Good morning, everybody. Wow, so many people here. Is there a reason for this? Did you explain before? Is there some special group here? How's that? Very exciting lecture today. Yeah. So there must be a special group here or something, right? Oh. From a certain... Oh. And how come? Oh. Who's the professor? Oh. Nice. Well, welcome. And I guess Arlene already explained about Al and Hing being here, right? And we... Thanks for coming. We had a lot of fun the other day down at Google, where you always get a great lunch.

[01:06]

So the person who's doing the program is named Kate Olson, and she's also a good friend. So here we are on television. So I want to talk to you today about something that I've been ruminating on lately, and that is the particularly Japanese dimension of our practice. And even though I don't speak Japanese, I don't know that much about Japan, and I've only visited Japan a couple of times briefly, and even though on the whole I've been fairly fierce over the years about the idea that we're practicing American Zen and not Japanese Zen. Still, as I'm getting older, I'm really coming to appreciate the Japanese quality of our practice.

[02:24]

Just how Japanese it really is. And I'm coming around, at least lately, to the idea that maybe the Japanese part is the best part. So I've been thinking about this and reading some books about Japan and Japanese culture and trying to understand this point a little bit better. So that's what I wanna talk to you about today. I wanna share some of these thoughts. And to do it, I'll probably have to make some very broad and sweeping generalizations about Japan, and about religion, and about history, and so on and so forth. And like all broad and sweeping generalizations, they will be untrue, more or less. But they do help us to appreciate and understand something, so be aware of that reality. So I'm going to begin with a super broad generalization, a really broad brushstroke, which actually it's great that we have

[03:32]

students of religion class here, because this is a big, broad point about religion that no doubt you've studied in your classes. And probably all of us who went to college studied this somewhere along the line. Historians of religion always talk about the Axial Age. Have you heard this term, the Axial Age? Which is a very big period of time. maybe around 1000 to 500 BC, when what we now call the world's great religions all had their beginnings in this period of time. And it seems like all over the world in different places, maybe without contact with each other, human beings reach some new stage of consciousness or some different stage of development And people had a sort of set of ideas or thoughts or feelings about life that they hadn't had before.

[04:39]

And out of this came all what we call, you know, all the major religions of the world. Judaism, which of course forms the basis of Christianity, which is a huge, you know, many, many adherence, began around this time. Buddhism began in this period. In China, there was Taoism and Confucianism, which I think are in world religions in that same sense. And although, of course, the differences between these different traditions are vast, compared to what came before them, there is a great similarity. Before all this happened, of course, there was already religion, because there's always religion. Did you know that? Wherever you go, anywhere, at any time, you just can't get away from religion.

[05:43]

There's always some form of religion. And my theory is that as soon as people began speaking and having concepts beyond what's in front of them, right away they had religion, that language and religion go together. But anyway, all the religions that existed before this time were rooted and embedded religions, rooted and embedded in a particular location, in a particular nexus of local custom and tradition that was taken for granted in a kind of timeless way, as if this is always the way it was, you know, these were always the spirits, these were always the ancestors, these were always the places. And people lived and died within that local nexus for generations and generations. So these so-called great religions were different from that in several identifiable ways.

[06:46]

The first thing that was different about them was that they all emphasized the individual, the individual person. They all, in different ways, said that each person is responsible, each person is sacred, each person is important, and each person has his or her own relationship to the transcendent or the divine or salvation or whatever you want to call it. And we take this absolutely for granted, right? We all assume this, but this was new. You might say, well, wait a minute, but doesn't Buddhism talk about no self, no individual? True, Buddha did use that language, but what was the purpose of it? The purpose of it was to effect liberation for the individual. So Buddha was really focused on the individual's practice.

[07:48]

So in that sense, even though the language seems to be the opposite, in fact, Buddhism is just as much focused on the individual even more. than all the other traditions. And because of this emphasis on the individual, it actually is a precept or a sin in all these religions. Again, we take this completely for granted, that you shouldn't kill another human being. It's wrong to kill. But before that, it wasn't necessarily wrong. It was difficult to kill somebody, and there could be bad consequences, but it wasn't necessarily wrong or a sin. or counter-indicated, or against the precepts to kill somebody, but only when these religions came and said, the individual is sacred, at that point came this universal precept, which, of course, we always violate when we declare wars and so on and so forth. So that's one thing that they all shared that was quite different.

