And I just want to welcome everybody, thanks for coming and helping with your, coming here today, helping us to rebuild our staff housing, which is falling out of the way, and all kinds of broken trailers and stuff. And now, with this vent fit and other things that we're doing, we can begin to build some housing so that we can actually be here in the next millennium. Which is soon. Which is pretty soon. So we better get started. Anyway, in this audience today, I think it's really true that I don't have to introduce Gary Snyder. Everybody knows Gary and what he's done and what he has to offer us. So I won't say anything else, just turn it over to him, and let's have a great day of dialogue and learning and studying together. Thank you, Norman. Well, thank you all for coming. I guess most of you must have known about Edgewood Drive and other alternative ways to get over the hill here. And I imagine we'll be having some people trickling in still.

[01:07]

I think we're about 20 people short of what we were expecting to have come. So we won't let that bother us. It's exactly a year to the weekend that I was at Green Gulch, 1996-1997, and did a reading here in the Zendo from Mountains and Rivers Without End, and then the following morning did a half-day kind of workshop. How many of you were here at that? Anybody? Gosh. Well, good. Today is going to be longer, and thereby more leisurely, and thereby more thorough. And I trust by no means necessarily repetitive, although some of the same things may come up again. And I'm sure there are some questions that got launched last time that are still in people's minds. How many were at the reading last night?

[02:10]

Oh my gosh, yeah. Well, you guys are wasting the whole weekend here. So am I. You could be out in the rain. You could be out in the rain, right. So we're all in this together. And I'm very glad to be, you know, I love doing things in this Zendo, this space. And I like doing things with Zen Center, so I'm glad to be able to do this. Rick, did you know that I read from your book of poems last night? I just heard. You just heard? In my mind. I asked if you were in the audience. This is Rick Fields. And I said, if Rick is here, I'm going to ask his permission to read some of his poems. But you weren't there. Well, I was going to give it a try. So I went right ahead. Thank you for those powerful poems. When asked what I was going to call this thing today, I said, well, I'll call it Dharma Conversation.

[03:14]

That was partly because I had a clue as to what I was going to do anyway. And basically, that's what Dharma practice and reflection is. It's a kind of a conversation, sometimes with ourselves, our various selves. And the history of what we call Buddhism is, in a sense, the history of a long set of narratives and conversations over 2,500 years or longer. And reflections on the possibilities of Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha, the possibilities of enlightenment, the teaching of enlightenment, and communities that are formed around that, or maybe don't have to be formed around it, just exist. What I really would call, roughly, what I'd like to follow through today, semantically, or present and invite you to talk about with me, is the Buddhist community, in the broadest sense, historically and also personally.

[04:26]

And of course, personally includes practice. We're going to follow a kind of a schedule. Not a kind of a schedule, it's going to be rigid, folks. What am I saying, a kind of a schedule? We're going to follow a schedule. We're starting a little late, 10 o'clock. 10 to 11.30. I'll hold forth, but not as a solid block of talk. I'd like to launch some ideas, tell a couple of stories, and then respond to you and have some conversations back and forth about what issues those seem to touch on or what can be explored further in that area. Hour and a half. So, 10 o'clock to 11.30. 11.30 to 11.45, we'll take a break. 11.45 to 1, more seminar.

[05:29]

It's like a seminar, we'll call it that. From 1 to 2.30 is this hour and a half staggered lunch. If the weather were better, we could all go down and look at the big waves on the beach. Maybe you can do that anyway if you want. You can walk down through there if it isn't too flooded. Hang out in the dining room, sit here in the zendo, and I'll be sitting around in the corner part of that time to pick up threads and talk with you and to talk to old friends. From 2.30 to 4 o'clock, again, we'll launch ourselves into this. 4 to 4.15, a break. 4.15 to 5, a kind of a formal wrap-up. And as Susan O'Connell said, at 5, the normal closing time for most seminars except for Zen Buddhists who are tireless. Get up at 3 and seminar until 6.

[06:30]

And then party! 5 o'clock, we'll end the formal part of it and I'll stay around to have conversations with folks that want to touch base. And I have to be out of here at 6 myself. So that's the schedule for the day. Please do feel free to raise your hand and throw a thought in or a question in at any time, whether I seem to be in the middle of talking about something or not. As I say, I'd like to keep this possibly on the level of a conversation. And I consider it, you know, my sense of it is we have an old and very interesting, by old I mean, you know, 45, 50 years old West Coast Dharma culture that is emerging.

[07:34]

And it's very West Coast in many of its details. And I know many of you here have been part of that because I know you for many years. Some of you are newer to it. We can have a certain confidence in our course and that it is a West Coast Dharma culture that appreciates, enjoys, and relates to a number of formal Buddhist centers and groups and specifically designated Sanghas. But it is bigger than that. It's social. It belongs to the society that we're growing into. It has a broader stretch of interests. It includes many people who are in the arts and a number of whom are in teaching and in the universities and some who are in many professions and some who are driving cab and pounding nails and keeping bees and trying to sell organic garlic

[08:37]

and all kinds of good things. So that's the culture that I feel at home in. And it's the culture that I would nourish as well as any old huge culture as well. But someone asked me a few years ago what I thought, you know, in terms of being a poet who I thought my poetry audience was as a writer. And I said, well, you know, every writer would like to think they had a universal audience at least of everybody who speaks the English language. Potentially, that's true. And if you're a writer in the English language you have potentially the largest audience in the world of any language. You have potentially the largest audience that anybody's ever had in history just with the English language. English is far and away the most widely used language in the world. But my audience is really west of the Rockies

[09:40]

from Northern British Columbia to the Tehachapis people of the western states and the western slope who have been thinking about nature, culture, alternative political and community possibilities and the Dharma. Here on the west side for the last half century. And some of my mentors in that going back are Kenneth Rexroth Robinson Jeffers Alan Watts and others that we can think of for me as a young man. Okay. And some of this is going to be a bit personal or autobiographical maybe. Why not? So what I want to open up with is the thought beings are numberless and the rest of the vow is

[10:44]

