So good morning again everybody. Some of you were probably here last night to hear the knockout performance of Mountains and Rivers Without End, which I realized last night is actually the crystallized and distilled version of what we're going to hear today, when you come down to it. I'm Norman Fisher, Abbot of Zen Center, co-abbot of Zen Center. And you know, at Zen Center we have a study curriculum, because Buddhism is really vast and you don't know what to study, there's so many things to study. So we figured out, a number of years ago, a study curriculum which we call the Five Root Curriculum, five topics that we study. The first one is The Life of the Buddha and the Early Teachings. The second one is Buddhist Psychology. The third one is The Teachings of Emptiness.

[01:02]

The fourth one is Ethics and Compassion, and the fifth one is Zen, classical texts we study. And when we reviewed this curriculum about a year ago, we realized that something was missing. So we decided to change the curriculum and add to those five root studies a sixth root study, which we're about to kind of unveil and begin in the spring, called Contemporary Buddhist Practice. And the reason why we opened up that sixth root is because we realized that something new was going on in Buddhism, based on a continuation of all the teachings of the past, but that contemporary Buddhism is actually a different animal. And what's happened in Buddhadharma in the last forty, fifty years, with its transmission to the West, and then, interestingly enough, from the West back to Asia, is a whole new

[02:10]

turning of the wheel. And so Gary Snyder was around and was working on this question from the early beginnings of that new turning of the wheel. So, to hear him speak about those times in a personal way, not only historical fact, but also feeling and sense of what it was, is really, really important for us to hear. So this is a real special day for Gary to talk to us and also hear from us. I think he'll let us know how we can participate by asking questions and probing, so that we can all share together in a deeper understanding of what this last period of the turning of the wheel has been. So I am really, really delighted that we were able to get him to show up, and Carol, which

[03:18]

is not easy to do, I'll tell you the truth. So we're lucky, and so please enjoy the day with Gary Snyder. Thanks, Norman. Please be relaxed and make yourself comfortable, and this is going to be a kind of a family gathering. I want you to feel free to raise questions and bring up your thoughts anytime you feel like it. It's a real pleasure to be able to do this. Norman raised the possibility of me coming down and doing a talk or two here at Green Gulch three years ago, and for three years we've been trying to figure out when one

[04:23]

might do that. I mean, that sounds silly, doesn't it? But that's partly because I'm a situated person. I'm situated in the Yuba watershed of Northern California, a river system that comes out of the Sierra Nevada, laps into Nevada County, Yuba County, and Sierra County. And as a person of place, I live a life that is very much engaged with my own community and my own local sangha, as well as being on the faculty at the University of California 50% time, and also keeping up my connections and my responsibilities, so to speak, to the world of poets and cultural revolutionaries and dharma characters internationally, and trying to figure out what's going on, you know, like everybody else.

[05:26]

Only I've just, I've been confused longer than some of you. I recognize many old friends' faces here today, and realize that, of course, you know, I'm just, you know, whatever story I'm telling is just part of a story that others here have got another chunk of, that it would take all of us to put this story together. And some of you have been following these paths virtually as long as I have. I am, however, as I've recently realized, the oldest person in the English department at UC Davis. I used to think I was the youngest. But as time goes on, you sort of outlast them all. I have to keep rethinking, you know, the chancellor of the university is younger than I am. I don't think he realizes that. Now that I have finished working through the writing of Mountains and Rivers without end,

[06:43]

which was a very absorbing artistic project over the last seven or eight years, and it would be a whole topping in itself to talk about how it feels to be an artist and at the same time a practicer of the Dharma. Because I think that the artist's engagement, concentration, focus, and also the complex of what you might call the responsibilities that go with being an artist have qualities of their own and limitations of their own that are a little different from some of the other roles that we might play. Like being an artist, you can't be sociable. You can't even be nice, you know, a lot of the time. So it's a different kind of a demand. Being done with that, I am turning back toward reflecting a little bit on the larger picture of my own involvement with the cultural affairs of the last 40 years.

[07:48]

And what I would call what I'd like to do today is situating the Dharma, so to speak. That is to say, I don't want to talk about how great it is to get enlightened or propose that you do that or propose that there's this good way to do it and that good way to do it. What I want to talk about is how we ever got the idea that you can get enlightened and how problematical that is in some ways and what that means in terms of the evolution of our own culture, whatever that is. How problematical the idea of an American culture is right now. We have four hours. We'll take a break after one hour. We'll have lunch after the second hour. After lunch, we'll come back. We'll have another hour, a break, and a fourth hour. Roughly, I'd like to divide it up this way. The first segment of post-World War II Bay Area Buddhist characters, people, thoughts,

[08:58]

and reasons, and stories, and gossip. And gossip is where it's really at. That's what T.K. Bay hears. Two hours of that. And then for another segment, I'd like to talk about Asian Buddhism. Traditional Buddhism, particularly in Japan. And what Asian Buddhism is and what it's not. And why there's nothing intimidating about it. And a little bit of the gossip and stories about what was going on back there across the other side of the Pacific with these guys who became the teachers over here before they came over here. I know why Sasaki Joshu Roshi had to leave Japan and come to Los Angeles.

