This podcast is offered by the San Francisco Zen Center on the web at sfzc.org. Our public programs are made possible by donations from people like you. Good morning. Great to see you all here this morning. I'm Tim Burkitt. I'm the guiding teacher of the Minnesota Zen Meditation Center, where I have been practicing since I was ordained by Katagiri Roshi in 1978. So I'm an old guy. And this morning, I'm going to talk about, I'm going to talk from a book that I have written, although I didn't actually write it.

[01:00]

One of my students, Wanda, wrote it, who's now my peer, which is an assortment of talks that I've given over the years with key vignettes from my very early memories of working with Suzuki Roshi, Kaigiri Roshi, and Kobanchino. But this morning I'm just going to talk about Suzuki Roshi because It would be about a 10-hour talk. I talked about all three of those guys. So the title of my book is Nothing Holy About It. And Wanda, who's here somewhere, got the idea. Where are you, Wanda? She got the idea of doing the book, and I'm just one of these lucky teachers that has a student that says she's going to do a book. I said, oh, cool. I said, of what? She said, of your teaching. Wow. Wow. I had kept the vignettes of my memories with Suzuki because I was kind of Forrest Gump.

[02:04]

I just happened to be there very early on, and I had all these wonderful memories. And I showed them to her. I said, maybe I could get a little article in Tri-Cycle or Shambhala Sun. She said, I'm going to do a book. So three years later, here we are. And we've been going on tour. And I'm from California. I'm from Palo Alto. And talking. So that's what I'm going to do this morning. And hopefully we can talk together a little bit too. So to start out, not reading, but this is from my book. So I was a junior at Stanford University in 1964. And I was taking a course in abnormal psychology. And I actually read about this new phenomena they were studying called psychedelic experience. Anybody ever heard of that? It was a very new phenomena.

[03:06]

And so I thought, well, I write my abnormal psych paper on that. Why not? It looked interesting. So I got a book, The Teachings of the Mystics, by W.T. Stace. And I began reading about St. John of the Cross, St. Teresa de Avila, Meister Eckhart, the great Zen teachers, the Vipassana teachers, it was all in this book, and the Sufi teachers. But the thing that amazed me, I didn't know anything about this, was that they all pointed to a stillness that emanates from the center of being. that they all claimed we can all tap into through spiritual practice, through meditative practice. I couldn't believe it. And, of course, I didn't know anybody who meditated. But I just kept reading the book over and over again, reading the portions in the book that sort of drew me in. And I went into a meditative state without knowing it, kind of.

[04:09]

You know how you repeat something, a phrase from a sutra over and over, one that really resonates in your heart, and how it settles you down? It kind of penetrates. Well, that was all happening to me spontaneously. I didn't know anything. And then it was spring break at Stanford, and I went to Utah to go skiing with my friends. And I only took that little book with me and my skis. And in the train ride to Utah, I just kept going over and over the key phrases in that book. the ones that really resonated with me and that pointed to this great stillness that pervades everything, which as a Unitarian I should have heard about, but I'd never heard about it. My minister in the Palo Alto Unitarian Church never told me about that. And so I got to Utah, and in Utah I had a spontaneous experience of

[05:14]

dying to little Tim. Little Tim just died. All of his rehearsing, his regretting, his repeating, his on and on and off stuff just died and opened up to just this, just this. And I went, I was there to ski with my friends, and we hitchhiked up to Alta to ski. And on the road hitchhiking, I was having just as much fun watching the cars as I was on the ski slopes. And my friends tolerated me. They didn't exactly know what was going on. They smoked dope, so they thought, well, maybe this has some original relation to that. So then on my way back to college, little Tim started coming back. He started, oh yeah, back to school, got to do this stuff, got behind. He didn't even do that abnormal psych paper, what are you going to do now?