[08:53]

The second thing is that these great religions were all essentially abstract. That is, they were based on practices and ideas and religious feelings not on place and craft and local tradition. And they were all based on written texts, which had never been the case before, on ideas that could be conveyed abstractly through words and letters. And also, the goals of all these traditions were highly abstract. You know, union with God in heaven is a pretty big abstraction. It has nothing to do with the local mountains or how crops are grown. But nirvana is also equally an abstract goal. Nirvana, release, letting go, is a kind of

[09:59]

Tremendous abstraction. What does nirvana have to do with the passing of the seasons or the spawning of salmon or seeds and plants, which had been at the center of religion before that? So the life of nirvana is radically different from ordinary, confused human life. And the kingdom of God is elsewhere, not here in this profane and humdrum concrete world. So these axial religions were essentially abstract. And the third thing about them, and again, we take all this so much for granted, we don't really think about it, but the third thing about them that we also take for granted is that they were universalistic. In other words, nirvana is not a special thing that is only available to people who were born as Buddhists. Nirvana is a universal human possibility for anyone who will undertake it.

[11:04]

And God in Christianity and Judaism is not just God for the Jews. God is God of everything and everyone. And although Judaism is always struggling with this universalistic aspect, Christianity does not struggle with it. Christianity sort of takes it to the max. Jesus doesn't just save people who were born into Christian families. Jesus saves everyone whose heart would open to Jesus. And everybody should, Christians would say, should accept Jesus' gift and sacrifice. And when you think about it, it's very obvious that every culture in the world, without exception, has been revolutionized by by these great religions, either willingly and enthusiastically taking them on or being forced to do so. Now, I think that the Hopis never had the idea of making everyone in the world into a Hopi.

[12:14]

Maybe if the Hopis had the chance, they might have wanted to conquer everybody in the world. because everybody does, given the chance. They might have wanted to conquer everybody in the world, but not to make them into Hopis. Maybe they would have wanted to conquer them to get their horses or something, but not to make them into Hopis, because you can't be a Hopi unless you're a Hopi. You can't turn into a Hopi. But you can turn into a Christian or a Buddhist. And the Christians did think at one point, maybe still, that everyone should become a Christian. And they were very enthusiastic about this for centuries. And I think many of us would say that they overdid their enthusiasm. Now, the Buddhists were much kinder and gentler and perhaps more skillful about this.

[13:22]

And their idea was, let's offer the teachings to everyone, which they did. Without exception, it didn't matter who the people were. You didn't have to be born in a certain way. Everybody could receive the teachings. And so Buddhism also spread all over the world. And various non-Buddhist people like us got to practice and share in the Buddhist teachings. So for better or worse, or probably for better and worse, these great religious traditions have really taken over the entire world. And so this gets me around to Japan. Because this is to me the interesting thing about Japan. Because in a way, unique among the world's major cultures, Japan has

[14:24]

escaped being taken over by these great religious traditions. Now, of course, immediately you will say, wait a minute, what are you talking about? Japan has been Buddhist and Confucian and Taoist for a millennium and a half. And Japan has also been Christian and Western for almost a couple of hundred years. So how can you say that it has escaped from the world's great religious traditions. But in a way it has, because Japan has never entirely overcome its ancient local cultural roots. Now, of course, in some sense you can say this is true everywhere. You can find evidence of those roots in remote areas in many places in the world, and even in the big cities there's always some taste of the past, because the past, of course, as we all know, the older we get, the more we know it.

