This podcast is offered by the San Francisco Zen Center on the web at sfzc.org. Our public programs are made possible by donations from people like you. It's the moment to absorb the presence of all of you in the Zendo. I haven't been in the Zendo in a long time. It's very different. Usually the last time I was here talking on a Sunday, you know, it's very festive.

[01:00]

People are coming from all over. The room's full. It's full now, but with fewer people. It's wonderful that you're able to sit every day together, right? That's great. Our sangha sits every day too, but online. It's very cheerful, but everybody's in their own house. So it's really good to be here. Thanks for inviting me. I was not going to show up in person because maybe I shouldn't tell you this, but there's a big spike in COVID in Marin. Maybe you don't know this or do know this. Yeah. So I said, well, gee, maybe I shouldn't come. And Julia said, no, no, come, come. So I said, sure. And I always appreciate being invited to give a Dharma talk.

[02:05]

because it makes me think about the Dharma, and that makes me happy. And I'm getting to the stage where if I didn't have to give a Dharma talk, I would almost certainly goof off and do something else, waste my time with something else. So I appreciate being asked. I guess... Everybody knows that this month of May is the 50th anniversary of the founding of Green Gulch. And Jiryu told me that it was actually on May 8th, 1972, that George Wheelwright, our great benefactor, somebody who was very much a part of our community, on that day in 1972, he signed over the deed of Green Gulch to Zen Center. and that it was about a month later that the first few people came to live here.

[03:06]

I'm not sure exactly when the Sunday Dharma talks started, but soon after, I guess. And for years, every Sunday, right over there, where Fu is sitting on a chair, and the next of the chair where Fu is sitting, would be George and Charlotte Selver, who at that point were already elderly people, They would be sitting in their chairs every Sunday at the Dharma talk, very happy and smiling, and we so appreciated seeing them every week. They were our elders, and they gave us confidence. And I know that at the beginning of this month, Linda gave the Dharma talk and told us about all of this, and that there was a ceremony afterward. And I guess... If it weren't for COVID, we would have had some big commemorative event. Maybe in the future, we will.

[04:07]

But because of COVID, we're just thinking about the 50th anniversary and not doing so much about it. So that's what I want to talk about today, just to share a few memories since I'm also a Green Gulch old-timer. But first, I have to confess that I am very skeptical about the past. I know that there is a past. It would definitely seem as if there were previous moments before this moment right now. But this has always been a great source of perplexity to me. What is the past exactly? does it actually exist? And if it does, how does it exist? And where is it now?

[05:09]

It's strange. This question actually bothered the earliest Buddhist practitioners, and they debated about it for quite a while, and there were different opinions. Some thought the past did exist, others thought that it didn't exist. But we wouldn't even think that there was a past if it weren't for the fact that in the present moment we think of the past. So today, if I'm going to tell you some stuff about things that I think happened at Green Gulch in the 1980s, I'm this morning, right now, talking to you about memories that are in my mind right now. Because a memory is the thought I'm having in the present, or an image or a feeling I'm having now.

[06:13]

But what it actually refers to, I'm not sure. Actually, the present might be more or less nothing but memories of past moments. even if the past moment that you're remembering was a split second ago. Is there a present moment? Everybody thinks that Zen is famous for its emphasis on the present moment, but maybe there is no present moment. Maybe all past moments are nothing more than aspects of the present moment. They say there's nothing but the present moment. But the present moment is always just now gone. So I'm saying all this to make sure that you will be suspicious and should be suspicious about anything that I might say about the past this morning.

[07:26]

Now, everybody knows now there's even some kind of like research about the fact that memory is entirely unreliable. Or, we could say, memory is completely reliable in telling you about the supposed person who is remembering. But it's not reliable in reporting a past that actually occurred. And that's why all history is unreliable, except That's the ongoing story of what we think of as the present. Otherwise, why would they keep writing history over and over and over again, right? But they do. They keep writing history. They still write history of the Roman Empire or the American Revolution. Why would they keep writing that history?

[08:29]

It's as if the past is always changing. And it is. And it is, to me, sad and beautiful and in many ways tragic that we human beings are so earnest in thinking that we can actually figure things out. We keep thinking that we're figuring things out about how it really was. Now we know so much more than the people in the past knew, which seems entirely true until we too become people in the past, as we are constantly in the process of becoming. So, keep all that in mind when I start to tell you now these yarns.

