This podcast is offered by the San Francisco Zen Center on the web at www.sfcc.org. Our public programs are made possible by donations from people like you. I'm speaking kind of loud right now. My voice always kind of goes down, you know, and then everybody's going, what? What do you say? What do you say? So it's good if it's kind of strong. although I come to the building here periodically, I stopped being Abbott in 1998, 97, 1997. So I'm looking around to see who's still around. A lot of people, actually. So I have a lot of things to talk about.

[01:04]

problem I'm having is, like, which one I should talk about. So I asked Linda a few minutes ago, what should I talk about? And she said, well, we're going to have the 50th anniversary of Tassajara this year, the 100th practice period. And it's also the 50th anniversary of the Berkley Sin Center. of which I am an integral part. And Suzuki and Roshi and I started the Berkeley Zen Center February 1969. No, 1967, sorry. This building was, we got this building 1969. So I don't want to talk too much about that, but It's interesting to note.

[02:06]

And so there are a lot of commemorative things going on this year. One of them is my birthday, which is in about a week. And I'll be 37. No, that was Jack Benny. I will be... So, but that's not why I'm sitting in a chair. A few months ago, I was doing a meeting next door. And so at the end of the meeting, I walked out to Chinatown. And then the next day, my knee was really swelling up. So, but I have a lot of cartilage. It's not like, you know, the bones are grinding on each other or something. Not that at all. It's just one of those things.

[03:09]

So I'm really feeling better. And actually, I could be sitting on that cushion. But we planned this, and here I am. And when I come here to give a talk, I like to talk about Suzuki Roshi's teaching. Because, you know, I don't know how often people talk about Suzuki Roshi's teaching anymore. It's easy to forget things. It doesn't take a few generations. If something is not established in a few generations, it's forgotten. When I was abbot, if I called, and immediately the person in the office would know who it was, And then after I was abbot, I'd call, and the person in the office would say, who? Who?

[04:10]

It's a funny feeling, but it's normal, and it should be that way. So I think we should keep Suzuki Roshi's teaching fresh in our mind, because that's where our practice comes from. And... I like to comment on his teaching. You know, when we read Suzuki Roshi's talks, every time I read one of Suzuki Roshi's talks, I get a different picture. I get a different understanding of what he's talking about. It's easy to just read the words and you think you got it or not, but actually, because his speech is so simple and so direct, you think you understand what he's saying. But actually, in his simple, direct way of speaking, because he was speaking to us, I'll talk about that, that's a good subject, Suzuki Roshi and his students.

[05:23]

We think we understand what he meant, but... I've been studying his teachings for the last, well, since 1964, when I started practicing with him. And he's still my teacher. I still can get my inspiration, even after reading the same thing over and over again. So, I like to comment on Suzuki Roshi's teaching, partly because... It inspires me and freshens my practice. So every time I read just a sentence or a paragraph, I get inspired. So sometimes people say, well, you know, after your teacher dies, don't you look for another teacher? And I said, no.

[06:27]

When he was alive, there were many teachers. By the time he died, there were many Asian teachers in America. But I didn't feel that any of them, although they all had their wonderful points and understanding, I just felt that no one could come up to Suzuki Roshi, who was so simple. One thing, he never... tried to make us be Japanese. Even though we wear these clothes and we have this formal practice in this building and in all of our buildings, he wanted us to be as American as we could be. He wasn't recruiting anybody to do anything. He just...

[07:30]

you know, he wanted to show us what was the best part of Japan. I remember, you know, in the Meiji period, the Japanese were making pottery for export with, you know, kind of mass production for America and Europe, which embarrassed him. He wanted to give us the heart of the Dharma as his gift. So his practice is very simple and very direct and very profound. When I came in 1964, somebody told me, well, there's this Japanese priest in the temple on Bush Street, 1881 Bush Street.

[08:43]

And there were several people who told me that, who were my friends. And they said, you should go sometime. And there's a little Japanese priest. They didn't say he was the great Suzuki or anything. He's a little Japanese priest. And they do sasen. They do meditation. So one day, I had been smoking pot. This is 1964, early 64. I was a painter, and my friend was a poet. And we were in my old house in the middle of the block that probably came around the horn in pieces and was put together under Isadero Street. said let's go to the temple on Bush Street and do Zazen I didn't exactly know what Zazen was so we walked up there I had my little black dog and we walked up Fillmore Street around 4.30 in the morning because Zazen was at 5 no it was 5.45 so about 5 o'clock

[10:03]

and went into the old synagogue on Bush Street, which had become Sokochi Temple. The Japanese congregation, when they were in a concentration camp in Arizona, or someplace, had saved their money and they opened. The synagogue wasn't working anymore, I bought it. I'm pretty sure they bought it. And made it into a Zen temple. But the Japanese didn't sit Zazen. It was a church. A Buddhist church called Soto Zen. That's a whole historical, another historical story. Because in the early days, during the Meiji period, around the time of the Civil War here, the emperor turned out the monks from the monasteries, pretty much, and reformed the Buddhist schools.