[06:15]

All came in, all flooded back. And so then when I was back at Stanford, I thought, gee, I wonder if there's a Zen teacher someplace. Because Zen seemed to be the one in the book that had the least accoutrements, little did I know. Little did I know. It was the most direct with all the other stuff. I mean, I'm a Unitarian, right? I was a Unitarian. So I thought, well, Chinatown. Chinatown in San Francisco. Then China. So I thought, I'll go up to Chinatown. So I went up to Chinatown, and I looked in the San Francisco phone book under Z. You know, I'm a Stanford guy, right? I know what to look up. Z. Okay. So Z. I find the Zen bar and the Zen center. Then I got my first con. What shall I do? Shall I do the Zen bar or shall I do the Zen center?

[07:20]

But I already knew the bar scene too well. Too well. So I went to the Zen center. And it was... tiny then in a Jewish synagogue on Bush and Lagoon, and the teacher just greeted me at the door and showed me how to sit. I think he introduced himself as Reverend Suzuki, probably. I don't remember. So that was the beginning. That was the beginning for me of sitting and doing Zen practice. So this book is about my journey and about my teaching along the way. I'm going to dip into it now and read some sections from it, but I'm going to just talk a little bit more first. Most of these sections are in the book, but I'm talking them instead of reading them because it's more fun. So last Saturday I gave a talk at San Francisco Zen Center. And Friday night we went over to where I used to practice, which is in Bush and Laguna.

[08:28]

the Sukhoji Temple. That's where I did all my practice from 1964 to 1969. And we went over there, and I showed Wanda where this Jewish synagogue was, and we sat up on the second floor, and then we looked in, and it's a senior citizen center now. So I said to Wanda, behind those elderly folks who are hanging out, There's a big auditorium, and they had movies every Saturday night, I think it was Saturday night, for the Japanese congregation. And Suzuki Roshi was getting paid by the Japanese congregation. We had no membership then, and it never occurred to us to give him any money. We didn't have much money, but... So the Japanese paid his salary, and we sat on the second floor of Zendo, And they never came and sat with us, but what he did with them is he did the funerals for them, he ministered to them, and he went to the Saturday night movies with them.

[09:34]

They had a Saturday night movie at Sakoji, which was a blood and gut samurai movie. In my book, I call it Class B movies, but I think they were more like Class D minus movies. And he went every weekend, and I think it was Saturday night, and he gave it talk on Sunday morning so um and of course I went to North Beach because that's where the the real aesthetically pleasing Francois Truffaut movies were right so and I kind of thought oh that this is hard for him this is hard so one morning I said to him uh uh sensei I said, you go to those movies every Saturday night? Yes. And he said, yes. And I said, do you like any of them? And he said, I like them all. I like them all. Now, this was a time that I was having problems in my practice.

[10:39]

I'd been practicing by this time for a year or two years, every morning and every night at Sukhoji, basically. I kept having these recurring images that just kept flooding me. And if you sit, if you're a serious sitter, you will go through phases where you will be flooded by images where that rehearsing and repeating and regretting and rehearsing and repeating and regretting will be movies, movies. So that teaching of his really helped me. Now, was he trying to teach me? I don't know, but it really calmed me down. It really calmed me down. The idea that I could like them all, that I could just be with them, not judging them, not evaluating them, not having to get on a stage and turn them into North Beach movies when they were blood and guts movies, but just they were telling me something about my suffering.

[11:41]

They were telling me something about my angst. Oh, that's good. That's good. So it helped me, helped me kind of get back on the path. Now, was I thinking of quitting then? Oh, I don't know. I thought of quitting lots of times. I can't even remember. But sitting facing a wall or facing inside with a minimal technique, which we do in Zen, means that you're going to be making movies. And a lot of the movies you make are going to be class D-minus movies. Unless you're a lot better than I am. But I think you've just got to be with them. Begin to disidentify with them when you see that they're not the real you. They're not the real you. They're just movies. So I never thanked him for that teaching. I never thanked him for any of these teachings. Now I'll thank him. Thank you, Sensei. Thank you. And I didn't even know they were teachings. But I think they are.