[09:35]

Green Gulch in the past. Of course, I tell them from my own point of view. And the first thing that I think of when I think about Green Gulch in the early days was how my wife Kathy moved to Green Gulch sort of all of a sudden in the early 1970s, soon after Green Gulch was started. And we were practicing together then in Berkeley, the Berkeley Zen Center. I know some of you also practiced there. We were there in the days of the Zen Center with our dear teacher, Sojin Weitzman. So when she moved to Green Gulch, I was really sad to see her go. Because in those days, when someone went to the Zen Center, they would disappear into the Zen Center as if they never existed, they would be gone.

[10:44]

Because the Zen Center seemed like this other world, and somebody went in there and that was it. You wouldn't stay in touch with them because they were gone. So I was sad. I said, you know, you're going to go over there and we won't stay in touch with each other. she said no no we will i have a really good idea what's your good idea well we'll plan to get married that way we'll be sure to be in touch so this was uh an entirely new idea to me but i i you know i was sad to see her go i really wanted her to practice and i knew she really wanted to so i said okay good let's do that let's do that But I never believed for a moment that this would ever occur. And that we really would stay in touch. But we did. And we did marry in 1976. And Beka Roshi performed our wedding ceremony at the city center.

[11:52]

But not too many people came because not too many people knew us. And those people who did know us thought we had not much of a chance. as a married couple, since we barely knew each other, and we didn't get along at all. In fact, this seems really unbelievable, but I believe it's so, that we got into a terrible argument on our wedding day, and we came two hours late to our wedding ceremony. In those days, ceremonies were often two hours late. It was commonplace. So it seemed to be no problem at all that we showed up to our wedding. Nobody said much about it. We were two hours late to our wedding ceremony, and the ceremony just went on. So this was when Green Gulch was pretty new and exciting and experimental.

[13:04]

And it was still, you know, a funky farm, cattle place. But it was a lot quieter somehow. Damn. Than it is now. And the whole world was quieter. You could tell. The entire world was a few decibels quieter than it is now. When you drove up the highway past Tam Junction, you just went a little ways and it felt like you were leaving the city far behind. Most of the houses that now exist all the way up to Green Gulch weren't yet built then, I think. And by the time you got to Green Gulch, it felt like you had been on a long journey and you were entering another world. Those were the days when the Zen Center was expanding at a rapid rate.

[14:07]

More students were coming all the time. People who were willing to commit their whole lives to Zen Center. And so more enterprises were constantly being established. It was very, very exciting. We were always excited with the next development. Baker Roshi said that Suzuki Roshi thought it would be a good idea for Zen Center to have a farm. In case of hard times, when food might be difficult to get, this advances of Hiroshi's own experience during the war. So somehow he thought it would be a good idea to have a farm. Maybe he made a casual remark one day. But Begiroshi took it seriously and he, through the many people that he knew, and he knew so many people, he managed to. make connection with George Wheelwright and to get Green Gulch Farm for Zen Center. And we moved in.

[15:10]

We began to experiment with gardening and agriculture and all kinds of things. Many, many different ideas and attempts. Ducks, chickens, horses. Green Gulch was off balance most of the time through the 1970s. As everybody now knows, probably all over the world. Zen Center went through a crisis in 1983 when Baker Roshi, in whom we had a tremendous amount of faith, decided to leave the community after people lost confidence in him utterly. And it was really sad, troubling, confusing, and I don't think any of us really and truly understood it all. Probably, from my point of view, I had a different view from a lot of other people who were shocked to find out that he was having an affair with a married woman who was also a Zen student at Green Gulch.

[16:23]

And then after that, a cascade of things came to light. But from my point of view, I thought, well, this is not good. This is a violation of precepts. It can't be glossed over or forgiven. But on the other hand, I thought, I was kind of glad to see that our teacher could be smitten and fall in love, which seemed to be the case. And he'd fallen in love, and when you fall in love, you'd sometimes do things that are ill-advised. So it actually made me happy to see that our teacher was a flawed human being, subject to human failings and feelings, which I had always suspected anyway. So now we knew it. So I thought, well, why couldn't he stay in the community and somehow we could...

[17:32]

work things out, which turned out to be impossible. But I couldn't at the time understand why it would be that hundreds and hundreds of people who are intelligent and basically have goodwill couldn't manage to live together and work things out, especially when we had the practice and teaching to help us. But really, that was wrong, and it really was impossible. So I'm saying all this as background to what it was like in Green Gulch in the 1980s after that happened. In a word, we were in a state of utter collapse. Most of the smartest, most talented, and most committed people left Zen Center. And those of us who were left behind, felt pretty lonely and confused.

