Zen is pretty easy if you can develop a relationship with a teacher, which means you learn to trust someone, and if you learn the practice of turning a question And those two things are probably most important, more important than zazen. Zazen is very important for softening you up. I feel so lucky with you. We can sit here and talk about things all softened up together, you know? As you know, I ask the anja every now and then what I should talk about. And today he passed on someone else's question. Does small mind have Buddha nature? That's a pretty good question.

[01:38]

What do you think? It has a little Buddha nature. You know, we say small mind and big mind, but big mind means everything just as it is. It means you perceive everything just as it is, or awake, awakened mind. Buddha just means awake, so Buddha mind or big mind, awakened mind. Small mind means distracted mind. So small mind is not characterized by seeing things just as they are. So we can say everything has Buddha nature or is Buddha nature. But small mind just means when we are distracted. Laman Pong said, Mind is thus, objects are thus,

[03:20]

There is no true and false. I don't care about existence, and non-existence doesn't interest me either. I'm no holy sage, just an ordinary guy who understands things. I think we can say, instead of everything is changing, we can say everything is doing. Or instead of ongoing, maybe we should say undoing. Or to do or not to do.

[04:24]

To be or not to be? To be. To be, it's sort of passive feeling. To do. We have no choice but to do something. So non-doing, that's not so good, though. Maybe no mind is better. Wu-wei. That's no mind is better than non-doing. Non-doing is very hard to explain. With no mind, I think you can understand. Non-doing is okay, but it's a rather confusing way to say it, I think. So I'm talking about Zen life again. And we don't have to be concerned with society too much to practice Zen. But if you are concerned with society, I think then we have to be concerned with society. We have to not have contradictory ideas. If we have contradictory ideas,

[06:06]

about society. There's no enlightenment there. Or sometimes someone will talk to me about compassion, and they're very concerned with how everyone is treated and helping people and so forth, except then when they have a child They very clearly want their child to be better than other children. There's no compassion there. It's natural to want your child to be credible. And you don't. You want your child, you know, there's nothing worse than being a dumb kid with smart parents. So So you want your child to be, you know, sort of smuts, you know? At least to hold its own with you. But so many parents actually, secretly, they want their child to be more beautiful than others and smarter and all that stuff, you know? How do you get away with that and then think you're practicing Buddhism?

[07:31]

Buddhism is more rigorous than that. I think that's maybe part of the problem that we have with questions, you know? The degree to which you don't get how to use questions always amazes me. I think, you know, it may be just a turn of mind, that you don't think in systems, or holes, or you don't try to make sense of things. But, you know, actually everyone, I think everyone, even the craziest people, are always trying to make sense of things. So we don't, maybe we don't use questions because we really fear rigorousness.

[08:37]

And Zen's main tool is questioning. There's no belief. You can't believe in Jesus, you know, in Zen. Who's Jesus, everyone says. Even Namo Amida Butsu, naming Amida Buddha. In Zen we might say naming cicadas. namu semi-buddha, nami chiketa buddha, nami namu grasshopper buddha, or namu namu buddha. We would be more questioning about what is Jesus? What is Amida Buddha? You know, and again, as Nagarjuna points out, we would accept the results of such rigorous questioning. So if you question like with the feeling of you'll get an answer and then you'll add it to your stock of information, naturally you can't get behind a question if you have that kind of feeling, like there's an answer.

[10:03]

But with nothing to believe in, we have to question the systems we make. And we're all such creatures of intellectual history. I sometimes feel sorry for us because we are pushed around by just very simple ideas which take over society. Maybe this is my own, you know, bugaboo, but, you know, the The two ideas which I think are most troublesome in practice, you know, things we don't question, are the idea of natural, which I've talked about a lot, and the idea of equal, or as I was talking the other day, the public, you know, or the people. Something which denies the particular.

[11:36]

And it keeps coming up all the time, and it interests me immensely. I always wonder about whether it's useful to talk to you about it. Recently, for example, two Zen students, three Zen students, went to Chez Panisse restaurant, I've told you about. and they went there thinking it was elitist. This strikes me as so interesting to think of Chez Panisse as elitist. Why is it elitist? Because it appeals to difference? But, you know, there's no poetry, or good English, or the development of anything, unless you appeal to difference. But to shape a nice... It's an interesting idea. Maybe it's slightly elitist. Maybe, you know, I don't say it isn't.

