There you are, to taste the truth of all of Together's words. Good morning. Last week, if you were here, you found most of us from the residential community not here. We were at a retreat at Green Gulch, an annual event where we try to open up and discover how better we can practice together as a community. One of the things that arose in the discussion is that to the people here today, one of the students said we should be more attentive, we should honor, we should respect more the beginners who come to Page Street, because this is Beginner's Mind Temple, as Suzuki Roshi named it. And I thought that was a very prescient and good suggestion to make,

[01:09]

because sometimes those of us who are professionals take it for granted that the newcomers will just sort of catch on as we go along and catch up. But it places me under a much greater obligation in speaking this morning. As some of you know, that's something I can do even in my sleep. Because now I see that there may be someone in this room, as there have been in the past, who came to Page Street and he did not or she did not even know the name Shakyamuni Buddha. This has happened. So how am I going to speak in the presence of such a one, in a way that will not further confuse them or repel them? What can I say that would encourage them to come and be with us not just for a Saturday morning?

[02:14]

What makes it so difficult is that the same thing that I say could have diverse reactions on the part of the listener. I could say something that would attract and I could say something that would repel. And so I'm walking quite a tightrope. The talk that I was going to try to give, even before I came to that memory of last week, was inspired by a casual encounter with a discussion, or not a discussion, a report on the radio about sound bites and how basic they are to the political success or failure of people because if you construct a 20 or 30 second statement and do it really very well, you can reach out and grab somebody and make them part of your entourage politically.

[03:17]

But what interested me most, we all know about sound bites, read my lips. It's the economy, stupid. What interested me most was not that aspect of it, which as a writer in the business for many years I understand, but why they work. And it was fairly simple. Most of us are so caught up in the everyday responsibilities of our lives, getting home through the traffic, finding that the dog has just thrown up over the living room rug. The children are demanding a certain tape from the TV star and so on. In that life we try to somehow engage with the greater society, pay a little attention to the big events of the day, and when someone can give it to us in a neat little package, we feel that we somehow or other have touch base and can now let that aspect of our lives go.

[04:21]

We now know what the situation is until the next day. If we don't go any deeper than that, we slip from one sound bite to another. These sound bites work because somehow or other they connect with things we already know but have not given expression to. We don't really understand, but we do respond from some deeper place than the superficiality might indicate. And then I realized this is the way we live our lives, not just in the presence of TV sound bites. And so I would like to develop this morning a personal experience with a sound bite that came upon me years before there was anything like television. Those of you who may remember, I hope people don't remember, but if anyone remembers my last talk, I explained how I had come to the end

[05:29]

of a 70-year difficulty with a sound bite, which I got from the Bible. Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God. It took me 70 years to start as a 5-year-old, pursue that sound bite through my life, and finally get rid of it. And it was a wonderful relief, because the energy that I had bound up when trying to hold on to that sound bite and relive the rest of my life was now free to do other things. And for a couple of weeks, I was right on top of everything and feeling great. And then the old symptoms came back, and I realized that, as the teacher said, the problem solved was the problem revealed. And so I will get to the story of the second sound bite. As the first one, it took place in my grandfather's house. He was an immigrant from Germany, penniless when he came here.

[06:30]

He had enough money to be the rector of a bank, have the largest art gallery in New York City, take two and three trips to Europe every year, have servants in the house. In other words, I guess I was born with a silver-plated spoon in my mouth. But there were certain aspects of that life that, as a child, began to puzzle me, and after puzzling me, to disturb me. And I guess the easiest way to bring it all together is to talk about the pairs. On this great old house, behind which the field stretched in Long Island Sound, there was a garden, and in the garden there were three pear trees. Their fruit was not very good. If you picked them too green, they were almost inedible.

