This podcast is offered by the San Francisco Zen Center on the web at www.sfzc.org. Our public programs are made possible by donations from people like you. Hi, everybody. I'm Tim Burkett, the guiding teacher at the Minnesota Zen Meditation Center. I'm really happy to be here. I have not been here for about 40 years. More or less, give or take, a year or so. It's great to be back. Great to be back. A little bit about myself. All of my adult life, I've been practicing Zen. I started when I was not quite 21. I became ordained by Katagiri Roshi 35 years ago in Minneapolis. And this book that I'm going to be reading from, this is not really a Dharma talk. This is a book reading, but I'll also talk. This book is an artful... This book, Nothing Holy About It, that's just come out in May, is an artful arrangement of portions of specific talks that I've given over the year by my editor and former student, now peer, Wanda Isle, who did a yeoman's job of transcribing, editing...

[01:22]

and crafting them with the help from others. And so the book is dedicated to everybody who practices, because everybody who practices can return to their original stillness, no doubt about it. I found Zen Center when I was, let's see, 1964. I was supposedly a junior at Stanford University, not doing too well, but I was there. On my spring break, I went to Utah and I was poring over a book called Teachings of the Mystics by W.T. Stace, which is probably still around. Wanda says it's still around. and had not been attending classes very much, had been just going over and over this book. I didn't know about meditation. We didn't know about meditation, but I was doing it in a meditative way.

[02:22]

Is it possible there is a peace that's at the core of all spiritual life? And I had a spontaneous awakening, a spontaneous opening in which Tim just died completely, and there was just nothing. joy and sense of communion with everything, with everything. But as I was going back to Stanford, that started to fall away. And by the time I got back to Stanford, it was just a memory. And little Tim, with all of his worries and concerns and hang-ups about how well he was doing in school, was there. So I thought, well... I should practice. I should see if there's a Zen master in the U.S. This is California. There are lots of Chinese in San Francisco. So I'm going to go up to San Francisco. But I wonder if there is from all those Chinese people, right? So I went up to San Francisco and I looked in the phone booked under Z. Well, that's the thing to do, isn't it?

[03:26]

And there was a Zen bar and a Zen center. I had a hard time deciding. LAUGHTER The Zen bar? The Zen center? Well, I already knew how to drink very well. Too well. Too well. And that hadn't helped my problems at all. So I went to the Zen center, and in those days, you just walked in, and I met the man who became my teacher, Shinryu Suzuki Roshi, my root teacher. I've also had Katagiri Roshi and Kobanchino as my teachers. So that's how this started. Actually, how this book started is that I gathered a group of about 25 vignettes about Suzuki and showed them to Wanda and said, I want to try to get an article in Tricycles. And she said, oh, we should do a book. So she did the book. I didn't do it. And it's about my teaching and it weaves the stories that I've told.

[04:27]

And I'm just going to... Read a few of the stories. I have lots more. I have lots more stories. Mostly about Suzuki. Because I knew him at a time when nobody knew him. A few people. Bill Kwong, Silas Hoadley. This was before Reb Anderson came. A few of us. We had break practice periods down here. David Chadwick, etc., etc. So I'm an old guy. I'm an old guy. So this book is about my journey and about my teaching. It's come out of my journey. So I'm just going to dive into it. This is from a chapter in the book called Cultivating Resiliency. It's the nature of the mind to judge, compare, and complain. It's the purpose of Zen meditation to experience the mind's gyrations directly.

[05:31]

When we turn the mind back onto itself, it starts to slow down on its own. It becomes focused and concentrated. We do it by bringing ourselves back again and again with kind attention, with patient attention. Without kindness and patience, the mind will never settle down. I'm sure you've noticed this. I'm sure you've noticed this. You start to get aggravated because you're sitting facing the wall and your mind is becoming more agitated than less. That's why it takes your kindness and your patience. When I first began my Zen practice, every time I sat down on the cushion, my mind shifted into high gear. One morning, I shared my frustration with Suzuki Sensei. That's what we called him. I asked for a technique to slow down my racing mind. He said... A busy mind is no problem. Just sit, Tim, that's all. Should I repeat something to myself? I asked, thinking maybe a mantra of some kind might help. No, no, just sit. But shouldn't I do something with my mind?

[06:33]

No, no, just come sit with me. He repeated gently. Can't you give me some books to read? He shot me a puzzled look. Why would you want to read a book? I had to go to Naropa to really learn about Buddhism. But to learn about heart-mind, all I had to do was be with my teacher and see that he was manifesting it. Always, always feel it. How often should I sit? I said, every morning and every night. Every morning and every night, and there's no how? So, those of you who know Dogen and you know Soto Zen, there's not too much technique with the mind because technique can get in the way. We're trying to get something through our technique. We're trying to get the calmness. But the calmness is right here. You can't get it. You can't get it. You're going to fail. It's right here. It's right here. But I didn't like that answer at all.

