I vow to taste the truth of the Tathagata's words. Good morning. Sometimes people new to coming to Page Street for the Saturday lecture ask, why do you do hanging out a banner that says Dharma Talk without announcing what the Dharma Talk is going to be about? And I've always replied in the past because we generally don't know when we send this promontory that I'm sitting on now what we are going to say. But this morning I can announce the subject of my talk. And it's not a laughing matter. I have some unfinished business with God. And those of you who have studied any Buddhism,

[01:02]

and even though you have only read about it, that sounds very strange to be spoken of in a Buddha hall, because in at least the Zen school of Buddhism, there is no God posted over all. We are a religion because we deal with the question of birth and death and all that surrounds that, but we do not have a supreme being, a king of the universe, or anything that would take that position in our understanding of life. So why should I be talking about my unfinished business with God? And even more important as far as you are concerned, why should I go public on it? It's something I should handle by myself. But it was because the question of God has suddenly become public As many of you may have noticed,

[02:04]

I feel that I have some privilege to go into this in public. Some time ago the New York Times Magazine section devoted its major article to a discussion among leading theologians and scientists about the existence of God. Omni magazine did the same thing with a number of professors and scientists and religious. And recently when you saw the news of the fragment from Mars that has caused all the excitement about the possibility of there being life on that planet, one of the theologians was radiant in his statement, Now we can show that God has used evolution as the medium by which to create sentient beings that can understand him. So this is in the air.

[03:06]

This is not something I have just dreamed up. Deepak Chopra, the Hindu doctor whose books on healing are on the bestseller list, is confident that soon we will be able to announce that God has been scientifically proven to be a fact. Daufrey John in the Reagan administration made the same announcement. The White House is going on such and such a date to announce the scientific proof of the existence of God. And at the Johns Hopkins University in 1932, a paper was circulated with exactly that title. So here we have sort of a wave-like effect. Why from time to time does this question become public?

[04:06]

Why should we be concerned with that? And by we I'm using this all inclusive, not just the people in this room. But why should it be news? That's, I guess, what I'm asking. Well, if you remember, in 1932 was the Depression. The country was in great anxiety of its future. The banks closed. That was a time of public tension. During the Reagan administration was the Cold War, children hiding under desks at school to be prepared for the falling of the bombs. That was a tension time. And today, if you watch the news or read the papers, you know that with tribal wars, the deterioration of the natural environment, things like that, this is also a time of tension. And I think what may be going on is that even though you may not have yourself

[05:12]

devoted any time or attention to this question of God, in times of tension you would like to believe that there is some resource, some refuge, some protector that can come to our aid. And I mean this with uttermost sincerity. I'm not belittling this at all, as I hope I will be able to show you before the morning is over. Frequently, in talking with the young people who come here, I find an interesting phenomenon to which I relate. Many of them were religious as children. Their natural, spontaneous childhood faith, not in any deity, but in just the enjoyment of living, the amazement at nature,

[06:16]

the things that were happening to them, were drawn towards a religious attempt to understand what was happening to them, and naturally turned to whatever religion was available to them at the time. And they all report that a great disillusion set in, that when they turned to the organized form that their parents were involved in, the walls went up. That wonderful, youthful radiance, that inspiration that they called God, was suddenly blocked from them. And I certainly was one of those, as I have explained many times before, who turned to the Calvinist religion, because it was that of my parents, trying to understand more about the experiences I was having, and found that there was no place in the formal religion for anything like that.

[07:19]

So it was a difficult time for me, because I had wanted to be a minister, and to be turned away from the Calvinist church left a big hole in my life. So when I went to the university in 1932, it was a few years after the Copenhagen Conference that started the Atomic Age, and Schrodinger and Heisinger and Niels Bohr and people like that got together in Copenhagen in 1929 and wrote the script for the Atomic Age. And so in freshman physics I got quantum theory. And as I've told you, some of my friends went to Los Alamos and built the atom bomb, and I took a different tack. I saw in this new, freer arrangement of the universe as it was presented, a chance for all those religious qualities that I felt

[08:25]

could now be brought in and accepted as a common understanding, that religion and science were not in any conflict. And that's when I wrote the paper on the scientific proof of the existence of God, and it was very, very popular. I had to give it in public many times. But then something happened. First place, the scientists came out, and I was not, of course, the only one who was moving in this direction. Some of the great minds of the period also were taking the tack that I had discovered, on their own, of course. And they were writing papers and publishing in the newspapers about this new opening to religion. And the scientists panicked, and Schrodinger and a number of other people said, Look, we are not religious.

