This podcast is offered by the San Francisco Zen Center on the web at www.sfzc.org. Our public programs are made possible by donations from people like you. Well, I'm glad that all the system works. I have some slides to show you. Once I was giving a lecture, or I was doing a bookstore, and in Seattle, and I had an old slide projector with the bulb, and the bulb burnt out. And I think one of the best presentations I ever gave was doing that, showing the slides without showing the slides. I just described each slide. It worked out really well. So this is nice, too. So just imagine that this, with China, what I want to do is sort of give you the background of how things happened in China, why they happened, where they happened, because that's also important for why Zen developed where it did, why the hermit tradition developed where it did.

[01:12]

So anyway, this happened a long time ago and is what was responsible for creating the landscapes in China, was the Indian plate slipping under the Eurasian plate. And in the next slide, we see the resulting river systems in China. This is what had the biggest impact, was the rivers all went from west to east. And another thing that this Indian plate slipping under the Eurasian plate did is it blocked off the annual monsoons. So beginning as early as 100 million years ago, Central Asia became increasingly arid. And... you know, the Takdamakan Desert in this area right here is the world's second largest desert. The Tangiri Desert, which is over in this area right here, is the world's third largest desert. So this area is very arid. And the next slide, you see this yellow river.

[02:13]

Can we go back to the previous slide? This is the yellow river. And this is the river along which Chinese civilization began around, say, 5,000 years ago or so right along this Yellow River and the reason it did was because this arid climate here and resulting whenever there were rainstorms there were storms and lots of dust so in the next slide we see this mouth of the Yellow River this is the Yellow River floodplain The Yellow River didn't exist until about 1.3 million years ago when it finally broke out of this gorge right here and started coming out into this area and filling in the sea. And here you can see the shoreline of the Yellow River in late Neolithic times, 5500 BC. You can see Beijing was on the ocean and most of what became the core area of early Chinese civilization did not exist.

[03:18]

It was all underwater. At best, a marsh. Because this river, we call the Yellow River, the Huanghe, carries more silt than any river in the world. The river that carries the second most silt is the Colorado. And during the summer, the Colorado silt content can reach as high as 10%. The Yellow River, in an average year, during the summer especially, carries 50% silt. So the Yellow River is basically just a big mud fire hose without control. And so it was just like a wild fire hose just filling in this ocean right in here, creating the shoreline. When Chinese civilization finally developed into what we call civilization, about this time, you can see how much had been filled in just in late Neolithic times. And this is why Chinese civilization... here and nowhere else's because you could develop an agricultural society here without metal technology.

[04:23]

You didn't need metal. There were no trees. No trees. This was a flood every year. It would flood. This is all mud. Nothing but mud. No rocks. No rocks, no trees. You could build irrigation ditches really easily with a stick. So this is where Chinese civilization began and why all the early aspects of Chinese civilization began along the Yellow River as opposed to the Yangtze. The Yangtze carries more water than any river in the world in the course of a year, and lots of rainfall, lots of forests, lots of rocks. Really hard to develop agriculture down there at this time, at least. So in the next slide, where that arrow is, you see the first city that was established in China was the city of Huayang. It was around 3500 BC. There was a fellow who established this as a city. I just happened to be there this week when all the citizens were asked to come outside and dig through the old moat.

[05:28]

This is how wide the old moat was that went around this city of around 3500 BC, known as Huayang. And the next slide we see, am I blocking anybody's vision? Okay, the next slide you see why this was an important place to begin this talk. This is the grave of Fuxi. In the West, we have Adam and Eve. In Asia, we have Fuxi and Niwa. Fuxi is the man who invented the trigrams that make up the I Ching, wrote the first version, compiled the first version of the I Ching that later, around 1,000... B.C., the Duke of Zhou refined, and then Confucius around 500 B.C. refined further and gave us the I Ching as we know it today. But Fuxi is the man who came up with the trigrams. His wife is even more famous. She was also his sister. And it's really hard to find an ethnic group in Southeast Asia or East Asia that does not honor Fuxi and Nuang as their progenitors.

[06:38]

In the West, we've made Niuwa into a man. But everybody in Asia will tell you it was Niuwa who saved everybody from the Great Flood. In the next slide, the Chinese have always, in ancient times, honored Fuxi and Niuwa as their progenitors. Nowadays, the Chinese have lost touch with a lot of their, you might say, ancient core beliefs. It's really hard to find shrines like this. Out in the countryside, I found a small village with an old shrine, Fuxi and Niuwa. And the next slide that you see inside, here's Fuxi and Niwa. You notice he has horns on his head. The Chinese like to call themselves the dragon race because they were half dragon and half human. The lower parts of their bodies were serpentine. And so this is Niwa and Fuxi. And of course, this is a local farm shrine in a village. So there's some clan, members of a particular clan.

[07:38]

being honored there. So this is sort of where Chinese religion begins too, where Taoism begins, the cultivation of the Tao with Niwa and Fuxi around 3500 BC. In the next slide, around 2800 BC, 700 years later, another man makes Huayang his capital, and that's Shenlong. Shenlong means the god of agriculture. He's the one who... who designated or certain plants as having use for growing grains and other plants having herbal or medicinal value. In fact, all the early texts in Chinese medicine are almost always called the classic of Shen Nong. Everybody attributes Chinese medicine's beginning to Shen Nong. But he also established, you might say, as a Chinese agricultural societies, again in Huayang, just along that floodplain, the southern edge of the floodplain of the Yellow River.

[08:45]

And so when you see the Chinese civilization developing, we see all these early capitals of the Xia Dynasty, the Shang Dynasty, and later the Zhou Dynasty, all along the middle reaches of the Yellow River. This would be up in Mongolia, Inner Mongolia, and then Mongolia up here. It's far too arid, and this is, of course, really arid up there. But this was well watered by this river that flooded every year and that you could draw off water in irrigation canals. In the next slide, we see, of course, the problem with that is this river flooded every year and how to control the floods. And these were the three men who eventually figured out different ways of trying to control the floods. It was finally this man, Yu the Great, who succeeded. Then he succeeded because everybody else had tried, Yao and Shun, had tried to build dikes to control the river.

