I'm tempted at this point to jump into the middle of my lecture, so I guess I will, and then I'll go back to the beginning. I tend to trust what comes into my mind, so I'll trust it. In order to give a talk, I was reading, there was an article in the New Yorker magazine some months ago about Hemingway, Ernest Hemingway, by Joan Didion, a fascinating story. Some of his descendants are publishing some of his unwritten novels, and they're editing them. And Hemingway had some reasons why he didn't publish them. But they don't mind, you know, he's dead, so they get to publish them. So there's a slight bit of controversy, but the New Yorker is taking the attitude, well,

[01:07]

why don't you read them and see for yourself? Anyway, in this article, Joan Didion quotes Hemingway, when he was pretty young, he one time wrote a letter to William Faulkner, who was working on To Kill a Mockingbird, I guess it was, and was having a very difficult time and couldn't understand how to finish. And Ernest Hemingway said, the only thing to do is go on when it is worst and most helpless. The only thing is to go on when it is worst and most helpless. The only thing to do with a novel is just go straight on to the end of the damn thing. And as Joan Didion points out, this was before three plane crashes that ruptured his spleen,

[02:11]

kidney, liver, first degree burns. And after one marriage, but not three, broke up, and various catastrophes in his life, and he was young enough to actually just go on. Young enough and energetic enough and had the conviction to just go on when it was worst and most helpless. But this isn't so different anyway than the advice that Suzuki Roshi would give. Suzuki Roshi said that in China, there's a saying about, well, they would have swordsmen. He said, you know, a skilled swordsman should be able to cut a fly off a friend's nose without harming the nose. And he said, you know, you might think this is dangerous, or you might wonder whether or

[03:19]

not you have enough skill, but you just go ahead and do it. But we worry about things in our life, you know, am I skillful enough or not skillful enough? Am I good enough or not good enough to do what I'm doing, and am I capable or not? And at some point, there's no help for it. You know, I have, I don't, I'm not entirely convinced that I'm, you know, going to give you a good talk, and that I have something to say, and that you ought to be sitting here listening. I don't know. And I don't, I'm not entirely convinced that, you know, it'll be helpful for you. We'll pass some time here together and go home and hopefully get a good night's sleep. And, of course, there's plenty of sayings in Zen that, you know, if you listen to, for somebody to give you Zen advice, it's like gouging a wound in good flesh, because already

[04:25]

we're each, you know, such complete, you know, people. We're already human beings. And, as I mentioned the other night, we can see and hear and smell and taste and touch and think and feel, and we have the capacity to find our way in our life. And, you know, to find our way in our life, you know, we will have to have, like Hemingway suggested and like Suzuki Rishi said, some strong conviction to just go ahead, because if you wait until you're good enough, or you're skillful enough, or you're not sure, or if you wait until, I want to be sure I'll get it right before I say something, or I want to be sure that everybody will like it before I give a talk, when will you ever give a talk? So, at some point there's no help for it, but for me to just start talking and, you know, something will happen and we'll go home. So this, the article of Joan Didion's went out and she quotes Norman Mailer.

[05:33]

Norman Mailer said, the literal details of writing involve one's physiology or metabolism. This isn't just writing, you know. This is the literal details of sitting, or cooking, or walking down the pathway, or eating. The literal details involve one's physiology or metabolism. He said, you begin from a standing start and you have to accelerate yourself to the point of celebration where the words are coming well and in order. You begin from a standing start and have to accelerate yourself to the point of celebration where the words are coming well and in order. You have no idea what you're going to do, you have no idea what you're going to say. From a standing start, and then you just have to go and you let something come out and there

[06:36]

you go. Otherwise, if you worry, is it going to be good enough? Will I write the right thing? Will I say the right thing? Is this good? Is it bad? Is it skillful? Is it not skillful? Will it come out right? Will people like it? You can't write anything. It's called writer's block. So Norman Mailer went on to say that writer's block, for instance, you know, all writing involves a minimum of ego, what he called the minimum of ego. Writer's block, he said, for instance, is a failure of ego. The minimum of ego, he said, is that you are convinced that the way you're writing it is the way it happened. Is it true? Is it not true? Anyway, we have some tendency as human beings to want to get it right, you know, before

