A few weeks ago, a guest student who hadn't been to Green Gulch for a long time asked me had I started to speak in the Zendo again. And when we compared notes, we found it's been over a year since I've sat at this place and had attempted to speak on the Dharma. So, when Lee DeBarros asked me yesterday, what are you going to talk about? I said, well, I'm going to tell the people how I started talking and why I stopped talking and why I'm starting to talk again. So, the theme of this morning's discourse will be a talk about talk. I wear glasses. I haven't got a hearing aid yet, but I do need notes, so please excuse me. How I started talking.

[01:01]

Sounds like something Charlie Brown would write for his term paper. What's his sister's name, that little wise girl? Sally? Lucy? No, no, Lucy is Linus's sister. Anyway, she always condenses it to one or two words, but this is going to be a long story. I'll get you out of here in time for lunch, okay? My mother was an elocutionist, and I don't know if any of you know what elocutionists did in the days before radio and television. We entertained ourselves, and she was very good at it. The ones that she was best at, I never got to hear because they were always at grown-up meetings, and evidently, they were slightly risque. I found some of her scripts later when I jimmied a drawer.

[02:04]

But she was good at her work, and naturally, she taught me. So by age five, I was speaking in public at church when the children had the service. I was on the first radio broadcast that did in our part of the world. And by age nine or ten, I was riding with the Civil War veterans in the Memorial Day Parade and doing Lincoln's Gettysburg Address from the steps of the monument without a public address system. And age 12, I earned my first money, something you've never seen, probably, a $10 gold piece, reciting the night before Christmas on a coast-to-coast network. And by the time I was 21, I was in the radio business and talking for a living. And when I came to Zen Center, I became a barker for the Buddha.

[03:13]

Step right up, step right up, we've got him on the inside. Shakyamuni Buddha, he walks, he talks, he flies like an eagle. And every time his golden body moves, it's supple and shiny as the Suwannee River. Now step right up, we got him on the inside. So I was very good at that. In fact, some people were telling me that I was better than everybody else. And please, would I talk more? And naturally, I like to hear that. So one day, I really turned you on. I don't know how many people may have been here on that fatal day, but it happened just as it sometimes does in the theater. I knocked it out. You all knocked it back to me. We kept this thing going. We took it over to the Wheelwright Center, took the roof off. And then in the middle of all that, I suddenly realized what I was doing. I was entertaining you. I was not talking Dharma, the truth.

[04:17]

I was putting on a show. And that really knocked me. So the next time I spoke, the last talk, this year ago talk, someone, not one, a number of people came up and said, sounded like you were reading your obituary. And they were right, because that was the obituary of this. You should have seen me when I started out. I had long, blonde curls down to here. Velvet suit. I mean, I was really something to see. So I did read the obituary of that child. And I'm not going to give you an example of my more lengthy poems that I did. And I'm not going to do the gestures. But while I was preparing these notes, I found myself going back to the poem by Charles Henley

[05:18]

called Invictus. Is there anyone in this room who recognizes either the author? Uh-oh. [...] I've got to watch. Great. Five of you. Now, I'm not going to do it like a little boy. But I am under the impact of this verse. Out of the night that covers me, black as the pit from pole to pole, I thank whatever gods there be for my unconquerable soul. In the fell clutch of circumstance, I have not winced nor cried aloud. Beneath the bludgings of fate, my head is bloody but unbowed. It matters not how straight the gate, how charged with punishment the scroll. I am the master of my fate. I am the captain of my soul. Now, I voice that on you today because that was a mantra for me. In all the life that I lived up till the time I came here, I lived by that vow.

[06:25]

No one was going to grind me down. And now that mantra that's so helpful is now the biggest hindrance in my practice because even the fact that I can remember it after 20 years of sitting on a cushion, you can see what I'm up against. So there I was, and now I have to get from where I was to where I am. Bodhisattvas are forces, people mostly, who appear when you need them most. And in this case, the Bodhisattva was a book. And one that rather surprised me because I had not been able to read for a year. Not speaking began to erode my ability to read. And I got down to mystery stories. And then I got down within the mystery genre to Simenon's May Gray and Rex Stout,

[07:31]

and then I couldn't even read those anymore. And I didn't write any poetry. So all of a sudden into this mess comes this book. 800,000 copies of it have already been sold. And it's Brief History of Time by the English cosmologist Hawking. And I'm not going to tell you anything about the book because I would love to spend the rest of the day talking about him and not about me. But halfway through the book, I put it down and I said, Why, he's speaking about dharmas. Now, in Buddhism, one of the main areas of understanding human life is a study called Abhidharma. And I was very excited when I first heard about it because I'm interested in how the wheels go around up here. But what they gave me were lists. 47 or 49 things on three different lists with numbers.