[09:26]

This is science. Please, don't make mystics out of us. Some of the most interesting papers on this subject that you want to read. So that was the first thing that, again, was turning me off. The second thing was that the churches, in trying to maintain their hegemony over religion, were opposing this, not welcoming it. And the third thing, of course, was the war, bringing in its wake Hiroshima and Buchenwald, and all of that. So here was this child, trying to understand the world, going to the university, and bit by bit, that childhood faith, that childhood feeling, I won't use it faith, I'll use the feeling, the emotion was being run out of me by the real world, in which I, of course, had to make my way.

[10:27]

So in responding to the real world, I got into politics, and at the age of 37, I was writing a political pamphlet. And all of a sudden, I've heard myself being dictated to. And this poem, which I have read before, is what came out. When I was young, When I was young, I lived with God, and in my innocence, I loved him, beard and all. But he was old, with a sense of sin and jealous, in a very nasty way. So every time my youthful eye would stray, he'd drag me home, take down his book, and read to me of love that others gave. One day, God caught me in a field with Homer, who also had a beard, but his was red. God gave such a roar that Homer fled, but when he stuck out his dusty foot for me to kiss, I clutched it till he rose up and threw him down. He hid his head upon a common stone,

[11:32]

and God was dead. I buried him there among the wheat. The work was easy, for his weight was light. Then I went home and burned his book, and on his sacred wine stayed six days drunk, to wake up sober in an empty room. Now very obviously, that poem is the combination of two things. My grandfather, and the wrathful God of the Old Testament. I, your God, am a jealous God, visiting iniquity unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me. So I was through with God. I had finished it, I had given up, I wanted no more of it, and in retrospect, I can see now that I made politics, radical politics, my religion. So that's at 37 years. At 57 years, I come to Zen Center, and another 20 years of practice,

[12:33]

and all the time the growing sense that something is missing. As much as I venerated the few months that I got to know Suzuki Roshi, no matter how much I opened up to this new way of being shown how my life could be lived, nothing absolutely came together to convince me down here, deep in my heart, that I was really where I wanted to be. That doesn't mean I wanted to leave Zen Center or turn to another religion, but something was missing. Okay. God had gone underground. I think that would be the best way to put it. In West Virginia, a stream will burble along and suddenly disappear into a mountain, and if you put dye in it

[13:36]

and station people on the other side of the mountain, you can tell where the stream came out. So this God stream went underground, and I could not find it. Last spring, or this past spring, I went to Tassajara, and Norman Fisher, the abbot, came and gave a talk, and you know Norman is a poet, and he brought some poetry along, not his own poetry only, but a poem called Self-Portrait, and this is where the stream is beginning to show itself again. It doesn't interest me if there is one God or many gods. I want to know if you belong or feel abandoned,

[14:41]

if you know despair or see it in others. I want to know if you are prepared to live in the world with its harsh need to change you. I want to know if you can look back with firm eyes, saying, this is where I stand. I want to know if you know how to melt into that fierce heat of living, falling forward to the center of your longing. I want to know if you are willing to live day by day with the consequences of love and the bitter unwanted passion of your sure defeat. I have been told that in that fierce embrace, even the gods speak of God. So there is God. He is being smuggled into my life. Norman dealt me the God card, and I had to play it. Many things in there that I can't take time this morning to speak of,

[15:44]

I just want to put forward the one thing, falling forward to the center of your longing. I would certainly say if I had one line to describe my total life, everything in it, everything in it, it would be a longing to see God. I've mentioned this before, but on a high intellectual level. It has not meant anything really in the way of the passion of this poem. Okay. That caused me quite a lot of trouble down at Tassajar. I was very glad that I was not really a member of the practice period, that I was allowed to have free time, and I spent a lot of time on that without much advance. And then I saw a post on a bulletin board, another poem. This is the poem that Nelson Mandela used in his 1994 inaugural speech.