[07:38]

we will do it. Want to do the right thing, want to do the good thing before we do anything. So this tends to stop us in our life and Suzuki Roshi's encouragement is have strong conviction to go forward, to just do it. Norman Mailer calls that ego. Suzuki Roshi said that's, you know, when you forget about yourself. So the language is a little different here, but, you know, Suzuki Roshi's when you forget about yourself is when you forget about how the activity and the result of the activity will reflect on you. Will it be enough credit on you? Will it be, you know, will it reflect well on you or poorly? And, you know, mostly we are busy keeping track and we have some scorecard. And we're also keeping track of the various activities, which ones are worth doing and which ones aren't. You know, sometimes people like cooking, but then they don't want to clean up.

[08:54]

So obviously there are many examples. Some of us like to meditate, but we don't like to bow and chant or we like to meditate. We don't like to do walking meditation, we like to do sitting. So again, you know, Suzuki Roshi would say, you know, you study something if you like it and then if you don't, you're stupid. But whatever it is, you know, you will have to start from a point of, you know, you begin from a point of standing still and have to accelerate yourself to the point where the activity you're involved in is happening well and in order, whether it's writing or cooking or cleaning the dishes or whether it's sitting or walking or standing or talking. We're starting from, you know, nowhere. And then we accelerate ourself into, you know, activity and conception and hearing and seeing.

[10:04]

And there's no help for it. You know, if you wait, if you wait for, you know, I'm not going to do that until I'm sure it's okay, then, you know, your whole life is spent waiting. When will your life happen? And we'll wait for something to break through to us when, you know, we could be breaking through. So the other night I ended with a poem by Rumi about, it's called Story Water and I wanted to repeat that again to you. That was going to be the beginning of the talk if you were here Monday. I promised it again for the beginning of tonight. And again, this is, we're going back to just to review Monday night's talk, you know, Suzuki Roshi mentions Dogen's teaching, you know, which is basic to Zen.

[11:14]

Everything is encouraging us to attain enlightenment. The mountains and rivers, the earth and sky, you know, the teapots and compost, everything is encouraging us to attain enlightenment. Here at Tassajara, we actually notice this sometimes, you know, we sense the sky or the earth or the trees or the gardens, the rocks, and we sense the way that people have cared for the space here. And we feel that encouragement. And then sometimes we say, oh, I don't have time. I don't feel like it. Leave me alone. I'm busy. I have things to do. Or we say, well, that's nice, but you know, it's still not good enough. Doesn't really do anything for me. And, you know, that's when we mean, you know, a more complete expression would be, I still

[12:16]

hate myself. You can, you can go on shining or, you know, glowing or whatever it is you're doing, but I'm still going to be busy hating myself the way I always have, thank you very much. But in other words, the water and the trees and the earth and the sky are there waiting for us to show up, you know, now and here and, and then they, you know, awaken us. But it has something to do with our practice. Everything is encouraging us to awaken, encouraging us to be enlightened. And everything is there for us when we are willing to meet it. You know, when we meet what we see and we meet what we smell and we walk and sense our body and we meet people and sights and sounds and smells and tastes, and when we meet things, you know, we're in, we have some, again, what we call intent, direct experience.

[13:20]

And this direct experience is, you know, outside of good or bad, right or wrong, not dependent on, you know, getting it right. We're just finally willing to be with things. So this poem, the story, Water, goes like this. A story is like the water we heat for our bath. It takes messages from the fire to your skin. It lets them meet and it cleans you. Very few of us can sit down in the middle of the fire like Abraham or Salamander. We need intermediaries. A feeling of fullness comes, but usually it takes some bread to bring it.

