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. Okay. Good afternoon. How are we all feeling? I was going to start out with that. No, I wrote out a talk, but then I decided just as I was walking up here that I'm not going to read this. So I may send this to my friend and type it up, put it on my blog or something. But I did want to say the views and opinions expressed in the following class are not necessarily those of Tassajara Zen Mountain Center, San Francisco Zen Center, Green Dragon... Green Dragon Temples and Green Gulch Farm, or their members, affiliates, and supporters.

[01:03]

Just so we don't get any trouble. My chosen topic this fine summer day is... based on the line from the Sandokai, the harmony of difference and equality that we chant, what is it, every three or four days that Sandokai comes up, harmony of difference? Hearing the words, understand the meaning, don't set up standards of your own. And what this means to me, as a human being, as a Buddhist practitioner, as somebody who's attempted to follow this way for about three decades. I am older than I look. I don't like to advertise how old I am. Because it's good to be clandestine about it.

[02:11]

But I was introduced to Buddhist ethics when I was about 18 or 19 years old. Some of you know this story already, but some of you don't. When I took a class called Zen Buddhism at Kent State University, taught by Tim McCarthy, who was a student of Kobanchino Roshi, Kobanchino Otogawa Roshi, who some of you may know. He was a Zen teacher, a Japanese Zen teacher, who was brought over to the United States by Shinryu Suzuki to basically help out and get this place going, among other things. I never actually met Koban, but I learned a lot about Koban through Tim. And in retrospect, it's kind of a weird thing. I heard the precepts as part of this class, the ten standard Buddhist precepts that we recited last night in the full moon ceremony that many of you in this room have taken yourselves.

[03:21]

And I thought, that sounds like a good idea. and I want to follow that. There was no... I didn't take a ceremony to commemorate it, not at that time. I did many years later, finally gave in to sort of subtle and not-so-subtle pressure of my Japanese teacher, Gudo Nishijima, to do the Jukai ceremony, but I wasn't really interested in the ceremonies, but I was interested in following the precepts. Making this decision wasn't entirely unprecedented in my life because around that same time I'd been part of the hardcore punk scene back in Akron, Ohio, which was at the time really, really influenced by what was going on in Washington, D.C. And I don't know how many of you know about this, but there was a band active in Washington, D.C. called Minor Threat led by a guy named Ian McKay.

[04:24]

And Ian Mackay wrote a song called Straight Edge. Let's see, I'll have to censor it. But it was, don't drink, I don't smoke, I don't eff, but at least I can effing think. And the song was a statement of his own personal philosophy, but a lot of people in the scene... found it compelling, and it started a whole movement called Straight Edge, and people would, you know, either write with magic markers or even tattoo this big X on their hands, an imitation of the X that you would get on your hands if you went, you know, you still do, if you're underage and go into a, you know, 21 and over drinking sort of place. And it was a scene that was really committed to ethics. I'll read part of what I wrote because I thought I phrased this well when I actually wrote it down. It was seen as the truest form of rebellion, not to break the rules, but to obey them even more thoroughly than those that society saw as upright citizens, but who we knew were complete phonies.

[05:40]

So it was like, it was an act of rebellion to stop drinking, stop smoking, stop having meaningless sex, and and live an ethical life, you know. But to, at the same time, look shockingly different. You know, that was another part of the scene, you know, to look as weird as you possibly could and be completely, you know, an upright citizen of the, you know, of America or whatever. Now that, you know, this scene was put together by... You know, kids mostly under 20, and a lot of them weren't as committed to it as others, and it kind of fell apart. You know, and I was sad to see it fall apart. But about the same time that it was falling apart, that's when I happened to take this class called Zen Buddhism, and I heard about these precepts, and I thought, okay, these guys shave their heads too. Maybe this will be the ultimate straight edge scene.

[06:47]

LAUGHTER And in a way, I kind of feel like it is. But this idea of... Let me just go through this the way I had it written down rather than try to improvise too much. I wanted to read what Suzuki Roshi said about it. Oh, okay, I've got the page marked. About this phrase in the harmony of difference and equality. The next sentence is, don't set up standards of your own. You should not establish rules for yourself. You should not stick to rules or be bound by them. People are doing that. When you say this is right or this is wrong, you establish some rules for yourself. And because you say so, naturally you will stick to them and be bound by them. This is why Zen is divided into many schools, etc., etc. They understood Buddha's teaching in their own way and then stuck to their understanding and thought it was Buddha's teaching.