[07:36]

But I said it anyway. Stupid person that I was. You also be kind of stupid to do Zen. Kind of stupid. The next one is Too Much Emptiness, A Cup of Tea. This is from the section titled Too Much Emptiness, A Cup of Tea. After an eight-week retreat at our monastery in Carmel Valley, which was named Tassajara Zen Mountain Monastery, I returned to San Francisco... Was there a yay? Yay! This place is... The one thing that amazes me is how meticulous everything is. I mean, Suzuki's hope was that we become meticulous, but we weren't. But you take care of everything. It's wonderful for someone who's just coming in to feel so taken care of and just notice the...

[08:44]

the care in which you are with everything. It's cool. So after an eight-week retreat at our monastery, I returned to San Francisco and immediately took a bus to the D. Young Museum. This is the old D. Young Museum. It had a fabulous Asian collection. It had the best Asian collection in the world, I think. I don't know what the deal is now, but this was a long time ago. I was still in the afterglow of the long retreat. In a meditative state, I walked through the museum slowly, soaking it all in as I made my way to the Asian section. When I came to the first Buddha statue, I stopped, or rather I was stopped by it, captivated by the peaceful expression that seemed to mirror what I was feeling inside. I felt an incredible stillness emanating from it. When I looked into the Buddha's eyes, they seemed to open up into pure space. I felt as if I were teetering on the edge of something. Instinctively, I turned away.

[09:46]

But just a few feet away, there was another statue. Again, I turned away. But the statues were everywhere. Infantly vacant eyes were everywhere. I was overwhelmed. And by now, completely disoriented. With difficulty, I managed to get back on the bus. To the bus and on the bus. Still disoriented, I headed straight for the Zen Center. Remember, it was a tiny Zen Center then. It was tiny. I stumbled up the stairs and plopped down on the couch in Suzuki's office. He greeted me in a friendly but mildly concerned manner and then asked what was going on. I told him about the statute. The spaciousness emanating from their eyes had pierced me to my core. Pierced me to my core. There were no thoughts bubbling up in my mind. My body felt awkward, unable to adjust to the sudden shift. Which statues, Suzuki asked, which seemed totally irrelevant. But I told him where I had been in the museum and described the statues I saw there.

[10:50]

Let's have a cup of tea, he said. Well, that's the whole section. I went home, and I came to Zaza, and the next morning I woke up, I was fine. And he kind of grounded me by just sitting and having a cup of tea with me. Nothing. And then asking me about the specific statues so that I would be grounded. Because we can get lost in spaciousness. So we think we all want to have an enlightenment experience, but do you really want to have one? It means letting go of everything you know, everything you believe in, everything you are, can be very disorienting. Scary and disorienting. So you have to just sort of ease into this, right? Ease into this. And have a teacher who will sit and have a cup of tea with you when you start to get a little woo-woo. Because there's so much stillness. So much stillness that you can't move.

[11:53]

But you can move. That stillness allows you to move. You're just not used to it. That's all. You're not used to it. You get used to it. It's wonderful. The next section is Living Beyond the Fear Body. Two stories about Suzuki Roshi, Living Beyond the Fear Body. I also have stories in here about Katagiri, but I'm not going to have time. And Chino, I'm going to do one. I'll have time to do one. All of who practice here, for those of you who have been around. And maybe those of you who haven't been around, I don't know. Once, as I was driving Suzuki home after our Palo Alto sitting group, I started the Palo Alto sitting group with him. It morphed into the Los Altos group. He asked me to do it. And so that's Kanando now. It was his idea, not mine. Once, as I was driving Suzuki home after our Palo Alto sitting group, he asked if I would take him to an area in Hillsboro. He wanted to visit a woman who he'd contacted about Buddhism.

[12:55]

He had never met this woman, but he felt he should go visit her. Well, I wasn't too happy about it because I was supposed to be in class, but I did it anyway. His directions weren't good. We drove around for some time before we found the house. It was on a large, spacious estate in a wealthy suburb. Suzuki said, you stay here. I'll go up. It was up. Way up. Huge place. Of course, the place is getting bigger and bigger every time I tell the story. Right? So I waited, but after only about five minutes he came back. How'd it go? I asked. Very interesting, he said. But not woman I thought. Wrong woman. Then he started to laugh. She thought I there to wash windows. Wash your windows. He exclaimed with delight. But I didn't bring my squeegee.

[13:56]

He shortled with great amusement. It was easy to see how she'd made the mistake. A Japanese man dressed in a simple black jacket and baggy black pants. This was 1965, just 20 years after World War II. I grew up in Palo Alto, and before I met Suzuki, the only Japanese I'd met were gardeners, cleaning people, garbage men. You guys know why? Because 20 years after World War II, they'd all been relocated. They'd been stripped during World War II of all of their property and been put in these relocation camps. And then when they came back, there was only manual labor for them. So before Suzuki, that's the only thing I knew when I thought about Japanese. Okay. So when Suzuki went to the wrong house, it's sad but understandable that the woman thought he was there to wash her windows.

