Oh, it's really great to be here and see so many familiar faces. And it seems like instead of I should just not give a lecture, we should all go outside and have tea and schmooze and see how the kids are and how you are and what's going on. It would be wonderful to do that. But we will do that. I'll just talk a little bit first, maybe. Well, you know, usually people who do Zen don't write. It's considered gauche to write if you do Zen. But I have a writing habit that I just have never been able to shake all my life. So I write a lot. I write all kinds of things. I can't seem to stop no matter how hard I try. Are you raising your hand because you can't hear?

[01:03]

Is that it? What? I'm sorry, what did you say? It's hard to hear. Okay, so we can, a combination of turning the volume up slightly and picking my voice up slightly is going to be better. All right, are we okay? Now you can hear. Okay, and that is why you were raising your hand, right? Okay. Somebody in the back was raising their hand, yeah, okay. All right, so are you okay now? Everybody can hear? Everybody's happy? Somebody else raised their hand, yes? That was a thumbs up. Okay, all right. So everything is okay. I was saying, I was apologizing for having this unfortunate writing habit that I have not been able to do anything about all this time. Eventually, I will fall silent, I'm sure, but in the meantime, it just keeps going on and on, and...

[02:04]

So I'm not so sure that I write well. But one thing I'm sure of is I write pretty fast. And this makes me popular with the Buddhist magazines. Because they know that they can call me up and they can say, you know, we need something, you know, by such and such a date. And they know that I'll be able to write it and have it in before the deadline. So I often write things for them, I think, because of that. Because there's nothing worse than a writer who says, gee, I'm sorry, I'm not finished yet. I have to perfect this. It'll take me another five days. Oh, sorry, it'll take me five days beyond that. Sorry, it'll be another day, a lot more. You don't like this if you're a magazine editor. Anyway, this is all to say that recently I was asked to write a piece for the Shambhala sun, generally on the question of contemporary applications of Dharma.

[03:07]

So I said, sure, I'll write that, and it took me a few hours and finished it. And as those of you who've heard me speak here at Green Girls before know that sometimes I do that. Instead of presenting a Dharma talk to save time and be more efficient, if I just have written an essay, I'll come and I'll read you the essay. The last time I was here, actually, I also didn't give a Dharma talk. I came with my book, Sailing Home, and that was really fun. A lot of people came and bought books and everything. That was in July. So now here I am again with another piece of writing. So I'm going to read this for you, and hopefully it won't be too boring, because people complain when you read something. It's not as good as if you give a talk. But anyway, that's what we're going to do today. And the title of this essay is called Applied Dharma Plan B. So I'm not gonna read this for you.

[04:14]

One of my Zen teachers was always watching out to see that we Zen students didn't backslide into our Western Judeo-Christian viewpoint, which is what would always happen, he felt, if left to our own devices. So his job was to make sure that this did not happen and that he would give us enough Zen input so that we would eventually be trained to see the world as the Zen master saw it. So this was in the early 1970s when this teacher that I'm talking about, as well as the rest of us, we were all pretty new to all this. In the 1980s, two eminent Asian Buddhist teachers appeared on the already established Western Dharma scene. And both Thich Nhat Hanh and His Holiness Dalai Lama paid, I think, in both cases, their first visits to America.

[05:24]

They both came to the Zen Center here. And we were lucky to host them. And we were astounded when they delivered to us exactly the opposite message. They both said that they had no wish to spread Buddhism to us or to convert anyone to Buddhism. I guess they had enough to do taking care of their Vietnamese and Tibetan countrymen in both cases in crisis as their deeply Buddhist cultures were being engulfed by Western-style materialist ideologies and powers. So they had enough to do. They weren't interested in making more Buddhists. As far as they were concerned, Buddhism's main mission in the West was not to establish a beachhead, but rather to help us return with renewed spirit to our own great religions. And they wanted, they hoped that what they had to offer would be for tools to help us, inspire us to rediscover what was best in our own cultures.

