around to it a little bit remedially. I don't know what to say. Anyway, I don't know how fruitful it is to speculate on the reasons. It certainly does seem to be a fact that it's taken us, our culture, a long time. It's part of many centuries of contact, beginning with the European explorers way back in the 1400s and 1500s. You know, the Jesuits were the first Westerners to come to Japan in the 1500s. And there are Jesuit tracts about Satori, Kensho, the teachings of the mysterious Zen school. They wrote about it and they studied it actually. And they had actually quite a lot of respect for it. In fact, the Jesuits' first impression of Japan was that it was a very civilized country. And they had actually quite a lot of respect for it.

[01:05]

In fact, the Jesuits' first impression in Japan was that it was a very civilized country by European standards, except for two things which the Jesuits found appalling. One was homosexuality, and the other was infanticide, both of which at the time were rather commonplace. And they just thought, well, you know, as a heated country, what can you expect? But they're doing pretty well, given the fact that they haven't heard the good word. And, of course, the Japanese, on the other hand, thought that what they were seeing from the West was totally barbaric. And, you know, that they couldn't believe how inferior we were compared to their standards. So these first contacts between these cultures pointed up a rather large... And it is true that by most ordinary standards of health and being well fed and cleanliness and all those things, Japan and China were the most advanced civilization in the world for some long period of time, for maybe about seven or eight hundred years.

[02:20]

They were definitely, in most major respects, more advanced. So it's true, these cultures are much older. They just developed it. Maybe developed with less discontinuity, so that the shamanistic roots of these practices which go back into the Stone Age were more routine. Maybe it has to do also with the historical development of Christianity, which for whatever reasons, purged itself of many of those strands within it which retain yogic practice, like Gnosticism and other things. Those things were historically purged from Christianity quite early and so did not remain in the dominant spiritual traditions of our society.

[03:24]

And they were never purged from India or China, those things were retained. So that also could figure in. I mean, for instance, apparently the doctrine of reincarnation was an acceptable belief in Christianity until the 900s. Although that's not generally known. I've read that. Brother David's been around it. But some council in the 9th century decided it was to go, so it went. From that point on, it was nowhere reincarnation to be talked about. unless he wanted to be one of these people that got burned. Anyway, it's interesting to speculate why it is that we haven't somehow developed this side of ourselves. I think certainly the things that you say are true. I mean, in America, we don't even have the continuity of European culture, bless her and help us.

[04:28]

We've rejected even the extent to which there was continuity of Europe. That was part of what America was, was the rejection of Europe. And it was built by people who rejected Europe by sailing away. So we're, I think, just now getting back to realizing what we left behind that's Europe, much less what Europe left behind. Anyway, we're getting a little bit far afield. Well, if you think in a very long view, thousands of years, I don't really like the idea of the thought of any race being superior to any other. If they were doing it over 400 years ago, Now they're building television sets and they offer all of that. And we're trying to think of it just even to me that maybe there's a pendulum shift and it takes 4,000 years to happen or something like that. Could be. Well, as I said, I don't think you'd like that, actually.

[05:29]

Well, I think it's my idea. It's just an idea that, you know, if you're honest, you could bring up. a lot of Orientals think that. I mean, there was a lot of the early Zen teachers basically did not see how people like us could make much headway in Kurdish because we weren't Japanese. I mean, that idea was prevalent even in the 50s. Well, a lot of people worry about Chinese building cars. I do not. If they do, they won't be perfect. Whatever. Well, let's get our cars first. The holy Japanese kind of straightened it. Definitely the superiority of that in that level. I drive a Japanese car. That's gone quite well. This goes back a little bit to when you were talking about being in accord with your surroundings and coming out of the womb somewhat imperfect and having to train yourself to be more in accord. Is there anything out of you at all in psychology that somehow got me the feeling that there is of children in some ways being

[06:33]

more in accord with things than adults, or that maybe you have some sense of accord with things which you may lose at some point in your childhood? Or is there any idea in Buddhist psychology of people becoming less wonderful through mistreatment than perhaps, you know, that maybe they came out of the womb a little bit more perfect and became less perfect through mistreatment in any way? Well, we have to get the right vocabulary to really discuss these things accurately. It isn't a matter of perfect or imperfect. you are born not blank, but with clearly delineated propensities for greed, hate, and delusion. And the main reason, and anybody who lives with children knows that it doesn't take them long to start expressing it. And on the whole, they express it less restrainedly than adults do. I mean, adults, you know, learn that you can't scream and stamp up and down and throw a tantrum and roll on the floor to get what you want. In fact, if they do, they have little men come in suits and put you away.

[07:35]

The main reason that children appear to us to be somewhat more innocent and so forth is that it takes them a while to get tattered. So they don't... Their patterns for those behaviors don't run so deep. So they have more ability to let go. They don't harbor things. Harboring quality is something that you develop by... karmic repetition, but there's no idea in Buddhism that somehow children are innocent or pure, because in fact, observably, they're not. Well, I didn't mean exactly that, but I guess sort of two things. Partly I meant the idea of the patterns being acquired, because it's not so much that they're actually born with the patterns, but they're born with the propensities and the patterns get out to detail. Is that what you're saying? That's right. And then I meant Is there some idea that they're less subject to... or less prone to dualism, or to perceive things in a subject-and-object kind of way, or is that... is that somewhat acquired?

[08:50]

Just... I'm not sure that I got this idea, but I somehow had this idea that there was some idea in Buddhism that when you're a child, you might be able to... But that's sort of what I meant by being in accord with your surroundings, that children might be able to be, to be, to perceive things differently. Yeah, well, if they do, if they do, the problem is it doesn't really count. It doesn't really, you know, it's sort of insignificant, but that's true. I mean, that is true. Children on the whole don't... darn so involved in their thinking than adults are, because they don't think so much. So in that sense, you might say they're slightly less dualistic in their perceptions. Their perceptions are more, you know... But it's not awakened perception, it's that your misperceptions have not yet awakened, and they're bent on to awaken.

