a prediction in what we're doing now, kind of maybe unconscious prediction.

[34:59]

You just are doing things, you sense. So there's various kinds of curves in a community like Zen Center of our, we're doing this and then we cut back and we do this. Underneath it all there's a movement toward being self-sufficient which seems almost predicated on that we're going to have to be self-sufficient. So we're not Buddhism, again, we're not trying like some people, some religious groups, we should hoard silver and you should put big hordes of food up, etc. Buddhism is much more lemming-like than that. If we're all going to jump over the cliff, we Buddhists should go with it, you know, there's no reason to define yourself out and try to protect yourself from what's happening with everyone else. So, in Zen Center there's not much attempt to try to store food or prepare for some disaster. but we do find ourselves moving towards some kind of trying to take care of ourselves and people around us.

[36:00]

Okay, maybe I should say something about culture too. My feeling is that technology has, by giving us economic and or rather technology by giving us physical and mental mobility has made our culture more primitive. That culture is actually a factor of people living together and having a lot of relationships with each other, just as if you're married and your marriage is one in which two people are together and allow each other space for individual development and so there's two new people always meeting each other. By the time you've been together 10 or 20 years, you have a private language where you know each other and other people couldn't understand. It is, Dr. Consley points out, that kind of observation. And there's almost a tangible quality that you may experience to the space of the two of you being together or with other people, you know.

[37:14]

And out of that kind of relationship, culture or something is produced is my feeling. And I particularly see that in Japan where people have been together where a shop may have been with somebody for ten generations, a little store that makes pickles or a potter is using clay that his grandfather prepared for him and it's aged, etc. That kind of experience of things, physical and mental experience of things in depth, not trying to reproduce all of culture in one generation, is an intrinsic part of the Buddhist idea of Sangha. Also, I would say that culture has a critical mass. I don't know exactly the use of that term, but what I mean by that is that it'll only expand to cover so many people, and if you double your population in a generation or two, there's no way for that the older generation to teach the newer generation.

[38:18]

You just can't teach everybody. You can't pass to everybody the way you survive. And so you have a lot of people around who just don't know how to live. They don't know how to eat, how to function. They don't know how to do anything, almost. So we're always building new schools rather than improving or making better our old schools. So in the midst of this, you know, What can you do? You know, there's an awful lot of problems around and if you just look closely at the people right in front of you, there's an awful lot of problems around. I mean, if you look closely at almost any individual, there's a mass of contradictions and desperate desperation. So you don't have to go to Bangladesh or someplace to find misery, you know. addition what can you do that actually anyway again I'm talking about the more the Buddhist point of view would be what can you do that's actually effective you know not lots of ideas or plans so much but what can you do right now that's effective and so we've rather started with that feeling in Zen Center and we've started out for instance in the building in the city we've tried to

[39:43]

you know, we start sweeping the building and sweeping the street in front of the building and the sidewalk. And actually, people in the neighborhood join us. And then we planted, helped plant trees in the neighborhood. And first, you can't even get somebody to allow a tree to be there. They come out at night and cut it down because someone may trip over it and sue them, you So, you know, you talk about trying to stop the war and you can't even plant a tree in front of someone's building, right, without them cutting it down. So, to go back again to my original statement about my pessimism is, I see people talking about changing things all the time and mostly I see that their unconscious activity, the 99% of their activity they have no control over, is creating the same kind of world they're complaining about, like the Japanese mother bringing up men that she doesn't think she should have married.

[40:48]

So we have sort of rather modest aims, but many things start from this. And so we planted some trees, the next thing we knew a building burned down by an arson and we in fact for several months had an arson watch out because there were about 30 arsons in the black neighborhood of which we're part in a period of two or three weeks or a month or something like that. And in fact, the big building burned across the street and Yvonne was the first person out. She thought it was her own room because flames were leaping across the ceiling and she rushed out and started helping people out of this 40-unit building that was burnt down by an arson. And then there was an arson going around burning down non-Christian churches. It's quite an adventure living there, you know. So we have somebody out, we've often had somebody out patrolling the neighborhood.

