If you need to move up or shuffle around, do it now, so we'll be less distracted later. I'm sorry that I opted to sit down, I mean, I'm not sorry that I opted to sit down, but if it's hard for you... This subject, as you know, is the meeting of Buddhism and American culture, which is a vast subject, and I'm not prone, except when I absolutely have to do it. I'm not prone to writing scholarly papers, so what I thought I would do is talk tonight from my own experience about the meeting of Buddhism and my work, and then talk a little more generally about some of the things I see happening right now in Buddhism. I guess I should start by saying that I've been writing seriously for forty-five years, I've been sitting for almost thirty-two years, and during that time a lot of different things

[01:09]

happened between me and Buddhism, so it's not really that simple, you know, but I'll try to talk about a little of it, and I'd like to start by reading a short poem called Tassajara, 1969. Even Buddha is lost in this land. The immensity takes us all with it, pulverizes and takes us in. Bodhidharma came from the West. Coyote met him. When I was a young writer in New York, eagerly pursuing every piece of information I could get about any of the arts, one of the things that was very current and very much about, and very much part of what was shaping the aesthetic of the time were D.T. Suzuki's essays on Zen Buddhism, and they were, of course, and we took them as quite theoretical and grist

[02:22]

for like our aesthetic mill in some way, and we found ourselves using many ideas of, well, it came down to one idea, which was that really if you were placed in yourself in the moment, you weren't going to make a mistake, and we used that on the stage in all kinds of works. Merce Cunningham and John Cage were, of course, pioneers of this, but my immediate mentor was James Waring, who was a student of Merce's for a while, and of Anna Halpern's out here. He was a choreographer, but I learned more about the composition of the poem from him and from Eisenstein's film form, incidentally, than I ever did from a book about poetry, and Jimmy Waring was very involved in this idea of what later, some 20 years later, Chögyam Trungpa wrote about as Dharma art, the sense of being in a state of placing yourself

[03:30]

at center and then allowing the work to happen, not fighting with it, not spending a lot of time criticizing it, and so on, and this came, there was a feeling in us that it had something to do with being on that center, but we really weren't sitting or anything, but there was a way where all of us had found a way to get there, at least for performance. I remember that very distinctly. So this was going on, and with it a lot of reading about the East, but not really practicing. I hesitate this, there would be little stabs at one kind of thing or another, but there was no practice world in New York in the 50s that I knew about. There was, of course, the Zen Institute, First Zen Institute, and so on, but that was for very rich people. We didn't bother with that. Anthony Tudor went there, so it wasn't for us ragamuffin beginning artist types. So all that changed in the early 60s. I

[04:40]

came out to the West Coast in 1962 on some kind of personal saga, but let me read some poems, a couple of poems from that 50s stuff first before I take you further, that I think have a little of that taste of at least the study of Zen, the study of Zimmer's philosophies of India, the study of whatever was available at that time. It was a little later that Govinda was available. This is a poem for Cecil Taylor called the I Ching. Mountain and lake, the breakup of configurations. All the Persian rugs in the world are doing a dance, or conversely, smoke. Outside my window, the hoods are shouting about Thai Cob. On Friday night, it was girls and they were drunk, but the white car stays the same that they lean against. This is a sort of, I guess I have a lot of things I call love poems that are really sort of anti-love

[05:53]

poems or non-love or, well, no, that's not right. This is a love poem of that same kind of flavor. It's called Numbers Racket. When you take no for an answer, will you look any different? Will you get pale behind your glasses? Will you go backward with that funny step? Will you straighten your jacket? I mean, are you taking it now, taking no for an answer? That was a flavor of that sort of. And then what happened to me was in 1962, I was out on this coast pursuing various strange personal dramas. And in the process of that, I met Suzuki Roshi, Shinryu Suzuki. And as soon as I met Suzuki, something I had wondered about for the whole

[06:59]

first stormy kind of 28 years of my life, which was that whether it was possible to meet someone that you could really completely trust in a human form. There's such a thing as a human you could trust. I didn't start out in a very good situation and leaped out of it at the age of 18, full of anger, and spent 10 years being a young artist in New York using that anger to propel me through things, using it very well, I think. But nevertheless, that's what it was. And when I laid eyes on this man for the first time, just that whole thing solved itself. And I knew that whatever this person was doing, that's what I wanted to do. And I've often said that it could have been apple picking, could have been plumbing, whatever it was, that's what I was going to do. I was only here briefly at that time. In San Francisco. But when I left, Dick Baker, who was very much around and very much

[08:11]

a Suzuki's assistant at that point, told me to walk into the Zendo and take any Zabuton and Zafu I wanted and take them with me, which I did. Back to New York. I probably still owe them. But Dick said I could have them. And began to sit regularly because I had started to do that the brief time I was here. And that became a journey that whenever I found myself on the West Coast, I would get up and get to, I didn't drive in those years. I would hitchhike up to Zen Center at five o'clock in the morning and go sit up on Bush Street. And stuff started changing. And it started changing very slowly. I think that one thing that people are unprepared for is how when you begin to sit, there's a period of time when you really, I think many people have told me this, but I don't know if it's true for everyone. You really don't make much creative work. There's a period of time when you're shifting,

[09:11]

the shifting of gears is such that you're not engaged, those things are not engaging. And it was a couple of years of sort of it slowly coming back in one way and another. And I experienced that twice. I experienced that when I first began sitting and then when I moved out here in 68 to sit, to be with Roshi partly. I was here for two reasons, to be with Roshi and to work with the diggers. That happened again at that point. And I could only write the very littlest things. I remember one session, I hid a little notebook in a dresser in the ladies room. And whenever I could, I would go to the bathroom and go and scribble a tiny little poem or a little drawing and go, because you weren't supposed to be doing that during session and go back to the cushion. I don't know what happened to that notebook. It just sort of went its way. But I think when things start up again, they're just different.