[15:03]

He was dressed in black. He had a black shirt, he had black pants, and he's a little Japanese guy. The fear body will feel demeaned by this because it's always concerned by what others think. Suzuki didn't feel demeaned. He lived beyond the fear body. He could accommodate himself to his environment. without getting caught by it, because he was bigger than his environment. It was more as if he had pulled a practical joke on her, and he joked with me about it for about a year afterwards. The next story I'm going to tell, I don't think I'll read it, is that the Zendo used to be that building there, right there, and outside the Zendo Suzuki, He used to like to work with rocks, and he was building a rock wall, and he had the big people help him. I was trying to show Wanda where it was, but this is 40 years ago.

[16:10]

And at one point, I was watching him. I think I was taking out the garbage. I was the garbage man at Tassajara. And I was watching him move stones at kind of the top of that little hill, that little hill there. And he fell down, and he rolled down the hill. And I watched him, and I was kind of afraid for him, you know? He rolled down the hill, and then he got right up, he brushed himself off, and he said, just like a stone. That's that story. Resiliency. We learn to be resilient. Our teachers show us, not by chatting to us, but by being. How to be resilient. How to be resilient, you guys. How to be like water. Water takes lots of forms. Sometimes it gets frozen. I get frozen sometimes.

[17:11]

But the water always melts and returns to its original form. So that's pretty cool. We're pretty lucky, aren't we? That water is like that and that our mind is like that. We feel like we can't experience that, but we can. All of us, all of us. This is the chapter on removing the veils of delusion. Happiness is the true nature of the heart. But for most of us, abiding happiness is not our experience. And that's because the heart is veiled. It's veiled. It's veiled by bodily veils, by heart veils, and by mind veils. Bodily veils. You notice this in your zazen, but you can notice this in many You contract. We contract to protect ourselves from the emotional memories stored in our body. In Zen practice, these trapped memories are freed.

[18:14]

It can happen quite suddenly. As old pains surface, we feel tension and anxiety moving through our body. Sometimes our whole body aches or even shakes during prolonged meditation, as mine did when I was a young student. Because our minds are still and focused, we're deeply aware of the pain of freed-up emotions. I had a lot of pottily veils. Just trying to sit with a straight back was painful. During retreats, my whole body shook. To make matters worse, others seemed to have no problem sitting cross-legged, even for long retreats. It was as if their bodies were made of air. Comparing ourselves to others is just another veil, the mind veil, and it always makes things worse. Another bodily veil is the urge to move. When we first begin to meditate, it may take a couple of years or even longer for the body to settle into a state of stillness. Usually we experience a lot of bodily resistance to just being still.

[19:18]

We feel itchy, tingly, hungry, sleepy, achy, nauseated, sweaty, queasy, on and on, on and on. Typically we respond to the whims, restlessness, and constant demands of our body by staying busy, don't we? We stay busy, we stay busy. And Americans are busy, busy people. We seem to be busier, getting busier every year with our iPhones and iPads and everything. So coming to Tazahara is wonderful, wonderful. Because we can settle down from our multitasking, and our concentration can become more just with this. Zen is the practice of single-tasking with one-pointedness. Seeing through the bodily veils starts us on the path to our true state of calmness. Heart Veils Anger, grief, sadness, and loneliness conceal our true heart.

[20:21]

In meditation, when we see these veils and feel the strong emotions associated with them, we feel discouraged. But they have been there all along. It is only we ourselves who cling to them. In the very moment that we see them clearly, in that moment we sense the immediate release. In the darkness there is light, says the Chinese Zen teacher. Light's always there. It's not separate from the darkness. But don't take it as light, said the teacher. As one veil drops away, another one arises. Behind the anger veil may be loneliness veil, and behind the loneliness veil, the grief veil, the sadness veil, or the veil of victimization. We think these veils protect us, but they rob us of life's energy. To reclaim our aliveness, practicing through difficulty is the key. The heart veils dissolve naturally as we move into and through our painful emotions. Mind veils.

[21:22]

And we know these pretty well, mind veils. We know them. Mental chattering, worries, habitual thought patterns, constant planning, regretting, remembering, rehearsing, regretting, remembering, rehearsing, regretting, remembering, rehearsing. Suzuki said there are limits to the amount of pain the body could endure, but there are no limits to mental pain. When I was having so much trouble with my body, I could not help but compare myself to others. It was frustrating and embarrassing, which led to a general feeling of discouragement. When we say this should be, we become entangled and confused. Life seems unfair. Anger and self-pity may conceal our bodily sensations. Purity is lost. If we start telling stories, blaming ourselves or others, or thinking what if, then we are no longer experiencing either the emotion or its underlying sensation. Storytelling, in this case, is an avoidance technique.

[22:26]

By avoiding our emotional pain, we attach to the suffering. Suffering isn't caused by emotional pain, it's caused by our avoidance. Furthermore, when we avoid our painful emotions, we may find some real numbness and lifelessness. Helen Keller said, life is either a daring adventure or nothing. Our commitment to see through these fails is a daring adventure. Sure, it seems tedious at times, but that's part of the adventure. When we penetrate the veils, as each of you can do, at any time, at any time, with your kind, open, focused attention, they just drop away. They're just gossamer. That's all they are. They're just very light gossamer. Then we move into whatever. Something new appears. Maybe a new veil. We just move into it and move through it. It drops away. There's always something new to Open up to, as my teacher's Katagiri Roshi said, of the pivot of nothingness, the next moment unfolds.