[12:42]

I think they are. So now I'm going to dip into the book and read a few things from the book and talk about it. So this next one is one I'd been practicing quite a bit longer than the story I just told. And I'd been at Tassajara a few times and really immersed myself in practice and a lot of sitting, a lot of sitting. This is called too much emptiness, a cup of tea, and finding a good seat. After an eight-week retreat at our monastery in Carmel Valley, which was named Tassajara Zen Mountain Monastery, I returned to San Francisco and immediately took a bus to the D. Young Museum. I was still in the afterglow of the long retreat. The D. Young Museum back in the mid to late 60s had the best Asian art, I think, in the United States. wonderful statues. On one floor they had Thai, on another floor Japanese, on another floor Chinese, and they really emphasized Buddhism.

[13:49]

I was still in the afterglow of a long retreat. In a meditative state, I walked through the museum slowly, soaking it all in as I made my way to the Asian collection. 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 into pure space. I felt as if I were teetering on the edge of something. Instinctively, I turned away. But just a few feet away, there was another statue. Its eyes were also like deep holes into no-thingness. Again, I turned away, but the statues were everywhere. Infinitely vacant eyes were everywhere. I was overwhelmed and by now completely disoriented. With difficulty, I managed to get back to the bus. Still disoriented, I headed for the Zen Center.

[14:55]

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 statues. The spaciousness emanating from their eyes had 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. Let's have a cup of tea, he said. That's the story. We had our cup of tea. As I remember, we didn't have any conversation. We just drank our tea together. I went home, got my night's sleep, woke up in the morning, was fine, came to Zen Center to sit. So this story, though, is about something interesting, I think.

[15:59]

It's interesting. We think we aspire to manifesting a deep quietness that we just fall into, that body and mind can drop away into. But when we're on the edge of it, we don't know if we like it that well, because it means giving up this little guy, this little guy who I'm so habituated. I am him. I'm the habituation. There's so much habituation in there that giving up, thinking about our next move, about the next day, about yesterday. It can be kind of scary. It's kind of scary. And Suzuki Roshi helped me by just grounding me, by just grounding me, by, as Wanda pointed out to me, pointing out, asking me about the statues so I could just see the statues while I was talking with him, and then a cup of tea, a cup of tea, grounding in the physical, grounding in the physical.

[17:02]

If we ground in the physical, we can actually let go of all of this stuff. Of course, it comes back, but that's fine. Once we've learned to let go of it, it no longer plagues us. The movie no longer plagues us. The movie no longer even intrigues us that much. It's just a movie. So now I'm going to read one about my teacher and me. my first teacher and me, Suzuki Roshi, my rude teacher, Katagiri Roshi, and Chino Roshi, my three teachers. And this is called Living Beyond the Fear Body. So, if we can just see the movie, see that what coagulates into a fear body has no... substance to it. It's just a movie. If we can just see that without judging, without a minute of criticism, without a minute of comparison, then we can see through it and let go of this fear body that we carry on our shoulders that weights us down so much and makes our lives so hard and gives us and our friends so much suffering.

[18:20]

So this is an example of my teacher. At his best. Of course, from my point of view, he was always at his best because I was young and I idealized him. Don't idealize your teachers too much, but I'm going to get into that in a minute. Once as I was driving Suzuki home after our Palo Alto sitting group, he asked me to start a group in Palo Alto in 1964, which then morphed into the Los Altos group, which morphed into Kanon Zendo. And I heard him give the talks in Zen Mind or Beginner's Mind in that Los Altos garage. So that's just a bit of trivia. That's a bit of Forrest Gump trivia. 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 contacted him about Buddhism. He had never met this woman, but he felt he should go visit her.

[19:21]

Well, I wasn't too happy about it because I was supposed to be in class, but I did it anyway. Actually, I was very happy about it. I'd much rather hang out with him than go to class. Later, when I was like 22 or 23, I thought, oh, I wasted my time. My dad spent all that money, and I could have studied all this wonderful stuff, but, you know, that's how life goes. That's how life goes. His directions to the house 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. And every time I read it, the spacious estate gets larger and the house gets larger. Suzuki said, you stay here. I'll go up. So I waited. But after only about five minutes, he came back. How'd it go? Very interesting. but not woman I thought.

