Good morning. I suppose that many of you would like me to just tell you about the fire at Tassajara. No? I can discuss it. more in discussion after the lecture. And I've talked about it so much already that some of you may not know the zendo at Tassajara burned down two or three days ago. Two or three days ago? Wednesday? Who knows? Thursday? Tuesday? Today is Sunday. From one point of view there's not much to say, you know, it just burned. But I think since it's such a

[01:34]

seems like such a big event, is such a big event, and one, it's one of the most, it's one of the best known zendos in the world burned up, so. I think you must be interested in what happened, so I should tell you. Do we have, Ed, do we have pictures here that are Okay, we can put them up afterwards? Good, thank you. Anyway, we were in the middle of Shosan ceremony, which is Mondo. Mondo is question and answer. in this case, between the students at Tassajara and myself. And I guess the ceremony had been going on about 45 minutes or an hour, and someone asked me, in fact, I guess the last question was something about, isn't this world mysterious and profound, or mysterious and strange?

[02:59]

I said, yes it is, or mysterious and strange, and then someone in the back of the room said, the person who was asking the next question, you know, about to ask the next question, Joel Clark. Are you here, Joel? And he was somewhat, maybe a little anxious about asking his question and yet he saw something and he went and looked. he saw a fire and he stepped back into the room and said, there's a fire back here, something like that. And I took a look and I saw something, maybe something, something going, you know, but not just little smoke or, I don't know, not much. Can you hear in the back okay? All right. And I I guess intuitively didn't want everybody to just jump up or run out or anything, so I brought my eyes back down to where I was sitting to bring us back into the room, you know, so we could leave from this place, not have our minds on the fire. So I looked down and then I looked back up again and in that brief span between looking down and looking back up again, the entire back

[04:25]

of the entryway was completely orange and illuminated. And I thought, this is a real fire. I better go check out, see what's happening. So I got up and I slid off my cushion and and went, not jogging, but fairly rapidly. Maybe I looked like, I had a green okay, so maybe I looked like Batman with my green man. Anyway, so I went out, you know. There are seats, by the way, those of you who are coming in now, there are seats right up here, I believe, on your right. And there's one more, just you who are turning back, there's one more just a little farther up, a little more persistent there. Yeah, good. Thanks.

[06:02]

Anyway, I went through the Zendo pretty fast. I guess maybe six or eight people went out ahead of me. I don't know how many exactly, but I passed most of the people who are the students at Tushar, some of whom are here, getting up. And when I went by, you know, I had to decide whether to stay there and see to put it out or we should go get hoses and things. And I took one look at it and already it was flames just shooting out from what looked like the basement. And it was obviously much too big and powerful to put out to my mind by fire extinguishers. So I We made some mistakes in this fire, actually we made some mistakes in preparation, not in the fire. We did very well taking care of the fire, but in preparation we were remiss in some ways. So I assumed we'd have, since we have a well-trained fire crew, we'd have water on it quite quickly, so I zoomed to put on clothes, it won't burn up and things.

[07:34]

I slid out of my clothes and turned around and came back. And Paul Disko, who I don't think is here, when he came out, he was one of the people in the back because he's the anja, and so he would ask the last question, or next to last question, last question, I think. was one of the first people out, and he... already the fire was coming around the edge when he came out, and he got the shoe rack out, and carried the shoe rack out and turned around, which only takes, you know, just from here to there, and turned around to get the other one, and by that time it was too hot. And the people who came out behind me, as they went out the door, which is a big door, you know, wide is this space, from there to there maybe, And quite a big entryway, completely open to the outside here. By the time they, the last people from the back were going through, which must have been a matter of, I don't know, 20 seconds? Pretty quick. Already they were getting their hair, lashes and eyebrows singed because the fire was so hot. Paul, when he couldn't get the second shoe rack,

[09:05]

went outside and already the windows of the library, I believe, if I understand the sequence correctly, the windows of the library were already popping out and breaking from the fire, moved up into the library. And the building burned, I can't, I mean, from the time I've started this conversation till now, the building was, it was already engulfed. It was almost all over by that time. So, you know, it was just like that, you know, it burned like a gasoline-soaked Kleenex or something. Just went right through the building. The mistakes we made. It's rather ironic after we fought so hard to stop the fire, you know, the forest fire. And what we were trying to stop was losing various buildings, especially this one, to now lose it, you know. The guests are going to come down this summer and come down the road and they'll say, geez, I thought you saved all the buildings last fall. I guess you lost one of them, you know. But why is it still smoking?