[09:56]

So it's nothing that you can really look to very hopefully. children lose it, that's all, quite naturally, as they become interested, more and more interested in trying to get what they want, as all human beings do. And I'm afraid that the idea of children being more pure and innocent is just not really much of a Buddhist idea. If you want to talk about some kind of good impulse in people, children or otherwise, like towards generosity or being loving or something. Is that belief to be completely acquired, that children, that you come out of the womb without any, or say, do you come out of the womb with impulses to grieve, hate and delusion? Are there potential for that? The other potential too? Yeah, you have both. And then the conditions that you live in determine how it goes. Yeah.

[10:56]

You know, you develop according to the law of karma, and that's partly your surroundings and circumstances and so forth. If you're in good circumstances, you develop well. If you're in bad circumstances, you develop poorly. But it's not like you have to train them to be genocidal. I mean, the impulse is there. Yeah, you have to train them. I think to me the first impulse that was a child, the infant, I think one of the first stages of infancy is when a child discovers that... It's not part of everything else. It's separated. Let's make demands. And those are demands. We can't survive as a man. So the first push is to make demands and to grasp and hold on to those things which give the infant, you know, as it goes into it, like a baby and security. So it seems those are almost essential behavioral behaviors. What then have to be learned are that there's a tape that goes along with the Gita.

[12:01]

And the first things that happen are the child making the Gita. The child's main job is to grow up. And Buddhism really is an adult bear, I must say. I mean, I think the main Buddhist idea for children in child raising is that you raise the child in such a way that... the Dharma is accessible to them when they're old enough to see it. But practically speaking, at the earliest age I've ever seen anybody practice sadhana, sort of from their own observation and feeling of why you would do it, is about fifteen. And that's about, I wouldn't go much earlier than that. I think you have to go through the work of making an adult body and mind with as good of circumstances as your parents and society can provide. And there are examples, you know, of these spiritual geniuses who had some great spiritual insight at the age of seven or eight.

[13:09]

But on the whole, the basic situation of children is that they're just rather unconscious, and everything that they do, good or bad, is on the whole not too conscious. And You might say, I mean, some way I've tried to explain this before is that Buddhist practice is continuation into your whole life of what you do when you're a child, which is sort of figure out how to survive and what the world's all about. And most people just don't continue that. They stop when biologically the process is completed. But that's really the point at which practice begins, that wouldn't have the equipment necessary to actually make something. But once we've figured out our physical survival, so the survival in charge of them, is that once we have figured out our physical survival, we realize we think we need a whole lot more than just figuring out our physical survival.

[14:18]

So then you have to ask the question, what's going on? What did I get here for? And that's where you sort of move into that. That's right. And so that's why I say it's, in a sense, an adult affair. And if it comes earlier in your life, it's a precocity. And some people are spiritually precocious. They have a spiritual crisis in early adolescence or something like that. And it's the kind of crisis that, for other people, happens. See, Jung felt that it was natural to have a midlife. That was the time, biologically, when it was natural to begin asking ultimate questions or religious questions. Characteristically in Buddhism, if you look at the literature of when they imagined people becoming monks and so forth, I think they felt it was an affair of early adulthood. That the decision to seek the Dharma was something that would occur to you about the age of 20. And I don't think they allowed anyone to be fully ordained into the Sangha before the age of eighteen.

[15:21]

Twenty, that's what I thought. They do have these child looks, historically, but that's not considered, that's just, you know, more like church school or something. So the actual decision to practice is one that you have to make yourself, and it's sort of like, you know, being old enough to drink or drive or something, or old enough to vote. You have to have a kind of, the ability to make an adult decision. Yes? Well, the one thing I have to ask is that if you would like your child to grow up with the right set of attitude to it when you write it. You'd like to set up attitudes to inform more of it, to think that you'd want to do whatever's possible to teach that child about respect or appreciation, or even to worry that you try to avoid teaching your child boundaries that are different, or so that it would naturally have an inquisitive mind, and it would naturally be able to appreciate

[16:34]

Well, it would be nice if they were that straightforward. But unfortunately, It's a lot more complicated. For instance, Japanese children are raised just the way we say. But very few Japanese young adults have the slightest interest whatsoever in anything having to do with it, because there's a lot more going on in a child growing up and just the parents, you know, it's the whole society and their peers and just what seems to be happening. I mean, amazingly enough, most of us were probably not raised that way. And yet here we are, this month, studying Buddhism.

[17:36]

And in societies where Buddhism has been present for centuries, as somebody was saying, you know, they're interested in the video things you can do. it's something that has come up in the society and culture, and they're not, it's not accessible to them. Karma is very mysterious, and it doesn't operate, I mean, it isn't, you know, on the whole, the whole doctrine of rebirth and incarnation is not central to Buddhism. It's sort of something that Buddhism took on in India and Hinduism because of what happened, but And still there is a sense that it's very difficult to really adequately explain what happens to people on the basis of what you see in just their life, this life. You raise one person perfectly and you do everything for them and they become a criminal. You raise somebody like Eleanor Roosevelt. had this horrible childhood, but everything went wrong, she was maltreated, and she became the saint.

[18:43]

And there are examples that all of us know of that. It's very hard to... All you can say is that the way in which people develop is not exactly fully accessible to the rational mind. That's certainly true of children. And, you know, children, I mean, to get back to Flora's question, children vary, vary dramatically in the way that they are. Any of the people who've had four or five of them can tell stories about how radically they differ from the word go. And the moment they come out, they're just different. And some children seem very non-dualistic and innocent and all that. Other children are profoundly dualistic from the first hour. So... Actually, you know, what we mean by non-dualistic thinking is not really what children do. I mean, it's a little bit more like... I really can't get into it in much detail, but it's... The way children are resembles that, let's put it that way.