[18:36]

Green Gulch had always been a very expensive proposition. Maybe it was ill-advised in the first place to have Green Gulch, because even though we got it for almost nothing, to maintain it, keep it going. It was really, really expensive, and very little income was produced. But because Baker Roshi had so much confidence, We were all confident too. But without him, we not only had no teaching and no inspiration, but also no confidence that what we were devoting our lives to made any sense. And there was a lot of talk about how could we get rid of Green Gulch, how could we sell it off, so that we wouldn't have this big problem anymore. You can imagine how we felt, those of us living at Green Gulch at the time. It was very grim. One of the insights that we thought we gained from what we considered the utter disaster of the Beka Roshi times was that it is not good for one person to have so much power.

[19:59]

Beka Roshi was, and still is, a very inspiring, forceful, and visionary person. So we began to distrust that kind of leadership. So we created various processes of group decision-making. And we got a lot of help from different consultants. we weren't that good at decision making. In many ways, our practice didn't prepare us for it. Making decisions, even having preferences and goals and desires, seemed on the surface anyway, contrary to what we were learning in the Dharma. So, our administration was not too effective. Add to that the general discouragement and it's easy to see we were floundering Gringolch went through several directors and regimes all of which flopped in various ways and the people who were in charge of those regimes would always throw up their hands and quit precipitously handing it off to somebody else who would do the same thing

[21:27]

Kathy and I and our sons, Aaron and Noah, had moved to Green Gulch from five years at Tassajara in about 1980 or 81. I forget exactly when. So we were here during this whole period. And we had no idea what to do. Getting through every day was always a great victory. We couldn't leave. because we had nowhere to go. We had children. We had no money in the bank. But we were given funds by both Zen centers at our request to move for a year to the Zen community of New York to study with Bernie Glassman, and we did that. We came back after a year, and Green Gulch was still in pretty bad shape. It was reaching the bottom of the barrel, the end of its rope, with no light at the end of the tunnel.

[22:41]

Pretty bad. In utter despair, with no one else stupid enough to do it, the Green Gulch community elders asked me to be the director. It was a desperate choice because I was not a serious Zen-centered person. I was a poet, not practical, uninterested in leadership and administration. But there was nobody else. So I said, well, I'll do it on one condition. What's your condition? I'll do it if I'm granted absolute power. I actually said that. Absolute power. And I had conversations with all the different people, you know.

[23:44]

And I said, I'll do it if you grant me absolute power. Will you grant me absolute power? They thought I was crazy, you know. They didn't know what I was talking about. They thought, oh yes, the poet. They say things like this, these poets. So they said, okay, absolute power. What I meant by this, as I tried to explain to them, was that I wanted to actually do things. Up till then, nobody could do anything because the main function of all our leadership groups and committees seemed to be to make sure that no one person took the lead, since we thought we had direct experience that when one person takes the lead, bad things happen.

[24:47]

But the consequence of this was that instead of doing things, the various leadership groups seemed dedicated to making sure that no one was able to do anything. So when I asked for absolute power, what I was saying was, that there was no point in me or anybody else being director if you couldn't do things. That if there were no decisions coming from the group, other than decisions about what could not be done, then since I had absolute power, I would make decisions. I could consult with people, but even if there was not universal agreement, even if there were serious objections coming from some quarters, I would go ahead. So that's what I meant. And that's what I did. At least this is my story. I know that those of you who were here at the time or heard about it at the time because you were at Zen Center might remember it differently.

[25:51]

So earlier than this, when we were deep in the doldrums and we were trying to figure out what was going on. We hired a consultant. We had many, many helpers in those days, many people who volunteered to help us figure out what to do. And I remember one person who had us in meetings, and this was very striking to me. One of the questions that he had was, so what's good about Green Gulch? What's positive? What buoys you up? And I remember we agreed that what was positive was when people came from the outside to Green Gulch, which they did on Sundays. In those days, Green Gulch was pretty much closed to visitors. Nobody came, except on Sundays. But they came on Sundays, and they loved it. They'd come to Green Gulch, and it made them happy. And they thought, Green Gulch is such a marvelous place. What a great community. What great people.

[26:57]

And of course, when people came and felt that way, it made us feel better temporarily because we could see Green Gulch through their eyes. Of course, we realized they didn't know the truth. It wasn't like that at all. We were miserable. We were not getting along as a community. It wasn't the way they thought it was. But I remember that insight. So we decided to open Green Gulch up. And there were a lot of really important community members who were dead set against this because they thought Zen is not the public coming. Zen is quiet, closed, only for committed people. And they had a point. But doing it that way, the way we had been doing it, was not sustainable.