[10:31]

And then we've had so much rain and water, and that we managed very well to keep the stream in its beds, even though the water went, as you know, up over the steam rooms and over the deck of the baths and into the plunges, and, you know, it was a tremendous volume of water. And as you know, we had to cut maybe 200 trees out of the stream bed and made 2,500 sandbags. And the road is completely washed out, which is one of the problems we had with the fire. The road being completely washed out, it's also washed out our water system. All the culverts are washed out and everything. So having washed out our water system, we've had to go up over where the stream was. We've had to put pipe in. And in some cases, I think we've put fire hose in. So maybe there's some kink of the fire hose going over something to lift it up over. So when we turned the standpipe system on, which is fed by the reservoir, there was almost no pressure. And that was stupid of us, you know. We knew, I guess some people had noticed there wasn't so much pressure in the

[12:13]

in the standpipe, in the faucets. So we should have put two and two together, but anyway, when we turned the standpipes on. Also, maybe there's some confidence from the fighting the forest fire and then the water, and now it being so rainy, it's quite safe there. The forest is quite safe. We could have, we needed a new Zendel, you know. So we could have just burned it just like that and no problem. I don't think I would have chosen the middle of the Shosan ceremony to do it. So maybe there was some stupid relaxation of normal paranoia and concern, you know. because we didn't notice, and usually we're very careful about fire and things, so usually we would notice such a thing. But anyway, there wasn't pressure in the standpipe system. And then our big pump. Last, for the forest fire, we were so lucky because we'd just gotten a well in, just before the forest fire, and we'd just gotten a new pump and so forth. Well, our main old pump, a Porsche,

[13:30]

pump that has been going very well since 1966, it came along with Tassajara when we got Tassajara, went out and we'd ordered a new pump comparable to it and somewhat bigger actually, but it's going to be delivered tomorrow. So this time we were unlucky, we didn't have our big pump. So I came back, you know, And I thought we would get some water on it, you know, to just hold it so we could plan how to save the buildings. It was pretty clear to me we'd lose enough of the building to have to rebuild it, but at least we could control it, you know. But I came back and I said, why isn't there water? There was no water. Well, we got a floating pump down into the stream and letting gasoline down over the edge into the stream bed, quite a drop. and got the floating pump going and with it we were able to save the kitchen. It was so hot inside, I just wanted, it was so clear we were going to lose the building, I just wanted and we all wanted everyone to stay out, you know. And some people went in to try to get the Buddha, but it

[14:55]

it was too hot and too smoky. There's a Zen saying, a wood Buddha does not pass through fire. In this case, a stone Buddha didn't pass through fire, you know. It's pretty sad. We've had it seven, it's about 1700 years old. Gandharan figure, and it's all shattered by the heat, but it looks very calm. It's lying on where actually the old fireplace was. Tassajara, we built the zendo over the old fireplace, you know, so the platform in the back, which is rather unusual to have in a zendo, some higher surface than another, was built over this old stone fireplace. The Buddha's, the Gandharan Buddha's resting very calmly, all cracked. Face is very intact, but the fire was very hot, you know. The kesu, the big bowl bell, is gone. I don't know, melted, gone. The incense burner, anything brass or bronze, you know, it's gone. The incense burner, which had three legs and beautiful shiny gold-like surface, is just three legs now.