[19:51]

But it's not anything like the same reason. It's more like the full possibilities of desire and selfishness haven't yet occurred to me. They seem to be floating in a sea of innocence, but it's not exactly the same at all. It's something that, if it were, this whole business would be much easier because we could just try to somehow freeze it and keep it from being perverted or distorted. But actually, I think the message here is that this is a profound existential problem for all human beings, and it doesn't come naturally to anyone. In fact, that idea is something a little bit like this, that there's no real shortcut, that there's... And in the texts that you read in Buddhism about this, the proof that they give you, just point to Buddha,

[20:52]

himself, you know, who was the, you know, spiritual genius par excellence, and basically he had a terrible time, as did most of the great spiritual teachers, and also that it does seem to be historically the case that those people who developed into the greatest sages worked the hardest at it. And there was hardly anyone for whom it came easy. And There's an interesting point that Suzuki Roshi mentioned several times, and Dr. Murase Sensei, the teaching teacher, mentions too, which means it to me a lot, which is that if you're superficially skillful at something, you have a knack for something, you actually end up having a very hard time actually. So in some ways, actually, historically, those who had the most difficult spiritual journey made the best teachers and had the most impact on people this high.

[21:56]

And those who had an easy sailing on hold it because we're not talking here about some kind of like being able to draw it. We're talking about seeing through or fundamentally addressing the universal condition of human beings. And from that point of view, The more you suffer, the more you get it. I mean, if you're insulated from all that, you get nothing. That's why in Buddhism, the devas, the celestial beings who, for some long period of time, are karmically immune and suffering, are considered to be quite sorrowful creatures because they don't learn anything. They just live in this... And Buddhism just kind of absorbed the idea that such beings existed without really examining too much. They said, if there are such beings, they're in a very bad situation because they can't get in touch with anything.

[23:01]

They don't suffer, they don't have bodies, they don't die. And what will happen to them is that eventually this good situation will end. And they'll feel quite terrible that they've wasted so much time. What that means for us, practically, is that any human being who's in a situation like that, where they're insulated from all the facts of life, so to speak, are in a very dangerous circumstance. Because when they wake up to it, they'll have so much remorse and feeling like they've missed out that it will be very hard for them to recover it. Yes, sir. I just saw the Chosen. The Chosen? Oh, yeah, about the Hasid. Yeah, the spiritual leader, the rabbi, the prophet, comes to that very problem of his son in a very unusual way, introducing him to... I was in New York, and I almost went into it, and I somehow thought it was one of these exorcist-type movies.

[24:14]

It was, you know, and so the shiny... I didn't want to say the name. I'm sorry, I missed it. It's exactly what you thought. It's coming around like this, and it's... Well, that's interesting. I had a question a little earlier here in the business of comfort, or this idea of the child reaching a survival level, but the operating picture on it. Moving beyond survival, we then question our own system. It seems to me that you could take that further and ask questions about this in lots of different sort of contexts. About the idea, at least in Western society, that one has to come from a comfortable situation before one really starts working at the kind of experience. So, on the other hand, it then implies that people that come from poverty or people who have lost access to certain kinds of comfort and educational experience either could deny opportunities to .

[25:18]

I wanted to speak to that. You've seen that in other, particularly Japanese culture, how that relates. Well, in Japanese culture, they have a very strong sense of taking the best possible care of each other. That's why Kono Roshi, this Japanese Roshi we visited, I found it very hard to understand how we could possibly try to make monastic practice work with families, because from a Japanese point of view, to have a family, your first responsibility is to your children, to your wife, to provide, you know, to give them education, and not to deny the things. He just was amazed that we were trying to do that, because obviously you can't maximize that if you're living in a situation which is more closer to a subsistence. Although I think, you know, actually, you may not realize it, but our kids are living pretty normal lives, and I don't think we're denying anything. But still, I think the value in that society, if you do the best that you possibly can for your children up to a certain point, then you just hope for the best.

[26:25]

But, you know, this business, it's very mysterious how it is. We're in the middle of talking about this here. And Buddhist history has mostly interpreted this Precept is having to do with sexuality and felicity or adultery or whatever, anyway, sexual misconduct, which has met or ordained the ordained love of the Luthish community. But we're expected to be diselvent and abstain from all sexual activity, and for the laity of Buddhism to abstain from the appropriate activity, which I suppose amounts to, if you're married, having your relationships outside of the marriage.

[27:39]

So from that point of view, there are a million traditional kinds of understanding. As I mentioned last week, It was just so taken for granted in India, I mean, in India today, that if you're a spiritual professional, so to speak, so to say, who has taken some vow of spiritual practice, that you're seldom... I don't think that Buddhism as a... as a community of spiritual depths or spiritual holiness could have been taken very seriously in the previous time, if not so. Part of it has to do with, I think, a fairly universal idea in most cultures that, particularly for men, sexual abstinence is the source of power.

[28:51]

meditative chants are often outside the realm of ordinary relationships, partly because of the fact that it's supposed to be intensification and concentration. I've never seen a text which explicitly really said that, other than some kind of project text. I don't think that in Buddhism that would be the primary. That would be more of a shamanistic reason. As I've often spoken about, yoga practice has been historically a source of power. Buddhism is not really too interested in power. Yoga practice is rather explicit that the jurors are going against becoming too involved in special powers. It seems that the main rationale, aside from the traditional Indian expectation, was that desires are bondage, because one becomes very attached to them, and it distorts your clarity, and that sexuality are most powerful.

