Then you might be tempted to think that American Buddhism would end up being the best Buddhism in the world. But what are you going to do about these other American Buddhisms like Japanese American Buddhism, Chinese American Buddhism, Korean American Buddhism, Vietnamese American Buddhism, and so forth? Well, there was a few years ago, this actually circulated around a little bit as an issue, and the other American Buddhisms were dismissed as ethnic Buddhism. Well, those are ethnic Buddhism. So that left white American Buddhism as the only non-ethnic. Well, that was pretty funny when we realized what had been going on. And

[01:12]

if we allow as the direction that we want America to go and to be is one that accepts, for better or for worse, all the cultures that established themselves here, then we have to say, well, white Buddhism maybe is also ethnic Buddhism, and that Japanese American Buddhism is an American Buddhism. Vietnamese American Buddhism is an American Buddhism. There will not be just one correct American Buddhism. That's where we are arriving right now. Arriving at that and appreciating that. Or I hope we can appreciate that. Would they say there are no atheists in the foxholes? Suzuki was writing about pure land

[02:35]

quite early in his life, and he regularly wrote essays for Kyoto Journal, was it? Or no, Eastern Buddhist on Jodo Shin thought. And there are many Zen priests in Kyoto. I met some of them who had great respect for pure land. Of course, in Chinese Zen, and I don't know, maybe some Korean Zen too, there are temples that often have a zendo and a nembutsu hall just across the courtyard from each other. And there are people who are doing a pure land nembutsu practice here. There are people who are doing a more traditional wado or koan practice over on this side, and they can do both. So in Chinese, maybe in Korean Buddhism too, there's never been the sense that you have to draw a hard and fast line between tariki and jiuriki,

[03:37]

between pure land and a Zen practice. To some extent, I think the Japanese have almost artificially reinforced a dichotomy between tariki practice and jiuriki practice. That is to say, practice, jiuriki means self-effort. You make an effort for yourself. Self-energy. And tariki, leaving it up to Amida or something or somebody, but letting something else do it for you. Provide the grace, provide the insight. But the psychology is the same as dogen. Basically, tariki or jodoshin is saying, you have to be able to get out of your own way. Body cast away, mind cast away. Don't stand in your own way. This is a lesson that must be learned in Zen practice. In Zen,

[04:39]

they trick you into it by making you think that you can do something for yourself until you finally have to give up and realize you can't do anything for yourself. So what are you going to do? Or in pure land, they just start right out saying you can't do anything for yourself. And then wait until you actually believe it. Either way, it's not as easy as it sounds. There is so much in dogen that is absolutely harmonious right in there with the jodoshin practice. So these two things aren't really necessarily to be said against each other. And it doesn't surprise me that Suzuki was doing jodo at the end of his life. He had so much appreciation for it when he was younger. He was a professor at a jodoshin university right there in Kyoto. Morimoto Roshi, just outside the

[05:41]

outskirts of Kyoto in the south end of Kyoto, once said to me, he was a jodoshin lover and student, and he gave taisho often using jodoshin ideas. He once said to me, jodo, he said, jodoshin is the only thing that can scold Zen. Nothing else can scold Zen. We can protect ourselves from tendai and shingon and so forth, but we're very vulnerable to jodoshin. And I said, well, why Roshi? He said, because they point out that we try too hard. Well, where are we? Way in the back there, sir. He came after Suzuki, and as a young man, as a teenager, met Suzuki when Suzuki visited London as the guest of Christmas Humphreys, gave talks and lectures around London for a period of time.