[23:27]

And a new world. A new world is occurring right now. Right now. We're pretty lucky, don't you think? Pretty lucky. Next section is the spell of desire. The second... No, I'm going to skip and say I'll go into it. Remember adolescence? I'm remembering adolescence more, becoming... Coming back to California, where I spent my adolescence and my young adulthood, I'm really remembering adolescence. So I actually went to Palo Alto, my hometown, and I went by my old girlfriend's house. So I'm going to read this story. Remember adolescence? Remember falling in love for the first time or even the second time, being in that semi-conscious, dreamy, la-la land, driving by your girlfriend's house over and over, which I did. When we meet someone we're attracted to, even their faults are appealing. We're not seeing the person at all, we're only seeing our own desire. Often in meditation we're besieged by desire, one desire after another.

[24:34]

They cycle through our mind endlessly. We're alone with them, with nothing to distract us and no way to fulfill them. We only look at the endless parade of desires. If you sit in meditation with devotion, you will have to endure your desires. After a while, we realize how irrelevant the object of our desire is. It's desire itself that perpetuates our suffering. We use desire to cover up all kinds of difficult emotions. All kinds of difficult emotions. If we're insecure, we set goals that will prove our self-worth. We use goal setting to cover deep hurts or painful memories. Avoiding difficult emotions perpetuates them. The cycle repeats itself with even more intensity. But it's possible, don't you think, to accept our desires gracefully, graciously? When we sit on the cushion and see one desire after another just passed and feel how consuming each is, if we just remain, then we are graciously accepting them.

[25:40]

We're graciously accepting them. It may not feel gracious on the inside, but when the bell rings and the desire suddenly dissipates, ever notice that? When the bell rings, all of a sudden the desire is gone? We recognize how little it actually means to us, how little it means to us. Often it was just a temporary distraction from the pain or boredom that was coming up. Developing a gracious attitude toward our obsessive desires is what Zen practice is about. Seeing the nature of desire is the beginning of spiritual liberation. As Zen practitioners, we learn to carry our desires lightly, like butterflies alighting on our shoulders. I haven't seen any butterflies here. Last time I was here, 40 years ago, you had a lot of butterflies. But I know the monarch butterfly is not doing too well these days. So let's pray to the great spirit.

[26:41]

Bring the monarch back into our lives, or whoever, Buddha, or whoever, or the rocks, or the trees, or great emptiness. It doesn't matter. Just give ourselves. We just give ourselves. We can just watch the delightful butterfly alighting on our shoulder. When it flies off, another will come, then another. If we don't get clean or judgmental, we can enjoy each butterfly. If you learn nothing else from Zen practice, I hope you learn to hold your desires lightly. And they're still going to come. I've been practicing for 51 years. They're still coming through. They are coming through all the time. But they have some beauty to them. They have some energy to them. I don't have to feed them. I can just enjoy them. I can just enjoy them. And just watch them fly off. And you can too. Each of you can do this. You probably already are doing this, but just in case you want, I want to remind you about that.

[27:43]

Okay, the next one is, let's see, what is this one? The next one is Bob Dylan. I mean, how can we leave Bob Dylan out? the Bay Area in the 60s, anywhere in the U.S. in the 60s if you're in any kind of counterculture, right? So this section is called My Love, Mine is Zero Mantra. After my first year of Zen practice, the austerity of sitting still and doing nothing did not seem to be working for me anymore. I was talking yesterday to a woman at one of the other centers I'm visiting, like, 15 centers around giving these talks, going back to my home center, San Francisco, going back to the Palo Alto Center I started, which is now Cannondale, coming here. Oh, I'm sweet. And everybody's treating me like I'm a special person, but you guys are the special people. We're all special, aren't we? We're all special.

[28:53]

Wow. Just here we're special. Anyway, my love minus zero mantra, Bob Dylan. So I used to play his records. I didn't want to go to class at Stanford. I would play his records to help me, because I hated class, and I was wasting all my dad's money. But I don't have time to talk about this stuff now, because I promised myself I'd get through all this material. After my first year of Zen practice, the austerity of sitting still and doing nothing did not seem to be working for me anymore. Even Suzuki Roshi was not working for me, though I kept sitting with him every morning and evening. A woman told me a couple of days ago in one of the sanghas that she sat for 10 years. She felt dry at the end of 10 years. It wasn't working for her anymore. So she had to try a different kind of practice, and that was good. She tried a different kind of practice.

[29:53]

Because if you feel dried out by your practice, you need to find a wellspring somewhere else than what you're doing and try something different. Because the wellspring's always here. Always here. But I kept sitting with him every morning and evening. Like I say, I'm stupid. To make the early morning meditation, I sometimes stayed up all night. True. Breaking coffee. Because I slept in during morning classes. Well, anyway, I can't have time to talk about stuff. I sat in an all-night diner in San Francisco, drinking coffee and staring out the window into the fog and darkness until it was time to come to sunset. This was about the time Bob Dylan came out with his album, Bringing It All Back Home. Four lines from the two verses in the song, Love Minus Zero, No Limit, became my mantra. My love, she speaks like silence. Without ideals or violence, she knows there's no success like failure and that failure is no success at all.