[30:07]

The bonding desire, particularly once you have family, children, and so forth, quite naturally become very attached to that. And that it reduces the absolute freedom of a person living in poverty. And of course, in ancient cultures, there's an economic bondage too. You were responsible for their survival, which means basically your whole life is devoted to that. The idea of a leisure class is really limited to hereditary monarchy and loyalties that you don't have to work very hard. And, of course, the idea that women had the child bearers and child rearers in most of these traditional cultures could have a married life and also be yogic practitioners, I think, would have been inconceivable because of the roles that were accepted by men and women.

[31:26]

And then Claude Field, when he took care of the children, maybe there were 12 or 10, 8 children who could survive. So this particular precept is one in which I think is somewhat more tied to economics and social structures and cultural morals than some of the others. And I think that in order to get to the root of the precept, you have to go below that level. I think the level of not killing or not stealing and so forth The root of it is fairly close to the surface, but I think in this precept, the root idea which underlies it is somewhat beneath the surface of Morit. I think that actually the root of it is closer to the surface if you understand the lay-in side.

[32:28]

That is to say, if you have a pattern, what is the limit of appropriate behavior? In other words, what's wrong with having an extramarital relationship? What's the problem? Why not? And what it fundamentally boils down to is that in almost every case such an event causes suffering. And so actually the basic understanding of this is that because this kind of relationship between beings is very emotionally powerful, something we get very involved in, that it has a very strong possibility of causing stuff. And it's interesting that next week I'll have to do Xerox 14 rules with a 10-pep order.

[33:31]

I'll take it up on this month. It's pretty unusual to be in the middle of Vietnam War founding a new And he wrote precepts to suit himself, to suit what he considered to be the situation of the modern world. And this particular precept is the last 14. And he entirely turns the precept over to this area of, that this area is one which is fraught with the potential for cause and suffering. He says, effectual oppression should not happen without commitment. In sexual relationships, one must be aware of future suffering that may cause us to preserve a happiness with others, respect the rights, and commitment to others. Another way of putting this is that, you might say, in our intimate relationships, do not act in such a way that cause deception or

[34:41]

or fault manipulation. So, in a situation where we're not just treating them with some kind of telepathy or abstinence, which is, in a way, not really solving the problem, as Ezekiel, as she used to say, was brought up, this phrase was, I never read it, but Hillary said, If you do, you have a problem. If you don't, you have a problem. And, you know, in Zen Center itself, at first, he was rather tolerant of being married. You see, most first people he ordained were already married. He didn't ask me to divorce my wife. Of course, he was married himself. You see, in Japan, what happened was interesting. This is a whole other twist to the historical culture side. Japan nominally follows the custom of the priest not being married, although Japan, with its rather shamanistic shinto background, has always relaxed the stringency of the Buddhist precepts.

[35:58]

And if a monk had a girlfriend, it would not be the most horrible thing. In fact, it was pretty much... tolerated, although I think in a serious sense, probably did not. But when the Meiji Restoration occurred in the 1860s, and they wanted to rapidly become westernized, they wanted to somehow break the political and social power of the big monastic institutions. which, because they were not involved in families, were outside the control network of society. The society controls you by who your family is, by the family network of the town, the village, etc. And that's how you get to people in society. So amongst, in fact, institutions of celibate males, particularly,

[37:03]

take on a very powerful role in society because they're outside of a familial bond and relative and so forth. And also the institution can maintain itself economically very efficiently. So these institutions, wherever they occurred, it was in Europe and in Asia, tended to accumulate great power, great wealth, because it just lasted every century. The southern floor gave you 100 acres of land, 1,000 acres of land in 1510. In 1950, there it is, with, you know, half a million dollars. It's just a desert. You know, Kobo Daishi, the monk that brought the esoteric tantric school to Japan, went to the emperor of Japan in the 9th century and asked the emperor to give him the whole mountaintop called Koya, Mount Koya, with the kind of black mountaintop.

[38:12]

And the emperor said, fine, here it is. And there it is, the present day, in Norwich's religious community, more or less in ruins now, where at one time it was just vast. And in those days, you could just go ask the emperor to send you an album. The emperor owned it all and gave it to you. And, you know, it's been part of the property of the Shimbun of Buddhism ever since, for over 12 years, 13 years. And the real estate that the large monasteries in Kyoto is on, it's just beyond belief how valuable it is. You know, Kyoto... You're told what the property values in Kyoto are, that one square foot of land for how these works, you know, an immense amount of money. And you turn the corner, and you see, you know, Shinji, which is in the middle of Tokyo. And it has a wall around it, a great big, beautiful gate. Kedros used to have these big, useless gates that built temples.

[39:17]

Enormous structures, people carved and everything. They had no purpose whatsoever, except they'd keep the city out, because no one quite in all these centuries had the gumption, the order, torn down to make way for progress. So these temples exist, even down to the present day, in vast, empty stretches of land in the main temple buildings. They're not even planted. They're just dirt. Great spirit. And, you know, the rest of Kyoto, Tokyo, whatever, just grows up around it. So, monastic is a negative point. Monastic institutions are invading political power, economic power, and so forth. So, At the time of Meiji, they wanted to create a nationalistic spirit in Japan and weaken the power of the Buddhist competition. One of the ways they showed to do that was to allow, officially allow priests to marry. And that brought those priests who decided to do that into the glory to the social mainstream and broke down the sense of separatism.