[07:37]

If you waited for the right time, they rotted. And so we took those pears, and we put them up, as we said in those days, in jars. And there were rows of pears down in the root cellar from those trees, which we never got around to eating. And that puzzled me very much. Then, as the community began to develop from a country into a town, a road, a street was surveyed on the side of our property, and lo and behold, those three pear trees were now not ours anymore. They were outside the property line. But still my grandmother sat by the back window to see where people would not steal the pears. And one day she called me, and raced out of the house, and there was some, what we called in our superior German attitude,

[08:40]

shanty Irish. They were up in the tree with her boy, three boys and a servant, and they were shaking those trees, and the green pears were falling down, and what they were going to use them for, of course, was for a pear fight, right? And she screamed at them, and the dog barked, and I'm standing in the background with the gun, which was a .22 rifle my uncles used to use to shoot the rats in the chicken yard. Now, the boys knew that there was a slug lodged in the barrel, but it didn't work. So, no matter how often my grandmother said, shoot, shoot, I fortunately kept shooting. But the idea of defending our possession of pears, that were no longer ours, with a gun, was a little hard to take. But I understood the situation pretty well, as a child could in those days.

[09:46]

But the real clincher came the next year, when a little Italian man, with a large push cart, came to the back door and said, the pears are falling, and would you please ask your grandmother if I could pick up the pears. So I went into the house, and I reported the situation, and she said, no, those are our pears. And I had to go out and confront this man, and tell him that my grandmother said no. And then it came to me, in one of those epiphanies of life, my more is his less. And soon all of the good things, the trips, the vacations, the food, all of these things suddenly appeared in a much different light than they had before. They weren't givens anymore, they were takens. And so that sound bite,

[10:51]

my more is their less, became one of the main forces in directing my life. And out of that, I puzzled a bit. I listened very closely, I read the newspapers. I tried to find out why this should be so. And I discovered that there were certain things about life that children weren't supposed to know. They were eroded sometimes in racist remarks at the table. They were referred to in discussions of the dirty and the ignorant and the foreigners. My grandfather was an immigrant. But there were foreigners who were of a different color. They lived further south than Germany. There were no black people in our community at that time. And I got to the idea that you defended yourself with guns, not just against the people who wanted the pearls,

[11:55]

but in a periphery, in a circle, you, what do you call it, circle the wagons. And I decided then and there, I would learn everything about everything, so that I could do something about that situation that I found so puzzling. And probably this all reached its ultimate in a childhood experience by the time that we were on the 20th Century Limited. There were no planes in those days, and we were going to Chicago. And it came out of the underground in New York at about 120th Street, which is Harlem. And it stopped for probably a light up the track. And there I was, face to face, through the third-story window of an apartment house with a little black boy my age, or my size at least, and no further away than from here to those windows.

[12:55]

And he looked at me, and I looked at him, and I could see through the window that there was nothing in the apartment. None of the pictures and statuary and drapes that were in my house. And because he was in the corner apartment in the train yourself position, I could look down the Harlem Street, and there were no green grass, and there were no towering trees. And we sat there, each looking at the other, and I found myself saying, if I had to live like that boy, I would get a gun. Now here is a privileged child, raised in the lap of luxury. Where did that come from? So as things went on, I did what many people of my class, my liberal class, did.

[13:56]

They entered into the area of political action to do something for that little boy in the window. And of course I was one of those. But most of those people found a place beyond which they would not go in that effort. They preserved their own social position. And in my case, as I've told many times, I will not continue to bore you with today, I went further into a radical position. I lost my job, I lost my status in the community, my family was distorted, Branch had to go to work, etc. and so forth. So in all of this, I found myself working in the kitchen, in the restroom. And it's a dull night, and the staff is standing around swapping slurries.