[28:01]

And I thought, if we open Green Gulch up to the public much more, as we always had on Sundays, it was going to change things a lot. In those days, it was more or less forbidden to invite other Zen teachers or other Buddhist teachers in. And this was not only true at Zen Center, it was kind of common in a lot of Dharma groups then. Everybody followed their own teaching and their own teacher. And other teachings and teachers were considered not quite right. Anyway, we were trying to learn the Dharma. We didn't know anything about it. And if we had all kinds of teachers coming, maybe we'd get confused. This one says this, that one says that. So that's the way it was. But I thought, if we want people to come, we need something for them to come for.

[29:06]

So I tried to find teachers who were willing to come at Green Gulch and teach us and anybody else who wanted to come. Now, this was before there was a place called Spirit Rock. There was no Spirit Rock. The Passana movement was on the East Coast only. But Jack Kornfield had moved to this area, and he was looking for a place to do his all-day sits once a month. Somehow or other we made contact with him, and he began to do his monthly sits at Green Gulch. And he was very popular, as he still is, and hundreds of people would come to these sittings. And I remember we Zen students working around, walking around outside and doing things on the farm or whatnot, watching. the Vipassana students outdoors during their walking meditation periods when they would walk like great blue herons, you know, one slow, exaggerated, you know, lifting, placing, so on, step after the other, and we would walk by and make fun of them.

[30:19]

Looks so silly, you know. Of course, the way we walk in Kinhin, one half step at a time, with our hands in Shashu postures is a perfectly normal and reasonable way for a person to walk, isn't it? But we were always very amused by the Vipassana students. And then also we made contact, I'm sure, although I can't remember, through Yvonne Rand, one of our pioneering Zen Center priests, with Bob Thurman. and Tara Tulka Rinpoche, who came from India with Bob translating to give retreats. And they were marvelous retreats and lots of people came to Gringold to attend them. Tara Tulka was a kind and learned person. I can see his face now still. Once he asked me about our practice, what exactly was our practice?

[31:27]

He had no idea, you know. What did we do? And I tried to explain him Dogen's teaching about Zazen. He was slabbergasted by this. He said that in his tradition, people studied the teachings on emptiness for a couple of decades and had to pass exams on these teachings before they could begin the non-dual meditation, which was itself a long careful and graduated course that took more decades, and here we were teaching more or less the same meditation practice to people who just showed up on a Sunday asking for zazen instruction, never studied Buddhism, and we expected that they were going to do this practice. He thought it was crazy, couldn't believe it. But I think that after some years of him coming, year after year, he began to be impressed with the fact that we could do this somehow.

[32:34]

Even though we really didn't know what we were doing, somehow we did do the practice. So I think he came to have some respect for it. We also invited the great Theravada nun Ayya Kema to come and give retreats here. Also many people that otherwise wouldn't have come. came because of her. She was a tremendous teacher and a wonderful person, and I really loved her. She reminded me very much of my Jewish grandmother. She looked like my Jewish grandmother, and she was practical, down-to-earth, plain-spoken. Actually, she was a Jewish grandmother who had fled Nazi Germany. There was this contingent of people who fled Germany and somehow ended up in China. That's what happened to her. And through China she toured all over Asia and eventually ended up in Sri Lanka where she ordained as a nun.

[33:36]

And she became a leading voice for Buddhism. And her influence on us and on me was strong. And also we had close relationships with other Theravada teachers. Ajahn Amuro became a close friend of mine. It was around this time, maybe a little bit later, that we introduced the Metta Sutta into the chant book. It's not chanted in Japanese Soto Zen as far as I know. And also we introduced the practice of chanting the Triple Ratchuj in Pali at the end of the day, something we had not done before. We invited great Zen teacher, Maureen Stewart Roshi, who by then had already started coming from the East Coast to do Sashen in California, and we said, well, why not do your Sashen at Green Gulch? And she did. She came every year, and many people came to practice with her.

[34:40]

We got to practice with her too, and Kathy became her close student, and I also became her student. She was a marvelously resolute person. He was a real presence in the Zendo and one of the first women Zen teachers to become widely known. During this same period, Katagiri Roshi from Minneapolis, who had been an assistant to Suzuki Roshi in the early days of Zen Center also came frequently. And I was lucky to be his Jisha and hang around with him. And for a year, he was our neuro abbot. And there were others and much more that happened. Those were the ones that came to my mind when I thought of this. So this was really something. Ingolch was turning inside out and upside down. And we went in a really short period of time from having almost no sense of purpose at all and being deeply discouraged to being proud of helping to maintain an important Dharma resource.

