Again, you know, I was a kid at being one of the faster draws in the neighborhood, but the Japanese kids are much faster than I am. Much more alert. They ride bicycles, you know, like fooling around with no hands, right through traffic and cars coming the same way. It just scares the daylights out of me. Well, examples of this are, for instance, I'd say a Japanese person tends to know all the kanji, all the Japanese characters he knows, in his body primarily, and some of them he knows consciously. In other words, you ask a Japanese person about, what is the kanji for such and such? That's where he knows it. And I found myself, and perhaps partly because of practicing Zen, that the last two or three years before I went to Japan I was very busy, probably in contact with a thousand people across the country. And I knew all their phone numbers, or a large number of them by heart, and their office phone. And a lot of the phone numbers I couldn't tell you, I could only dial. I think, Mike Murphy. And I could dial his number perhaps, but I couldn't write it down.

[01:13]

And when you find Buddhist robes, for instance, and the eating bowls that we use, the knot, you don't remember how to tie the knot, you put your hand down, you put the cloth under this finger and then you take the other end of it and you put it under that finger and you pull and you tie it. Or when you take your robes off, I'd be darned if I know how this big flat piece of kesa, it's called a kesa, which is a Buddhist robe, is actually folded. When I take it off, I untie it here, and I put it here, and then I take my fingers and turn the corners like that. And then I go something like that, and then twist it and put it around my head like that, and then, and it all ends up folded up just perfect. But it depends on using my, not my head, the back of my head, not the inside of my head, and my body in various ways to fold this piece of cloth. And another interesting aspect is one which I'll get into more tomorrow night, is this thing of rhythm, a fundamental rhythm that's part of the culture, which is not part of our culture. The clothes even have rhythm designed into them. My robe's got rhythm. And the cloth that hangs over my arm, for instance, or a Japanese kimono, first of all, they think the cloth has an intrinsic nature in itself, so you don't, like, shape it to fit the body.

[02:39]

You just put it over and you sew it down here. In fact, if you have long arms, it comes to here, and if you have short arms, it comes to here, because they use the same, they just take it right off the loom and put it right on your arm. I had a lot of trouble getting it, and it makes it longer for me. And the first thing, when you have that, as soon as you move your arm, you have a relationship with the cloth. It's not just your arm moving with the cloth by going along with it. it sort of like drags behind a bit and swings and when you stop it, it swings out this way. So you have a kind of relationship with the cloth as you move and you have to take it into consideration. And when you have all these robes on, you don't feel closed as we do, closed up. You feel nude under these artichoke leaves. You have these various layers of things, you know, and you're quite cool and thermal inside because none of it hangs on your body. It just barely touches and is tied like a Here, it feels very much like wearing a backpack. You sort of pull your obi tight and the whole thing sort of sits on your hips here, rather nice. But also, they design rhythm as a ... rhythm is actually designed into it in another level, which is depending on your social status and your occupation. Like if you're a Soto priest, you have really long sleeves, which really change your movements and affect your rhythm.

[04:03]

And if you're a warrior, it's a little different. If you're a lower class person, your sleeves are short. If you're a higher class person, your sleeves are longer. Various distinctions like that, which have to do with the rhythm which is expected of you. Well, what I'm trying to say here is that There are these kinds of forms which we find in Japan, in China, which are alternatives to ours, I think. I think they're possible ways which we can experience things too. What the Japanese essentially is doing here is he's not emphasizing endpoints, he's emphasizing relationships. He's emphasizing process and not product. And I think if you know this and get a sense of this, it can be a kind of way in which you can open up your own life, because you can begin to question your own distinctions of inside and outside, or conscious and unconscious, or public and private. And you can think of, like, what the Negro is doing in our society as a challenge to our idea of what public is, what public space is.

[05:23]

There are many ways in which you can think about these kind of things. When you write your name, instead of just making the letters on the page, you can find if your awareness and attention can flow in the ink as you write it. You can find if your being can organise that, so that when somebody else looks at the letters they have a feeling of where you were at when you were writing it. And I think you can actually do that. You can write an envelope. and just address it. And if you, if, when you're making an R, you have the full sense of R, then that R, then it, are you? Anyway. You, you can have a sense of your full tension being in each letter. And when somebody else reads it, there's a kind of vibrancy in the letter. This is a kind of Buddhist practice, actually, to have your attention in this kind of thing. And when you begin to see that these distinctions, which are really basic to the way each of us thinks about things, can think about things, many things are defined out of our lives, defined out because our language and our cultural vocabulary don't permit us to even be aware of these possibilities.

