The Japanese Zen world, this is the entry I'm going to take into it, is made up of married priests, almost entirely. The headquarters temples have little branch temples all over the country. I think the Rinzai headquarters temple of Myoshinji has something like 60,000 branch temples. The headquarters temple of Daito-koji has 30,000 or so. I think Nanzenji has around 15,000. I used to know those figures. And those temples are households. They raise children and have families. The single unmarried Zen priests that you find are generally only

[01:16]

the highest ranking. The dedicated roshis that teach in the sodos, that teach in the monasteries. And even sodo roshis, monastery roshis. And I'm distinguishing between teaching roshis and non-teaching roshis. I should make that distinction. A sodo roshi is a roshi who is teaching formally in a monastery. There are, of course, a certain number of people who have received full Inka, and even more than Inka have received the title of roshi, but don't necessarily teach in a monastery. They may have a small circle of personal students that they teach with in their own temple. Maybe university students, maybe professional people. There are many cases of highly qualified roshis teaching to small groups of selected

[02:16]

personal students. Some of whom will be other priests. I mean, priests, even after they become, after they leave the monastery and go out and take over their responsibilities for a temple, some of them will continue their Zen practice with a teacher by commuting to periodically, just like my people here do, except these are priests keeping up their study. But the sodo priest has the grueling schedule. The sodo roshi has the grueling schedule, has the responsibility for running almost what's like a boot camp, and being inspirational and tough and setting a great model. And so those are the men who, for the most part, still remain single. Well, the reason I bring this up is because one of the first things that strikes, that is striking to the rest of the Asian Buddhist world about Japanese Zen Buddhism is that

[03:19]

the priests are married. The Chinese priests and the Korean priests, I believe the Korean priests don't marry, still. And of course, Tibetan marriage is sectarian according to the sect, according to the school. And of course, the Theravans aren't supposed to. So one of the first questions that comes up when you start practicing Zen in Japan is to try to understand how this fits in the Zen world. I mean, there are many other things one would approach, but this is the one that's on a level that concerns us, that's very interesting to us, because we are almost uniformly in this country primarily concerned with what we would call a lay practice, a practice that can involve men and women equally, married as they may be, partners as they may be, and with children as they most likely will have sooner or later. So how does that work out in Japan? It's an interesting question.

[04:21]

It's one of the unresolved problems in Zen Buddhism in Japan. It's one of their key problems, is that they haven't figured out how to have married priests gracefully. And it's getting to be a tougher and tougher nut within the institutional world of Japanese Zen to know how to deal with it. The way it came about was, during the Tokugawa era, the Tokugawa shogunate, going back to the 15th century, the Tokugawa shoguns decided to really organize and control Japanese life to a degree it had not been controlled before. And one of the things they did was simply declare Buddhism an agency of the state. Declare that the temples

[05:34]

were like the U.S. Forest Service or something, it was one of our agencies. And consider the priesthood as regulated and licensed by the government, as well as through its own organizations and institutions. And then the government also set up its own set of rules and requirements for Buddhist priests. And it also limited the number and required that if you wanted to become a Buddhist priest, you not only went through the ceremonial and practice initiations that Buddhist priests would go through, but you'd get a license from the government as well. Celibacy and no families was part of the regulation that was established by the Tokugawa regime. Now, this was already customary within Buddhism anyway, but the regime made it law, made it actual secular law. The only exception was the school of Shinran Shonin.

[06:43]

And I'll just throw this out because it's something to think about and I don't know if we'll get back to it or not, but it's an important precedent that Shinran set. As you know, Honin discovered that perhaps people could resolve their spiritual anxieties and win, in a certain sense, Buddhahood by invoking the name of Amitabha or Amida. And he left the Tendai sect and went down to Kyoto and established the following. And his teaching of the Namo Amida Butsu phrase involved a kind of mantra-like extended recitation practice where one would set oneself to reciting, calling the name of Amitabha, calling Amida Buddha

[07:47]

a million times. That takes a few years. And so it was in that context of an intense and primarily monastic Jodo-Shin practice, Jodo practice I should say, Jodo, pure land, that young Shinran, also a Tendai priest, started studying. Shinran, following Honin, had his own insight, which was, if invoking the name of Amida accomplishes the grace of the universe, brings the grace of the universe instantly to you, then why should you have to recite it a lot of times? If you recite it just once with an open heart, isn't that enough? And so he left Honin and said, this is too much. This isn't understanding how Amida's grace is accomplished. And he also got married and started a family, started his own teaching

[08:54]

circle, and started the first and only lineage of openly and completely established, the only established married priesthood in Japanese Buddhism, and maybe the only established married priesthood in all of Buddhism except perhaps one of the tantric sects. And that was accepted by the other Buddhist sects eventually, and that was also accepted by the Tokugawa government, that the Jodo-Shin lineage was a married priesthood. And they successfully accomplished the transition into having a married priesthood and carried it down through the centuries right to this day. So that's the Jodo-Shin example, this long-term married priesthood. When Japan was secularized during the Meiji Restoration, the Tokugawa was taken apart

[09:56]

and the Tokugawa regulations were canceled. At that time then, all of the Buddhist sects in Japan found themselves deregulated on their own and no longer part of the government. That also meant that a certain amount of guaranteed government income was also cut off. And it coincided with a period of active hostility towards Buddhism, the period when Buddhist temples started falling apart, when unscrupulous priests started selling art objects out of the temples and art objects got on the market. It's the period when the Boston Museum, the Far Eastern Museum of Antiquities in Boston bought up a lot of its stuff then, Ernest Finolosa. Or the Musee Guimet in Paris obtained an extraordinary treasury of Buddhist imagery. It was during