I vow to enlighten them. Xu Zhou, Mu Hien, Tze Gan Do Looking back in my own case I realize that I was a pretty normal person as a kid as a young person and I say that because for years I thought I was eccentric and what was normal about me was and I'm sure many of you share this probably most of you what was normal about me was I felt considerable empathy and sympathy and engagement with non-human critters and with the rest of the human world the rest of the non-human world that I had a sense of a kind of life

[11:44]

in things I was naturally nobody told me this to be this way I was naturally cautious about insulting things like logs or boulders I had a natural sense that there was some integrity and presence in all of the material and immaterial natural world that called for attention and respect and this was just part of my being I lived in the country of north of Seattle I was out a lot into the woods which was just over the fence from our cow pasture and I was working a lot with both cows and chickens too I had morning chores I got up every morning like a farm kid

[12:44]

I was a farm kid I got up every morning at 6 and helped my father finish up milking and then shoveled the manure out of the backs of the stalls for the dairy cows and took care of other dairy chores carried the milk up to the house and then went out on milk delivery using my bicycle and then came back and took care of my chicken flock which was my own personal flock I had 80 Rhode Island red hens that were layers that was my project and that's how I made a little money for myself was my own chicken business my own ink business I did that for years up north of Seattle but also there was a lot of wild land around and I was constantly probing and exploring into the wild land anyway what I've just described as a attitude or outlook on the world which I thought was eccentric because I lived in a Judeo-Christian capitalist culture in which those are not the standard ideas about the nature of the world is that that's the way most

[13:44]

of the people in the world have always seen the world that's your basic low-level peasant animism the sense of the world that ordinary possibly uneducated working farmers peasants subsistence people have always had everywhere in a more refined version it is Japanese Shinto in a more refined version slightly more refined with specific stories and specific little ceremonies here and they're attached to what we call a folk religion but folk religion is based on an old perception of the world as alive which is generally shared by children and is taught or conditioned out of children as they grow older by an educational system which of course does not honor values of that sort nor does it honor

[14:45]

the imagination you know the imagination is not something that is stimulated talked about or exercised in formal education although it's one of our most powerful learning tools and problem solving tools we use it by default rather than by permission unless you major in art then you get a special territory so this is going on and I want to answer a question that somebody raised last night which I declined to answer because it would take too long so I'm doing it now why was I attracted to Zen well so what I'm saying is I was not attracted to Zen because I didn't have a religion I had a religion and by the time I was thirteen or fourteen I knew I had a religion I was quite aware of it and I had my own little rituals

[15:46]

and I had my own little shrines in the woods that I designed and placed there with some kind of American Indian readings that I had done so I put a shell and a little beadwork and some feathers and a prayer stick that would be my shrine in the woods and then when I started doing snow peak mountaineering in the Pacific Northwest when I was fifteen my first snow peak climb and I became a mountaineering fanatic overnight I felt that far from just getting onto the top of a dead old volcano my first peak was Mount St. Helens that I was being instructed somehow by Buddhas except I didn't call them Buddhas then I just knew they were great beings and there was something magical in being out above Timberline above the clouds into the blue upper air on the ice that was deeply moving

[16:47]

and deeply inspiring and exhilarating to which I could only imagine some kind of magical meaning that I couldn't you know put a word to so why does one become a Buddhist? Good question why do peasants become Buddhists? Why where are the limits of Paganism? Pagan Peasant the religion of the country of the pace the countryside Paisano that's all the Pagan means it was the countryside religion of the ancient Mediterranean the countryside religion as it happened to be taken over by ruling class people in Greece and Rome became a rather elaborate in Rome it became an elaborate religion of the state but original but in its origins it's one of

[17:47]

that variety of life affirming and shall we say biodiversity affirming religious fundamental ancient religious outlooks biodiversity affirming all sentient beings with that impulse already in me from my own intuitive perception of the world I was offended when I tried out Lutheran Sunday school my parents were left-wing atheists socialists but they were tolerant broad-minded and they said well maybe you should have a Christian experience just see what this culture is like and I was up for it so I started walking down to the Lutheran church about a mile from the farm for Sunday

[18:48]

school on Sunday mornings I don't know how old I was probably eight or nine and I've told this story before we had a heifer that I was fond of that got sick and died and so one day in Sunday school the question of heaven and who gets to go to heaven came up and I asked the Sunday school teacher well would the heifer go to heaven and I was told no and I thought about that and I pursued this it never occurred to me before that animals didn't get to go to heaven too what the heck would heaven be like without any wildlife you ever think of that you want to live in a city with streets paved with gold and no animals the alternative vision of course is the garden of eden and that's another story that's another whole line of Christianity which is largely considered heretical at any rate that was the end of my exploration

[19:48]

of Christianity when I couldn't crack the insistence of the Sunday school teacher that heifers and cows and chickens didn't go to heaven so I never went back and but I kept my ears tuned as I learned and read and I became aware that not only Native American religion with which I was fascinated and reading quite a bit and hanging out with fascination in the universities this was up in Seattle the University of Washington Anthropology Museum full of great carvings great totem poles great woven Chilkat blankets hammered copper plates bent wood boxes with killer whale designs and raven designs on them I just was totally fascinated by that I also had a sense that it wasn't really open to

[20:49]

me as a white kid but when I heard about Hinduism and Buddhism world religions you know and that one of the things about Hinduism and Buddhism is that in their sense of the grand drama of the universe and the drama of enlightenment all beings are part of the game I thought that makes sense and so it was from that standpoint that I was drawn toward eastern religious thought and ultimately Buddhism not so much on account of the idea of reincarnation but simply the ethical allowance actually the ethical insistence that non-human beings be given respect and

[21:49]

gee by 1944 45 everybody is hearing about Mahatma Gandhi too and Gandhi as eminent world spokesperson for non-violence for Ahimsa as an ethical principle a little later I learned that Buddhism had as its first ethical precept the first precept Ahimsa the same term as Gandhi was using in fact Gandhi got it for Buddhism as it turns out non-violence non-literally harming non-harming and I thought eminently sensible why didn't they think of that in the occidental world you know where were they what kind of a clock cog were they slipping in