[14:24]

Beauty surrounds us, but we need to walk in a garden to know it. The body itself is a screen that, let's see, the body itself is a screen that shields and partially reveals the light that's blazing inside your presence. The body itself is a screen to shield and partially reveal the light that's blazing inside your presence. Water stories the body. All the things we do are mediums that hide and show what's hidden. Study them and enjoy this being washed with the secret we sometimes know and then not. So again, in terms of, you know, in the Zen language, we say you will have some

[15:25]

direct experience when you meet something directly with your whole body and mind. The light blazing inside your presence, you know, we meet something. And this, you know, Suzuki Roshi said, is when you forget about yourself. Or I would say, you know, when you forget about how it will reflect on you, and you go ahead and do the activities of your life, you go ahead and take care of each moment of meeting what's in front of you, and everything is alive and encouraging you. Suzuki Roshi said, if you think, you know, when you have some problem in your practice, he said both things, you know. I think the last time I was here, I might have talked about how he said, when you have a problem, this is where, you know, you can't practice meditation without having a problem.

[16:26]

And actually you need a problem in order to have, you know, be alive, in order to practice. And that's where to establish your practices with your problem or difficulty. You know, if you think that my practice will be good when I get rid of all the problems and difficulty, this is a mistake. You will have to practice, you know, before you get rid of all your problems and difficulties. You'll have to just go ahead. In this other talk he says, so if you think you have a problem, then your practice isn't good enough. Because when you meet things directly, you know, everything will encourage you. And whatever you see, whatever you taste, will be, you know, awakening, will be direct experience of reality. So it's not so, you know, dissimilar than Hemingway saying, there's no, you know,

[17:57]

the thing to do is to go straight on to the end of the damn thing. The thing to do is to go on when it is at its worst and most hopeless. And when you feel most hopeless, you go on. And in a way, you know, this is to go on because, you know, we can endlessly, endlessly think about what to do that would make everything okay or what to do that would, you know, we could finally like ourselves or what to do where people would finally appreciate us or, you know, what would give us the answer. And, you know, endlessly we can think about it and there's nothing to do finally but to live, you know, the next moment and to go forward. So it's a, you know, it's like saying, you know, way-seeking mind then in Zen and Buddhism is associated with arousing the determination to go forward and you will find your way. I am going to find my way. I don't know what the answer is, I don't know what to do, I don't know what's good or what's bad,

[19:00]

but I will find out and I'm going to go forward and I'm going to try various things and I'm going to meet things and I will find my way and I'll find the answer, I'm going to live the answer. So before we have the answer, you know, we go forward, this is, you know, to have some strong determination to awaken way-seeking mind and to just go ahead. And, you know, we will make mistakes. But this is a different kind of mistake than the mistake of I'm not doing anything until I'm sure it's the right thing. It turns out that people who are attracted to spiritual practice often make that mistake a lot. I'm not doing anything until I'm sure it's right. I'm not saying anything until it's the perfect thing to say. You know, because we've done enough things that have caused suffering and pain. So I don't know if you saw it, but in the last two or three weeks there was another article in the New Yorker

[20:08]

that was interesting about, loosely speaking, they called it physical genius. It was largely about a brain surgeon in San Francisco named Charlie Wilson, but also about Michael Jordan, the basketball player, and Yo-Yo Ma, the cellist. And what is it about them that makes them successful at what they do that you could say that they're a genius? And there are certain things that are basic to anybody that becomes a brain surgeon or a basketball player. You know, they have a certain skill to start with, a certain capacity to do that activity, and then they practice a lot. So they develop the skill through practice. And then there are two other factors that seem to make a big difference. And one of them is they actually will admit mistakes. Speaking of this business about mistakes. But they go ahead and do things, and they don't say,

[21:11]

well, I'm not going to do this unless I can do it without ever making a mistake. They go ahead and do it, and then if they make a mistake, they will acknowledge their mistake. And they did a study, apparently, of brain surgeons, and they found out that the worst ones were the ones that wouldn't ever admit to making a mistake. You know, when they were in residency, part of the study was that they asked them, you know, do you ever make mistakes in your surgery? And the ones who then later turned out made a lot of mistakes didn't admit that they ever made a mistake. When was the last mistake you made? I didn't, you know, I haven't been making any mistakes. So this is one thing. And the second thing, though, that is interesting is that they have a certain what, you know, in the article they call vision or imagination, or the capacity to see things.