[41:55]

We've made the neighborhood a great deal safer. pushed up land values because we have a lot of students walking around all the time to make it safer. Anyway, when the building burned down, we thought, well, what could be done to help the, to do something positive in the neighborhood of the space? And we got, it started as a park, and it's going to be, it's the largest new park in the city in 40 years. It's about an acre, and it oversees the bay. And we participated with its putting it together and raising the money for it. And the Trust for Public Land and Huey Johnson did most of the work. But we worked together on it. We got together with them. And the Koshland family, who are Levi Strauss, bought it. And now it's in the process of being designed. So what we looked for was some way to express in the neighborhood to give the neighborhood some mode of expressing itself, some way to articulate itself, the people in it, not just the buildings, because it's fairly easy to fix up the architecture and turn it into a place where people live on the way to better neighborhoods.

[43:04]

We created this thing called the Neighborhood Foundation, which is attempting to try to give the people in the neighborhood some actual stake and possession of some of the buildings and to by building in such a way that prevents redevelopment and is an example for other neighborhoods who could do it themselves rather than just have some lot of money come in and it seems done in the abstract and usually drives them out. Whether it'll work, I have no idea, but this kind of attempt, like the Neighborhood Foundation, comes out of, and we've made it separate from Zen Center, though there's some Zen Center people on the board. It's interesting that the money that started the Neighborhood Foundation has come from the Point Foundation, which came from the Whole Earth Catalog, which is some of the whole same effort toward articulation. So there's some wholeness about the attempt, but whether it will actually work, we don't know.

[44:09]

But anyway, it comes out of that same kind of effort. Another example in here is in relationship to possessions, which again informs our community, is that you don't possess things that other people want. It just causes a lot of trouble for yourself if you possess things that other people want, you know. It may be very nice to have it, but in the end you have to gird and armor yourself with all kinds of barriers and exclude yourself from neighborhoods and certain associations because you have so vastly more than other people, or even a little bit more. So there's an attempt to have to own things when it's possible with others, and when that isn't possible, own things that are rather modest and anyone could have. So, related to that is,

[45:11]

There's also a tendency to not have things which, well, if there's a relation, as I talked about the made and the unmade, and we do prefer things that we make ourselves usually, or a friend made, that there's a sense of limiting yourself to what's the, value isn't something absolute, but rather, in fact, for Zen, value is, difference itself is value. that gradations of difference are far less important than differentiation itself. Each thing has its value because it's different. A group of people who can know each other. That gradations of difference are far less important than differentiation itself. Each thing has its value because it's different. And So, for example, let me try to put it in more concrete terms.

[46:28]

For example, we're trying to limit the size of our community, talking about, I was saying, 200 people or so, to those people who can know themselves face-to-face, to know each other face-to-face. It attempts to be a face-to-face community, beyond that group of people who can know each other. Now, a face-to-face community can be quite large when you're together a lot, when there's, by choice, less mobility. In previous times, you didn't have to choose to not have much mobility because there was no choice, but now we have a choice and maybe some American Indians or some other people have chosen not to progress or not to be goal-oriented in the usual way, but what they have is enough. Anyway, Zen more is like you choose, we make that kind of choice. It doesn't mean you don't go any places, but you don't go very often. unless it's related pretty closely to what you're doing. So being a face-to-face community, again I'm trying to say what defines Zen Center and what causes us to do certain kinds of things, what defines our limits.

[47:47]

Zen Center also turns out to be large enough to do all kinds of things. It's large enough to have enough people for us to grow all of our own food. We haven't quite got it together to grow all of our own food, but we grow a large portion of it. In fact, we have enough for something like a thousand dollars a month now of vegetables and things we sell to the food conspiracies and health food stores in the area. But sometimes we haven't got it worked out, so we have what we need when we need it. You know, you have a whole lot of eight kinds of lettuce. You can't possibly eat it. Eight kinds of lettuce in barrels and barrels. So we sell it, you know. We sell things at our cost. Again, we don't try to make a profit. We figure out what it costs to us and we sell it at that cost. But included in that cost is the energy expended, etc. But we generally sell things. We don't try to sell, we in no way try to sell things at what the market will bear. It never occurred to

[48:49]

our effort to do that. It would seem a weird, it just would seem completely weird and unfair. You don't do things to other people like that. Related to that is, I'm trying to go off in very short tangents. I have a tendency to go off in very long tangents. Try to go off in very short tangents. There are six modes of practice called the six paramitas. One is generosity, second is conduct, the third is patience, and the fourth is energy, and the fifth is samadhi or absorption or meditation, and the sixth is wisdom. And all of these are actually one, of course, we always say that in Buddhism, and how we understand that is actually something accurate, I mean something that you do. It's not just a word, but they're all there, and they also are related to each other in sequence. Generosity means that you do recognize everything as a version of yourself, or the interrelationship is such that you rejoice in others' merits, that you take pleasure in other people's success, or you are assisting other people, because there isn't so much difference.