[22:49]

the year 1500 BC when the roots of western monotheism were shaping up that they didn't include the non-human I still don't get it because it seems obvious but that's the history that we are so to speak dealing with and I also realized because I had the habit of reading widely and lots of curiosity I realized that one needed an international perspective a world perspective something that would help one with a world perspective as well as being taken with the ravens and salmon and trout and blue jays in your own backyard your own watershed mandala which I do think is of tremendous importance and we'll come back to that but oh that was

[23:50]

my heart the cosmopolitanism of Buddhism was attractive and the realization that it had worked its way from not only into Indian culture but Sri Lankan Southeast Asian Tibeto Nepali Mongolian Chinese Korean South U.S. or Vietnam and Japan you know that the capacity to do that was that it had done that was impressive to me and that pulled me towards Buddhist teachings or investigating Buddhist teachings any questions at this point very interesting yeah I do not think of this as a unique story no I I think that this is a story in varying degrees all of us share or many of us share and so

[24:50]

one of the reasons I'm repeating it is maybe to call it to your own attention that this might have been you know buried in your own I've heard that from your ancestors you know those things have a way of catching up with you for example we were on the coast of the United States we had ozone and all that stuff so now you come up with a very simple dharma consciousness and people very simple about I've been saying this for a long time can you hear me gentlemen can you speak a little louder and a little slower please because this is a conversation when I first met Garrett I was being billed out of Napa State and we had a 25 mile distance and I was trying to go to Florida yeah I just thought it was a wonderful place so I brought a glass of whiskey with me okay

[25:51]

come back to it later if you feel like it yeah well what I'm hearing is that you had a vast experience being in the west you have vast experiences and you were trying to find a frame of reference I was trying to find a frame of reference that made sense you know to me and my vast experience at first was just you know the three or four square miles of forest around the farm and then you know I expanded it to the summit of Mount St. Helens the summit of Mount Hood like literally get up on the summit of Mount Hood what do you see boy the world is big that was before you know kids flew in airplanes I'd never been up in an airplane and so that was like my experiential knowledge those mountains gave me the experiential knowledge of space big thing space big sky you know emptiness they say except I didn't know about that then you know but you

[26:51]

don't need to know about it so my first the thing that first drew me towards Buddhism was ethical and not a perceived need to solve personal problems but a perceived need for a philosophy that fit to real ethical needs of the world and the ethical needs of nature of the whole world of all beings including human beings and of course all beings you know so moving now into the Buddhist story a little bit again as a voracious reader kind of like a bottom feeding fish with a big mouth I sucked

[27:52]

up a whole lot of information pretty rapidly about Hinduism Tibetan Buddhism Chinese Buddhism Taoism and so forth and you know with a a storyteller's mind you know I saw I got a sense of what the narratives were and filled that out later by my own travels in East Asia and in India but let me say again you know my sense of teachers originally was first it was stumps big 12 foot high 8 foot diameter Douglas fir stumps same size western red cedar stumps those were scattered in the woods back of our farm we had them on our farm too some of those big stumps and when I

[28:52]

was a boy I was helping my dad get rid of you know we would pack we'd get dynamite at the hardware store and pack a charge of dynamite deep in the stump crotch down underneath dig under there put the dynamite in it get back and blow the stump up and then a neighbor with a team came in with his team of horses we would drag the shards of this giant stump each of which weighed several thousand pounds no doubt we'd drag these shards of the team into a pile and then we'd burn those brush piles of stump shards in the fields all nice and clear and green grass every one of those was covered with stumps when I was a little boy and they were dynamiting and burning the stumps that was like the next step in civilizing the place the first

[29:53]

step was clear cutting it so at some point I realized and so this is the instruction of the stumps that something had happened here before that I didn't know about suddenly it occurred to me those stumps mean something at first I just took them as part of the landscape like kids do but then the spirits of the stumps the hovering spirits of the vast trees maybe you know were whispering in my ear take a look at this what do you suppose happened here now I know they were logged in 1895 during the vast clear cutting that was taking place between Seattle and the Canadian border and that they were part of the world's greatest temperate zone rainforest that they were some of the biggest temperate zone conifers the world has seen you can still see a few of them on the Olympic Peninsula in Olympic National Park you can still see a few in some of the drainages of North

[30:53]

Cascade National Park the redwood trees on the north coast are something like that and bigger but these weren't redwoods so a perception of what my society had already done finally came to me and then I was appalled and the other critters in the neighborhood in a sense were my teachers too and then the mountains I guess which took me out into a larger space so now I'm going to say a few words about India yeah the distinction between something like a stump and a mountain do you consider them all beings well you know there's a difference between a canyon wren and a ground squirrel they're both beings but they're very different and so when we say

[31:54]

they're all beings we're not saying they're all the same of course they are all entities they are all small deep dharmas they are phenomenal entities are they of the same order there are many orders just as in an ecosystem which is a really elaborate and complex neighborhood or community there are many many orders far more complex in their interrelationships than any human society because human society is just a one species society so when you get a multiple species society you've got something very rich I'm going to switch over a little bit to the metaphors of ecosystems here so I thought for a long time in my half-baked half-assed scientific way my grasp of science is rudimentary

[32:54]

but I sure love it so I was thinking for a long time of ecosystems as organizations of sentient beings including plants and several of my scientist friends up at UC Davis people who I hang out with and I love their presence made it clear to me that an ecosystem includes an enormous amount of inorganic input that an ecosystem includes the mineral flow that comes out through the soils the carbon of course the oxygen the hydrogen the water and that a true ecosystem is an exchange system not simply between different kinds of living creatures but it is an exchange system between the organic and the inorganic world as well and it is specific you know to a lot of it is specific to a given watershed we've got patches of forest up where I live and work around the forest I live right in the middle of a

[33:54]

huge forest some of it is like theoretically mine but most of it belongs to you guys public land and it is in mosaics you go out for a walk and for a while you'll be under oak trees with an open understory black oaks next thing you know you'll be in a series of thickets with an upper canopy then you'll get into a canopy without heavy understory next thing you'll know you'll be in clusters of plants a soil type and all of these plants have got different tastes they flourish in different places they know what they like right down