[30:58]

The first line, my love, she speaks like silence, was about my teacher. Sensei seemed to speak like silence. That's what we called him, Sensei. Silence went with him wherever he went. It wasn't a rigid, heavy, reverent kind of silence. It was light. It was spacious. It was brilliant. It was ordinary. This silence is ordinary. Just between two thoughts, there's silence there. And it's very extraordinarily ordinary. Do you know what I mean? Extraordinarily ordinary. I was romanced by that silence. I sensed something wonderful in it. I was drawn to it. I'm still romanced by that silence, but not by the silence of any one person, by the silence that is present in all beings, in all life. After almost 50 years, I'm still awed by the great silence that surrounds and imbues everything.

[32:06]

Without ideals or violence, the next phrase of Bob Dylan's. One reason practice became so hard for me was that I had an ideal that I was clinging to. My ideal was that I should do Zen practice with grace, but I was stumbling through it with no grace at all. Ideals are frequently about should and shouldn't. They have nothing to do with actually what's going on. Too often they provoke violent thoughts. We are limited and bullied by them. Like my competitiveness with my sitting partner, Howard Iriana. He sat better than me, but I don't have time to talk about that now, so I'm just keeping going. But I was limited and bullied by those thoughts that Howard was so much better sitter than me. Just showing up each morning and evening was all I needed to do. I didn't need to compare my Zen practice with some ideal. The more rigidly idealistic we are, the more violent we become on the inside.

[33:09]

If you haven't noticed this yet, you're repressing it. But you will notice it. You'll notice it. The next section that I will read is... Oh, I won't read another... Oh, yes, I will. I'll read about Chino Roshi. Chino Sensei. I knew him as Chino Sensei. How many of you know about Chino Sensei? Just seeing how... I'm just interested in how many people. Only two out of the whole group. Wow. Wow. Wow. The physical dimension, this chapter's on the physical dimension. Chino Sensei was a teacher here for some time, and he's no longer alive. The physical dimension invites us to open up and experience life directly. If I hadn't been swept up so quickly by my inner critic, perhaps I could have shared a bowl of vegetable soup with my teacher that evening.

[34:14]

Oh, I think I better go a little... I better go farther here. One morning when Suzuki arrived to give his weekly talk to the Los Altos group, he brought along a young Japanese monk who had just arrived from Japan. Suzuki introduced him as Chino Sensei. We were all drawn to Chino. He had a gentle, sweet nature and a quick, natural laugh. He moved in attentive and precise ways, which somehow gave the impression of transparency. He seemed fragile. Having held a position as ceremony instructor at a Heiji monastery in Japan, Chino-sensei embodied ritual. It was like a dance for him. Suzuki was not as good at ritual, so he was happy to have Chino-sensei as his new assistant. I wasn't good at ritual either, so I knew why Suzuki was so insistent that I become Chino's attendant while he was at Tassahara. He was hoping Chino would shape me up, though he didn't say that.

[35:18]

Instead, he said, Chino Sensei will show you something every day. That sounded cool to me. It made me feel special. Being an attendant was difficult. I tried to follow along and pay attention. See where Chino put his cup down so I could get it back to him when the moment came. Those of you who have done Chen practice, you know about this. You've been attendants, you know about this. When you're an attendant, you're completely immersed in the physical because you're attending someone else. But I didn't care much about the physical dimension back then. So the job was difficult but rewarding. The first evening I went to Chino's room. Chino's room was up. Well, the agenda was there. His room was up there. I don't know. I can't say where. First evening I went to Chino's room to see if he needed anything. He invited me in and whipped up a very strong ceremonial tea. It was delightful to watch him whip the tea into thick foam and then serve it in such a delicate way.

[36:22]

This became our routine. It was as if he were attending me. Every evening we drank tea together and talked. He asked questions about American culture or books I was reading. Says if you hoped Chino would teach me about ritual, but I discovered that Chino didn't even like ritual. Neither of us had much interest in it. So he didn't teach me anything about ritual. But when Chino did ritual, he completely gave himself to it. At Tassahara, we ate our meals in a ritualized way, as they do in Japanese monasteries. It's called Orioki. This is for people who don't know. It's called Orioki. I hated Orioki. At the time, I did. I love it now. They introduced it after I'd been practicing for three years. And I thought, what's this all about? But Chino taught it in a wonderful way. Orioki flowered when Chino was doing it. The most interesting thing about Chino Sensei was that he taught without speaking.

[37:24]

He taught with his body. He immersed himself in the physical. When he moved it, it was as if his whole body were moving with one-pointed focus. At Tassajara, there was a stream with a log across it. This stream, which is mostly dried up. I've never seen it this dry. Even in the summer, it had a lot of water in it. Boy, I... I hope it's okay, that stream. Maybe somebody better go talk to it. Give it some support. Love it. Anyway, yes, so the stream was rushing, even in the summer. But this must have been during the rainy season. At Tassajara, there was a stream with a log across. It was down that way, toward... down that way. Shino didn't have... Better balanced than anyone else, but he was able to move across the log with ease. There seemed to be no intrusion of thought or fear. The rest of us would be freaking out, struggling to stay on the log and worrying about falling off.