[09:59]

Nothing too shocking. So we'll try to go through some of the topics that are part of what you might call Asian Buddhism. And what are some of the key points that we might want to look at. Like, why do you wear black? What does that mean? And where does that come from? And then for the rest of the time after lunch, roughly, see if we can talk about a North American practice. And what Norman was suggesting that we are interested in. Which, of course, we all are. What would a North American practice be? And how are we getting there? That's the way I'm looking at it, roughly. And as I said, you know, let's try to stay within those territories so that we can kind of cover that ground. But within the territory that we're in at any given time,

[11:15]

please feel free to raise a question or pursue something a little bit. And see how that works for us. And of course, some of this is going to be my own personal story because I come into this in my own quirky way. And we all come into these things in our own quirky ways. And I have been, as a poet and as a political cultural figure in American culture, as well as a dharma practicer, I've been somewhat marginal, complicated, problematic to myself among the more radical and among the more orthodox, among the more traditional and among the more groundbreaking. One of the best behaved and one of the worst behaved in the history of dharma practice in the last 40 years. And I haven't improved in certain ways.

[12:19]

So, some of you here remember all of this. So, the 50s, let's look at the 50s. Right after World War II, with that remarkable kind of psychological switching that takes place in big events. Directly after the American victory in the Pacific War, the surrender of Japan, combat soldiers, combat navy and combat army people from the Pacific War were not sent in to the occupation of Japan. None of the combat troops were ever sent into the Japanese occupation. As soon as the surrender was announced,

[13:23]

the combat troops were pulled back and were returned to the United States and let out of the army. And the people who went in as occupation troops were new troops recently drafted who had never seen combat against the Japanese. This was a deliberate policy. This was, for obvious reasons, not to complicate matters by having guys driving around in jeeps on the streets of Yokohama in Tokyo, newly arrived, maybe just there a week, soldiers who had seen their buddies killed in war. What that meant was that the American soldiers who went into Japan were not nearly so conditioned and qualified by the events of combat. And what they found was a friendly population. Burton Watson, the great translator and scholar of Chinese and Japanese,

[14:31]

was with the Navy. He was a Navy interpreter. He was one of the very first people to go ashore off of the aircraft carriers that were out in Yokosuka Bay. And to actually walk the streets of Yokohama after the surrender papers were signed. He was like in the very first wave. He said they went ashore with arms and guns and fear and trepidation and were expecting hostility, possible sniping on the streets. They weren't sure what they were going to run into. Within four or five hours, they were drinking tea and beer in bars and having chats with people. And what happened, I'm describing that as how the kickoff of a totally new attitude towards Asia and towards Japan came about. So that within a few years, just three or four years after the end of the Pacific War, Americans were trying out Japanese cooking.

[15:35]

And Japanese aesthetics became a key item in Sunset Magazine and Vogue through the 50s. The aesthetic ideal of shibui or asperity, dryness, was proposed. And the translations of Blythe, R.H. Blythe's translations of haiku, a whole wave of Japanese cultural items came into, especially here on the west coast, what was from five years earlier, a hostility towards Japan, towards a tremendous openness towards Japanese culture and Japanese aesthetics. Good question.

[16:47]

Yeah, why were the Japanese so open or able to be non-hostile? I've talked with Bert Watson and Phil Yampolsky and others who were in the occupation about that. And they said, well, frankly, there were hostile people here and there, but they held back, kept their mouths shut. And partly it was, you know, some of the characteristics of Japanese culture were indeed to accept the instructions that came down from the top. And when the emperor himself announced on the radio that the war was over, that was an extraordinary turn for everybody. Now, Nao Sakaki, whom some of you know, the wandering poet and shamanistic Buddhist practicer, he calls himself a teacher of Fox Zen. And he said that on a radio interview that he and I were on together in Australia once.

[17:51]

And the interviewer asked him, well, Mr. Sakaki, what is Fox Zen? He said, oh, it's a kind of Zen where you fool people. Now there was a radar man in the Navy, and he describes how they were all called to attention out in the yard. And they said, but at such and such an hour, the emperor is going to make an announcement. They turned on the radio, and the emperor spoke in incomprehensible grammar because he has his own grammar that nobody else knows, you know, imperial level Japanese. Only the top aristocrats use that grammar. So nobody understood it, but somebody interpreted it and said, the emperor has said that we are now surrendering and you must be peaceful. And they turned off the radio. This is the story Nao tells. And then their commanding officer said, everyone get out their service revolver. We are all going to shoot ourselves.

[18:52]

It is time to commit suicide. And one of the junior officers said, wait a minute, let's listen to the radio a little more. So they turned it back on. And there was a quick message which was, oh, yes, the emperor forgot to say, and don't commit suicide. Yes. Soldiers, but they were afraid that the U.S. soldiers would behave punitively in the same way that their own soldiers behaved in other countries. And so they were really afraid.

[19:55]

It was a long period. They were bundled, basically, to try to stay about late. They thought that they were going to be funded in late. Uh-huh. [...] And so there were people like Bert and Phil who were good enough at Japanese. They had been trained in the Monterey Language School and the Boulder Japanese Training School that they could go in there and talk in Japanese. And the troop discipline was excellent, you know, the American troop discipline. And as I said, these guys had not been in combat.

[20:56]

They weren't angry. So they did not go ashore and commit, as the Japanese had been told, they should be afraid of, perhaps, at least earlier in the war, all kinds of violence and rape and so forth. The American soldiers behaved themselves quite peaceably, and, you know, they were just interested in looking around. So everybody relaxed in fairly short order, and the experience of soldiers in the occupation was a very positive experience. They found people friendly and helpful. They were also struck by the poverty and the destruction of Tokyo and Yokohama, the suffering and pain that the ordinary people were living in. And so they more or less pitched in to help. And it was, you know, in the annals of war in history, the occupation of Japan is not a terrible story. It worked out better than anyone would have imagined. And we're still trying to understand, you know. We're still learning these cross-cultural differences