[34:55]

to a north slope a south slope a west slope as well what kind of sun comes in how the breeze blows how the soil tastes it is so refined and that is a model for the world that is the natural world we need to understand that that richness and complexity a little better as a model that would apply to our own human social life as well so your question was are these guys all beings yeah they are they all have different stories different perhaps meanings what does a huge old douglas first say to us uh it raises a lot of questions how did I ever get to be so big how come that tree got so big what's that history what is it what is it that enables this being to become so huge what was in its own nature that enabled it to do that what was in the soil and the weather that enabled it to do that when

[35:55]

you get a whole bunch of them together five thousand square miles of them what does that mean what does that create what world what is that what mandala is that do you know this is from chris maser in his wonderful book primeval forest he's a BLM forest scientist up in corvallis in ancient forests in big old forests on the west coast there is a as in almost all forests there's a very deep and necessary symbiotic relationship between the roots of the conifers and fungi and without certain fungi these trees can't live the fungi play the nutrient exchange role in the soils they speed up nutrient exchange they service the roots in ways that the roots can't service themselves without fungi trees don't get big some of them can't even live there is a symbiotic relationship that goes back millions of years

[36:56]

and it's particularly true apparently in the ancient forests there is a species of flying squirrel that lives in the ancient forests of the west the west coast that is so arboreal it lives in the top of the canopy and the top of the canopy is 200 feet 300 feet up there 400 feet in some cases it lives in the top of the canopy and it has a life in the canopy that goes on for dozens or even hundreds of generations without the squirrel ever touching the ground those squirrels they carry however in their feces the spores of the necessary mushrooms or fungi that make the mycorrhizal relationships in the understory and when they do touch the ground as they do sometimes they'll sail all the way down to the ground for some reason or another maybe they'll fall when they fall they don't get killed they just spread their

[37:56]

wings or flaps if they defecate on the ground they have planted spores in the ground so they say after a huge stand destroying fire such as will come even in the forests of the west coast maybe once in a millennium a stand destroying fire is one that takes all the trees down it will be the flying squirrels dropping into the burn from adjoining standing trees that will re-inoculate the soil with the fungi that will enable the big trees to come back that's part of the rich story of ancient forest that's all part of the story of the stump the other part of the story of the stump is the IWW the industrial workers of the world trying to organize the loggers who are working in very unsafe conditions at very low wages doing the clear cutting and living a life which is so structured that they'll never be able to get married or have a family because

[38:57]

they have to work in these remote camps and they're not paid enough to save up enough money even and a lot of them are Finns or Swedes or Norwegians they barely speak English in many cases so what do they do they remember socialism from Europe and they organize and they start labor unions and then they start the industrial workers of the world now that's another story of the stump that's the story my grandfather was part of he was an IWW organizer so you know there's a lot of history there both human and non-human maybe you're asking the question or maybe implicit in your question is are all critters equal do all critters call forth equal moral regard this is a big debate you know in ecological ethics in animal rights people not so much in deep ecology which steps aside

[39:57]

from that question or in buddhism which does not take that question on as a serious question buddhism doesn't say ahimsa non-harming as little harm as possible okay first don't hurt human beings right no murder second gorillas they're kind of like us be especially nice to them third cows and horses they do work for us they give milk they have vertebrae so you can be sort of nice to them and you go down the scale you know so then some people say well I don't eat red meat I don't eat chicken anymore and I've quit eating fish but I eat oysters and clams because they don't scream and they don't try to run away from you actually I heard somebody say that working down the scale of sentient moral responsibility yeah

[40:59]

not now before we whatever we break for lunch I would be thrilled if you could remember and say for us the song of taste the what point the song of the taste the song of the taste hey good point I'll do it I'll do it in just a second as a matter of fact yes this is against the stream of what you just said what what what about the moral principle that I grew up with that what counts is whether a being can feel pain we ought to attend to that so it is difficult to imagine that a shrimp screeches but it isn't so difficult to imagine that a dog screeches in pain maybe you know

[41:59]

now I'll tell there's no reason why we shouldn't cover this we're talking about the ethics of the non-human and explore this a little further on that part if you just look I have this example he said that he was really afraid you know really afraid of jungles and everything but he hated cockroaches because they grew out of his butt and whenever he saw a cockroach he was totally hostile to it we all have some kind of bad karma as part of the arguments and discussions of ecological ethicists there's a journal you know called ecological ethics or environmental ethics it's been going now for 15 years an academic journal called environmental ethics comes out of North Texas State University in Denton, Texas it's a very good journal and it has it does all the book reviews and it covers all these arguments over the decades it's a real

[43:00]

resource for people who are now beginning you know formally even in the universities in some philosophy departments to include the question of environmental ethics as a serious ethical territory the ethics of the non-human and there's a tremendous resistance to it also in formal academic philosophy and generally in the academic world as a whole there's a tremendous resistance to it it is still dismissed as touchy-feely counterculture stuff or sentimental stuff you know what happens to those kids that love trees like I was still am they decide to go into forestry I thought I might go into forestry at one time they go to forestry school they enter forestry school say at the University of Montana I heard this from a friend of the University of Montana first day in forestry class the instructor says how many

[44:01]

of you here love trees lots of little hands go up he says how many of you think that you might be so to speak tree huggers a few tentative hands go up and he says I'll tell you something folks we're here not to teach you about trees not to help you like trees not to help you save trees we're here to talk about fiber and how to get it out boy they cut all the people out of forestry class very quickly that think they love nature and they get into engineers and fiber producers road builders timber mensuration measurement experts etc. etc. that has been the forest service and the timber industry for years now and that's the way it works okay so the questions about degrees of pain are one way that people can talk about it another way

[45:03]

that that can be approached and I heard it just recently said very beautifully by the South African novelist J.M. Coetzee who gave two talks at Stanford this fall one was called The Animals and the Philosophers the second one was called The Animals and the Poets I didn't get to attend the lectures but my friend Mark Gunnerman sent me the tapes and they're fascinating so one of the questions of course that he deals with his narrative his lecture really is a narrative it's almost framed like a short story so that he doesn't make himself into the person who argues on behalf of animal rights but he has a woman lecturer the mother of a professor at a small college who is a well-known writer and allows Coetzee to distance himself a little bit but the response is this and this is basically right we don't know enough about animals to talk about