[35:53]

for the world. So opening up Green Gulch the way we did, did three things all at once. First, it gave us good teaching when we really needed good teaching. Second, it brought in many people who were enthusiastic about Green Gulch and their enthusiasm rubbed off on us and made us feel much better. And third, we became solvent. We could forward to stay here. I should mention that during this period, one of the people who was a great source of inspiration and energy for me was Gil Fransdell, who was a priest at Zen Center then. He had recently been touring Asia. He'd been in Japan. He came back with lots of good ideas. He's a very enthusiastic person, and we work together really closely.

[36:55]

People know him now as a Vipassana teacher. And he has two different centers, a city center and a retreat center in Silicon Valley. And he's created many training programs for chaplains and whatnot. I can't remember why he decided that Zen was not for him. Although he did maintain his connection to Zen, and he did, even while being a Vipassana teacher, receive Dharma transmission from our teacher, Sojin Roshi. But I think there was something about his experience of Zen, both here and in Japan, that he found lacking. And he thought Vipassana would be better for him. And he's still my good friend. To this day, I see them now on Zoom.

[37:56]

So maybe that's enough reminiscence for today. A lot happens in 50 years. A lot has happened at Green Gulch, Zen Center, The Western Buddhist movement, in my life, in your life, a lot of you, weren't even a thought 50 years ago. And a lot has happened in the world. But I'll tell you, 50 years is a short amount of time. Before you know it, it goes by. Looking back, it seems that those of us who were either noble enough or stupid enough to have given our whole lives to practice were really naive.

[39:12]

Of course we were naive. How could it be otherwise? So everyone's mistakes during that time, and there were many, many mistakes. Many of us made many mistakes. be by now forgiven we were all so young and we were all so arrogant without knowing we were arrogant and we had to be because if we really knew what we were getting into probably we wouldn't have gotten into it our arrogance was that we thought we knew what we were doing But the Dharma is like that. Buddha uses our blindness to help us eventually see. And I think we do.

[40:15]

Eventually. See. We see something anyway. Not everything, but something. I think today, the Western Buddhist movement is so much wiser than it was then. So many people practicing now. Many, many people. Young people, old people, men, women, all genders, races, cultures, social classes. Not only in the United States, but all over the Western world. And there's even Western Buddhism practiced in Asia, and there's even Asian Buddhism influenced by Western Buddhism because Western Buddhism just means modern world Buddhism. And these days, I know this is true in the everyday Zen Sangha, mature people come to practice.

[41:23]

In other words, people later in life coming, which was not so much the case in the past when It looked like Buddhism was a kind of youth movement. Now they complain that it's the opposite. But it's a good thing. Because it means that, by and large, people do understand what they're doing and why. They're old enough to know that human life is very beautiful. But it's also... a catastrophe. It's also really difficult. It is not easy to be alive and to suffer what will occur in a lifetime when you live in the world among others and you have a human body. Human beings really and truly need a teaching and a practice.

[42:32]

in a way of life, in a community. People suffer when they don't have that, a lot. Maybe Zen or Buddhism is not what we thought it was. Maybe it's not as colorful, as exciting as we thought it was. but it is a wise and solid way of life that takes you all the way through to the end. In Zen Center, Green Gulch, is an important anchor for the whole Western Buddhist movement. And it is a worthy thing to spend time maintaining it and supporting it.

[43:43]

As we began to understand in 1980s, the time that I've been talking about, Green Gulch isn't just for Green Gulch. It's not just for the people who live there for short or long periods of time. It's not even for the people who come to visit. It's for everyone. And we really need it. So now those of us who helped, who participated in the establishment of the Zen Center in our youth, and in its youth, are old people. Something that is very hard to get used to. Maybe there's no such thing as old.

[44:48]

It's just how it is. Creaky knees. A little less energy. Different thoughts and considerations. But we're old people. Zen Center is on the brink of continuing with a new generation of leadership. And this is a really, really wonderful thing. I know that some of our younger leaders are a little apprehensive about this. But you're going to do great. I have no doubt. Because Buddha is very smart. Buddha always provides what is needed. There are always setbacks. There are always crises.

[45:54]

Bad ones. But they are evidently the necessary setbacks and crises. Despite all the many, many mistakes, there are no mistakes. Thank you all very much for listening to my talk. I hope I didn't make you too sad or depressed or anything like that. I'm really grateful that you're here taking care of Green Gulch. It's a great thing you're doing. It's really important. Thanks too. dear friends and time of brothers and sisters of long ago who are still here holding down the fort. These other people wouldn't be here if you weren't here.

[46:59]

It's a great thing. For more information, visit sfzc.org and click Giving. May we fully enjoy the Dharma.

[47:49]

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