[21:56]

between traditional Asian people and North Americans as to how these cultural attitudes enable things to happen in this way. The reason I mention this is because the 50s was not just a time here on the West Coast where an interest in Buddhism arose, but it was part of a cultural ambience that is a little harder to pin down. Part of that ambience was it was the era of abstract expressionism in painting, of improvisatory jazz, and it clicked miraculously well with the idea of spontaneity and immediacy, as in haiku, and the kind of Buddhism that was presented in the writings of D.T. Suzuki, who made, and then the popularizer of that, a fine man, whom I respect highly, named Alan Watts,

[22:56]

that made the language of Zen, especially as it came through Alan Watts, sound very much in line with, very much appropriate to, the aesthetic and style interests of the 50s. It just all clicked together somehow in a way that would have been unpredictable, but it made it a very lively moment in time, and particularly a lively moment in time here in Northern California, in the Bay Area, where there was an independent, strong artistic community, composers like Harry Parch over in Sausalito, a circle of painters who arose into considerable prominence, working with some of the same ideas, highly, extraordinarily well-read and thoughtful poets like Kenneth Rexroth, who said to Jack Kerouac, the first time Jack went to his house on a Friday evening soiree,

[24:05]

a regular Friday evening thing at Kenneth's, always a circle of people there talking on Friday evenings, and Jack says, he had just come from the East Coast, he said, you guys are talking about Buddhism, and Kenneth said, this is in 1952, Kenneth said, oh Jack, everybody's a Buddhist in San Francisco. This is in 1952. And it wasn't so much Buddhism as it was pacifism. There was a strong pacifist impulse in the Bay Area that was connected to an anti-Soviet and anti-capitalist politics. And it was that little node of people who founded Pacifica Foundation and founded KPFA. Some of them were just back from the conscientious objectors camp up in Walport, Oregon.

[25:07]

So we started off, right after World War II, Northern California and the Bay Area started off running in these matters. I came down here from the Pacific Northwest and had stumbled onto my thoughts about Buddhism partly through ethics, partly through my own almost native deep concern for nature and for the question of how we relate to and what our obligations toward non-human beings is. Feelings and values that I just held without conscious reason, except feeling, but impressed by and very much taken with the fact that Buddhist ethics, as I discovered somewhere along the line,

[26:09]

the first precept of ahimsa, was an ethic of non-harming and an ethic of respect that extended to the whole natural world. And with very little more than that, I thought, ah, this is very interesting, I want to find out more about this. Later I was able to find out how much else there was in Buddhist thought and in Buddhist practice that made it all the richer. When I came down here from Oregon, somehow I'd heard about Alan Watts. So I looked up Alan Watts over at the Academy of Asian Studies. So these are some of the nodes from the 50s. One was the Academy of Asian Studies, located over in San Francisco. First started by Frederick Spielberg, and then Alan Watts became director of it. He just arrived from Illinois, where he had been the chaplain for Northwestern University

[27:18]

and had gone from being a Christian to a Buddhist, and from a Buddhist back to being a Christian. That was how he did the chaplaincy at Northwestern. And then right on, in the process there, decided that he was really a Buddhist and not a Christian. And came out then to the West Coast and with Frederick Spielberg and a few others started the Academy of Asian Studies in San Francisco, which became a real center for a lot of us. That's where I first met Claude Dallenberg and Locke McCorkle, who were attending, dropping in on the lectures that Alan Watts, in particular, the lectures that Alan Watts gave. Another node of the 50s that we all connected with, or many of us connected with, was the Berkeley Buddhist Church in Berkeley. A Jodo-Shin, pure land, Japanese-American Buddhist center.

[28:23]

That was my first contact with people who were culturally, traditionally, family, unembarrassed and totally natural Buddhists. In other words, not people like myself who were reading books and talking Mahayana philosophy or trying to figure out how to do Zazen, but people who were just Buddhists. And that was wonderful for all of us who began to go to the Friday night study group meetings over in Berkeley, hosted by the Berkeley Buddhist Church on Channing Way. Open to people of all description, the greater part of the people attending it, Japanese-American college students, Berkeley students. But Alan Watts turned up there and gave talks. There was a Tibetan Lama, Lama Tada, who was in residence. Alex Wayman, who went on to become a major scholar of Tibetan Buddhism

[29:31]

based at Columbia University, was one of the graduate students who visited there regularly. Glenn Grosjean, who still travels to Japan and Korea periodically, following his Buddhist practice. Many other fine people. Many of whom I've known for years. Tai Unno, who became like the major scholar of Jodo Shin Buddhism, were all there in that circle. Jodo Shin got kind of lost in the shuffle, got kind of lost to the consciousness through the 60s and 70s of new people who kept coming in, new Caucasian people who kept coming into Buddhism. For those of you who aren't so well acquainted with Jodo Shin, the Pure Land sect of Buddhism following in the line of Shinran, it is the major school of West Coast Buddhism. It had, not too long ago,

[30:37]

something like 400 temples, churches, and chapels up and down the West Coast. California, Oregon, and Washington. Jodo Shin temples out in valley towns like Cortez, like Sacramento, Modesto, Bakersfield, going back to the 20s and before. Strong Jodo Shin temple right now, active and well, in South Central LA. The priest there of the Jodo Shin temple there, Masakodani, whom I knew in Kyoto when he was doing his training at the Honganji, has been a hardcore supporter of staying in the neighborhood and working with black people in the neighborhood in his Jodo Shin church. The peculiar, quiet, soft-spoken nature of Jodo Shin

[31:43]

has been such that more energetically practice-minded, you know, want to try something difficult and hurt themselves white folks, have not been able to see its subtlety a lot of the time. But the remarkable pair, Jane Imamura and Reverend Kanmo Imamura, who hosted the Friday evening study group meetings at the Berkeley Buddhist Church through the 50s, touched the hearts of many people who have gone out and have been involved in Buddhist practice in very many other schools later, so that it's not at all false to say that almost every branch of Caucasian Buddhist practice

[32:45]

here on the West Coast today has had some karmic connection at some point with the Berkeley Buddhist Church and Jodo Shin. And these are relationships that are not over. You know, this is still weaving back and forth, and Jodo Shin itself, West Coast Jodo Shin, is looking very deeply into its own practice right now, its own practice which is no practice, you know. Jodo Shin, do nothing. Anything that you try to do is going to stand in the way. We'll come back to that maybe. And then the university, with Dr. Ferdinand Lessing in charge of Mongolian and Tibetan studies, with graduate students like Alex Wayman, or in the Chinese department, Peter Budberg and Ed Schaefer, both of whom had a sardonic attitude toward Buddhism.