[40:25]

So, It's quite common now for priests to marry, particularly after the monastic changes. I'm talking about men now. Women, monastics, the rule doesn't apply to them. A nun is not a nun in Japan. But the role that nuns and nuns in Japan are totally different anyway. So a priest, a man in Japan, has a... recognizable social role for the monastic women who do not have five arches. It's very inequitable. And some of the things that I saw with regard to how the nuns were treated in Japan are not too pleasant as we don't understand it. But to the present day, it is. Thank you. Well, it's a cultural value which the Buddhists

[41:28]

cultural value was chosen to adopt and actually aggrandize, because it's, I would say, at the present time, there's a loosening up in the society at large that I don't see occurring at all in Buddhist history, which women are beginning to make new friends with. There are the executives, women are being employed at jobs that are probably But really, the mainstream of Buddhism has to get to that, but it's beginning to, but you know, Japanese Buddhism is still very medieval. So Suzuki Roshi was married. In fact, he was given this position of a temple priest in a town, a congregation of family. He was expected to get married. They said, we're having the priest get married, so somebody could take care of the temple. He had a wife to do the stuff. And so he actually married twice. His first wife died.

[42:46]

And so he married, he ordained married people, but at a certain point, because of the real problems that people's marriages got into, people he ordained, he, toward the end of his life, he had a kind of reaction, and at one point said he wanted some of his disciples not to get married. It was a big blow to a lot of people, and it scared several people away. They wanted to get married. But he got a little discouraged because, in many cases, the emotional betrayal of people's not-so-good marriages got in the way, particularly of their being able to practice. So as you can see, at Zen Center, we are emphasizing families a lot. I'd say a big majority of the people that are ordained are already married, in fact, probably for the first time in Buddhist history, really, you know, the man and the woman are already married to each other, both of them are ordained, which I don't quite know how that's going to work out.

[44:02]

I think we're treating ordination, priest ordination in the Zen Center as really having mostly to do with a willingness to make your practice visible to other people and really rather separate from, apart from what you do there. Well, there's certainly a big difference, but I can't really tell you what the difference is yet, because we've not really done it long enough. But we're going to both be expected to train in roles which is training. You know, wearing your robe and being head monk at Kasahara. Princess Dan and Deborah, you know, Dan, what else, Deborah.

[45:08]

Deborah's now the principal, the head monk at Kasahara. She's skipping lunch usually. I've seen students who said, well, she's doing it. That's a role which is reserved just for a BMP. She's doing that, and you end up cooking in the kitchen. That would not be the case if she's not ordained. And so we have four or five such couples. Now, I know that Kenneth Roche, she asked him to be ordained to Samaria College, but then she asked him to be settled there. At least while they're in monasteries, so I don't quite know how that works out. I'm not too familiar with the details of how they do that. So we've gone halfway, so we've gone all the way. But the main point, I think, of this precept, aside from the tradition, is that our intimate relationships with each other are fraught with the possibility of potential of hurt or of sorrow because we invest so much of our emotion into them.

[46:22]

And so one solution to that is just to avoid it. And the other is that if you don't avoid it, to do it with sufficient consciousness and awareness to go on. that you remain aware of the possibility of future suffering. It's not something you're fooling yourself about. And that you do your best to maintain relationships which are non-deceptive, in which you're not using the other person for the satisfaction of your own need, but you're acting for it. engaged in a reciprocal relationship of mutual satisfaction and a difficult to unify. And after that, love and commitment. So I suppose you might say from this point of view that

[47:30]

Prostitution, for instance, would not be approved by people in a Buddhist society, and would not be taken out of view, because it's not a situation of love and commitment. It's nursing. Yeah, I didn't hear you actually yesterday. Well, I explained in the lecture we're cutting up these things, but, you know, it's the same as reading the Greek, but I've been reading this French translation of a Jewish text. He translates Raga. It sounds pretty neat. So I thought, well, that's interesting.

[48:33]

That's a much more outdated kind of translation. I wonder why I did that. Maybe it's wrong, but I decided this experiment to use the word love instead of greed. Because I knew it would cause problems. We have a big thing about the word love. I didn't give any propagandas about the actual mass culture. Song, etc. Love is supposed to be something very positive. And Christian love. So, the negative side of love is something that we tend to not want to notice too much. But love is actually a word which is so broad that it covers actually a number of stories. covers both very positive side and also very negative side. So I thought there might be some usefulness in using the word. It could force people to think a little bit about what they wouldn't understand love to be.

[49:36]

Actually, Buddhism has much more precise terms for each of the various aspects of love. It doesn't have any words drawn. So we have raga, which means passion, a passion to die. And we have lobha, which means . And we have tanpa, which means . And we have karuna, which means compassion, care. And we have Udita, which means joyous, joyous feeling for another. And we have the Teichak, which is kind of what I call 360-degree love. You are even-mindedly in pain of unlimited love. Those words are all being loved. some manner.

[50:51]

So just, you know, English, I think that our language is not very developed in this stupid area. We don't have a very precise vocabulary for the various shapes that love can lead us into. We say we're in love with somebody, but if you observe the long-term behavior of these two people saying that they're in love, we find out that that seems to include very many things that should be properly paid as well. You get, you know, there's a, it's statistically true that if you're somebody who's going to be murdered in this life, it's overwhelmingly likely that you'll be murdered by some member of the family. And if 80% of all murders are committed within family, by the relatives, it's very important. So this intimate regard or attachment or relationship with each other is, you know, cut both ways.

[52:01]

And this word raga, passion, could also mean passion, negative, as well as passion of love. Yeah. Anyway, I think that the phrase, misuse of the senses, implies, strangely enough, if you think about it, it implies that the senses themselves are okay. Otherwise, there wouldn't be any point in discussing them with you. I mean, the senses were bad to begin with. You just say, the senses, period. sensory life or sensuous life, avoid it or don't do it, but instead it says the misuse or wrong, wrong abuse of the sense. I think the implication, which I feel is my experience in Buddhist practice, is that the physical equipment of our body and mind is not considered to be the fundamental problem.