[11:03]

the period when the priests were selling it off. And that was only about ten years that that turbulence and confusion in Buddhism took place. And then Buddhism, the Buddhist schools began to reconstitute themselves. But it turned out that after three or four centuries of government regulation, when they were told there is no longer a law against Buddhist priests marrying, they had sort of forgot that it had been their own custom to begin with. And they said, oh, yeah, really. They said, oh, we can get married. It's legal. And so that was the beginning of that rise of Buddhist priesthood marriages throughout almost all of the schools of Japanese Buddhism, which comes on down to this day. And the problem with it is simply this. Even in ordinary Japanese families, the role of the wife and

[12:13]

the role of women is, I won't say downright oppressed, but I'll say suppressed. And as we all know, the relative power and prestige between men and women in Japan puts a whole lot of weight on the men's side. Now, it's not quite as simple as that. There is a powerful in-the-house strength and role that women in Japanese families have. And it's not a simple black and white patriarchy, matriarchy world. If you compare, say, call Japan and China patriarchies, and then compare that patriarchy to the Middle East, well, that's a different world. I mean, the true patriarchy is in the Islamic world. And even that, you know, it bears some further examination before you conclude that women have no power whatsoever.

[13:18]

For example, in contemporary Japan, and for a long time in Japan, not just contemporary Japan, women run the household budget. And the men come home with their salary checks and hand it entirely over to the women. And the women are the investors. They do the investing in mutual funds or whatever aspect of the stock market that they choose to invest in. For family investment, it's almost all in the hands of the women. So there are a number of Japanese language investment magazines entirely aimed at women because they're the ones who do it. And they hand out their husband's allowance week by week, you know, back to him for spending money. Now, that's an old, old custom. But in the Buddhist temple world, the role of temple wives was even more difficult because there was still a trace, more than

[14:26]

a small trace, of complicated feeling among Japanese Buddhists, Japanese Zen Buddhists, shall we say, that they should be celibate, that they really shouldn't have a family. That trace of thought that this isn't quite right throws a negative color on the whole institution of married priests in Zen. In Jodo-shin, there is none of that because they have totally accepted that they are a married priesthood. But the Zen world in Japan is still wrassling with the question of how do we gracefully accept being married if that's what we do. And so it's been the wives and the children that have taken the heat for this that have felt somewhat slightly less than first-class citizens. And just as the family part of the

[15:27]

temple, the children's quarters, the bedrooms, the television set, the funny Kewpie dolls, and the goofy-looking calendars, and all of that is way in the back, and that's where the family is. And then up front are the first three or four rooms that have elegant Zen-style Buddhist aesthetics. You know, it's like two totally different aesthetics that are going on parallel at the same time, too. In the best of situations, the wives of Buddhist priests are daughters of other Buddhist priests. Maybe that's not the best, but it has worked out to some degree that there has become an almost occupational family heritage of daughters of priests marrying sons of priests, and they all know how to be priests, and they all know how to live in temples. And to give them credit, to give them full credit, the daughters of

[16:34]

priests are given an education, and part of their education up until recently has included tea ceremony, flower arrangement, and other aesthetic skills, which they, of course, become very good at. And so your village temple of the 60s or 70s, as I remember it, was a family operation in which the priest mediated disputes in town. I mean, people would come out from town to ask him to mediate a labor dispute or some argument between two factions, where he would give, of course, conduct funerals, where he would maybe give lectures on certain topics he was interested in, maybe do a series of Dharma lectures. And his wife would be regularly giving tea ceremony lessons or flower arrangement lessons or both. So the two of them would be using the temple space in a creative way, and she would definitely have

[17:39]

her role, just as he had his role. And they would both work very hard, and they would both be doing their gardens and doing their rice field, maybe a small tambo. And one of the common strategies of Buddhist temples in Japan to make a living is to run a kindergarten. So a number of them would have a child care center or a kindergarten on the side, or maybe a juku, an after-school mathematics and English language course, teaching series, teaching system. And they might run a little zazen hall, a once or twice a week kind of thing, like a sitting session, which is advertised in town, and maybe a few high school students or college students, primarily, would come out there and sit maybe one night or two nights a week. So that's the actual life of a Japanese Buddhist temple. And his son, their son, who's

[18:41]

going to be a priest, will be shipped off to a monastery somewhere at some point, and will have to spend at least a year in the monastery, preferably three years. And after that time, he'll be qualified to be given or assigned to a temple of his own, and the cycle will repeat itself. So these village Buddhist priests play a useful role. It did play a useful role, primarily in rural areas. This was never well worked out in the big cities. And a few of the young men that would go into the monasteries would click with the training and really get into it, and then they would be the ones who stayed on longer and longer and longer and longer, and might eventually become fully qualified Zen teachers themselves. But only a small percentage, and the rest of them would be leading the day-to-day bread-and-butter Buddhist life out there in the community. Well, all of this is in

[19:46]

trouble, partly because Japan is now an urban nation, and the agricultural rural village is on the rocks, and partly because the wives of Buddhist priests have actually organized their own organizations, like labor unions, and are trying to, you know, they themselves have their own organizing efforts, are trying to win some recognition, some rights, some understanding in the community, some status. And, you know, it's high time that the wives of priests be considered full partners and have full status in the world of Buddhist practice. That'll be hammered out. One of the questions when that does get hammered out is, then, well, how is this different from lay Buddhism? Because the overlap between

[20:48]

lay and priestly Buddhism becomes much less. So that's an interesting question and an interesting little story there. I think you left out one thing, which is all the memorial services and the funeral services. I mentioned that briefly, you know, that the big function and role, the biggest function and role of Buddhist temples is funerals. And they sort of have taken over the niche of doing funerals, as the Shinto shrines have the niche of doing marriages. Although dedicated Buddhist families will go to a Buddhist temple for a marriage, and that has become a little more common. But for many Japanese people who otherwise, you know, rarely go to a temple, there will be a family graveyard somewhere in some temple somewhere, and they will have a Buddhist ceremony, Buddhist priests chanting for the funeral. Many marriages conducted,