[33:49]

When I first went to enter the Chinese and Japanese departments at Berkeley as a graduate student in 1952 or 3, the graduate advisor then was Ed Schaefer. And Ed said to me, well, why do you want to study classical Chinese? You know, you'd ask that to anybody. And I said, well, because I want to get a sense of what the education of a Tang Dynasty person was at the point that they then decided to become a Zen student. And he said, oh, are you interested in Zen? I said, yes. This is 1952. He says, everybody wants to study Zen these days. What I want is somebody who's interested in Tang Dynasty material culture. I said, I'm sorry to disappoint you, Dr. Schaefer, but I will try to look at material culture, too. And so I was, you know,

[34:52]

admitted to studying there in that department. And actually, you know, Budberg and Schaefer, with all of their sort of ironic attitudes towards these things, were great scholars, greatly helpful. And I commend the works of Dr. Edward Schaefer to you. He did exactly what he was interested in, namely material culture. But believe me, it's a fascinating topic. His book, The Golden Peaches of Samarkand, UC Berkeley Press, out of print now, but in libraries, chronicles the trade between Persia and Anatolia in China during the Tang Dynasty. You wouldn't believe how fascinating that is. And another of his books, The Vermilion Bird, is an account of Chinese relationships with what we now call Vietnam and Cambodia and Laos between the 9th and the 13th centuries. And a number of interesting cultural exchanges there,

[35:59]

including the history of the Chinese discovery of incense and the importation of incense from Southeast Asia into China, which is still going on. Fascinating little details. And then Schaefer went on to become a scholar of medieval Taoism and Chinese astronomy. So his great book on Chinese astronomy is called Pacing the Void. So, great teachers, great teachers. Um... Alan Watts. It was so much in our minds at that time. Locke. I don't know whether you noticed, but when his son Mark was publishing his books, he handed me a book that had several treatises on Buddhism by Alan Watts, published in 1930.

[37:01]

Alan was born in 1915. These were learning treatises published by the Buddhist Society in London. He said before they talked him out of it, you know, because he said he was enlightened early, and they talked him out of it. They said, you're too young. You couldn't improve. Yes? Now, Watts was some kind of boy genius. There's no doubt about it. And also middle-aged genius, you know, as he got older. With an irrepressible confidence that enabled him to hold to his view of Buddhism, you know, without wavering, hold to his view of Zen,

[38:04]

without wavering his whole life. That itself was kind of a koan, is to see Alan's confidence in his own path. I don't remember if all of this is in Rick Field's book or not, but Alan left England when he was 19 or 20 at the outbreak of the war. I'm not sure if that was exactly his age. And within the relatively small circles of Caucasians interested in Buddhism, made contact right away when he came to New York with Ruth Sasaki and Soke-yan, the roshi who was teaching in New York at that time. And, of course, Ruth Sasaki was Ruth Everett, or Ruth for Everett, who took the name Sasaki when she married him during the war.

[39:07]

The reason that she married him, they say, or she says, is to keep him out of the camps. But the fact was, he was in the camp anyway. I guess when they got married, she got him out of the camp. Anyway, Alan met Ruth Sasaki and her household as a young man. And Ruth had a daughter by her marriage to Mr. Everett, who had been a Chicago stockbroker. And Alan ended up marrying Ruth Sasaki's daughter, Eleanor. So there was like a very sort of in-the-world of English-speaking Buddhists little sort of top-level marriage. Christmas Humphrey's protégé and the daughter of Ruth Sasaki who was possibly the first American to ever study Zen in Japan in the 30s. And what little centers there were of Zen practice at that time,

[40:16]

the First Zen Institute of New York, founded by Ruth Everett Sasaki, was almost it. So Alan was right in there. And he and Eleanor were together still when they went to Northwestern University and when he was the chaplain there. Then they got divorced shortly after that. And I guess when he came out here to the West Coast, he had remarried at that time to another person. But very small circles and very interned circles for a while at that time. It was Ruth Sasaki who got me to go to Japan. I was a graduate student at Berkeley studying Japanese and Chinese. It was in my plan to try to get to Japan somehow.

[41:16]

I didn't have much of a clue how to do it other than, well, I'd better learn the language anyway. And I had a fascination with classical Chinese poetry. That was really one of my reasons for studying with Schaefer and the great Chinese scholar Chen Shixiang. So I was working away learning classical Chinese and taking courses in spoken and written Japanese and doing my Buddhist studies and sharing an apartment with Phil Boylan. And yeah, the Berkeley Buddhist Church, going to the Berkeley Buddhist Church Friday night meetings and bringing Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg to some of those Berkeley Buddhist Church Friday night meetings. So that two of the traditional Japanese American Asian Buddhist circles in Berkeley in the 50s, Jack Kerouac gave a lecture. This is true.