[38:28]

But Chino didn't seem to worry about anything. He just walked across the log. Okay, now the next one. I'm just going to read a couple more. The next one is Suzuki Roshi's Counterculture. 800 years after Dogen, Suzuki Roshi breathed new life into Buddha's original counterculture. For those of you who studied about Buddha, he developed a counterculture in India. It was counter to the dominant culture. It was counter to the Brahmanic caste system. And he did it very, very artfully and very gracefully so he didn't get in trouble. So nobody tried to crucify him. It's just interesting politically. We need to... to think about that politically ourselves. And there was a counterculture when Zen came to China. I won't talk about that. It was part of a counterculture. And also when Dogen then tried to bring Buddhism alive into Japan after he went to China.

[39:32]

So anyway, Tsukiroshi breathed new life into Buddha's original counterculture. He made it come alive again. Everything he did seemed to arise from the ground of his being. the same ground as Buddha in India, Bodhidharma in Hanshan in China, and Dogen in Japan. Like Dogen, Suzuki felt that Buddhism in Japan had taken on a corpus of fear. He actually talked to me about this. He came to America seeking an enclave of fresh ground to cultivate. He discovered a wellspring, but it was unlike anything he could have imagined. On November 13, 1967, A lot of you guys weren't alive then. To raise money to buy Tassajara, we organized a Zenefit held in the Avalon Ballroom in San Francisco. I thought it was in the Fillmore Auditorium, and I had David Chadwick read this whole book, and he corrected me and said it was in the Avalon Ballroom. So, lucky for me, I got it right.

[40:34]

The concert featured performances by the Grateful Dead... Quicksilver Messenger Service, Big Brother and the Holy Company, and Janis Joplin, artists who have since become legendary. And the first time I've been giving a lot of readings from this book, the first time I gave a reading, someone emailed me after the reading and said, oh, I'm going to email you that original poster. It's online. So he emailed me the little original poster for the event, and the event doesn't mention Janis Joplin. It only mentions... Grateful Dead, Quicksilver Messenger Service, Big Brother and the Holding Company. And I said to my friend, well, they left Janis Joplin out. And Janis Joplin was not that well-known at that time. And so she was just part of the Big Brother and the Holding Company. But my friend's in the post office. I worked in the post office. My father worked in just a block from me, way up in the highest... Story was on a big-time tourney in San Francisco. I've worked in the basement of the post office doing my Zen practice.

[41:37]

And I had three friends in the post office who were just in love with Janice. I mean, they had fallen really in love with her. And if you hear her music now, you can understand that. You can feel that. You can feel that. I still do. I still do. Anyway. Anyway. I didn't usually go to the Haight-Ashbury district because it wasn't my scene, but I went to the Xenophon. The auditorium was full. Light effects emanated from strobe lights and lasers mounted throughout the theater. Pungent odors filled the air. Do you have any idea what those pungent odors might have been, anybody? Incense. Incense? Well, yeah, incense. There was a reason for the incense. Right? That was to mask some of the other pungent odors. People were dressed or undressed in an amazing variety of regalia, and the huge sounds of 60s rock boomed from the stage.

[42:45]

And I was sitting probably three or four seats from Suzuki, and... I watched the light show on Suzuki's head. These bald heads are great for watching a light show. I was grooving on the light show. I didn't say anything because I didn't want to be rude, but it was fun. Anyway, let's see. Katagiri Sensei, my second teacher, or my third teacher, Colbin and Katagiri, my second, third, whatever you want to say. had been in the United States for only two years at the time. He was reserved, quiet, and a very gentle presence. I remember seeing him standing anxiously in the shadows, half hidden, and looking quite out of sorts and unsettled in that crazy environment. He looked as if he wanted to run away. I'm sure he did. I'm sure he did. Suzuki was older, and he'd been in San Francisco now for...

[43:46]

eight, nine years. He'd gotten somewhat used to it, and he had been practicing resiliency training, which really is what Zazen is, it's resiliency training, for many more years, many more years. He sat in the front row of the theater, just about where you're sitting. I'm Janice, and you're him. Yeah, he was really not very, he was very close. with the lights flashing on him from all directions. What a memorable sight. Surrounded by utter chaos, he was completely relaxed and seemed totally in his element. He was looking around, smiling, taking it all in. I think he was grooving on the whole thing. Finally, the last performer, the amazing blues singer Janis Joplin, took the stage. She gave it her all. Talk about shedding the fear of body. Really, talk about shedding the fear of body. In front of a thousand people, she bared her heart and soul in a classic Janus performance.

[44:47]

Then it was time for Suzuki to say something to the crowd. The auditorium grew silent as he crossed to the microphone. When he spoke, his voice was calm and warm. At first, I think your way very different from ours. But now I see, not so different, not so different. And the crowd roared, roared. Suzuki was touched by Janice's ability to shed her freer body and give her whole heart to others. People responded to her in a visceral way. Janice imbibed the music. It seemed to come from the ground of her being. But she didn't have a practice that cultivated resiliency. She didn't have a practice. Zen, zazen meditation may seem boring, but you will become very resilient if you stay with this practice. Very, very resilient, very fluid.