[16:45]

And I've used it in a previous lecture, but I'm afraid that I edited it. Originally to you, I said, quoting Mandela and the author of the poem, our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us. And it's just not the light in some of us, it's in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. And as we are liberated from our own fears, our presence automatically liberates others. Now, I think in any other context than this morning's lecture, you would say that is a very Buddhist statement. I know that Suzuki Roshi was fearless

[17:51]

in the face of everything and anything that life could give to him, beginning with the horrors of the atom bomb in his native country, loss of his wife, things like that. He was fearless. Katagiri Roshi says, a monk has nothing to give except fearlessness. And he gave fearlessness because of the way he lived his life. But this is the whole poem. Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small doesn't serve the world. There's nothing enlightened about shrinking

[18:52]

so that other people won't feel insecure around you. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us, and it's not just in some of us, it's in everyone. And so we let our own light shine. We unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fears, our presence automatically liberates others. Born to manifest the glory of God. I don't think Suzuki Roshi ever thought of that. But, but, but, he portrayed it. So I'm resonating here to something that is not just the words. And once I found myself wondering about why do I respond to this, I imagine, Christian presentation.

[19:54]

In my age, and 27 years of Buddhist practice, what is happening here? So in the past few months I've discovered that I've been reading more books about Christianity than about Buddhism. St. John of the Cross, Julian of Norwich, The Zen Teachings of Jesus, Christian Zen. I'm attracted to the spirit and devotion that these books portray. I'm envious of the trust that the Christian mystics have in their tradition. And I'm kept at arm's length by God. I am pulled towards the manifestation of their spirit, and yet he stands in the way. He's like that angel with his flaming sword that God put at the gates of Eden after he had thrown Adam and Eve out.

[21:02]

Do you know about that, any of you who are Christians? Christian background? And what he said when he put the angel there, they have eaten of the tree of knowledge. Keep them out lest they come back and eat the fruit of the second tree and become immortal and gods like us. I always thought, whoa, that's not right. But I can see now that if that is so, using that as metaphor, not as fact, we do have to fight our way past that angel with the flaming sword. And that's when I began to feel very, very sad. Why did not I discover this long before now? Well, number one is Suzuki Roshi wasn't around when I was a child. And I was thinking the other day, if at nine years old I wanted to be a monk,

[22:05]

and if I was in a country where there were Buddhist monks and somebody knew about that, I would have been sitting Zazen for 70 years. Oh, better luck next time. But you see what I'm getting at, the place that I'm in, I'm pulled this way and I'm pulled that way. So I turned to the Christians again. And here maybe I can find a crack in the wall. Meister Eckhart was one of the leading mystics of the Middle Ages. And in his 40th sermon he says this, When I stood in my first cause, I then had no God.

[23:07]

And when I was then my own cause, I wanted nothing, longed for nothing, for I was an empty being, and the only truth in which I rejoiced was a knowledge of myself. Then it was myself I wanted and nothing else. What I wanted I was, and what I was I wanted. So I stood empty of God and empty of everything. But when I went out from my own free will and received my created being, then I had a God. When I stood in my first cause, I then had no God. And when I was then my own cause, I wanted nothing, longed for nothing, for I was an empty being, and the only truth in which I rejoiced was a knowledge of myself. Then it was myself I wanted and nothing else. What I wanted I was, and what I was I wanted.

[24:10]

So I stood empty of God and empty of everything. But then I went out from my own free will and received my created being, and then I had a God. And of course that immediately, for those of us who studied the Bible as children, relates to the first verse in the first chapter of the Gospel according to John. In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was God. So how do we get from there to the Buddha Hall at Beginner's Mind Temple? Hmm. In the Platform Sutra, the Sixth Chinese Ancestor says, from the beginning not a thing is. And I think this is where Meister Eckhart and Zen Buddhism make a weld.