[15:00]

And the maker D was out on borough for transporting stolen securities across state lines. The night porter was out on borough for burglary. A couple of the raiders were in and out of jail, they told me, because of prostitution. And here I am. I want to be one of the boys, right? So I tell them about my story, how I'm under conviction of contempt of Congress, and I'm looking at six months in jail and a $10,000 fine. And that sort of got them, they said, well, what did you do? And I try to explain that I supported the First Amendment in the presence of the American Activities Committee. What is the First Amendment? And so we got into discussion about that. And I happen to also to have mentioned that I once had a job where I ate in restaurants on the other side of the wall

[16:04]

and reported on them on my radio program. So this one black guy looked at me and he said, let me get this straight, man. You gave up all of that for any bitty piece of paper? And I said, well, I wouldn't call the Constitution United States for any bitty piece of paper, but yes. And he says, man, you need psychiatric care. We're trying to get out of this bleeping kitchen. So I have not forgotten those people. I have not forgotten the people I knew aboard ship, their descendants are out in the street in the morning, the silent sounds, sometimes gunshots, violent arguments. I'm living in my old house, this beautiful place

[17:04]

where the food is great and everything is clean and everything is just wonderful. And that world is now coming closer to me. And it has battered me for the 25 years that I have been trying to practice. People said, look, under the conditions then, you did the best you can. Why don't you just drop it? After all, who are you to save the world? You paid your dues, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And confronted with the situation as it is now, I had to be human. What am I to do with the world as it is and the age that I am? What is left for me to do about it? But always the doubt remains. A teacher has said, one remains a child of his age even in what one deems to be one's very own. Nothing in my story is unusual.

[18:06]

This is the way the world is, as Suzuki Roshi would remind us, things as it is, things as it is. My world, the day I was born, 20,000 men died between breakfast and lunch in one of the battles in 1915 on the Western Front. Today my world includes Cerro Verde, Chiapas, Chechnya, and you name it, there's a long list, right? The California poet Robinson Jeffords wrote, It is certain that the world cannot be stopped or saved. It has changes to accomplish and must creep through avenues toward a new discovery. It must and it ought. This is the offer of necessity. It is also a sacrificial duty. Man's world is a tragic music, and it is not played for his happiness.

[19:07]

Its discords are not resolved but by other discourse. Who am I to save that world? I remember once sitting in this exact same place that I had referred in my talk to some horror in Africa pre-dating Rwanda, and found myself saying, Suzuki Roshi said, If your children are dying and there's nothing you can do for them, 6,000, and I said, Then those are my children as much as the ones that call me grandfather and father. If your children are dying, 6,000. Then I had a sudden memory. We used to, I'm sure many of you were with me on them, did peace marches that we did in San Francisco

[20:10]

and those that were there when the bombs were about to fall, massive amounts of people moving down Market Street, and I was in one of those parades once, I don't know the exact year, but they were repetitive, it was like family reunions, we all got together and saw all the people we hadn't seen since last year, and I said to myself, What are you doing? And I stepped to the side of the curb and watched the parade go past, and I was holding a flower. Someone behind me who knew me in the parade took a picture of this dripping man and this dripping flower. I think that is the place where I took my first step towards Zen Center even before I knew that it was here. I remember the time that my grandfather, when I stood in front of a rice dog still smoking,

[21:11]

he said, Take a good look around, you won't see a Jew or a communist left alive in Germany in a few years. This is 1933. And always the boy in the Harlem window, always this montage of these people coming by. Now there is this card, someone who lives by vow, and having not preferred by vow to serve the world, the question arises, How can I possibly serve sentient beings? At least the world is a known quantity and the time involved is precise, but serving all beings? What about now? And they said, Well, there's a problem that runs in the family because my four-year-old plus two-months-grandchild said the other day, You know, if I hadn't been born, I wouldn't be having all these troubles. So I came home from that child care session,

[22:29]

pretty roughed up. I don't think any Roshino teacher has quite gotten to me the way my grandson did. And someone had given Branch a tape of Roshino, Julie Harris, the actress, reading Emily Dickinson, and I needed something to calm me down. So I listened to Emily, with whom I have quite an intimate association. But there was one on the tape that I had never heard before. I would have liked to have played you Julie Harris's recitation of this poem. I'm not going to try to imitate her, I'll just give you what Dickinson said. I reason Earth is short