[08:36]

And I said, No way, man. I got out of that at college. So here I find a book and it's talking about dharmas. Now, what do I mean by dharmas? It's in the Heart Sutra. And dharmas are... Let's see if I can get the exact quote without remembering the whole... Oh, yes. They neither appear nor disappear, are not tainted nor pure. They neither increase nor decrease. They correspond roughly in the Western tradition to the atoms of the ancient Greeks. I guess it was Democritus, right? Please say so. Right. Democritus first conceived, What is this whole universe composed of when you get it down to the very essence of things? And so here is this modern physicist talking about something that I could understand because when I was at the Johns Hopkins in 1932,

[09:37]

the Copenhagen Conference on Atomics had just been held in Copenhagen where Einstein and Bohr and people like that wrote the script for the atomic age, and we got it in freshman physics. And a number of my associates went on to Alamogordo and built the bomb. But I got a religious hit out of it. I was a very devout Christian at that time and terribly disturbed by the truth of science, one of those basic conflicts between, quote, religion and, quote, science. So here was a chance for me to take science and put it at the service of my belief. And I wrote this paper on the scientific proof of the existence of God. And fortunately, the only copy has long since been lost. And I couldn't tell you what it was. But I was a great success. All the uptown churches, Sunday night for the young people,

[10:39]

get Hartman. He's got this God thing going. And I don't know what the kids thought about it. They probably didn't. But the parents and the ministers thought it was great. And then one day I happened to, this was the Depression, any time, any place in Baltimore in a cab for 25 cents, and I was all decked out in a Borsalino hat and a full-on scarf, pigskin gloves. And the cab driver looks at me and the address I gave him. He said, you don't want to go down there, Mac. That's the worst white slum in Baltimore. So I said, I got to preach there tonight. He says, your funeral. And it was. When I got there, the church was so poor they couldn't heat it. So they had service in the Sunday school room, big pot-bellied stove, red hot. And I'd been giving my pennies to the poor all my life, but I'd never smelled them before. And when that room got full and a lot of these people hadn't had a bath because their gas had been turned off, I knew that these people would not dig the scientific proof of the existence of God.

[11:43]

So I knew the Bible pretty well, and I found the verse at the end of the Beatitudes where Jesus preaches to the multitudes, and then they feed them all on the few loaves and fishes which the disciples had for their lunch. I don't know what I said. I may have spoken in tongues. It's impossible to say. But when it was over, women were weeping, men were embracing me and saying, if there's one left like you on earth, we are not lost. And I was so terrified of what I had blundered into that I went home through a sleet storm and got double pneumonia and never went back to church for about 20 years. Okay, so here I'm reading. Well, you really want to laugh? I didn't go back to the church until the Communist Party told me to about 20 years later. Now there's one for you. Okay? So here I am. I'm reading about dharmas. I'm back at the Johns Hopkins.

[12:47]

I'm in the middle of high particle physics, and then I say to myself, hey, I can write a new paper, this scientific proof of the non-existence of God. And then I said, hey, wait a minute. You've been studying Buddhism, and in Buddhism you don't come down on one side or the other. You don't say God exists. You don't say God doesn't exist. In fact, those are the things that the Buddha never paid any attention to, never entered into arguments or debates with people, because he was interested in only one thing, the nature of suffering and how to end that suffering. So then I said, wait a minute now. Is there anything left out of my scientific background that could be placed at the service of Buddhism the way I put high particle physics at the service of Christianity? So I began to search around and what's left of my mind,