[10:12]

And so the work was very different. And I'll read you a little of it again. This is 1964. And I'm in upper New York state living with Alan Marlowe. And we're both sitting in some kind of way or other, whatever we were doing. And oh, sure. It's page 55. It's called The Bus Ride.

[11:13]

I thought at first it was from the shore of Sicily you had taken me, coming out of some feudal hall on the Baltic Sea. But the memory is older. Was it the shore of Crete you plundered in your tartar coat and that strange leather hat? I know that you took me north and away from the sea, as I ride now in this bus, that I mourned a little for my painted cloth and fine enameled chests. Did you take me from China, out of India, to the sweep of the Gobi Desert, tents heavy with plunder, where I longed for my books and the sound of my own tongue, the saris with gold enwoven? You were brave and kind to me, taller than any man of my own race. I slowly learned to love you, as I am learning now. Our tartar sun plays in Kirhansen in his chilly room, in these northern mountains where you have taken me. The silk screens covered with

[12:18]

calligraphy, poems of the old time I set up about me, came down in that desert wind. Coming upon you in morning meditation, I find in your eyes the light of the first man, greeting the winter sun at the edge of the world. I think that, I'm going to talk about this a little later, but I think that no matter what we, no matter what else it is, American Buddhism is going to be a matter of a great eclecticism. It's going to have a lot of stuff in it, all kinds of stuff. And at that point for us, for me, I wasn't really involved in totally sorting out the strands. I had studied a lot of Hinduism before I studied Buddhism, and that was there for me still too. And in this life we were living at

[13:25]

that point, there was a lot of sitting and there was also a lot of psychedelic drugs. And the combination was very interesting. It really brought things to a point very fast. Instead of unfocusing things, in fact, it seemed to focus them. So, this is a poem. It's got Shiva in it, but I call it Buddhist New Year song. And it's really as much as you can write a poem about such a thing, about a New Year's Eve LSD trip in 1965. And it has a tangle of these things in it, whatever it has. Buddhist New Year song. I saw you in green velvet, wide fold sleeves. Oh, I'm sorry, that's 56, next page. Buddhist New Year song. I saw you in green velvet, wide full sleeves,

[14:26]

seated in front of a fireplace. Our house made somehow more gracious. And you said, there are stars in your hair. It was truth I brought down with me to this sullen and dingy place that we must make golden, make precious and mythical somehow. It is our nature. And it is truth that we came here, I told you, from other planets where we were lords. We were sent here for some purpose. The golden mask I had seen before that fitted so beautifully over your face did not return, nor did that face of a bull you had acquired amid northern people, nomads, the Gobi Desert. I did not see those tents again, nor the wagons, infinitely slow on the infinitely windy plains, so cold every star in the sky was a different color, the sky itself a tangled tapestry glowing. But almost I could see the planet from which we had

[15:28]

come. I could not remember then what our purpose was, but remembered the name Mahakala in the dawn. In the dawn confronted Shiva, the cold light revealed the mind-born worlds as simply that. I watched them propagated, flowing out, or more simply, one mirror reflecting another, then broke the mirrors. You were no longer in sight, nor any purpose. Stared at this new blackness, the mind-born worlds fled, and the mind turned off, a madness or a beginning. So those years in the early 60s for me were like a time when I was sitting mostly on my own, connecting with Suzuki Roshi when I could, but I always wanted

[16:29]

to move back out to San Francisco. San Francisco when I first saw it in 61 was the most amazing place in the universe. It's not now anything like a shadow of what it was, but I mean almost every tenement had something like beveled glass doors or you know just it was a enchanted city the way Venice is. But I also especially wanted to move back out to San Francisco because I needed to sit with people. Sitting by yourself when you haven't sat much is confusing and doesn't get you very far. So finally we moved out in 67, but we couldn't stay because Alan decided that this was a terrible place and not glamorous and we had to go back to New York. And so we went back to New York via New Mexico, which also wasn't glamorous. And then the next year I got him to go

[17:30]

away on a little trip taking all our remaining credit and go with it and he went to India. And I moved the entire family to San Francisco without telling him that I had left New York. He was in India and we just moved out here. And a lot of it was so I could be going to Zen Center every morning. A lot of it also was because in those two years when I came out in 67 and coming out again in early 68 there was a lot to do with the diggers. I mean there's a lot of stuff I could do with the diggers like readings and organizing and it seemed very exciting to me. I have an anarchist grandfather and I grew up in a world that that was the strongest closest thing I had ever encountered among the adults in my world to a faith was my grandfather's anarchist. My parents were agnostics and so on. And so it was very exciting to come and do that and I moved out with 14 grown-ups

[18:35]

and all their accompanying kids and dogs and one rifle and one electric typewriter. Somebody gave me both of those at my going away party. They said those were the two things I'd need in the West. I don't know what happened to the rifle. And yeah some of us flew and some of us drove and we all converged on this 14 room house on Panhandle. It was $300 a month that we had rented ahead of time. And I started sitting every morning and seeing Suzuki Roshi very often and sitting session and going to Tassajara some of the summers. I came out in 68. I had my youngest child in 70 and then the summer before I had him I spent the summer there in the previous one so 70 and 69. And I don't know you know at that point there was a lull time and then stuff