[53:10]

As I mentioned, Buddhism, the Buddha himself rejected which did take that view of how the body was the enemy or the problem, and that one had to somehow weaken the body to allow your spiritual body to emerge. I think that Buddhism takes the attitude, and this is part of what is meant by the middle way, is that the body itself is not the problem. It's the use. which our intentional or karmic mind makes of our equipment. That includes sexuality. It includes all of our senses. Because Buddhism is based on a kind of empirical idea that everything exists for a reason. So the body that we have, there's good reasons why we have that thought, why we have that thought, why we have a body that could be open to your pleasure and wide enough to come and take you.

[54:18]

If we didn't have such organs, we probably would survive more than a few minutes. Therefore, there would be no human realm. There would only be the realm of bodiless, disembodied consciousness. In fact, having a human body is considered to be an essential prerequisite for being a Buddha. which means having tenses and that, in fact, liberation is accomplished through the body, through the senses. There is no experience of awakening or enlightenment that I know of in the Buddhist tradition which plays and translates. There's always a relationship to some sensory experience. You hear a sound, or somebody says something to you. Or in one case, there was a Zen master who was enlightened and saw a huge process, and so forth.

[55:22]

Even Dogen, who had his big transformation, while he was sitting in his endo, his teacher was shouting in his ear. Not the person sitting next to him, he sat in the endo. give our most important messages to the person next to the part that wants to hear that. So I think the way she would often fall out, then Richard Baker, in front of everybody, actually, if somebody else is panicking. You take the person that you know doesn't care too much, and you say it to them. You know, if you say it to the person involved, it's a little bit too, they resist it too much. They have too much resistance. They don't realize for a few weeks that it's actually their problem. They think, oh, I really got it. Boy, I'm glad it wasn't me. So this, Jogen's teacher is shouting to the star next to him about sleeping in his audience.

[56:28]

I think it just gave Jogen some insight. So, Charlotte wanted to know about this because, you know, her work emphasizes the weight that she senses. And Buddhist literature does tend to veer into a kind of rhetoric in which it sounds like the senses are a problem. But early wisdom school mostly, and even then, there's certainly context to that kind of statement. Because practically speaking, they are a problem. The main problem is that is not that we have senses, but that the experience that our senses give us have a great deal of believability such that we imagine it real.

[57:33]

And that we can identify an ego or self in relationship to our sensory experience. That's the problem. So in its widest sense, this precept refers to what we call in Buddhism the kalpa, which means dualistic discrimination or an identification of a world which is separate from or outside the boundary of oneself. And this is the use that most people put their senses of their body to. It's a misuse in that It's using the senses to aggrandize a sense of separateness from others instead of to use the senses as a vehicle for identification and oneness with others.

[58:38]

I remember once I was giving a lecture about this, and for some reason, an image from a book I made to you, Now that I and my son is reading the book, it just reminded me of it. It's the book The Prince and the Pauper by Mark Plain. And there's a charming little incident in there. You know, the story, this poor boy, Prince of England, becomes switched accidentally. the poor boy, they think the prince has gone crazy and thinks he's the poor boy, but they still think he's the prince because the boys look exactly alike. And the whole plot of the story at the end turns on the fact that at the time that the prince seemed to have gone crazy, that is, the two boys switched, the great seal of England also disappeared. No one could find it. So it kind of slowed up the stage, didn't it? And they knew that the prince had it. But the new prince, I couldn't remember what he'd done with it, of course, because he wasn't the prince. And the real prince was out in the world, you know, poor section, about to try and get back his throne.

[59:45]

And at the very end, at the coronation of the new king, the poor boy is just about to be crowned, the real prince comes in, and there's these two boys in front of each other at Westminster Abbey. And, uh, The test to see who's the real prince is, where's the great seal? So the prince, the real prince, directs, he's chavity pose, he points to one of the great lords and says, you, go into my room. And there's a little drawer and it's in there. So this duke or something goes to the room. There's a funny little incident where the Duke listens to this boy dressed in rags, ordering him to bow, and looks at the other little boy with all these robes on, and he carefully bows right in the middle between the two of them. So he's not, you know, he's not, and then the whole crowd, Mark Twain is so skillful, the whole crowd kind of turns a little bit toward this little boy in rags, because he's so authoritative, and he's the one.

[60:47]

The Lord goes, and he comes back and he says, he dies, and this time he's dying more toward the boy on the throne. He said, the field is not there. He's walking around, he's not there. And then the little boy in the throne doesn't really want to be this king at all, so they leave, the old king has come back, so he prompts him, he said, now think hard, I don't want to tell you, because you remember when we were playing together in your room, he tells him, prompts him, and then he remembers, so he stuck it in the arm of a suit of armor, so the lord goes back, he turned up, there he is, and The point of the story is that the apostate-born prince had been using the great thief queen for his own uses. He didn't know what it was. And he said, oh, that's a great deal. I didn't know that's what you were talking about, but I knew what that was. I've been using it for something. They asked him what he'd been using it for. And he sort of just got embarrassed.

[61:48]

He didn't know what to say. He knew that the rightful prince had just been recognized. He said, it's all right. We'll tell them. So he says, well, actually, since I was using Pac-1... So, he had a great deal of anger. He didn't know what it was. He was just cracking walnut, too. So, somehow that image stuck in my mind as, you know, the Buddhist energy toward the body. It's not that there's anything wrong with the body, but that most people are using it to crack walnut. To do something which is rather, you know, childish and silly in comparison to what you might be using it for, which is something quite important or solemn. So I think this really is the basic feeling of this precept, is that the senses themselves are neutral, at least in theory, but in practice, the seductiveness of the sensory world is so great that almost everyone inevitably succumbs to the illusion of fixedness or reality of ourselves in the world.

[63:02]

which the senses in combination provide. And part of what meditation practice provides is an experiential validation of the fact that the sensory world is something constructive. It's mostly put together in the brain, basically. and that it doesn't have a reality independent of our own interests and desires. Now this is a very radical idea for the web. It's just now beginning to come into its own with modern developments in physics and so forth. And still I think most people find it to be a very bizarre idea. that somehow the world that we see and experience is a large part of our own creature. And language, language is a very important part of this creative field.

