I vow to chase a trip to the Titan's Roots. I've been thinking about the words to an old song on the last couple of weeks. It was written by George M. Cohan. I don't know how many people here have ever heard of him.

[01:01]

Has anyone heard of him? Oh, good. My grandmother, my mother's mother, the Irish side of my family, had a collection of his records. She had one of those old wind-up Victrolas. When I'd go to visit, she'd let me play with the records. She'd say, don't break them. Lately, I was thinking of this one song. I don't even know the name of it, but I know the beginning of it goes, Life is a funny proposition after all. We're born, we live a bit, and then we die. I don't know what the rest of the song is. I'll always remember that. I guess maybe I've been thinking of it because I'm trying to prepare for this tonight talk.

[02:11]

Last week, Red mentioned, Red's in Tassajar. Hi, Red. He's tuning the tuner. He's listening. But last week, he mentioned the turtle moving towards fire. He explained a little bit, what he brought up, from that Buddhist saying about how difficult it is to practice Buddhism, or how difficult it is to be born a human in order to be able to practice Buddhism. I guess some schools think that only humans can be Buddhist. But it's about the odds of the same for being born human as it is for this turtle, who's blind or has an eye down here to find that log in the middle of the ocean that has a hole in it, and then put his belly-eye up to it to see the sun.

[03:20]

So we're very lucky to be born human, and we can practice Buddhism. This Georgian Kohan, we live a bit. It really is a bit. Even if it's 80 years, that's not very long. Some people only live 30. Well, I was born 54 years ago. I'm not very far from here. My parents were living on Julian Avenue, which is over by the Roxy Theater. Probably many of you have been to the Roxy Theater. Forty years later, I was knocking on the door over here.

[04:28]

I'd heard about Suzuki Roshi's book. I came over to buy it. I think it was, I think Yvonne opened the door. It was Saturday morning. And she said, well, the bookstore isn't open. We're just about to have Zazen instruction. Would you like to spend your time having Zazen instruction? Then the bookstore will be open. I really came over to buy the book. I saw some people in black wandering around. There was a single file down there. I went down to the Zen building. That's where they had it. Mel was giving Zazen instruction. It was pretty good. At that time, I wasn't unfamiliar with meditation. I was going out to the San Francisco Ashram on Fulton Street.

[05:36]

It's still there. Dr. Chowdhury was the teacher there. He taught a lot of Sri Aurobindo thought. The meditation we did there was in chairs for about ten minutes. Zazen here. But I thought, well, I like the way Mel was talking. I don't know what happened after that. I think after that, there was a lecture. It was Suzuki Roshi. I think he had just come back from Japan. Anyway, I was taken by the Zazen instruction. Someone said, will you go upstairs? There was a lecture. I came in here. This man comes in. I wrote the book. Right away, I felt something. Suddenly, I saw him. He teaches this Zazen. Mel. The next morning, I think we had Zazen on Sunday morning.

[06:38]

Anyway, I was back. I went home and practiced trying to cross my legs. I did a Zango. I kept trying that. I couldn't hold still for more than five minutes. I kept coming. That was the time that Suzuki Roshi was becoming ill or was ill. So he stayed here. He was in the Zango, it seemed like, every morning. I went in. Here he'd be. He always seemed to be there early. I'd get there at ten to five, he'd be there. I'd try at four to five, he'd be there. I was trying to beat him to the Zango, but he was there. That's when we sat on the floor, but there was a tom at the end.

[07:45]

I guess that would be the west end of the Zango. I never got to meet him, I mean talk to him. He started bowing in the hallway, but that year I felt that he taught me a lot. I was studying Tai Chi at that time. I told my teacher, my teacher was named Fong Ha. He was kind of a seeker like me too. We were trying a lot of things. But I told him what was going on over here. So he came over to Zazen Instruction with me. I used to go to Zazen Instruction every Saturday. I did that for about a month, a month and a half. I figured, well, maybe I can learn something more.