[06:48]

At that time, he was a fairly young man himself, quite fluent in English, deeply impressed Alan Watts. And Alan certainly is teaching under the influence and in the lineage of D.T. Suzuki, there's no doubt. We take Suzuki, D.T. Suzuki, so much as almost our own that we might overlook the fact of how remarkable he was for a turn-of-the-century Japanese man, laboring under, among other things, the pervasive anti-Oriental racism in the early years of this century. Believe me, it was out there. It was intense. Living in Chicago for nine years, marrying an American woman, taking her back to Japan with him, where she had to stand up against the anti-white

[07:50]

racism of the Japanese. And Suzuki, and becoming fluent in English, which isn't easy, and then actually being the most influential Japanese think, internationally influential Japanese thinker of the 20th century. That's who he is. The most influential Japanese thinker of the 20th century. The Japanese don't even realize this, that this is the guy who had more influence in the world, Europe and America, than any other person in their century, from Japan. It's remarkable. We almost take it for granted, because he's so much our own. There were some other questions here. Yes. Well, if it isn't too much of a change of direction for what you want to be talking about, I'd really like to hear you say something about what we're calling engaged Buddhism in the light of weaving together cultural traditions. Okay. That's good. Yeah. It'd be a good time to mention that.

[08:50]

Now, engaged Buddhism, there's an occidental idea. There is, that's a very, for me, it was a very strong feeling, and for some of my friends and colleagues, as I was saying earlier, back around the time of the Korean War, feeling that Buddhists should have something to say, as well as much as the Jehovah's Witnesses and the Quakers, the traditional peace church people, were having things to say about our involvement in the Korean War. Of course, then the Vietnam War comes later. It's my own cultural conditioning and upbringing to feel that it's almost an obligation to be, to some degree, politically engaged, and to take a certain stand on issues, and to study history, and to try to come up with a sense of what a political direction for your society might be.

[10:00]

And I had a number of friends and peers who felt somewhat the same way, even back in the 50s. Went to Japan and found that there was not much sense of a call for political engagement among traditional Buddhists. But where it was, when it was there, it was quite strong. The Japanese peace movement, the anti-Hiroshima movement, the annual Hiroshima conferences and get-togethers had a large Buddhist component. And so there was a left, so to speak, pacifist Buddhist element in the Japanese peace movement from the 50s on. But it was not Zen. It was from Jodo-shin and from other schools of Buddhism that

[11:03]

were not quite so pricey, not quite so high class. One of the things you have to understand about Zen is that it's high class, especially the urban Zen, especially Kyoto Zen. It's like the Episcopalian church, only more so. A poor tradesman or farmer or lower middle class salary man would be as hesitant to walk into a Zen temple and ask, when can I come and practice Zazen here? As a poor, lower middle class person or farmer would be hesitant to walk into an Episcopal church and say, I feel like coming to church here. They would feel out of their own class. If there is any Buddhism which the rulers of Japan show a little interest in, the captains of industry, the top people in the government, it's Zen.

[12:06]

Kobori Osho of Ryoko-in in Daito-buji, to name one, was a regular advisor and Zen teacher to some of the top capitalists and top power players in Japanese culture, right down until he died just a few years ago. That's another part of the equation that you have to realize. When Japanese people, when you go to Japan and say I'm a Zen student, they look at you askance and say, well, what they're thinking is, you don't look rich and powerful. What gives you the right to study Zen? Now that's also changing. But the high culture connections, tea ceremony, painting, and so forth, the very, very high culture connections, plus the political connections, put especially Kyoto Zen at the very top of the social scale. Especially Rinzai Zen. Especially Rinzai Zen, yeah. It took me years to figure that out.

[13:10]

After I'd been in Japan about seven or eight years, I suddenly started saying to myself, gosh, I should dress better. No wonder they don't like to have me come around. I understood from when you were studying with Suzuki Roshi that Soto Zen, they always said it was farmer's Zen, and kind of the common people's Zen. But I was beginning to understand the misconceptions. I was under that all back in the 60s, learning about Buddhism and Zen. So, can you tell us something about the history of Soto? Soto Zen has more of a base in the countryside and is probably more democratic and probably has been for a long time. So, I should qualify what I've been saying is that the big temple, big home temple based Kyoto Rinzai schools of Zen are the ones that have had this peculiar high political status, high cultural status.