[09:47]

And Yu the Great came up with the idea of dredging. Just dredge the mud and keep the channel open. The Yellow River, as I told you, is the silthiest river in the world. This has always been the biggest problem. basically the Yellow River is an aqueduct. The bottom of the Yellow River is 30 feet higher than the surrounding countryside. And actually, that was about 20 years ago, so maybe it's 50 feet higher. And it's just basically an aqueduct, and so it's always breaking through these dikes because they've given up trying to dredge it. Every winter, the Chinese government... Chinese Air Force has to bomb the mouth of the Yellow River to break up the ice flows that block the water because that forces the river to flood upstream.

[10:47]

Anyway, the Yellow River and the control of the Yellow River was key to the development of Chinese civilization. If you understand how important this is, then it helps knowing why things happened where they did. Next slide. So this was Huayang again. The Yellow River in the mouth is right about there. These were all early capitals. But right outside of Huayang, just how many miles? Maybe 60 clicks, is the town of Liu Yi. Very small little town. But this is the most important... Again, Huayang is where Fuxi lived and died. And one of the two emperors who established the Shang Dynasty were both up here. All these guys were shamans. They're all... If you want a definition of early Taoism, think of housebroken shamanism. Shamans who stayed home and lived in a civilized society. Anyway, Liyue, in the next slide, this is the home of China's first really great Taoist.

[11:53]

These village women have come here to pray for sons or grandsons, but by doing so, They supposedly, this man, his spirit can bestow on them male offspring. This is the old home of Lao Tzu. Lao Tzu is the author of the book called The Tao Te Ching. Next slide. This is Lao Tzu's old observatory. It's been rebuilt many times. But the thing about Taoism, and especially Lao Tzu's version of it, is the movement, the study of the movements of qi, for example. Taoism is about converting qi into jing, into essence, and jing or essence into spirit. And so all the early Taoists had these observatories because what you're trying to do is you're trying to transform this mortal body into an immortal body by transforming

[12:59]

focusing the qi into jing and the jing into shen or spirit. And so sometimes it's really hard to understand the movements of qi inside the body. And so the Taoists used to focus on the sky as an indicator of what's going on in the body. Because the body is just a microcosm of the greater Tao, the greater cosmos. And so they would study not just the stars, that's the least of the things they studied, especially clouds. Clouds, shapes of clouds, colors of clouds, anything that's in the sky they would study. Of course, there were no paved roads in those days, so you had to build an observatory above the ambient dust and the ambient light of these early villages. So this is Lao Tzu's old... Here's a Taoist right there. Right there. And there's a Taoist up there, too. And took... I faked that.

[14:02]

Next slide. So eventually Lao Tzu grows up, goes to Luoyang. This is where he's from right here, outside of Luoyang. Then he goes to Luoyang, becomes an official, and he's in charge of the records. And he finally gets fed up with Luoyang at the age of... After he turned 80, he left and said, to hell with this place. And next slide... He came to this pass right here called the Hangu Guan Pass. It's the most strategic place. The ancient Chinese said whoever controls this pass controls China. And even during the Second World War, the Japanese couldn't break through this pass. They had to fly over it and conquer the Sion area from the other side. Anyway, this is the Hangu Guan Pass where supposedly, according to early historians, Lao Tzu met the keeper of the pass, and the keeper was a Taoist who was expecting him and asked him to write down the Tao Te Ching.

[15:04]

The Taoists have another story, which I'll tell a few minutes later. In the next slide, so there's the Han Du Wan Pass. According to the Taoists, the keeper of the pass brought Lao Tzu to Hua Shan, where he lived for a while. Hua Shan is a Taoist mountain. Certain mountains are Taoist mountains, certain mountains are Buddhist mountains. In the next slide, You can see one of the peaks of Huashan. Huashan means Flower Mountain, so it's like a flower of stone. Next slide. You can see the trail. It's up this ridge where it's a couple thousand feet on either side, straight down, or more or less down. The next slide, you see this girl right over here. It's 3,000 feet straight down where she is, and she's holding onto an iron chain, and she's walking on two by fours with loafers. going around this corner to meet this Taoist master who she wants to be instructed by.

[16:06]

She didn't know that he wasn't home. That's why I'm taking a picture and I'm not out there, someone taking a picture of me. I asked the Taoists up in the mountain, if the people ever fall, they said, yeah, about once a month. So, anyway... the thing about Taoists when they're practicing there's a certain phase in your life in a spiritual career in China where solitude is crucial and the Taoists really really like to be alone and so that's why they would live in places like this not the Buddhists so much but the Taoists this is their cup of tea the next slide we see the kind of places this is a the stairs going up to a place right here. There's a cave right here. This is a very fancy cave. It has a skylight with post holes and eaves to keep out the rain. This cave was lived in, and you can see there's the remnants of some kind of eaves.

[17:12]

A very famous Taoist woman who lived here in the Han Dynasty, around 200 B.C., lived in this cave. And there's her name, Misi Inu, the jade maiden of the bright star. Wow. Anyway, these are the kind of places until recently Daoists lived if they were going to be practicing in solitude. Again, caves, mountains, really inaccessible places because Daoist meditation is much more complex than Buddhist meditation more or less unless you're practicing some tantric visualizations. They would last for hours or days because you're moving I often describe, think of Taoist meditation as that woman at the circus who gets all the plates spinning and you've got to keep them all, get them all spinning. And Taoist meditations can become exactly like that where you're moving the chi around the different parts of your body and trying to get it all going at once to transform that chi into, you know, eventually into spirit.