[15:25]

The past never disappears. It's sort of always there. But I think there's actually something really different about Japan. And think about it. This is an astonishing reality of Japanese history and culture. Japan has always remained indelibly Japanese. And yet, at the same time, it has completely and thoroughly based its culture on outside cultures. And this is really astonishing when you consider it. Early on, at the beginning of any identifiable Japanese culture, Japan decided that it would swallow Chinese culture whole, which it did. It took on the writing system, the religion, the social forms, everything Chinese became Japanese. Now, you might say, well, don't cultures always borrow from one another?

[16:30]

And of course they do. There's no culture that's hermetically sealed. We're always borrowing from each other. But swallowing a culture whole like that, self-consciously, and saying, we're now going to take this whole thing on and make it our own, this is really pretty much unprecedented. for a great culture. I can't think of any other examples that are quite like this. And in 1868, in the famous Meiji Restoration, Japan did this again. Only this time, they swallowed whole Western thought and Western values and Western culture, and they reinvented themselves again, based on this. All the while, remaining essentially and indelibly Japanese. So Japan is an odd culture. It's a kind of bifocal culture. On the one hand, completely post-axial, post-industrial even, modern culture, and at the same time, completely Japanese, completely Japanese.

[17:46]

beyond this culture. Not retaining this as a memory or a kind of nostalgia, but as something that's central to it. A pre-axial, non-rational, non-materialistic, earth-based culture still exists at the heart of Japan, a culture with no texts, No credo, no ideology, no worked out ideas about itself. Very vague, very mysterious, and yet at the same time a powerful sense of identity and an unmistakable and very particular feeling about life that is essentially and particularly Japanese. And one great commentator on Japanese culture writes that... Japanese culture is like a container without anything in it.

[18:49]

An empty container. No content. And it can be filled up completely with any content that you want to put in there. Chinese culture, Buddhism, Confucianism, Modernism, the container will take it all in. And it will always remain the same. Japanese. Without any particular information. content, which is why any content would be okay. That's what this commentator says. The container is a feeling for life, a sense about life, a kind of really nothingness. In fact, Nishita, the great Japanese philosopher of the 20th century, said that about Japanese culture. He said the philosophy of absolute nothingness. This was the essential Japanese thought and way of life. So I find this, when you think about it, it's really quite amazing.

[19:50]

And I think we all know this. We all have this idea. We all understand this about Japanese culture, even though we might not have thought about it so much. Very unusual. Which is why I think one finds it very difficult to really understand Japan and Japanese people. Because in our terms, it's so full of contradictions. It doesn't really make any sense. And again, I'm bringing this up not because we're here to become students of Japanese culture or world culture or even religious culture, but because I think it directly bears on the practice that we are doing together. And it may be one reason why we often find it so difficult to kind of grasp this Zen tradition to kind of get it right and figure it out. We're trying to figure it out, but we always have a hard time figuring it out, and this may be why.

[20:51]

Particularly the kind of Zen that we practice, the Suzuki Roshi Dogen style of Zen, which I think is very particularly Japanese in its essence. And I think it's not that hard to understand other forms of Buddhism. You know, Indian Buddhism or Asian Buddhism, even Chinese Buddhism, kind of are reasonable. You know, nirvana, samsara, it all makes sense, you know. But with Suzuki Roshi, it all gets very fuzzy and hard to understand. And yet, we are, despite this difficulty, I think, or maybe because of it, we are very attracted to this beautiful way of practice because it is exactly that. It is very, very beautiful. And it speaks to our hearts somehow, even though it resists all our efforts to straighten it out and make sense out of it. A lot of these thoughts I've been having come from reading a book by the great Berkeley sociologist Robert Bella, who's really one of the great...

[22:01]

about religion and society in our time. He's still going in his 80s. He's a professor emeritus in his 80s now. And there's a book of his called Imagining Japan. And this is a quotation from that book. The split between abstract foreign culture carried by relatively isolated intellectual coteries and emotional native culture more widely shared among the people has never been entirely overcome. The split between abstract foreign culture and emotional native culture. So this is interesting, emotional native culture. And in my limited experience, I find this to be absolutely true. that there is a deeply emotional feeling sense about Japanese people and Japanese culture.