[06:33]

And both of them took a serious interest in Judaism as well as in Christianity. And the Dalai Lama, in the early 90s, engaged in a very famous dialogue with leading rabbis because he wanted to find out how the Jews had managed to survive for millennia in the diaspora, which is what the Tibetans are now facing. So he convened all these rabbis at a very famous meeting. And both His Holiness and Thich Nhat Hanh wrote important books on Christianity. So they were seriously interested in our religious traditions. Now, when Buddhist thought and literature and practice was first introduced to the West, and I'm thinking now of the very earliest people who wrote about Buddhism for Western audiences, D.T. Suzuki, Alan Watts, Christmas Humphreys, and other people like that.

[07:36]

Those early writers said that Buddhism was beyond religion. All the trappings, all the Asian cultural stuff, the chanting, the robes, the incense, the piety, the Buddhist statues, the sense of family tradition, this, they said, was all extra Not only was it extra, but it was even in a way a corruption of what was originally a purely rational, a psychological, almost scientific approach to the mind that was what Buddhism was really about. And meditation was the heart of this Buddhist approach, and meditation was beyond Buddhism or any religion. And if you sat down, if anybody sat down in meditation, and they made an honest effort to investigate the mind deeply, anybody would automatically, if they applied themselves enough, achieve a state, a transformative sort of universal human experience that was actually the real basis of all religions, although most religions had lost track of it in their rush to create doctrine and protect institutions and all this.

[08:59]

Anyway, that's what, more or less, I mean I'm interpreting, but more or less that's what they said. And so when the early American young people who went to Asia and learned meditation came back home in the late 1960s and early 1970s, it made perfect sense to them to abstract pure meditation practice from the Asian Buddhist context that they learned it in, and to teach it as a kind of secular form of dharma, that anybody could participate, whether you were a Buddhist or not. And this was how the Vipassana movement started. And that's why, if you go to Spirit Rock, there's no, I mean, not nowadays, there are Buddhists there, but there's no chanting or anything like that. It's a pretty secular form of practice. And because of this, and because many people shared this viewpoint, it became really popular, and it's still very popular. So there was that whole view of Buddhism that I think many of us still share.

[10:05]

However, this viewpoint is considered completely incorrect by most contemporary Buddhist scholars that I know and that I have read. These scholars maintain and they base their view on a long and thoughtful discussion that has taken place in social and religious studies over several decades now. And their view is that there is no way to strip a religion of its context. Buddhism, absent its texts, its rituals, its customs and traditions, isn't Buddhism at all, and whatever good might come from meditation practice as a so-called secular activity these scholars maintain is pretty superficial. It won't last, or if it does last, it will become so watered down and so unmoored from any cultural weight, from any actual substance, that it will be eventually subsumed into the general American consumerist madness.

[11:18]

And they cite, from their point of view, they cite yoga. They say yoga now is just another brand. And that's what meditation will be, absent its cultural... weight a Buddhist weight so I'm telling you all this because this is a kind of a thumbnail sketch from my own impressionistic point of view of the various perspectives that important people in the Buddhist movement have had about you know what Buddhism is and what it has to offer to the West and it's important to consider all these different viewpoints when you are trying as I have been trying not because I had the idea to do this, but because it just happened willy-nilly, trying to apply Buddhism to life in postmodern Western culture. Now, a few months ago, I participated in a panel discussion for Buddha Dharma magazine.