[45:49]

And you won't think you're fluid. You'll just be like that. That's the promise my teacher made to me and that I make to you. I make you that promise. I make you that promise. Janice imbibed the music. It seemed to come from the ground of her being, but she didn't have a practice that cultivated resiliency. She could bare her soul on stage in front of people, but privately her life was tragic. Less than three years after the Zenithet, as most of you know, she was dead. So, Suzuki Roshi, how many of you have read Crooked Cucumber? Oh, a lot of you have read Crooked Cucumber. That's cool. That's cool. So Suzuki Roshi, from the time he was a young Dharma heir, a young teacher, wanted to come to English-speaking country. He had a teacher there, Miss Ransom, a British woman, and she... I got this mixed up yesterday when I was talking about it, so I better remember.

[46:59]

She taught him... and he taught her Japanese and some Buddhism. And he got to be friends with her. And he felt very encouraged by her interest in Buddhism. And he also liked the fact that she was very restrained. They had tea promptly at 3 o'clock in the afternoon. Everything was meticulous. She was very modest. She was very well regulated. So he thought, oh, I want to come to this... part of the country, America, where they're like, Miss Ransom. Well, then where did he end up? In San Francisco. In San Francisco. At the beginning of the 60s. Well, people didn't find him until about 1961. And you know what started to happen in 1961. I found him in 64, but we were not disciplined. That was not our culture. We were undisciplined.

[48:01]

We loved it. We were not modest. We were immodest. We always bathed naked. Everywhere we bathed naked here. Poor Suzuki covered his privates wherever he went. And men and women mixed, and we skinny-dipped all up and down. Finally, finally it changed. But we did it for a long time. We didn't know it was not part of Japanese, and it was so not part of Japanese. He didn't even want to show his gentle larry to the man. That's what Japanese cultures love. Anyway, I'm going off here. I'm supposed to be staying on my thing, so I don't go over time. So this was a different counterculture for him, but he was resilient. He saw that our minds and our hearts were oriented to it, opening up to stillness, that we believed we could do it, and some of us had done it with psychedelics. And he wasn't before... for or against psychedelics. Actually, he told one of my friends, Marianne Derby, she should take a psychedelic, he thought, because it would help her.

[49:04]

But because of psychedelics, we were ready. And we came down here, and after a while, we shaped up, and we did the practice just like you guys are doing. Well, maybe not as meticulously as you guys are doing it, but we did it with our full hearts. and all of our energy. We gave all our energy to it. We gave up stuff to do it. In those days, when we gave up everything, we were fools. We gave up our inheritances and everything, college and our careers. We were fools, but that's wonderful. You'd be a fool of some time, but don't always be a fool. Don't always be a fool. So, I want to now just read one more, one more, and then if there's time for questions, and I don't know if there is, or comments. We'll see. And this is from the end of the book. To forget the self is to become intimate with all life. You know this? Everybody who's introduced to Dogen should know this.

[50:07]

To study the way, the Tao. We used to say Buddhism. That's not a good translation. It's the way. To study the way. is to study the self and we study not by thinking about it or even think about it but our study is to be with it to be just with it attentively with no comment just to be with it to study Buddhism is to study the self don't waste your energy thinking put all your energy into studying just this As it's unfolding. Just this. As it's unfolding. To study Buddhism. Forget this Buddhism. Study the ways. Study the self. To study the self is to forget the self. To forget the self. To forget the self is to be it with all life. Not long after I had my satori experience at Tassajara.

[51:08]

You guys know the term satori? Raise your hand if you don't know the term satori. Okay, everybody knows. Oh, it just means enlightenment, muscle, whatever. Enlightenment has so many meanings. But my teacher, my root teacher, Suzuki, said there are no enlightened people, only enlightened activities. I believe it. Not long after I had my first Satori experience at Tassajara, I went in for Dokusan with Suzuki. You know what Dokusan is? Private one-to-one meeting? He looked at my shoes strewn by the door where I had kicked them off. They were dirty and disheveled. His were tidy and placed carefully, side by side. I had never noticed that before. I don't believe I said that. I couldn't have been that stupid. Wanda claims I said that. But I am pretty stupid. And I do. My wife says I overlook everything, so maybe I did. Maybe I did. Suzuki said to me, now that you are so-called enlightened, it's time to take care of those.

[52:12]

He said as he glanced at my shoes. I wasn't interested in my shoes. That was an opportunity to transcend the physical, to experience something beyond ordinary. I was often frustrated by Suzuki's reluctance to give us the real stuff. What did my shoes have to do with emptiness? I'm skipping now. We stay connected to the world through what we do, not what we think, and not what we experience, what we do, what we do. It's important that we be fully engaged in our lives. Today, people frequently come into Doksan to talk about their ideas about them, into Doksan with me. I don't want to be rude, so I listen, but I'm not very interested in that. I'm not interested. Sorry. I can tell you guys because you won't be having dokes on with me. The bigger question is, what are you going to do? How are you going to live? Your life is short. What do you really want to do in your heart of hearts?

