Good evening, everyone. Last night I took up the introduction to the precepts. The talk was entitled, The Nature of the Precepts. Tonight I will take up the first grave precept, not killing. We will close this talk with the four vows and then have a short discussion period. In examining the Buddhist precepts, we must be careful not to fall into our conventional

[01:06]

Western attitudes that relate to the Ten Commandments. Not killing is not exactly the same as thou shalt not kill. The latter is the sixth, I believe, fifth or sixth, I have to look that up, of the Ten Commandments which Moses brought down from the mountain and as such it is one on a list. Not killing is not only first on the Buddhist list, it is actually the only precept. And numbers two through ten which follow it are really nine subsections of the one main precept, not harming. The Ten Grave Precepts are negatively framed, but actually they are not to be taken negatively

[02:14]

or positively, but as presentations of the realized mind that uses negative and positive, right and wrong, appropriately and compassionately according to circumstances. The first precept plainly means don't kill, but it also expresses social concern. Let us encourage life and it relates to the mind. There is no thought of killing. We find these three elements in all of the Ten Grave Precepts, the literal, the compassionate and the essential, termed in the Doksana-rama the Hinayana, the Mahayana and the Buddha-nature views.

[03:14]

Hinayana and Mahayana should not be confused in this usage with sectarian or geographical classifications. They refer to attitudes and not necessarily at all to beliefs of people living in Sri Lanka or Japan. The Hinayana view is just that. The extreme limit of such literal interpretation is not Buddhist at all, but the Jain faith whose monks filter all water before drinking it in order to protect the microscopic animals that might otherwise be swallowed. I am not familiar enough with Jain theology to know just how ahimsa, not harming, really works for its followers.

[04:15]

They must assume that a sharp distinction exists between the animal and vegetable worlds. Otherwise, they could not feed themselves. Strict vegetarians too tend to fall into this trap, it seems to me. However, any error would simply be in the degree of strictness. The literal interpretation of the first precept can be very instructive in showing how the bodhisattva makes his or her way in a universe in which every entity is in symbiosis with every other entity. The Mahayana view acknowledges that great fleas have lesser fleas upon their backs to bite them, and the little fleas have lesser fleas and so ad infinitum.

[05:22]

The bodhisattva seeks to give life, to nurture the other as well as the self in keeping with the natural order of things. The Buddha nature view is summed up in the Heart Sutra. There is no old age and death, and also no ending of old age and death. It is important to see into this passage clearly. The first point is that in the world of nirvana, the real world of empty infinity, there is nothing to be called death. From this point of view, Takuan Zenji, whose letter to a samurai I quoted last night, is right. There is no one killing, no killing, and no one to be killed.

[06:30]

The peace of infinite emptiness pervades the whole universe. I discussed the risks of this absolute position when taken exclusively last night in my talk on the nature of the precepts. If there is no sword, no swing of the sword, and no decapitation, then what about all the blood? What about the wails of the widow and children? There is no end to dying, the Heart Sutra also tells us. When the balanced message of the Heart Sutra is internalized, the complementarity of nirvana and the relative world of samsara becomes clear, and the literal and compassionate views

[07:33]

become altogether inseparable from the Buddha nature view. No one view is exclusively true. The Bodhisattva does not take action that violates the spirit of reverence and benevolence at home or in the world. Practicing benevolence and reverence, however, is not as easy as discussing them. I can recall occasions when I sat in the dojo in a turmoil of murderous thoughts and feelings. Maybe some of you have had similar experiences. How can our vows to save all beings include such roughnecks of the mind? In the same way, it encompasses our friends.

[08:39]

It is as though neighbors come to the door when you are doing zazen. Take a moment to acknowledge them. They are closer than neighbors, after all. Be compassionate with yourself. Oh, there you are, you violent thought. With this recognition, you are kanjizai, at ease with yourself because you are no longer blindly responsive to your thoughts and feelings. And that means you are no longer at the mercy of your karma. Then when your boss or somebody else important takes up a role in the old family play that formed your life, you can exclaim, oh, I remember you.

[09:42]

And the pain will be reduced. You will be left to deal with circumstances which might be difficult enough without clouds of childish emotions to confuse them. This bodhisattva practice has its source in zazen, where you discern the power of a single unacknowledged thought, for it carries you away. And you discern the importance of seeing through it. Thoughts and feelings conveyed from our grandparents and beyond disrupt our families and set the stage for continuation of subtle and even overt violence in the future. With awareness, all this can change. I should not have said or done that.