[50:02]

If he has it, why should you have it? You know, there isn't some competitive feeling in that sense. And to do that is to physically and emotionally recognize that interdependence. You can talk about interdependence and be building your own fortune and you're not really recognizing interdependence then. And that interdependence is how you, so practice is how you continually recognize that, in some ways resist our restlessness and tendency to try to create some static situation. Further, the first abhumi, which is there's ten stages of enlightenment. And the first abhumi is joy. And joy arises, a kind of feeling of bliss arises, maybe some Christmas feeling that some of us have a little bit of, because everybody seems to be doing shopping together or some feeling some of you may have from childhood or something. But there is no possibility to feel joy as long as somebody else in the world is suffering or you have not recognized or related yourself to that suffering.

[51:06]

If you can block it out, you're suffering, is the Buddhist idea. So there's no way to block it out, and when you see that you can't block it out, then you take some active relationship to that, then it's possible to have some joy. And out of that joy, perception arises. Without joy, there's no clear perception. Mental functioning is not considered something neutral or abstract if you divide things into this and that. It's very clearly subjective-objective and neither subjective-objective. and it's related to the quality of your mind which is related to joy. So, the second paramita is, paramita means perfection, the second thing you try to perfect and again in Buddhist thinking there is, you always take vows which are unattainable. To take a vow which is attainable would be considered too small an effort

[52:11]

you know, too easy. So you always take a vow which you can't attain. That kind of effort is needed. So the six perfections are these that I mentioned. And the second one is conduct, which is that, what I'm talking about, that physical expression of your activity. I've seen, I saw somebody yesterday with their feet on a copy of Sri Aurobindo. This would not be considered good conduct by Buddhist practices. It's quite natural for us. There's a book and it's on the floor and we put our feet on it. But a book is meant and designed to be handled with the hands. And so you'd handle it with the hands and not with the feet. That kind of distinction is part of conduct. And until you have some relationship to your conduct, you can't have some freedom. because you're afraid of the effect of your actions.

[53:14]

If you really followed your own impulse, you would be afraid of the effect of your actions. Most people are anyway. So to trust your impulses, you have to have some experience of conduct. And the third is patience, which means on the one hand forbearance, not suffering so easily. We are quite weak, you know, cloudy day and we're depressed. So how to sustain yourself through difficulty and through anger and various things. And what it's more like, it's like instead of sitting on top of the fire of your emotions, your emotions become more like a campfire on the edge of the horizon. The sky itself includes it. So you more and more find that space by when you meditate you allow things to come and go and eventually what comes and goes you see it's changing, you stop identifying with it, and if you have an identification, it's with that space in which things occur.

[54:18]

And by that there's some detachment, but also it takes some forbearance or patience. You know, you stop when you're sitting in meditation, you don't scratch all the time. And only in this way can you experience yourself, actually. Because as long as you react with fear or hesitation or defining. For instance, if you have some experience, particularly if you're of a scientific bent, as my family are all scientists, it was quite difficult for me to not want to codify or explain or know if somebody else had this experience or etc. As long as you do that, if each experience is a gift and you don't know where it came from, you're not trying to repeat it then or figure out what it is or compare it. It is more kind of, well, You don't add to it. What it is, is enough. There's no reason to add, oh, have you ever had that experience, or does this mean I'm crazy, or something. As long as you have that kind of feeling, you're afraid of your experiences. So, you need that forbearance to begin to allow things to happen which otherwise you wouldn't let happen to yourself.