[25:15]

They're both talking about the same thing in different ways. Or as Rumi says, if I could awaken completely, I would say, without speaking, I'm ashamed of using words. So I guess I have been addicted to God. And in any addiction, the need continually to repeat the old experience blocks you out from all the other experiences that are possible in your life. And instead of having the middle way, it's all or nothing. Either I will see God and have God, or the hell with everything else. And I don't know if I have kicked the habit. At this moment, I can't say.

[26:19]

One time, when my youngest grandson was not yet past the mama-dada speaking stage, I took him in his stroller through the Arboretum. And there was, if you have been there, on the walk not too far from the main gate, a tremendous Asian magnolia tree, very much like a native magnolia. But our magnolias are about like this, and theirs were like this. This is a massive tree, and it was just lit up with flowers. And I stopped. And when I stopped, Jacob interested himself in something that was on the ground in front of the stroller. And I was debating how am I going to show him the magnolias. I can't tell him to look. I maybe could tip the carriage so he would have to look.

[27:26]

And just then, he happened, on his own, to look up. And he turned to me, and he smiled, pointed. That, of course, is the story of the Buddha raising a flower and Mahakasyapa smiling. He could not speak. He had no words. His experience of the magnolias was direct. Mine was, for an instant, direct, and then got tracking in all the things that I should do to show the kid the magnolias. You know, it does again, says Jesus' words. Save as you become as a little child, you shall not enter the kingdom of heaven. Now, the kingdom of heaven is right in front of us. You can feel the tatamis under your feet. You can hear the traffic in Page Street.

[28:27]

But as the Book of Serenity says, you do not know that you are already seated in paradise. So this is our common hang-up, my hang-up with God and your hang-ups with whatever words you have fixated yourself on. So how can we become, in our old age, in our maturity, like little children? And I got to that point in preparing my talk, and I flashed on the word lobotomy. That's so. So I thought I would explore that. Now, a lobotomy, in the technical sense, is a very drastic but simple operation.

[29:29]

I will not attempt to describe how it's done, because you'd all rush screaming out of the room. But what it does, it severs that corpus callosum, the 40,000 connective circuits between the left and the right brain. And it's done for people who have very violent actions, and it reduces them basically to vegetables. But there is something about the corpus callosum that is amazing. It does not begin to operate until the child is four years old, and it is not completely fixed in place until it's nine. So for the first four years of our lives, we have been going around with two brains. Not interrelating with each other, each of them operating independently within the totality of the child.

[30:30]

And bit by bit, the two sides of the brain make a connection, but it's not set until you're nine years old. And what happens is that the children who write poetry in those years will astound you with what they write. If you didn't know that they were written by children, you'd wonder, who are these amazing poets? They have an originality that can't be expressed. They talk about things that can't be talked about with perfect ease. Because they are in the middle way. They are not yet locked into the tyranny, I think we could say, of the left brain. So, lobotomies. Maybe Zazen is a non-destructive lobotomy. Maybe in Zazen, through the years, we begin to separate, without knowing how we're doing it,

[31:44]

the lock that the left brain has on the right brain. We don't destroy the left brain, we don't destroy anything, but we begin to return to that childhood condition where we knew we were seated in paradise. We didn't know what paradise was, but the feeling that we had in moments of our childhood, I don't say everyone had a happy childhood because they were children, but there were moments when the direct appreciation, the direct involvement, the direct response of this one-and-a-half-year-old child pointing up to the flowers, was our common heritage. And talking of golden ages, we now, in retrospect, yearn for that moment when we too could see without talking about the flowers.