[22:14]

So if you're only going to do what's right, or what you know will work, or what's going to be successful, or what you think, you know, people will put up with, or, you know, what, you know, is safe. If you only do what's safe, then you, you know, this is not what these people are doing. Yo-Yo Ma said there was one performance in his life, when he was 12 or 14, when he tried, when he decided to play everything perfectly. And partway through the performance, he almost went running out of the recital hall. Because he found it so awful. And it was... And he decided from then on, he would express himself in the music. You know, that when he played the music, he would actually show up. And it would be him playing. It wouldn't be making the perfect sound.

[23:22]

Making the music sound perfectly. It would be him playing music. And he decided to trust, you know, his playing music. And his expressing himself in the form of that music. So again, this is different than if you want to get it right, you follow a recipe. You put in exactly this much salt, that much pepper. You don't taste it. You're going to just get it right. And then, where are you in that? You're very safe, because you didn't take the chance of actually deciding, or tasting, or experiencing, or knowing for yourself. You stay in a position of safety, in a kind of hiding. If anybody challenged you while I was following the recipe, I did what I was told. So, when we, you know, actually go forward in our life,

[24:26]

we're outside, you know, and we have some direct experience, and we sense and taste and respond to things, and we see what to do. This isn't just Yo-Yo Ma and Michael Jordan, but when we see what to do in our life, you know, this is, we have some vision, some imagination, and we see something, and what we see, this is not something that anybody could have told us, here's the right thing to do, don't do that, do this, you should this, you shouldn't that, this is good, that's bad, and you did, it's not like you pulled out your little notebook of the stuff to do, and now I know what to do, because it's item number 33, and it's right here, this is the good, and you know, it's like you just saw, this is the thing to do. And you can never go back and say, well, it was the wrong thing to do. You get divorced, and then five years later, you can say, well, I shouldn't have, and it's a little late. Usually. And you can never say what would have happened

[25:28]

if you'd taken the other choice. You can't live two lives. And we're studying, you know, how to go forward in our life, and see what to do, and for ourselves see what to do, and know what to do, and have confidence in going ahead, without actually knowing. I mean, we don't know that it's right, or that it's going to work, or that we actually can, you know, hit the fly off the nose without hurting the nose, but this is the encouragement is then, you know, live your life. And, you know, each of us can find our way, and we don't have to depend on, you know, being somebody telling us, do this, don't do that. And it's actually the people who are doing that, you know, who are following all the rules and the recipes, and getting it right, who are a big problem. I just did what I was told. And that ends up being, at some point, fundamentalism.

[26:35]

You know, I'm going to stick to my way of doing it, because it's right. And I'm going to eliminate all of you who don't. Believe the way I do. So we also understand in sin, you know, don't stick to anything. Suzuki Roshi said, you know, in David's book, it's quoted in David's biography, Suzuki Roshi, he summed up Buddhism, you know, he said, all of Buddhism can be summed up in three words, or two words. In English, it's three words, in Japanese, two, apparently. But in English, not always so. Not always so. So when you stick to something, you know, then you don't have the possibility, when you stick to doing what's right, or what's good, or what's spiritual, or what's sin, or you stick to some rule,

[27:39]

and you try to impose the rule on others, you know, you won't have the capacity to see what to do. Seeing what to do is not, you know, doing what you were told, it's seeing what to do that's outside of that. So if any of you are basketball fans, you know, Michael Jordan is really amazing, because he sees things that nobody else sees. Other basketball players, and, you know, it happened in those two years that they played the Utah Jazz, Utah Jazz have great players, they're as physically skilled as Michael Jordan, except they keep trying to do the same thing, and they stick to doing the same thing, and if that doesn't work, they don't know what to do. Karl Malone, at some point, doesn't know what to do, and the thing he's good at doing doesn't work. And he doesn't come up with something else. He doesn't see what to do that's outside