[19:43]

happened like the poem I opened with, little short poems. Another one of those is this one. Like wind dispersing, like some huge blood offering to the North American landscape, we are being eaten. Our puny European arts ground to powder. As the Rockies erode, the desert spreads to the sea. And so there were a couple of years of the incredibly precious time and closeness here and sitting every day and all that. Part of the time I lived just up the street here at 436 Page. Doesn't seem to be able to get away from this neighborhood. I've been around it a long time and I found that the work did and didn't. I never wrote directly very often or very much about

[20:47]

Buddhism. I never wrote, oh this is the Dharma kind of poems. Although right now I'm doing that some and I'll read you some of those. Not this is the Dharma but I'm doing workshops called the Poetics of Loss where we all write our death poem as if we were going to die right this minute. And doing that repeatedly over and over again is very interesting. I think soon I'll have death poems for every month of the year and I might put out a book of them. I have death poems in August and September and October. See where it goes. Let me just read you a few poems and then I'll talk a little about other stuff. So my oldest daughter Jeannie in 1970 was 13 and she had moved out of my house and into Yvonne Rand's house because she liked it better there. And she spent part of that summer at Tassajara and I wrote her, she's a triple Scorpio, and I wrote her this poem. Letter actually is a letter

[21:50]

but it turned out to be a poem that happens sometimes. Letter to Jeannie at Tassajara. Dry heat of the Tassajara Canyon. Moist warmth of San Francisco summer. Bright fog reflecting sunrise as you step out of September's endo. Heart of your warmth, my girl, as you step out into your Vajra pathway, glinting like your eyes turned sideways at us. Your high knowing 13-year-old wench smile. Flicking your thin ankles you trot toward adventure, all sizes and shapes. Oh, may it be various for you as for me it was. Sparkle like dust motes at dawn in the back of gray stores, like the shooting stars over the Hudson, wind in the Berkshire pines. Oh, you have landscapes dramatic like mine never was. Uncounted caves to mate in, my Scorpio. Bright love like fire, light up your beauty years on these new jagged hills.

[22:57]

In 71, in one of those lay ordination ceremonies, I got my name from Suzuki and wrote this on the way back, very simple. I say my new name over and over, coming home from the temple. Then all of a sudden, just like that, I found myself on the road and it hardly has stopped. Recently I asked the Lama that is my teacher now, Lama Tarchen, about teaching. Not wanting to especially take on any more of it and he goes, oh of course you should teach, how wonderful to be able to help sentient beings. Tarchen, Lama Tarchen, he's down in near Santa Cruz. So I found myself on the road endlessly and it was kind of scary because I had never really

[24:12]

encountered the middle of the country, just the two coasts and the first place I was plunked down was Wyoming and aside from the fact that everybody drank all the time, there was the fact that every weekend at least one or two people were killed in the bars in Casper where I was teaching and I had kids in the classroom that when you ask them to write about, to make up a planet, they would have a planet that had belts all over it and anything that went near it had welts and it was named dad, stuff like that, you know, it was a really scary place to be. I mean I had one kid whose hands were completely maimed, her mother had held them in a fire to punish her for stealing food from the refrigerator for her baby sister and then after she came out of the hospital the judge gave her back to the same mom. So it was like an interesting place to be all of a sudden, you know, from the two coasts and really just a world of either art or meditators, you know, and art can be rough and rowdy but it's not like that, you know, the art world is not like that and so

[25:18]

I had a lot of things to learn and one of them was to really not see these folks as different and I wrote a lot of poems during the process of assimilating all this, you know, and this is one of them, it's called Sixth Notebook Incantation. Ping-ponging back and forth across America, starting small grass fires where I land in Minnesota jail, Wyoming community college, high schools of South Tucson, may I always remember the Bodhisattvas, sitting down in BIA cafeteria, may I cut hamburger with the sword of Manjushri, pluck lotuses on windy Nebraska hills, set jewels of locust fire around my neck after I brush my teeth in steam heated dormitory bathroom, pure light of ancient wisdom stay with me like a follow spot, pierce my armored heart, clean cobwebs of plastic food and deadened eternal sorrow. How do you like it here? I like it very much.

[26:22]

That's what they ask you everywhere. How do you like it here? So it's important. Another one, I'll read a few more travel poems. This ends with, I forget the name of who it is now, a death song of one of the Crow Indians, the last lines of this one. It's called Brief Wyoming Meditation. I read, oh I keep not telling pages. He went away. Okay. I read, Sand Creek Massacre, white antelope scrotum became tobacco pouch for Colorado volunteer. I see destitute prairie, short spiny grass and dusty wind and all for beef too expensive to eat. I remember at least two thirds of you voted for madman Nixon were glad to bomb the gooks in their steamy jungle and I seek, I seek, I seek the place

[27:28]

where your nature meets mine, the place where we touch. Nothing lasts long, nothing but earth and the mountains. Another travel poem on a different note. It's called Tara at Grand Rapids. I think she was about five when I took her to the National Poetry Festival, my youngest daughter. One, on the airplane she said, I feel stretched. Where? I asked and she laid her hand on her crown chakra. Two, this morning we walked to breakfast. Birds were singing, holy, holy, holy, holy. She whispered, that's what they're saying. Holy, holy, whole wheat. Well anyway, whole wheat is holy too. So I don't know, you know, I could read more poems, talk a little about. Yes, I think I

[28:44]

will read this poem. I don't want to go too late because I want us to have questions too if they want, but one of my trips, maybe my last trip, I was in a motel in Riverton, Wyoming. They loved me in Wyoming. They made me come back every year. The ranchers loved me because I told them exactly what I thought and I wore long wool skirts and boots and I don't know, I just went back there every year for about seven years and worked and this was the last year and I was in a motel in Riverton and it was hunting season and the motel was full and everybody that was arriving was arriving with bloody antlers or heads in the back of the truck and everyone was drunk. There were lots of really wild looking women and it was kind of weird, I would say actually, but then you know