[13:55]

and I came across a statement by Haldane. Now, I'm going to say some things from here on out, and I don't want anybody going away from here and saying there's this little old man out at Green Gulch who is telling everybody that science is Buddhism or that science proves Buddhism. What I would like to develop for the rest of the moments is how they both might be looking at the same thing. You know, the Buddha really could be conceived of as the first scientist in modern parlance because he directed his followers clearly observe, and that's all that a scientist does. He or she clearly observes, not what they're looking for, not what they'd like to find, not what they wish would be,

[14:58]

what is it that actually arises, how it matures, and how it fades away, even though it may only take a ten billionth of a ten billionth of a second, some of the speed with which these modern particles are now coming into existence and going out again. So you could say that there is a place where the Buddha and science are sort of in the same area. But what does science say on this question? And the one place where I got a little handhold was J.B. Haldane. He said a long time ago, probably about 50 years now, not only is the universe more complicated than we imagine, it is more complicated than we are able to imagine. Now that, to me, is a very important statement,

[16:03]

not just about science but about our lives. You just can't make a statement about anything and have it last for any length of time. In one of the Jewel Mirror Samadhi, which we chant in the morning at service, we say, underneath everything true eternity still flows. And soon as people say that light is a particle, some other scientist says light is a wave. And we have the same problem in Buddhism. We have gradual enlightenment and sudden enlightenment. But we also say that no matter how clearly you can understand either one of them, underneath the true eternity still flows. So it's flowing right as we're sitting here. It is flowing through us. Countless neutrinos are penetrating your body as I'm speaking. We don't know it. Scientists will tell you so, but you don't know it.

[17:03]

All kinds of things are happening that we don't know about. And if we attempt to stabilize that, make a form out of it, hold it down so we can look at it, then the flow is impeded. Okay. So I thought, well, I'm on a roll. I'll read another book. And I got hold of a book by Treffle called The Dark Universe. One of the problems that modern scientists have, as far as cosmology is concerned, is that they know all about how the universe began from their viewpoint, but they can't find about 60% of it. Up until a few years ago, it was called missing matter. Now they've changed their tune a little bit. They call it dark matter. It's there, but you can't see it. So Mr. Treffle, who is a very good, popular scientific writer, goes through the whole schmear, and then he describes to you the end of this universe as he sees it. And then he says a most wonderful line,

[18:07]

which I, if you remember, nothing else. Take this home with you. After giving you this whole rap on things that even the, I think another scientist would have a hard time understanding, he said, but it doesn't really matter. What matters is, have I been the best person that I could be? Now I submit that is, I don't know if he's a practicing Buddhist or not, but that man has really got it in balance. Here he is, dreaming up these fantastic worlds, ending these fantastic worlds, and then he just throws it away. I'd like to meet this guy. Then I thought that Haldane has said something else. He said, man needs both science and religion. Science to tell him the truth, and religion to help him live by that truth.

[19:11]

Okay, how could that statement, or those statements by Treffel and Haldane, impact, it's a word I just learned. I like to use it, I've never used it before. How does all this impact on our practice here at Green Gulch? Well, it's pretty simple, actually. Do you know, have you been aware, have you ever felt or discovered, that every proton within your body originated with the Big Bang? Think about that some morning. Or that the hard elements in you, like iron and carbon, were created by the supernovas, like the one that just blew up a few years ago over South America. Now, that's hard science, friends. Those are facts. And what do they mean to me today?

[20:13]

Well, one of the greatest difficulties that we have in practicing Buddhism, one that everyone has trouble with from the beginning, and some people have trouble with it and leave the practice of Buddhism, they cannot get over the idea that this self is real, and that we are all one. So on the second half of that, I present to you the thesis that these modern scientists have shown us, that we are all one. Now, when I say it like that, it becomes a philosophical statement. You can have an emotional reaction to it, you can call that religion. But it's something where we can begin to burrow towards the basic understanding of Buddhism from where we are today and in a language that sounds like we understand it.