[08:45]

So I got to have Zazen Instruction with Bill Kwan and Reb. Anyway, Fong liked what was happening here. So we would meet, we'd go to first period. And then we would do Kin Hin. We liked Kin Hin because Kin Hin reminded us of Tai Chi. It was kind of that meditation movement. And then we would leave after Kin Hin. So everybody's coming in, and we were always going out. I don't know if anybody was here then to think about what the heck we were doing. Why we stayed for Kin Hin and then leave second period. But we went to my house up there. I lived on Waller Street at that time. And we'd go do Tai Chi up there. And then have breakfast, talk about whatever. I was thinking about what to say tonight.

[10:02]

I thought about that knocking on the door. And I tried to think back over my life of when did I take that first step to come over here. It's the last week or so I'm like reviewing my life. They say that a drowning person has a new life. At least they have an oldest, I think so. I really don't know. I was brought up Catholic. Catholic nuns, French Catholic nuns. In a school out in the Bayview district. Down in Camelton Park.

[11:08]

It was called St. Joan of Arc. And there was some period there that I became very, I don't know what you'd call it, devout. I was an altar boy. I'd go to Mass every morning hoping that the scheduled person wouldn't show up. So when the priest would ask me to come and serve him. But finally he never showed up because he knew I was going to be sitting there. So that made them think that I wanted to enter the seminary. They were kind of making hints. I might may have. But a friend of mine bought a trumpet. I don't know. So I, my father said, I want a trumpet. And he said, trumpets are too loud, I'll buy you a saxophone. Found out later because he wanted to play the saxophone.

[12:11]

So I gradually became interested in music. Saxophone. And I started being good enough to play in a teenage band. And I wasn't getting up in the morning and going to Mass anymore. Because I'd be up late playing music. And in fact I stopped going to church altogether. And music became part of my life, the main part of my life. I had no interest except music. Which wasn't classical, I mean a dance band, jazz. So that took my life up until... Maybe it saved my life. Because I was in the Marine Corps during the Korean War as a band.

[13:18]

And I never left California. We used to go down, I was at Camp Pendleton. And the band would go down to San Diego, to the docks. And we'd play the Marine Corps hymn for these young Marines who were going over to Korea. We'd go down maybe once a month. They were called replacement drafts, they were going over to show us spaces that were made. And then they started coming back, we were playing for them coming back. And a friend of mine who I played off, he's coming back. I didn't know him, I'm standing in the dark with my clarinet. His voice yells from the ship, he says, Gerudo, you SOB, you were here when I left and you're still here when I come back.

[14:22]

I'm glad he got back alright. So I met my wife Barbara while I was in the Marine Corps. And I got out, we came back here and I started going to San Francisco State. I think it was there that maybe something happened towards getting me over here. It was a humanities class and the teacher recommended a biography of Mahatma Gandhi. And something happened to me reading that. This was during the 50s, a lot of things were happening in town here, creative things.

[15:31]

And then old Alan Watts appeared. Some of the people I hung out with were starting to talk about Sandy. Sandy, what had he been talking about? Far out. Alan Watts had a program on KPFA on Sunday nights at that time. Every Sunday night at 10 o'clock, Barbara and I would lie in bed and listen to Alan Watts. Wow, he's far out. But he was teaching us something. And then, see, I was wondering more about what's this Buddhism. Because Alan Watts never mentioned Sahaja. And Nick Barber bought a book, Christopher Humphrey's Buddhism, probably still around.

[16:34]

And he never mentioned Sahaja. But it was interesting to read him when I was liberated. And then D.T. Suzuki. But all of this was, it wasn't, we weren't trying to practice, it was more of an intellectual pot and wine. Suzuki, talk about him. There was something Alan Watts mentioned about going with it, going with the flow. He's like a man, when you're riding a bicycle and you start to fall, you have to go into the fall in order to start out. And I said, oh, that's great. And so I started to start falling. So I kept falling for several years.

[17:38]

Didn't land on the bottom, but I didn't fall up either. I think I dropped out. I had some money saved. That was the time all this drug culture was coming out on LSD. I bought a little camping trailer. A car I still have, which some of you know. It was black then, now it's orange. And we took our son out of school and just traveled around for a year. We settled down in San Diego County, northern San Diego County, near Europe, Canada, Mexico. We were just wondering what was going on.