[12:22]

And the subject of the panel was the future of Western Buddhism in the next generation. So, I was the only... sort of old timer on the panel all the other people in the conversation were all younger people one was a 22 year old woman who had just begun her practice and the other were various ages but all much younger than myself the only other person on the conversation who was my age was and had been in the Buddhist movement a long time was the moderator who belied his point of view by asking the first question, which was, isn't Buddhism going to die as all of us baby boomers perish and there's no one coming along to take our places? Everybody's old in the Buddhist movement, isn't this awful? So we had this long conversation that will be transcribed and published in Buddhadharma magazine. I think it was Buddhadharma magazine. It could be Shambhalasana, I get them mixed up. But I'm pretty sure it was Buddhadharma. Anyway, of course I don't remember

[13:26]

all the things that were said in the conversation. And by the way, I was mostly listening. I didn't have that much to say. And they weren't all that interested in anything I might have said anyway. So I don't remember all the things that transpired in the conversation, but the impression that I had is that for the most part, these younger practitioners were not at all interested in doing what I and many of my contemporaries had done, which is to say, throw ourselves into an Asian tradition, give our lives over to it, and therefore, to one extent or another, live our whole lives somewhere on the margins of mainstream American society. They did not want to do this. These young people seemed to be insisting that Buddhism speak to them as and who they were as post-modern American young people.

[14:31]

And they seem to feel that Buddhism was gonna have to straighten out and become a little more flexible, a little more open, a little lighter on its feet if it was gonna survive in the world in which they were living. So this was an interesting thing to hear. And depending on your point of view, what you think Buddhism is or ought to be, you will either be cheered up by this viewpoint or like depressed by it. And it will seem to you either hopelessly self-centered and naive or refreshingly honest and expansive. And you will think that it either means that Buddhism in the coming generation is doomed to fade away and disappear into, you know, like a brand, as I said before. Or you'll think that it means that Buddhism will thrive and develop in many wonderful ways in the future.

[15:39]

Either one, so take your pick. Or choose them both. So I have... as I said a moment ago, ended up participating in a major way on both sides of this question. As you can all see, and as those of you who know me know, I'm a Soto Zen Buddhist priest. I even have some kind of certificate that proves it. And I do traditional Zen practice. I lead traditional Zen sessions with all the usual bells and whistles. I ordain lay disciples and priests in the traditional ceremony that I received from my teachers who received it from Japan. And I try my best to take all of them through the quite intricate rituals and trainings that the tradition involves.

[16:48]

I study Zen texts and other Buddhist texts and I lecture on them. And I'm even connected to some extent to my Japanese Dharma brothers in the old country, so to speak. Though I have found it less possible to clang on all their bells and whistles. Anyway. I always tell people, all of this that I just described is my plan A. That's plan A. And I really appreciate it, you know, and I am immensely grateful for it and feel quite at home in it by now. And then there's plan B. And plan B is everything else that I spend my time on, in which there's virtually no Zen stuff. No robes, no incense, nothing. In Plan B, I teach Jewish meditation.

[17:54]

And I wear a kippah and a tallit. In Plan B, I teach, as I did yesterday, I had a wonderful day yesterday with my friends at Google, teaching my course at Google called Search Inside Yourself. Everything at Google is acronym, so we refer to it S-I-Y, Search Inside Yourself, which is a meditation-based course in emotional intelligence. In Plan B, I work with conflict resolution professionals to bring meditation practice and the insights that meditation practice can foster to bear to help increase skills for understanding and working with conflict. I work with caregivers for the dying, doctors, nurses, chaplains, social workers, to use meditation to increase their ability to be present with depth and with as little fear as possible for the dying process with patients and their families.

[19:12]

And I, for many years, with Mark Lesser, have been doing a series of retreats here at Green Gulch, one-day events. for business people to help people in the work world reframe their work as spiritual practice. And sometimes it ends up that we counsel them to quit their jobs when it turns out that their jobs resist such reframing. Although this is far less common than you would think. In other words, almost every job can be framed as spiritual practice. I work with lawyers to explore ways to make more justice possible in this incredibly crazy and corrupt legal system, and to make legal work and legal education more humane. And I've also, over the years, through my poetry and essay writing, tried to bring my Zen practice into the contemporary literary conversation that I've been part of my whole adult life.