[16:27]

gone. Glass is just melted. While the fire is still going on, Elias Dittry calls up, you know, makes cushions. And he said, �Do you want your new cushions in denim or black?� Already, people in San Francisco and Green Goss were trying to figure out how to help. And they thought we'd have to sit outside, so black cushions get dirty very easily. So, they wanted to be one of them in denim, which wouldn't show the dirt, since Zenda was burning, you know. We're crazy, you know. And next day we found the walk-in. We need a walk-in to get food storage back together. We got the medicine cabinet out of the office before it burned. Those of you who know the building, the Zendo burned very rapidly and the office roof went immediately afterwards, but still he was able to go in the office because the

[17:51]

wall there of the office stopped the heat to some extent. And the storage area, which was an old foundation of the old kitchen reaching out to the back toward the stream, that all burned. And the fire was so hot, there's a, again, those of you who have been down there, there's the bell, this kind of wooden structure that was there for years, that the bell was hanging in, the Densho bell. And it's maybe, I don't know, the distance of myself to Louise, maybe. Louise is the woman sitting in the corner in the black robe, you know, sitting in such good posture. From here to her. From that distance, the wood of that structure was that deep charcoal, just from contact heat. And we had to keep, it was just bursting into flame from the heat and we had to keep putting it out. And we had to keep wetting ourselves down with hoses and buckets to get up close enough to fight the fire. And the county of Monterey had required, when we rebuilt the building, that we put in a firewall, which we did, and it saved the kitchen.

[19:18]

We're going to send some praise and thanks to the building department of Monterey County, I think we should do. And if we hadn't been there, the kitchen would have burned, but with that wall giving us just a little bit of time, and there's a door, the kitchen door there, the wood completely burned off it, and then there's some fireproof stuff inside the door. The wood completely burned off it, and then the metal frame around the door melted, and the flame is shooting in from the kitchen, in the kitchen around the sides of it, yet the door held. It was amazing to see it with all this, like a flamethrower on it from the other side, and that door held. So we kept putting out the hot spots all along that wall and where it was coming in along the beams and we went up on the roof and got it completely soaked and then as the shingles were burning we went up and and pull them off, the burning shingles. The roof was so slippery we had to nail wooden horizontal strips like a little ladder onto the shingles to stand on it. Anyway, everyone worked very well together and we had bucket brigades and everything we could think of going. And in case the kitchen went, we passed the dinner out through the kitchen

[20:43]

window which is cooking, it was a hot Mexican meal with many peppers and things. And after we got the fire under control and the kitchen saved, we sat down and had a very good meal sitting outside and morale was quite good, you know. And we had to figure out what to eat because all of our food burned. We had a lot of the food up in the library. Because of the flooding, we had to keep clearing it out of the storage area. But both the storage area and the library burned. So there was no food anywhere. So we had to imagine what normal people ate for breakfast when you had to shop at a supermarket in the middle of the night. So several people went to, does anybody know which supermarket? What? Monty Mart, which is open for, 24 hours, you know. We arrived and bought something like $350 worth of Cheerios. And cornflakes, you know. I think the grocery store asked, how many champions do you have out there?

[22:08]

I'm surprised they had that much breakfast cereal on hand. So we bought milk and all this cornflakes and stuff and white sugar and bananas, I don't know what, various things. So we had a breakfast. So next morning we had breakfast and at lunch we had Cheerios and peanut butter. And peanut butter and stuff again. And we took the guest dining room and made it into the zendo. And now we're planning to build a temporary zendo up in the upper garden that will be somewhat bigger than the one we have now. And it'll be 40 feet by 60 feet about and have A place for 60 people to sit, 40 half-tan and 20 full-tan. Full-tan is like this, you can, full length of a, you can sleep there if you want. And half-tan is like this end of the city, where it's only half that wide. And we'll have a walkway outside it, so we can do kinyin outside. And we'll have a corrugated metal roof, which is the quickest and cheapest thing to put up.