[13:37]

So what? I think you'd have to make a case for it. But it's interesting, and I think it's the kind of thing we have to talk about, because it looks like we're going to do the restaurant, and we'll probably have an elitist dinner and a lumpen lunch. We could call it that. Have your lumpen lunch. Monk's munch. But it interests me that we place so much concern in it. Or as we talked about the guest season and membership and so forth. I think mostly we're reacting against Darwinianism. Darwin, and you, I think you also, there's certain laws that I would recommend you remember. One is the law of opposites. Whenever you have something, the opposite's going to occur. At least it's very likely.

[15:14]

So if you have Hobbes and Mill and Locke and those guys worrying about whether man is inherently evil or good and so forth, and trying to get away from the divine right of kings, trying to put society on a factual basis, and everybody is equal, and you create democracy and a political system which emphasizes everything is equal, Then you've got to explain difference. And you can't explain difference anymore by the divine right of somebody or other. So you've got to base it on the facts, man. So you get, you know, Darwin in there, who's supposedly a scientist. He was a very smart, nice fellow. I studied him quite a bit. Darwin and Asa Gray and Lewis Agassiz and so forth. And Darwin, you know, he's looking for an explanation. Agassiz was in favor of separate divine creation. Darwin said, no, it's all this. Where does the one return to? So Darwin came up with an explanation for difference. Survival of the fittest.

[16:42]

And this gets turned into congressional law, practically. First it's an explanation, and then it's an excuse for exploitation of difference. And so in the midst of democracy, we get the greatest exploitation of difference that the world's ever known. So you've got about 5% of the population of this country controlling something like 80% of the world's resources. I mean, there's never been such an undemocratic, you know, event. So I want us to be careful when you create one thing. The opposite creeps in and expands. So now we're reacting against that, you know. I say, so we don't like survival of the fittest, we want survival of the unfit, or something So, but go back to Chez Panisse. Excuse me. Gregory Bateson listened to that tape I made, you know, here where I was going, and he reported to me that he said listening to me was like listening to a mountain goat. I guess I jump around.

[18:23]

It's all pretty, makes sense to me. No? Doesn't make sense. Makes very good sense to me. I guess so. Well, I think I'm boring you to death, you know, with all that same stuff every day. So, I like something more contrapuntal. Anyway, back to Chez Panisse. So, actually, at Chez Panisse, Alice, who runs it, not the Alice of Alice's Restaurant, Alice, who runs it, probably, you know, a meal there is $12 a person, or $15 a person. But she probably earns less money than the manager of Denny's. They barely make any money at all.

[19:28]

It's just that, you know, if you eat at most places, basically what you get is microwaved frozen fish. Actually, you do better at Denny's, you know, than in most restaurants. But if you start out with all fresh ingredients, all fresh vegetables, And in their case, meat and chicken and fish that is as fresh as they can get, or the best they can get, and you prepare it carefully. It takes an awful long time. Even if we make a meal for visitors at the Green Gulch, in which all we try to do, like the other day we made a meal and Georgette actually made butter from daisies. Our cow. So she made the mayonnaise, and she made the butter, and she made the... something else. And the bread was made. What else? And, uh... What? You know, anyway, we had all green gulch food, mostly.

[20:56]

It took several people all day long just to do it. So I don't know if that's elitist. Is it elitist? I was reading recently about vegetarian meals in Mampukaji, which specializes in... I think Philip brought me there for the first time. Didn't you? I think so. which specializes in Chinese vegetarian food that is developed from monasteries. And this book says that a single meal there gives you all the dietary requirements for the whole day. But it's very carefully prepared. So it's, you know, I don't know, it seems to me okay if some people want to occasionally go out and have a meal, which is prepared in a very craftsman-like way, and you pay roughly what it costs to do it. I don't know. It seems all right to me. I don't see that it's elitist. But that two Zen, three Zen students would jump to the conclusion, or feel that it was, interests me. You don't have to do it. You can go to the movies, you know, or eat at home,

[22:23]

someplace else. But it seems, I feel, you know, it's when you appeal, the owner of Denny's, of course, makes a fortune. The manager of Denny's makes more than Alice, my guess is. Denny's, you know, which is open to anyone 24 hours a day, that a lot of people don't want to go there. It may be open, but... So, another proposition I think one has to accept, and I guess some people don't, you know, which is that all systems favor the competent. And there's no way I can see around that. All systems favor the competent.