[21:51]

however, under the auspices of the Shinto shrine. Yes? There was a, there is a small Zen nun world. There always has been. I know of one Zen nunnery in Kyoto. There was in China, too. Its numerical representation is tiny in the Zen world of Japan compared to the men. And I visited there with Ruth Sasaki one time, that nunnery, saw the nuns sometimes doing begging on the streets, identical robes, identical shaved head. And my understanding was identical practice in every regard. But the Roshi of the nunnery

[23:02]

was nonetheless under the authority of the Roshi of Nansenji. And she had not been granted full independent authority. And Ruth Sasaki investigated that a little bit and said, well, it's because she's a woman. They won't grant full Roshi authority to a woman. And she was very peeved by that. You know, Ruth was very aware of these questions as a strong and independent and powerful woman in her own right, even from the 20s and 30s on. So where it stands now, that's already 25 years ago. Where it stands now, I don't know. Now, I understand there's a very strong tradition in Korea of nuns, lively and strong, and probably in China, too. Were they celibate? The nuns were celibate, yeah. Well, I should say on the surface, because in Japanese culture

[24:08]

there's always the omote and the ura, what's in front and what's behind. The ura means what's in back. And Japanese culture has a remarkable capacity. Once we make our social agreements, our social agreements are the priests are celibate, our social agreements is this and this and so forth. We all play that game. And if we find out, for example, that there is a roshi who has a girlfriend that visits him once a month or something, nobody ever notices it. It's invisible. And it's not even gossiped about. There's quite a capacity to, if the surface is what it should be and is running well, what happens behind the surface is nobody's business. And that's a very, it's a key part of traditional Japanese life. And it's been a key part of Japanese politics, you know, for centuries. So what's

[25:12]

changing is that nobody quite respects that as they used to anymore. And now we hear about scandals in the Japanese government. And of course, that was always there. The difference is that now people are beginning to talk about it. And this is part of the emerging and evolving new culture of Japan, in which the women's movement, the Japanese women's movement is playing an absolutely transformative role on all levels. And I would venture to say that westernization and industrialization and mechanization of Japan did not seriously change Japanese culture. I mean, people put on a suit and drive a car doesn't mean they're any different inside. The traditional family relationships and the traditional power relationships remain the same. What will transform Asia will be the women's movement, because that transforms

[26:18]

family and power relationships. And that's what's underway right now. It's already 12.15. Let's have our lunch and continue after lunch. Really nice sun here today. It was so chilly here yesterday. You live in a really special microclimate. You can be over on the other side to look at

[27:26]

those hills and just see that bank of clouds right up at the top of it. You say, oh, Muir Beach is sucked in. Green Gulch is sucked in. I was saying last night at the beginning of my reading, how back in the early 50s, before I ever went to Japan, living in San Francisco or sometimes in Berkeley, we would come over here. I had an old 1937 Packard. Really great car. You remember that car, yeah. That's right. Somebody wrecked it. Somebody burned it out on the beach or something. That was after you? Yeah. I heard about it, yeah. We would come over here and come down this road and go down to Muir Beach where we would gather mussels or just go swimming or a little surf fishing or go on down to Stinson Beach.

[28:32]

I remember one time riding with Claude Dallenberg, Ananda, and looking down in here. In those days it was the Wheelwright Ranch. We'd look down here and we'd say, oh boy, wouldn't that make a great place for a Zen center? I had no idea that such a thing would ever come to pass. We used to make jokes like, yeah, he runs a little Zen do somewhere out of Kansas City. We thought that was really funny. Now it turns out they've got these little Zazen groups everywhere. In a way, far surpassing the expectations that we had in the 50s, the circle of us who thought that Buddhism and Zen really made a lot of sense. We had expectations, but it has quite surpassed any of the utopian notions we had. I asked Alan Watson about 1970, well, how's Zen going? He says, look, I feel like a man

[29:38]

who has pushed a button expecting a buzz and got an explosion. That was replicated in many forms. This is a lot of fun. I hope that you're enjoying this as much as I am. As we get into this, don't hesitate, if you feel like it, to ask some questions directed fairly personally at me. We don't have to keep this totally in the abstract. As we were closing, we were talking about the role and the problems with family Zen temples, Zen temples that had entered into family life but hadn't really incorporated that into their own psychology, didn't know how to deal with it, and in which the Zen family, the family members, were somehow not able to have the same status as the, quote, priest who represents the temple to the world

[30:46]

had. Norman had some very interesting comments on that, but people were all gone at that point. It was just a few of us that were following up on that. I asked Norman if he would go over that a little bit again. Why don't you sit up here so we can hear you. Yeah, I was saying that the problem that Gary pinpointed is exactly the same problem that we have now with this business of the married priests and how that works out. In the beginning, like the first 10 or 15 years, we inherited this attitude that it was okay for people to be married, but the families didn't really count. That was very tough. The first crop of priests had terrible families, divorces

[31:47]

and messed up kids for the first group of people. Then the next group of people who ordained and married, times changed or just seeing what had happened or what, I don't quite know why, but that next group of people decided that if you were going to be married, you should be married. Take care of it and deal with it in a fair way, in a good way. We took it on more, but as I often say, you try to be a priest and do all the things you're supposed to do, and you try to be a husband or a wife or a mother or a father, and you fail at all of it, but at least it's a noble failure. I think it's far preferable to the previous way that it worked. However, it's obvious that it's not a sustainable situation. We have an Elder's Council at Zen Center, and we've been working for about the last year or year and a half on defining for us in our time and our location what being

[32:53]

a priest could be or should be or can be. We're trying to revive it and revise it and look at it in different ways. Basically, what we're trying to say is that if you have a tradition, as we do, where there is this thing about being a priest, and there is such a thing as being married and being a priest, and it seems like a viable thing to offer because it works somehow, it is worth doing, you need to look at it differently. Maybe it's something that you do want to offer to people in various situations. What we're doing is we're opening up the possibility that there can be lots of different kinds of priests, and that there can be different tracks for training and different ways of completing the process of training as a priest. For example, there can be a priest who specializes in service, who doesn't learn the ceremonies and doesn't do memorial services and so on and so forth, but actually goes out and helps homeless people or serves soup in a kitchen. Somebody else who might be a craftsperson, and that's their path in the Dharma. Certainly people who will