[46:04]

which animal has more consciousness and which has less we don't know a darn thing about it we don't even know what consciousness is we have a very narrow humanoid definition of a certain kind of consciousness which is our self-awareness to think that we can apply the standards that we have in regard to human consciousness to other animals and to grade them accordingly is outright arrogance and ignorance nor do we understand pain or what pain is to who or how much anybody feels it we do know that practically all these organisms right down to the smallest have nervous systems which respond to stimuli to probes to touch to taste to smell they are sentient so it is healthier and more honest to say okay

[47:04]

let's say they are all conscious in some degree they all love their own lives and they feel pain and so what we're going to do inevitably inextricably is we're going to have to cause some pain let's just be aware of it let's just acknowledge it and then there are of course you know personal food choices this is not like trying to get into a philosophy of what's the right kind of food to eat there are personal food choices and the vegetarian choice is a very wise and sensible choice and a very prudent choice nothing wrong with that it's an elegant choice but one would want to avoid being too judgmental about other people and other cultures who do not make the vegetarian choice since most of the world it's all it can do to get

[48:05]

enough to eat you know by whatever strategy by whatever means and then there are a few people in the world a very tiny number who are gluttonous and who eat things they don't have to eat that's true too and we could say that gluttony whether vegetarian or non-vegetarian is not terribly attractive the big meat eaters in the world are the North Americans the Argentinians the New Zealanders the Australians nobody else in the world eats anywhere as much meat as that you ask the average Chinese person are you a vegetarian they say oh no how much meat do they eat one pound a year that's the average amount of meat eaten per year for a Chinese peasant but they wouldn't call themselves a vegetarian because they're looking forward to that little treat that they might get once a year so there's quite a range of degrees possible in this whole thing yeah that seems to be one of the

[49:05]

the point that's brought up in Tibetan is that an Irish part of their diet is based upon eating meat as one of the two forms of eating that they like and so how do they go about doing that mindfully by acknowledging the universal energy that flows through that and doing it mindfully and that seems to be the sort of base for this conversation or rather the emphasis to do something in a mindful way acknowledging the universal energy sort of egocentric mantra for one person whether a male feels comfortable understands it so yes you know quite so that as consumers of food we are all consumers of food one of the few

[50:07]

things we can do is be mindful and be grateful and practice ahimsa non-harming by some kind of intelligent sense of what is the least harmful diet in some larger picture the least harm-causing diet in some larger picture and in any case to be grateful to our food whether it's a carrot or whether it's a tail feather of a chicken so yeah saying grace is a shortcut way of describing the ceremonial and mindful response to the almost you might say moral human dilemma moral not even human it's the moral organic dilemma of all living beings that all living beings eat and that it is a metabolic world in which we are all food for each other I know that's the larger picture of that is that we are all edible and you might

[51:08]

as well take pleasure in the fact since somebody else will take pleasure in it yes A comment regarding the sentience I was reading the other day Ken Wilber to simplify the argument hierarchically one of the statements he made was that plants contain minerals but minerals don't contain plants which sounded fine I guess but I was really uncomfortable with it when I thought about it and being somewhat of an eccentric kid partially because I was reading you and partially because I was reading you it was very apparent to me that the stone and the mineral also contain plants it's just that you listen differently and hear the pain of the stone and the pain of the soil it's a different kind of listening different kind of paying attention and to say that if you said even the snail

[52:09]

has a certain pain if you listen to the soil or you listen to the rivers you can also hear their experience thank you that's exactly where I was going to open it up to you know next comment on Ken Wilber Ken Wilber does think hierarchically very much so he has a graded sense of a progressive idea about evolution like Teilhard de Chardin did leading to higher and higher realms and leaving material worlds behind and he's basically a rationalist it's all very cut and dried logical rational judgmental theory I got into kind of an argument at a party at somebody's mansion on Lake Tahoe once with Ken Wilber first time last time I ever met him he's a brilliant guy I mean he's just like a whip that guy he's just incredibly

[53:09]

sharp Richard Baker told me not too long ago about visiting Ken Wilber at home and he said you know how that guy lives? First of all he doesn't live with anybody he lives alone so he gets up at four and first he writes then he works out in his personal gym for a couple hours then he meditates then he writes then he eats just the kind of food he likes that he feels is just right and you know he has this incredibly disciplined life of writing researching and working out in his gym what a guy I'm not making fun of him I sort of envy him you know I can't figure out how to do that myself but here was the gist of the argument we were talking about evolution and Ken was saying that the process of evolution

[54:10]

is into the spiritual into the no-sphere the mind realm and is toward a higher and higher spirituality I said okay okay but are we going to say that all of the animals through time were just steps on the ladder and had no integrity in their own right some dinosaur does not exist for the purpose of us the dinosaur exists entirely for its own purposes the dinosaur is complete in itself the dinosaur is a Buddha complete and there now in its own time it doesn't exist for some past purpose or some future purpose who said that Dogen this is Dogen's answer to a hierarchical sense of evolution an artist's answer

[55:11]

is we do not listen to a symphony for the purpose of getting to the end of it which is the best part of the music is the end better than the beginning give us a break every step this is an old Dogen koan or somebody's koan every step on the way of the Dharma is equal that's a Sasshon koan the first step is as much of an accomplishment as the last step and so we should think of sentient beings in that light and we should think of evolution in that light that at every point the universe has been complete and it's not that there is some higher purpose that will come into being through time salvation in time salvation via history which is

[56:12]

Judeo-Christianity or Marxism salvation through history no as we know from the Dharma our Dharma practices any enlightenment there is is always going to be in this moment and this moment is the perfection that will be eternally okay, where am I going next with this yeah, non-sentient beings yeah you made me think that one of the arguments that ethicists use in defense of the environment is the idea of intrinsic value and it gets a little bit fuzzy particularly in the political realm to start talking about intrinsic value how would you how would you view the notion of intrinsic value and how would you be able to argue that in a more realistic way in terms of working in working in communities and working with politicians to argue for intrinsic value intrinsic value he's asking about the the scale or the grades of intrinsic value which are part of environmental ethicist vocabulary possible argument