[29:48]

I'm a city person and that night I had this big room with two king size beds and I went to sleep to all these parties going on and I dreamed, the only dream I had that night, I dreamed that Suzuki was sleeping in the other bed all night and I woke up and the beginning of this poem was in my head and I wrote it as much as I could because I could just hear it and then I had to stop because I had to drive clear across the state that day so I put the rest of it on the tape machine as I drove and finished it then. It's fairly long, it's called Wyoming Series. In October all the Bodhisattvas come to Wyoming. They sleep beside the hunters in motels. They hover at daybreak by springs and waterholes, whispering warning to the antelope. In October the hunters feel fine. They are warm with blood. They are warm with whiskey and able to make love once more to their women who stroke them with antlers still red at the stump.

[30:53]

A wild excitement fills the men as they enter. They growl like mountain lions. The women taste of blood inside and out. At dawn the Bodhisattvas come to Wyoming. They stand beside motel beds. They gather fumes of this angry loving to turn to pure sorrow. Silver elixir they catch in crystal vials to pour on the headless corpses of antelope in the folds of raw harmonious hills. He said, never shoot a running antelope. Even that much adrenaline poisons the delicate meat. Three, here lizard woman works her tensile claws into sands newly thrust from seafloor and time is a song the land sings. He said, I have midwifed many deaths, she said, and I births. She said, that is why in the old time

[32:05]

the female was named severity and the male mercy. Midwife of death, you open the door of escape. He said, it doesn't pay to eat antelope unless you know to eat prana instead of flesh. This is a love poem to a harsh land. In fall the air of Wyoming is full of angels. They are singing requiem to hunter's children. They are resurrecting paths which cross the land like shimmering lines. The angels clean rifles. They wipe stains from the floors of new Dodge campers. They mend baffles and down bags. They brighten orange jackets and vests and caps. They lie in cold rivers, their wings crossed over their eyes. They are singing requiem to hunter's children. Lizard woman knows what she's doing. She's out in the night bringing a message here,

[33:10]

a warning there. When the prairie is restless she does it by jumping. Star to star she jumps, though she knows in the cold her blood is supposed to be sluggish and she should sleep. The hieroglyphs need to be traced on the stone walls. In Wyoming the lovers shelter out of the wind. They huddle in doorways of broken motels. They huddle in reservation shacks. They weave them nests of promise, spun glass and tonkas. They weave green plants and look at light through the chinks. They huddle in mining tents and company towns. They weave into each other and make the dawn. She said, first birds then trucks. The light poured in. The buck stood in the stream and watched them break the lock. It understood they were not hunters

[34:12]

and so it stayed and watched while they drilled out the lock from the trunk of the car. The deer knew about cars, they hunted, but this one was still. The buck's eyes met the woman's across the water. This is a love poem for women I never touched. In Wyoming the bodhisattvas have turned to stone. We chip at them in canyons by small streams. The woman was hunting. She thought she was hunting rocks. She searched out crevices in the butte for lizards. Snow lay on the edges of things, outlined the mountain. The woman was harvesting rocks. In the air above the water, the deer and the woman drank news from each other's eyes. This is a love poem for men who fell with me from sheer rock ledges into tornadoes of breath.

[35:18]

The men in whose loneliness I encircle myself. In whose eye I explode. In Wyoming the bodhisattvas have turned to stone. They stand like rock walls. They heave themselves from the earth. They tangle the roots of aspen in river canyons. They are the megaliths set by hands so ancient you could not say if they were flesh or spirit. God power or the giants walking soft. In Wyoming the giants still sing in windy canyons. The lovers hear them. It gives an edge to their dreams. So, after Suzuki died in December of 71, I was still sitting and I kind of went back to sitting

[36:27]

on my own and did that for about 11 years. When I was on the road, I would encounter some of the people who had taught here, like Katagiri Roshi, and go see them and ask them questions and check up on what I was doing. Or Covincino or Chogyam Trungpa, who I met at Tassajara in 1970. And I heard him when he talked here. I don't know if you guys have a record of that talk, but you probably do somewhere. But someone asked, it was after all 1970 and we were all very involved in social change. Well, what good is it going to do the world if we sit, just sit here? And he said, well, that's 200 of you or so off the streets and out of the way. And in 74, I started teaching in the summers at Naropa Institute, which he founded in 74, in the poetry program there, which was very chaotic. I have a poem about that,

[37:33]

which I might read if I have time. And then, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. It's called the No Problem Party Poem. And I'm not sure if it's Buddhist. It describes a party in my apartment at Naropa. First glass broken on patio, no problem. Forgotten sour cream for the vegetables, no problem. Louis McAdams' tough lower jaw, no problem. Cops arriving to watch Belly Dancer, no problem. Plastic bags of melted ice, no problem. Wine on antique tablecloth, no problem. Scratchy stereo, no problem. Neighbor's dog, no problem. Interviewer from Berkeley Barb, no problem. Absence of more beer, no problem. Too little dope, no problem. Leering Naropans,

[38:34]

no problem. Cigarette butts on the altars, no problem. Marilyn vomiting in planter box, no problem. Phoebe renouncing love, no problem. Louis renouncing Phoebe, no problem. Hungry ghost, no problem. Absence of children, no problem. Heat, no problem. Dark, no problem. Arnica scattered in nylon rug, no problem. Ashes in bowl of bleached bones and juniper berries, no problem. Lost tea tape, no problem. Loss of temper, no problem. Arrogance, no problem. Boxes of empty beer cans and wine bottles, no problem. Thousands of styrofoam cups, no problem. Gregory Corso, no problem. Allen Ginsberg, no problem. Diane DiPrima, no problem. Anne Waldman's veins, no problem. Dick Gallop's birthday, no problem. Joanne Kiger's peyote and rum, no problem. Wine, no problem. Coca-Cola, no problem. Getting it on in the wet grass, no problem. Running out of toilet paper, no problem. Decimation of pennyroyal, no problem.