[20:18]

So all that is Plan B, and it involves None of the usual Zen trappings. My favorite Zen dialogue is this. A monk asks Zhaozhou, what is meditation? Zhaozhou says, it's non-meditation. The monk says, how can meditation be non-meditation? And Zhaozhou says, it's alive. That's my favorite Zen story. And in essence, this is the teaching that I'm always working with when I apply Dharma in all these other contexts. Because whatever you're doing, without knowing it, you're always operating within a circumscribed set of concepts that deeply condition the way you can see things. Basic concepts like the self. And who is that?

[21:23]

After all, who are you? After all, actually. Concepts like time. Does time pass? How does time pass? Where is the past? What is the present? Concepts like the world. Do we actually know? If there's anything out there, how do we know and what is it? And in the story that I just told you, concepts like meditation, as if we knew what that was. So the fact that we're operating within these completely unconscious conceptual systems that condition and circumscribes our lives, this is true for any of us. It's just the human condition.

[22:25]

In addition to that, if you're a caregiver for the dying, then you have a set of concepts that you've learned from your training in that field that might bind you and prevent you from really doing good work. If you're a lawyer, you have a whole other set of concepts and formations of character that you've been constrained by and that you have to work with. And as with life in general, so it's true in professional life. Unexamined concepts will blind you, will bind you, and will really hurt you. And they can make your life and your work way less successful and way less sustainable. And so to have some happiness and some creativity with what you do, you need the capacity to understand your concepts and to be able, at least to some extent, to step outside them and be human for a moment. The word professional. You know, I'm being professional. It used to mean, more or less, and still does in many circles, removed from your humanity.

[23:34]

Setting your feelings aside and being professional, you know, being objective. But now, being professional is being re-understood, redefined as meaning being a feeling human being in the context of my work life. And meditation is helping people to make that shift. As probably most of you know, in recent decades, there's been a ton of research and discussion about emotional intelligence. Daniel Goleman's great books on the subject. And he cites so many studies that show how hugely influential emotional intelligence is in outcomes of all sorts, both professionally and personally. And some more recent research shows that the best way to develop emotional intelligence is through meditation practice.

[24:42]

Because meditation practice gets at it at a deeper level than the cognitive. We can't think ourselves into and out of an emotional life. Because our basic emotional set is formed in childhood and its foundations are largely unconscious. So meditation, which is a somatic and a visceral process, is the most effective way that we know of to change our deeply ingrained responses, emotional responses. So in all this work that I described in Plan B, it's all meditation-based, and we always practice meditation. And we sit without any formality, just simply and easily in a room. Sometimes we use cushions if we have cushions around, but we also sit in chairs if that's what we've got. And, you know, I've been practicing meditation and thinking about the practice of meditation for my whole life.

[25:46]

and especially in our way of practice in Soto Zen, there's a brilliant literature on this subject, mostly following the teachings of Zen master Dogen, who really is a profound thinker and writer on the subject of what is meditation and how does it fit into a life and a religious life. So I've been studying this for a long time, and in the end it seems to me that Zazen, as we call it in Soto Zen, as many of you know that term, that Zazen is very, very deep, but at the same time, very, very simple. It's simply the practice of sitting down with a presence right in the middle of your life and feeling the feeling of what it's like to be alive which most of the time we completely miss and completely ignore because we're busy we have things to do tasks to complete and problems to solve and who notices I'm alive so really Zazen is that simple sitting down in the present moment what it actually feels like to be alive and seeing what happens when you do that and I think somehow

[27:11]

What happens when you give yourself to that process of coming back over and over again, to being with the simple feeling of being alive, committing yourself to coming back to that over and over again? What happens in that process is somehow or other a deeply healing path. Now, to be sure, as my Buddhist scholar friends would assert, there is some culture involved here. It's not an automatic process. There's some teaching. It's not an unmediated process. But basic Buddhist teachings can very effectively be translated. And I feel like in all these things, that's what I'm doing. I'm really translating into other language basic Buddhist teachings. And Buddhist teachings have always been translated. from culture to culture and in various settings and formats when asked whether his words needed to preserve be preserved in a in a sacred language and their exact you know word preserved as such as the as those words are say in the bible uh both the new testament and the old testament so-called old testament and in the quran when asked you know