[42:17]

And he was deeply steeped in the Lotus Sutra. He had read the Lotus Sutra and practically memorized passages of it in one of the old translations. How was it that Jack Kerouac had read the Lotus Sutra, you might ask. When he was working on the railroad as a brakeman across Texas and Oklahoma and then later between Los Angeles and San Francisco on those runs, there were certain towns that they would drop the men off in for three or four days at a time. Then they would pick up another job and go on from there. Key little railroad towns. And those key little railroad towns had dormitories for the unmarried men that worked for the railroad. And they had public libraries, good old Carnegie libraries. So Jack discovered the series edited by Max Miller

[43:19]

called Sacred Books of the East. Big, hard-bound, brown-backed, 13 or 14-volume series of books, the Sacred Books of the East. They were in and possibly still are in every public library in America. And Jack started reading the Lotus Sutra out of one of those volumes and loved it because he said it was even bigger and gaudier than Catholicism. With its vast expanse of universes and galaxies and varieties of beings and this extraordinary eschatology that promised salvation not only to human beings but to every possible being in the universe, including demons and angels, in all possible galaxies. And he said, now that's a religion.

[44:22]

Well, the Jodo Shin people connect with the Lotus Sutra. And the part they connect with is just one little section in it that prior to Honen Shonin, everybody had overlooked this one little section that said, if you find it too difficult to read this whole sutra and to understand what it says, if you will simply recite the name of Amitabha, that will take care of it. And then you don't have to read the book. All of those scholars in the Tendai sect sort of passed over that passage until Honen discovered it and said, why are we working so hard reading this whole book? All we have to do is say Amitabha. And so he starts the Pure Land School of Buddhism with that. And Jag made that connection. And Allen Ginsberg too. Both of those young radical writers were living in the Bay Area at that time

[45:34]

and we were going back and forth between Saturday nights or Friday nights at Kenneth Rexroth's and Friday nights at the Berkeley Buddhist Church and then other Friday nights of unmentionable behavior. And were welcomed by the Asian American Buddhist community and by the scholarly community as much. Ruth Sasaki was, some of this is in Red Fields. Ruth Sasaki, after the war, during the war, her husband, Soke-on Sasaki, Sasaki Shigetsu, the first Japanese Roshi to live and teach in the United States. He died during the war, shortly after they got married, not long after they got married. His Dharma school moved forward and ran a strawberry farm in 1907. Most of them, you know this story. They came over in 1907, stayed and tried to grow strawberries for three years.

[46:38]

Said that the strawberries were too small and the farmers, probably Japanese American farmers, laughed at them and said their strawberries weren't any good. So they gave up and went back to Japan, all except two. One was Soke-on and the other was the guy who went to Los Angeles. Senzaki. Senzaki, yeah. Nyogen Senzaki. Nyogen Senzaki. People often forget that it wasn't just Senzaki that stayed behind. It was also Sasaki Shigetsu. Nyogen went to L.A. where he became a janitor and eventually started a little study hall, a little Zen study hall. That was where Robert Eaton first touched base with living Buddhism in the United States, was with Nyogen Senzaki. Sasaki Shigetsu, on the other hand, went north and worked on ranches and for the railroad in Oregon

[47:43]

and was an itinerant laborer up and down the coast. He was a big man and very hardy. So he entered into the immigrant working class for a number of years, made periodic trips back to Kyoto. No, I guess it was Tokyo, actually, in his case, where he did four or five months of intensive dokusan with his teacher and then came back and, again, worked in the United States as a laborer. He did that until he completed his training. And then he moved to New York and he was supporting himself as a furniture carver in a factory when Ruth Sasaki discovered him and funded him to have a zendo. And that was the beginning of the First Zen Institute of America. Okay, after the war, Ruth goes back to Kyoto, contacts Goto Zuigan, her husband's Dharma brother,

[48:44]

starts studying Zen with him, sets up a branch of the First Zen Institute of America in Daitoku-ji, is given a temple by the Daitoku-ji priest. They say, here's an old temple we're not using. Why don't you fix that up and you can have it? We'll even make you the priest of the temple. And they did. They made not only a woman, but a white woman, into a Daitoku-ji priest, which just goes to show something I want to talk about a little later, is about how Asian Buddhism isn't nearly as rigid as you might have thought when it comes right down to taking care of things. It's very flexible underneath that authoritarian exterior. So Mrs. Sasaki, Ruth Sasaki, was working away with her. What she took to be her first and highest priority was translation. She had started doing Dokusan or Sanzen in the 30s with Nan Shinken Roshi at Nanzen-ji

[49:47]

and had been allowed to sit in the Zendo with the monks, also a first, had a tiny room nearby, came back every morning at 4 a.m. for Sanzen, sat through all of the session, followed through all of the sitting schedule, and made some progress in her practice over two whole winters that she left her husband and family behind in Chicago, this is in the 30s, and went and did this Zen practice in Kyoto. Barely another white person in Kyoto at that time, except for missionaries. So her post-World War II conclusion about what was needed for American Zen students was very practical. The Zen students that she foresaw as coming, because she could see it coming, she said, and her entire focus was Rinzai-style Zen,

[50:49]

so she said, people need translations because you're going to be given koans, and you're not going to know what the heck the koans are. And so we have to get right to work and translate the Mumonkan and the Hekigan Roku right now to lay the groundwork for coming Zen students. How did she learn Japanese? She never did. Her Japanese was terrible. But she did Dokusan with Nan Shinken? Yeah, somehow. Actually, she had a person who was an interpreter for her first Dokusan. She had an interpreter, and it might have been Dr. Suzuki. See, D.T. Suzuki set her up for this. How did that come about? I'm not telling this story in chronological sequence. Ruth's husband, Mr. Everett, he was a wonderful agricultural stockbroker,