[14:13]

There's almost no Soto Zen in Kyoto. There's only one Soto Zen temple. It's all entirely. Yeah. I think we need to take another little break and then we'll have another spell of time to wind this up. If we get out of here in time to go hiking. Not that I'm in a rush, because I'm not. I'm enjoying this enormously. So, let's get settled. There's a couple of things that got started that I want to finish responding to. One was Susan Moon's question, I believe, about engaged Buddhism. And, like, what about that?

[15:19]

Susan Moon is the editor of the Turning Wheel and, together with me and several others, has long been involved with the Buddhist Peace Fellowship, going back to its early days. And, as I was saying earlier, well, I guess that's an accidental thing, to be willing to get engaged in some kind of open political expression and action, whatever it is. Then I stepped back in my discussion and started talking about how the Japanese Buddhist world has responded to political issues and said that only certain groups, and in not necessarily huge numbers, had been political or been involved. Being political sounds like a little too much, but had been involved in a political expression.

[16:23]

And then I have to add to that, in recent years there have been, in the last 10 or 12 years, there have been some really quite interesting cases, even in Zen, of individual priests who took on roles in their community. Like one Rinzai priest who had a small temple over on the Japan Sea, north of Kyoto, who became the leader and the organizer in a movement to block a nuclear reactor being put in in their area. And another Rinzai Zen priest whom I met up in Matsumoto, who has a beautiful, old, feudal temple in the city of Matsumoto in Nagano Prefecture, who, without anybody, any reason or push for him to do it, became deeply involved with relief efforts for Chernobyl and had volunteers domiciled in the temple, had raised money

[17:28]

with companies and corporations, getting large donations of medicine and supplies, and was pressuring airlines into flying freight loads of supplies for the people suffering at Chernobyl. That was an individual Rinzai Zen priest. Well, of course, any individual person can and will do that sometimes. But he was using the full power of being head priest of a fairly eminent temple, shamelessly, you know, and pushing his way, using that status and power, and getting a lot of respect for it from the rest of the Buddhist world, rather than an attitude that maybe this was questionable behavior for a Buddhist priest. And so I think that there again, there's a change in attitude in Japan. Other cases in other countries, of course, there have been some very political Buddhist priests, and they've suffered for it, gone to

[18:29]

prison, all kinds of things can happen to you. But here in America, we've had for some years now, a basically peace and justice oriented, peace, justice, and ecological justice, environmentally oriented, small movement called the Buddhist Peace Fellowship, and I'm sure there are some others, for over 10 years. And as I recall, you know, I used to be on the board of directors, now I'm on the board of advisors, we took the position years ago, that we do not feel that it is the obligation of any Buddhists anywhere to necessarily be active or open in political expression, that this is our personal choice. And we do it in good spirit. But we don't mean to imply that somebody who does not have a certain amount of engagement in their Buddhist practice is in any way lacking. It's an entirely personal choice in the Buddhist world. And I

[19:34]

understand perfectly well, those who criticize engaged Buddhism saying, your first priority should be your practice. I understand that. I also remember one of the metaphors from one of the sutras, which says, the water wheel goes around. And as it dips down deep, picking up water, it gives water away, spilling it off the top. You know, so engagement in the world and deep personal practice are one and the same. And that's an old metaphor. Yes? I've been involved in Buddhist Peace Fellowship for some time too, and we've been involved in a base program you did a little benefit for us. And what we've been exploring is how actual engagement, the sites of social engagement or social activism can be sites of practice. And that practice as done in a zendo or done in a temple, there's only one way to practice. But actually, practicing in the interaction and transaction within service can be a site of

[20:41]

practice. And as well as in our contemplative practice, can be a place where we really wake up to social structures of oppression and injustice and how that becomes internalized. So we've been really playing with those two frames and sort of breaking a little bit of that dichotomy. I don't know if I was hearing that, but sometimes people talk about practice and then going out. What we're talking about is going out as practice and coming in as engagement. Meeting out there as practice. Yeah, that actually in interaction, there's a lot to do about, a lot to be mindful of in terms of precepts, in terms of ethics, in terms of attentiveness and mindfulness. Right, right. Good point. We've been very rich for people. Yeah. And I admire what I hear of and read about, how you folks are extending that. It's an excellent undertaking with the difficulties are the same difficulties that all such