[18:22]

So they... Meditations would last a long time. Of course, Chinese medicine is the result of Taoist failures. They tasted and tried everything to give them the ability to not eat. Kirin illnesses was never really the goal of Chinese medicine. I mean, it's what we get out of what they experimented with. But what they were trying to do is live in these caves and not have to eat. and put the body at rest so you could meditate on the Tao and transform chi into spirit. Anyway, next slide. This is that Taoist that woman was trying to find. I found him. He moved down the mountain. Because he had lived on the mountain for 50 years in that cave. He moved up there, he said, when he was 35, lived there 50 years, and finally he got too arthritic to live there anymore. Because the trouble with living in a cave is

[19:23]

the moisture in your joints. Anyway, next slide. So that's Daoism. What am I doing now? Oh, yes. Yeah, that's Quashan, rather. The next slide, just past Sion. These are the Jonan mountains, just south of Sion. Can't see them very well, but this is this really fine soil called Los, L-O-E-S-L. L-O-E-S-S, that blows down from Mongolia and the upper reaches of the Yellow River, can't get past these mountains, so it settles there. It's the deepest soil in the world. In places it's 300 meters deep, just soil. No rocks, just soil. And they found human remains there, jaw, part of a jaw, human jaw and skull, dated 1.3 million years. So people have been living in this area a long time. I mean, Homo sapiens, Homo erectus, have been living in this area a long time. And in these mountains, as were the early Taoists, because in these... Siyang was an ancient capital, and so was Loyang.

[20:30]

So these early spiritual practitioners always went to the mountains, the nearest mountains, to practice. Next slide. This is an artist's rendition of the place that the keeper of the Hangyuguan Pass brought Lao Tzu, And the Taoist said, this is where he wrote the Tao Te Ching, on this knoll in front of the Zhongnan mountains called Lo Guantai. Lo Guantai. It's about 70 kilometers west of Xi'an. The next slide. This is the earliest known copy, a complete copy of the Tao Te Ching. It's 200 BC, dated 200. Lao Tzu lived around 500 BC. We found partial copies of the Tao Te Ching, 300 BC. And, of course, people are putting these in graves. So they'll have a copy of the Tao Te Ching in the next life. So you may want to think about that when you're buried and take some books with you. Maybe Beginner's Mind. In the next slide, there's Lao Tzu's grave at the Mo Guantai.

[21:36]

Can't see it that clearly, but the next slide. So that's sort of where Lao Tzu was. He's from Liu Wei. Fu Xi is from here. The great Taoist writer named Zhuangzi is from right east. He's buried right here, his whole village. This is sort of a very Taoist area where all the great early Taoists came from. All the Confucians came from here. Qi Fu is where Confucius was born. The next slide. There is the cave. When he was born, his mother thought he was so ugly, she abandoned him in this cave. He just happened to be born when a tiger had just given birth to cubs, and she took him in and raised him, nursed him, and an eagle supposedly stood guard in front of the caves, keeping other people, other creatures away, and his mother realized he was somebody special, took him back. Anyway, this is the old story. Next slide. Eventually, he became known as a sage, and his home was turned into a palace by some emperor,

[22:42]

And if you visit his home today in China, you have to walk an entire kilometer until you get past all the shrine halls that different emperors have built in his honor. He's recognized as the greatest of all Chinese sages, as they really downplayed Laozi and elevated Confucius, because Confucius teaches obedience and loyalty, whereas Laozi sort of... All the revolutions pretty much in ancient China have been led by Taoists. So anyway, Confucius' old home. And the next slide, there's Confucius' grave. It's the grave of the exalted sage. Next slide. And just north of Qifu is the most sacred mountain in China called Taishan. This is the most sacred mountain in China because this is where your spirit goes when you die for reassignment to the next life.

[23:43]

And so just like Lao Tzu would go to the mountains, Confucius spent a lot of time in the mountains too. Everybody likes to spend time in mountains so they could be alone for a while. Confucius came here and the next slide we can see the mountain in the distance called Taishan. And these two shrine halls were built a thousand years ago they were built like this a thousand years ago these are them and the insides are still lined with the original murals painted of the emperor's procession to come pay his respects to this mountain in ancient China you couldn't become an emperor unless you would come here to honor Taishan so anyway this is the beginning the base of the mountain just past the shrine halls in the next slide you see this archway at the beginning. This is where the trail begins and it says the number one mountain here and over here it says Confucius climbed here.

[24:44]

And so he did. He went up the mountain. This is a trail. In the next slide you see a typical trail up a sacred mountain in China. Emperors and kings and local people have paid to have the trail turned into a stone escalator that And so along the way, you could burn paper money and incense to your ancestors because you make a pilgrimage and you go to these mountains, especially Taishan, for your ancestors so that they might have a better rebirth. Are those boats? Boats? No, these are straw baskets that are full of paper money that somebody is burning in that incense burner right there. The next slide. And you can see the trail as it goes higher and higher and higher. And you know, it's a trail for pilgrims. Maybe a thousand or two thousand, maybe a thousand pilgrims walking every day in the course of the day.

[25:48]

And of course you get thirsty, so this fellow's carrying up about 30 bottles of beer. And there's little places where you can spend the night too. It takes about five hours if you climb the whole thing. Maybe a little bit more. And there are cable cars to go up halfway and then all three-fourths of the way. You could take cable cars if you feel so inclined. But in the next slide, you see the very top of the mountain. This is a Taoist shrine. And you see a Taoist in this blue rope. They're about to go in here and conduct a ceremony to the goddess of the mountain. is the name of the goddess, the goddess of the azure-colored clouds. Anyway, that's Taishan, the sacred realm. Next slide. And so as Confucianism developed, all the early Confucians and famous figures in Confucianism and even in the literary scene would go to mountains.

[27:01]

This is the home of the most famous group of Confucian crazies called the Seven Sages of the Bamboo Grove, who lived here in the early 200 ADs. Up in this mountain right here, these are the Taihan Mountains, about 70 kilometers north of Luoyang, the other side of the Yellow River. In the next slide, down along the Yangtze, you see the old home of one of China's most famous poets. Actually, one of the seven sages of the bamboo grove was also one of the most famous poets of early China, a man named Ranji. This is where the poet named Tao Yuanming lived. This is a mountain called Lushan, behind it. And so all of these early people associated with Confucianism and Chinese literature all go to the mountains to perfect their... their meditation, or their literary art.