[51:50]

he was interested in funding Japanese agricultural projects in Manchuria during the 30s. And, you know, you might say he politically sort of took the wrong side prior to World War II. He was not having a problem with the Japanese doing a lot of industry and a lot of agriculture in Manchuria. So he had business in Manchuria, so they took a big fancy steamer out of San Francisco. She had been studying yoga and doing Sanskrit classes at night at the University of Chicago on her own, and one of her upper-class spiritual yoga women friends had told her just a word or two about Zen Buddhism, which she had never heard of, and had learned that there was a Dr. Suzuki who spoke English, who was married to an American woman who knew a lot about Zen, who lived in Kyoto. So when their ship en route to Harbin,

[52:56]

the port for Manchuria, stopped for a few days in Kobe, she took the train up to Kyoto, took a taxi, and looked up Dr. Suzuki. Dr. Suzuki gave her a copy of his just-published book called Essays in Zen Buddhism, First Series, which she then read on the ship. Yeah, it's a great story. And after she got back to the United States and had read his book, she wrote him and she said, this is what I want to do. And so he set it up for her. He said, if you come next winter, I will arrange it for you to sit at Nansenji and be a Dharma student of Nanshin Kenroshi. Now, to say a Dharma student of Nanshin Kenroshi is no small matter either. He was considered the finest and the toughest and the most orthodox of Rinzai Zen priests during that era. And his name is still very well remembered

[53:57]

in Rinzai Zen circles. So there she is, back in Kyoto, 1953 or 54. She can't read Chinese. She couldn't do Japanese too well, but she could get by. But she had brought in a brilliant young Japanese Chinese scholar, a Japanese scholar of Chinese literature, Iriya Yoshitaka, and another brilliant young Japanese scholar of Zen literature, Yanagida Seizan, as assistants to work in her little research library that she started. So she had these two younger or middle-aged, young middle-aged expert scholars. She was paying to start doing this translation and research work. And then, as it happened, two Fulbrights in town, the very first wave of post-World War II Fulbrights

[54:59]

in Japanese studies, Philip Yampolsky from Colombia, Burton Watson from Colombia. And Burt and Philip were each, of course, working on their own projects as Fulbright students. But they weren't getting paid too much either, so she hired them also as part of her part-time staff and put together those four men as her research translation crew to do her dream of translating the Hekigan Roku, the Mumonkan, and the Rinzai Roku, the Rinzai Roku. So where do I fit in? One of my professors from Berkeley was over in Kyoto briefly one winter, 53 or 54. She invited him over for dinner, and she said, I could use another research assistant, somebody who knows Chinese. And he said, Well, we have a graduate student at Berkeley.

[56:02]

And not only is he studying Chinese and Japanese, he's actually interested in Buddhism. She said, Really? Because you didn't take it for granted in those days that everybody was going to be interested in Buddhism. So on one of her trips back to the United States, she contacted me, and I met her, and she said, Well, if you'd like to come and be part of my research team at Ryosen-on, and we're right across the lane, just right across the alley from the Daito-guji Monastery, you can enter in and study full-time as much as you like at the Daito-guji Sodo, I'll make it possible for you. And you'll have enough employment with me doing whatever research and translation we need to support you, but you won't have to work so much that it interferes with your own Zen practice either.

[57:05]

You know, we'll be very flexible. So, of course, I was just delighted with that opportunity, and that's, you know, what it was that got me on to, in those days we didn't fly across the Pacific, got me on to a passenger, a Japanese passenger freighter sailing out of San Francisco in May of 1956 on my first trip to Japan. Paul. You did the Hanshan translations before? Yeah, that was a graduate seminar with Chen Shih-xiang. Was that something that Suzuki was aware of? Not till later. I showed her those later. She hadn't even heard of Hanshan, I don't think, herself at that time. And Burt Watson had also translated the same material. You know, Burt got interested in Hanshan when he saw my translations. So, yeah, that's the next part of the story

[58:08]

is that I arrive in Kyoto and start gearing into working with Rusasaki and studying Zen in Kyoto. And this is a good point for us to take a quick break. It's five after eleven. Is this on? Yeah, okay. I'm going to talk about Japan and Asian Buddhism for a while next. But before we go into that, does anyone have any leftover thoughts from what we were just talking about, the 50s? Yeah. I was just wondering about you just made a little mention of the unmentionable things that happened in Japan. Kind of nice. But was it difficult for you to maintain a practice in the midst of what sounds like

[59:09]

a lot of wildness that was going on here in something like Tokyo? That's a very personal question. If it's a personal question and a personal concern, I will answer it. Well, first of all, it's like the newspapers. The first page of the newspapers always gives you an impression of greater chaos, turbulence, and crime in the world than there actually is. So rumors of wildness are highly exaggerated. The question still is a basic question, of course. How do you follow a path of practice as a layperson in the world

[60:10]

and perhaps in a world, say, like the Bay Area, which is full of gaudy distractions and exciting events, some of which are legal and some of which might not be even. All that one can say to that is, you know, keep your health. And it goes back to a basic approach to the precepts that I find very useful. That is to say, in my reading of it, as I have been instructed and as I have understood the way the precepts, and this is going into Asian Buddhism, the way the precepts are seen, known, and applied in most of traditional Asia, is that they are not the same as the Ten Commandments. That is to say, it is not proposed

[61:12]

as legalistic prescriptions by which you stand or fall in an ultimate kind of black and white. Nor in the Asian world are you staking your eternal salvation on some bits of behavior in just one lifetime. I mean, this is one of the oddities of Christianity, at least some varieties of Christianity, in that, and people have noted this, of course, in one, the behavior of one brief lifetime establishes your career for eternity. And if people actually believed that, as Alan Watts used to say, if people believed the Christian teachings that you are going to go to hell forever if you don't cue the line, they would be good. Obviously, people aren't taking it

[62:22]

as seriously as they should. So, the precepts I see as, and this is, you know, in Zen training, too, are of themselves challenges and koans to which every day you address yourself. How am I going to deal with this one today? You know? And often you don't deal with it entirely as well as you should, perhaps. But your mindfulness to the point remains. You don't excuse yourself, nor do you necessarily beat up on yourself too hard. You just say, well, I didn't do so well yesterday. And you look at it. And you live with it. And sometimes you make choices. And you might make a severe choice. Shoot somebody in self-defense. Okay, I killed somebody. I'm not going to let myself off the hook.