[33:59]

do the traditional training and teach in traditional ways, but different ways of doing it and different relationships with teachers and different relationships with Sangha and not necessarily being a resident and so on. We're working on that, and it's going to be a very slow process. At the same time, I think we also need to define within Zen Center a track for celibate priests, which we don't really have now. There isn't a vow of celibacy in honoring somebody who says, I want to be single, and I want to practice quietly as a single person or teach as a single person. Maybe we would have a house where people could be monks at Tassajara, and then when the guest season comes, they move into a house and they continue to live a monastic schedule, a monastic lifestyle, and then return to Tassajara in the fall. So I think we need to have a wide sense of the benefit of the commitment of being a priest, and then within that wide sense, different tracks and different paths. So we're

[35:00]

working on it. This is the type of thing that you can't really figure out. It's all going to depend on actual people coming forward and doing these things. But we're going to try to maybe make a space of permission and see what people really do and see what actually happens. So anyway, I've been thinking about this problem for many years and living it out myself for about 15-20 years. But what I'm getting at is, it seems to me that a parallel consideration for you all

[36:06]

to be thinking about, and I know you are thinking about it, is what is the lay practice. Yes, of course. People in the community are going crazy with the demands of the 90s and trying to have practice. I find it, of course, a lot more challenging than it was when I was in the monastery. Of course, yeah. The short answer is, life is hard. Life is very hard. There was a guy named Ray Coffin who was in the Daito-koji monastery shortly after I had been in the Daito-koji monastery, so this was some years ago. He was one of the first of that younger generation right after me to be in the monastery. He was a Texan. After about five years or so, Ray wrote me a letter. I was living in Japan then. He said, this Zen practice life, I really love it, but what do you do about the celibacy? So I wrote him a postcard. Enjoy it while you can.

[37:10]

After he came back to Texas, he got in touch with me once and he said, you were right. I didn't mean to cut you off. Yes. I have a more general question. I wonder if it's possible to practice Zen or practice Buddhism without becoming involved in Asian culture. Theoretically, but why would you make a point out of that? Well, it seems to me that it's very difficult to understand a culture that you haven't been born into. And so there's so much that comes to us in terms of teachings from the East that are culturally based rather than spiritually based or based in spiritual practice.

[38:30]

But how are we going to know? That's the question. Yeah. This is a very good question. Alan once said that's what his work and his life was dedicated to, to take the Zen out of the East and bring it to the West without bringing the Buddha. And he said it's not very easy to do this. Yeah. Which is and which isn't. And there's another question which actually is a more contemporary line of thought, which is maybe you shouldn't even try. Who are we to say what's baggage and what isn't baggage? Secondly, so what is American culture? What is it that you're bringing it to? And are you so sure? I mean, do any of us know what it is that is going to be right for this currently totally in flux multicultural culture? An alternative approach to that would be to

[39:37]

say, and I think this is the direction we're going to find ourselves going. We have committed ourselves, so to speak, as a nation now, quite consciously, whereas it was somewhat unconscious before or only semi-conscious, to being a multicultural society. If we're going to be a multicultural society, we're going to gain the capacity to understand, incorporate, become comfortable with, live with a variety of cultural traditions. There is no one single American cultural tradition that you can invoke. And so we might look on bringing Buddhism without worrying a whole lot about what might be Asian in it, and figuring that it's part of our cultural education, as well as our Dharma education. And that ultimately it will settle out one way or another. Yes?

[40:41]

This may be our fourth hour, but it seems to me that one of the things I've really derived from your life is the real place-based practice. And there has been in my life, sometimes what gets in the way of me being situated right here in this place with these beings is sometimes the cultural forms that have come along with any kind of, well, particularly Buddhist practice. And when I think of precepts of non-killing and I think of agricultural farming and those kinds of issues, what's a sentient being and what isn't, and how do I actually live that out this time? And I've grappled with just sort of incorporating the ideas of sort of animals, differences between animals and plants and things like that. It's like if I participate in industrial agriculture, there's a way in which I feel like I'm violating

[41:42]

certain precepts, which may or may not be an issue between animal and plant life. That's just a very small example. But I guess what I'm picking up here is that the issue for me is that certain cultural forms sometimes seem to be a challenge to really let my practice really derive from this life, in this place, at this time. And to me that seems like where the rug is. I think I'm following what you're saying. And to go back to the very beginning of what you said, certain cultural forms might run counter to being in this place. Is that what you're suggesting? I mean, is the nub of it? Yeah, I may get distracted from what's actually here. What does a Zen practice look like here at Green Gulch in this value? That's a better way of phrasing it. I mean, the way to phrase it is, I think, is to say,

[42:44]

in any case, regardless, we need to be grounded, aware, fully present here and where we are. That's practice. It's a big part of practice right there. If we do that, and if we give full acknowledgement to that, what cultural form is going to stand in the way of that? Because you're giving credence to it from the beginning. You're practicing it. If you practice that, this doesn't have to be Buddhism. I mean, I will challenge Christians or anybody else to do the same. Be here now. And what do you think here means? We'll come to that in a little bit. And what does now mean? I think I will come back to that in a little bit, but I just say that I don't think a cultural form of this sort of that is going to stand in the way of that unless it is like obviously right up against it, is truly against it, in which case, you know, then you have to make a choice. But, you know, the question

[43:49]

is, I think I'll just go into it for a moment, is, well, what is Asian Buddhism like? What is it that's cultural? Or let's not even say what is it that's cultural. Let's just say, what is it like? What does it do? What were you going to say? Just two comments. One is that in the capital of Tang dynasty, China, there were synagogues and Nestorian Christian churches. And I was in Pakistan just two years ago at Taxila, which was one of the major Buddhist centers before Christ was born. And Alexander the Great came down through there and sat and debated with Buddhist scholars, you know. I mean, what piece of the history are we taking here when we're talking about culture anyway? I mean, it's, you know, it all flows, you know, in pretty amazing ways. It's a tremendous number of strands already woven together. In general, and then maybe a few specifics. And, you know, some of this applies across the board to all of Buddhism. Most of it does. And one is that it is not monotheistic. Now, notice I didn't say it's not theistic. I said it's not monotheistic.