[11:13]

And they created temples. Well, there were always temples, but the monks were allowed to marry and eat meat and to raise families in temples. That was a radical change, which is historically... important for the way our practice has developed. All of our priests have been married, have had children, a Japanese priest. There were quite a number. We had four Japanese priests when I was starting to practice in the 60s. Suzuki Roshi Kadigiri Sensei, who was later Kadigiri Roshi, And who started the Zen Center in Minneapolis. And Covencino, famous Covencino Roshi, who was Covencino Sensei.

[12:19]

And a priest named Yoshimura. They were all quite wonderful and all different. So we got a wonderful picture of these teachers who were all different. and had different personalities and different ways of teaching, but they all taught the same thing in their own way. I remember Yoshimura, a very sweet guy, he said, you know, we were talking one day, he said, the greatest arrogance is to say, I am alive. that always sticks in my head. So Suzuki Roshi came in 1959, died in 1971, and when I came to Sokoji, I'm coming back to where I was, the Japanese congregation

[13:35]

because there were people coming to see Suzuki Roshi they had it was not too long after the Second World War to tell you the truth 20 years or something and there would be a lot of servicemen and people who had been to Japan and experienced something in the Buddhist temples they were looking for something here if there was a Zen teacher so they would call and in the phone book Sokoji Temple, Shunri Suzuki priest. So they'd call him on the telephone, and he'd say, well, I sit at 5.45 in the morning, so please come if you want. And they were sitting in the pews of the temple, this big auditorium, full of pews, like a church. So people would come, and they'd sit with him, and then they gave him the most wonderful group, a wonderful room with a kitchen.

[14:41]

And so that's where the practice developed. And it was all word of mouth. But little by little, more and more people would come. And there were artists and poets and people who were interested in things like meditation and the romance of Japanese dharma. the misty hills and so forth. So, when I came in 64, the place had been, the practice had been incorporated, and there was a, the chief priest became the corporation's soul, which was a big mistake. But that's another whole story, which for another time. Do you mind if I have a little glass of water?

[15:55]

So people, his students, he had maybe two dozen students who were very close, and practiced together. We practiced every morning. You know, that was the setup. Every morning there was Zazen at 5.45, and in the evening, I think, at the same time, 5.45. So, and Suzuki Roshi was always there. He was always there. That was something that really impressed me, because I had been an artist And everything I did was kind of improvisational. And here was this older man. I thought he was old. He's an old man. But he was only in his 50s. Late 50s. He died when he was 67.

[16:58]

So he was late 50s. So we'd go to Zazen. And he would walk out of his door. He had a door that came to Zendo where his office was. And he'd go to the altar and offer incense and bow and sit. And Katagiri was his assistant. And Katagiri came to Zen Center a year before I did. He was a year older than me. And he would sit on the altar and do the service. He would do the kokokyo and the bells and be the kokokyo. all at one, all at one. Now we divide it up. When you have a lot of people, you divide up those instruments. But if you don't, you just do the whole service yourself, which I did for many years. And then at the end, he would come out and do his bows, for instance, chant.

[18:03]

We've chanted the Heart Sutra in Japanese. three times and that was our service. We never did anything in English until Tatsugami Roshi came. That's another story. So I was very impressed with the fact that he would always on time and always did the same activity and at the end he would leave and do the same activity and when we'd leave we'd go through his office and he was there and he would bow to each person, which is kind of wonderful. It's not just like everybody left and he left. He would bow to each person personally. So that was his style, was to take care of each person personally, no matter who they were or where they were or what we were doing. Every person was addressed personally. And that really impressed me.

[19:08]

So that's when I started sitting regularly. Actually, my first, not my first time, but I had been going sort of for a while. And one day I realized, this is it. It just occurred to me, this is it. I think many Zen students have that feeling, you know. At some point, you just say, this is it. And I had been looking for it for a long time. And so I just continued Sazhen. I just continued to go. And that became my life. I said, I was 35. I said, if I don't do this now, you know, it'll pass by. And I'll have to wait another millennium for my practice to show up. So I took it right there and then as it came, I didn't... There was really no doubt at all.

[20:13]

So at one time, as we were... Just the group, the Sangha, was beginning to form and... it came up with some people that it'd be nice to have some kind of a monastery where we could go and actually spend time without having to go back and forth to practice together. So we started looking for that. And we started looking for a place that would be a monastery for us. You know, we didn't have that many students, and we didn't have that much money. But as it came about, after a long period, after a period of really searching, we discovered Tassahara. And after some negotiations, we bought Tassahara's hot springs, kind of a historical hot springs.