[07:51]

In other words, they stuck to the finger pointing at the moon. You're all familiar with that analogy, I assume. If three teachers are pointing at the moon, each has his own finger, so there are three schools, but the moon is one. As Sosekito says, don't establish your own rules for yourself. This is very important for our practice. We are liable to establish our own rules. This is the rule of Tassahara, you may say. But rules are the finger point that points to how we have good practice at Tassajara according to the situation. Rules are important, but you shouldn't think this is the only way, or our rules are the true and permanent teaching, or their rules are wrong. You shouldn't stick to your own understanding of things. Something that is good for one person is not always good for another. So you should not make rules for everyone. Rules are important, but don't stick to the rules or force them on others. When you enter a monastery, you shouldn't say, I have my own way. If you come to Tassajara, you should obey Tassajara's rules. You should not establish your own rules. To see the actual moon through Tassajara's rules is the way to practice at Tassajara.

[08:56]

Rules are not the point. The teaching that the rules will catch is the point. By observing rules, you will naturally understand the real teaching. two questions for me, which is, what are the real rules and what are the real standards and why? Why is the bigger question, but I'll save that for a couple minutes. When one takes the precepts through my teacher, Gudo Nishijima, one of the precepts, one of the Not the ten grave precepts, but one of the six that you take before them. And I don't know what this is analogous to in the tradition here. I'm kind of curious to dig through and find out, but I don't have the stuff to do it. But one of the ones he makes you take is, I vow to obey the rules of society. And a lot of people I talk to these days, when they hear about the precepts, the two that they want to talk about most...

[10:02]

everybody's probably going to know the answer right off the top of their heads, the rule about intoxicants and the rule about sex. The one I had the most trouble with was obey the rules of society, because screw society, you know. Society sucks, the system blows. That was one of the songs that people were grooving to in the scene back in Africa. I don't know who came up with that one. Nobody heard? No. There was another one that went miniature golf that went miniature golf. That was kind of a sad joke. Anyway, to vow to obey the rules of society. That for me was a tricky one because I'd always been kind of anti-society or against the rules of society. But I think this is part of Buddhist practice. Now, every... Every breakfast and lunch here, all of us chant a meal chant in which we dedicate our meal to the four benefactors.

[11:05]

And sometimes people go, well, who are the four benefactors? Well, I don't know what translation people here are working from, but the version that we work from during the seshins and things we would do with Nishima Roshi... were written out. We would chant them in Japanese because we were in Japan, but next to the Japanese was written an English translation, which was very clunky, a very direct translation, but extremely clunky and not chantable. But one thing that always sort of bugged me was one of the four benefactors happens to be the leaders of our nation. That's one of the four benefactors. So... Imagine that all these people at Tassajara were two or sometimes, only two times a day, right? For eight years, dedicating their meals to George W. Bush, among others. But that's the idea that you obey the rules of society, meaning to me whatever society you happen to find yourself in.

[12:14]

It's part of the Buddhist way to obey those rules. So when you're in Tassajara, you obey the Tassajara rules. If you go to another temple, you obey their temple rules. And if you are in Japan, you obey Japanese rules. And having a kind of respect. And that was a difficult one for me to overcome as well, because the idea of having respect for politicians, very especially Japanese politicians, is kind of difficult. They dealt with the problem of the radiation leak over there by raising the acceptable levels of radiation continuously. Well, it's still safe because we raised it by 10 points yesterday. And that's what Japanese politicians do. But to me, the interesting question and the thing that I kind of want to see if I can talk about in the next 45 minutes or so, is why.