[06:40]

But more than that, when you see that these forms can be, you know, the Japanese way or our way, at such a fundamental level as what time and space are, you realize also that our mind is actually free. That our mind doesn't have to be this form or that form. Actually, your mind is free. That your mind is emptiness itself. In Buddhism we call, I think, to manifest big mind or emptiness or freedom from form in every activity. While you're doing that activity, while you're doing that form is called great function or great activity. You do the specific thing but you simultaneously have freedom from it, but believe it or not,

[07:43]

it sounds like a contradiction, that requires full attention on that thing. And when you have full attention on what you're doing, your ego or consciousness covers everything. And we say big mind or cosmic mind or universe And none of those words are really very accurate. You say universe and there's a sense of big rocks out there in space or something like that, some physical object. So in Buddhism we try to find some other word which is more, has more meaning than just universe as kind of like a physical material universe. And sometimes we say mind only or consciousness only or emptiness or awareness. And when you practice zazen, the whole point of zazen meditation is to, if each of us is the centre of the universe, is to know what that is by, through your own being, because you imply, are the whole.

[08:56]

seem to be the last card. I can answer some questions, or whatever you want. Yeah? I was wondering, in the culture you're describing, what happens to creativity? What kind of a role does it play in that kind of a culture? It seems to be looking in this big, weird-looking mirror. It tends to be more educating rather than creative. Does it have a different value there? I haven't thought about that as much as I'd like, so I don't have a... I haven't, sort of, like, gone over the various ramifications and possibilities of it, but I feel that, basically, the Oriental artist is refinding – not refining, exactly, but refinding, renewing – but he's also It's not so different from our art, really. It describes the process and feels and thinks about the process differently. Certainly, newness isn't an important thing. Styles change very slowly and

[10:08]

generally through our company with social changes in a sort of little different way than we are, ours do. But a good, for instance, sort of maybe the most essential art form is how you make the kanji, how you make a Japanese character. And so, if you make it with full attention and full spirit, you convey that spirit to the other person. Japanese art and Chinese art, I think, is a vehicle for this, which perhaps our art is too, but it's not the sense of newness that we have. Does that answer your question, sir? Questioner 2 You would say, then, that in their art, for example, the structured art is such that their individualism is displayed in the subtleness of what they do? David No, not their individualism at all. Their merging with everything is displayed. their relationship to that character is displayed, not who they are separate from anything else. There's just no compulsion to display themselves, for example. No, in fact I have a statement, I've copied down and I didn't bring the card, but in which this man says that he really... it's in the Expo 70 book and it's an artist, one of the Japanese artists who illustrated an Expo 70 book, and it's really an extraordinary statement, rather embarrassing.

[11:34]

because he says, writing this book in translated English – I don't know why they even translate in English – and he says that Western artists trying to find the new, he implies, are responsible for the German concentration camps, for the atomic bomb, for horrible things done to humanity, and only the Japanese person who knows true self-sacrifice, who gives up his individuality and ego to the group. to what it means to be intrinsically Japanese produces real art. I mean, it's very difficult to get a Japanese person, often, to even answer a question like, how do you feel about something? He says, well, we Japanese feel such and such. You say, well, how do you feel? Well, we Japanese usually say... And my teacher does it all the time, Nagasaki sensei, who's a pretty liberated Japanese, but he always says, we Japanese. And I don't... You know, that just seems... To me, I want to know how he feels, and it takes me sometimes half an hour to get down to what he feels, and I have to sort of keep edging around. What? Well, it's, you know, like it's, you know, it's there and then it's not there, you know. Yeah.

[13:02]

Well, I've been thinking a lot about this but I haven't come to any sort of resolution and right now it's so complicated and so many things are like stewing. The way I think about things is I pour as much as possible into the pot and I let it stew and I keep stirring and it gets kind of mixed up and what I think about property and money and things like that right now, it is in a kind of stewing place. But in a simple way, if you go to... like I have some land in the Sierra, and if you come and you say, I want this, you know, I'm going to live here, or something like that, there's a sense in which, if I know the trees and the rocks and the stream and the names of the plants and know the contour of the ground and am familiar with it, it's not your territory, you know, in a sense. I know it and I'm familiar with how to live on it, how to use it, how to use the acorns on it, etc. That's different from having a lease and speculating on it, like California laid out as a big thing to make money on. Let's buy this and wait for the value to go up. I'm not saying that that's necessarily bad.