[57:14]

I'm not quite sure which territory of intrinsic value you're talking about are you talking about like quantification potential quantification one of the dangers that I think that we're getting into is that we're now starting to look at ecosystems and say here's a given species what's its function within that ecosystem can we lose it in other words if we understand evolution correctly we've lost over 90% of all the species that have come to pass on the earth so there's a precedent for saying that there are species that do go and if that's the case then how do we rationalize which species go by ranking them as it were within a given ecosystem did you hear that I'm afraid they couldn't hear it that's why don't you stand up and turn around and say that again because because this is really interesting um oops I did hear what I said um the one of the arguments that I'm getting concerned about is that as we begin to argue about preservation of species and ecosystems the rational side

[58:18]

of us is saying well how do we begin to rank those species within a given system such that if we say that we know through history and through science if we do our science right we know that we do lose species over time in fact over 90% of all species have come to pass on the planet um so why should we get upset about losing a few more and then in that regard what they're saying is we should then go in and say which species in the system is really playing a vital role to that system in other words can we take out a few species and that system will still be intact and then the other people are arguing well wait a minute no every species has intrinsic value and then it shuts down okay so you're using intrinsic value thank you very much are you a biologist ecologist I'm a Gary Snyder reader well you must have you must have another life because I never said that stuff oh boy

[59:28]

that's always an excuse so your sense of intrinsic value there is the ecosystem manager's sense of intrinsic value what is the value of the species in the system yeah that's only one of several kinds of what you might call intrinsic value that is an ecosystem manager's mindset what he was describing ecosystem managers are kind of a new thing around right now as the understanding and knowledge of ecosystems has grown and it has grown enormously just in the last twenty years land managers the professionals who take care of grazing lands forest lands deserts and so forth on public lands and also people who are hired to do that on large private land holdings have come to realize that they need to understand ecosystems now you might think this is kind of late in the game for something like the US Forest Service that has been managing forests for over a hundred years now to suddenly discover

[60:29]

that it ought to think about ecosystems but it has and also when they're honest they confess as one of their Tahoe National Forest biologists Mike Chappell said to me he says the truth is Gary we don't know a god damn thing about forest ecology and we've been doing this for a hundred years well so they're saying to the Department of Agriculture to the US Forest Service and to the Bureau of Land Management in regard to management issues management issues is ecosystem management and now everybody's trying to figure out what that means everybody who's in the agencies and it does mean although it's not been really made very clear it means a kind of holistic view of land minerals and all species plants animals interactions with the sense that the biodiversity this is also

[61:29]

a new idea that the biodiversity should be maintained the species array should be maintained but doing so say that you know say that Buddhism became the state religion of the United States and the Dalai Lama was in the White House or maybe on the cabinet cabinet member and they were really getting serious about you know not killing sentient beings and maintaining biodiversity well actually something like that happened in the United States we got the Endangered Species Act how in the hell did we ever get that it was a total accident so to speak the congressmen etc. who voted it in in the early 70s didn't have a clue as to what the implications of it were but it sounded good at the time and I

[62:29]

would argue this is a little self-serving maybe but I would argue that the energies of the 60s set it up so that civil rights was going strong the environment was just being discovered Paul Ehrlich's book was out they'd had the first Earth Day nature was apple pie and mom as far as American politics were concerned for a few years in the early 70s and the Endangered Species Act got passed there's not another nation on earth that has anything like the Endangered Species Act they're smarter than that they know that they've got to make money and that they've got to survive and that they can't screw up their corporations you think Japan would ever pass a law like that forget it the Wilderness Act too you know we it's a remarkable little turn in the American psyche that that those things slipped by and that's part of another story about the American psyche like how in the world did we ever get Henry David Thoreau

[63:29]

where did he come from the American experience has produced some remarkable eccentrics who took on the challenge of the new continent in deep and unexpected ways who brought a lot of intelligence to bear on it and touched a cord in the American mind which confronted with the vast richness of the new world and its diversity loved it so we have a split consciousness in this country and have had for 500 years between sensing a need to use and exploit and on the other side appreciating the sheer beauty of it you find that all the way through the literature and you find it in the very same people sometimes that split so because playing on that split and playing on a certain kind of ignorance we got the Endangered Species Act and the Endangered Species Act now is just

[64:29]

endless mischief and also it's not very well framed in many ways so everybody is trying to find a way to reframe it ecosystem management the concept of which is one of the ways of trying to think of how to reframe it and intelligently so in that to save species you don't just save species you don't save individual species you've got to save the context you know like Hillary Clinton would say to save children you don't just save children you've got to save families to save families you've got to save communities it takes a village it's the same thing in nature you've got to save the whole community or a good chunk of the community before you can actually make species species have to have a place to live so arrogantly and ignorantly ecosystem managers with their half-baked sense of things are trying to do triage in literal cases

[65:29]

like brush lands down near San Diego where there's an endangered bird or in other cases where they're looking at it and saying we've got to let the developers do XYZ we've got to keep species A, B maybe we can do without species C maybe the system will stay together it's a nutty way of thinking and the analogy that 90% of the species that have lived on Earth are now gone is not a real analogy because from ecosystem thinking from the standpoint of ecosystem thinking you don't think species you think niches who plays the function the species are gone the niches are eternal the seat in the mandala is always there different guys and gals come and sit in it the seat is there and that's true in species true in

[66:30]

ecosystem functions so the niches haven't gone away right right and if you have very good karma you will be reborn as a zindo then you'll get to always sit although they say you know mountains are always sitting if not walking yeah to move back over to the I'm getting there yeah that's that's in the the six gati the six paths of existence psychological ecosystem

[67:31]

thinking from Buddhism okay let's talk about the ecosystem what is in the ecosystem that is not handled or taken into account by ecosystem managers this is the shortcoming the shortfall of ecosystem management thinking pardon me no that is part of their thinking that is their thinking well it's so far you're right it is it's limited in the sense that it's based on human self-interest and most ecosystem management still even though they'll put out god I'm going through this like every day right now with the Tahoe National Forest this is like what is right on my tray is a new logging proposal well they call it vegetation management plan they don't call them timber sales anymore nice to see