[28:39]

what he already knows to do, and what's the, you know, what's the thing to do that works, and what he's good at. He doesn't come up with anything else. So then in the fourth quarter, he'll score two points. And Michael Jordan's team wins, because he figures out, he sees something to do that is outside of just doing what he's good at doing, and he doesn't stick to something. And, you know, so this is, and this, again, you know, this isn't just about basketball. This is also, like, how you cut vegetables, or, you know, how you do anything in your life. It's very tempting to stick to things. And actually, the only way we find out that we're sticking to things is they're not working. It's not working, and you're like, oh, this doesn't work, this is hopeless, this is helpless. I can't, you know, I just don't know.

[29:41]

For the last year, I find myself saying, I just don't know, I just don't know. And what I mean is, I just don't know what to do so that everything will be okay, and it'll come out right the way it should. And that's right. I don't know what to do so that it'll come out right the way it should. And I'm going to have to go ahead and do something anyway. I mean, stick around, I guess. See it through to the end. And so, I encourage myself to awaken this kind of strong conviction, you know, I'll find a way to live my life. I'm going to find out what to do, moment after moment. I don't know what to do, and I will wait and see what to do. You know, and I don't have anything to stick to, and I wish I did, you know. You can see how nice it would be to have something to stick to and rely on and fight for.

[30:42]

I'm right. You're not. You're right. So anyway, you can see I don't have the answer for you. And, you know, we have the idea of practice first. And when you do something, when you study something or do something with your whole body and mind, forgetting how it will reflect on you and whether or not it will be successful or whether or not you have enough skill to do it, when you study or do something with your whole body and mind, you have some direct experience and everything is helping you. Everything is helping you awaken. Everything is encouraging your enlightenment.

[31:46]

Thank you. Thank you. A lot of this, you know, for me, started many years ago here when I was the Tenzo. And, you know, they... I was pretty young. I was 22 or 23, and I really didn't have that much experience, but I'd had a couple months' experience, so Zenzner asked me to be the head cook. I had a couple months' experience more than the people I was working with. Those were the days. So I had no choice but to go ahead and do it, you know. And when you're in this kind of position, of course, you like to think, you know, it's... Anyway, I decided I knew what I was doing.

[33:14]

And after a year or so, I forget how long, you know, the kitchen crew rebelled. And they said, we don't want to work with you anymore. And they said, you know, and they went and talked to the director who, some of you know, Peter Schneider was up at Green Gulch for the Suzuki Roshi day a couple weeks ago. And we had this meeting, you know, and the people in the kitchen said, you treat us worse than you treat the bread. You treat the bread with really love and care, and you don't treat us like that. And you're always bossing us around and telling us what to do, but you know, we actually have taste. And we actually have, you know, we have taste and we can discriminate, you know, but you decide everything. You know exactly how it should be seasoned.

[34:20]

So you make all these decisions as though we have no capacity of our own. And you don't let us do anything. And so another woman said, you know, you treat us just like, you know, we were some kind of spatula in your hand. So the director, Peter Schneider, said, so would you like to change the way you work or would you like another job? And I said, I don't, I don't know. I don't know any other way to work. You know, the way I was working was, I know what to do. I know how things should be. And then you should do it my way. Because I'm the one who knows. So this is exactly what happens if you're the one who knows. The whole world would not,

[35:24]

well the whole world would be encouraging your enlightenment. By saying, I don't think so. Sometimes it's, of course, this is not the message one wanted to hear from the world. The enlightenment that one wanted to have, exactly. And I said, well, I don't know any other way to work. And Peter said, well, why don't you think about it? And I went outside over there and sat down on those brick steps and Trudy Dixon came along. Trudy Dixon was the woman who was the editor of Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind. And she was, she had been diagnosed with cancer and she probably lived about two months after that. I admired Trudy greatly.