[13:17]

Why is it important to be ethical? Not just to obey the rules of society, but to be ethical in general. Why do we want to be ethical? Around here, we chant every morning and at various other times during the day something about saving all beings. And this is a difficult one for a lot of people. And quite frankly, it was a difficult one for me as well for a long time. Because if I think of saving all beings, I kind of imagine Superman. Superman goes around and saves all beings. If somebody yells for help in China, Superman has to go to China and get that person out of the well they've just fallen into or whatever it happens to be. You know, and a lot of people, I don't want to tar all Christianity with the same brush, but I think a lot of sort of mainstream, not very well thought out Christianity views Jesus the same way as being, as going around saving all beings, being perfectly good himself, the way super morals, and being able to go and save all people who need saving.

[14:35]

And that view of saving all beings is, of course, impossible. The thing that was the key to saving all beings came quite late in my sort of Buddhist life. Just maybe five or seven years ago at the most, I was teaching in Los Angeles, and I had this guy who used to come to my talks almost every week named Rob Robbins. And Rob Robbins was a kind of troubled individual. I don't think he'd mind me saying that about him. But one of the things he said was, he told me his understanding of the vow to save all beings, which was, I vow to save all beings from myself. And I really like that version. I vow to save all beings from myself. So tomorrow morning when we do the robe chant, well, I'll do that. I'm just kidding. I just wanted to see. But I do like that, and actually I've thought for a long time when I do establish something for myself, I might change our version of the chant to that.

[15:40]

Because I think that's kind of the key. Because the idea that there's going to be some perfect individual who's going to come along and save us is, well, demonstrably untrue. It's not going to happen. We keep waiting for it to happen. Some of us keep waiting for it to happen, but it doesn't. In Buddhism, there's the understanding that the people, the bad guys that the world needs saving from are us, are all of us, collectively. So, our duty is to try to change... the world by changing ourselves because that's all, that's all we can do. You know, it doesn't, it's not quite as glamorous or exciting as, as Superman flying to China to save the poor person stuck in the well, but it's, it's necessary and it's the only way, you know, it's, it's all we can do.

[16:49]

But I think, I think it's, it's more than we imagine. It has more power than we think it does. But again, I keep, you know, I was raised by, I guess one could say, a Buddhist teacher, Tim, who one of his little mantras was, to understand Buddhism, you have to have an equal amount of doubt and faith. And I... I think that has always been my policy. And I am constantly asking myself why. Even having practiced what I practice and knowing what I know and doing what I've done, I sometimes say, well, why be ethical? I mean, why believe that? Why not just try to get everything you can and get it for yourself, live a

[17:53]

you know, power, sex, and all that. And don't worry about ethics, because, you know, ethical people are losers, right? But again, it comes back to another one of these weird Buddhist notions, which is that we share identity with all things. And that is a tough bit of philosophy to chew over. When you first encounter it, if you're anything like me, it sounds kind of crazy. It sounds wrong. It sounds obviously wrong. I mean, that's what I thought. I thought it sounded like a neat speculation, or maybe a fun little thing to play around with in your head, but it didn't seem to be correct. because I didn't see how I shared identity with all things.

[18:58]

But somehow I committed to this Zazen practice, and through it was able to kind of come to a sort of understanding, which I have been lately attempting... different ways to describe in different venues, just to see where it goes. And I tried to write it down this morning again, and I've attempted to write it down a few times. So I'm going to explain it to you the way that I explained it to myself this morning, more or less. I'm not going to read basically off this paper, but it went like this. For my entire life, I had, up until a certain point, believed that there was a thing called me and that this thing other people called Brad or Dingbat or whatever they called him.

[20:09]

But this Brad thing, this something, was my absolute core. was the very bottom of everything. It saw what I saw. It did what I did. When I did something bad, even when no one else was around, the Brad thing could see it and knew that it happened. This is bad. Sorry, I wrote something bad here, but I'll read it anyway. The Obama administration may know what porn sites I look at, but the Brad thing knows what evil thoughts those porn sites cause, right? So it's like this ultimate something, and it's very private. Nobody else can see into it. Nobody knows, unless I happen to take the step of telling them, and I could be lying, what goes on inside that core bradness. And other people... have their own me entities, and they saw what they see, they know what they know, and maybe there's God somewhere, you know, off in the rim of space, sitting there with a cigarette, and he has his own me.