[39:37]

Destruction of hair clasp, no problem. Paranoia, no problem. Claustrophobia, no problem. Growing up on Brooklyn streets, no problem. Growing up in Tibet, no problem. Growing up in Chicano, Texas, no problem. Belly dancing, certainly no problem. Figuring it all out, no problem. Giving it all up, no problem. Giving it all away, no problem. Devouring everything in sight, no problem. What else in Alan's refrigerator? What else in Anne's cupboard? What do you know that you haven't told me yet? No problem, no problem, no problem. Staying another day, no problem. Getting out of town, no problem. Telling the truth, almost, no problem. Easy to stay awake. Easy to go to sleep. Easy to sing the blues. Easy to chant sutras. What's all the fuss about? It decomposes, no problem. We pack it in boxes, no problem. We swallow it with water, lock it in the trunk, make a quick getaway, no problem.

[40:39]

I wrote that the next morning as we were driving out of town. So then by 1983, I needed to have a teacher and I needed to, I was doing a lot of work with Western magic and I was doing a lot of work for people and I really felt that I needed the backup of a tradition that understood, that was Buddhist but understood magic. And I talked to Chogyam Trungpa without becoming a student and told him, I think I used those very words, that's how I had phrased it to myself, that I didn't want to give, I couldn't see giving up Paracelsus for Padmasambhava, that I needed to be able to work in my own tradition too. And he said, no problem. And so I began to study at Dharmadhatu and went to seminary in 88 and did a whole

[41:44]

Lundro track, which I finished a year or so ago. So this is a very different practice, as you all know, a very different way of using the mind and the self toward opening than Zen is. But yet I don't think that it would feel so present for me if I hadn't had the 20 years or so of Zen before, you know. And I felt like those 12 years that I was, or 11 years that I was just sitting on my own, I was still working on stuff that Shunryu Suzuki had said to me in my last Dogasans and I still hadn't gotten it straight. I'm not sure that I have by now, but maybe, you know, and that I had needed all that time to absorb stuff that he sort of crammed into the last year or so. I think many of us who were around then had that experience. And so in terms of my own journey, that's sort of it. I thought I'd read

[42:46]

you some poems from when I went to the Vajrayana Seminary and then I would maybe read a few new things briefly. And then I have a couple of things I want to just put out there, things about Buddhism in America in general right now, where we're at or not at or what's going on. But when I was at seminary, I could only write very tiny poems, like when I first started sitting. Seminary at Rocky Mountain Dharma Center consists of two weeks of straight sitting and then 10 days or 11 or 12, something like that, of intensive study of Hinayana. And then about 10 or 12 days of sitting, but with more emphasis on Bodhichitta and that kind of thing. And then 12 days or so of studying the Mahayana, but I mean intensively studying. And of course, you've done a lot of sitting before you went there. And then a whole bunch more sitting and then studying the concepts

[43:49]

in Vajrayana, and then you end with getting a transmission at the very end of it. And it's three very lively months, kind of. It's not quite like anything, like the time-space in any other part of your life, exactly. So anyway, I'll just read you some of these little tiny things I wrote there. This is a book called Seminary Poem. Kobunchino made the cover for me. And that's Marpa Point, which is there and the land where Rocky Mountain Dharma Center is and comes up in the poems and is our highest point of land there. First is Swallow Sequence. With a note at the beginning, the swallow's nest was removed from the shrine tent, quote, it is hoped they will procreate elsewhere, quote. After hearing us take the precepts, the swallows decided it was safe to nest in the shrine tent. We have removed the nests and now what will we tell the Lohan?

[44:55]

When their new eggs hatch, these swallows will teach their young that Buddhists, like all humans, are not to be trusted. These very little guys got in and now it's not so easy to get out, huh, bee? Same for you as for me. Tough little boy, but not too tough to be proud of his ikebana. He had about 70 kids there. They were in class all day doing ikebana and stuff like that. The bald man combs his few hairs respectfully before entering the temple. Pink shorts and purple pack, she marches down the trail, coffee cup in one hand, a conch in the other.

[46:05]

A friend of mine died while I was there. He had actually paid for me to go. He'd been a patron of mine from time to time and I wrote several and they turned out to be one sequence of poems called Peter Hartman's Sequence. Rain falls, my tears do not, walking the trail. This is the first sunset that he will not see. Far from here, friends sit with the body. Making arrangements for his orphaned cat, now for the first time, I come close to tears. Flashlight on the trail. Day off and the sound of a harmonica comes down the path.

[47:13]

Any of you who have been to such places, Tassajaras like that too, there's no music. But day off is day off and the sound of a harmonica comes down the path. As the moon sets, they leave off their studies of emptiness to talk about love affairs more fleeting than foam on the sand. The fourth Buddhist lie, she said, you'll meet someone at seminary and strolled into the twilight with flowers on her hat. This is a very much of a woman's poem. I lie in bed trying not to bleed on the sheets and studying the doctrines of the Yogacharans,

[48:15]

who of course are the mind only school, so how could you bleed on the sheets in the first place? Last day of sitting, we stretch and test our muscles as if going into the 10th round of a championship match. Having tied his orioke wrong at breakfast, he bows to it and does it up again in the post-meditation tent. Her hair in a samurai topknot, she sits in warrior posture in her blue-rimmed sunglasses. The pine shadow falls on the tent wall and I see the shrine as if for the first time. So those are those and I wanted to do a couple of things.