[44:54]

It does not rely on, invoke, or pay its regards to one single centralized deity. And that in the great breakdown of religions in the world, between religions of faith and devotion on the one side, and religions of practice and insight, or wisdom traditions on the other side, Buddhism is clearly a wisdom and practice religion. It does not have a creed. It does not have, it does not call on you to recite what your faith is. If in the Christian world you're asked, well, what is your creed? What is your faith? That's a common question. What do you believe in? What is your faith? And you might be able to recite something pretty precise about what your faith is and what your creed is. That's not a Buddhist question. In Buddhism, they ask traditionally,

[45:56]

who is your teacher and what is your practice? It gets right down to the practical and practice side of it, and doesn't invoke a central single deity. But it's also false to say that Buddhism is atheistic. Buddhism believes in the spirits. I'm talking about Asian Buddhism now, traditional Asian Buddhism. It accepts the possibility that a variety of sentient being, which is not quite so commonly perceived as birds and animals, is still around. Some of them are angelic. Some of them are demonic. Some of them are interesting. Some of them aren't. There may be a huge variety of them. This is the realm of deities and spirits. If any of you have read the first third of the Huayen Sutra, Cleary's translation of the Avatamsaka Sutra, the Huayen Jing, if you've read the first third of that, you will

[47:02]

have noticed that the entire first third of it is dedicated to invoking all the varieties of spirits of the universe, and what their individual qualities are, and the nature of their various understandings. It's charming. It's a charming invocation of what it is an invocation of. It's simply a larger ecosystem. It's the realm of sentient beings. Gods and demons are sentient beings in the traditional Asian view, which is also the view that Buddhism took on. How do you work with gods and demons and other beings of that order in the traditional Buddhist way? One thing is you assume that they need to practice too, that even the most powerful and elegant and beautiful of gods are still in samsara, even though their samsara is a lot longer time span maybe than ours. They live a long time, billions

[48:04]

of years maybe, but they have problems with ego, and they are still in the wheel. Interestingly, in Buddhism's own self-assessment, it says of the varieties of beings that are in the six realms, and these are all the beings then, the human realm is the realm from which you can best achieve insight and realization. That is the advantage of being a human being. That's the only advantage of being a human being, is that you have a better chance to see the whole picture and how it works. Why is this? Well, the gods have too much power and they're too beautiful, and so that stands in the way. Now, you can translate the metaphor of gods into aristocrats and the ruling class if you like, or whoever it is that's too beautiful and too powerful to pay attention to what's going on in their lives. But the

[49:11]

Buddhist tradition doesn't necessarily metaphorize that. It just accepts these realms of other sorts of deities as part of what may well be out there. And so you see it woven into the sutras and woven into the ceremonies, and just outside of the entrance to the zendo at Daito-koji, where I did most of my formal Zen practice in Japan, is a little stone shrine to the earth goddess, the shrine to the goddess of the place. Once a month, we did a tour. Every day, of course, you do your sutras, but once a month we did a tour around the whole eight or nine acres of the Daito-koji monastery to a number of less-visited tiny shrines that were shrines to deities of the place, including the deity of the bath and the deity of the kitchen and the deity of the outhouse, you know, the kami. So that has always been accepted as metaphor, as practice in Asian Buddhism. And as you said, the Asian

[50:20]

world knew quite a bit about the oxidant, so much so that they knew about Allah and Jehovah. They received plenty of news about those folks. And in 7th or 8th century A.D. Mahayana cosmology, there is a commentary. One of those cosmologies has a commentary in the matter of describing where the gods live, what their particular habitats are, because not all of them are in the realm of form. Some of them are in the formless realm. It says that in the 33rd heaven of some category or another, there is a powerful deity called Jehovah that is highly regarded by the people of the West. And this interesting and powerful deity is unfortunately under the delusion that he created the universe. That's the Buddhist way of

[51:36]

dealing with that. What's fun about it is that it all does come down to then, in a sense, saying demons, angels and so forth, they can be converted to Buddhism. They can still learn. They're not hopeless cases either. And a little point about that was, and you can see this in Tibetan art, there are some pretty horrific demonic figures in Tibetan art doing some pretty scary things. These have all been converted to Buddhism. They are all supporters of the Dharma. They are Dharma protectors. So the little point there is this. If a demon becomes enlightened and becomes converted to Buddhism, it still looks like a demon. And it's still going to be fierce. So that's how it goes. So all of Asian Buddhism has incorporated these

[52:44]

previous animistic local deities and spirits effortlessly. And this is kind of an interesting point because in the Occidental tradition, there is really a watershed divide, a hard line that was drawn, and it was drawn with fire and blood between pagan history and Christian history. The pagan connections, the local roots, the respect paid to local deities and gods, the local shrines, as far as the church could possibly do it, that connection was shattered. And we have a Christian tradition that is full of wonderful and remarkable and useful teachings, but it caused a

[53:45]

split in our Occidental psyche and a split in the Occidental, in the historical and psychological mind of the West. So that even today, to put yourself into the position of wanting to be a neo-pagan or wanting to study the Wicca or craft or witchcraft tradition, which is an ancient agrarian and maybe even Paleolithic religious tradition that was part of the lives of our Occidental or Caucasoid ancestors and was still alive and well in some parts of Europe up until a few centuries ago, you put yourself at risk for being called a Satanist if you try to pursue these studies in some corners. This is no joke. I mean, there's a person here today who teaches poetry in the schools, Will Stable, has taught a lot of poetry in the schools, who has found that he had to be very careful