[21:21]

But all of these me's are separate, you know? And one day, and this is after a lot of zazen practice, it just... It just happened to sort of hit me like a ton of bricks. Hit who like a ton of bricks? I don't know. That that core thing, that most private, essential something that was me, was not mine. Wasn't located in me. It wasn't located where I thought it was. It wasn't really me. It wasn't personal. It was... the universe looking out through my eyes. And this wasn't like an idea somebody expressed to me that I suddenly decided I believed. It was just, this happens to people sometimes. It may happen to you.

[22:24]

It may have already happened to many of you in this room. But it just becomes abundantly clear. So clear that that if you dropped a bowling ball on your toe, nobody's going to say, are you sure you dropped a bowling ball on your toe? Maybe you just think you dropped a ball. Maybe that's just a speculation in your head. Maybe that's just an idea you have about the universe, that there's a bowling ball now sitting on your toe. You know that there's a bowling ball that's been dropped on your toe. It was that level of clarity. And it wasn't as if this was something that dawned on me all at once. It was like ah, I remember that, you know? It's like you suddenly, you know, you remember where you put your coffee cup, you know? Ah, that's where I put my coffee cup, you know? And it wasn't like it was newly added, it was just there. The interesting thing, though, about these types of experiences, if one can call them experiences, is...

[23:28]

it doesn't necessarily make a person any more ethical. There's nothing... One could argue about it, but I would say, to begin this argument, that there's nothing intrinsic in the experience that's going to make you ethical. And in fact, I believe my speculation... is that there are people in the world who've had an experience like that who have become less ethical based on it. If that sort of thing hits you at a time that you're not really prepared for it, you can decide that since you are everything, you can't really harm anyone but yourself, and therefore you can go harm everyone. You can't take advantage of anyone but yourself, so you can just go take advantage of everyone. I, you know, some of the things I see and read about that go on in the sort of spiritual world of things, lead me to believe that this is actually going on, it has been going on for some time.

[24:36]

And I, again, speculating, believing, that this is the reason that this practice that we do here, de-emphasizes so-called enlightenment or Kensho or Satori of each kind of experiences, but instead deals much more with ethics and responsibility. Because I think those are the groundwork, and I think anybody who is on a meditative path that could conceivably lead to that kind of understanding, like the one I just attempted to describe here, it's really important that people who enter that thing should be grounded in a kind of ethics. Which way to go with this? Okay, how about I say this? This idea of obeying the rule of society and not setting up standards of your own, the line is followed by

[25:41]

If you don't understand the way right before you, how will you know the path as you walk? The way I've come to understand it is that this sort of lack of separation between myself and whatever I encounter is that whatever I encounter is a kind of teaching. I mean, I say it to sound like a cliché... practice with that. I think we should set up a day when anybody who says practice with that can be legally slapped. But that's something else entirely. But it is demonstrating to you what you need to know. When you find yourself in a situation in which your activities and whatever happens to be restricted by what appear to be outside forces beyond your control I tend to look at that these days as okay this this must be what I need you know because I ended up here and that's and that's the way I tend to look at it now one one difference

[27:06]

And I always seem to talk about this whenever I talk at Hasahara. One sort of difference, not sort of, one difference between my Zen practice and what a lot of people here have gone through is that it was almost entirely non-residential, almost entirely non-monastic. So, in terms of... what are the real ethical principles, it became kind of up to me to set up standards of my own. Because there wasn't anybody, there wasn't any Tonto looking over, or any Eno telling me I shouldn't be doing Zazen in shorts and a Green Lantern shirt. Hey, it was hot. And... There was nobody there to sort of look at the specifics of my life and say this is ethical and this is not.

[28:10]

I had teachers, but they weren't always accessible. It could be months, it could be six months, eight months before I could get the equivalent of a practice discussion with one of my teachers, just because of the way things were. And when it was available more often. I did it more often, but there wasn't much. And so I've been forced to try to make up standards for myself. And that's, I think, what all of us have to do. Because as individuals, we're going to have, each of us, a different understanding of what... of what all of the precepts need. And I believe that's the reason the precepts are the ones that we take these days in contemporary Zen are so expletive, deleted, vague.