[21:51]

exercises face, is getting out there and being involved and then keeping control of your own emotions if it gets intimidating or angry. That's right. It's an ongoing inquiry that obviously is full of perils. Yeah. Yes. I have an interesting other side to this one. I've been involved for many years teaching students who are leading into environmental careers and I've become more and more aware of how anguished many of them are at not being able to articulate their spiritual concerns in their environmental practice. The fear of being not seen as hard as scientists, the fear of being seen as wacko Berkeley graduates. I find it an interesting parallel with the Buddhist concern for action, the activist,

[22:53]

scientist, environmentalist concern for how to bring this in, in a legitimate way into public hearings, into statements about saving local environments. I'm not asking this as a question so much as just an interesting phenomenon. In this regard, I think the time is coming when those of us who wish to can be open about being Buddhists, open and frank about it, and claim the same rights for our religious affiliation that other people claim for their religious affiliations. Now, I know that there's a certain number of people who do Zen practice or who study Zen who don't think of themselves as Buddhists or who are trying to steer away from what

[24:01]

they think of as religion and maybe have something which is more, what, psychotherapy? Or at least more secular. There is that tendency. But for myself, I've always thought of myself, first of all, as a Buddhist, shamelessly, with all of the trappings. And Zen is a practice within that. And of course, I recognize that there's a lot of nutty stuff and some questionable stuff in some corners of Buddhism here or there, but that's all right too. But in the current national debate about things like values and ethics, there are times and places when we should be able to step forward and say, it is a deep religious value in my teaching to hold non-human beings in high regard.

[25:07]

And that I do not necessarily, in other words, you don't necessarily have to make an environmental point by quantifying damage to the ecosystem with a chart and with statistics. Although sometimes that's the most effective way of making a presentation. But there is also the point to be made, which is as real, at least for us personally, for some of us personally, that this runs against the grain of my very own religious values. And that sooner or later, the fact that there are people in our free society who are Buddhists, who come to feelings about damage to the environment or threats to individual species, simply on that level, with no need to have any further scientific data, or you don't have to come up with a lot of scientific data to justify not killing people. And the same should be true of other organisms and species. I would feel that to be also the case.

[26:10]

And that religious conviction can have a very powerful impact. For instance, environmentalists in Humboldt County have been trying to talk to Charles Hurwitz for a very, very long time. It had never come to pass. And Bill Duval and I and some others just organized this really little gathering in Redwood Park with the rabbi and Episcopal priest and myself and the Arcadia Zen group. And just had this teeny little press conference and Charles Hurwitz heard it. And just from that... Heard of it? Well, yeah, he had caught wind of it from the local LP. Yeah, LP official. Yeah. And just from that conviction, he was on the phone with the rabbi for hours and was trying to organize meetings where everyone can talk it out. Really? Really? That's very interesting. Yeah.

[27:12]

You all know who Charles Hurwitz is? He's bringing us a big teaching. Well, I was listening to some of one of those hearings, picked it up on NPR the other day, and they were playing back the testimony of several people at the hearing who were ranting and raving against Charles Hurwitz personally, you know. And I was wondering, you know, isn't there another way to reach that guy than just, you know, basically cursing him out on public radio, which is not going to get anywhere, not with him. So I'm interested in hearing, you know, that at least he talked to the rabbi. Now we need to get a rabbi who's a deep ecologist, which is not entirely impossible. Yes. Yeah.