[21:33]

and turned it into a Zen monastery. So that was the beginning of that. And then Suzuki Roshi, he felt that because we were getting too big, people were beginning, after Tassahara was discovered, a lot of people wanted to go in and help build it up. So a lot of people came down the road They didn't necessarily come through Zen Center. They just showed up at Tassajara and became Zen students. And the whole practice there at that time was just building things up, hauling stones. And it was work practice. Zazen and work practice, which I thought was really great. Because it was kind of like grassroots, building a grassroots practice. We didn't have a lot of people helping us. We were there in the deep mountains.

[22:36]

It was a pioneering practice, which was really wonderful. And that's the way I've always felt about our practice. When it becomes too corporate or something like that, then I feel it loses something. But we were just men and women down there. The women in their bathing suits in the hot summer, you know. It was a little chaotic, I have to say. But Suzuki Girl, she was very understanding. It was amazing. He didn't say you have to wear this or you have to do that. And people were having affairs all over the place. Because it was men and women practicing, which is the most unusual thing. Practicing together, which is the most unusual thing. It is a most unusual thing. men and women practicing Buddhism, Buddha Dharma, in a monastic situation together.

[23:39]

So naturally nobody knew what to do because it was unprecedented. But Suzuki Hiroshi is very understanding. But at some point, the Japanese people from Sokoji, who were very generous to let us use their place, I mean, all these hippies coming in with their, you know, dirty feet and rings on their toes and rings on their nose and stuff like that. Which was, you know, anathema, not anathema, but very unusual for them. But they didn't complain much. But they still had their feelings. And so they got a little upset, I think, that all these people were coming to Sokoji Temple And it was having, they felt it was having a kind of an effect on them. So Suzuki Roshi, and so then more and more people were coming, since they had been coming to Tassahara, they were coming to Tsugoji.

[24:47]

And Suzuki Roshi said, well, let's find a place in America, and it was very hard for him, because he had been brought over from Japan to be their teacher. And then he became our teacher. And then his interest became our interest rather than the interest of the Japanese, which was maintaining a church. So he was not so interested in the church. He was interested in Zen practice, in Zazen, and developing something wonderful and new. So then we made an effort to find a place, and you're sitting in it. This is that place. And he moved in with his wife and Oka-san. The thing about Suzuki Roshi is that people trusted him. He just emanated a certain quality that people could trust. And he was trustworthy, honest, and that's what he was... That was the foundation of his practice.

[25:58]

And Richard Baker, his... most prominent student did a lot of work to make all that happen. I have to say that. So that's a kind of history of the inception of Zen Center. Like that, yeah. And then There were three of his students who he asked to set up a place to practice. Les K. in Los Altos, Bill Kwong in Marin, and myself in Berkeley. So we started the Berkeley Zen Center in 1967, February.

[27:01]

because Izuki Roshi was here and I was there, we were always in contact, but pretty much I was the caretaker and I developed the practice based on a combination of practice here and practice at Tassajara, kind of a quasi-monastic practice that is for lay people basically for a long time, in a urban setting. And there have been many changes over the years, but that was 50 years ago. And we're still going. So people are still practicing us and so forth. And so there have been a lot of people that passed through both of these places. And in Berkeley, we always maintained a schedule, kind of like here.

[28:09]

And emphasizing lay practice. So one of the things that I wanted to talk about before I talked to Linda was how do you practice in the world? And when you walk into a zendo, the zendo has the flavor of practice. It's set up in a certain way. There are the tatami mats, there are the zabhatans, there are the zavhus, there are the altar and the Buddha and all the trappings. And you walk in and it gives you a feeling for practice. And you know, oh yeah, this is what I'm doing now. I'm practicing zen, so to speak. But Zen is not something that's different, that's a different practice from our usual life.

[29:11]

And this is, although we know this, we know this, it's not different from our usual life. But to understand it and actually embody it is something else. How do we practice continuously? There are two Japanese terms. One is... which means continuous practice. And the other is which means the circle of the way. Circle of the way, I love that term, it has to do with how you do something. Because every one of us no matter how freely we think we are living our life, there's always a pattern to our activity. When I was a painter, I tried hard to not have a pattern to my activity.

[30:21]

I'd just wake up whenever I'd wake up. Actually, but I did have patterns. I just didn't understand what they were. I wasn't conscious of of the patterns as patterns. I worked as a, before I started practicing, I was working as a boat painter. When I was in art school, a friend of mine and I, because they were building a lot of housing projects, they needed painters. At that time, apprenticeship as a house painter was four years The first two years, we were learning how to wash brushes and clean the pots. And when you learn that, you make sure that your brush has nothing left in it when you're finished painting. And it's a whole technique about how to do that. And the paint bucket is like a mirror when you're finished cleaning it.