[29:18]

Galen Gadwin told me I shouldn't use the F-word so many times in talks. But that's the one I want to use, just so you can get a feeling for what I really want to say. They are. And how about for the F word, we'll use the word frustratingly. They're frustratingly vague. How do you not kill? We're down here. I'm a vegetarian all the time, but everybody who's down here is a vegetarian, at least when they're down here. But we're killing carrots. We're killing... uh, cabbages, you know, we're killing, uh, the bugs. Uh, there was a debate apparently at Green Gulch over whether to use blood-based fertilizer. And I guess they finally decided to use the blood-based fertilizer. Am I right about that? Okay. You don't know, but, but there is that, you know, no matter what you do and Buddha is said to have been one of his inspirations for, for doing the things that he did was, uh, watching the, the farming go on in, um, area where he lived and seeing a worm get cut in two and realizing that this is part, this is what, this worm gave up its life so that he could eat vegetables and tofu and things, you know, and be a nice vegetarian.

[30:35]

So you can't get away from it. You can't get away, you may not steal, but you steal, you know, you may not shoplift, but you steal things. And you may not... I steal cookies sometimes in the dining room. We do that. Every job here has got some little perk, I think. There are all kinds of things. The misusing sexuality. You could do a whole day on that one. That one was something like what a thing to give to an 18-year-old, you know? I kind of resent it sometimes that I heard that so early, because all of my life as a sexually active human being, except for possibly one or two encounters in high school, was lived under this cloud of must-not-misuse sexuality.

[31:41]

And... And who knows? Especially you go to Japan and you find out that there's a whole different definition of what sexuality should be. So it's an interesting practice and one of the things that helped me that Tim actually said was that the precepts are koans. They're just as inscrutable as what is the sound of one hand clapping or why did Bodhidharma come from the West. Yeah. You know, they're difficult and we have to find our way through them. But we find our way through them because of this shared identity. And until you kind of see it for yourself, you have to do what I did, which is just sort of take it on faith. This is the faith part of it.

[32:44]

I knew Tim McCarthy well. I knew Gudo Nishijima well. I could tell that they weren't BSing. I'm being so good with the language, aren't I? I should get a gold star. Anyway, I could tell that there was something truthful. So I said, okay, I accept this. Bless you. That there's something to this. And because we share identity, doing harm to others is the same as doing harm to yourself. So in reality, evil isn't just bad or wrong. Evil is just stupid. It's just stupid behavior because you're not stealing from anybody. You're stealing from yourself. You're not misusing somebody else sexually.

[33:45]

You're misusing yourself. You're not lying to somebody else. You're lying to yourself. And I tend to have this sort of utopian view of what Buddhism is actually asking us to do. I think it is asking us to form a better world. a better world, not in the sense of being shiny, golden example of betterness, but a better world in being a world that is a hell of a lot more fun to live in, you know? I really believe this. I don't think any of the Buddhist ethics, the Buddhist ethical principles and precepts are there to make life sort of dull and ordinary and to make us sort of, you know, nice model citizens of the world. but are there to teach us how to create a world in which we are actually happier. And if I didn't believe that, I would drop it because, you know, I ain't got time for it.

[34:49]

I don't want to waste my life on something that's not going to somehow improve things. I don't have any great interest in being seen as a good person. When I hear about that thing, I want to be a better person. I never thought that. I've never sat and thought, gosh, I want to be a better person. Screw being a better person. I want this world to be a better place. And I want to enjoy it more. And I've followed this... this stuff for all these years and made the mistakes that I've made, uh, in, in order to try and realize that. So I'd like to stop here while we've still got 24 minutes and see, I wanted to stop six minutes ago, but I got a little, and see if we have any sort of discussion. Excuse me of being unethical.

[35:50]

Yes. Um, uh, interested in how you're related ethics to the insight you have. You suggested that that can kind of be co-opted and used by people to do all sorts of things. And I wonder if in your experience it's, you know, when you're in touch with that core me that you were talking about, in my personal experience it seems that a big part of that is that it's got an impersonal sort of volition. Yeah. And that a part of that tends to look an awful lot like compassion. Yeah, I would agree. So it kind of strikes me that if someone really stays grounded in that, I mean, it's not a good way to put it, but it's when I got them. Yeah, yeah. And you said that compassion will sort of naturally flow from it, and the way that it could kind of be co-opted is exactly that.