[23:31]

And anguish absolute And many hurt But what of that? I reason we will die The best vitality cannot excel decay But what of that? I reason that in heaven Somehow it will be even A new equation given But what of that? I reason Earth is short And anguish absolute And many hurt But what of that? I reason we will die The best vitality cannot excel decay But what of that? I reason that in heaven Somehow it will be even A new equation given But what of that? And what struck me personally about that

[24:33]

was that I had always been looking for a new equation. There was the Christian equation which sustained me for 17 years and the Leninist equation that sustained me for another 17 and the Marxist equation that sustained me for 17 years and the Buddhist equation that sustained me for another 17 years and it does not sustain me anymore. Because what I have been doing and he would say Looking for heaven Somehow it will be even Let me talk about an even playing field whenever it cliches that you hear Someday, somewhere, somehow it's going to be even and a new equation will be given and everything will be alright But what of that? Teacher has said Perhaps it takes us to the bottom of the heart but Zen knocks the bottom out I think Emily came as close as she ever did

[25:35]

to the bottom and that thin membrane that separates us from the universal condition Another poet said One must choose between perfection of the work and perfection of the life to which a philosopher replied Let us then become artists of life and another poet said The progress, the progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice a continual extinction of personality a continual extinction of personality and here the poets come very close to the Buddhist position To study Buddhism is to study the self and to study the self is to go beyond the self and be awakened by all things

[26:37]

Should, if it's not obvious, point out that when Emily says I reason, I reason, I reason that is exactly that it is that we do We figure it out We start out by saying if I had not been born I wouldn't be having all these troubles and you take off and move no matter what direction you go into that's it and you think and you reason and you worry and you figure and you suffer because what you are trying to do is to maintain a point of view a Christian point of view, a humanist point of view a Buddhist point of view a point, a point, you know These questions, these koans that life throws at us I refer to as hitching posts for donkeys Yes I hitched myself to a post

[27:42]

That's what it would appear and how promotional she got and those dog leashes that they've got now that I'm, I'm, I'm go for my that I'm still off the leash But, as the sutra says when the basis is reached and the approach comprehended true eternity still flows and if we are able to unhook ourselves from our donkey hitching posts and free ourselves into true eternity then all of this stuff that I have been boring you with for the past 35 minutes is irrelevant who cares that's all the fuss about So no matter what can be said by a poet, by a priest by a scientist, by an artist that flow can never be contained

[28:45]

It doesn't matter how tight you weave the mesh of your net when you try to reach out and catch the flow it will go right through you can't do it When I read the or heard the Emily Dickinson poem I remembered a haiku by Isa He is one of the noted haiku poets of Japan He's not put on the same scale as someone like Basho for instance He was a common ordinary man He was not an intellectual He was not an artist He was married and married his children and they all died all except one who he never saw because she was born after his death

[29:46]

And he wrote a haiku about the death of one of his children Like a dream, like a bubble and yet, and yet You see in the Diamond Sutra it's written As a dream, as a bubble should our life be viewed Notice please that it did not say our life is a dream or a bubble but it should be viewed as that Like a dream, like a bubble and yet, and yet and but what of that you see that but what of that and that and yet, and yet that seems to be the place where if we are persistent in our practice we can live in the midst of anguish absolute and many hurt or in the presence of death

[30:51]

without having to go to heaven and find a new equation You know I've said it so many times this Basho is what it's all about this is right, this is left this is right, this is wrong this is good, this is bad this is heaven, this is hell and you can carry that through all the dichotomies but when you know that they arise out of the womb then you can deal with them they are not the some all and be all they are just something that comes up out of the and yet, and yet they come up in the form of the death of your child they'll come out in the form of um, but what of that it will work it will work

[31:39]

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