[23:37]

and it will prevent hearing any lectures during the rain. But we think we can build that in two weeks or three weeks. The carpenter, head carpenter, thinks two weeks, but three weeks is OK. So maybe we can start guest season. I think we can start guest season on time. because the kitchen didn't burn and everything is okay except the zendo. Zendo is the most essential and also most expendable building we have, because it's the center of our practice, but also we can sit anywhere. So, anyway, we'll build this temporary zendo. And the drum, the big drum burned up, and the mokugyo, the big wooden mokugyo, all pretty ... I don't know how we're going to replace it. It's quite expensive. All of that stuff was given ... Suzuki Roshi arranged for that to be given to us from Japan, so I don't think we can replace it easily. I don't know. Someone talked to me and they said, I want to be a Doan. Doans are the people in Zen who ... Zen practice who

[24:57]

Sangha life, who ring the bell and drum and things like that to begin meditation and service and so forth. Someone said to me, I wanted to be a Doan next practice period, but now there'll be nothing to do, because there's no drum and things. But to replace the drum will cost, what, $10,000? Red, do you know? What? $15,000. And the Mokugyo, do you have any idea? $8,000. That's $15,000, $23,000. And the kesu, well, we could get one for $1,000. But to get one, say, as big as the one in the city is about probably $6,000. And then there's many other small things needed, table and incense burner. So maybe just to replace the do-un-rio is $30,000, the drum and bell and things.

[25:58]

And to build this temporary building is about $10,000. And I don't know all the food storage, because when you've been in a place for many years, you build up a tremendous inventory of food, of stored grain and all kinds of basics, you know, you have. So I don't know, but it's going to be quite a few thousand dollars in food storage. And then the Buddha, the head of the restoration section of the Brundage Collection, I believe, has said that his people may be able to work on trying to bring the Buddha back together. And the Buddha is insured. Nothing else is insured because in the mountains, so expensive, you almost can't or cannot get insurance for buildings at Tassajara, or if you can, it's very expensive. So, I think we have a little insurance, a little on the Mokugyo, which was

[27:19]

I don't know how it was appraised, but people here, insurance people, don't know the value of such a thing, but I think we had it $800 worth of insurance, and on the Gandharan Buddha there was $25,000 worth of insurance, if it's collectible. Their theory is rather strange, say, if they pay you for the whole amount, they want all the pieces of the Buddha. So, like, they'll insure you if you send your corpse to them, you know. We'd like to keep the pieces, but if you keep the pieces, then they say, well, it's, so I don't know how that'll work out, but. Anyway, if any of you have any, in the next two or three weeks, we're going to be doing quite a lot of cleanup work and building this new zendo, temporary zendo, and if any of you can come and help, please talk to I don't know who, Ed Brown or Lou Richmond or someone after the lecture about it. Come down for a weekend or for a couple of weeks. And if any of you have any ability to contribute some money to

[28:47]

to building the new Zendo and even to rebuilding the building. Eventually we will, but we want some time to, it's too much to try to rebuild that same building now, so we'll rebuild it somewhat differently, as we wanted to, you know, but maybe we won't start right away, but eventually or anytime we need to start a fund to rebuild that building. Anyway, any help any of you can give us or you know somebody who might help, that would be wonderful. Right now, the walls, the old walls, it looks like a 12th century Irish monastery in ruins. It looks quite beautiful. We don't know really how to go about fundraising for it, if we should send out a letter to people or not, because for some people it's so discouraging, you know, to hear about it, especially after we saved Tassara during the forest fire. And some people are superstitious and will think maybe there's some danger of fire or something, you know, or it means something, you know. To me,

[30:13]

You know, I'm afraid it doesn't mean too much more than a match burning in an ashtray. I don't know where you'd draw the astrological significance from just a piece of paper burning and a building burning. In the end, even though we weren't as well prepared as we should be, should have been, We should have made sure the new pump had arrived, you know? We should have gone and picked it up, probably, and not waited for it to be sent. Anyway, but no matter what you do, human beings make mistakes and buildings burn, and every temple I know about in Japan, with almost no exception, has burned and burned and burned over and over again. It must be more startling for you who weren't there than for us who were there. It was rather stunning, I must say, but still, we're just there and it burned and then we worked to put it out. And also, it was not a classical zindo, you