[36:55]

It would have to be co-opted. Someone would kind of have to, like, step back into identity and say, like, oh, well, yeah, I had this insight, and so it's all just happening, and the hell would... Yeah. I agree with that. I agree that compassion is sort of the true movement. Yeah. Nishima would put it, accord with circumstances. And according with circumstances had to do with finding the natural sort of compassion that that insight or whatever tends to flow along. But I think all of us... Well, I don't know about all of us. I think I tend to jump back and forth. And to the point where it gets very, very confusing. So even... There was a point... just after the first sort of big hit of any sort of insight where I thought, ah, I got it all, you know, and I had this idea of enlightenment as this sort of permanent thing that was like getting your college degree, you know, you get your bachelor's degree, nobody can ever say, well, maybe they can, but it's very rare that they can say, oh, you don't have your bachelor's degree anymore, you know, you're now just an undergrad again.

[38:08]

But I don't think it works like that. You do step back into it. And I feel that absolutely... And this has been something I've been saying a lot lately. Absolutely anything can be sort of co-opted by that sort of self-identity thing, you know, whatever that is. I hate the word ego because it's so overused. But can be co-opted by that part of our personality... and used to its advantage. But you will find, and this is kind of my experience of it, that you're fighting. Whenever I wonder if my particular ethical decision is the right one or not, my my tendency is to try to step back and very quietly see if I'm fighting for a position.

[39:13]

And if I'm fighting for the position that I'm taking, then I think it's probably the wrong one. Whereas if the decision that I'm making seems to come naturally, it's probably the right one. But then again, you get confused because you have to work with this stuff for a long time because you have a lot of, we all have, a lot of habits, you know, habits of thinking, habits of doing, habits of whatever, and they'll come up very quickly. You know, Nishima used to say that the first thing that ever comes up in a decision-making situation is intuition, and that's what should be followed. But that intuition can get knocked off really fast. Like, it's intuition, oh, you know, hit the guy, okay. Then you think that hit the guy is intuition, you know, and then you... And then you're in another conundrum. And when that happens, however long it takes, you can get back.

[40:16]

You can get back to the point of going, okay, that was a mistake. And then you have a mess to deal with. But you go, okay, I made this mess. Now I've got to deal with this big mess I've made out, or small mess out of things. And you can still... you know, that's the beauty of it. You can still always go back, you know. It's not that you, you know, it's not, this isn't a practice where there's a sort of vision of a God who can grant you grace or not grant you grace. It's that you always have a chance to fix whatever's wrong, but depending on how wrong you've made it, you know, it may take more things. And, you know, that's... yes your example of rob robbins yeah saying i'm saving all beings from myself that's what he said yeah um brought up a long-term question i have um about interpretation because to me that's just setting up you say and i like that

[41:30]

I like that interpretation. To me, that's just setting up standards of my own or, well, that sounds good to me. I don't trust what sounds good to me. Oh, yeah. Like you were saying, intuition. Oh, hitting him was, that's not the real, that's not the intuition that I'm talking about and just backtracking to something I agree with. It's not necessarily something I agree with. it's I don't know my feeling from attempting to work with it is that there is there seems to be like this innate sort of balance point you know and if you are able to you know it's like balancing something on your finger see if I can even balance this pen on my finger you know it'll only I'm kind of nervous whoops But anyway, it'll only balance on one point, right?

[42:34]

And when you reach that point, you know it, and it doesn't have much to do with a personal like or dislike, except that I think in a way it tends to feel good. I'm trying to sort of, rather than trying to make a philosophical statement, you know, based on what you... I've said, I'm trying to sort of use my own, like, my whatever I have to explain how it seems to work. So it's not what I want. You know, in Christian formulation, it's not what is the thing that Jesus says, not what I will, but what God wills, you know, Jesus is saying when he's going to take the cup. And it's sort of like that. Although not necessarily anthropomorphizing a god out there, or you could if you want to, who's going to tell you what's right.