[54:51]

about mythologies and imageries that he taught in poetry because of the potential charge of Satanist teachings from right-wing Christian families in the school district. So this painful split is still in our culture. They didn't have that in Asia. In China and Japan, Tibet and India, the archaic animistic religious roots that go back to the Paleolithic, that are part of our oldest psychological and spiritual heritage, were never cut off. They were never hit with pesticides and herbicides, but they are allowed to have a place in the religious life and in the psyche of the people of all those cultures. And that takes the form in Japan of the long interaction between Shinto and Buddhism, the comfortable play between Shinto and

[55:53]

Buddhism. So much so that up until Meiji, up until the restoration and the beginning of modern Japan, they had a hard time separating in their own minds even Shinto and Buddhism out. That the division of Buddhism and Shinto that is so clear, or is more clear in Japan today, was not a hard and fast division in previous centuries. And it certainly wasn't a psychological division that anybody felt impelled to make. And there was a whole, the Suijaku religious theories of medieval Japan, which actually went out of their way to demonstrate how every one of the major Shinto deities was just another form of a well-known Bodhisattva or Buddha. And so they actually tried to overlap them. Alan Grappard, a very interesting scholar of Buddhism and Taoism, who teaches at UC Santa Barbara, has a book out on Kofuku-ji, one of the big Nara

[57:02]

temples, and it's a book on how Kofuku-ji was both temple and Shinto shrine for centuries, and how those two roles played back and forth seamlessly all those centuries. That's very interesting. So what does that tell us about, you know, Buddhism coming to North America? It tells us that Buddhism will be very comfortable with coyote and raven. That whatever local spirits are still around are definitely going to be acceptable. Or Carl Jung. Or Carl Jung. Carl Jung, local spirit. Carl Jung, 20th century, middle-class German coyote. Another thing about Asian Buddhism is that it's not puritanical. And that's a very, puritanism has to be understood

[58:19]

in a fairly specific light. It means a highly internalized degree of guilt, and a rather highly developed dualistic sense of the split between spirit and matter. Almost Manichean. Now the severe dualism of the Manichean ideology is such that it totally separates spirit from matter. And that is extreme dualism. That is what dualism, that is what is meant sometimes when they talk about the dualist heresy in the early days of the church. Extreme dualism. But Christianity, although officially the Roman Catholic Church declared extreme dualism a heresy, and in doing so reasserts that Christ ascended

[59:21]

in the flesh, not in some spiritual form, but in the flesh. And this is like a major, the incarnation, it's like a major theological point. The Puritans fudged on that, and are not so sure that the flesh is okay. Buddhism is not historically puritanical. It has its precepts, and it has reasons for, which are practice reasons, for trying to keep us all in moderation. But that is not a metaphysical rejection of the material world, or of the world of desire as such, or of foolishness, or of desire, or of mischief. Samsara is a mischievous creation. Not an evil creation. It's a mischievous creation. Yeah. You know, I'm glad to hear that you don't find that culturally transmitted, but I've had a lot of problems with various traditional

[60:54]

scriptures and teachings that seem to be very, you know, on the side of, like I said, on the side of some kind of distaste for incarnation. For body. Yeah. There are some pretty extreme, there are some pretty extreme images and metaphors to inspire a sense of how impermanent our bodies are. Yeah, it's true. It's true. I would still say that at base they are not dualistic. This is just an extreme way of making you look at the body, of making you look at it again and again, and looking at it in all its aspects. And then you can go beyond that. There is also, you know, a line between India and China and Japan. A big cultural line. It's been argued. One of my professors at Berkeley said, the line between Asia and the Occident starts in Burma. And India belongs with the West.

[62:06]

Well, it also, it's highly intellectual. They have a great tradition of dialectic and debate. The great tradition of philological and linguistic analysis. A philosophical systems which are seamlessly, can seamlessly fit in with Occidental philosophical systems. Linguistically, we share the Indo-European language family, or a lot of India does anyway, and so forth. Whereas China and Japan look at it differently. Now, some of the early Japanese commentaries on the Vinaya are quite interesting. The Vinaya, that is to say, the Tripitaka volumes on discipline and rules, and the stories about how the rules came into existence, because every one of the rules in the Vinaya has a story that goes with it. And there are a number of rules in the Vinaya that you wouldn't think of unless you read the Vinaya. Namely, like, you should not make love to corpses, and don't have sexual relations with monkeys.

[63:16]

Well, there's some story behind every one of those. So, you know what the Japanese said, this is in the 12th century or so, they said, the people in India must have been really bad to have to have rules like that. They drew the conclusion, I mean, they actually said this, we of Japan are far more virtuous. We don't need nearly so many rules. Yeah. This kind of eternal doom for some other purpose. Is that, I mean, I've kind of been watching this for a while, as a place where Zen kind of dangerously merges with something that looks like Zen in our culture.

[64:45]

Good. Good point. And exactly one of the points that I want to touch on. Asia has, the Far East has, not India, but the Far East has, China and Japan has a strong work ethic. Highly organized, highly motivated, hard working, and materialistic, in the sense of wanting to get ahead cultures, wanting to have property, wanting to have status. And one could say, well, this is the Confucian inheritance. Certainly, it has been institutionalized in Confucianism and in Neo-Confucianism. But quite possibly it belongs to the archaic village culture of the Far East. It belongs to the village culture of wet rice agriculture and the high degree of organization that's required to manage irrigation ditches and labor sharing that is necessary among the villages to keep up large water projects.

[65:59]

This has been speculated about China. You know, they're saying that the Chinese village systems, well prior to civilization, 8 or 9,000 years B.C., had these fantastically well organized water systems that meant a high degree of cooperation and perhaps some suppression of individual nuttiness so that they could keep all this going. Well, so they work hard. And the Japanese work hard too. That does not mean they're Puritans in the same way. It doesn't mean that that is the Protestant work ethic. The Protestant work ethic comes from way over here with its own metaphysics. The Far Eastern work ethic comes with its own metaphysics, which are quite different, I'm sure. And so what your point is very well taken. That there are, and you know, this is also true of Japan itself. It has been pointed out that for reasons that are fascinating and complicated, Japan was ready to fall into being an industrial capitalist power.