[31:39]

So, by classical zendo I mean traditional way a zendo is built. If it was, we'd be rebuilding a zendo rather like it. So, you know, it would be a familiar space or we could see similar zendos elsewhere. But this was a very funny room and we'll never rebuild it. No way to rebuild it. You couldn't find that same old maroon linoleum again. They don't make it anymore. You just see it sneaking into some building and taking their linoleum up. It's well polished. And there's no way to get 10 years of polishing it back in. Or that funny divider which was also so troublesome that we would take in and out. And it was very funny roof Very funny building But I I think all of us had become very fond of it. We spent so many thousands of hours You know with our eyes half closed sitting in there meditating And so often I when I leaving

[33:14]

Tassajara, I go to the door or up to the altar and bow. This time I went to this space just smoking rubble, this space, and bowed. And still I could see Jikido cleaning the... I'm rather romantic, so I could still see Jikido cleaning the aisles and lanterns on. We don't know how it started, Only, I give you a brief idea. The only flame that we knew about was in the two Cervell refrigerators in the basement. The propane light that was in that area had been disconnected and the tank taken away to be filled. As far as everyone remembers, two or three people are quite clear that the lamps were out in the area just at the kerosene lanterns, were out at just the area in the stairway. But that area is where floor wax and candles and other things are kept for the Zenda. So somehow in that area the fire started and then the stone stairway going down to the lower basement and food storage acted as a chimney and once the fire got going either down below or up above it started a draft and then somehow that fuel must have got involved the floor wax or kerosene lanterns or something.

[34:42]

And once the chimney effect started, it just really took off and moved up through the building. And the other problem was that we've never had the money and ability, time, to finish that building. So what you have is an old building with very soft 100, you know, wood, maybe well over 100 years old, very old, old building that's been rebuilt to some extent after previous fires, coming up to a new building and the joining not completed. So with the joining not completed, both buildings were open to the fire to move into it, you know. So that's another, you know, fault. But I don't know, you know, we don't do things by getting a big bank loan and then having a construction company build a building for us. We do it as we can and as we have the carpenters and money, we do things in segments. over several years, so I don't know there's that problem. And we all, we knew the Zendo is with doors at both ends and many windows at ground level that would be very unlikely to imagine a situation that we couldn't get out of, you know. So, anyway, that's what happened, okay?

[36:11]

So now we have to rebuild and clean up and get ready for guest season. As for a fire of that magnitude, it happened in the most manageable way for us. If it had burned the kitchen down, we'd be in very deep financial difficulty to replace the kitchen and not be able to open guest season. But as it is, we did want a new Zen Do, And no one was hurt, you know. I'm very grateful. We're all very grateful, of course. No one was hurt in the fire or fighting the fire. Oh, I got a small cut, which is now healed. But anyway, we're okay, so. Now I'm going to give my lecture. I took so much time, I'm sorry. Let me see if I can say just a few minutes, five minutes, of what I want to talk about. Ryokan has a poem. On the first day of the month,

[37:51]

With begging bowl in hand, I enter the city streets. On the first day of the month, with begging bowl in hand, I enter the city streets. A thousand gates unbolted in the dawn. A thousand gates unbolted in the dawn. Ten thousand homes with smoking, with cooking smoke slanting up. Ten thousand homes with cooking smoke slanting up. Last night's rain washed the streets clean. The wind shakes the rings on my staff." When you go begging, you carry this staff with three rings in it. Last night's rain washed the streets clean. The wind shakes the rings of my staff. Taking my time following in the tracks of ancient Buddhas, I go begging for food. How wide, how boundless this Dharma world. Taking my time, the wind shakes the rings of my staff. Taking my time, following in the tracks of ancient Buddhas, I go begging for food. How wide, how boundless this Dharma world.

[39:14]

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