[28:03]

In the next slide. And then I sort of introduced Taoism and Confucianism, but then Buddhism shows up along the Taklamakan, on either side of the Taklamakan Desert, from Taxala, which is the ancient kingdom of Gandhara, Today, it's in Pakistan, and you've got Afghanistan, and so forth. All these trails were met at Kashgar, pretty much, and then they would divide and go to different places, then come to Dunhuang. In the next slide. And, of course, Camel was the way to go. Nowadays, you can take a train. In the next slide. And then they came to these oases through here, from Dunhuang down to Zhangye, Wu Wei, eventually to Xi'an, And Luoyang was the capital of China around the time of Christ, and this is when Buddhism finally shows up in Luoyang. Next slide.

[29:04]

This is the first Buddhist temple called the White Horse Temple because the monks arrived with white horses laden with Buddhist scriptures. And just inside the front gate on the right of White Horse Temple is the grave of, in the next slide, of Matanga, the first translator. If you read the sutra in 42 sections, it was translated by Matanga and his friend Dharmaraksha. This is their grave. Around 67 AD, when he died, when he arrived and he died five years later. Next slide. And so after Dharmaraksha, actually while Dharmaraksha and Matanga were alive, supposedly they went up all the way up the Fun River, to Wutai Shan and established a Buddhist pilgrimage center up here. In short, they said this is the most sacred mountain in China for Buddhists, and they established a pilgrimage center up there as early as the first or perhaps the second century AD.

[30:07]

In the next slide, you see Wutai Shan today, and there's about 20 different monasteries in this one valley of Wutai Shan. So as soon as Buddhism arrives, it starts... building monasteries in the mountains. And the next slide, down along the Yangtze, they did the same thing. This is Shanghai here, but further upstream, there's a mountain called Zhou Huashan, Nine Flower Mountain. And the same thing happens, but a few centuries later. And the next slide, you can see Zhou Huashan means Nine Flower Mountain. You see the flowers, supposedly. Here's the old trail. Nobody takes it anymore. Now everybody drives. You can drive up the mountain. In the next slide, you can see the old steps. Some people walk the last part of it. And, of course, like a lot of places, people who go up these mountains, just like Taishan, they do so for merit, that they can transfer to a loved one. Or they make a vow where they can transfer the merit from that vow.

[31:10]

And, of course, they put these locks here on an iron chain with the vow that that this lock will rust away before I break my vow. And a very typical reason for this is a person's mother has cancer, is ill, and they may climb this mountain and ask the resident bodhisattva, Ksitagarbha, you say, what is it, Jizo in Japanese? Yeah, Jizo. Yeah, Jizo. They ask Jizo to help their mother and they say, well, I will... if my mother gets well, I'll be a vegetarian twice a month. So when you go to a Chinese restaurant on the new moon or the full moon, very often it'll be packed with people eating vegetarian meals to honor their lavali and they to climb these sacred mountains. Now the next slide. So here you see the pilgrimage center up on Zhou Huashan.

[32:12]

There's probably 30 monasteries at least there. And of course, a couple thousand pilgrims come there every day. Pilgrims slash tourists. Because the Chinese are right now just reacquainting themselves with their own religion and they're not too sure about it. Next slide. This is why people come there. This is the shrine hall that contains the body of Jizou. There's a Korean monk who was recognized as the incarnation of Jizou in the Tang Dynasty. 8th century, and when he died, they put his body in an urn, and the monks take it out once a year, and they give it a sponge bath, and it's in the shrine hall. And so you go buy your paper, your incense or your paper money, go in here, and you burn it as an offering to Jizo and ask for a favor. Next slide. But even though this is a pilgrimage center,

[33:15]

The pilgrims are all in one area. Just as you go on the backside of Jiu Wajan, this is how it looks. And the next slide. There's a cave there. And I've known this. This is a hermit nun. She's been living there over 30 years. Her name is the Tiger Lady. And there's a tiger. There used to be a tiger that lived not with her, but was her pal. On two occasions I went to visit her. She showed me tiger footprints in her garden. This is what we call the South China Tiger, about as big as a German Shepherd. And they've been known to kill people in ancient times, but nowadays there's so few left, you hardly ever see them. She had her gardens up above. Anyway, this is the cave that she built. She built her hut there because it was called Tiger Cave, and there's always been tigers there. This is... She's no longer alive. This is a picture I snuck of her. Next slide.

[34:18]

Meanwhile, back in Xi'an, there are these mountains I told you about, the Zhongnan Mountains. And when I first went to China, it was because I had translated the poems of Cold Mountain and Stonehouse, two monks who had lived as hermits in the mountains or in caves. And I wondered whether this was a fiction, whether people like this really existed. whether they still existed. And so I just happened to hear about the Jugnan Mountains, and so I went into these mountains south of Sion. In Sion today, in the next slide, you can see this is the city wall. This is a new wall. It's only 600 years old, but it encompasses the entire city. They have a marathon on it every year. And in the next slide, just south of the city, I happened to fly out one day, of Sion on a clear day, and I took this picture. These are the Jonan Mountains, just one of about a dozen rivers that drain the mountains and go past Sion.

[35:21]

This is also a picture of, oh, let's say, 300 hermits. Last year, after meeting all these hermits, I wrote a book called Road to Heaven. It came out in 1993. It came out in China, I think, around 2003, and it became a big success. It sold over 200,000 copies, and the Chinese have suddenly discovered hermits. And so there's this one film guy in Xi'an who has been in these mountains and has filmed over 600 hermits. And so there's lots of hermits, lots of hermits. Next slide. These are the mountains closer up. There's only one road that used to go through. Now there's a highway, several highways, but this is very inaccessible, very rocky. The next slide. So this is sort of going into the mountains.