[23:39]

So what do you do about that? Anytime you create a system, any kind of system, favors the competent. This is everything he's doing. If you're born with a deformed heart, your heart is less competent, you're going to have a harder time. you may, like the Chinese adage says, the person with one bad organ wins the race. You know that? If you have a bad stomach or a bad heart or something, because of that you take care of everything, so you end up healthier than a person who has nothing wrong with them and so they don't take care of anything, is the idea. Even if you design a system which is

[24:58]

for incompetence. Still, that's a kind of competency. And generally, such systems designed for incompetence don't last very long. Delancey Street is a system designed for incompetence. And John Maher has always I should put this on tape. Sorry, John. John Maher is always talking about, God, these dumb bunnies who can't tie their shoes. I've got to do this and that. They're incompetent. And John makes no boons about it. If he leaves them alone, they're into something or other. Drugs or back into prison. And it's an interesting contrast for John to come to Zen Center, where the people in Zen Center are generally more competent than ex-convicts.

[26:21]

You know, Delancey has a very hard time making their restaurant work, because the food's lousy. And the service, sometimes the service is real strange. So what it takes, it takes an extraordinarily competent person like John Maher to hold it together. and Mimi, who's studied with Sartre and so forth. So you have two or three or a few very competent people holding it together. So another proposition I would make is, don't confuse religion and resources. Is it Now, there's no way you can universalize resources. The better farmer will have more food. There's no way Alan Chadwick and myself, both given an acre of land, I'd starve to death. And Alan Chadwick would have an abundance of food, you know.

[27:53]

But more competent people will always get more of the resources. And I don't think you can mollify and minimize that. You can try to do something about it by the political system or something. Even the Zendo. We can keep the zendo completely open to people, but actually it's not. If somebody hits someone in the zendo, we exclude from the zendo. Mr. Money, Mr. Money, tells the story of visiting Senzaki for the first time. And he came to the door and Senzaki said, oh, I have a guest to go out. You can go out and wait on the back steps, though. So he waited in the back steps for a while. And after a while, Senzaki came out and said, oh, I forgot you were here. You can come back some other time, though.

[29:31]

Senzaki never had a guest, just he was, you know, keeping this person at arm's length or testing them or initiating them. There's no way, again, we can avoid exclusion. is that I think we want to tend toward whatever is most universal, which does not eliminate the particular. Make sense? Denny's eliminates the particular.

[30:38]

Paul and I have been talking about the carpenters' union, and he said the carpenters, if I understand what he said, is the carpenters made a mistake when the unions opted for the quantity of work and control of the work rather than control of the quality of work. And now they're being, in many cities, priced out of business, or partially, because the level of work they do is pretty easy for anybody to acquire, and who's willing to work for a lot less wages. Maybe we should start a carpenter's guild, which emphasizes the quality of work. You might get shot up. I'm still trying to start such a thing. But even force won't hold the line, you know. Difference will prevail. So probably money is pretty good. Pretty good, isn't it?

[32:15]

It probably works better than bartering in rice or wheat. And from what I know of history, it's a heck of a lot easier to manipulate a system based on salt or wheat or something than it is money. Money has a problem, is that at least you can eat the wheat, and it doesn't... Money produces money, and wheat you can eat or plant, We could have a system based on California poppies, which would wilt as fast as you picture it. We'd corner the market on California poppies, fresh frozen. You know, at Green Gulch, there's only a certain number of eggs to go around.