[20:24]

Wrong woman. Then he started to laugh. She thought I there to wash her windows. But I forgot my squeegee. He chortled with great amusement. So it's easy to see how she'd made that mistake. This is 1965 in the Bay Area. Growing up in the Bay Area, before I met Suzuki, All the Japanese I saw were manual laborers. Menial laborers. They were what? Cleaning women. They were gardeners. They emptied the garbage. They did other menial chores. Why? Because in 1940s, during the war, what did we do? What did we do? It's our karma. We shipped them all to relocation camps. And they lost everything. They lost everything. So when they came back, they had nothing. And here he was dressed in his black traveling clothes.

[21:27]

Black traveling clothes are very simple, but they look like, to her, they look like window washing clothes. But his response was, he thought this was just a great joke. He thought he'd played the joke on her. Not she'd played the joke on him. The fear body would feel demeaned by this because it's always concerned about what others think. Always we're trying to compare ourselves to others so that we can feel okay. We're watching the movie to see how good we've done. But he was, through all his years of practice, he was able to see through it. And we can do this too. It doesn't have to take us our whole lives. Little by little we can do this, little by little. 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's more as if he had pulled a practical joke off on her.

[22:34]

So we're bigger than our little Tim or little Gene or little Adam. We're bigger than that. And when we begin to see the space between each image, we experience that. that largeness, that hugeness, just in a tiny space, just in a tiny space. William Blake's Eternity in a Grain of Sound, right? Eternity in a Grain of Sound. So the next one I want to read is from the Spell of Desire. So when we start practice, when we live, we desire not to be plagued by all this stuff, all this worrying, all this comparing, all this judging. So we desire that, and then we get mesmerized by our desire, and our desire actually creates more movie, more movie, transfixed by it.

[23:43]

So this, I start by remember adolescence, Remember falling in love for the first time, or even the second time, being in the conscious, dreamy la-la land? So my first girlfriend in Palo Alto, when I was maybe a senior in high school, every night that I could get my dad's Buick, I drove around the block to look at her house. Now, what was the deal there? Looking at her house? Maybe catching a glimpse of her in the window? Anybody ever done that? Anybody ever felt that? This is us. This is human beings. We're all like this. We're all like this. It's not bad. It's something that we can see. We can see. And with our kindness, we can appreciate it and just let it drop away. Just let it drop away on its own without messing with the movie. We're not seeing the person at all.

[24:47]

We're only seeing our own desire when we do this. Often in meditation, we're besieged by desire. One desire after another, cycling through our mind endlessly. We're along with them, with nothing to distract us and no way to fulfill them. We can only look at the endless parade of desires. If you haven't experienced this yet and you're sitting, just sit some more. Just sit some more. If you sit in meditation with devotion, you'll have to see and endure your desires. After a while, you can realize how irrelevant the object of your desire is. When the bell rings, what happens? Usually the desire goes when the bell rings. It's just gone. But it's desire that perpetuates our suffering, isn't it? It's desire for the right movie. I want the North Beach movie. Why do I have to keep seeing these class D minus movies over and over again? I've been practicing for X amount of time.

[25:48]

But just be there, just be there with it. We can do it. When the bell rings and the desire suddenly dissipates, we recognize how little it actually means to us. Often it was just a temporary distraction from our pain, from our boredom, developing a gracious attitude. toward our desire is what Zen practice is about. Seeing the nature of desire is the beginning of liberation. As Zen practitioners, we learn to carry our desires lightly, like butterflies alighting on our shoulder. We can just watch the delightful butterfly. On this trip, I've been here almost a month, I've missed the monarchs and swallowtails and even the cabbage butterflies. I like them just as well of my youth. I hope they're around. I know the monarchs have had a hard time, but we need to do what we can to take care of them, don't we? Because they show us how to be light by just lighting on our shoulders and flying off.