[36:23]

These pictures were taken in 89 and 90 when I first was trying to find out if there are any hermits. And so you sort of have to go to the last village, get transportation to the farthest village you can, and then walk. And because hermits are basically competing with farmers for land, hermits have to live beyond the farmer commute. And like us, farmers will walk about an hour or so to a field, but not much more than that. So hermits usually have to walk about two to three hours before you get to hermit territory. I met these guys coming down the mountain on the so-called trail. The trails are... hard to find sometimes on these mounds. They're all coming down and they've got these big poles and baskets because they've been gathering walnuts from this hermit nun. So when I go to the mountains in China, if I'm looking for a hermit, I ask, is anybody practicing the Tao on this mountain? And they know exactly what you're talking about, whether it's a Taoist or Buddhist.

[37:25]

And so they'll either take you there or on the mud or the trail, they'll draw you a little map. So anyway, it's a hermit trail. Next slide. here's a hermit now coming down the trail. And in the next slide, he stops long enough to point out where he's living and he's out of food and he's going down to the village to get some food. Because the villagers help the hermits. The villagers are really happy to have hermits on their mountain because it rains on time. Or if they need special esoteric knowledge, they can go up to the hermits for it. Like being cured from an illness. So hermits have always been an important part of Chinese society ever since these early shaman emperors lived and people like Lao Tzu. Hermits always went to the mountains in order to help people and not just to get away from people. Anyway, he's inviting me up to his house later.

[38:26]

He says he'll be back later. So here's his house. Next slide. A little airy. Anyway, he lived there for 10 years. Next slide. On the backside of that same mountain, this is the most famous hut in China. This is where Empty Cloud lived. Around the early 1900s, around 1903, he moved here. Empty Cloud's Xi'in in China, in Chinese, he's the most famous of all Zen masters of the last couple hundred years. And anybody who's been teaching Zen for the last 50, 60 years in China is... is one of his students. This is where he experienced his enlightenment and actually this is where he took the name Empty Cloud while he was living in this hut around the early 1900s. So you can see this hut is vacant when I get there. Hermits build huts if they can't find one that's just empty.

[39:30]

So if a person wanted to go become a hermit they would They could walk right in here and make themselves at home. The huts don't belong to anybody because the land belongs to the government. All the hermits in China are living there illegally. But the government isn't about to touch them because they're so revered. And the next slide. In hermit realty, we call this a fixer-upper. This is going to take a lot of work. But it has good location. LAUGHTER and there's a water sort there's a spring right off to the side and the two key things in a hermit location is access to water and uh proximity to firewood enough enough wood in the area so uh so hermits almost never live you'll all never find a mountain with one hermit uh there are if there's a hermit on a mountain then there's 20 hermits or 30 40 hermits and they all live uh

[40:33]

there's a sort of a hermit buffer and it's about 15 minutes that is you have to walk about 15 minutes to the next hermit and the reason is they need that territory for firewood just as a wild animal would need a certain hunting territory so lots of mountains in China have no hermits at all but certain mountains do they have this tradition as being really good mountains for spiritual life And the Zhongnan Mountains are perhaps the most famous in all of China. So that's why there are so many hermits there. Because the early capitals of China were all just at their foot, Chang'an and Luoyang. And so these people who were practicing these traditions would go up to the mountains once they thought they were ready. And the next slide. Here's a hermit hut that is as fancy as you'll ever see. You can't see, but it has a tiled roof.

[41:35]

It's got window frames that are going to be glassed. Well, the hermit who had this built was a graduate of Chinese Literature Department of Beijing University. And so he didn't know how to do anything. And so he had to ask the farmers to build this hunt. It took six farmers, eight days to build it. And the reason they can build it so fast is that it's all mud bricks, but the Los soil is so cohesive, when you mix Los with a little bit of straw, as soon as you put it in the form, you can put the form on the next brick and build it, and just keep building. You could build a whole wall in a day. And the soil will hold together in that form. You don't have to sun-dry them for a week or two or whatever. These are all loose bricks. And then what you do is once you get the thing enclosed and get the roof on, you see there's smoke coming out of there. You build a fire inside the hut, and you fire the hut.

[42:36]

Turn the hut basically into a teapot. And the next slide, you see the fire is coming from this, the kong. Every hut has... This is the most important thing inside the hut. It is an oven bed. It is a brick bed that is an oven. So you heat it. And so you... You don't have to waste firewood heating air. You just heat a single surface. And so you live on your kong. You sleep on it. You meditate on it. You eat on it. You entertain visitors on it. Do everything on your kong. And that way you stay pretty healthy. Keeps you warm. Keeps your joints from becoming arthritic. And so incidentally, if we go back in that last slide, the previous slide, that is, being a hermit in China is like getting a PhD in spirituality there is no famous master of Taoism or Buddhism or even Confucianism in China who was not a hermit at some point in their career it's where you get your credential that no one else can give you you have to give yourself

[43:56]

So you go to the mountains when you think you're ready. So you have to have basically an undergraduate degree. You have to have studied with somebody. You have to have a practice. When I published my book in Chinese, there were a number of newspaper articles about criticizing the book because it felt it was encouraging young people to run off to the mountains, which was unfortunate because people did run off to the mountains. A lot of college students would just go off to the mountains. You can't go off to the mountains unless you have a practice. A lot of people thought, just like we sometimes just want to run off to the mountains. But in the mountains in China, if you're going to live that kind of life, it's really hard. And so you have to have a really sincere, really deep practice to be able to get through the winters, get through hunger, illnesses, lots of things. So this guy was up there getting his Ph.D., And he's now one of the more famous monks in China. He's the abbot of Dongshan, the head temple of the Soto Zen sect.

[45:05]

So you have to do this in a sense. If you haven't been a hermit, you won't be respected. So anyway, that's why people go to the mountains. And it's a personal thing. Just like not everybody who graduates from college goes to grad school. It takes a special calling. Next slide. Sometimes life is tough. You see, this nun was really in tears when I interviewed her. She put on her robes. You can see, she doesn't have a tiled roof. Instead of glass on her window, she's got a piece of plastic that has been ripped apart. But I saw her two years later, and she was smiling. She had a tiled roof, she had glass in her windows, and she had a disciple. The difference is, when I first took this picture, she had just moved there the year before, and the local villagers won't help you if they don't think that you're sincere, if they think maybe you've just come up because you've read my book or something.

