I vow to taste the truth of the Kutataka's words. Good morning, and welcome to the first talk of the new year in Beginner's Mind Temple. And as a guarantee that the name is correct, we have one, two, three, four, five, six, seven Beginner's Minds seated in the first row, and actually they should be giving the talk today. You want to talk? How's your imagination working this morning? Good? Okay. So I'll give you something difficult to imagine. Imagine me your age. Now I'll make it a little harder for you.

[01:00]

Imagine me your age with long blonde curls. Pretty hard, huh? Now try to imagine the Buddha as a young boy. Can you do that? When I was a boy your age, they'd go around and pat me on the head, and they would say, and what are you going to be when you grow up, little boy? As though I was a nothing, you know? You don't go around patting a prince on the head, right? Siddhartha, which is his name before he was a Buddha, was a prince. His father was a king, and also you didn't have to ask him what he was going to be, because that was all foreestablished at his birth. He was going to be a what? A warrior. Did you know that? I don't know how many stories of the Buddha you've heard, but his father was a warrior

[02:01]

class, and when Siddhartha was born, a wise man said, oh king, your son will either be a great world teacher or a great world conqueror, and naturally the king had wonderful ideas of his son at the head of armies with his many elephants and his chariots, bashing the neighboring kingdoms and coming home with slaves and jewels, and he had his son's future all planned out. And he was trained. Siddhartha was trained as a warrior for many years. That's how they did it in India that time. He was in training at the same age that you are now, he began his training. But as such things work out, one day he went downtown with his charioteer. He didn't go to the mall. They didn't have malls those days, but probably down to the marketplace, and on the way he

[03:02]

saw a sick person and a dying person and a dead person, and he'd never seen them before because everything at the palace like that was kept out of his sight. They didn't want him thinking about things like that. So he asked his charioteer, what is this, and the charioteer says, oh, we all come to this. And he was so shocked by the realization that old age, sickness and death was the common denominator of everybody's life, that it threw him, and the idea of being a great warrior didn't interest him anymore. So one night he slipped away from the palace and cut off his long curls and gave away his fine clothes and began to search for the meaning of our lives. I always wonder about him slipping away in the darkness. He didn't go up to the king and say, father, I am leaving here. I don't want to be a warrior. I guess he felt his father would not have let him go or something.

[04:03]

It's interesting. You might think about why he slipped away in the darkness. So he started to study, and he started to work, and he didn't really get very far, and then he began to practice what they call austerities, and he didn't eat much, and he got so thin that he could feel his backbone through his stomach. And it looked like his life was over. He had left the palace, and he hadn't found a new life. And then he remembered. He remembered when he was your age, a day when he was sitting under a sorb apple tree in the springtime, and his father was doing the ritual plowing, the first furrow of the season, and the bullocks had gold harness and flowers in their horns, and it was a perfect moment. Well, they didn't have a sorb apple tree to sit down under, but he took the next tree. It's a pipple tree, they call it, and he sat down under that tree, and he washed himself

[05:09]

and had a breakfast, started to eat again. And if it hadn't been for the memory of that moment as a child of your age that brought him back to where his life should have been, we might not be sitting here today talking about the Buddha. So remember, there are two words that you can understand, even though you're not too old, what the Buddha taught. Clearly observe. Just keep your eyes open. See things as they really are. And when you lose it, you can always come back and sit on one of these cushions. Thank you. When we first got a computer here in the building,

[06:38]

there was a sign on the door. It said, don't pull the plug or we'll lose the program. And those of you who were here the last time I talked observed what happened when my plug got pulled. It evidently startled a number of people because I received a number of poems, some letters, many notes of concern for my situation. It was sort of like an intellectual stroke or a concussion. Mark Lancaster was telling me how in a football game once he remembers the play that knocked him out and he remembers coming to in the hospital but there was a space in between that he knows nothing of. And there's been a space in my life since that time that I know nothing of. And what I'd like to talk about this morning are some of the things that you, who actually