[26:51]

They show us how to be light. We can just watch the delightful butterfly. When it flies off, another will come, then another. If we don't get clingy or judgmental, we can enjoy them. If you learn nothing else from Zen practice, I think you can learn to hold your desires lightly. I think you can do that. So now I want to read a little section about one of my other mentors. So I had my root teacher, the teacher who ordained me, and third teacher, but then I had Bob Dylan. I mean, you know, this is a 60, so, you know, Bob Dylan. He was one of my men, one of my guys, too. So this is from the section titled, My Love Minus 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. If you sit with sincerity, at some point, your sitting doesn't work for you.

[27:58]

It just doesn't work because the you who's trying to manage the movies is not making any progress. Even Suzuki Roshi was not working for me, though I kept sitting with him every morning and evening. To make the early morning meditation, I sometimes stayed up all night. I sat at an all-night diner in San Francisco, drinking coffee and staring out the window into the fog and darkness until it was time to go to the Zen Center. Well, that's weird, isn't it? But I was a college student. I was a college student who stayed up generally until round one, stayed up until round one, and then slept in until... you know, 9 or 10. So if I'm going to go to a 5.30 sitting, it's much easier to stay up than to have to get up right after I go to bed. So it worked for a while. For a while it worked. I just did it. This was about the time Bob Dylan came out with his album, Bringing It All Back Home.

[29:00]

Four lines from 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 failure is no success at all. The first line, My love, she speaks like silence, was about my teacher. Sensei seemed to speak like silence. Silence went with him wherever he went. It wasn't a rigid, heavy, reverent kind of silence. although we did call him Reverend Suzuki then in those days, it was light, it was spacious, it was brilliant, it was ordinary, 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.

[30:02]

by the silence that's present in all of us, butterflies and pollywogs and people and dogs and cats and skies and moons and stars, all of us, all of us. After 51 years, I'm still awed by the great silence that surrounds and infuse everything. The next line, without ideals or violence, One reason practice became so hard for me was that I had an ideal that I was clinging to. Good movies, right? Good movies, enlightened movies, whatever those would look like. My ideal was that I should practice Zen, do Zen practice with grace. But I was stumbling through it with no grace at all. There was a Chinese-American guy named Bill Kwong, who was there when I started, and he was so graceful. And I would have put out a contract on him. I never told anybody.

[31:04]

But that's the violence inside when we compare ourselves to others. We all have that violence. We can see that. We can see it. We can graciously open our hearts to it and then watch it disappear like the butterfly just flies away. It comes back again. But it's just movie. That's all. Just movie. Ideals are frequently about should and shouldn't. They have nothing to do with what's actually going on. Too often they provoke violent thoughts. Look at all the religious wars, you guys. Look at all of them. More people killed in the name of religion, including Buddhism, than anything. Oh, there's patriotism too, but religion is even worse. We're limited and bullied by our violent thoughts. just showing up at Zazen. Each morning and each evening was all I needed to do. That's what my teacher asked me to do.

[32:06]

That's all I needed to do. I didn't need to compare my practice with some ideal. The more rigidly idealistic we are, the more violent we become. So I'm going to read a couple more, and then I think there'll be a little time. Oh, no, I don't know if there's time for questions. I think we do questions afterwards, don't we? Yeah, we do questions afterwards. I'm going to read a couple more. So this one is titled Suzuki Roshi's Counterculture. 800 years after Dogen, our founder, Dogen, Suzuki Roshi breathed new life into Buddha's original counterculture. So Buddha was a radical. He was a radical that knew how to be a radical without getting crucified, which is interesting, isn't it? Very interesting. And he was a radical in that the caste system was so embedded in India.

[33:06]

It was not formalized yet, but it was really embedded. It's still embedded in India. You can read Alan Sanaki's book about that if you want. He's been to India recently. My daughter-in-law is Indian. I said to her the other day, I said, there aren't any more castes in India, right? She said, oh yeah, we just don't talk about them. They're about... 17 or 18, not just the six you think about. But Buddha would have nothing of that. He said, we're all together in this. We're all interdependent. We're all of one's stuff. So anyone who comes here, I will treat as the awakened person that they are, just by being. By being individual, we're undivided. So he welcomed everybody in. So that was his first counterculture in India, I think. Maybe not the first. Then we have a counterculture in China, which I won't talk about now, because I don't have time. But Zen was a counterculture in China, countered to the Confucian way of being, which was very heavy.