[14:28]

society has to survive as it exists, never works out quite satisfactorily in perfect relationships. But this idea of property also is not just a simple idea of property, it phases right into government, communism, capitalism, and basic values of what human beings are, as these people on the ship said, that the person who doesn't believe in property should be killed. I think that this is a problem which actually you're in the process of creating now. Each of us, by the way we live and are making decisions, are trying to find out what it means, what property means, what money means. I don't think there's any answer in existence at present. My own feeling is I don't see anybody, any system, any governmental system, any rule book which tells me satisfactorily what our relationship to material things is. that are, you know, like how you, what, what, the effect of possessions on you, should you have possessions, a lot of possessions, a few possessions, property, land, that's not clear at present. Should the government own everything? I mean, it's just not clear and I don't think anybody knows the answer and I think that each of us is actually in our living trying to find that out. Yeah.

[15:51]

Well, there's a great deal of interest in the West, of course, and a lot of discussion about it, and I've given some talks at Japanese universities and other groups to young people and other people. It's hard to answer your question exactly because it doesn't apply exactly, but there's not much self-criticism. Even Nagasaki Sensei, again, my teacher who feels there should be self-criticism, can't criticize himself and can't criticize society. You read newspapers, there's very little criticism of the society or government activity which has really any strength or meaning. It's just, you know, like they feel they ought to criticize a little, but it doesn't have much power. And I noticed

[17:08]

These things are so reinforcing and so difficult to get free of. I mean, I noticed, for instance, a lot of middle-aged Japanese women who live near us complain about the way their husbands treat them. They'll push them around and et cetera, you know. And they wish that their husbands were more like Western men sometimes. And I think this is more than just talk, because they are aware that they don't have to be at the bottom of the social heat anymore, but they don't know quite what to do about it. But I watch these same women, when they bring up their children, they bring up their little boys, to be exactly the kind of man who will push around a woman. I mean, it's not as simple as... I say push around, and it sounds like I'm being critical. I'm not being critical. In fact, when you talk about... I mean, when you start saying, Japan is this and America is that, in some ways, to us, it seems very difficult and abrasive. And in some ways, it seems rather super-duper, you know. and actually beyond. My actual experience in Japan is just the same as my actual experience here, is that human beings are so complicated and wonderful and beautiful and extraordinary that you can hardly say anything about them. But when they start behaving, you can predict their behavior according to a certain pattern. Well, again, one example along this line that is interesting, I think, too, is they have a lot of demonstrations in Japan about

[18:37]

war and peace and things like that. Well, they're absolutely confusing to us. Here are these young people struggling to express some different feeling, and I was in a big demonstration against Reischauer when he came, a former teacher of mine at Harvard, who came to Kyoto, and I didn't know, really, I was demonstrating against him. I was just walking along the street, you know, and suddenly the street was filled with police with a shield like the Roman Legion, you know. I thought this was pretty interesting, and I was waiting for a bus to go home, so I followed them. And pretty soon, down the street came thousands and thousands and thousands of young Japanese men and women. And I've been in lots of sort of demonstrations and riots before, and in a big peace march in America, for instance, they say, would everybody please walk twenty abreast or eight abreast or something like that, right? And the line just wanders, you know. And I can remember at freshman riots at Harvard Yard, the police would – the students wanted to get out in the street and the police would open a gate, right, and all the students would race for the gate. And they'd get right to the gate and the cops would close it. And then they'd open the gate over there and some students would say, there's the gate over there, open it, and they'd race across the gate. And, you know, four or five times like this before the students got to know what was going on, they were exhausted and they'd just give up. They're too tired from running back and forth.