[07:40]

communicated with me, and perhaps some of the things that you were thinking at the time and make that the subject of the talk. Of course, this is a Buddhist temple and I have to have a Buddhist subject, so let's call this an examination into self-clinging. That will make it legal. Actually, I think that what happened was something more like what they call a computer virus. It seems, I don't understand it of course, it seems that you can insert something into a program and it will eat out the intelligence of the program that you introduced it in. And I have identified the computer virus that was at work in my situation. I won't give you the whole description, but it was four lines of a poem that somebody had given to me that I read and appreciated, but it got to me and it got to me in a way

[08:47]

that I was not prepared for. This is the heart of the poem. I used to think the worst affliction was to be forbidden pencil and paper. Now I think it is not to know who you are or who you have been. And I realize that I have been speaking in public since age five, professionally since age twelve, I've been writing all my life, and what I was doing in all of that time was trying to know who I was and to remember who I had been. And somehow or other in the course of the last talk the ability to do that came apart. And I should have been warned because Suzuki Roshi told me when I came here, I was older than most people when they start practice. He said, if you really want to do this practice, you must realize one thing.

[09:50]

Creative energy, whether it's sexual or artistic, is very close to zazen energy, but it's already split off and taken form. And if you want to do this practice, you will have to give up your writing. It may come back, he said, but I can't guarantee it. Well, I didn't pay much attention to that because I had already given up my writing as a professional. I had lost it and I wasn't writing for publication anymore. And I thought, okay, it's very nice, but I don't have to be concerned. But in the light of this poem, to know who you are and who you have been, to write for that purpose, and we all do it. We do it 24 hours a day. You're all writers. You're all writing a script. You're writing a script called Me, the story of your life. You're editing it. You're changing scenes around. You're rewriting your past. You're reimagining your future.

[10:51]

So what I'm saying today has bearing, I think, on everybody's life. So we write, I think, basically to create and preserve a self. Someone like Kafka, who suffered so greatly in his life and in his writings, I think, says it best. Autobiography, the weapon of the rational eye, does not in the least assure us of reaching the truth about ourselves. That truth is gained only by the self-destruction of the eye, or as we would say, the ego. So here I have been confronted at an advanced age with evidence that I have blown it. I have spent a whole lifetime working on that autobiographical eye, and I'm getting the

[11:57]

message from a lot of different sources that that's not where the truth lies. Sort of like a mountain climber who has put himself in an impossible situation, spread eagled across a rock, holding on with desperation, no more handholds, no place to go. I've lost my mental handholds. And this was obvious to one of the people who were here last week. This is why this morning I am so deeply moved that people could have observed this thing happening, when even I didn't know it was happening. This is the poem that was on my door when I went up to take off my okesa after the last talk. The person must have slipped out and written it and put it up on my door. To be the center of attention until I am gone.

[13:04]

No props at all. To go with these mumbling faltering words. The electricity of all eyes turned on me. Vanishing. Giving up the question. The intention. Hot light. Center buzzing. Words begin again and fail again. Noticing the enlivening pain. I don't know who wrote it and if they're here today I can only say thank you. I went for a walk the other day and those lines were very much with me. And I was coming up Lily Alley. It was a rainy day and I had my umbrella and I stopped. And I just stared. I don't know how long I stood there and then a black young woman across the alley

[14:06]

dressed in ghetto clothes, a black watch cap and jeans and a jacket. She says, Mr. are you alright? And I said yes. And then I said thank you. This is what happens I guess when you begin to drop your autobiography. At that moment I was in her life and she made a response to me. Also in the talk last time I mentioned that a teacher here in Zen Center had told me once words do not refer to things. They refer only to other words. It was a great shock because I always thought if you say the word love

[15:07]

there is something that is love. You say the word joy, you say the word honor, you say the word integrity that somehow or other in the world out there you could find things called joy, integrity, honor and so forth. I had never doubted that. And so I said, I repeated his words and then I got another poem. A revolution in language has taken place. A revolution in language has taken things hostage. Life without things, to what will we refer? Can speech ever be of things as it used to be? About that crack in the bedroom window pane that so annoys you and that I have still not tried to fix? And from where we watch the blue icicles, gargoyle-shaped shimmer in the morning sun?