[49:19]

I don't know how much time I really want to take. One is to read you a few of these death poems because I think that for me they're being a very wonderful discipline. It's like each time I look new that moment in my world and what am I saying, what am I doing with it or saying goodbye to or how am I arranging this going business? So here are some of the death poems in October. Turn off the fan. I want to hear my heart before it stops. It's one of them. Here's August. Sorry to leave this mess. Maybe you can sell it. I bow once more at the door. Okay.

[50:23]

Here, take this bottle of echinacea tincture. It didn't help me but... On the road again. This is much simpler than driving to the airport. So many beings. I wish I had bowed more often. Sorry, I won't be speaking at your conference on dead poets. So they're interesting. They're interesting to do. They're very interesting to do. I recommend them as an exercise. Also, when we do the Poetics of Loss, we do a whole bunch of

[51:35]

other kinds of things. We write about all the things we won't get around to in this lifetime, which is very interesting and fun, actually, once you get over realizing that you're disappointed. And then we write to other folks, goodbye poems to people who've gone on and so on, of which I only want to read you a short one called Once More an Elegy. I'm tired of goodbyes. Goodbye. Good night. Did you have a good time? Do you want to take any leftovers? Not very morbid. No, I'm sorry. I have a morbid one. Would you like it? It's actually not a morbid one, but it's a harsher one. It's called A Farewell Rite. You can put down your drugs now, put down your fierce lust. Only the light body travels, east wind blowing you west toward the dark. Put down your fine winds,

[52:39]

your symbols from Sikkim. Light body rises like mist from your swollen corpse. Is that morbid enough for you? No, it's too much. Oh, I'm sorry. What a disappointment. Even that, you see, that was for a fly. Yeah, that's true. Well, I'm sorry. I get D in morbid. I wanted, when I was doing toward the end of Nundro, a lot of stuff was going on, Dharmadhatu and Vajradhatu and all the sanghas in the world, probably, but that was the ones I was aware of it in. And three little, very short poems came at that time. I was just intensely looking at that and at my connection to this lineage and at my whole thing. And so I'm going to just read them. They're called Three Dharma Poems. One. His vision or not, gone is the authority with which he opened his fan.

[53:44]

Two. Raindrops melt in the pond and it's hard to say just what lineage is. Three. My faith, what is it but the ancient dreams of wild ones in the mountains. So maybe I'll stop reading right there, but I'd like to, I have these notes. I wanted to just talk for a little bit about Buddhism and American culture. Very briefly. I think that this is a good place for the Dharma because we're a whole nation of displaced people. And in our displacement, there's something unreal and surreal already about where we are. We're never quite connected to where we are. It's a little bit easier for us in some ways, I notice,

[54:48]

than for, although one can't really generalize that much, than for most of the Europeans I've met to really begin to get a little bit of a handle on emptiness. We're just, it's just not real, our lives, anyway, in some way. And it makes it, it gives us a little edge. Our uncomfortableness gives us a little edge there. So there's that on our side. And then there's like our basic, I've been noticing that we have two, two parts to our way of approaching the Dharma. Two things that are very much part of the American character. One is a kind of wide open, blasted open, anything-goes-ness, where it seems like, you know, even we felt this land was so vast. And so that sense, you know, when Bodhidharma went to the emperor of China, you know that story? And the emperor asked him for the word of the holy truth or some phrase like that. Bodhidharma said, vastness, no holiness.

[55:53]

Vastness, you know, we have that here, in a way. So we're lucky that way too. But, and that's one of the ways, that's one of the ways we approach this whole thing, is from that blasted open place. Which I think we're the first people in the Western culture to get that in a long time. We've been, we were sort of landlocked in the little, little worlds for too long. But the other part of our thingy that we bring to this is the Puritan fathers. We bring a vast amount of wanting the rules and wanting to keep them right, of a kind of rigidity and morality and some basic idea that we can use Buddhism this way. I've seen a lot of that over the last 30 years, a lot of like

[56:56]

using it against our own natures rather than moving with them, you know. So that we use, we use, oh, you know, we'll find, we can find something, just like you can find anything in the Bible, you can find anything in Buddhism. You can find anything in Buddhism and what we're tending often to do is to shape Buddhism toward another Calvinism, you know. And that's really dangerous, I think, because what Buddhism asks us to do is to have, to hold ourselves in that place of uncertainty where there are no final answers, you know. We're asked constantly to stay open. John Keats said something about when a man is capable of staying in doubts and uncertainties without any irritable reaching after fact and reason. I think we need to remember that our reason, if our reason or our morality could have gotten us what we want from Buddhism, we wouldn't be looking at the Dharma.