[23:12]

And I think, as Westerners, our feelings are much more abstract. We think our feelings. If we get mad at somebody, we have a whole bunch of rationale why that's true. Our feelings are never divorced from our rational feelings. thinking instincts. But I think mostly Japanese people don't think their feelings. They just feel them. They just feel them. And it's hard for us to get the hang of that. That sense of how to feel your life without overthinking it. How to feel through the body and the heart rather than with the thought. And again, this is not about Japan particularly. Because all this, I think, is really embedded in our practice. It's embedded in the whole sense of Zazen practice, which is at the heart of what we do in Soto Zen.

[24:15]

When you think about it, this is how we understand Zazen. Really deeply feeling our life through the body without pushing it around with our thinking. And our... Zen forms, our way of life, you know, the robes and the way we feel about the robes and what we do with them and so on and so forth. The sound of the bell, all this stuff. There's a deep feeling about life that comes with all of this. And I think that now, maybe after 40 years of living this life together, collectively, we're just now beginning, I think, to feel the deep feelings. that come from this way of life, feeling them in our hearts, in our shoulders, in our hands, in our feet, feeling them in the bowing, feeling them in the chanting, feeling them in the silence.

[25:19]

And it's difficult to explain this rationally. And I think it takes a long time, actually, to appreciate it because it is a very emotional thing. It takes a lot of repetition. and a lot of experiences with others over time before you really get to appreciate it. This book I mentioned by Professor Bella is actually a study of some of the leading intellectuals. It's a kind of intellectual history of 20th century Japan. And when you think about it, again, I'm astonished by what they managed to do. The first thing they had to do was learn European languages, which they did. They turned over their whole educational system to a study of the West. So they learned European languages and they read abstruse and profound European philosophies in the original languages and mastered them from the inside and the outside.

[26:27]

And again, inside the Japanese container, they all became Japanese. Now this is an amazing feat, you know, to do this, to completely swallow up a whole other culture and then turn it into something else. So from their point of view, they saw, with a very critical eye, the mania of our Western rationalistic, mechanistic, production-driven culture. and they critiqued it and argued against it, in many ways not too dissimilar from what our own Western philosophers did. Because ever since, if you study Western thought, ever since the invention of big factories and nasty, dirty cities with poverty-stricken neighborhoods and oppression of women and the young and so on and so forth, our own

[27:31]

Western thinkers have been saying, this is not a good idea. This is not working out. Something has to be done. We can't go on this way. They've been saying that since the 19th century. I mean, the rest of us are going along trying to get through the day, but the people who had the time to sit around and think about it have been saying that. We've lost nature. We've lost community. We're saying that now, but they've been saying that for a long time. And when you think about it, what was the tremendous passion of all the violence of the 20th century about, if not that? It was about our collective human dismay over what we had wrought in the previous 100 years. And our misguided and hubristic attempts to correct this through the great ideologies of fascism and communism, which, of course, were, in retrospect, pretty lunatic.

[28:48]

And millions and millions of people were slaughtered in the attempt to, like, straighten us out and create utopia. And we still have, after all of that, you know, we still have the same problems. And it doesn't seem to be getting any better. But at least, I hope this is true, no one anymore thinks that we can fix this now by killing a lot of people in order to straighten them out. At least those who do believe that are few in number, not able to commandeer whole major countries. So maybe we can say this is a great advancement at great cost, but a great advancement in human understanding. Well, you could argue that the high point in Japanese culture, and I think many people do think this, was in the Kamakura period, which is the time when Dogen, our founder of Soto Zen, practiced, and also Shinran, who was his great contemporary.

[29:57]

And both of them expressed Buddhisms that even though they were not revolutionaries or felt like they were starting new religions, in fact, both of them were really expressing a kind of radical view of Buddhism, views of Buddhism that were wonderfully human and gentle and humane and universal without being at all coercive. And both of them retained and drew on what is most beautiful, in my opinion, the Japanese spirit. This wonderful and indefinable feeling for life, a kind of profound faith in life, and then an acceptance of life's troubles and sorrows, not as a kind of mistake to be corrected, not as a kind of problem to be overcome, but as itself.