[16:12]

No, all we can speak of or ever speak of is language. But in speaking of language we are evicted, thrown into the shattering and silent evaporating world of things. New Year's has always been my holiday. Christmas, for reasons I could spend the rest of the morning telling you, is not for me. And it never has been. But New Year's, that's my holiday. And my father used to go around and make New Year's calls. I don't know if that's still done. And I used to go around and make New Year's calls. And I would look forward to it with a real sense of the spirit of the new year. Well, I dragged around this year.

[17:13]

I really did. I went because I had set it up and people were expecting me and so forth. But all what I was doing was moving through this world of evaporating things. And remember, from a Buddhist position, things are not just this bench or the stone figure of the Buddha or the automobiles. There are mind objects, these joys, these sorrows that I mentioned earlier. Those are also objects. And to have the object of my enjoyment of New Year's Day evaporate, the word is right on. To watch it like a snowball disappearing. I arrived at a very... I had my friend's last person on the list in a very depleted state. She's a Sufi. I've known her a long, long time.

[18:16]

And we exchanged gifts. I gave her a Zen book. And she gave me a Sufi book. One-Handed Basket Weaving is the title. Precious, huh? And the subtitle is Poems on the Theme of Work. And it is by the great religious teacher Rumi, whom we refer to in this day and age as the poet Rumi. But actually, he was a teacher who used poetry as a means of teaching. He was not, as today we would call, a poet. If he were asked, he would say he was a teacher. So I looked through the book, you know. I wasn't interested in getting a book. But, on page 37, I found a poem that fits right into the chain,

[19:21]

the linked chain of events that began with the first one I read. It's a level of words, it's called. God has said, The images that come with human language do not correspond to me, but those who love words must use them to come near. Well, I certainly have been a lover of words. I taught myself the Bible, to read so I could read the Bible. I jimmied open drawers where forbidden books were kept. I've written and listened to poets and plays. Just what they call the life of the mind, I think there's such a title and such a word. I've lived the life of the mind, so I'm a lover of words, so this poem has to be to me. God has said, The images that come with human language do not correspond to me, but those who love words must use them to come near.

[20:25]

Now we have to make a quick advance to Nietzsche. Because if I can get through the next 15 minutes from that viewpoint, I will have had a good morning. Whither is God? Nietzsche asked. I'll tell you, we've killed him. You and I, all of us are his murderers. What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun? Whither are we moving? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there still any up or down? Are we not straying through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Is not the cold night continually closing in on us? He wrote that many, many years ago,

[21:34]

but you just have to tune in the TV or look at the newspapers or just walk out on Page Street and you hear the echoes of Nietzsche's cry. So, when Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo yanked the earth from the center of the universe, there were people who couldn't take it. They wouldn't look through Galileo's telescope at the moons around Jupiter, because if they did, they would lose their faith. There's the story of the French president of the Science Society, who, when he heard of Edison's phonograph, gave a long lecture proving it couldn't be done. So, by the next ship, one of Edison's machines was brought into the hall and turned on, and you know what the man did when the phonograph began?

[22:36]

He jumped up and tried to choke the horn. So, we are always choking the horn. We are always not wanting to see what actually is there or not there. So, here on one hand, we have a poem directed to me about God, and on the other hand, here is Nietzsche, and right in the middle is me. And I had written a poem once, without knowing about Nietzsche. I've said it before, but again, now I see it for the first time. When I was young, I lived with God, and in my innocence, I loved him, beard and all. But he was old, with a sense of sin and jealous in a very nasty way. So, every time my youthful eye would stray, he'd drag me home, take down his book,