[55:29]

And the world is a fantastic, illuminated place when you stop being afraid of the experiences which might threaten you. So forbearance is one, and the other side of patience is waiting, waiting for things to happen. You pick up something, stones say, and you immediately want to make it into something, or you think about it, or you expect something, but you don't wait for it to reveal itself. This may seem strange to you, but there's a space in which you wait for things to reveal themselves. one practice we do in Zen meditation and Zen practice. Zen has very few rituals that aren't related to the activities of life itself, washing dishes, going to the toilet, bath, meditation, going to bed, etc. One of the things we have is we have a little space, an altar kind of space.

[56:34]

Of course, the idea of a Buddha, there's no idea of a God in Buddhism, strictly speaking, but you have an image or a Buddha to maybe give you some opportunity to define something. And as you enter the toilet, you bow to it. And as you leave the toilet, you bow to it. And it seems ridiculous at first. Why bother with that? You just want to go to the toilet, go take a leak, come back, you know. and if you're in a hurry, you know, etc. But, you know, it's rather a nuisance, you know. Your bladder is enough to define your activity. But what happens when you're pushed around by your bladder or your mind or your anxieties is that there is no space in which you're not caught by things all the time. But what happens if you stop and do this little bow, before you go to the bathroom, in a practice community that we do. I wouldn't suggest you necessarily do it at home, people think you're a little crazy, but in a practice community you can do that.

[57:36]

What happens is at some point suddenly it reverses itself, and what's real is no longer the running to the toilet, but the space in between. For instance, it's like I mean, you've often had the experience of maybe trying to do something intensely with some concentration when your mind is not distracted and you feel like half an hour, an hour has gone by and you look at the clock and five minutes have gone by. And that kind of space is available to us all the time, but we're unable to enter that kind of space, you know. But once you've had that kind of reversal, you hear people talking and there are these vast spaces between each word, you know. because what you perceive is the field out of which the words are arising rather than the specifics. Your mind doesn't grasp onto the specifics all the time as identity. Your mind is rather resting, you know. So, patience or waiting for things. Now again, this is related to when somebody, again, somebody asked somebody, what is the phenomenal world? And the teacher said, wave after wave.

[58:41]

wave after wave of phenomena, right? But what this means is wave, one way to express it is wave follows wave and wave leads wave. That simultaneously the wave is leading the preceding wave and also following, you know, what, you know, I get the words mixed up. And what this points out is for a Zen practicer is the intelligence of phenomena. that phenomena, we're intelligent beings in actually an intelligent world, it's not dead inanimate Christian world, excuse me brother, that in some ways there's that Christian, popular Christian idea that that's all inanimate stuff that can be manipulated and we're alive, you know. I'm sure that's wrong when you look at it carefully in Christianity, Anyway, there's that kind of idea of a dead world which we're actors in.

[59:44]

And there isn't that kind of feeling. In fact, phenomena has its own intelligence and how do you have that space in which you allow the intelligence of phenomena to participate in your activity? And it makes life a hell of a lot easier when you do that because you give up trying to control things that can't be controlled, you give up trying to control yourself when you realize, if you really start trying to control yourself, you'll go haywire. You can't do it. Most of what you do is beyond your control, is habit and something other than a habit. And so you allow events to have their own intelligence. I mean, if you have to make a decision, you sort of take it rather easy and you let the events decide for you, but you're participating in it too. Again, this is, I talked with someone last night about this a little bit, it's a matter of, again, this is a value for, maybe a value for Zen or rather it's something that we find that happens through meditation, is that most of us are out to lunch all the time.

[60:49]

You know, by the time a thought has occurred, the root of the thought, you know, we don't know how it occurred, we just are thinking something about somebody. We don't notice how it occurred and in fact you can't remember when you started thinking about it. That's maybe rather important when you read Zen stories and you find that somebody's getting 30 blows all the time, right? Somebody asks a question and the teacher goes, whap, whap, whap, whap. We're rather scared of physical, that kind of physical expression, but it's actually a relief to have it, to just talk at somebody or embarrass them or shame them is often worse than giving them a little kick or a hit, you know. It doesn't have to be fighting, it can be some kind of communication. But a teacher does not do that to a student until the student has a consciousness which would know what was going on in his mind at the moment of being hit. A person who's out to lunch, you wouldn't hit because he'd say, what the hell did he hit me?

[61:48]

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