[31:02]

life's deepest beauty and liberative spirit. This is really an astonishing thing, and I think this is what we love in Suzuki Roshi's teaching and in Dōgen's teaching, because it gives us so much sense of healing that we can be ourselves, that we don't have to somehow remake ourselves, reconstruct ourselves inwardly, violently almost. in order to be okay. Dogen taught, as we all know, Dogen taught Zazen, Zen meditation, not as a way of achieving enlightenment, but he taught it as both path and fruition simultaneously, based on a confidence in our deepest human nature. He felt like, I think, in sitting, and this is what it amounts to, all of his profound writings on this subject, he felt like that when we were sitting, we were not sitting to overcome our humanness.

[32:16]

When we're sitting, we're sitting to allow ourselves to open up to our perfect and imperfect humanness, and that doing that, is the ultimate truth. This is a really radical thought, and it comes right out of the heart of Japanese culture, maybe in a way more than it comes out of Buddhist culture. Shinran's teaching, about which I don't know so much, seems to be the opposite of this. His idea was that human life is so difficult, and we are such a mess. That practice is absolutely impossible, and anybody who thinks they can do spiritual practice is kidding themselves. So the only thing that you can do is throw yourself at the mercy of the Buddha and hope for the best. Because anything else is just arrogance and stupidity and will lead to a bad end.

[33:20]

That was Shinran's point of view, which seems to be quite different from Dogen's, but the truth is I think it's almost the same. Anyway, coming back to us and our practice. So I think all of this, again, I apologize for all these grand abstractions and big ideas, but it's good that the religion studies people are here. Maybe that justifies it, gives them something to think about. You can write a paper about all this. Quote me in the paper, you know. And if it's doubtful that I really said it, then show them the TV. The video. So, Suzuki Roshi, I think, was Japanese through and through. And he lived exactly in the period that...

[34:29]

Bella is writing about in his intellectual history of Japan in the early 20th century, when all these things were going on and all this foment was going on. In fact, one could argue that the period of intellectual life in 20th century Japan was the most dynamic period of intellectual life anywhere ever in the world, just because of this gigantic effort to digest and critique all of Western thought. It was incredible. Period. And he lived, that's when he came of age. He was born in 1904. And you know that all of this was not unrelated to what was happening in the Komazawa University, where Suzuki Roshi went to college. And he wrote his thesis in college on these issues. We think of him as a very traditional... Zen master trained in the old-fashioned way.

[35:31]

And in part, maybe that's true, but it's not exactly right. Because he did go to Komozawa University. He did read a lot. He did study with some of the great Buddhist leaders who were digesting all of this thought at the time. And I think that was part of what he had in mind when he wanted to come here. He wanted to find a way to test out and understand these things differently in a Western culture. And this, I think, is what he tried to communicate to his young American students who were in a state of, really, in a state of shock and disillusionment with the American culture that they had been brought up in and took for granted as being reasonable and good. And all of a sudden, they came to feel that it was terrible. It was shocking. And he came and met them at just that moment in their lives, in our lives.

[36:33]

And he wanted to teach them Dogen's way, the Japanese way of Buddhism. And I don't think he did this because he was nationalistic. There were Zen teachers who came here with a very nationalistic spirit. But I don't think he had that spirit. I don't think he was nationalistic in that way. I think he really felt that there was something unique and important about the Japanese dimension of Buddhism, something that was exactly needed and useful to us and to the world in this particular cultural moment. I don't think he had a plan or knew exactly what it was that he was doing. And if you look at his lectures, they're extremely ruminative. He's sort of like figuring it out as he goes along. But I think you see him in those lectures, figuring this out and trying to think, you know, how can I express this and what is it that's needed here? Now, I myself came to the Zen Center a little while before Suzuki Roshi's death.