[20:06]

In Japan, they just do just the opposite, they get all excited running back and forth, and they're super organized. I mean, they're demonstrating in some ways against the seniority system for individual freedom, but here they come down the street, maybe 8,000 of them, you know, right? Linked, eight in a line, eight in a line, and every twentieth person is a squadron leader with a little different helmet. And he says, Ampo, I can't remember the words exactly, but he says, Ampo, and then all twenty say, Sampai. And every twentieth leader says, Ampo, and all the group says, Sampai. And they chain, you know, snake dance down the street. It goes on for hours. I was heavily, I followed them, I was, but they get more and more excited, and pretty soon, and the police are beautifully organized. It's really unbelievable. And I'll just tell you one aspect of the thing. I was trying to stay out of the way and there's all this cement and it's kind of confusing, like you see headlines. Japanese anti-war group vows to fight to the death. You know? How can an anti-war group vow to fight to the death? But, you know, and on the helmets they have, don't kill, you know, and they pick up big pieces of paper and they're throwing huge stones at the cops, you know.

[21:27]

And I sort of, by this time, wanted to get on the police side, maybe. I thought, this is sort of a little ridiculous, but I couldn't because all these big stones were coming, you know, as I was running around behind this thing. But one of the most interesting things is the way the police ran things. There was this marvellous armoured car and it had little windows all around the side with, you know, like cameras being, you know, wide angle lens taking pictures of all the demonstrators. And I was up on this little pedestal, this monument, sort of watching this thing. And the roof opens like this. And out comes this thing, you know, like a, you know, bell telephone thing but much bigger and fancier. And this thing rises up out of the roof and this guy with binoculars. And he sort of signals to the walkie-talkie for a group of the foreign legion or Roman legion to come in from this side and this side. It looks like they just run it long enough. I was the only foreigner and Japanese television was filming me. it looks like they just run it long enough for the television cameras to get some good footage and then the police close it up and they just close it up and sometimes the students of kamikaze squad get themselves really excited when they're around red helmets or white helmets come racing and they charge up against this armored car and just as they reach it the doors go you know and they beat against the sides and then as soon as they're beaten back and out comes this guy again

[22:54]

But most of the time in the universities, you know, there's like 20 groups or something fighting over Todai, and there's like five or six guys in control somehow. And most of the fighting is these 20 groups fighting to be the five or six who run things. And I can't figure it out, you know, and I don't know a single person in Japan, except one person who's been there nine years and he's a Soto priest and he's in the process of being deported as one of the leaders. But he seems to understand it as working on a book. But I can't get anybody... He's explaining to me. I can't understand what these factions are and what's going on. And I know a group of professors, one of them is an American, who wanted to support the students. And every time they met to support the students who were attacking the seniority system, every meeting was about how they'd save face for supporting the students. So, I suspect we're doing the same kind of thing, really. We're talking about, you know, like getting together and tribal life and etc. We're being individual as ever, you know. And they're talking about being individual and other things and they're just being as group as ever, you know. You had a question back there? The closing of Tokyo University?

[24:15]

Well, all the major universities up until this new law are closed, and they may be closed and shut down permanently as of about December. It depends how long they're fighting this fall. But I tell you, I just don't understand it. Japan has a lot of things you just don't understand, and part of it is areas of vagueness which occur. It's very hard to get specifics out, and it's very interesting and complex, but I'll talk some about that another time, maybe tomorrow night. Yeah? Is there an equivalent in Japan to the Osaki Opinion? If so, are they copying the West, or are they looking more to the River East? And can other countries do the same? Or are there people who are wondering what the young people are looking for?

[25:31]

Yeah, well again this is very difficult to answer exactly and not and I don't think I've been there one year I think the third year is when I'll get to know I have an idea at least why I don't know You know, I don't even know why I don't know at present Marijuana is there isn't much of it there are Americans sometimes bring it in and English people and other people traveling not Japanese and they often abandon it in Japan because they're scared to bring it to America So there's the gaijin – gaijin means outsider or foreigner – there's a lot of marijuana and stuff around. Some LSD. There's very little LSD on the Japanese scene. There's a little marijuana. I think marijuana, you know, is originally a Near Eastern or North African plant. I think it was brought to America and Mexico in the bales of hay of the Spanish conquistadors, and then it began growing in Mexico and places. And it's not native to America and it's not native to Japan, but there is some growing in the hills in Japan, I know, and as far as everyone tells me, it's rather weak, I don't know. But Japan is very alert to the drug thing and there continues to be an international

[26:50]

I mean, all countries in the world seem to have this big thing of fearing drugs, and I think they fear them because they open up this same area we're talking about of questioning the basic assumption of, like, what, you know, your mind gets maybe higher. I think in... well, I have some theories, too, about Western society and inebriation and Oriental societies and inebriation, but too complicated to go into. In short, there's very little, as far as I can tell, and I have some connection with Japanese hippies, very little drugs, very little. And there's some aspects of the culture and some of the young people take a lot of uppers and downers, but I think that answers part of your question anyway, right?