[10:47]

You can say to your spouse or child, and the damage is repaired to some degree, perhaps without a seam if it is caught early enough. Compulsion is weakened by such correction, and next time perhaps the error will be milder. This too is bodhisattva practice. Complete freedom and complete compassion are the same in the Buddha mind. But, I dare say, even Chakyamuni had to work at it. Don't scorn psychological help in initiating this process. There are collective thoughts and feelings too, national compulsions. These days we are pressed to come up with rationalizations that do violence to all three

[11:54]

views of not killing. Distinguished social philosophers labor to define the just war. Entire countries, entire cultures are killed for so-called pragmatic reasons, which we cannot deny without destroying basic assumptions, such as the nation state. We are shown statistics of war and peace down through the ages, and with a sigh we are obliged to agree that the Western world, at any rate, has made far more war than peace. For the Buddhist, however, it is not possible to move from the integrated position set forth in the first precept. Just because historical statistics show lots of war, it does not follow that behind history

[12:54]

there is an imperative to wage war. Indeed, the imperative is survival and self-realization. The perversion of self-realization into self-aggrandizement directs the course of our lives to violence. The fundamental fact of survival is that I cannot survive unless you do. My self-realization is your self-realization. The concept of the nation state is the root of violence and killing in international affairs, just as the concept of the self as a separate entity is the root of hatred in small groups. We have reached a place in international affairs and in local affairs, too, where it is altogether absurd to insist, as some of my Buddhist friends still do, that the truly religious person

[14:01]

does not get involved in politics. What is politics? What is political? Is torture political? No. As a matter of fact, the denial of politics in religious life is itself a political statement. The time when politics meant taking a position of allegiance to one government faction or another has long passed. Politics in our day of nuclear overkill is a matter of ignoring the first precept or acting upon it. Acting upon the first precept is also the spirit of not harming applied in the natural world.

[15:02]

The same poisons that set us apart in families, communities, and across national boundaries—greed, hatred, and ignorance—blight the grasslands, deplete the soil, clear-cut the forests, and add lethal chemicals to water and air. In the name of progress, some say. In the name of greed, it might be more accurately said. We are killing our world, the web of life and death that realizes Buddha nature in many forms, evolving to what Mahayana Buddhists call the enlightenment of plants and trees. Animals and plants are archetypes that nurture our process of maturing as children and populate

[16:11]

our dreams as adults. We are figures in that dream time, too—nightmare figures for wolves and most other wild creatures. We torture animals in our laboratories under the arrogant assumption that medicine is just for human beings. And we divert the grand possibilities of essential nature into sordid feedlots, reducing animals to machines and degrading their human keepers. The dream time is impoverished and miserable. I do not hold to the perfectionist position that before one can work for the protection of animals, forests, and family farms, or for world peace, one must be completely realized,

[17:15]

compassionate, and peaceful. There is no end to the process of perfection, and so the perfectionist cannot even begin bodhisattva work. Compassion and peace are a practice on our cushions in the dojo, within the family, on the job, and at political forums. Do your best with what you have, and you will mature in the process. There are many personal tests of this practice, from dealing with insects and mice to questions about capital punishment. Perhaps the most intimate and agonizing test is faced by the woman considering abortion. Oversimplified positions of pro-life and pro-choice do not touch the depths of her dilemma.

[18:22]

Usually, she experiences distressing conflict between her sexual reproductive drive and the realities of her life, social, economic, personal, and indeed she faces such realities for any child she may bring to term. I have known women who said they were not upset at having an abortion, but I would guess that they were out of touch with themselves at that particular time. Perhaps distress shows up in their dreams. Surely self-awareness is never more important. Listening to women in the Diamond Sangha share their experience, their experiences, I gain the impression that when a woman is open to her feelings, she is conscious that abortion

[19:26]

is killing a part of herself and terminating the ancient process begun anew within herself of bringing life into being. Thus she is likely to feel acutely miserable after making a decision to have an abortion. This is a time for compassion for the woman and for her to be compassionate with herself and for her unborn child. If I am consulted and I learn that the decision is definite, I encourage her to go through the act with the consciousness of a mother who holds her child in her arms after an accident, lovingly nurturing it as it passes from life. Sorrow and suffering form the nature of samsara, the flow of life and death, and the decision