[64:08]

Language is what helps to leave it all together. Language is the, uh, the connective thread that ties together the senses. I know there's a theater workshop person, one of the exercises he asked people to do is to run around the room and shout out the wrong names for everything. And he asked them how they feel afterwards. And everybody reports a kind of hypersensory awareness that lasts for a while. Because by freeing yourself from the learned thread of linguistic identification, you restore something of the lost freshness of a sensory world which is unmediated by language. Pilatid Buddhism goes further than that, and then unravels that too, to some extent, so that you can see that the boundaries between things are created by your own interest and convenience.

[65:15]

And again, it's not that this constructed world is wrong, but that it is not reality itself. It is a convenient construction which has its uses and which has its limits as well. So, one of the final places which came to in later times and expressed in a passage from the Vimalakirti Sutra is that the nature of greed and delusion is the vana itself. It is to say the fundamental nature, the fundamental reality of our of our that the restricted sensory world is actually the awakened world. Another phrase that comes to mind is, this very earth is the pure land.

[66:27]

We're not in the wrong place. There's nothing wrong with the world we have, except that we are misinterpreted. or using it in the wrong way by practicing all this. So getting back to the specificity of sexual life, I would say Buddhism, in theory, has a neutral, if not neutral, favorable attitude toward marriage and you can have relationships. But in theory, it's rather cautious. I mean, but in practice, it's rather cautious. Because the observable outcome of how people live their life is such that this often turns out to be the biggest problem area of your life.

[67:30]

So that's all I had to say. I agree that you need to to have further discussion about it right now. I don't consider myself the expert on it, but you've all lived your lives, so you have something to do. I think it's true. One of the things you said about the nature of the universe, it's one of the things that I think I can say is that it is real. Well, it's a thing, a facet should be locked here to suture, because the nature, the actual nature, the real nature of the three poisons is nirvana itself, liberation itself. The practical extrapolation of that leads directly into tantric reasons. is that therefore you can find your liberation in those, right in the middle of those phenomena.

[68:45]

Because you don't necessarily find awakened mind by suppressing or avoiding those, but rather by somehow penetrating right through them. Yeah, I've been turning over the question of pre-marital sex and our teenage sex, that it was a problem for the kids. And it seems to me that the problem there would be when are people capable of making that commitment, such that they can't come and talk to their kids. It's such a gray area, but that's what I was trying to avoid it all together. And then it has to come up against that problem. We haven't had teenagers that we've had somehow. I think the real problem is not... I think the real problem is the way our society has developed in the last few years. Physical maturity and social maturity are a big gap.

[70:04]

I think that people marry at a very early age, and they marry into a network of social support, which provides a mature backdrop. So you could have a 14- or 15-year-old couple marry and live in a household where family and start producing children and they all work because you have a two or three generation of that's what many can report and work to you know what to do yeah they're not ready to kick it out and say okay they don't have to go set up the house I had a job, and I did college and all that. It's just another part of the situation. So we've developed an artificial situation which we can't quite deal with. Biological fluctuations have happened.

[71:06]

People programmed in, they've got some other kind of life, and we're doing something else. So, of course, there's a problem. And the... I think there's a problem, the whole problem of what to do with teaching new beings about the age of 12 to 20. You're totally an example. I mean, they... To me, the more I serve it, the more providing it was, I think, was there in the Spanish fantasy world to do that. wander around in, and since we didn't take this seriously, nobody quite figured it out. More than an individual can figure out about chemistry, unless you want a very, you know, all together, high family framework. But society took it. College took it. The world outside college has a real world.

[72:06]

Right. Literally, man. Well, college is a different thing to me. I think when you're a little younger than that, it's the audience. And it's mostly great to kind of avoid it. So I think that the sex side of teenage life can be one of the hardest. I'm saying to me that teenage role can grow well from pre-teenage role. It's largely a matter of the ethics of the children. And this is the result of market force and recognition in cold terms of the female correctness that's the market function of the female correctness. All the magazines deal with deep correct analysis, deal with segments of the market as profit and loss. The major industries in this country rise and fall, including the new computer industry, on the basis of that method.

[73:06]

I think it's thankful having this year's resources and this year's human resources. I happen to be one of those who has looked particularly high and impressed by this treatment of the Illini. And I feel it is a great disservice to this treatment of this treatment. And especially to an Illini that could so remarkably overabundance that could so remarkably openly and openly be marketed and talked to the way it does in most of the marketing and talk to these cultures. And this is the proof to me of the exploitation, and sexuality is only part of the exploitation. So what she's saying, basically, is that teenagers, because they're vulnerable, are a deep victim to the underlying theme of greed that we've learned today. And because they have so limited preparation, it's most easy for them.

[74:13]

And their parents are equally easy for them. Because the parents of that request, they may not be able to help them because they may not be effective. But frequently, parents are not only the target, but also the parents who design the target. The parents who are the martyrs, who are the avid touchers, who are the pallid adulterers, the wicked conquerors. The thing is, I've thought for many years that I sometimes say this, the society at large, living in, you know, in some way, they call it society, it's such an interesting thing to think about, but if the society ever quite figured out how radical Buddhism is, it would shut us down because, you know, the values that Buddhism has to value are not the values of society. And when you bring up some issues like that, it's very clear that... Although I think, please, if you see, do not take the idea that what seems like the most condescending power, one of the first things they do is shut down all the amusement parks, ban all the Western drivers, so on and so on.