[27:51]

Well, no. In fact, you go into a go-go place again and here's a... No, it's just different. The answer is no, there's not. One of the things, this is not exactly related, but one of the things that strikes me, you can't even say this is a psychedelic style. Here in America you can say, free of LSD, this is psychedelic. Of course, I don't think drugs are producing this. I think that there's a fundamental change in consciousness going on which makes people suddenly use marijuana and use LSD in ways which they didn't and they were available before. In Japan you go to a go-go place and here's a person imitating exactly the doors or the birds or some group and he has absolutely no idea. It looks like psychedelic style maybe but he has absolutely no idea of the effort the psychedelic, the drug use, etc., which went into the producing of this song, or even what the words mean. He doesn't even know what the double meanings are. It's just no idea, he's just singing it, and it sounds pretty good, you know. Way back? I guess I'm somewhat confused, because when you initially started out, you raised the question of who am I? I guess you're kind of a Western man, the question is, you want to try to kind of understand

[29:14]

For a Japanese man, the question is very different. And I guess what's troubling me is, because it's my western mind, I don't understand how the Japanese man arrived at any kind of understanding of the way I'm alive. Maybe it's the fact that he went about that in relation to the biological environment. I don't know. Well, there's of course a relationship between the individual or unit as he produces the group and the group as it produces the individual. And, you know, there's actual separate people, they're not all glued to each other. I mean, they are separate. But they often don't have separate names, for instance. I mean, you go to a Japanese farming community and if you asked for Taro, no one would know who Taro was. there's everybody's name, it's like on a ship, there's the purser and the first mate and the chief mate, etc. The names in the village are the grandmother who lives up the hill, the third aunt, etc., and they have all these names based on your status, your relationship with the group. It's like on a ship, you're a purser or chief mate, depending on your group identity. And this group thing is

[30:32]

It's a cliché of anybody who's studied the Orient, but the implications and the length to which it's carried out in society are really great. For instance, I wasn't studying at a particular Buddhist temple, and people didn't believe I was a Buddhist. I mean, they'd say, are you a daito-kichi or a hentai-ji, or where are you? And I'd say, no, I'm practicing at home, mostly. Sometimes they go, well, I felt myself disappearing before their eyes, because I didn't have a group connection. Yeah. Well, that's

[31:33]

and I really don't know enough how to answer it. There's some different feeling about individual suffering than we have. Of course, Americans and the Green Berets do some pretty bad things. There's a kind of... I mean, I feel like the terrible thing about being arrested in this country is not that you've committed a crime or you're going to be punished for that crime. That's one aspect of the problem, of course, whatever it is. but that you are put in a position where your captors can act out their fantasies on you, you know. And most of the punishment is the policeman or whoever acting out his fantasies on you, he can now treat you the way... And in Japan, of course, something like this goes on too. But there is a different feeling, and when you're not a part of... For instance, you can't become a Japanese citizen. That's almost impossible. Koreans who've lived in Japan, There's a kind of everybody – China puts down Koreans and Koreans put down Japanese and Japanese put down Koreans, you know. And Koreans who've lived in Japan for generations are still immigrants, and you're an outsider. I'm an outsider. I'm an outsider who's excluded with a smile, but Koreans are outsiders who are excluded with a frown, you know. It amounts to the same thing.