[28:36]

Well, yes. We have the wilderness. They don't have very much of what you'd call wilderness in Japan. But they certainly have a lot of wild nature. And, you know, that's a good question. And I would like to talk about that a little bit. Because this also leads into some of the territories that I have tried to bring some creative thinking of my own to in speaking of Buddhism and speaking of nature. And the term wild has been a very productive term for me as I've explored it and come to use it. And at the same time, the idea of the wild and the idea of wilderness is a very potent

[29:45]

idea for Americans. That it has become an almost archetypal position of American consciousness to think of, speak of the wild from, and it goes back to our earliest, the earliest history of Euro-Americans on the continent and the various ways in which they thought of, addressed and went into this vast new continent and the ways that they interpreted it to themselves. One of the most common ways, of course, was to think of it as a vast, howling, uninhabited wilderness, which is some of the language that you see in early writers. And then other writers corrected that, especially after the Lewis and Clark expedition,

[30:46]

saying, well, actually, there are people living everywhere. They were, you know, Lewis and Clark were never out of sight of a group of Indians virtually. The whole time that they were traveling back and forth across North America. And other early explorers and travelers who described such remarkable biological richness, such beautiful accounts of the different parts of North America, starting with Florida. Who were the guys that wrote on Florida? Bartram, yeah, William Bartram. Which has recently been republished in the Library of America series. Bartram's travels in Florida. Just about the same time as the Revolutionary War was taken by 1776. Most remarkable accounts of birds and alligators and fish and Indian peoples living in there. Beautiful accounts. So we've got a long history with that.

[31:48]

And we've had a long conflict, cultural conflict, in our sense of our obligation and duty and relationship to this continent, which is basically, on the one side, it's beautiful. It's lovely. It's unlike anything in Europe. We're so lucky to live in this wonderful, natural continent. And on the other side, this is throughout American history. And on the other side, we've got to develop it. You know, so it's been this constant contradictory sensibility and contradictory message that is embedded in American consciousness. Like the very guys who say, we've got to have jobs and get out there, are the same guys who say, God, you can't find a good place to fish anymore. They feel it themselves in that, without even recognizing the contradictory quality of it.

[32:52]

But the wild and wilderness are two different things. Wilderness, wild is process. Wild is, it describes the self-organizing, self-propagating, self-managing process of nature itself, without human agency. And in that sense, by far the greater part of the universe is wild. That it is, that the world goes about its business, organizes and propagates itself effortlessly on all sides. And we can only be grateful for that. Wilderness is a topos, is a place, a location, a physical place on earth where there is a large quotient of wild process in operation. And certain things, you know, any vacant lot will have wild weeds, wild plants, wild

[33:59]

insects, and maybe a few wild birds in it. And wildness will be active in a square yard of ground that you might have quit cultivating or quit scraping, which is a wonderful thing to consider, that it's so resilient. But at the same time, the diversity that would represent what our planet is capable of requires more space. And so this is the argument for large size wilderness areas, that to keep all of the creatures going that would be here and were here not long ago, and there are a variety of reasons that we can invoke for keeping a large number of creatures going, I would say it was a moral obligation if nothing else, but you can get a database for it if you like. That takes larger space. Then the quality of wildness, or the quality of wilderness, which in this case would

[35:00]

overlap, it's a little harder to define, but it has, there is a respect, a profound respect that we feel in an environment that is totally independent and free of us and is totally self-managing, where we can step back and see everything working without any human management process having been inserted into it. And another quality of the wild is that everything is always in place. Nothing is out of place. When a bunch of leaves are shook down by a gust of wind in the forest, the leaves falling on the ground are not in disorder. There is no disorder in a wild system, and in that sense we have to ask ourselves, how did we come up with our own notions of order? Since in every world but our own, everything falls effortlessly into the right place.

[36:05]

Ours is the only world where things get out of place. That's an interesting thought. So I'm going to take part of your question about Asia now. In China and Japan, since the lower lands were cultivated, the wild areas were in the mountains. And as Chinese civilization, agrarian civilization advanced, of course, you had to go higher into the mountains to find the wild areas. Early shamans, early Taoist hermits, early meditators would retreat into the mountains. They would set up a cave or a hermitage or a cabin and find a place to do their practices. And that is pre-Buddhist. It's very ancient in the Far East.