[20:29]

to prevent birth is made on balance with other elements of suffering. Once the decision is made, there is no blame, but rather acknowledgement that sadness pervades the whole universe and this bit of life goes with our deepest love. In Japanese Buddhism, there is a funeral service for the mizuko, water baby, the poetical term for fetus. Like any other human being that passes into the one, it is given a posthumous Buddhist name and is thus identified as an individual person, however incomplete, to whom we can say farewell. With this ceremony, the woman is in touch with life and death as they pass through her

[21:30]

existence and she finds that such basic changes are relative waves on the great ocean of true nature, which is not born and does not pass away. Bodhidharma said, self-nature is subtle and mysterious. In the realm of the everlasting dharma, not giving rise to concepts of killing is called the precept of not killing. Self-nature can be understood to be a synonym for essential nature or Buddha nature. And there is a reason for having that particular term. The self portion, pronounced ji in Sino-Japanese, is the ji of kan-ji-zai, the one who perceives

[22:32]

the self at rest. Kan-ji-zai, as you or me, has no thought of killing. The self at rest is essential nature as we experience it and so we call it self-nature. It is subtle and mysterious. Concepts is literally views in the original. Opinion might be another translation. Not giving rise to is literally not giving birth to. No concept of killing is born, in other words. Bodhidharma takes the essential position and is not referring to means. The practice of peace and harmony is peace and harmony, not some technique designed to

[23:40]

induce them. In the family, this is a matter of listening to spouse and children and gaining a sense of how it is for them. Male and female tend to have different perspectives and children and adults live in different worlds Without falling into a kind of pernicious equality in which all views are equally valid, you can play with views and see what happens. If I am anxious to protect myself, then I will kill your views. If I practice giving life, then I will offer you the scope you need. Even deeply held convictions can melt in the dynamics of give and take where male and female,

[24:46]

adult and child, friend and friend, hold dialogue in the spirit of trust. Easier said than done, to be sure, but the alternatives are brutish. Dialogue is the Tao. In Zen Buddhism, this is the mondo. Questions and answers between teacher and student, or student and student, striking sparks that neither could create alone. With no thought of killing, our cause is peaceful and harmonious. Down through the decades of peace and environmental work in this century, from Satyagraha to the

[25:47]

movement for a new society, we find leaders holding fast to peace as peace itself. They turn the wheel of the Dharma of peace using means that are themselves expressive and instructive. When we convey the truth in this way to people who hold concepts of violence, then compassion is not compromised. Speaking truth to power, the ideal of the society of friends, is nonviolent and inclusive. So, I want to tell you the story that I almost told you last night, and that is about a peace organization that made arrangements to hold a dialogue with a military officer with broad

[26:48]

responsibility and authority. I don't know why he agreed to meet with them, and I didn't hear the reason. I didn't hear the outcome of the meeting. I only heard about discussions in the organization before the meeting took place. The delegation had to decide what to say. And so they role-played several scenarios, and none of them seemed satisfactory. And so they finally decided to give up their role-playing and just go, and that their first words would be, how's it going? In other words, with your truly awful power, with nuclear war a possible outcome of something you might decide to do in an emergency, how are you bearing up?

[27:53]

When we speak from the same side of the counter in this way, then we are human beings together, and the we-they dichotomy falls away, and peace has a chance. This peace is not the vacuum of a sensory deprivation chamber, or the harmony created by authority. It is the peace of the self-forgotten doing the work of the world. Dogenzenji said, the Buddha seed grows in accordance with not taking life. Transmit the life of Buddha's wisdom and do not kill. Dogenzenji is a kindly grandmother, petting us and giving us encouragement.