[57:58]

So if we bring our reason and our Western morality to Buddhism, we're defeating our very purpose in coming to the Dharma. I think this is very tricky at this point. And with that comes another kind of using it against yourself like, you know, beating yourself up for not being perfect at it, but no pain, no gain kind of American Buddhism. This can get pretty tough, you know. So that's part of what I'm seeing around that I wanted to mention. And also, as anybody who's watching anything can see, it's the need for the Dharma and the interest in the Dharma is growing very fast, exponentially, because of the way the world is now. You know, we have plague, famine, and war. And none of them seem to be promising to leave very fast. And what Buddhism gives us is a wonderfully simple way of relating with things as they are,

[58:58]

with life and death, a way to relate with death, a way to relate with pain, a way to relate with each other around these things. And we can do that just by being present and genuine in them. So it's a really important thing. And it's a way also, it gives us permission to have our compassion. Nothing in America gives us permission to have our compassion. You have compassion, you're a sucker. Buddhism gives us permission to be present with our feelings about what's happening and to learn how to stay present by practicing with those feelings. So I think it's like, it couldn't be a more important time for it, you know. I suppose I know that every, in one way, every age has a plague, you know. But here we are. And it seems to me that the three of them, plague, famine, and war, are all escalating at an incredible rate. So then there's some questions.

[59:59]

I mentioned the question about Calvinism and Buddhist Calvinism. Question I have about the kind of Buddhism that fosters theophobia, a word I made up, fear of religions that have gods. You know, it's just, and we have to watch that stuff. I mean, we could think of all these gods as bodhisattvas if we want to sort of just start off by communicating with others instead of holding others at bay and then take it from there. So that's another question. And then, of course, there's a question that's much worked with and by very capable people of where do the women fit into all this? And how do they fit in as leaders and teachers, dharma teachers? And about that, I know many, many people are militantly working on that in many ways. But I just want to remind everyone something Rita Gross pointed out in her book, Buddhism After Patriarchy, that things tend to start more open to women and to close down

[61:05]

as time went on. In other words, although by our standards it wasn't very open, when Buddha was around still Buddhism was more open to women than it became in the next 500 years. So working, looking at how to make sure that the openings stay open and how to do that. And then, of course, the eternal question of how do we make it ours? How does it become American Buddhism? And everybody's always like militantly, you know, it's got to be American Buddhism, you know, at the cost of often too much of the tradition, too much of the teachings. We're so enamored of the notion that we have to make it ours. But I think we can afford to go really slow and take it slow. Because I don't think it's going to become American Buddhism for the next 200 to 500 years. I think 500 is a closer guess. In 500 years from now we'll truly have an American Dharma.

[62:06]

You know, we might have American sadhanas based on American Indian stuff, who knows, you know. We may have sadhanas or teachings that have some root in Christianity. There may be Christian Buddhism. There may be American Indian Buddhism. There may be magical Buddhism from Western magic, you know. All these things blending together. Certainly we're, you know, we're in an eclectic place in an eclectic time. But I think it's good to stick close to what we're given and let it change just because it changes, not because we think about how to change it. If we could get there with our reason, we wouldn't need the Dharma. So if we reason about how to make it American, we're still stuck in the same place, you know. It inevitably will take the shape of this landscape. But all we have to do is practice and be nice to each other. That's what I think. And what we think about, you know, what we think about

[63:10]

all of this, including what I've just said, is all perfectly irrelevant, you know. As you probably noticed, most of our opinions are irrelevant most of the time. So that's about, that's about all. The last note I have here says we don't have to shape American Buddhism. It will shape itself. There is nothing we have to do but practice and be kind. So thank you very much. And yes, that's why I threw these last things out too, as maybe Grist for questions, if anybody, or thoughts, if anybody has any spontaneous insights. I wanted to ask you about the issue of poems. When you were speaking about poems, it was very much the same as you said, making things happen, as they happen, so that you can change them. Absolutely.

[64:13]

I never think about poems. Okay, so it just started happening that you didn't start referring to it? You mean like at seminary? Yes, at seminary, the way the poems came out was short. Yeah, I never think, the long poems happen too. I don't create a poem. I let it come through me. And I think that's part of the part of, I mean, definitely practice helps that, but that goes all the way back to when we were just theoretically studying Zen in the 50s, was simply get out of the way and let the work happen. Occasionally, there are places where I will fix or correct something. There are usually places where I've, when I was receiving the poem in the first place, broken my attention, or veered away from what it wanted to say, and I have to then go back later and make it somehow clear there. Or sometimes there'll be, you know, there'll be other things like that that come up, or I'll be interrupted and go back or whatever. But usually, very often things just come out the way they come out.

[65:16]

There's very little that has to be done. And what has to be done, aside from what I just said of breaking attention, will often have to do with a little fine tuning by the ear. So when you read it, you realize you want an extra the there or you don't. And aside from those two things, no, I don't make poems. You know, they arrive when they arrive. And in between, there's always plenty of other things to work on. You know, like other things that you want to type up, translations to do, prose to write. I don't, I make prose. Except I really don't. I make an idea for prose, though. I don't make an idea even for a poem. But I make an idea for prose and then I let it happen. But with a poem, I don't even have an idea. I have no notion. So, is that answer? Yeah, okay. Oh, the notion of the death poem. People have written death poems forever. And there's a book of Japanese death poems. It's very wonderful and so on.

[66:17]

The notion of the death poem came because I wrote a little short poem to my partner Shepard one day, a little haiku. And then I realized it could also be read as a death poem. It was hard to stay awake. Was there something we were saying? And I realized from that that I could read that that way too, you know. And then the idea, the notion and the idea that I wanted to bring all of this loss and grief that we're all feeling into the workplace when I do a workshop for poetry. And I worked out this whole poetics of loss thing that has four or five different exercises. A death poem is the first. And depending on the age of the group, people take it very seriously. Young people don't like writing death poems. People in their 20s. But when I do it with a, I did it from, I had a private writing group of women

[67:21]

that were all in their 40s and 50s. We giggled our way through the whole day of poetics of loss. It was very interesting to see the difference. American Indian death songs and Japanese death poems were the two things that I started from. Are the Japanese death poems, real death poems? I mean. Most of them, yeah. There's a whole book called Japanese death poems. And it's mostly, you know, that was that tradition in Zen that the master would say last words or write a last poem. I love the master who wrote for his last words, I don't want to die. And all his disciples got very angry and upset. And so he wrote it again. I don't want to die. And then he died. But from that idea of the vast teaching or the death thing, that became also the death poem. And they go way back, yeah.