[63:25]

I certainly broke the first precept. But I know why I did it. And no excuses. Whatever karmic retribution goes with that, I fully accept it. I made my choice. And perhaps you would say, and it was for that time and for that situation, the right choice. So that's how, you know, traditional, I think, traditional Buddhist thought approaches the realities of our moral and ethical life. To add a little more to that, our culture here, just in California, has changed a lot since the 50s. People's attitudes and values have shifted and swung around several times between the 50s and then through the 60s and then till now. You know, what might be almost forgotten is that there was a strong culture of bohemianism through the 50s and the 60s

[64:26]

in particular that made a more experimental and goofier lifestyle possible, sometimes with negative results, sometimes with harmless results. But it was a lot looser and a lot more playful and a lot nuttier and certainly a lot more free of anxiety than it is now. Part of that is AIDS. Part of that is the complicated rise of an authoritarian and basically police state mentality in the anti-drug movement. An inability on the part of the authorities to come up with any creative or flexible ways of trying to deal with what is honestly a true problem, namely

[65:27]

the abuse of drugs. But they've only come up with police state alternatives to it. And for those reasons and for other reasons, including the emergence of various streams of feminism and the misunderstandings and hard stances taken on both sides that have made the dialogue between men and women, on the left even, and in the old days, if you were on the left, men and women were in good dialogue with each other on the left, has made that dialogue much more difficult. And so our interactions are more complex now and more fraught than they were in the 50s and 60s. In a sense, in the 50s and 60s there was a brief period there when a lot of people were in agreement, and there was a kind of unity

[66:28]

of practice and opinion about ways to go. Maybe they weren't smart ways to go, in some cases, but at least people were in agreement. Now, there's no agreement. It's really fractured. And as everyone says, the left is all fractured. And so is the right now, all fractured. And pretty soon the center's going to be fractured, too. That's part of our current cultural dilemma. So that's a long answer to a simple question. Anything else you'd like to go back on, too? I wonder about the Christian Catholicist Quaker side, people like William Stafford and some of those people. How did they get into anything? You know, interestingly, in my experience, very few Quakers have ever made

[67:29]

a move over toward Buddhism. And that may be because they find the practice they have within the Friends quite satisfactory and supportive as it is. And the Friends have, better than many Christian denominations, they have a stronger Sangha spirit, a stronger sense of community. But what has, one of the things that has amused me, though, about Quakers is that, and I've had people who follow the Friends come to some Zendo affairs and ceremonies and Taisho, for example, in our own Sangha. I remember a couple of people in particular who were really offended by having to make bows and doing prostrations. And their opinion

[68:29]

of Zen, even, was I thought Buddhism, I thought Zen Buddhism was supposed to be plain, plain and simple, and free from ritual, and free from superstition. You're just like all the other guys. I said, yeah, we are. You know, Zen Buddhism is part of Buddhism. And it's part of Mahayana Buddhism. And we, I said, I hope we never get rid of our ritual and our superstition. It's wonderful. So, you know, there's a difference of feeling there. And it's historical. The Quakers come out of that long lineage of plain folks, plain church, anti-priestly, anti-ritual Protestantism. And, you know, with good reason. You know, their opposition to the abuses of the Catholic Church in Europe. And they haven't loosened up enough with that to appreciate the possibilities of archetypal ritualist ceremonialism in other traditions. So that's an interesting question. As to the quality

[69:33]

and the nature of Quaker sitting as compared to Buddhist sitting, I don't know. And there's a pacifism question that's interesting there too. One cannot help but respect, great respect to the friends for their strong stance, their strong anti-war stance through the years. And, of course, during the Vietnam War, there were thousands of young men who flocked into the Quaker church. And that was a period of, you know, a really high period because of the anti-war stance that they got so many young people that, you know, decided they were Quakers right about that time. I don't know how their fortunes are right now. But it was during the Korean, it was during the Korean War when I was spending time at the Berkeley Buddhist Church. That was just in the Korean War. Kenneth Rexroth, of course,

[70:33]

and that whole anarchist poetry circle of the Bay Area, they all came out of, as I said earlier, a very strong pacifist background. Robert Duncan, William Everson, all of those people. So we had very strong pacifist leanings. And the Quakers and the JWs, the Jehovah's Witnesses, you know, got our respect. So the Japanese Buddhist Church does not take a formal anti-war stand. This is during the Korean War. I say to my friends in the Jodo Shin Church, aren't you guys going to come out against the war? Yeah, I was just a naive liberal kid, you know. Aren't you going to come out against the war? No. They wouldn't talk about it. And I thought there was, at that time, I thought there was some kind of political moral feeling at some point in Japanese-American Buddhism that they wouldn't announce themselves as in