[28:37]

by disciples. Should we do this, Buddha? Should we keep your words in a sacred language that should be exactly preserved? I mean, of course, it could be translated, but always go back to the original. The Buddha said, no, no, it's not important that that be done. Just translate into whatever local language people speak. And the result of that is that there is no Buddhist canon. There's many Buddhist canons in many languages, and they don't all exactly accord with one another. Because Buddha said, just translate. It's not important, these exact words. So translation from the very beginning was an important part of Buddhism. And so that's what I do. I'm translating into terms that people can understand and work with on an everyday basis. Caregiver terms, lawyer terms, business terms, literary terms, Google-friendly terms. And I don't, you know, I... Even if I could, I don't think I would try to become an expert in all these various languages.

[29:40]

And I avoid, in all endeavors, any kind of heavy use of technical terms. And I'm not an expert in anything. And I just use common sense. And what I know about the process of dharma and about people to try to bring these teachings down to earth. for a particular situation. And I found that, in fact, people need to know these things, not from me or from someone else, but for themselves. They needed to discover them for themselves. Maybe when I do a formal Zen session, as I just finished one the other day, I can give a talk and everybody will sit there in silence and they will more or less take my word for it. But, All my plan B work involves dialogue and conversation. I don't usually give long lectures.

[30:42]

I say a few things and then there's lots of dialogue and lots of conversation. And people explore with one another the points that I'm trying to make and add to them from their own experience. They learn from what they say and they learn from what they hear from each other. No doubt more than what they learn from me. And so that's our process. We do meditation practice, we do zazen, we talk, we listen, we dialogue. And I always say, you know, that this is not like a weekend workshop, end of story. Come back. People come back over and over again. All the work that I do is ongoing. Because it takes time. And little by little, over time, people's views will change. The unexamined concepts that they've had will become unmasked. And their best intentions that have been lurking there all along, as we all have good intentions, I think, will become free from the constraints of fear and self-protection.

[31:46]

Now, I've frankly been surprised that my Plan B work has not been criticized much, at least as far as I know. For all I know, it's criticized tremendously. I just haven't heard about it. But as far as I know, my Plan B work has not been greatly criticized by my Plan A colleagues. You would think that they would say, oh my God, this is commercializing the Dharma or watering down the Dharma. You would think that. But I haven't heard that so much. And it may be because I have my certificate and my robes and enough credibility in the Plan A department. that they don't do that. But you know, I don't really think that's it. I think the reason why, if it's true anyway, that I'm not so much criticized, I think the reason why is that as we're all together going along in this process of transmitting Buddhism to the West, we're getting a little bit more nuanced in our understanding of what we are doing.

[33:03]

And the idea of, you know, don't backslide that we heard in the 1970s, I don't think even that early teacher of mine would say the same thing now. Now I think we all appreciate that, as Thich Nhat Hanh would put it, Buddhism is made of non-Buddhist elements. That is, that while we appreciate and honor Buddhism's many cultural expressions, and we recognize their importance, we know that it is really impossible to identify a core Buddhism within these various cultural elements that we can extract and that we must preserve. Buddhism, by its own logic, according to its own teaching, is empty of any core. It is simply the honest, real and inevitable human confrontation with suffering.

[34:12]

And the possibility that we could, with some wisdom and some effort, understand that suffering differently and overcome it. And whatever works to effect that in a lasting and authentic way, whatever you call it, is worth sharing. For me, Plan B without Plan A would be absolutely impossible. And it's thanks to Plan A, to my good fortune to have had so many years to practice here at Green Gulch and Tassahara and at City Center, to have a life where I could practice every day and do nothing but practice. Thanks to that and to the many wonderful and dedicated teachers that I've had that I could offer Plan B to others.