[33:19]

And, in fact, there's not enough for the community. So the people who come on Sunday want to buy the eggs, right? And other vegetables, and vegetables. And who got eggs was not based on money, but was based on some sort of mysterious list that got passed from whoever was head of the farm to the next person who was head of the farm, or it's the selling of vegetables. And it became such a bone of contention that I had people calling me up saying, I'm never coming to a lecture again because I can't get my eggs and they're playing favorites with my eggs, you know. So I had to sort of sort out what the heck was going on about the eggs. And it's sort of like we've done the guest season where there's a kind of secret membership. of one head of the guest season passes to the next, who should get reservations, because they're nice, or they've done this or that for us. In the guest membership letter, by the way, we've put one category, there's this nominal fee. If it's too low, everyone will join, so there's this nominal fee. And then we say, you can also become a member by any

[34:50]

There'll be a limited number of memberships reserved for those who can come up with an alternative or creative contribution. We don't know what'll happen. We'll be fighting to get into the alternative or creative contribution category. We did that to ease the pressure on those people who get upset about money. But, you know, if you switch to, for the most part, the vegetables are sold by money at Green Gulch, and it causes no problem, because it's a pretty universal entry. And despite the distortion that money has been given, still, I think we can help if we, in our community, can treat money as... You know, money can be anything. And it can be as well as, of course, a way of purchasing things. It can be status, prestige, power, but it can also be affection and so forth.

[36:12]

So begging has been very important for monks to allow someone just to give you something. And the money or the gift is only some expression of feeling. And Zen artists traditionally don't sell their works. Hakuin Zenji just gave his paintings away, and Ryokan just gave his poems away. It makes it hard on the historians. You have to go to where Ryokan lived and go from household to household and see if the households have kept his drawings and paintings, his drawings and poems, because he made no collection of his works. But Ryokan and Hakuin have other ways in which they support themselves. they're supported by an extremely competent, sophisticated system of Buddhism, which justifies sitting around doing nothing, painting a few pictures and living on subsistence wages.

[37:34]

And I think we should distinguish also between idealistic morality and realistic morality. Idealistic morality is like a monk not handling money, or PBS, public broadcasting system, not taking advertising. Actual fact, mobile oil has supported the whole afternoon you just watched. But PPS doesn't handle money, you know, or that feeling. But idealistic morality has a point. Another example of idealistic morality is the mad monk, mad drunken monk tradition. In China there was one group of monks, who reports have, would sit around naked for days, getting drunk.

[38:49]

And if a friend came, no one would let him in, and they would have to come in through the doggy door, naked, barking. And if they entered appropriately, and naked, then they could sit around and drink for more days. This is a good example of idealistic morality. Like PBS? No. Realistic... Hyakujo is more realistic morality. A day of no work is a day of no eating. More to... I think how we try to do the bakery, for example. To find out how to handle money. So I think another proposition would be the best thing you can do for people is to encourage them to be more competent and to increase the varieties of competence, the varieties of the particular.

[40:13]

In Zen, you know, like money, the most universal factor is intention. And it's free. Anyone can have intention. And intention is the most important and powerful thing. Intention is much more important than talent or anything. Intention and turning questions. Well, I'm about forth done. Anyway, I'll figure out some way to stop. Anyway, if you have no system, unless you live in the woods by yourself, pretty much, or have

[42:24]

then you have to have your own mental system. But if you have no system, as people live together, you have just powerful people take over. Then you get a system imposed on you, some feudalism or mafia-type arrangement. It happened very clearly up in Sunshine Park, or what was it called? That Coca-Cola singer's place, Morning Star Ranch, pretty soon you had the parking lot controlled by people who you couldn't park unless you gave them cigarettes and money and they carried guns because they wouldn't allow any, they wanted a kind of anarchy to go. So no system I don't think works. And if you have a system, it also favors the competent. If you have a clinic, you know, as I was talking with someone, even a clinic for the poor, the more competent, use it better. You've got to fill out a form or you've got to do something. So I don't think we can deny, there's no way you can get out of dealing with that whatever you do it favors the competent.

[43:52]

So it's probably, I think it works better to encourage more and more particularity, more and more shepanises and so forth. We don't have to universalize and think if we're not able to do everything, it's wrong or we're excluded or we're left out. We're very much an initiated group of people practicing a particular way. But also, just like we want our children to be bright, we get involved with, is our teacher competent? Is the lineage of the smart guys in our lineage or the dumb bunnies in our lineage? Well, if you're compassionate and egoless, you'd be happy to be the recipient of the dumb bunny lineage. But no, I'm egoless, but my lineage is powerful. It's crazy. Double whammy. But still, we want our lineage to be credible.

[45:28]

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