[28:56]

With the practice of not killing, he is saying, you will become the Buddha and transmit his wisdom. We can only be grateful for his guidance on the true path. Bodhidharma takes an absolute position of unrelenting purity, and Dogenzenji offers a step-by-step way of practice. When I bought the Bodhidharma figure that presides at the Kokoan Zendo, his brother Dogen was also for sale in the same bookstore window in Tokyo. I bought only one half of the pair. Somewhere, the teacher of the path is leading another group of friends, perhaps. It is my responsibility and yours to evoke Dogenzenji in our hearts, to practice giving

[30:01]

life, inspired by Bodhidharma's great example and succinct expression of truth. Peace in manner, peace in words, peace in speaking truth to the power of greed and cruelty in the world, all have their source in the peace of Zazen. I have a feeling from your talk that you and I, it was communicated to me that the practice of the precepts is quite central to our practice of Zen.

[31:02]

I wonder why it is that there is so little that can be studied directly or explicitly about the precepts. Were you here last night? Oh, I took this up a little bit last night, but to review, it's an important question and deserves some more discussion. The precepts appear at the very end of formal study, both in Soto and Rinzai traditions. And part of the reason for this is that they come down to us as koans. With the stress upon the Buddha nature view, there is no thought of killing. And the feeling is that if this is introduced too soon in the practice of the Zen student,

[32:07]

then there will be a lot of misunderstanding, that there will be an antinomian reaction, the idea that I can do as I please since I'm enlightened. And that is one factor, I think. Another factor is that the precepts were ritualized as the central element of ordination and became so intimately associated with ordination that it's kind of hard for me to put this into words, but the impression I get is that precepts equal ordination, ordination equal precepts. And that's what they are.

[33:11]

If you want to be a priest, then you take the precepts. And then you've taken them, okay, now you're a priest. There's a man named Paul Groener who wrote a book called Saicho and the Bodhisattva Precepts as his doctoral thesis for Yale in 1979. And he makes the point that in the Far East, they didn't take the precepts that seriously. And when we think about this, we think, yeah, that's true. In the book Monsui, for example, you know that book published by the University of Hawaii Press with the cartoons about monastery life and little captions. One of the pictures shows the monk going over the fence at night.

[34:17]

Where is he going? He's going to the whorehouse, you know. And so much a part of the monk's life that there it is in the book about the Monsui. So you get the feeling that in Japan, anyway, the attitude has been the precepts, yeah, yeah. And the original life is sort of diffused. They're taken seriously as koans. You realize what they are as koans. But because, as I may have mentioned last night, Japan and China and Korea permitted Buddhism on sufferance to come in. So Buddhism was a guest religion in the Far East.

[35:21]

And they protected the dharma with their monastery walls. And they knew very well that they could not extend their vow to save all beings much beyond the monastery walls if they started complaining to the lord of the province as Hakuin dared to do once. And I think Dogen Zenji also had something to say about this, about the poverty of the peasants and the poor life that the fishermen and the farmers had. They'd get clobbered. They'd lose their lands and so on. And that extends down to the present times, to the present century. The monks who were affected by Western thinking on the subject of labor organization and involved themselves in the Tokyo streetcar strike in 1909 were punished and imprisoned. And a man who dared to question the divinity of the emperor,

[36:26]

I think he was a Soto priest, was beheaded, if you please. So you don't step out beyond those monastery walls. So how can they take these precepts and vows in any way except as a kind of professional ceremony? I'm oversimplifying. But I think that all this relates to the fact that they aren't very deeply discussed, as you say. And so it behooves us to put them back in their rightful place. Yes? Because we were talking about last time, and it relates to right now, too. You were talking about how Mahayana is a middle way between perfectionism and self-indulgence.

[37:36]

And you kind of described hedonism or self-indulgence as regarding yourself as not being able to be censored by self, or internally or externally. And I'm wondering, like, the middle path, what part censorship from others and from the self plays in the morality? Yes, yes. That's important. Certainly, the basis for the Sixteen Bodhisattva Precepts is the fact that I nurture all beings and all beings nurture me, that, indeed, I contain all beings, all beings contain me. And this is true for all other beings. So that I am not a law unto myself in any respect.

[38:47]

And the fact that I am responsible to others and others are responsible to me is a kind of unspoken morality built into the universe. All creatures follow this law. I have an essay in the new book called, The Mind of Clover, in which I try to show that clover follows this law. You know, it dies and its nitrogen nourishes all the other plants. All beings follow this law. Yes. Yes.