[32:57]

Anybody outside the group seems to be an outsider. In fact, one of our problems in Japan has been cats. Cats are abandoned often near our house and they're left out before they've been weaned and they just are out there crying and the neighbors don't want me to bring them in because they don't like cats and I'm sitting there trying to work and I hear the rain and you know and I hear these cats crying and after a while I go out and I rescue them. and I feed them and I don't know what to do about it, you know, because I keep getting more and more cats, right? I've got five cats buried in my backyard, you know, but I talked to Nagasaki Sensei again about it and he just doesn't feel it. Why does it bother you that the cat is crap? He just doesn't feel it and the way dogs and cats are treated in Japan to us seems really bad. Dogs are kept chained up on short, light leashes, every dog I've seen, in front of houses for a long day and night. And I found a cat in front of our house chained to a eggplant plant on a string so short its front feet were off the ground and it was like this against the plant, right, and its voice, for two months after we named it, it's all black, we named it Black is Everywhere, and

[34:21]

and blackie everywhere for two months and had this sort of voice right well in this field where this eggplant field there is at least one human being working in that eggplant field trimming off leaves and watering etc 12 hours a day and that cat was tied up there because my daughter watched it for three or four days right three or four days That's my wife. She's my researcher. And none of the farmers working the field untied it or did anything for it. It's tied there waiting for someone to take it away and they often leave it near our house because they know foreigners are more soft. But there's this thing, and I don't quite understand it, but I mean, I know, for instance, that if I hear a rat, the rats that are in my house suffering, I'm sort of glad, you know, a little bit. They're sort of a nuisance, and mostly I try to be nice to the rats in our house, but when they start crawling around near my head, I get a little bit... And most Americans, for instance, don't have feelings about flies and rats, so, you know, the Japanese don't have feelings about cats and dogs, but... There's something going on which I don't know about. Yeah? This is exactly what Nagasaki sent to me. He said, you know, the Buddhist idea of compassion, we should be more compassionate, you know?

[35:40]

It seems to... the primary factor in any society seems to be the demands that sociology and psychology or something like that make to survive. And they shape the religion, they shape everything, you know. And the group thing in Japan is the predominant thing and it's just everything else is secondary to it. In fact, some people explain the relationship to cats. I don't think it's an adequate explanation, but one of the explanations is that they don't want, from Buddhist teachings, the death of the cat on their karma, so they abandon it, thinking that at least it's not their responsibility anymore, so they abandon them. And of course, what happens is the Buddhist monks, because they're left around the Buddhist temples a lot, the Buddhist monks have to drown them. Because I left in and then there's all these cats and so they're going to control them in the little corner. So that's a problem. OK. Zen Center students, I can talk to you later. Yeah. When Zen went from Kamino...

[36:53]

I knew you were going to ask an easy question. No one knows, of course, but I think on the first part it is possible and it's possible because the mind is free of forms, actually, absolute mind or big mind, it's free of form. Form is emptiness and emptiness is form is one of the very basic E equals MC squared kind of formula in Buddhism. And I think that the truth of that is that Buddhism is the practice of this beyond this or that culture, so of course Buddhism can be in Japan, in America. But at first it'll have to come over, like if you take a tree out of Japan or China and you took off all its branches and bark and planted it in the States, it would die. But if you plant it in the States, eventually its roots in American soil will change and it'll change.

[38:20]

Exactly what it will be like I don't know, of course. That's exactly what I spend most of my energy in doing, in trying to work in a larger sense in a community of people trying to find how to live and in a more specific sense with the Zen group which I'm a part. And we don't know. My own personal feeling about this is that Zen, which emphasizes, which doesn't talk about mudras and mandalas and specific religious practices so much, but tends to try to find the deeper aspects and ordinary things of our life, like eating and going to the bath, things like that, which most of the rituals in Zen center around daily activities. The one activity that has been left out in Zen is family life and sex, and I think that, for me, what interests me is not the shaved head, castrated priest thing, but the family or householder

[39:29]

I'd say, mandala. I'm interested in how the household and family is a mandala, is a practice, just like eating, etc. And I think that, like, Tassajara has women in it. Some of the Japanese priests would like there to be no women, but I feel that men and women have to practice together, and at present we're in the process of adding this step and trying to find a way to create a practice that will work here. And we don't know, you know, but something's happening. I think that's a good point to end. Yeah? Yeah, pushing it.

[40:32]

Well, I could, but I think that's something that you have to sense, that there's a difference, that these differences I'm talking about, these fundamental differences between outside and inside, public and private, time and space, past, present and future, are carried out on the most minute levels in the culture, including the way tools are handled. But more than that I can't say because you have to have a sense of how the whole interrelationships work and are before you can sense, well, why is this one that way and that one this way? Okay, I'd like to stop. Thank you very much. Tomorrow night I'll take this all one step further.

[41:26]

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