[43:41]

But it's a matter of knowing kind of where it sits. It doesn't make any sense at all. Well, I don't know about any god, but I... You know, using myself as a litmus has gotten me into as much trouble as good. Well, in that case, see, I think that's also what the precepts are for in a way. That's kind of how I feel about the precepts. The precepts are kind of there so that if you get lost and confused about what to do... you can always go by the precepts. You know, you just think of the precepts and, you know, what would Buddha do, whatever, you know, because they're a distillation. You know, one of the ways I'd thought about doing this talk was to give you examples. That's why I brought these books of some of the early formulations of the Buddhist precepts, because they're crazy.

[44:44]

The one I just came across, which I thought was fascinating, was that it was a violation of the Buddhist precepts for a monk, who was a male monk at the time these precepts were made, to urinate standing up. And I thought, geez, that's an inconvenient precept. But the precepts were based on a principle. It's like understanding the meaning of the rules. So... what we've come to these days is trying to set up precepts that are broader than those early ones and say, you know, and kind of leave it up to the individual to interpret it. But that's, you know, that's kind of it. Thank you. So, you're really reflecting that setting up standards of your own are setting up standards that also are important with you.

[45:46]

Attempting? Yeah. It's the vow. Yeah. The practice. Yeah, attempting to do that, but failing, you know, and realizing you've failed and trying again, you know. And that's the tricky part. And I think you, you know, it helps to have a good grounding in what we're doing this for, you know. And I think we're living in an interesting time in which we are, you know, this sort of burst of information availability has made it possible for us to see things that people never saw before. For example, how miserable rich people can be, you know? Things like that were not available to us. So we can say... that maybe greed is not the way to true happiness.

[46:50]

You know, it becomes available. And we're living at a time when we are kind of gradually approaching the ability to know the entirety of human experience. That's very utopian and out there. But I think eventually, you know, and it'll be hundreds of years, but we'll have that. And we'll know each other's experience to a degree in which we'll be able to find what is actually the best sort of life. But for now, understanding the standards that are available to you in wherever you happen to be, I think is... is a good way, and when the standards are wrong, doing something about it. But working with it to make that happen.

[47:53]

I'm wondering a bit about the actual utility of viewing the precepts as koans, because a lot of them seem like quite literal and quite specific. Not using intoxicants seems pretty simple and straightforward to me. And yet I see that I feel like a lot of people end up getting really confused taking a very broad view of things. And I feel like my understanding is that not taking intoxicants is one of the precepts to My understanding is that alcohol is fairly commonly consumed, and we're in excess, and it's like, huh. Yeah, I used to go to a Zazen meeting where they would, I only went to it like twice, but they would do Zazen for half an hour and then break up the theater. That's not unusual. Yeah, and I just wonder, like, is this really the best, you know, yeah, you're not clinging to a fixed view, but like,

[49:03]

And I feel like maybe we could be better off in a lot of situations if we did play into some fixed views. And given the human capacity for delusion and how powerful it is, I mean, three of our habits here at Zen Center have had major indiscretions. Yeah, it's an interesting thing because you can take... For example, if you take the intoxicant thing, you can take it as very literally, don't drink, don't do drugs, you know. But then, you know, one thing that's sort of slightly annoying to me sometimes is to, do you know the Thich Nhat Hanh thing? They kind of, they broadened the view of intoxicants to include intoxicating literature and things. And most of my favorite movies fall under the category of intoxicants. in their view of things. You know, you can always broaden it out.

[50:05]

And then, of course, there's Bodhidharma's view of the precepts, which says not to... What is it? Damn, I can never come up with it right off the top of my head. But he takes this kind of philosophical view of that particular precept. But yeah, you're right. If you take the precepts sort of literally, don't lie, you know, just don't lie. But then... But then you come into, like, individual sort of day-to-day, moment-to-moment situations where, say, you're married and your wife says, does this dress make me look fat? There might be times when not telling the truth is the better option, you know? You can always... And so... And so the precept of not lying, let me give you an example which I think I've used here in this dining room before, but it's my favorite one. Tim McCarthy, my Zen teacher I've already told you about, one of the things he did in life was he became an euthanasia technician because he is an animal lover.