[37:09]

The tradition of mountain hermits, of sen-nin or xian, immortals, the lore of immortals, the idea that some individuals, by staying in remote places and following certain practices, gain a greater quotient of sanity, of health, of maybe long life, of power, of spiritual power, very deeply rooted Asian tradition, Far Eastern tradition, already well established before Buddhism came to China. The early Buddhists following in the same vein did set up their temples in less populated areas, often, and up in the mountains. Not always in really high mountains, but in some slightly more remote place. And also, partly, it would have been real estate prices. That is to say, good agricultural lowland where you can grow vegetables and rice is probably more expensive. And mountain land is still, you know, often cheaper.

[38:15]

But there are some remarkable sacred mountain temple sites in China and in Japan and in Korea where it's not an easy trip, where it's a long and very difficult hike to get up into a remote place, which then may have dozens or even hundreds of little temples and shrines, and where you can stay the night in a little board floor dormitory, and all kinds of ceremonies and sacred practices are available to you. So there is an association, a deep archetypal association in the Far East with spirituality and mountains. We would not necessarily consider those mountains wild today. That is to say, they no longer have tigers living on them. The tigers are gone. The wildlife has been depleted considerably. But still, there is a deep and ancient appreciation in all of the Far East for the possibilities of what spiritual practice in the mountains can be.

[39:17]

We have, in North America, willy-nilly sort of found our own wilderness spiritual practice. But before Buddhism, read Henry David Thoreau and how he sees his life at Walden Pond, or in his essay, Walking, which is in some ways even more profound than Walden, what out of his own reading and his own sensibility he makes of the surrounding swamps and woods of the place he lives and his daily walks there. It's quite remarkable. Or take a person like John Muir, who starts out being raised in a pretty fundamental, strict Christian household, and mysteriously, over a few years, somehow breaks out of that to a direct, devotional, pantheistic worship, almost, of nature itself.

[40:22]

Does that all on his own somehow. And then comes out to the West Coast and locates himself in the Sierra Nevada and develops a vocabulary of observation, which is quite precise, and also a vocabulary of praise and devotion, which is a little bit purple. It's a little bit too much. But that is a homegrown American phenomenon. So we have, and there are other writers like Mary Austin and a number of others, who have found almost their way independently into a spirituality of wild nature. This is an American thing. I don't know any place else where people have done that. And so in that sense, wild nature itself was our teacher in this regard. And certainly it was one of my early teachers. Mountaineering was like a teacher to me, Snow Peak Mountaineering, when I was a teenager. Buddhist practice brings a great deal to that, and ultimately I think is extremely valuable

[41:30]

to that. And the way it was valuable for me was, I was a fanatic at 17 or 18. I was a mountain fanatic. I was a backcountry wilderness fanatic. And I know lots of kids that are like that still. I did not want to be where there was a sign of human activity, if I could help it. My heart soared to be way in the backcountry and to be way up there, you know, where half of the landscape is still covered with snow in August. It was a little excessive, you know, how much ecstasy that brought me to be in such a place. And quite, quite beyond reason. Also, you know, ultimately not practical. So it took, right, it took some little pointers from Buddhist and Taoist practicers like the

[42:35]

line, for the person who has wilderness in the heart, any room in the city will be acceptable. That a true appreciation of the processes of the universe enables you to see that it does not stop when you enter the suburbs or go into town. That you don't draw a line between your favorite variety of real reality and your less favorite variety of reality. It's all real. And this is a great Buddhist teaching. It's a great Zen teaching that the concrete pavement is the source of infinite aesthetic pleasure, if you want to look at it that way. Yes. There just seems to be some sort of corollary between what you described about the wild as a process and enlightenment in terms of the whole, something that is self-organizing

[43:39]

and has its natural order that we can only discover and come to. And how I understood enlightenment or the small piecemeal. I had a teacher in Japan who instructed me when I began doing koan practice, who instructed me to let nature take its course. He said, it's a natural process. Just sit and let it work and the koan will fall into your hand when it's ripe. Rather than the other kind of advice which is bang your head against the wall. I got that kind of advice too sometimes. But it was interesting that there was also the language of this is self-ripening. This is once you launch it and stay with it, that it will come about according to its own process.