[68:35]

you again looking for maximizing fiber or maximizing say deer because we've got hunters and so we do have to have a certain number of good deer that becomes the self-interest part of ecosystem management and the hopeful thinking of ecosystem management type guys is and gals boy there's a lot of women now in fish and wildlife in the forest service in BLM they're all through the public lands business now clear up to national forest supervisor levels they're really in there and they're on the firefighting crews too we see women with the agencies all the time now they're good they run a lot of risks so they're all trying to find a way ideally to provide some of the stuff the society needs like timber or deer and at the same time preserve as much or

[69:35]

all of the biodiversity they can and they will use the language that you suggested of intrinsic value although the deep ecology position is all things have equal intrinsic value in nature because as John Muir said years ago in an essay no creature exists for the benefit of human beings creatures exist for the benefit of themselves they are in their own best interests and that's how we should understand them that they exist for their uses not for our uses primarily so these arguments these are very current and we haven't seen the end of it by any means what's the thing that you were starting to say the land managers leave something out okay we'll come back to that I haven't

[70:38]

made it yet though thank you Norman the Endangered Species Act is going to be around it's a hot topic it's currently it's going to be argued for a long time to come and as I said to the people at the Buddhist Peace Fellowship I was one of the founders of the BPF and we originally founded it with both an environmental and social ethic base and I keep reminding them little notes to Alan and other folks I say don't forget nature don't be drawn totally into social justice and all these wonderful problems that human beings have there is no other religious group running around here in North America right now except Buddhism and except the BPF and no engaged group except the BPF who can also take it as their territory to speak up for endangered species as well as all these other questions

[71:38]

and the BPF people have gotten really much better at that recently in the last few years they sent several cadres of people up to be activists at the Headwaters Forest which I really admire and so I'm not criticizing them they're doing with their limited resources extremely well and they are taking what I would consider as a mandate to Buddhist activists that they include the question of non-human nature and its fate in their work right alongside of these admittedly horribly urgent questions involving human beings but let's not separate them out too much so what does the ecosystem manager ignore? All sentient beings what do all sentient beings include? Humans they do actually ecosystem managers include humans and that's part of ecosystem management they don't draw the line anymore just at the National Park or National Forest or BLM boundary they look at

[72:39]

where the ecosystem goes they say that's a yellow pine ponderosa pine manzanita forest it goes right on down the hill goes off our boundaries goes right on over to private land it's over on that ranch over there as far as the bear or the cougar and the birds go they don't know where the boundary is it's all the same ecosystem for them they're going to go down there they're going to come back here when they're on private land they don't know it's private land so we have to think about so-called private and so-called public as part of the same picture it's all the same ecosystem and the ecosystem may reach all the way down to the Berkeley hills in some cases so that is like an expansion that ecosystem management provides for us but you know to take the metaphor of ecosystem further what else is in the ecosystem is in Buddhist thought and in Indian thought gods spirits gods and spirits demons Nagas Nagas

[73:41]

girls Kinaras Yakshas Yakshasis all of them are sentient beings that's part of the realm of sentient beings so sentient beings include a less visible world of entities that we are aware of but and who have effects on our lives but are not so present but they're part of the ecosystem also there are ghosts and then there are hungry ghosts there are demonic hell dwellers somewhere in the ecosystem that is the Indian that is the Indian and the Indian Buddhist way of thinking about ecosystems and then there are Buddhas are Buddhas in the ecosystem or out of the ecosystem well there are diagrams

[74:41]

of this and the Buddhas are out of the ecosystem because they know how to do it but also they come back into the ecosystem because then they're called Bodhisattvas when they reenter the ecosystem to play some part in these marvelous chains okay I'm going to talk a little bit about India now Bharat India reincarnation the idea of reincarnation is very widespread in the world a lot of North American Indians Pacific Northwest Coast Klingon Haida Guadalupe all those people have a strong belief in reincarnation lots of other places too it's one of the varieties of folk religion it's not universal but it crops up in folk religion here and there in the world and

[75:43]

apparently became a very strong part of Indian thought quite widely quite early so it is built into Indian eschatology to live in the belief in reincarnation and the belief in past lives in a culture that believes that is quite remarkable it has remarkable effects I have read had read plenty of Puranas Indian stories from the Vishnu lines and the Shaiva lines Shiva lines before I ever went to India and could see in the Purana narratives how reincarnation taken fairly literally played out with fantastic tale making fantastic story making or you

[76:45]

only have to think of the Jataka tales of the previous lives of the Buddha very entertaining and also quite moral there are lessons in all of them and beautiful childlike stories the Puranas stories are scarier and creepier and more dramatic than the Jatakas so then you go to India and you start hanging out with ordinary Indian people with their considerable dignity and arrogance regardless of their station in life confidence and arrogance their argumentativeness their remarkable verbal articulateness regardless who they are where they are they can argue with you and a lot of them can do it in English and

[77:49]

their remarkable sense of being at home whoever they are that has a lot to do with the belief in reincarnation because when you live in a reincarnation belief culture in a sense the pressure is off you are not faced with the challenge of getting all the experiences that you think you want in this lifetime you don't have to make a list of the great cities that you haven't visited yet or the birds that you haven't got on your life list or whatever it is that you think you still want to have or do or be or experience forget it you have experienced everything there is no new experience take that as sort of the ground the ground line of your belief in yourself I've already done everything

[78:49]

I've been everything I've been everywhere I may not remember it but there really isn't anything new to do that's really what India has as a kind of a strength of belief it's inherent in the system and so there's a kind of insouciance and confidence and lack of neediness really in a certain sense that comes with that that makes them in their own way at home at home in their station in life in their caste in all these complicated different worlds that Indian people live in such a complex society so much more complex than Europe than all of Europe and you have to look at that as one of the threads that lies behind the evolution of Buddhism and a thread of course which includes the idea

[79:50]

that we have been all sentient beings that you have lived out the experience of all the different animals that they are all familiar to you in some deep inner sense and that puts everybody at home in the larger ecosystem and of course the wheel of reincarnation the wheel of rebirth includes gods deities demons hungry ghosts hell dwellers and so forth you've all done that too so heaven is not a particularly attractive place it just has the virtue of being a very long stopping spot one stays in the heavenly realms quite a bit longer than in any other realm so what did they do in India with this this sense of an ecosystem so to speak