[39:59]

Yes. Yes. Yes. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yes. Yes. That is the ongoing challenge, isn't it? Yes. What does one do, you know, when seeing brutality? Could I read something from the book? Sorry. I want to read you a little passage from an essay that I won't be doing,

[41:07]

won't be reading in this series. Thank you. Mm-hmm. This is from the ninth precept on anger. And maybe you know the story because it's one that R.H. Blythe cites in his Zen and English literature. When Robert Louis Stevenson saw a dog being mistreated, he at once interposed. And when the owner resented his interference and told him,

[42:11]

it's not your dog, he cried out, it's God's dog and I'm here to protect it. So it is, I think, always possible to intervene appropriately if you yourself are in a safe, secure place, comfortable place. That's easier said than done, always, you know, but what are we about unless we are convinced that all beings are the Buddha, you see? And so there must be some way to work with even the most violent criminals. If only to let them be, you know, to protect them from getting into any more trouble

[43:20]

and to not respond violently to them. To be firm, certainly. But one of my students is a counselor working with inmates who have drug abuse problems. And he just says, there's nobody who can't be saved. And that's the spirit with which he goes into the halfway house where he's working with these people. It's painful. Thich Nhat Hanh talked about this pain of 40,000 children dying of malnutrition every day. You can believe those statistics, an incredible number. When one is open and sensitive, one feels this pain. Somehow one has to maintain and, yes?

[44:28]

Is there a way when you're like, for instance, like when you're someone that, like, I think they've hurt me, or done something that I feel will hurt someone, and I can tell that when I'm with a person that I close, my heart closes, yet it's like having, you know, maybe it's just a mental block, to be able to still hear them with your heart and have them open, because it doesn't seem to be either one of us good to have the heart closed. No. And yet, not be foolish. That's right, that's right. There is such a thing as spiritual prostitution, you know, where you are nicey-nice to everybody, no matter what they do or say. Yeah, that's what you mean by foolish, isn't it? Yes, exactly. Yes, so how to do that, that is the question. And it takes practice. Yeah. It means that you put yourself out, and sometimes you get clobbered.

[45:29]

Yes. You were talking about intervention in politics, and I was wondering, in America, like in most western countries, especially the Buddhist people, who are mostly a very, very tiny minority, how does one go about the public affairs or the intervention in politics with a little bit of a hope of efficiency? You see, the point is that you don't go into such matters with the hope of being effective. You see, you go into such affairs to speak the truth. Let the chips fall where they may. Whatever happens will happen. In the most skillful way that you can, in the most instructive way that you can,

[46:39]

to speak the truth. The Gandhi's salt march is the thing that comes to mind, you know. He meditated a long time, those of you who saw the movie know that he meditated a long time before he set out on that salt march. And what the movie didn't show was that the Congress Party was meeting and dithering, saying, what is Gandhiji going to do, you know, they were waiting for him to do something. And for months he was just meditating, praying, and talking quietly with his old friends, determining what to do, what is the most skillful way to present the truth. And that's what satyagraha means, see, holding the truth.

[47:44]

It doesn't mean independence from England or anything like that, you see. It's not considering goals, but considering the means that is itself the end. The means that will be the presentation of the truth. The story I've told many times, and perhaps I've told it in this room, comes to mind of the time I was taking part in a demonstration in Bangor, Washington, against the Trident nuclear submarine. There were 4,000 of us. And about 350 from that group went over the fence and occupied the base.

[48:46]

And most of the people were chanting and yelling and waving their banners and things. But one affinity group went over the fence with a tent. And there on the grassy knoll, while they were waiting for the bus to take them off to jail, you see, they put up this little pup tent. And they put up their banner and it said, Bangor National Park. In other words, we are declaring this place freed, right now, from militarism. This is right now the habitat of animals and people who love nature. Right here, right now, not in the future. That was the message that I got from that banner and that tent.

[49:51]

It didn't last long, but it was a good one. Do you see my point? The Minnesota group initiated a sit-in at the UN during the special session last June. And they just sat there and did zazen. I guess you saw. No, who was it, son? Yeah, yeah. With a little sign. Sitting as peace, or something to that effect. Any other questions? Yes. Could you talk about how long Nansen was in jail? That's an important one.

[50:54]

Yasutani Roshi used to say, and I've seen other Roshis give teisho on this case, who say the same thing. That when Nansen struck at the cat, he mimed the action. And released the cat. And the reason that this makes sense is that the response in the doxan room is a mime, always. It may involve words, but it is a mime. It is a little play. Just as Marcel Marceau is the butterfly catcher, is the prisoner with the walls closing in, is the kite flyer, without any visual aids. So you mime the koan.