[44:40]

And along those lines, something else that I pointed out in my book, The Practice of the Wild, a couple of times is that if we see the term wild as meaning self-organizing, self-propagating, that we can then say that the deep mind is wild. That the imagination eludes management. That consciousness itself eludes management. That when you are sitting, you're sitting to a great degree with wild mind, not with tame mind. Tame mind is the mind that you cultivate to produce a yield. When you are working with tame mind, you are able to do math problems or write an essay. But wild mind is creative imagination and leaps in unpredictable directions. The truth is, as a rule, we can't predict what our next thought is going to be.

[45:45]

And that would tell us that the mind is pretty wild. It's also interesting to consider that language might be wild, according to those same terms. That the richness and complexity and degree of organization that exists in a natural language, in the syntactic structures of a natural language, and in the capacity of vocabulary recall, and in our capacity to effortlessly construct syntactically correct sentences without effort, one after another, are all qualities of wildness. It's like wild nature working for us faster than we can catch up. And your rational mind wouldn't allow you to do that if you had to stop and think about what is the next correct sentence I'm going to say. So in the richness of our own consciousness, we are also drawing on this mysterious strength,

[46:50]

which could be called wild, this mysterious process. Now, I like to think of it that way. Well, where are we now? One more little North American thing is place. A strong distinction, a striking distinction between our North American lives and the lives of people in East Asia, or anywhere else in the world practically, is our mobility, our lack of history in a place for any length of time, as compared with people who still, for the most part, remember where their ancestral village is, even if they don't actually live in it. And many of them will still make a New Year's journey back to the ancestral village,

[47:55]

even if the rest of the year they work in some big city. The network of Buddhist temples, for example, in Japan, is supported by place-based people. Judy Hoyum was reminding me during the break, she just came back from three months of Rinzai practice at a temple outside Tokyo called Kōanji, that the real foundation of the temple's life and economic base is about 400 families that are called the donka, the patrons of the temple. These families are long-established local resident families, some of them, most of them probably going back for generations. They supply a lot of money annually to the temple and will be available for repair, for raising money for repairs or anything that comes up.

[48:57]

In turn, that temple and all the other temples conduct a steady series of funeral ceremonies and memorial ceremonies for the households of their 400 patrons, their donka. And there will be a graveyard, you know, back at the temple where these ohaka, these graveyards, these gravestones are. That support network of local people based there over the generations is not necessarily a group of people that care a whole lot about enlightenment or about Buddhism or about practice. They are in a culture. They are in their own Japanese Buddhist, agrarian, and nowadays capitalist culture. They admire the young people who will do a lot of zazen and maybe ultimately go to Kyoto and sit in one of the main monasteries in Kyoto. They'll admire that a whole lot. But they think of it as a very exceptional kind of practice. Not everybody's

[50:04]

going to do that. From that standpoint, another light that can be thrown on traditional Asian Buddhist practice is that there is a huge public support for it or support network for it that comes from these connections, these traditional connections, by people who are content in an almost devotional way to be part of it without necessarily having to investigate it, but will continue to support it. And their sense of the Buddhist practices that we all address ourselves to is that that belongs to a very special population of people. So, that puts us in a different relationship to it. The other thing is, of course, that each one of those temples finds itself grounded in a place. And I know that in North America, it's our notion that what we want to learn is ourselves.

[51:05]

You know, who am I? Self-realization. But I think it's useful sometimes to ask where you are as well as who you are. And maybe in Asia, the question of where you are is not a very critical question because you're always in the same place. But there is a certain small spiritual value in asking yourself how you are situated, how you are grounded, and who are your neighbors. So, that line of thought is the basis of some of the essays I've written over the last 10 years, essays on watersheds, essays on bioregions, essays on sense of place, suggesting that the Sangha community is one of

[52:10]

the three treasures, one of the most equally important aspects of Buddhist practice, that in a certain sense, Sangha, Dharma, and Buddha are all equal, and that the extensions and metaphors of the meaning of Sangha are very rich, that the traditional early interpretation of Sangha was that it was monks and nuns. And then, the next Mahayana extension of Sangha was the community of laypeople and monks and nuns who are all together in their interest in the Dharma. And then, a larger Mahayana extension of that is that the Sangha is all sentient beings, whether they know it or not.