[21:16]

Okay? But I'm talking, huh? How does this talk, all this talk, mean anything, even to me, much less to you? Well, Blanche and I sometimes go over to the First Unitarian Church in Berkeley and do a Zen weekend. And Dr. Boki, whose pastor, was one of Suzuki Roshi's first students. In fact, I think Richard Boki sat with Suzuki Roshi before anybody else in Zen Center did, if not awfully close to the first. So we're over there, and when you participate in a Zen weekend with people who are not practitioners except once a year, maybe they've read a few books, you get a lot of Buddha babble. And you can't be too hard on these folks

[22:21]

because they're trying to talk your language, you see. So we play it cool, and washing dishes and talking about the depths of enlightenment, you know, all of that groovy stuff. And we got on the question of emptiness. And Dr. Boki, in passing, said, The poet gives to airy nothing a local habitation and a name. It's from Shakespeare. I haven't been able to find the source. If anyone recognizes it, please tell me. The poet gives to airy nothing a local habitation and a name. Well, the scientists are doing that, too. You've all heard of electrons. You've probably, in high school or college, drawn those circles in the middle of the nucleus and around and around go little electrons.

[23:23]

Now they don't even believe their electrons are there. There's some sort of a hazy something, you know. So they give it what? A local habitation. They place it precisely a certain distance from the nucleus, and they give it a name, and they call it an electron. So here is the poet doing it, and here is the scientist doing what Shakespeare said. And then I thought, well, what about meditators? In the old days in Sri Lanka, when Buddhism came, there was an outpouring of scientific books, legal books, books on navigation, a great cultural uprising. But, as Kanze points out, meditation was left to older monks of inferior intelligence. So if there are any scientists in the audience today,

[24:26]

I will plead that my inferior intelligence is being placed at the service of my meditation. So what do we do when we sit on these cushions when you are not here? We clearly observe. And what do we clearly observe? If we're lucky, there is no self to be got at. Day after day, week after week, year after year, life after life, we sit on these cushions, and hopefully one day we will be able to see what we talk about, namely that there is nothing there. That can be got at. Oh, sure, you can say Lou Hartman, a.k.a. Shuwin Mitsusen,

[25:27]

is located at this particular point within the zendo. Helps you know which way you're going, but it doesn't tell you anything about life. Metaphor for this self. Holograms. Not the ones that they put on magazine covers, but the ones that you reach out to grasp and find there's nothing there. Well, there's real light, and there's real polarization, which Mr. Wheelwright could tell me all about. And there's the turntable that revolves the object, and there's the camera, and there's the film and the camera. All of these things are, quote, real, unquote, but you put them all together, and you can't get at it. So you put all these things together that we call a self, name, hairdos, history, family, wedding license, car license, you name it.

[26:29]

There's nothing there. All right, now we're going to end right on time. How about that? If I can find the last... Ah, here it is. Okay. So, Sixth Chinese Ancestor says, From the beginning not a thing is. This is a statement about all of this empty nothingness that we've been talking about. So, one monk asked another monk, If the Sixth Chinese Ancestor says, From the beginning not a thing is, and I say, therefore we make it all up, what do you say? And without drawing a breath, the other monk replied, From the beginning not a thing is, and therefore we have to make it all up. Okay, we're down to where the wheels go around. If there is nothing, and at the same time we have to make it all up,

[27:36]

what are we going to make up? Well, I don't know about you guys, but in this Green Dragon Zen Temple, as Tanto Norman Fisher has more than once reminded us, what we make up here are bodhisattvas. Now, what is a bodhisattva? Bodhisattva is a word. Nothing more or less. Nothing more or less. The Prajnaparamita literature is filled with admonitions that when you say bodhisattva, all you're doing is blowing some wind through your larynx. Well, that doesn't encourage you very much, does it? But, in the good book, it also says, in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was God.

[28:38]

So, here this 17-year-old preacher, and the cosmologist Hawking, and the sixth Chinese ancestor, and John, who wrote this particular book, this particular gospel, all seem to come very close together. From the beginning, now, the thing is, so put a word in. For us, what's the word? Bodhisattva. For Mr. Treffle, Dr. Treffle, who wrote The Dark Universe, to be the best person I possibly can be. Once in this room, at the end of a session, Baker Roshi was giving a lecture, and at the end of the lecture, questions came,

[29:39]

and he got in a really fast mondo with one of the monks. It was like a tennis match. Bang, bang, [...] and then, bong! And the monk says, Well, if that's so, I'd be a Buddha. And Baker Roshi said, Don't you want to be a Buddha? There was this long silence, and all the time I'm saying, Say yes, say yes, say yes, say yes. I want him to be a Buddha. But that is an example of how you could make a transition from this made-up self that you have been making up since the word go. All your life, you've been making it up. Each one of us is a self, as individual as the fingerprints. How would that self become a bodhisattva?