[18:43]

Somehow I got across a book on Hatha Yoga. I forget his name, but he's still around. He's the teacher that flies around in an airplane. It's all painted different colors and everything, but everybody knows his name. He's from Canada, actually. He's based in Canada. And so I was doing, I was on a health kit. I used to do it, but I was very tan, bleached hair, white hair. So I decided I wanted to get a little healthy. And I started doing it. We had photographs of the book when I was doing the asanas. And something happened and it was something unusual. I was very relaxed. I didn't quite ever have that feeling. I still have those books, Christmas Humphreys and Fallen Blossoms.

[19:57]

I had a look at them once in a while. And then we came back to San Francisco. It was 1968. And I'm still kind of searching. There's something. Maybe I'm still falling, but there's something. I don't know what it is, but I want to find it. I saw an ad or a poster. I bought the E-chain. I had that. I used to throw the coin. There was a class being given the E-chain. The E-chain.

[20:58]

And at the end of what was the old American Academy of Asian Studies, that had already been broken up, but there were still a few classes left. They were right over here on DuBose and Fillmore. The building that's now a Baptist church. And this class was being taught by an old Chinese gentleman named G.C. Chow. Delano's Chow. He was called Dr. Chow or Mr. Chow. He was an interesting man. And then they were teaching, offering courses in the Bhagavad Gita. And that was the chant, Bhagavad Gita in Sanskrit. And I started going to the California Institute of Asian Studies. And took the class in the Lotus Sutra.

[22:06]

And I was going to the ashram on Sundays. I started going to the ashram because they still have an ad in the paper. Saturday religious section. But they were celebrating Gandhi's birthday. And Benny Bufano was going to give a talk. Barbara had been trying to get him to go out there. It's not too much of a religious church. But Benny Bufano and Gandhi combined. I couldn't resist that. I think you all know Benny Bufano. There's a little sense of his culture. Many things around town here. But it turned out he had been on the salt march. The march to the sea that Gandhi did. The British wouldn't let the people make their own salt. They had to pay tax. So anyway, Benny talked about that.

[23:13]

Benny was a short guy. Talked kind of like a cab driver. When he got up to talk he said, Well, I went over there. There was all these people. Gandhi was there. We walked to the sea. Everybody was waiting. But what I'm trying to get at is that I was going in many directions. I even was going to Alameda on Sundays to a place called the Home of Truth. Which was a Christian, but a different kind of Christianity. Kind of what you might say came out of if Emerson had formed a church. Not exactly like the Unitarian Church. But anyway, I was very fascinated with the preacher or the minister who sounded very much like Dr. Chaudhary would sound.

[24:22]

There was a lot of East-West in his sermon. I don't know if I found the step yet. It doesn't matter if it's one of the many steps. It was at the American Academy on their bulletin board that I saw what you call an advertisement for Yoshi's book. It was an excerpt. I remember something about our practice or Zazen. It was like a steel rail riding on a single steel rail going off into the horizon. That brought me over here. In fact, that morning

[25:24]

I was over on the motel over in the Marina District buying a mantra from an Indian teacher. When I left there I thought, I'm going to go buy the book on the way home. I think about this Hindu teacher who sold me the mantra. He would go into this very small motel room and his assistant was in the room and there was no the guru wasn't there. There were about three of us. We had been in a talk by the assistant the night before and he told anyone who was interested to bring a $10 bill and a whole piece of fruit and a flower. And

[26:28]

so we go in the room and he's talking to us and I'm still wondering the teacher's room is really small. And he tells us, he gives us, the assistant gives us the mantra. And he takes a $10 bill and says, now you go in the other room and get the flower and the fruit. So there's a door and open the door and it's the bathroom. And there's this very old yogi sitting there. He looks very old. I mean he was. And so I have my cat on the floor. I sit down and there's the apple. There's a lot of apples and flowers. And I look and he comes over and he says, hey, get up and leave. He thought I better go and get the book.

[27:30]

I'm not making fun of this man. I believe he was real. He didn't have much money. Maybe he had to be sweet. So I kept sitting every day. No touching. I don't think I spoke to anybody here for maybe a year. I don't know. Took me a while to get used to service. I guess that's not unusual, a lot of people. But I still have this sort of anti-religious feeling. Something. Criminal.