[53:10]

And then, the largest extension of that, which comes from some of the Chinese Huayan philosophers, was that everything in the universe, sentient or non-sentient, why draw the line? You know, why make any distinctions about this? That's all part of our Sangha. And in addition, let's not make a distinction between things that exist and things that don't exist. They're all in the Sangha. It's a lovely idea. But how do you approach such a scale of Sangha? Well, my suggestion is you have to start where you are, and enlarge your sense of community, or practice your sense of community, as it were, with the people you practice with, practice with, and with the neighbors across the street and over the hill, and then with the non-human neighbors as well. The owls, the coyotes, the jackrabbits,

[54:16]

and the eucalyptus trees are part of the Sangha. So, this is, you know, the Buddhist way of thinking of talking about what the agency guys call ecosystem management. The ecosystem is our neighborhood. Our neighborhood is the ecosystem. And, you know, that is a little bit too technical sounding. To put it in other terms, it's bad manners not to know your neighbors. And that is, you know, it's a matter of the etiquette of the wild. It's a matter of the etiquette of the wild to be, if you are somewhere, even if you're not going to stay there for long, to be aware of the fact that you are somewhere, and to pay your regards and your respects to the whole fabric of the place, and then, wherever possible, to bring your practice into the fabric of that place, or to bring that fabric into your life.

[55:21]

That's why we try to use local woods in building. That's why a good, the tradition of flower arrangement is the plants, grasses, and flowers through the year of this week. And each week, the flower arrangement changes following the season. That's why I felt irrationally offended, and it was irrational in a way, when a Japanese building built in the United States some years ago was dedicated in a Shinto-type ceremony, using Shinto plants flown from Japan, rather than using the local plants. There was something that had been profoundly missed there. To have more of a practice of place in North America would be the beginnings of having a

[56:30]

community. And in a way, our Buddhist exercise here in North America has been top-down. It's been from the head down. It's been from the educated people down. It's been from, for the most part, the white people down. And it's been from the cities down. And so, still, a great part of our American Buddhist practice is urban centers that are visited regularly by college students and professionals and upper-middle class or middle-class people passing through. That's sort of our social scan for the moment. That's fine. There's nothing to be ashamed of in that. That's the way Buddhism came to China, too, in the fourth, fifth century A.D. But the other side of it is, by gradually finding our way to be people of place,

[57:33]

we can begin to have communities. And by beginning to have communities in place, we can begin to have a place to host a temple and have people who live there long enough to support the temple, to support the practice in the more traditional way of a network of people in a community that will be there generation after generation to help keep it going. Because, you know, in the long range, funding is the question. That's about all I have to say, I think, today. I have one little thing to say about speaking of funding. A funny little insight I had onto the Mahayana Sutras. Why the Mahayana Sutras are so long, especially the Huayen Jing and the many versions of the Prajnaparamita Sutra,

[58:36]

some of which go on endlessly and are very repetitive. I've been wondering about that for years. That's it. I decided it was a function of funding. That somewhere in the fourth, fifth, sixth century A.D. in China, wealthy merchants could be talked into funding a small group of monks to write a sutra. And the longer you wrote the sutra, the longer the funding would go on. That's an insight I got after being on the California Arts Council. Well, it's getting late. Thank you very much for your questions and your interaction. This has been a lot of fun. Thank you.

[59:37]

Thank you. [...] It really wasn't his fault. He loaned his temple to another priest who lost a whole lot of money on horse racing. And, you know, in the Japanese system, you have to take responsibility for somebody else's errors if it was on your watch. They said, okay, Joshu, somebody's got to go to Los Angeles. It looks like it's you.

[60:22]

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