[23:38]

and read to me of love that others gave. One day, God caught me in a field with Homer, who also had a beard, but his was red. God let out such a roar that Homer fled, but when he stuck out his dusty foot for me to kiss, I clutched it till he rose up and threw him down. He hid his head upon a common stone, and God was dead. I buried him there among the wheat. The work was easy, because his weight was light. Then I went home and burned his book, and on his wine stayed six days drunk to wake up sober in an empty room. That's a poll of about 35 years ago. So what's going on here? It's very fortunate for me that I spoke in the presence of the children, because in the Bible, it says very clearly, Save as ye become as a little child,

[24:38]

ye shall not enter the kingdom of heaven. Or in Buddhist terms, that would be, Save as ye become as a little child, ye shall not enter the dharmakaya, that is, the totality of everything. So let's spend a little time with ourselves at the age of these children. There is something in the human brain called the corpus callosum. It is that bundle of about 40,000 nerves that connect the left brain and the right brain. Incidentally, it's bigger in women. I don't know if it means anything. The women have more of those connectors than men do. But the interesting thing is that it does not begin to function until a child is four years old and is not completely in place until the child is nine years old.

[25:40]

So in those years, the child is living left brain and right brain at the same time, but not connecting them. So all sorts of wonderful things happen when you observe children of that age. They come up with those amazing formulations, poems. We have a friend who works with poetry, with children in the schools with poetry, and he sends me, from time to time, examples. And if you did not know that a child had written that poem, you would think it was from one of the greats. Now, where does that come from? It comes from their ability clearly to observe. They see, without being influenced by all the stuff that we feed into our children with all the good intentions of raising them and educating them, they see things as it really is.

[26:42]

Things as it is, as Suzuki Roshi said. And they can respond to things as it is spontaneously. And the older they get, and the more that the corpus callosum does its work of putting these two things together, we are trapped then into the everyday life. Now, the Buddha knew this. And it was his great insight to be able to show us how, as adults, we could separate out those two areas of experience so that we can both take our place in the everyday world and enter that wonderful place which all of us remember at least one day in our childhood life. But it's very, very difficult to do that. And what this zazen does, that we practice,

[27:44]

you can't stop your mind. You've all realized that. But you can put your butt on a cushion. That you can do. And what we know now of modern understanding, the mind is not located here. It's located in the totality throughout the body-mind. And as the body stills itself, the mind also. Like you take a dog for a walk in the woods. It'll chase rabbits and tree squirrels and dig and run. And all you have to do is sit on a stump. And a little while, the dog comes back. Okay. It's sort of a non-surgical lobotomy. And there's evidence to indicate this through the brainwave investigations. I was very interested in a young man out at Langley Porter who showed me on one of the casso tubes

[28:50]

where exactly in a zen master's mind the break occurred. He's gone, so I can't tell you anything more than that. Okay. Or you could put it this way. We honor the Prajnaparamita in our chanting and in our practice. Maybe what I'm talking about is the ability to find our way into that wisdom beyond wisdom which these children have automatically, which we had just by becoming human beings and which we lose sight of. But I'm still in the woods. This is all very clear. I find this intellectually a great relief to know that what's happened in the Buddha's time is perfectly acceptable to this time.

[29:51]

But there's God mentioned in here. And those of you who attended Buddhist classes or have read Buddhist literature, you know that Buddhism is a strange religion. There is no creator. There is no savior. And in the final analysis, there's nobody to be saved. So what am I doing? What's happened to me that I can read a poem that talks about God and respond to it? Am I going to have to take these robes off and go back to being a Christian minister, which I almost was? You smile. It's a question now. So let me conclude, if I can, by reexamining the situation that occurred when I was the age of these children

[30:54]

and which gave rise to all the things that bring us together this morning. I apologize to Blanche, who's heard it so many times. I apologize to the people who have heard it a few less times than she had. It concerns a boy sitting under a tree, a five-year-old boy sitting under a tree in the springtime on a rock by a stream. It's evening. The sky has that pearly opalescence. The tree is the tulip tree, one of the tallest trees in the eastern woods. The swallows are darting over the water. The trees are towering. The sun is glowing. And I disappear.