[37:42]

So I didn't really practice with him. I practiced mostly with Dick Baker, who was the abbot here, and I know that a few of you in the room will remember the days when he took this seat every week and gave wonderful Dharma talks. And he had lived in Japan for some years. And he lived there because Suzuki Roshi sent him there because he thought that all of his senior students should really experience Japanese Buddhism from the inside. So Dick often, and some of you will remember this, often spoke about Japanese culture and how it was in contrast to our culture. And I don't know if he actually... said it this way, but you got the idea that he was saying that Japanese culture was good, beautiful, sane, true, real. Our culture was crude, confused, abstract, violent, messed up. Anyway, we all thought that anyway, so we heard that.

[38:49]

We heard that in what he said. And we tried our best to be as Japanese as we could possibly be. Even though we said, oh, we're not trying to be Japanese, but actually we did try. And part of that meant, you know, not particularly paying attention to our feelings or noticing them or taking them into account because it looked like Japanese people didn't do that. So we wanted to be good, disciplined Zen students. And we were. And we did really amazing things, actually, because we were so good and so disciplined. So we were trying to be like Suzuki Roshi. We were trying to imitate the way that he was. Not saying too much, expressing our lives without words, without biographical stories, without overt emotions.

[39:53]

And no doubt, this was natural and wholesome for Suzuki Roshi. It really worked well. He had a good life and was a wonderful person. It didn't work that well for us. And after a while, it became obvious that this was not a workable way of going about this. So of course, as always happens, we then had a reaction against all this. So then we became anti-Japanese. almost denying the Japanese foundations of our tradition and saying, well, we're not practicing Japanese Buddhism. We're practicing Buddhism. And we were going to take the Buddhism out of the cultural matrix so we could study other kinds of Buddhism and study Buddhist philosophy. And it wasn't about Japanese things. But of course, you can never do that, you know.

[40:57]

Religion is always in a cultural matrix. So I certainly did that myself. I certainly had that idea myself. So maybe all I'm saying today is that now maybe we're coming to some balance point with all this and noticing and appreciating how Japanese our way of practice is and really taking that in. Suzuki Roshi was trying to convey a kind of humane and tender Japanese feeling about life, and that feeling pervades our practice in everything we do. And maybe now we're mature enough to not externalize that idea, but to figure out how to make it our own. not necessarily to sort of swallow it up into our American craziness, but while remaining who we are, allowing ourselves to be changed, and maybe radically changed in the way that we look at our lives by these Japanese aspects of our practice.

[42:17]

Suzuki Roshi's son, Hoitsu Suzuki, who's now a 70-year-old guy, is the abbot of Rinso Inn. Suzuki Roshi's temple in Japan. And while Suzuki Roshi was still here in the last few years of his life, he gave up the temple and installed Hoetsu as abbot in, I think, 1967 or so. And a few weeks ago, Hoetsu and his wife Chita Se and their son Shungo were here. And we went upstairs and looked at the scrapbook, which is up in the abbot's room. in Zen Center City Center, the scrapbook that has the pictures of the installation ceremony in 1967 at Rinso Inn. And it was really beautiful to sit there with them looking at this scrapbook. Shungo is, I think, around 30 now and lives at Rinso Inn. And he's a wonderful priest and lives there. He will become abbot there, and he lives there with his wife and baby daughter.

[43:18]

And so it was great for him to see these pictures, which I think he had never seen before, of his father being installed at Rinso Inn. And in several of the photos, you could see that Suzuki Roshi, because he was there at the ceremony, you know, passing on the abbotship, he was clearly in tears. He was crying in the middle of this... Tremendous pomp and circumstance and formality that is a Japanese installation ceremony of Abbasi. He was crying, and poor Hoitsu, who at the time was in his 20s, was scared to death. And I cannot explain this, and perhaps it's not even true, but I have such a deep feeling of personal connection. to Minso Inn Temple, which I've only visited a few times, and to the whole Suzuki family.

[44:25]

I feel enormously close to them, even though I really don't know them well at all. Somehow, their presence, just as human beings, conveys to me that warm feeling of practice, so mysterious and so deep, and yet so human and simple at the same time. One of our old-time Zen Center guys, probably nobody knows him anymore, but he's still also around in his 80s now, Stanley White. He told a story that his father came to Zen Center. This is a long time ago. Now, Stanley's father was, I think, a very wealthy guy. They were Jewish. His father was born in like Europe, you know, in a very kind of old-fashioned European Jewish bearing. And Stanley's, those of you who know Stanley, I see a few people in the room who would know him, remember that his conflict with his father was his life story, you know.