[34:10]

I'm sure you can do it lightly, but it was very heavy at that time. And then Dogen, you know about Dogen, trying to create a new culture in Japan. Like Dogen, Suzuki felt the Buddhism in Japan had taken on a body of fear. He actually talked to us about this then. 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, to raise money to buy Tassajara, we organized a Zenefit held in the Avalon Ballroom in San Francisco. Now, I had my friend David Chadwick go through this whole book before it was published, and I had said that it was in the Fillmore Auditorium, but his major correction was to say, no, it was the Avalon Ballroom. The concert featured performances by the Grateful Dead, Quicksilver Messenger Service, Big Brother and the Holding Company, and Janus Joplin, artists who have since become legendary.

[35:16]

I didn't usually go to the Haight-Ashbury district because it wasn't my scene, but I went to the Zenefit. The auditorium was full. Light effects emanated from strobe lights and lasers mounted throughout the theater. Pungent odors filled the air. People were dressed or undressed in an amazing variety of regalia. And the huge sounds of 60s rock boomed from the stage. Karagiri Sensei, my second teacher, 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. Suzuki was older. He'd been in San Francisco by this time for eight or nine years, so he'd learned about us.

[36:22]

He'd learned about us, and he decided he was going to work with us. So he was kind of used to us, if you could ever get used to that kind of thing. And also, he'd been doing zazen for 30 more years than Kadigiri. So he was incredibly resilient. When I look at the window washing story, I got lots of those stories. He was able to be where he was. He was able to adjust himself to circumstances, as we can all learn to do through zazen. We don't do it through our heads. We learn it. We do it through this practice. What a memorable sight. He sat in the front row of the theater with lights flashing on him from all directions. 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.

[37:27]

So after I gave my first talk on this book and I read this first excerpt, someone emailed me and they said, I found the Zenefit poster online. And they emailed me the Zenefit poster, 1967, September, November, whatever, November 17th. And it has everybody there, except it doesn't, it says the Grateful Jet, Chris Silver Messenger Service, Brigg Brother and the Holding Company, but it doesn't mention Janis Joplin. Who knows why it doesn't mention her? I didn't know. I didn't know. Anybody know? Yes, right, good. You get the prize. She was part of Brigg Brother and the Holding Company, and she hadn't risen to this fame during her last years and after her death. Finally, the last performer, the amazing blues singer Janice Joplin, took the stage. She gave it her all.

[38:29]

Talk about shedding the fear of body. In front of a thousand people, she bare her heart and soul in a classic Janice performance. I worked as a mail handler to support myself in the post office. basement of the post office on Market Street, and three guys that I worked with who were kind of druggies were deeply in love with Janice. And they used to talk about how in love they were with her, and then I told them about the Zenefit, so they came over to the Zenefit. 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. calm and warm. At first, I think, your way, very different from ours. But now I see, not so different, not so different, the crowd roared. Suzuki was touched by Janice's ability to shed her fair body and give her whole heart to others.

[39:35]

That's why people were falling in love with her all over the place. People responded to her in a visceral way. Janice imbibed the music. We can imbibe the stillness that's here. We can't get it through our head, but we can imbibe it just through aspiration to wholeheartedly be here and sit, or stand, or move, just to be with it in stillness. 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 Zenifit, she was dead. But I don't want to end on that note, so I'm going to read one more from the end. Because dying to little Tim does not mean Suicide, you guys, it means opening up to all this, to the wonder of all this, and just appreciating it, appreciating people's effort, appreciating people's dilemmas and problems, including our role.

[40:48]

So this is from the epilogue, which plays with the famous phrase by Dogen. To study the way is to study the self. To study the self is to forget the self. To forget the self is to be intimate with all life. I'll use that translation for the moment. Now I'm back to Tassajara, where I'm living. Not long after I had my enlightenment experience in Tassajara, I went in for Dokusan with Suzuki. You guys all know what Dokusan means? A one-to-one meeting. A 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 was pretty dense, wasn't I? What was I doing all that time? God! I told Wanda that I must not have said that.