[80:51]

that existed not only in space as we understand nature but in time as well a temporal passage through interconnecting realms by virtue of what they called reincarnation what it brought about was understandably the desire on the part of some people to get the heck out of it and that's where India where Indian religion a good part of Indian religion comes onto our philosophical horizon as of about 500 BC the Upanishadic that is to say the thinking of the Upanishads and the Yogic traditions with all their diverse practices of India and then the evolution the emergence of Buddhism of the

[81:51]

Buddha's teachings of the Buddha's teachings from within that in the context of a vision of the natural world so conditioned by the sense of reincarnation and also by the ecosystem sense which you can either take pleasure in or you can be neutral about it or you can look on it as scary and awful that everything eats everything else and it's not a vegetarian universe nature red in tooth and claw we don't think of it quite that bleakly that was when 18th century 19th century that that was said that phrase was that Tennyson that said nature red in tooth and claw I thought maybe it was Hobbes you know could have been Hobbes the

[82:57]

civilized take the quote civilized western culture take on the natural world that is of course one of the takes is prior to the rise of hippie ecologists the take on the world was that it was a brutal place on the natural world that it was full of competition social and organic Darwinism no pity no mercy short brief lives red in tooth and claw and that what human beings had managed in their own way for their brief periods of time on earth was a little civil life a little civility hot running water and an indoor toilet good manners clean streets a chance not to have to live like your quote in the jungle that was the late 19th century early 20th century sense of brief sense

[83:58]

of peace of mind before world war one when people thought they had actually accomplished sort of a civil world at least in the western European white realm and then all of that fell apart as we know and continues to fall apart as we have horrendous problems in cities and total lack of civility almost total lack of civility in our public life and by contrast the jungle now looks pretty good but so that you don't get too far on the I love the harmony of nature side Dick Nelson marvelous ecologist and writer and anthropologist I was at a gathering on behalf of animals that Dick was present at Dick lived in the far north for many years and did research and life together with Inupiaq Eskimos

[84:58]

wrote a book called The Hunters of the Northern Ice lived then for several years with the Koyukan people of the Yukon River Athabascan Indians wrote another book called The Hunters of the Northern Forest best books on Native American subsistence economies and hunting and practices that you'll ever see then he wrote another book called Make Prayers to the Raven which he sums up the spiritual side of the views of these people of the far north and actually presents how the spiritual and the economic uses and beliefs about animals and fish and birds are totally woven together and you know to go back to what this gentleman over there said about a ceremony or a ritual of gratitude how they really do it how they've got it down how they have a view that enables them flawlessly to kill

[85:59]

to take life to use and to never miss a beat in their respect for the many levels that this creature has both as a physical entity as an archetypal character in their stories and as some kind of a spiritual being it's a remarkable picture of that life and something like that was there in early India but also at some point in early India they lost hope some people lost hope for the ecosystem as a place to be the Athabascan Indians have never lost that hope they love living in it they don't say I want to get out of this but in India some people came to the point of saying we want to get out of that and that became the inception of the yogic schools founded by Gautama which we know as Buddhism and I'm

[87:00]

going to wind this down at this point and pick up later we have five more minutes now I'm going to take these remaining five minutes for a few more thoughts from you folks and then when we come back I want to continue a little longer on what I have come to understand in my own eccentric way about early Buddhism and its anthropology and its history and its relationship to these questions and then we'll go on from there. Yes? Could you repeat the name of that South African author that you went by really quick? J. M. Ketzee C O E T Z E E Very well known guy actually. Yes? Could you also repeat the name of the author you just mentioned? That is Richard Nelson author of a number of books lives in Sitka just brought a new book out just two weeks ago called

[88:00]

Heart and Blood Living with Deer in America. It's all about deer from Alaska. I read a review of that. It's a fascinating book. He decided to move himself out of the wilds of Alaska where he has done most of this writing and thinking and find out what it was like to have deer in the suburbs. What the interactions between people and deer are in all these different contexts which they never lived in before. It's fascinating. And also what we're learning about it. Yes? I was curious last night you mentioned that after you read The Mountain Spirit, well I learned to read poetry in northern India. Maybe now isn't the time but since we're in India I'd ask that maybe you want to answer it. Well, briefly, in India they have a great tradition of poetry readings both in Urdu and in Hindi. Probably in the far south they have it in Tamil too. They call them Mushaira. They've always

[89:02]

done this. You know, oral literature is still alive and well in much of the world. Or the oral presentation of literature. So a poetry reading in India starts at dusk. They have a group of people, maybe 8 or 10 or 12 poets that are going to read. It's outdoors usually, or under a tent. Hundreds or even thousands of people will sit on rugs on the ground. They have candles on the stage. They might have a PA system if it's big enough. And snack and chai sellers, samosa sellers, little potato snacks, they set up their stands around the edge of it. And the poetry reading starts at dusk and runs till dawn. It's an all-night affair. And people bring their kids and their kids fall asleep and people fall asleep. And they sleep through half the night. The most imminent and famous poets are saved till last. And so people will finally kind of wake themselves up again if

[90:02]

necessary. And just before the sun breaks over the horizon, they'll have the poet that they really wanted to hear, maybe. Then they have another cup of chai and the sun breaks over the horizon and everybody scatters and goes home. I love that event. First of all, it gives you enough time. It takes time. We try to cut short all of our artistic experiences in America. The opera is the longest thing we ever experienced, three hours maybe. You need things that last 12 hours sometimes. So you get all of the time you need. You're allowed to sleep if you want to. And there are snacks to eat. And it is very social in a quiet way. It's a group experience. It's a community experience. And it just feels very, very good. It feels like one of the genuine contexts of experiencing art. So we've got all that stuff cut really short. We're in a hurry. So that's my

[91:02]

ideal. The jazz festivals go on, you're right. And the bluegrass festivals. Yeah, that's true. Music festivals take a lot of time. Drama and poetry, they don't take such a long time anymore.

[91:19]

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