[46:08]

So I saw her two years later, and she was doing great. Next slide. This is a woman, a nun I became really good friends with. She spent 35 years in her hut. And this is a college student who came up one day with a group of friends hiking and was so impressed when she met this master, she told her friends to go back down without her. And she's been there ever since. And now she's the most famous master on the mountain. Last time I saw her alive, I was telling somebody this morning there were six Communist Party officials inside her hut who had heard about her, wanted to know what they could do to help. Again, these people are really highly respected members of society. A very different attitude we have toward hermits. Next slide. There that young nun is today, a couple of years ago. Sometimes she's a little bit too severe. Next slide. But there she is, loosening up with a hermit tea party.

[47:11]

LAUGHTER It's not a tough life. Nowadays, she has electricity now, so she has a couple of light bulbs. Some hermits now have solar panels so they can have light. So the technology has really improved their lives. And people respect them now. Before, the local villagers hardly had enough money, food left over for themselves to help the hermits. And now... the local villages have a lot extra, so hermits get helped a lot more. Next slide. Here's another career, an aspect of the hermit career. This is a very famous abbot of a temple who had now become a hermit. So he was becoming a hermit at the end of his life. He had been a hermit when he was younger too, but now he was going back to live in a hut at the end of his life. Here's a young... monk who had guided me to find this fellow.

[48:14]

This is down in Fujian province where it's considerably warmer. So he's actually growing rice. You can't grow rice in North China. Next slide. This is the cave where a very famous hermit lived. And this is why I went to look for hermits. This is a Cold Mountains cave. A fellow who was... The Taoists claim him and the Buddhists claim him. He was sort of a free man and wrote a bunch of poetry. You know, Kerouac's book, The Dharma Bums, was dedicated to Hanshan, Cold Mountain. This was his cave. Still there today. And, I mean, there's a woman who's been living there with her disciple for the last 12, 13 years. She's still there. She's taking a vow of silence. She doesn't speak, but... I call her the butterfly woman. She flits around like a butterfly. Next slide. This is Stonehouse's old hut.

[49:20]

I went to look for hermits in China because these two great poets, Cole Mountain and Stonehouse, had spent their creative lives living as hermits. I wanted to see whether people really lived like that. It turns out they really do and still do. Next slide. I wanted to add a few slides about the arrival of Zen in China, because there was already established in China this spiritual tradition associated with mountains and solitude. And what Zen introduced was something different. Again, Luoyang was pretty much the place where all of this happened at the beginning. In the next slide, you see this sacred mountain right outside of Luoyang called Songshan. This is the first pagoda ever built in China, around 500 A.D., but about the same time the year this pagoda was built, there's a fellow named Bodhidharma who came to live on this mountain, right above Shaolin Temple.

[50:25]

Next slide. There's Bodhidharma's old cave. And somebody's walled it up. It didn't used to have that wall. It's a small cave, but... He wasn't very big. He didn't need much room. So that's where Bodhidharma came and lived until he found somebody to pass on the Dharma to. Next slide. So his heir lived up here. Two dynasties were fighting for control of China. So Luoyang was destroyed and the second patriarch, Hueco, went to live here. And then there was another persecution and he went all the way down here to live. Next slide. Right here. Oh, you can't see it. Anyway, imagine a mountain right here, where that little red dot is. And he went down there and taught the fellow who became the third patriarch. Then he went back north and was assassinated, and that was the end of his life.

[51:25]

In the next slide, you can see his disciple became the third patriarch, and this is where his temple is today. But when he was alive... he was living in somebody else's temple. He only had two disciples, the third patriarch. Nowadays, he has his own temple, but in the old days, he was living, this was somebody else's temple, and he was just living there at their mercy. But he had two students, and one was a man named Daoxin, and he's the man who changed what Zen is today, or made it what it is today. Next slide. And this is why. You can see this large monastery. This was the first Zen monastery in China. Dao Sin built it in the seventh century for the end of the first half of the seventh century. And the reason he did is because he found what we call a high mountain basin and he bought the land and built this temple.

[52:32]

It's been rebuilt many, many times. But you can see all this rice. In this basin, he was able to support a community of 500 monks. Instead of having two disciples, he had 500. His successor, the fifth patriarch, had 1,000. And the fifth patriarch's temple is about 30 kilometers away from this one. And then that's where Hui Nung, the sixth patriarch, became the sixth patriarch. And he went down to South China and built a temple and had 3,000 disciples. So what happened is the recognition that it's better to practice as a group, as a commune. So this is, again, a crucial change in what Zen was. Up to that time, Zen had been a teacher with a handful of disciples and able to transmit the Dharma in a small group of people, but it's all meditation-based, all on the meditation cushion.

[53:33]

What Daoxin did is he made Zen a way of life into everything you do because you're living together as a community. Everybody's practicing, supporting each other. Zen changed overnight, became this huge religious force in China that it never was. In India, it never would have been in China if this had not happened because, again, even Bodhidharma only had a few disciples and the first three patriarchs only had a couple. Zen was no big deal, would have It would have never amounted to much, just as it never amounted to much in India. Once this happened, it changed. Next slide. So this is the Fourth Patriarch's Temple, Fifth Patriarch's Temple, right there. I just knew the Huangmei. Let's see, what should we do here? There's Dongshan, right there. The head Soto Temple, right there. This is Baijian Temple, the fellow who... who wrote the code for all Zen monasteries.

[54:35]

Matsu's temple was at Baofeng. There's Huangbo's temple right there. Yangshan, Saoshan. And this is the Gan River. And even, I was telling somebody earlier that the people in the Gan River watershed of Jiangxi province still say Zen. They don't say Chan like other Mandarin speakers say. So this is where, this is the heartland of Zen, where Zen began. And today, Injushan, It's probably the biggest Zen monastery in China. Next slide. This is, you can see all the rice. So it's totally self-supporting. There's about 350 monks at any one time there. They have retreats all the time. Typically, they're 49-day retreats. If you ever wanted to go to a retreat, it definitely would be possible to do a retreat up on Yunzhu Shan. Just let me know, and I'll... I'll give them a call. They do. They welcome Westerners.