[41:53]

She said I did, so it's in the book. That's worse than Forrest Gump. He said to me, now that you are so-called enlightened, now that you are so-called enlightened, I didn't know why he put the so-called in there. I mean, enlightenment is enlightenment, isn't it? It's time to take care of those, he said, glancing at my shoes. I wasn't interested in my shoes. Zen 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 spaciousness and stillness? But one of the phrases of my teacher that I like the best is, there are no enlightened people, there's only enlightened activity.

[42:53]

Only enlightened activity. That's activity where we forget our little selves and reach out and experience some intimacy, some joining with all life. We stay connected to the world through what we do, not what we think. It's important that we be fully engaged, moment by moment, but without judging too much. Maybe you did it bad in the last moment. Don't worry about it. Don't worry about it. This moment, this moment, always a chance. Today, people frequently come into one meeting. to want meetings with me to talk about their ideas about Zen. Well, now that I've been giving all these talks, nobody's going to do that anymore. They'll do something else instead, right? I don't want to be rude, so I listen, but I'm not very interested in that. The bigger question is, what are you going to do and how are you going to live? Life is short. It's getting shorter and shorter. For me, I'm 72.

[43:55]

Shorter and shorter. But even at 20, it's short. Are you doing what you really want to do? Are you still in your mind enough so you can discover how you really want to be here with others in the short time you have here? How you really want to reach out and take care of all of these butterflies that are around, how to relate to them, how to enjoy them? When Ram Dass, so, well, kind of Ram Dass is maybe one of my teachers, too. I mean, who isn't? You guys are all my teachers. You know, when you pay attention, then you're my teachers. When you aren't paying attention, I don't want you as my teachers, but actually you're good teachers then, too, you know, because then I have to deal with it. This little Tim has to deal with it. I have to come back to stillness, back to stillness. So my difficulty is just fine in Zen, just fine. The bigger question... Oh, I said this.

[44:58]

When Ram Dass asked his guru, Neem Karoli Baba, how can I be enlightened? Baba answered, love people, feed people, love people. So then he went back to the United States, Ram Dass did, and... Then decided, well, he still wasn't doing too well. He needed Ram Dass. He needed Baba's support. So he went back to India to get more support from him. And he asked Ram Dass, he asked Baba, but what's the best path to awakening? Baba said, feed people, love people, feed people. So Ram Dass went back to the United States, started the Seva Foundation, service to others. But the first year it was just chaotic, chaotic. Everything fell apart. Nothing worked. So he ran back to India again, ran back again to see Baba. And he said to Baba, I don't know why I'm reading this.

[46:00]

I know this by heart. But I am, I guess. He said, Baba, I've tried to do all this stuff, like you said, and it's not working. What's the best technique for establishing a real community in other countries that's really different from India? And he said, love people, feed people, love people. To study the way, to look at the way, to look at how the small mind encapsulates everything and puts everything into a very, tiny arena and then see through it so that we forget the small self and help people is to be intimate with all life, isn't it? And we can do that. We can all do that. We can all do that. So I want to encourage your aspiration. But if your aspiration starts to turn into judgment, please come back to your aspiration.

[47:04]

The judgment, the idealism, what will get you. And you'll become kind of rigid, and people won't want to practice with you because they think you're competing with them. But then that's okay. We're naturally competitive, so we just notice that. We fess up to it. All the karma ever created by us. And we come back to this stillness that's always here at the center of being. We don't have to be Mother Teresa. We're just ourselves. Just ourselves. Just as my teacher was. Just as my teacher was. So I think that's what I want to say for today. Thank you very much. Thank you for listening to this podcast offered by the San Francisco Zen Center. Our programs are made possible by the donations we receive. Please help us to continue to realize and actualize the practice of giving by offering your financial support.

[48:08]

For more information, visit sfzc.org and click giving. May we fully enjoy the Dharma.

[48:19]

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