[31:27]

So this is the kind of skills that go into that kind of work. The building trades have skills that you don't forget somehow. And they're wonderful skills because they teach you how to handle things, how to handle your belongings. I think that the building trades, if you learn them as an apprentice, teach you how to practice them. Because practicing Zen, it's just how you take care of your life. It's not something special. So when we come into the Zen Do, this is very special. It's not like outside where the cars are going by and people are yelling and everybody's in a different state of mind. So it has this special feeling. But then when you go out of the Zen Do, how do you practice?

[32:31]

And no matter how long people have been practicing, they inevitably come after 20 years and say, how do you practice out in the world? So it's not a, it's, our practice, Suzuki Roshi, we always talk about going back and forth. When going, when living your life in the world and going to the Zendo is exactly the same thing, then you know that you have some maturity. If I go to Tassajara, when I go to Tassajara, I've done so many practice periods there, I just don't think about any outside world. And then when I go out into the outside world, I don't think about Tassajara. I'm just where I am. That's the nature of my practice.

[33:34]

I think that's what Suzuki Roshi meant by, it doesn't matter where you are, the practice is exactly the same. So he would say, when we leave the zendo, the zendo is extended to wherever we are. It's like when you, on your computer, you take the end of a... image on the computer and you stretch it all the way across. That's the image I have in my mind. Your practice gets stretched like that to wherever you are. So there's no way you can escape. Once you start practicing Zen, you can't escape even though you think you can. Even though you go away and never come back. You really can't escape because it's just your life. It's nothing else but your life. So I think of when you're in the zendo, you know exactly, you should know, exactly what to do.

[34:47]

And everything you do is zen. Eating or yoki is zen. Bowing is zen. Walking slowly is zen. Being careful is relating to everything around you. Well, the same thing. in your daily life except that it's like if you think of the practice as a paper bag and you say well this is a paper bag and you put stuff in it and all that but when you reach in and turn it inside out you don't know what it is so It's like everything we meet in the zendo is practice. Everything we meet as we leave the zendo is ordinary life. So how do we address ordinary life as practice? So that each, everything we meet becomes a way to practice.

[35:54]

It teaches us how to practice. So the world, instead of escaping from the world, we go into the world. And the world teaches us how to practice because we have a practice called Zazen. In Zendo, we know what to do. And you shouldn't be able to know what to do in the same way when you're out in the world. And so, you know, Zen practice, Mahayana practice, is to pay attention or pay attention is not enough, how to help people. Help people is a difficult word, actually. It's hard to know how you help people. Suzuki Roshi said, you don't have to think about it. You do your practice with the Zendo, then you go into the world and forget about the Zendo, and just practice. It's not like, how can I sit cross-legged when I'm on the bus, or walking down the street?

[36:59]

Well, you should be able to sit zazen walking down the street. That's the great koan for you. How do you sit zazen while walking down the street? I remember Suzuki Roshi saying, suppose you had no legs. And what brought this up for me was a student of mine who has no back. He was a student for a long time. He was a very athletic guy And for years, he comes from an athletic family, and he could have been a football player, but he suddenly got this back problem. And for, I don't know, 10, 15 years, he's had this back problem where he has to carry around his special chair and has to walk very fast in order to

[38:00]

do that, and he's on his back a lot, and so he's learned to live on his back, primarily. So, he's living in Colorado now, so we talk by phone, but he said to me the other day, he said, how do I, he does this, he said, how do I practice, you know, I know how to practice in the Zendo and all that, but how do I practice when I'm not? And he tells me all these things he does. And he's a great practitioner, but he doesn't know it. He doesn't know that he's a great practitioner. One of my, the person who, I'm not saying who this person is, because I didn't ask her to tell, you know, of course I could tell you, but she has Parkinson's. And She's had Parkinson's for 10 years or something like that.

[39:02]

And everything she does, every movement and moment of her life, she has to calculate how to move. She does well. She really does well. And she's always smiling. When I'm with her, I do a lot of joking about her condition and she laughs. And so we have a great time with humor because humor elevates things. It opens everything up where it'd be so easy to just shut down, which is what most people do. In her case, most people would be gone, but she is very buoyant It's amazing. Totally amazed.

[40:04]

But this is our practice. I got a fortune cookie the other day. I was going to bring it and use it as an opening, but I forgot it. It's like adversity entering will purposely, or not purposely, but willingly enter adversity is the noblest thing. So that's probably enough. I could keep talking all day, but I have to know that there's a beginning and an end. If you want to ask a question or something, continue, we'll be in the dining room.

[41:13]

Thank you for listening to this podcast offered by the San Francisco Zen Center. Our Dharma talks are offered free of charge, and this is made possible by the donations we receive. Your financial support helps us to continue to offer the Dharma. For more information, please visit sfzc.org and click Giving. May we fully enjoy the Dharma.

[41:49]

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