[71:35]

solidarity with the peace churches. Because you know, Buddhism is supposed to be against war. Black and white, in my mind. It took me years to understand what the experience of Japanese-American citizens had been. How totally traumatic having been sent to the camps was. What a deep wound it was to be a fully qualified American citizen and then be put in a camp. And so there was kind of a shutdown in the Japanese-American world after World War II of political engagement. They were not going to speak up on any issue on a national scale because they had no trust in their safety as American citizens in the American political process. And I, you know, the Japanese-

[72:37]

American, possibly Chinese- American, Asian-American Buddhist world is just now beginning to think, I think, about the possibilities of entering into the larger cultural and political dialogue that many of us take for granted, you know, because we're not risking nearly as much. And so that's part of the history of racism in America, right there. Yeah. Oh. Is that right? Yeah. Yeah, I'll say a few words about that. Of course, you know when you go to

[73:39]

City Lights or some other bookstore and you're looking for a poet's book of poetry and you don't find it on the shelf, that isn't necessarily bad news. It might just mean that they're sold out. And that it'll be reordered. Kenneth's Selected Poems edition in New Directions Press is perennially available and perennially in print now. I mean, some of the other books are harder to get. But his volume of Selected Poems is going to be available and will continue to be. And he does have a steady readership. For those of you who aren't acquainted with the name of Kenneth Rexroth, I'm sure practically everyone has heard of him at least. He was a very powerful cultural leader and poet in the

[74:40]

Bay Area almost from the time he arrived in the Bay Area or at least became active around 1936-1937. 1936-1937 he was originally from Chicago and was raised grew up within the political activist union, labor union, labor movement and radical mentality of those circles in Chicago. Which was quite something. He was immediately active, or when he became active on the West Coast, he became active in things like organizing nurses unions. They were not organized in any of the hospitals. He and his wife Marie, who was a nurse at RN, became engaged in a whole series of issues and efforts. And some of which were cultural like the WPA programs for writers,

[75:41]

the writers of the books on the rivers series. And you might not know that the federal government, the WPA, not only gave people shovels and had them work on trails and roads, but they assigned writing projects to people who were writers and paid them to write books. Or they assigned murals, like the great mural that is inside of Coit Tower, which is from that era, which is worth going and looking at. It's full of socialist propaganda. They assigned paintings and books to people, including the series on American Rivers during that period. And Kenneth actually was one of the administrators of the writing program. So he was very active in the San Francisco cultural left and made a break with the Communist Party. I don't think he ever was in the Communist Party, but also he came out very strongly critical of it in the late 30s or early 40s, even before, well before it was

[76:44]

popular to be critical of the Soviet Union and critical of the Communist Party. You have to also remember that cultural life in the United States through the 30s was almost uniformly pro-socialist, strongly Marxist, and a hard, a very strong core of Communist Party members as writers and painters and editors and filmmakers. That was American life in the 30s. And that was what the McCarthyist, the McCarthy era was still trying to root out. And it wasn't entirely something they made up. It was really there. Although it wasn't nearly as dangerous as they made it out to be. It wasn't dangerous at all. Anyway, so Kenneth comes out of that left, which became an anti-Soviet left and an anti- capitalist stance as well. And that became characteristic of San Francisco literary life. San Francisco literary life and intellectual life in general was like a island

[77:47]

of independent left-wing thought that was not pro-Soviet, not pro-Communist. And it made it unique and it sort of pushed it beyond the boundaries. In the midst of all that, Kenneth also was a student of Buddhist literature, Chinese and Japanese literature, a great lover of Japanese art, and a great sensibility and a spirit for nature and the Sierra Nevada. He made long backpack trips every summer for a period into the high Sierra. Wrote some beautiful poems about it. He had a little cabin over in what's called Devil's Gulch, in what's now Samuel Taylor State Park, where he would go and spend weeks at a time coming across from San Francisco. And so he paradoxically wrote some of the most serene and beautiful poems of reflection

[78:48]

and nature that you'll find. And, at the same time, wrote some very powerful, radical, political poems. Unique, really, in that regard. His personal manner was so abrasive that he made enemies right and left, and won the undying hostility of the East Coast left-wing establishment because of his not only opposition to the Communist Party and to Soviet, being pro-Soviet, but his absolutely outrageously abrasive ways of talking about it. So he insulted everybody. And then, as his biography, which recently came out, discloses, and it wasn't entirely a secret to those of us who knew him, he was terrible with women. He had, basically what he wanted was to be allowed to have as many affairs as

[79:50]

he could possibly manage while his wife stayed true to him. Now, isn't that an outrageous attitude? Can you imagine a man thinking that way? He actually tried to live it out. So, he went through several traumatic divorces where his long-suffering wife would finally leave him and then he would totally break down and cry and couldn't understand why she was leaving him. It's a funny story. Now, he was a complicated and difficult man and because of that, that's one of the reasons his reputation suffered after he died is that a lot of negative stuff about him came up understandably and in truth. But the long-range outlook for Kenneth is that his poetic reputation will survive

[80:53]

and will be appreciated and the role he took in standing for something that we still desperately need an independent free-spirited left that does not fall into any authoritarian trap. Any statist program but keeps a critical stance of its own. Very valuable. And a pacifist left. Very valuable. So, that's a legacy of Kenneth Rexroth's. And we teach Kenneth in any courses we have like at UC Davis on California literature or literature of the West and students uniformly love reading Rexroth just as much as they love reading Robinson Jeffers. Robinson Jeffers and Kenneth Rexroth are of our lineage. They are elders

[81:53]

in West Coast culture and if for that reason alone, everybody should be acquainted with them and should be reading them and should be proud of what they did and should remember that great art is often created by people who are less than great human beings and not worry about it. That's how it's going to be. So, thank you for asking about Kenneth Rexroth. Okay.

[82:24]

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