[45:38]

Anyway, Stanley's father comes to Zen Center and meets Suzuki Roshi and says to Stanley, is he Jewish? This is the story. I don't know how true this is. And Stanley says, no, Dad, are you crazy? He's a Japanese Zen master. And Stanley's father says, no, Stanley, I think he's Jewish. Anyway, all this is just an excuse to read you a few pages. I conclude here by reading you a few pages from one of Suzuki Roshi's books. So I just warm up for these few pages, all that I've said. And I'm thinking that maybe if you think of what I've been talking about and listen to Suzuki Roshi's words, I think you'll understand immediately what I've been talking about. Because Suzuki Roshi's words don't sound like what you read in most Buddhist books.

[46:46]

I mean, they're clearly Buddhist books. things he's saying, but it's very different. It doesn't even sound like what you read in Zen books, I think. It's very different. So anyway, let's see if you think so too. I'm going to read maybe three or four pages. This is from Not Always So, and it's from the chapter called Find Out For Yourself. In your Zazen, or in your life, you will have many difficulties or problems. When you have a problem, see if you can find out for yourself why you have a problem. Usually, you will try to solve your difficulty in the best way as soon as possible. Rather than studying for yourself, you will ask someone why you have a problem. That kind of approach may work well for your usual life, but if you want to study Zen, it doesn't help.

[47:48]

The moment you are told something by someone and you think you understand, you will stick to it and you will lose the full function of your nature. When you seek something, your true nature is in full activity, as if you are feeling for your pillow in the dark. If you know where your pillow is, your mind is not in full function. your mind is acting in a limited sense. When you are seeking for the pillow without knowing where it is, then your mind is open to everything. In this way, you will have a more subtle attitude toward everything, and you will see things as it is. If you want to study something, it's better not to know what the answer is. Because you are not satisfied with something you are told, And because you cannot rely on anything set up by someone else, you study Buddhism without knowing how to study it.

[48:58]

In this way, you find out for yourself what we really mean by Buddha nature. The words, you know, Buddha nature, the word practice, the word enlightenment. Since you seek freedom, you try various ways. Of course, you will sometimes find that you have wasted your time. If a Zen master drinks sake, you may think the best way to attain enlightenment is to drink sake. But even though you drink a lot of sake, as he does, you will not attain enlightenment. It may look like you have wasted your time, but that attitude is important. If you continue to try to find out in that way, you will gain more power to understand things. So he seems to be recommending that you drink a lot of sake and that seems to be a good idea. And I think he is. I think he's saying that.

[49:59]

Whatever you do, you will not waste your time. When you do something with a limited idea or with some definite purpose, what you will gain is something concrete. This will cover up your inner nature. So it's not a matter of what you study, but a matter of seeing things as it is and accepting things as it is. Some of you may study something only if you like it. If you don't like it, you ignore it. That is a selfish way. And it also limits your study. Good or bad, small or big, We study to discover the true reason why something is so big and why something is so small. Why something is so good and why something is not so good. If you try to discover only something good, you will miss something.

[51:04]

And you will always be limiting your faculties. When you live in a limited world, you cannot accept things as it is. skipping the parts. When I was at Eheji, the big monastery, assisting my teacher, he did not tell us anything. But whenever we made a mistake, he scolded us. The usual way to open sliding doors is to open the one on the right. But when I opened the one on the right, he scolded me. Don't open that side. So... The next morning I opened the other side. But he scolded me again. And I didn't know what to do. Later, I found out that the day I opened the right side, his guest was on the right side. So I should have opened the other side. Before opening the door, I should have been careful to find out which side his guest was on. The day I was supposed to serve him, I gave him a cup of tea.