[52:03]

And I'm sure that, in fact, in the Hekigan, there's the story of a monk actually miming an older teacher doing a dance. I think it's about case 85 or so. So we know that that miming goes way back in Zen history. So that's one aspect. Another aspect is that this very, very drastic action is taken to cut through the place where the monks are stuck. In their argument. You know, the story is that Nansen came upon... Nansen was out doing samu in the garden.

[53:06]

And he came upon monks arguing about a cat. Monks from the Eastern and Western halls. Don't know what the argument was. Probably, has the cat Buddha nature or something like that. So he grasped the cat and said, If any of you can say an appropriate word, I will spare this cat. Nobody said anything. He decapitated the cat. It's not a good story if we say he mimed decapitating the cat. You have to go all the way, so to speak. And there are two important koans that hinge on this action. One on this action and then one on the action that Joshu took following,

[54:10]

where he put the sandal on his head and stalked out. And Nansen said, If you had been there, the cat would have been spared. I take up this koan in the discussion on anger and make the point that Nansen showed an angry face. The precept says no indulgence in anger. So he wasn't indulging in anger. His act was a teaching. You must break through this relative place of arguing this or that about the cat. Can you break through? He challenged him. No. I'll show you how to break through. So the koan is, What is the central act of this koan, of this case?

[55:18]

I said yesterday that probably there is no precept that cannot be broken at some appropriate time. I'll tell you another story. This is a story that's typically Rinzai. A teacher in Japan told his monks that everybody who hadn't had a realization experience was going to have to have it this time, this session, or he was going to lose his life. He would be buried alive and he dug a deep hole in the monastery compound.

[56:30]

And so there were about 12 of them that hadn't had any realization experience and they sat and they sweated and about the third day one or two of them got it and about the fourth day another two or three and finally ended up with only one guy. So he didn't get it at all and the session ended. There was a closing ceremony and so they they escorted this guy out, big hole in the ground and two burly monks grasped him one by the heels and one by the hands and they swung him one, two, three, and he tossed him up in the air and he said, I got it, I got it, I got it. So rather drastic characters in our heritage.

[57:34]

I don't recommend that we go around killing cats for our instruction. It's an upaya that was done once. Lots of people have trouble with this koan but lots of people have trouble with other forms of killing too. Mm-hmm. On balance, Nansen was a very compassionate teacher, I think. Did I speak to your question pretty well? Uh-huh, uh-huh. Do you know some of the mind experience?

[58:35]

Mind experience, yes. I mean, I thought a koan was a historical event. A koan is a matter to be made clear. That's the definition of a koan. See, koan refers to the absolute and relative, the emptiness and form, the essential world and the karmic world as one. That's the essential meaning of the word koan. And so we see that in this way, in this way, in that way, in that way, many, many different facets to this essential fact brought out in the Heart Sutra, form is emptiness, emptiness is form. That's what the koan does, gives us, in the case of the Harada Sutra,

[59:43]

Harada Yasatani line, 550 facets to those two lines in the Heart Sutra. So everything from Gutei's finger to Nansen's killing the cat brings out one side or another side of the middle way, we might say. So koans as history are useless. It's all, all cerebral, all mental. Unless the koan is experienced in the gut and then presented, it has no use, no use at all. Just like when you internalize the precept of not killing, how do you deal with cockroaches? How do you deal with mice, you know?

[60:45]

You're presented with this living koan every day. And incidentally, about that case of, you know, the case of Nansen killing the cat ends with Joshu, who was at that time still a student of Nansen, coming back from town. And Nansen told him about it. Joshu put his sandals on his head and walked out. We know that in the Chinese, according to Chinese custom, when you put your sandals on your head, you're grieving. So that is the surface meaning of that part of the koan. So there was acknowledgement at the time, you know, sadness about this event.

[61:49]

That is not the deepest point that Joshu was making, but he made it through that gesture of grief. Yes? I guess one thing that has occurred to me is just to stop looking and leave that space. But then I know that someone else will move in there, and they'll have to kill me. So I wonder, what kind of gesture is that?