[67:00]

It had preconditions that come from a very different history, but included such things as paper money, large scale banking systems, large pre-modern feudal era corporations with big trading networks, large powerful families who knew how to raise capital. A sense of what capital was, even though they'd never heard of capitalism. And the capacity to motivate large populations of people to work. And so that when Japan entered the 20th century, it took to capitalism like a duck to water, even though it did not have the same history. And it had to do with something that comes out of China. One of those two things is Confucianism. The other thing is complex banking and money systems, which go back to about the 8th or 9th century AD in China. So you can fall into it with a different history. And there's a sense in which Japan also has a Protestant-looking culture, but it's not a Protestant culture.

[68:16]

So we are in danger in accepting the things that we like about Zen Buddhism, for example, its apparent directness, its apparent simplicity, its cleanliness, its high degree of organization, its focus, its ability to work hard. We accept that in part because it is exactly what our secular Protestant Anglo world and also our liberal Jewish world feels comfortable with. So there is a danger in that. And as you were suggesting, there's a danger that we end up working hard because we're still Protestants and Puritans inside, and not because we're working hard in what way? As practice? As focus? As energy? The measure of it in part is the ability to quit working and goof off, is to be as free with stopping it as we are free with starting it. And a practice for all of us, period, is how to make space and time in our lives, because as everyone testifies, we are all busier now than we were five years ago.

[69:41]

Way in the back, the man with the beard. The real problems were related to the practice of Buddhism, or our being Buddhist. He said something to this effect. The real problems were Christians and Jews. Well, but to be specific, what is it in Judaism or Christianity that you would think would impede our practice of Buddhism? Is there anything in these traditions that you would find that would impede our practice of Buddhism?

[70:53]

The illusion of having created the universe. And the illusion of running the universe. And this is a serious one. Hitherto, so far, no demonstrated ability to recognize that non-human beings are part of the same spiritual universe. This is in one sense one of the greatest failings of the Judeo-Christian tradition, is that it has limited its spiritual and ethical scope entirely to the human realm. And to give them plenty of credit, there are ecological-minded Christians and ecological-minded Jews now who are wrestling with the question of how to enlarge their spiritual scope and their ethical scope to include nature. But there is nothing in their tradition to force them to do it. So this is, you know who is forcing them to do it? We are. St. Francis.

[72:29]

Us Buddhist environmentalist types are forcing them to do that. St. Francis is wonderful, but boy, he's an exception. Or he's a special case, you know, he's a special case. He has a one-lifetime mind. Pardon me? He has a one-lifetime mind. Well, yes, that's another interesting point. The sense that we only have one lifetime to work it out in. Now, that does leave us with the question, well, what about reincarnation? Do we take it literally? Or do we take it as a metaphor? Different schools of Buddhism will do it different ways. And the Tibetans are pretty literal, or at least they seem to be pretty literal about reincarnation. But in any case, taken as a metaphor, it implies that we have lots of selves to go through. And lots of mistakes that can be made and be played again. And lots of learning is possible. And maybe the best thing about it all is there's lots of space and time to work it out in.

[73:33]

And what Buddhism adds to that is the suggestion that you're never going to totally blow it. There's always another chance that it comes around again. That you are going to stumble and fall and collapse and goof off and make mistakes. But that's not the end. Your chances to learn are infinite. Which is a very optimistic world in its own way. Somebody else? Yes. It seems to me to be a misconception among Westerners that Asian societies, there's something fundamentally different about the Asian psyche. I don't believe that's true. I've lived in Asia myself for more than 10 years. I speak Chinese. I've lived in Japan. I speak some Japanese. What I find in Asia is very much what I found in the West. If you trace back Western cultural and philosophical traditions far enough, you find a group of people that were pretty right on in what they were doing and in their time.

[74:43]

And to some extent those traditions evolved in the West and became perverted by various ideas and social constructs and society and so forth. And the church, yes, didn't recognize animals as non-human sentient beings and so forth. You know, some pretty critical historical mistakes. But if you get down to it, in Asia people pretty much have the same concerns that you have here. They live the same sorts of lives. They're subject to the same sorts of religion. And to me, I think even the Buddhist church is right with that in Asia. I recently did a translation for a very big temple in Taiwan, a Pure Land sect. And the master of that temple was a great priest. He took 49 vows. He prided himself on taking one more than Amida Buddha about saving all sentient beings. One of the vows I translated for him said, although if I'm born in a female body, but I aspire to liberation, in my next life I'll be able to get out of being a female body.

[75:48]

So it doesn't seem to me that the East has any monopoly on wisdom. Or has any particular... As much as I love Japan, I love China, I love India. But I think, doing the cultural work there, it has never struck me, living around those places, that the people are inherently by their culture under any less delusive influence. Delusive influence. Under any less delusive influence. Yeah, probably not. What the East has provided us with, though, are some traditions of practice. Like the teaching of meditation. There is no teaching of meditation in the West that is so clear, so consistent, so highly developed, that has been carried forward for so many generations. In fact, within the Christian church even, they don't teach you how to pray. There's no teaching, at least in modern times, of prayer.

[76:53]

And so I think that the distinction that I made earlier between religions of belief and religions of wisdom and practice is a very valid distinction. And that tells us what Buddhism is. I did not say that Buddhism has had great success in Asia and that it has made those societies more ideal. Or that a huge number of people in those societies are far more enlightened than people in this society. Hard to see. Hard to tell. What you say is true. People are pretty much people everywhere. But still, there are little enclaves of very fine teaching. And there are some cultural features, some cultural practices that one cannot help but admire. Some of it is in their art. The art of the Far East is quite remarkable. Both the painting and the literature.