[32:47]

Frequently in the morning, we chant the Song of the Jewel Mirror Samadhi. I won't read it all because a lot of it is confusing even to me. But there are some things which come through, I think, and this is an excerpt of them. The teaching of thusness, or in Suzuki Roshi's words, things as it is, has been intimately communicated by Buddhas and ancestors. The meaning is not in the words, yet it responds to the inquiring impulse. Just to depict it in literary form is to relegate it to defilement. So I have been defiling for the past thirty-five minutes the very thing that I want most to transmit. Just by talking about it, I have defiled it.

[33:50]

With all good intentions, I have defiled it. Naturally real, yet inconceivable, it is not within the province of delusion or enlightenment. Where is it? You study, and even though the basis is reached and the approach comprehended, true eternity still flows. True eternity is flowing through this room. True eternity is flowing throughout every aspect of the universe. We don't know it, though. And then comes that wonderful line, When the wooden man begins to sing, the stone woman gets up to dance. What does that mean? Well, don't worry about it. It is not within the reach of feeling or discrimination. How could it admit of consideration and thought?

[34:52]

So here we are back in a childhood situation where the direct feeling is recognized and it cannot be spoken about. It is a great mystery. And then finally, Pukan Sazangi, which is Dogen's instructions on how to sit Sazan. And the heart of it for me is, You should cease from practice based on intellectual understanding, pursuing words and following after speech, and learn the backward step that turns your light inwardly to illuminate yourself. Body and mind in themselves will drop away and your original face will be manifest. Now were you, this is me speaking now, not Dogen, were you to come face to face with your original face,

[35:57]

you would be coming face to face with God. In the language of the Christian mystics. That's what you would see. You would see your true face, and in that true face is God's true face. And this could possibly be a way out for me. Not to succeed at it. I mean, when you get to be 81, you don't expect too much anymore. But to try. Remember the last time I spoke, where is the passion that I once had when I was active in radical politics? Why have I not been able to bring that passion into my present practice? Why do I yearn for the passion that I see the Catholic mystics have? Blanche went to a conference between 25 Buddhist monastics

[37:00]

and 25 Catholic monastics, and she was deeply impressed by the spirit of the Benedictines and the Cistercians. Where is our passion? Where is your passion for Zazen? Is it something that you do because to live in Page Street you're expected to go to the Zendo a certain number of times a day? Those of us who feel otherwise and want to go to the Zendo, do we go with passion or do we go wondering, what am I doing here? And perhaps, I guess it was Yvonne Rand said, if you do not ask yourself, what am I doing here, every time you enter the Zendo you don't belong there. But you had better come up with the right answer,

[38:01]

or you'll miss it. So it would be devoutly to be wished to be able to see the Magnolias and the Arboretum like that, and not thread them through a whole system. I'm not a poet, but I have written poetry on occasion, as all of us have. And I remember many years ago before I came to Zen Center, living in Berkeley at the time, and it was a beautiful spring day, and we were near the campus, and I used to go up there to take my morning walk, and there were the glorious flowering trees, and there were the glorious flowering California girls,

[39:05]

and I was feeling good that morning, and I came up the walk, where you are approaching the Founder's Grove, which is that big towering eucalyptus grove in the middle of the campus. And on the edge of it, spotlighted by a sunburst, was this flowering plum tree. Immediately, I thought of a poem. Loveliest of trees, the cherry now Is hung with blooms along the bough. And I said, I will write a poem. And I took out my pencil and my paper, and I dropped the pencil. I bent down to pick it up, and as I raised up, there was a bedding branch without flowers of some sort of tree. I screamed, and I leaped back

[40:09]

as though I'd seen a snake. Now what had happened at that time? Very simple. My mind was concentrated on writing a poem about that tree over there, and all of a sudden, something else intruded in between it, and I was scared, because I was, for probably the first time in my life, I was seeing something directly without anything intervening. And I think, since I started out with Christian references, I will end with one. It's a terrible thing to fall into the hands of the living God. And for one split second, I was in those hands, face-to-face with what was there. This is Suzuki Roshi's things as it is. And we can't stand it, because it violates our self-concept.

[41:10]

Thank you very much. Thank you very much.

[41:26]

@Text_v004
@Score_JJ