[52:11]

Now usually you fill 80% of the cup. because Japanese teacups don't have handles, so you hold it, you know, with the part without the hot liquid in it, 20% at the top. That is the rule. So I filled it 80% or 70%, and he said, fill it all the way up. So, the next morning, when there were some guests, I filled all the cups all the way up, 99%, and I served them. And he scolded me. Ha ha. Actually, there is no rule. He himself liked very hot, bitter tea, filled all the way up to the top, but the guests didn't like hot, bitter tea. For him, I should serve hot, bitter tea. For the guests, I should offer tea in the usual way. He never told us anything. When I got up 20 minutes earlier than the wake-up bell, he scolded me.

[53:14]

Don't get up so early. But usually if I got up early, it was a good idea, and he thought it was good, and he praised me. But on that day, no. So usually, when you try to understand things better, when you try to understand things better without any rules or prejudice, this is the meaning of selflessness. Who knew? Who would have thought? When you try to understand things better, without any rules or prejudice. This is the meaning of selflessness. I don't think you'll read that in any Buddhist sutra. You may say that something is a rule, but a rule is already a selfish idea. Actually, there are no rules. So when you say, this is the rule, you are forcing something, the rules, on others. Rules are only needed when you don't have much time or when we cannot help others in a kind way.

[54:25]

To say, this is the rule, so you should do it, is easy, but actually, that is not our way. For the beginner, maybe, instruction is necessary, but for advanced students, we don't give much instruction, and they try out various ways. If possible, we give instruction to people one by one. Because that is difficult, we give group instruction or a lecture like this. But don't stick to the lecture. Think about what I really mean. I say the same thing, you know. Don't stick to the lecture. Think about what I really mean. I feel sorry that I cannot help you very much. The way to study true Zen is not verbal. Just open yourself and give up everything. Pretty simple. Just open yourself and give up everything.

[55:28]

Whatever happens, whether you think it is good or bad, study closely and see what you find out. That is the fundamental attitude. Sometimes you will do things without much reason, like a child who draws pictures, whether they are good or bad. And if that is difficult for you, you are not actually ready to practice zazen. And this is what it means to surrender. Even though you have nothing to surrender, without losing yourself by sticking to a particular rule or understanding, keep finding yourself moment after moment. This is the only thing for you to do. Thank you very much. That was his lecture. So isn't that wonderful, Zuki Roshi's way of expressing? So here at Green Gulch, we have a beautiful tea house.

[56:32]

And we have a tea master in the tea house, Meya-san. Are you here, Meya-san? Somewhere? She was here before, yeah, in the back. So fortunately, we have a Jewish girl from Detroit, who is a Japanese tea master. And if you ever have a chance to, you know, the tea house has different events and all this, and there you will absolutely experience the heart and soul of what I'm talking about very directly. So this tea house and Mea-san herself is one of the great... hidden treasures, not only of green gulfs, but of this whole area. So I don't know if you've ever, probably a lot of you don't even realize that you can do things there. And I would really recommend that there's even, you can even study tea on an ongoing basis. And it's a wonderful thing. And the last note is that this is how it is. The other day, yesterday, yesterday, I was at a Jewish meditation retreat.

[57:36]

And yesterday being the Sabbath, the Torah was opened up and People are called to the Torah and say Hebrew prayers. And one of the people at the retreat is one of our dearest students at this Jewish meditation center, whose name is Keiko. Keiko is Japanese, born and raised in Japan, married to an American. And she's Jewish. She became Jewish. If you're Japanese, you could become Jewish. It's possible. And so it was a very moving thing to hear Keiko go up to the Torah and in perfect Hebrew, because she studied Hebrew and she's conversing with the prayers, in perfect Hebrew, heavily accented with Japanese. She speaks perfect English also, but of course heavily accented with Japanese. So it's wonderful to hear her in perfect Hebrew, heavily Japanese accented,

[58:41]

recite with full confidence these Jewish prayers. So this is the universe we live in. And it's very interesting, very, I think, unexpected to many of us who were older and would have thought that such things were possible. And also very hopeful for our human future, don't you think? Very hopeful. I'll leave you with that thought and thank you very much for listening today.

[59:15]

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