[55:35]

They're very open to Westerners coming and living there. Of course, you know, the nice thing about a monastic life is you don't have to say much. So you don't have to know much Chinese. You just have to learn a few of the, you know, they have their own way of doing things. Much less rigorous than the Japanese system. They're much more, the Chinese say, whatever. They're very much into whatever. Anyway, the next slide. This is where Huangboi lived. That's a cloudy day, but again, a huge high mountain basin. They identified this ecological niche as the ideal place to have a mountain, have a monastery. We had lots of flat, arable land, but remote. And this only existed in the Yangtze area, because Yangtze gets all this water. And the next slide. Here we see the ultimate high mountain basin. It's the inside of a volcano. And this is where Rinzai Zen began.

[56:37]

This is the temple, the monastery, and the mountain called Yangjishan that made Rinzai Zen famous in China. So you can see that these people are consciously seeking out this sort of ecological niche, a place in the mountains where we can support a group of people who can practice together. And that's why... Tassahara is so important because it's carrying on this tradition that made Zen what it is today. Zen is not really a certain form, a certain way of wearing robes and chanting this and that, but it's really a way of life. And so I'm really grateful to see this happening here. Next slide. And this is also a key element of Zen monasteries that that made Zen possible in China. Of course, we don't have it in the West because it's really hard. This is the guest hall. You have the right to walk into a Zen monastery and stay three nights.

[57:39]

And so it allowed people to travel all around China to find their teacher because you never know when you're going to find your teacher. So the guest hall is really crucial. When you go to the guest hall, you have to leave your bags outside. You go in, do a couple of prostrations, wait for the guest manager to show up. They have a little interview. Check your credentials. Make sure that you're sincere. Then they put you up for three nights. And if they let you stay longer, they have another more serious interview. And if you get through that interview, they're required to support you for the rest of your life. That is, you have the right to stay in that temple forever. And of course, like in the temples here, if you live in the temple, you're going to have duties. With one exception, at any Zen monastery, if you don't want to do anything, you don't have to as long as you stay in the meditation hall. So if you just want to meditate, please, go right ahead.

[58:43]

No kitchen duties, no guest rooms, none of that. Just meditate. So anyway, that's the last of my slides. And so I guess it took a long time. It took a little bit over, about an hour. So I don't know if we still have any time for questions, but I'd be happy to answer some if anybody has a question. Yes? When you say these homes try to stay about 15 minutes away from each other, don't they why they're cutting down forests? Because of that. Oh, no, I've never seen, I've never heard of a monk cutting down a tree. No, deadfall. Yeah, yeah, yeah, because they're hermits. And they don't use, they don't really need things, everything. I mean, things, all the twigs and leaves and everything. No, it's very rare for a hermit to cut down a tree.

[59:45]

They would cut it down a tree if it was involved in the construction of a hut. But other than that, no. And that's why it's really hard. You can be on a trail and not even know there's a hut there because of the density of the forest around the hut. And they want that too. And do you have to spend a certain number of years before you're called officially a hermit? No. I think a day would be enough. They call anybody who goes to live alone like that but the Chinese have a saying they say the little hermit lives in the mountains the great hermit lives in town and so there's a certain truth to that because you go to the mountains for a certain period generally it's like getting a graduate degree 3, 4, maybe 5 years is typical

[60:47]

for the period that someone lives as a hermit. And then they go back down. And I'd say about 20% of those who do go back down go right back up. Or they don't go down at all. So you do run into lots of hermits who are up 10, 20, 30 years. That's typical. I wouldn't say idealized so much as they're revered. They definitely are revered. It all depends on the hermit, though. Some people are good at it. Some of them are good as teachers. Some can't teach. Even though they have maybe a personal practice that is very rewarding, they can't speak about it. and some of them learn how to teach, others can't.

[61:48]

But they all get little practice because the local villagers are always coming up to visit them, asking them questions, and outsiders too. It's not uncommon to meet college students staying with hermits for days at a time, asking questions, asking for some instruction and so forth. All the hermits get a little practice in teaching, but suddenly come good at it, and as they become good, they're recognized. But a lot of hermits just disappear. I mean, into a monastery. I'm often in a monastery where I'll see a monk, and he'll just look like another monk, and it turns out he's been a hermit for 10 or 20 years, but now he's down. Yes? Yes, sir? Oh. Oh. Yeah, absolutely.

[63:07]

Yeah, there's no career anymore. There's no career. Not when you barely have enough to eat. It's a personal quest. They're even dissuade from doing that. A teacher really makes a student jump through some hoops before they'll agree to help them choose a place. So not everybody goes... Lots of people don't ask the... through one winter, even if they have a good practice. So there's really not much of a career involved. It's just a quest for truth. And a lot of them die. There's a lot of illnesses. There's no doctors around. So there's that too. You had a question, Tim? Yeah. I was wondering... As you went to those Chinese Zen temples or monasteries, like in the West, we sometimes have this idea of Zen, of being this kind of anti-intellectual tradition, you could maybe say, like studying is not that important.

[64:19]

And I was wondering, like, how common is the study of Buddhist sutras? Well, I'd say, in my experience in China, that's where you study. The Zen monasteries in China are the places where people really study sutras, read texts. And almost every major Zen temple in China has attached to it now a Buddhist college, a Buddhist academy. And they sort of have another reason for doing that, to attract students. Because if they attract students, then a lot of them will stay at the monasteries. So in Chinese Zen, those are the people who are studying. The other Buddhist temples, not necessarily, because they're more devotional. Most Chinese Buddhists are Pure Land Buddhists. And the temples where they go that they support are Pure Land temples. They support people who just practice chanting the name of the Buddha.