[68:22]

Sometimes someone will have written it. And they'll say in this book, we suspect that this person had prepared this death poem once in advance. But most of them are traditionally supposed to be written at that last moment. Did you hear what Alan's death poem was? Marlo, no. You mean the Mahayana yoga taxi is coming for me? Yeah. No, the Mahayana yoga taxi is coming for me. Mahayana yoga has arrived, right. And when he said that a week or two before to me too, so he had prepared his death poem. I knew he had prepared his death poem. He had another one too. He said, the longest trip I've ever gone and I haven't got any new luggage. Talk about magic.

[69:30]

Well, I don't practice alchemy in the lab, though I'd like to. So what I'm referring to is Western magic based on the Renaissance Kabbalah type of tradition. Ritual and correspondences and practices that come out of that. Yeah. But when I said I was doing a lot of magic for people, a lot of that was protective work done in trance or ritual work. And sometimes when I would encounter whatever was that I was doing the protection about, I could see that behind this whole thing there was such very large forces that I began to feel that I needed the backup of a teaching, a tradition and a sangha. Because it was getting a little far out. What did you say you didn't want to give up the Padmasambhava? Paracelsus. He's an alchemist and a healer. He was an alchemist, but he was an alchemist who wasn't at all interested in transmuting metals.

[70:33]

What he was interested in was making the cure, the panacea, the cure that would drive out all illness from the center of you on out. I was just thinking about the transformational alchemy and healing. Where did you study alchemy? All over the place. Where is that? No, I studied in Scotland. Did you do lab work? No. I've seen it as working to transform the nature of the person. Oh no, when I talk about alchemy, I'm not talking about psychological alchemy. I'm talking about the actual transformation of matter. Whether it's a physical transmutation of matter, yeah. Whether it's the person that you want to heal or any ripening.

[71:35]

The metals are just one example of the ripening. There's millions of them, you know. If you're good enough, you could do it to the whole planet. Do you mean psychological or physical? Psychological, but you see what's happened is that there's become a reductionism in alchemy. How did we get on this? This is a Buddhist center, guys. There's become this reductionist thing where people try to interpret the whole thing as if it was only psychological. Psychology, the transmutation of the soul, which we don't even have in Buddhism. It's one special case, just like the making of gold is one special case. The making of the elixir is one special case. They're all, you're looking for the essence that's going to ripen or perfect, bring anything to its perfection. And that's what Shakespeare was slipping in there when he said, ripeness is all. In your experience, is the American culture more or less resistant or in another way,

[72:44]

more or less accepting of Buddhism than other cultures that you've been familiar with? Well, I'm not all that, you know, I'm an American and so I'm not all, I can't say that I'm all that familiar with millions of other cultures. I found that in general, talking to someone who's not a Buddhist and trying to express some of these ideas like emptiness or interdependence and so on, it's easier to get some glimmer of understanding from a rancher in Wyoming than from a worker or somebody like that who's European and tends to have more a political materialist analysis of the world. Whereas, we just seem to have like, really, we just don't know where we're at. So, in some way, we're way easier to communicate with. It's easier to talk to people here than it is in Japan.

[73:47]

Yeah, well, it's easier to talk to people here than in Europe. So, that's two answers right there. But you'll find that about not only Buddhism. I mean, you go to the straightest community somewhere in the Midwest and you start babbling about alternative medicine and they're open, you know. You start babbling to a woman, I have a dear friend I have who's my Italian translator from Italy and she won't even go to a chiropractor after two whiplash injuries, you know, because it's alternative. Much less can you babble about the rest of it, you know. There's something, there's something, I don't know. But, you know, I can't say because I wonder, you know, who's bringing Buddhism to the Inuit? And is it easy or hard? I think it'd be pretty easy up there, right in the middle of Shunyata. I don't, so I can't answer that really. Back there, there's a hand.

[74:49]

I was reading the digital co-op and there were some lines that I decided that I'm going to start asking people that are interested in what these lines mean to you. So, I'm going to tell you these lines and then you respond to me, okay? Okay, but this is not a Shuso ceremony. I'm sure, I'm sure you can do this part of the digital co-op. Firewood to firewood does not become ash. Ash is ash and does not become firewood again. Mm-hmm, exactly so. What's the problem? Can you show me the minute between the firewood and the ash? Good luck.

[75:57]

Anybody else? Okay, thank you. Thank you very much. Next month, Jane Hirschfield will be giving a talk in this series. And later this month, Rita Gross will be doing a weekend. I think it's the last weekend in February or something like that. Where, here? Yeah, so stay at home. Can you show me Rita Gross in between then? Would there be any like hour or two hour period? It's a day and a half. Oh, she'll probably do the public lecture. You know, I'd be interested in maybe doing a workshop on death poems. Yeah, that would be wonderful. That would be a good place for it, yeah. Yeah. Most pleasant. Thank you very much.

[77:11]

Thank you very much. Thanks for coming. Yeah. Nice to see you. Yeah, it's great to see you. It's been a long time. Can I get, can you shoot something over to me about the Rita Gross weekend? Yes. I was very sun-dried.

[77:25]

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