[28:39]

And after, I don't know how many, a couple of years, well, of course a few years he died. And I felt sad that I never spoke to him. I don't feel sad anymore. We were speaking to someone. And then mysticism, he said, would be sensitive about it offering G-classes. And I felt drawn to that. I didn't know why. Well, I do know why. I used to go to Japan town a lot before I came here and look around. I was always interested in Japanese things. And there was a place

[29:57]

no longer there called Honami which was like, basically I guess it was a stationery store and a lot of papers and old Japanese brushes but they also had tea equipment and Japanese magazines. And I was always fascinated looking at the teabowls and the chasen, the whisks. I remember the head of the place, Mr. Honami was an old man, 70 or 80. He was always there and his two daughters and wife. But I would ask him, what is that? Tea. And one time I saw these boxes of fugu, the cloth that you use for the ceremony. I said, what's that? And he took it out and folded it

[31:00]

and did what you do in tea ceremony but I didn't know. And I thought he was doing some kind of magic. I was just watching. And then he said, tea ceremony. And I went, what? A cloth tea ceremony? Anyway, maybe that's why I signed up for the tea class. I couldn't sit and say some more than five minutes. So if you say, why do you want to study tea ceremony? Gradually, it became longer. When I did it too much, a couple of years ago, I did it. I came close to talking to Mr. Hiroshi last night.

[32:00]

My first session maybe it was three days, five days, I think we did seven. But Katagiri was, Katagiri Hiroshi was here and both were doing the session. And there was a sign-up sheet. That's right, when I first came over here, some learned friend, I told him I was coming here, he says, oh, well that's too bad, you'll never get to talk to the teacher privately. I said, why not? He said, well that's so dope, and only in Lorenzai do they talk to each other. So maybe that's why they'll be required about talking to them. Anyway, that was the sign-up sheet and I was on both sheets. But then he became more ill, I think like Suzuki Sensei

[33:09]

used to ask me why I wanted to study Chi, I'm sure some of the people here watching me doing sessions used to wonder why I wanted to do that. I went around writhing and grimacing. I was determined to stay. I think I used to expect something, I was going to be rewarded for being here, like something. But I died. This last June session was kind of great,

[34:11]

being here reminded me of my first, first one. It felt very good. It wasn't just like nostalgia, it just felt like something very good was happening. During that week there was a lot of flashbacks, pretty much what I've been going through for this, I guess because of the category, and then we had a visitor in and spoke to us. I forget her name, but she was a very good speaker and a woman grocery. And she brought back a lot of memories of the past because right away she started quoting from Meister Eckhart,

[35:13]

that quote, the eye with which I see God is the same eye with which God sees me. That was one of my favorite quotes. And here she comes in, which I'm already having a lot of nostalgia, and she says this, and she quotes life, the translation of Haiku, what's going on, this past coming up. Hmm. Tiredness.

[36:15]

Oh. Aren't we supposed to have questions? I'm going to wait until the end of December. Whatever you like. Whatever I like. I don't know whether I should. Does anyone want to ask a question? I can read a poem. Cut. You want me to? Whatever you like, Tom. A couple of weeks ago

[37:42]

in Rep's Blue Cliff class, he brought up the Chinese poets of the Tang Dynasty, and I thought I knew what he was saying, these poets, but he was saying their names I never heard. I said, who are these people? I thought I had, I know who the famous poets were. He was saying Liber, Dofu, and I always called him Li Po. Of course, I read it, that's how they pronounced it in those days, and now they have all the modern Chinese scholars, and they brought up, and I used to say, Tofu, Liber, Dofu. This is Li Bo, Li Po. There's a bar in Chinatown called Li Po, and I guess that's named after him, some grandman,

[38:43]

has a big Buddha behind the bar. This is called Drinking Alone Beneath the Moon. A pot of wine among the flowers, I drink alone, no pith or kin near. I raise my cup to invite the moon to join me. It and my shadow make a party of three. Alas, the moon is unconcerned about drinking, and my shadow merely follows me around. Briefly I cavort with the moon and my shadow. Pleasure must be sought while it's spring. I sing and the moon goes back and forth. I dance

[39:44]

and my shadow falls at random. While sober we seek pleasure and fellowship. When drunk we go each our own way. Then let us pledge a friendship without human ties and meet again at the far end of the Milky Way. The End

[41:09]

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