[31:54]

I tower with the trees. I glow with the sky. I flit with the swallows. I flow with the water. And when I come back to myself, I say, wow, you just disappeared. Now I wanted to please my mother, so I ran into the house to tell her, you'll never guess what, I just saw God. Now, that was the only word a five-year-old could possibly have to explain what had happened. And she said, that's nice, now wash your hands, it's time for supper. Okay, many people have said, your mother was a Zen master. I didn't want a Zen master, I wanted mommy to pay me some attention, right? I mean, how many mothers

[33:00]

have their sons give them this wonderful offering of God-seeing? Okay. Now we've got to get in there and do some very fine tuning. There was an instant between coming back to myself and running into the house, where I stopped. And I should have stayed there. I stopped because I said to myself, if you disappeared, who is it that experienced the disappearance? And then it was gone. I mean, there were no Zen teachers around. And I said the word God, and those of you who remember your Bible know that in the first chapter of John, in the first verse, it said, in the beginning was the word, and the word was God. So I got hooked on godliness,

[34:02]

I followed it all through the Christian tradition, I got into Nietzsche, I got into humanism, I got into Marxism, and then I got into Buddhism. Searching what for? A way back to that moment, the only real moment in my life where life was a totality. All this other stuff, family, job, temple, going to the army, all of that didn't cut it. That moment, though, that was it. And I thought that if you got the right words and put them together in the right order, you'd go back. You'd follow the trail of your autobiography back to the time when you started to write it, and there it would be. Of course, what we know now is that that moment is always

[35:05]

right in front of you. Since I knew no better at the time, I could recognize it. I didn't have to be educated, I didn't have to sit zazen, I didn't have to read books, I didn't have to anything. It was just there, and it's just there all the time. If we're able to... drop the autobiography, and notice what Kafka said, the truth of our lives is gained only by the destruction of the autobiography. The truth is always there, we get in the way of it. But we have such an equity in all of the pain and the suffering and the loss and the confusion

[36:08]

we can't let it go just by saying so. And that's why we sit zazen, so that it will bit by bit drop away, and we'll be able to see our lives as they really are, and have that wonderful support and strength and assurance that it's all okay as it is. No need to change a thing. Well, a minute left. There was another letter about writing, which we've been talking about in that last period, and I must have said or indicated,

[37:11]

what can I write now that I'm not writing my autobiography? And this is what the person wrote to me. The reason for writing changes from trying to alter the world for the better into being engaged and sharing your experience in that engagement with others, but to go beyond shorthand drafts and sketches to more finished, polished pieces, make your writing accessible to more than yourself. This is not unlike chanting, an activity which is performed for the group as well as the individual. The style of writing is like

[38:13]

counting the breath during meditation. If you realize this is only a technique to focus your energy and not the goal and purpose of your sitting, you will use it appropriately. Make poetry writing your practice. Strange. I am not a poet. I have written poetry, but everyone does that. And I envy people like Norman Fisher, for instance, who sat on this very place a few nights ago, and among the things he told us was how much he felt that his life as a poet had informed him in his Buddhist practice. Well, here is someone who is telling me, make poetry writing your practice.

[39:13]

Well, now, I threw a lot of this sort of stuff in the fire during the New Year celebration. We have a fire out in the yard, and I burned up all wonderful future lectures I was going to give. I keep notes on all... I share one thing with the Dalai Lama. We're both interested in neurology, and we love to hang out with neurologists and learn the latest business about the way the mind works. I threw that out. I threw the outlines out. I was going to throw my poetry out, but Blanche wouldn't let me do that. Now, should I listen to this one person? Well, there's three of them. Without the writer knowing it, and without the two other people knowing it, both my teachers have told me your practice is writing. Unfortunately, I was raised

[40:25]

in a strict discipline where you did what people told you to do. Thank you. Thank you. No, no, I'm not ending it up. I will do it. Ha, ha, ha. See what pit I've dug for myself. Well, there's one thing to look forward to, and that's the 49ers game. Thank you. May our intention...

[41:02]

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