[35:18]

And in the end, I think it's thanks to Plan B that Western Buddhist teachers will in the end be able to make their greatest contribution to Western society as they'll be able to reach out and help many people beyond the people who will come to Green Gulch and other Dharma centers. It's not right for us to keep the teachings only for those who feel comfortable coming to it here in other Buddhist places. We need to share it with others. So that's a tremendous contribution that we can make. And the other thing about it is I think it's very important. We never talk about this and nobody ever thinks about it, but if the Buddhist movement is going to survive and thrive, Buddhist teachers have to be able to earn a living. Most Buddhist teachers that I know, outside of places like this where it's a wonderful thing that people can be supported, because Zen Center is so strong, we can support many people to do full-time Buddhist practice.

[36:27]

This is rare and almost impossible for most people, people who leave a place like this and go forth into the world, who have so much to offer. find it almost impossible to survive economically. And I know because I train a lot of people and ordain a lot of people and I see people in my other groups are struggling to survive economically. And I think plan B, because we can offer so much, in the end we'll be able to be supported. And unless we are, what we have to offer will be enormously curtailed because How much can you do when you've got a full-time job and maybe a family and so on in your spare time? How much can you do? So we now understand more than ever. It's never been the case that there was a hermetically sealed culture, you know, unaffected by other cultures. That's never been the case. But now it's less the case than it ever has been.

[37:29]

And now we really understand that. And it's meaningless, really, to speak up. Eastern culture, Western culture, this culture, that culture. Because cultures are merging and mixing all the time. And every culture has its toxic elements. Every culture has its toxic elements and every culture has its noble elements. The oddly existent, non-existent, vague something that we refer to as Buddhism has been to my way of thinking, one of the most beautiful aspects of the Eastern cultures. And if it does disappear into Western culture, it will not do so without radically altering our Western culture for the better, I think. And I think that's already happening. to some extent, Buddhism is disappearing into Western culture, and it's made Western culture, I think, much more humane and much more alive and aware.

[38:34]

In addition to the many millions of people whose suffering has been and will have been alleviated by their contact with Buddhism in this long process, the whole idea of what it means in our culture to be a person and how one goes about being a person will have been deeply altered by Western culture's connection to Buddhism. If Buddhism disappears, it will have that impact, and that's okay as far as I'm concerned. But I don't think Buddhism will disappear like that. I think it will have that impact on the culture, but I think there will be. I think Green Gulf Zen Center is strong and firm and will continue to be. And there'll be other Buddhist groups that now exist will continue to exist and there'll be more of them. And then we'll have a long time to see if we can fill up this empty vessel called Buddhism with our own precious elixirs.

[39:47]

And it'll be wonderful to see as far as those of us who are a little older will get to see. what that looks like in our lifetime. It's a wonderful and exciting prospect. So anyway, since I was with my Googlers all day yesterday, I really didn't have time to prepare a talk, so I'm reading my essay. Isn't that convenient? I have this essay. Really good. And that's it. That's my essay. So I really appreciate your listening today. And more than that, If you're here, in whatever capacity you're here, somebody who thought you were actually going to the Pelican Inn and you made a wrong turn and you saw all these cars and you thought, well, something must be going on here. Let's see what's happening. Even if that's the case, if you're here, it means that you're a participant in this wonderful project of transformation, transformation of your life

[40:54]

transformation of the lives of other people that you know and transformation of our whole world and culture. And now is a very pregnant moment for transformation, I think, as we find ourselves on the cusp of some kind of change that is right now unclear. But that's always a good moment and a positive moment and a strong moment for things to... change in a good way so let's all go forth and see what we can do each one of us it is possible for our best human values to lead the way instead of be tagging along behind and that's what we're hoping for now and that's what's possible now and that depends on factors beyond anyone's control.

[41:56]

It depends on the effects of our leaders. It depends on who our leaders are. But more than that, it depends on every one of us and the kind of courage and effort that we will make toward that future. So please, let's go forth and encourage one another and make that happen. So thank you for listening today.

[42:17]

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