[51:14]

And when he saw what was going on in the world of dog pounds and cat pounds and things like that, he saw that people just didn't care. It's like, kill a cat, kill another cat, kill another cat, oh, kill a dog. And so he decided he wanted to find a way to do that compassionately. And one of the things this led to was this brief period of a few years in which his house was just full of dogs and cats. because if he didn't believe an animal needed to be euthanized, he'd just take it home and try to find somebody to take it away from him, and it became a big mess. But one of the things that happened to him was he got a call in the middle of the night saying that a dog had been hit by a car, and the dog wasn't dying, and they needed somebody to come and put it out of his misery.

[52:16]

And so... He went to the scene and he found, and the way he describes it, he said the dog looked like it had been torn in half, you know, but it wasn't dying. It was howling in pain and it was, you know, it was holding on to life. So Tim got his stuff out and he had this very special formula that he invented that he said makes the dog high as a kite before he puts it out. But he did that, he gave the dog the injection, and as soon as the medicine started taking effect, the dog just started licking his hand, you know, and then passed away. So, if Tim had at that moment taken the Buddhist precepts at their sort of literal face value, he would have said, I am a Buddhist and I do not take life, you know? So... I guess what I'm getting at is those situations where you violate the precept in order to keep the precept are exceptionally rare.

[53:18]

But they do happen. So that's why I think that's why it makes sense to remain flexible. Rachel raised her concern about interpretation of precepts. How do you understand the precepts and utilize them? And the concern was based on our own ideas. It's a problem if we don't trust ourselves. Or if we're based on our own ideas has caused us suffering. I have kind of the opposite problem where I don't really trust other people's interpretation, especially people in power. Especially people in power that are attached and kind of like embedded within an institution, which is supposedly proselytizing very specific ways of interpreting precepts.

[54:25]

And I've, not just in this institution, but in many other institutions, there's a lot just riddled with problems seeing people of authority interpreting precepts in a very specific way. And so I kind of like, it's like, I hear that just following my own ideas might lead to suffering, whereas somebody can't follow other people's ideas, because I know for a fact that I'm used to suffering. So it's kind of like, well, I can follow nobody's idea, but then there's no point talking about precepts. I think... I don't know. Because I tend to be the same with that. I don't trust authority figures, especially if they're wearing robes. This is why you only see me wear the robes when I absolutely have to. Because I really have strong distrust for that, especially religious authority figures. Although I feel that... Well, for example, here...

[55:28]

I feel that the rules, the Shingi rules they have, are based on trying to make Tassajara 1 work and make it be the place that most of us want it to be. And that if you break too many of those rules, it either breaks down entirely or stops being the kind of place that we want it to be. It starts being a... what it, what it starts being, you know, with all the young people around, it could easily start being a pickup, you know, spot, you know, like, but, um, but, but I think, I think it's so, so it's, it's to me, it's a kind of compromise, you know, if, if I come into an institution that has rules, um, I try to abide by those rules.

[56:29]

I have been seen standing up and eating. And that's the only one I've been caught on. But, yeah, so trying to find kind of a middle ground between... If you see that authority is being abused and that people are espousing ideals that they themselves aren't upholding, then you need to respond to that. I think part of what I began this thing with the straight edge movement within punk was responding to people in authority who didn't keep their own rules by saying, F you, we're going to keep those rules. you know, and see if you can, you know, now what are you going to do, you know? I think it was kind of a brilliant, you know, slap in the face, you know, like, look, I'm obeying the rules.

[57:33]

So that's one way, you know, and the other way is to point out the hypocrisy of it, and maybe you do both. But... I think it's a good idea not to trust authority. But at the same time, there's a sort of wider, slightly more mystical view which says that authority doesn't ultimately actually come from outside. It has an aspect which is actually coming from within you. and being expressed as something outside of you, which sounds a bit spooky and weird and acidy and whatever, but it's the way I tend to view it. I tend to think that often authority is my own needs being expressed by someone who appears to be other.

[58:41]

Sometimes. Not always. I think that's all the time. Thank you. Yes, thank you for attending. And I brought my rakasu to wear, and I forgot to put it. Thank you for listening to this podcast offered by the San Francisco Zen Center. 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.

[59:18]

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