[65:22]

And you're not going to see hardly any study in those sort of temples. In China, if there's any study going on in monasteries, it's usually in the Zen monastery. Yes? Oh, maybe 5%. Yeah, about 5%. Because Zen requires you to do something other than just chant the name of the Buddha. So, yeah, I'd say about 5%. but all these monasteries have been rebuilt the only real problem because China has been experiencing what we call a spiritual or religious renaissance and there's a downside to that the renaissance is in part due to the great wealth that the country is experiencing

[66:27]

So people are giving lots of money to monasteries. And so Zen monasteries are all being rebuilt. When I visited some of the monasteries in the 90s, there was nothing but bricks. There was nothing. And now there's huge structures. And that's the real problem. People are becoming so wealthy, they're giving so much money to all monasteries. And maybe that's not a problem for Pure Land monasteries, but it is for Zen monasteries. So Zen monasteries are turning into tourist centers. It's a real problem. They don't know what to do about it. Once you accept the money and you build this big edifice, then people want to come see it and light some incense in it because they can gain merit that way. So you get hundreds of visitors every day. That's sort of the downside to what's going on. Yes? Which... Of all the Germans that you met and talked to, which one made the largest impression on you and what?

[67:31]

I guess Yuan Zhao, the woman whose picture is on the cover of my book Road to Heaven. She got into bed with me. She was 83 years old at the time. She got under the covers. We put the covers all around me and another monk. And she taught me these two mantras so that I would be, you know, if I was dying, I could chant this mantra and I would be guaranteed a good rebirth. And she taught me the, if it turns out I didn't die, she taught me the antidote so that I wouldn't die and I wouldn't be reborn. And so I was really, she went to so much trouble on my behalf. She was easily the most famous nun in China. She had founded four Buddhist colleges. She had personally defended this monastery.

[68:38]

She was in charge of Kumarajiva, the great translator. She was in charge of his temple at the foot of the Zhongnan Mountains. She and her fellow nuns had beat off the Red Guards and refused to let them come in and destroy the temple. She eventually became a hermit at the end of her life. And that's where I met her. And I visited her several times. And even right before she died, about a couple of months before she died, she sent me some calligraphy. I gave her a sheet of paper and asked her to write something for me, the most important aspects of Buddhism. She eventually sent me that, the scroll that still hangs on my wall. And then about two... the next year I was traveling in China and my book had just been published Road to Heaven in America and I was taking her a copy because her picture was on my cover I was flying from Beijing to Xi'an to then go into the mountains and some businessman was sitting next to me and I took out the book and it looked like he was having a heart attack he said where did you get that book and I said well I published it he said well that's my master

[69:54]

All these wealthy people in China seek out people like that to gain instruction from or just to know so they would be somehow associated with that person so they would improve their merit. When we got off the plane, he put his car and driver at my disposal to take me to the foot of the mountain so I could hike up. But he told me, he said, by the way, she died last month. So I was a month too late. But the odd thing is when they burnt her body, her heart didn't burn. They have a picture of her ashes with her charred heart still intact. It's still red. And then they enshrined it up in the mountains. So I hiked up and put my book up. It's now part of her shrine. She was, I think, the most impressive because she was so strong, so powerful. Like I said, she said, let's get in bed. She told me, you come over here. And we all got in this, you know, under the covers. I'm going to teach you this mantra.

[70:56]

Because you'll need this someday when you're really sick and you're going to die. And so, and I recorded it. And then me and the other monk, a few hours later, we hiked together down the mountain. And we both practiced. We would do the mantra meditation. to rescue, to have us, so our rebirth would be good, and then right after that we'd do the antidote. And went down the mountain like that. I've forgotten completely, but I still have the recording, just in case. What did she write on the scroll? She wrote compassion, kindness, renunciation, and joy. compassion, kindness, renunciation, and joy. Those were four Buddhist virtues, you could say. That's... Anyway, so that was who I... That was the first person in China I had met who really bowled me over.

[72:03]

Wow. Her personal presence was so powerful. And, you know, she made... She was... People... She affected a lot of people. Anybody who met her tells stories about meeting her. What was her name? Yuan Zhao. She's in my book, Road to Heaven, Chapter 6. There's some pictures, and the picture's on the cover. Yes? This young filmmaker? Oh, Ted Berger. Ted Berger? Yes. Yeah, there's an American who had graduated... from college, came to visit me once about, oh, I don't know when it was, it must have been 12 years ago or so, and his name was Ted Berger, and said he wanted to go to China to find hermits. And so I, you know, we gave him some connections. He went into the, well, first he went to Beijing and lived for a while, and he fortunately, instead of earning his living by teaching English, he got a job doing translations for a film company.

[73:10]

So he would go on location and do translations on site and for subtitles for this film company. So he learned how to operate a camera. And then when he went to the Jonah Mountains, eventually he started, he developed an association with a particular teacher and started filming. Has he made a film? Well, he did make a film about that called Amongst the White Clouds. But he's coming out with two more films within the year about... I think the first one is called Alms. He compared the practice of the great Zen monastery that I told you about in the mountains of Yuzhuzhan and the great Zen nunnery, China's first Zen nunnery. The Chinese had never had a Zen nunnery until about 15 years ago. And so he's been filming both of them and showing the daily life in Zen, regardless of whether it's a nunnery or a monastery.

[74:17]

And those should be coming out this year. He has a website. Sweat Cloud is on Netflix right now. I saw it before I came here. Ah, well, good. And then eventually these other ones will be. Alms is one of them, but I forgot the other one. But they're in the final stages of production. Yes, E.J. ? We need to wrap up in a couple minutes to prepare this room for a retreat that's coming really soon. Oh, okay. Just one more question. Okay, yes. I was curious about the Boralist civilizations that you talked about. Yes. Do you happen to know if that's what they did to Mokhtar Chia? To what? Mokhtar Chia. He's a modern writer. He does... I don't know any... I don't know anything about Taoism in the West. And I haven't read any of those. I guess... I'll be around this evening, and maybe if you have any other questions, you could just run into me at dinner time or in the courtyard or something. Thank you very much. Thank you for listening to this podcast offered by the San Francisco Zen Center.

[75:23]

Our Dharma talks are offered free of charge, and this is made possible by the donations we receive. Your financial support helps us to continue to offer the Dharma. For more information, visit SSCC.org and click Giving.

[75:38]

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