[77:56]

And some of the most remarkable of that art can be traced to a Taoist-Buddhist influence. The combination of Taoist thought with Buddhist thought and what I take to be the basic sanity of Far Eastern village culture from very early times has given, I would argue, a slight quotient of more sanity to the Far East. A slight quotient. That makes it a little less crazy than Occidental history. But it could be argued. That's what I was trying to say.

[79:01]

I'm only saying that from a cultural standpoint, in the context of what we absorb culturally, I don't think there's any significance culturally. I mean, accepting art and so forth from where it is is representations of liberation. But beyond that, it's not a... I don't like to see the dichotomy set up so radically I agree. Our discussion did start with the question, though, of how are we going to feel about what would be Asian qualities to the Buddhadharma and are there some parts of the Buddhist teachings that we could call, quote, baggage. And frankly, at this point, I don't see how we're going to see what's baggage. And if there is baggage, it's not much. And in any case,

[80:01]

we have so much other kinds of baggage laying around in the United States that wants a little more baggage. Paul. Let me try and bring around to a particular question. In terms of the transmission, your experience, that is, you started out today talking about your experience in the early fifties and now through the places you've been and the studies you've done. In reflection on that, why Zen Buddhism in the United States? We begin with the interaction between Japan and the United States after the Second World War. Zen Buddhism, as I understand it, is not the most dominant form of Buddhism in Japan. True. But it clearly had a very large impact during that time of interaction between the U.S. and Japanese culture.

[81:02]

And that's why we're here in this place. So why Zen Buddhism? It's partly a historical accident. And it's partly, I think, truly connects a little bit with what I was saying earlier. And responding to this gentleman's question, that there are some qualities in our American, predominantly, as it were, 25, 30 years ago, waspish, somewhat puritanical, or somewhat, not puritanical, somewhat Protestant, liberal, and cosmopolitan mindset that left a little opening for Zen by a degree or two. Plus, it is, it has a literature of a fascinating quality. And the historical accident is that it overlaps

[82:07]

with the interest in the aesthetics of immediacy, with the aesthetics of abstract expressionism, of jazz, combined with a secular spirit that wants to get away from abstraction, metaphysics, and mythologies. So that's only one little picture. But it helped. It contributed to this particular opening. And then the other big historical contribution is Daisetsu Suzuki, a very unique figure who absorbed a great deal of Western culture. Turn of the century, Japanese philosophical studies of Hegel and Kant, very intellectual, pretty far-reaching,

[83:08]

lived in America for seven or eight years, in Chicago, went back to Japan, refined his knowledge of Chinese, a little bit of knowledge of Sanskrit, and, together with a few of his colleagues, constructed, virtually, a Buddhism that Westerners would like. Now, there are some interesting studies of this right now as to how Suzuki and Keiji Nishitani, and that circle of Japanese Buddhist philosophers, kind of made up a Buddhism that we would like. Have you read about this? Yeah. It wasn't entirely an accident. You know, they wanted to make something that the West would respect. And they hit it. And they got it right. To a degree. You also should know that that is all under critical attack right now by post-modern advanced Buddhist scholars at the University of Wisconsin. No, University of Michigan.

[84:10]

What? To get to his question about why Zen, Yes. I ask myself the same question I don't know how many times I've thought about it. It seems to me that fundamentally they're talking about its use value. It has a value. It works. And it's as if there's a switch there that gets turned on. It doesn't have a value or work until you've done it for a while, though. What makes people even try it? The reason it seems to have a use value to go back to what I was saying is that you read D.T. Suzuki and thought, gee, this would have use value. But if you look at the environmental politics right now, particularly the whole issue of ground therapy what's happening in the D.T. College movement, for example, I think a Buddhist perspective is in a very, very real sense largely responsible for at least some of the philosophical or the underpinnings in the way that

[85:14]

the reasons for why people embrace the movement. I mean, again, it gets back to the fact that it's useful. It provides for the perspective that has a use value for the lives. That's why we're interested in it. But that could have been a school of Buddhism. You're not going to convince Americans that sitting around chanting Amitabha is going to be of real value. But if you tell us it's going to be of use, we're going to pay attention. So you're answering my question. Yeah. I mean, the answer still is that the way Zen was presented initially in the literature of D.T. Suzuki was sympathetic or vibrated in harmony with what were some perceived psychological needs in Occidental culture as of whenever. Now, that was just a little window. that becomes concrete is Suzuki Shunryu

[86:14]

comes to Bush Street. And other individuals, independent of D.T. Suzuki and independent of reading those books, set themselves up here and began teaching and people began practicing. And it turns out, yes, this is something you can do. But Suzuki, in a sense, softened people up for it who were thinkers and thinkers and halfway practicers who really were thirsty to have an opportunity to do some kind of Zen practice. That's amazing. I had no idea that that's what happened. I kind of had the idea that he went to and studied Buddhism and set its essence forth for the Western press. But, of course, it's naive to think about it Well, the critique actually that has been there's some essays on this. The critique of

[87:15]

intellectualized Japanese Buddhism is that they got a vocabulary from German philosophy. Heideggerians, right? Well, before that, before Heidegger, they were Hegelians. And that they themselves abstracted that kind of idea of a pure, essential, intellectual, or not exactly intellectual, but an essential Buddhism which could be abstracted from the Buddhist tradition. Whereas, it turns out, in a sense, that the idea of a pure, essential Buddhism without baggage is the ethnic Buddhism of educated white people. That's our ethnic Buddhism. That's what our culture tells us to look for. Whereas, it does not exist in the real world.

[88:17]

Okay, now let me take this just a little farther because there's an important point and there's a little mini-controversy that's been going around that Norman knows about that connects with this. If you have allowed yourself, and I think we have all done it at one time or another, at least for a few minutes, if you have allowed yourself to think that there is a true, pure Buddhism and that perhaps it is our virtue as Americans, or it's to our advantage as Americans who are not deeply embedded in any traditional culture to be able to appreciate and perceive that then people will have the misfortune to be embedded in some backward traditional culture.

[89:10]

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