[36:25]

She was quite a beautiful woman, attractive, and she was a very warm-hearted person. She was in her late 30s. I think she died around the age of 38. And she asked me what was wrong because I was sitting out there crying. And I told her that I didn't know what to do. I didn't know any other way to live my life or to do things besides knowing what to do, knowing what's right, and then trying to get the right thing that I knew to happen. Isn't that the way that you ought to live your life? Figure out what the right thing to do is and then do it and get everybody else to go along with it? And if they don't want to, beat them down.

[37:31]

Only in this case, I was outnumbered. Anyway, Trudy said, Ed, I believe in you. I have faith in you. And I said, you know, I just started crying more. How could you? I can't imagine why you would have faith in me. And she just said it over again. I have faith in you. I believe in you. I have confidence in you. So this is the kind of confidence I would like, if I can, to pass on to you tonight. I have confidence in you to go ahead in your life, to find your way, to find another way of doing things, to see what to do without knowing ahead of time what's right, what's good, what will work, what's best,

[38:35]

and to do something, to go forward and do something, and to see what to do without already knowing that it's right or good or best or success or good or bad. And you see and you do it. After that, I took a couple of days off and I, you know, decided to have a different person each day, be it a food patent, or, you know, the assistant cook and be in charge of preparing meals and to make up menus. And then people would come and ask me, you know, does this have enough salt? I don't know. Why don't you decide? Me? And then they found out, like, uh-oh. Oh, when you decide these things, actually you're on the spot.

[39:36]

It's going to reflect on you. Oh. And actually before they'd been able to just do what I told them and they didn't have to worry like that. But actually that's what they asked for. That's what we're all asking for, you know, to go ahead in our life and be able to trust our own taste or our own aesthetic. Trusting your own aesthetic, of course, doesn't mean, you know, ignoring other people's. It means to know for yourself and to see and find your own way. So this is possible for us to go forward in our life without knowing ahead of time. We live the answer. Anyway, since that time I've been rather interested in empowering other people,

[40:37]

I started then looking for my successor. And then as the Tenzo, instead of, you know, up until then I had been trying to get everything to come out good, so it would reflect well on me since I was the head cook. And I was trying to make myself indispensable. Now, you know, this is another bind, you know. If you're indispensable, then when do you get a vacation? And also when you're indispensable, you have to maintain your indispensability by diminishing others. I'm indispensable because they're so crummy at doing their jobs. And they couldn't possibly do what I do. And then you have to make sure that they don't. And then you complain like they don't take responsibility. It's all worked out, you know. Anyway, so after that I started looking for my successor.

[41:43]

And I started, you know, like, everybody who worked in the kitchen, is this my successor? I'll teach them everything I can. So that I can be out of here, so I can be completely dispensable. Dispensable. Would you like another poem to end my talk tonight? All right, I have this other poem. I was going to give it to you whether you wanted it or not, but thank you for that yes. This other poem is a Rilke poem that I like a lot. So because I like it a lot, some of you must have heard it because I use it a lot since I like it a lot. And it just seemed to fit with what I was talking about. And coincidentally there's some water and secrets in it, just like the poem earlier. Hey! So Rilke's poem, this is Robert Bly's version.

[42:52]

Rilke's poem goes like this, you see, I want a lot. Perhaps everything. The darkness of each infinite fall. The shivering blaze of each step up. There are those who live on and want little. And are raised to the rank of prince by the slippery ease of their light judgment. Good dad. But what you love to see are faces that feel thirst and do work. Most of all you love those who need you like a crowbar or a hoe. It's not too late, and you are not too old, to dive into the increasing depths of your life. Where it calmly gives out its secrets.

[43:54]

It's not too late, and you are not too old, to dive into the increasing depths of your life. Where it calmly gives out its secrets. Thank you.

[44:13]

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