[75:36]

You know, I think that it's still a very dualistic, almost Duval-Kirchner kind of... You can't stand that thing out. What you have to be is... Again, this is, I think, the point that I need to make, but we take delusion, or based on something, which is studying every sound, that it would take people to die out of reason. And what you want to do is not somehow crush them or pass the law preventing them, but rather to re-channel this desire in a way in which you can truly satisfy it. And the problem with most things people go for, sex or video games or photography or whatever, is not that they're bad or wrong, it's just that they're just not bad at something, actually. That's why they're addicted, because the satisfaction doesn't last. You have to keep going back. In a way, spiritual life is, you might say, to reach through the veils of all of that and find something in your life which actually does something, and which renders all that other stuff unnecessary because it isn't good.

[76:51]

This is something that I think, to read books about Buddhism, it sounds very puritanical and rigid, but actually, the point, I think, of Buddhism and probably any authentic religion is to give people what they really need. As Sukhira, she said, to give animals to die, she used to praise like that. What people really want the most is transcend the one that you feel kind of limitless sense of well. And if you can have that, I don't think you need a video market. There's no market for distraction in a society where everyone is pretty technical. So the reason there's a market is people who are in fact... So, we have some responsibility to invest in people.

[77:53]

And not to just say it's wrong or bad, but also, how can we give people, the teenagers or whatever, what they really need? Which I think is, for teenagers, they need to be like people. That there's a world in which they're actually part of. And that they can see where they could go, and what they can do to build something. I think that's, to the extent that that's missing and lacking, there's always room for distraction. I think, uh, I just want to tell you, I've had some of the camps that they're in, they're really at the same level. Yeah. And what happened, I think that the cliche had a lot of We got disciples, we got, we used to go, and we got very healthy, and we had to drink, and we were having the sexual energy. The deities just allowed us to get there. We were raised here, and if they didn't have any, They wanted to marry, she cared a lot. From what I saw, all those couples were very happy.

[78:58]

They were cute, dainty people. The year they got married. I think at that time, we could do a lot of charity to occur on that. We couldn't make any special effort to get people up and see what happened. You had the point. Well, it's just one extension of that point. You speak of teenagers finding a place. I think the extension there is that for most people, The place was not good. And I think that a teenager is only affectionate about affection, and the place was not good. Uh, sorry? I think, uh, I think that, uh, probably not, uh, being there and having children actually might be helpful to the kids, uh, to educate them to have a place in the community. Right. Well, I think that, you know, in Den Center, I think that, I don't think it's any accident that people who seek Hiroshi decided to regain were already married.

[80:06]

I think that it meant that they had reached a sufficient level of maturity or growth in their life that they were married and had children. Their life is severed in some way. So I think that in our society, I think the Catholic Church is finding this out by default because so many of the best monastics are leading workers because they feel that they... that family life would fulfill their spiritual task and in a lifetime self-deceive not what they need. I think that not only does it help the individual to have the basic experience of being married, but also It can be a guide if your marriage is working. People can observe how you're doing, and then it can help other people, or encourage people anyway. In fact, we say that in our marriage, we say, your marriage can encourage others.

[81:10]

I think that a marriage that stays together is encouraging other people who are having trouble with their own. I think that would be possible. It's interesting that the parish priest was not required to be celibate for many centuries with the kind of political decision. in some council or other, when the monastic orders had the preponderance of political power, according to Brother David. And I think that the idea that a parish priest, whose mission was to serve the laity, be celibate, it is kind of a silly idea on the basis that they have no experience of that which they're supposed to be advising people on. And I think that it's probably been the protection of the Catholicism that that the leadership, and, you know, it was a surprise to me to discover how late that idea came in. A lot of these things that we think of as written in stone were, I was also told the reincarnation was an acceptable journey for many centuries to decide against God.

[82:24]

So, I think our practical experience at Zen Center is that is that given the society we live in, the type of people we happen to be, that having family can be a very useful thing. It does take a lot more energy, no question about it. If you can have it, if you're young enough, come to the practice, you know, because you could spend some time, three years anyway, just by yourself. That's three. Just finish it off as fast as you can. That's three. That's three. That's it. That's it. Well, I think you'd have to ask people who are involved in the single-seed how satisfying they would become at the end.

[83:57]

I think the Buddhist attitude would be, if there isn't at least a possibility of some kind of relationship, strictly kind of gratification quality. Maybe it's not so satisfying. And also you have the quality of being addicted to go to such a relationship again and again because it doesn't grow. I think part of the undercurrent here is that sexuality does not exist in a vacuum. It's tied to everything else in our life. And it doesn't... It isn't... It's more complete or satisfying when it draws in other aspects of that life. And maybe there will be somebody who, from their own experience, would disagree.

[85:03]

But the experience I've had with various people is that Most people who go quickly from one relationship to the other are pretty lone. It doesn't seem to dispel... If the arrangement the two people have is that it's going to be denied and you're never going to see one another again, there's a lonely quality to that, which grows on you the longer you stay in that kind of path. And... I think if you've got people to be honest with themselves, even people who are doing that are, in the background, hoping that something will click. Find an opportunity. It may be a big social experiment, which is a kind of dialectic or dynamic outcome of a kind of puritanical backlog with experimenting with the reset.

[86:05]

So in that sense, it may be a necessary stage to go to. But I think any trend like that, you just have to watch it until it lasts. If it's really satisfying in a deep sense, it doesn't last. And I think if you examine history, what you find is that such behavior is peripheral. of certain social classes or certain eras, and it's not, you don't find, we've gotten so far, I've studied this history of man with sexuality, you don't find a society or culture which has maintained a stable pattern of kind of casual, promiscuous behavior. It's a kind of cringe behavior that always seems to be there, sometimes a little bit, sometimes a lot, sometimes just the ability, sometimes more the whole society. and maybe with, you know, art deception.

[87:06]

@Transcribed_UNK
@Text_v005
@Score_77.17