[53:19]

In your heart of hearts. What do you really want to do with the short, precious years that you have? Maybe you have 50 years left or 60, but they're short and precious. And if you just do what your heart mind guides you to do, then it's timeless. It's timeless. It's beginner's mind. It's beginner's mind. So it's short and precious, but it's infinitely long, infinitely long, infinitely spacious, right here, right here in your own little heart mind, your own little flawed heart mind that may have a pacemaker soon attached to it. Because in your flaw, that's your opening. In your flaw, that's where you're opening. That's where you connect with each other. That's where you connect. We stay connected to the world through what we do, not what we think. It's important that we be fully engaged in our lives. Today, people frequently come into Doksan to talk about their ideas.

[54:21]

I don't want to be rude, so I listen, but I'm not interested. The bigger question is, what are you going to do? How are you going to live? Life is short. What are you going to do with your time? When Ram Dass asked his guru Neem Karoli Baba, how can I be enlightened? Baba answered, love people, feed people, love people. Some of you remember this. I had interchanges with Ram Dass over the years from the time he came to Stanford at Richard Alpert to tell us all about LSD and turn us all on. But that's a whole other story, a whole other hour lecture. Later, Ram Dass went back again and asked, but what's the best path to awakening? Baba said, feed people, love people, feed people. So Ram Dass worked to help establish a community based on Baba's teaching in the United States, but it didn't work. It totally failed. So he was totally confused. So he went back to Baba again.

[55:21]

He went to India again. And he said to Baba, well, but now, come on, tell me this time. What's the best technique? Tell me something. What's the best technique for establishing community? I've tried to do it, and I failed. I tried to do what you said, and I failed. Baba said, love people, feed people, love people. Starting with yourself, okay? Starting with yourself. You don't have to go far off. It's right here. Okay, it's right here. It's always here with you. And you have a lot of skins, as Meister Eckhart said, or veils, as Buddhists say, that hides what's right here. But it's here. It's here. Just settle into it and see it. And you'll experience some wonderful joy, which you could use to help people. To help people. Dogen said, to study people is to study the self. We just study the self continuously, moment by moment. There's nothing more to do. We start this practice by studying the small self.

[56:24]

Eventually, we meet our true, boundaryless self. Love arises naturally from the ground of our being, which is the ground of all being. To study the self is to forget the self. When we penetrate the small self, we move through it and beyond it. But you have to move through it. You can't bypass it. You could do spiritual bypassing, but it doesn't work. It only works for a little while. We begin to trust interconnectedness, the way a bird trusts the tree it built its nest in. Trust, shraddha, is the realization that in an interdependent universe, all beings are completely nourished. And then to forget the self is to be intimate with all life. And I don't know if I have time for questions, but somebody who's keeping track can tell me. You've got a couple minutes. A couple minutes. Okay. A quick question. Anybody have a question or a comment or a story or a song in a couple minutes?

[57:32]

Yeah. What's the story with all these copies of the book back here? Pardon? The book. Oh yeah, my book is for sale. It's a deal. And Wanda, my friend who did the editing, who really wrote the book, is here to... Okay. So maybe that's it. Is there time to answer this woman's question, or is that it? Yes, of course. Oh, okay. Yeah. I was interested, you had mentioned there's a woman who felt like her practice was drying out, and she moved on to a different practice. Yes, yes. Yeah, I thought that was interesting, an interesting comment. Yes. And that sometimes that is appropriate, which of course it is sometimes appropriate.

[58:34]

Yes, yes. There's those times when the most useful thing is to be with the feeling. That's right. That's right. That's right. I was wondering if you'd speak a little bit more to that distinction. Well, what I want to speak to instead, but I'll try to include that, is how important it is to work with someone who's been doing this for a while, who's been doing this practice for a while. Whether the person is your formal teacher or not doesn't make sense. so much difference, but sort of, if your practice is dry, drying out, if your mind is just all over the place, you sat a whole week and it's still all over the place, you did a practice period down here, then you should be sort of, I spent a lot of time with him, he didn't talk that much, but he helped me a lot, and I stayed with him during my periods of dryness because of the help he gave me. Now, this woman, her teacher wasn't close by, And if her teacher had been close by, would she have stuck with our practice?

[59:38]

I don't know, but our practice as teachers, as teachers, we have to learn about Western psychology. I'm a Western psychologist. Tibetan practices, Vipassana practice. We have to learn enough about those so we don't get territorial, so we can really support you. And you need a teacher, you need a helper, a mentor who has that kind of... And then that person can help you decide whether you just go through the desert. Because Jesus was 40 days in the desert. Ryokan lived for 40 days, 40 years in his little hut. But sometimes we lose our aspiration to open up because we give up. So you need at least one spiritual friend. And if you can't find one, then go find one somewhere else. They're all over the place. And then maybe you need two. Maybe you need a mentor, a best friend, and a teacher because you're too much in awe of the teacher.

[60:43]

But don't be too much in awe of the teacher. The teacher doesn't know anything. Really. Speaking from experience. Okay, thank you. For more information, visit sscc.org and click giving.

[61:19]

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