[30:45]

Well, you give it a name, and then you read in the literature, What does a bodhisattva do? And how does a bodhisattva act? And how does a bodhisattva put on his or her clothes? And how does a bodhisattva walk? And how does a bodhisattva sit? So, you give to airy nothing a local habitat. That word local is so important. It's not somewhere out there. Right here, local, you know, right close to you. A habitation, a place, and a name, bodhisattva. Hmm. Now, this has been going on, you see, for 2,500 years. And the meditation that underlies this activity

[31:54]

has been going on, Lama Govinda has traced it back 30,000 years. They found figurines in cross-legged meditation, carbon date around that time. There are other, Buddha did not invent this, this is what I'm saying. It was in the air in India. I've come across a meditative treatise that's 4,000 years old, and a lot of it is on breath, which is a yogic practice. So here is this ancient thing from a far part of the world, completely alien, completely foreign. What are we doing mucking about with this stuff? Well, what I've tried to tell you this morning gives me an encouragement to think that it's not ancient and alien at all. That Buddha was on to something through the medium of this meditation.

[32:56]

Well, and you all can say, yeah, but ancient India wasn't at all like modern technological society. Well, you should go back and read if you can. It's not very well documented because the atmosphere in India has eradicated most of the ancient artifacts that have remained. But when you study it, you find that the times today and the times in Buddha's time are identical in one basic thing. An entire culture was disintegrating. The Aryans who had come down and created the vast culture of the Upanishads and the Vedas, the magic qualities of the priesthood couldn't hold it together anymore, and India was going down the tubes. Starvation. Torture that I will not attempt to recount.

[34:04]

It would make some of the things that you read about these days seem like child's play. City-states were merging. Money was beginning to come into circulation. Wars as we know them now had begun. And to really put it all together for me, the Buddha witnessed the genocide of the Shakyas. Twice he sat by the road as the enemy came in, and twice they turned back because they knew the Buddha, and the third time the king's advisors prevailed and the Buddha's people were wiped out. Now I submit that if the Buddha could penetrate the nature of his times through this form of meditation and give us the guidance and clues

[35:09]

on how we can do it, that in the times that we are living in, and I'm sure all of you at least either see one newspaper, you might even read the San Francisco Comical from time to time, or the TV, you know where we are. I don't have to tell you that. So what I am saying is that thanks to all that I have been able to be educated in up to and including these last 20 years, the word bodhisattva puts me on the mark. Now I may sit and cheer for that young man who came this far and stopped. I don't know if I've gotten into the floorboards or enough time to continue,

[36:10]

but I know that I have. And I think I've made the transition, and it has been a great privilege to me to put myself in the presence of all of you as witnesses, and I give you all carte blanche to tug on my okesa any time you see me getting off the mark. Now you, many of you, have been here before, and you know how we conclude, the chant that we conclude. There's one that I would like to tell you about that you would have to come at five in the morning to chant with us. When we put on our robes, our okesas or arakasus, the little bibs for baby Buddhas that some of us wear, we say, Great Robe of Liberation,

[37:12]

Field Far Beyond Form and Emptiness, Wearing the Tathagata's Teaching, Saving All Beings. Great Robe of Liberation, Field Far Beyond Form and Emptiness. All of this wave and particle, sudden enlightenment, gradual enlightenment, form and emptiness, anything that you can do to split the continuity of the flow is, I guess, if Buddhists use the word sin, would be a sin. I mean, this is our basic teaching. There's right and there's left, there's right and there's wrong, there's up and there's down, there's black and there's white, there's heaven and hell, man and woman, good and bad, da-dah, da-dah, da-dah, da-dah. And as you practice, someday you can feel that before there's a right and a left, there's a one, and out of this one, all of this stuff goes, and the wonderful thing about it is

[38:15]

it's all empty. It's an airy nothing to which we give the name of right and left and so on. So let's take a few vows now, make you all bodhisattvas. You didn't know it was going to happen to you, but you're stuck, you can't leave now. May our intention be that you're stuck,

[38:39]

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