[62:59]

It depends, you know. So it could be a teaching gesture. If indeed the bakery cannot be rodent-proofed, do you suspect it cannot be? Well, you could, a lot of money. Close off all the apertures. It's an incredible place. Spent a lot of money, quite a few thousand dollars. So then it could go one step further. So we get them all out of the bakery, and they run next door to do something to eat, and everybody kills them all there. To me, it's almost the same scenario as going out of the bakery and leaving somebody there. Yes, yes. Yes.

[64:01]

Great fleas have lesser fleas upon their back to bite them. Yes, yes, yes. I don't think there's any easy answer. If a Zen center cannot afford to spend all that money to tile the inside, then something else has to be done, you know. You either have to set traps, or you have to step out. And which you do, you know, depends upon you, really. And there's no judgment involved. What is the true teaching? You know, this is what you have to have to decide. And in one way, the true teaching is, I don't want to to infect my fellow beings with the diseases that the mice carry. On Maui now, there are cases of plague.

[65:07]

Can you believe it? Plague, which are carried by rats. And the rats are in the cane fields, and the pineapple fields, and almost beyond control. And they put out poison for the rats, and then the owls all die, you know. It's a dilemma. I wish I had some fancy answers to this kind of question. I don't. Yes. Ikenroshi, the political question that grabs me is the one you touched on in your test show was about torture. And I find it much more compelling than, it's just personal, but I find it much more compelling than the nuclear question, because the nuclear question is, for the most part, a future event,

[66:09]

and looks fast, except for the people who survive it. And then what they undergo, I think we could commonly call torture. But torture is happening right now, every day. And there are people who perform torture on other people, and they're trained to do that. And it's something that I almost can't get my mind around. I can't quite figure it out how it happens, or what's all involved. And I try to educate myself, and I end up feeling sick about it. And I certainly don't really know how to speak about it, how to think effectively about it. I join the organizations that fight it, and I give what I can. But it's really a profoundly disturbing thing to me that it can exist. And it seems to have always existed in almost all cultures that I can see.

[67:11]

Chinese, Japanese, India, all the countries that Buddhism has certainly been in. Just hoping for a jewel or two. What do you think about it? Well, I too am a member of Amnesty International, and I write my little postcards diligently. And I am a great believer in that organization, and I think they're doing wonderful work. I also dutifully write postcards to my Congress people about support of regimes that have torture as a part of their legal system. I'm also a tax refuser.

[68:15]

Would you clarify that? Yeah. Up until this year, my wife and I have declined to pay the portion of the taxes that we consider to be the percentage that it goes to war. And, you know, in light of your question, how effective is this? It's not effective at all. So we're going to step it up. Next year, we're not going to pay any. What we do is send in a little letter saying, sorry, but we don't like what you're doing, in effect, and so we're not going to support it. The whole system is so rotten. What is our president saying, if you please?

[69:18]

Getting rich is what America is about. I'm quoting him, you see. Well, that way lies fascism, really. That way lies fascism, because we can't all get rich. And so the rich are going to get richer and put down the rest of us. So it's all wrong. So I don't want any part of it. But you don't have to pay taxes, probably. You're not earning that. Maybe. But anyway, somehow, we have to take a stand, somehow, and make it personal. One more question. Yes. When I'm thinking about what David just said about torture,

[70:26]

how important it is for me to understand the capacity I have to torture. I only have to remember my little brothers and sisters. Yes. They're named. No, she's named. Indeed. Indeed. I wonder how you look at that, or how you seem to go home, at Paso Haram, and remembering poems of his poems, of his true names. I felt that he was resting in the center of the world of suffering. And I don't know the beginning and answer to my question. It's just that I have to keep remembering that I am, in fact, that I have to live. Yes.

[71:39]

And notice little responses that you get when you read things in a newspaper, or see things on the television, you know. Little starts of pleasure that rise, and then we quickly put down over some very terrible things. It's not happening to me, or something like that, you know. That protection, feeling that, well, at least I'm safe, is a kind of condoning of the killing of others. Yes. That's very important. This crossed my mind, you know, when you were talking about torture.

[72:41]

We have it in us. And because we have it in us, then very clever people, for their own ends, find ways to draw that out. Okay. Tomorrow, no stealing. Thank you very much.

[73:14]

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