Good morning, everyone. Maybe just while our speakers are getting settled, I'd like to say a few things. My name is Mako Vocal. I currently serve as the abiding abbot of City Center, San Francisco Zen Center. And it gives me great pleasure and joy to be able to introduce our three speakers today who are introducing this book that just came out recently, seeing one thing through. I've been anticipating this book for many, many years, having first met Sojin Roshi when I came to Zen Center in 1997. He was still abbot here, amazingly. This really dates me, I think. And was a great teacher of mine. these three here have been practicing, I don't know how long, Norman, how long has it been that you were, you were like 1970 at Berkeley Zen Center when it was over on Dwight Way.

[01:26]

These three bodhisattvas have been, have worked on this book, helping Abbott Hozan Sanaki of Berkeley Zen Center compile and choose the lectures and help with, so I think, Sojin had started compiling some of these materials, some of the biographical materials. And each of these bodhisattvas, former abbots, poets, writers, physicians over here, will be sharing some of their selected readings from this book, Sojin's Talks. So thank you all very much for being here. Please stay afterwards for the book signing that will happen right after this. Thank you. Hi, everybody.

[02:54]

You can hear good, right? I just now noticed that the cover of the book is an iconic photo. You remember this photo? I think it was hanging maybe in the Zen Center in Berkeley. It's a photo of Mel's ordination in 1969 in the attic at the house that was the Berkeley Zen Center. And it is a very young and handsome male. Everybody fell in love with him. He was so handsome. And an equally handsome Suzuki Roshi. Young and handsome, both of them, in 1969. It's a beautiful photo, actually. Um... I think I've told this story before in print, but I want to tell you the story of the day that I met Mel in 1970.

[04:03]

I moved to Berkeley to study Zen. Berkeley, San Francisco, it was all the same to me. I had never been here. I had been living in Iowa City, and I was really interested in Zen, and somebody told me that you could actually practice Zen in the United States. that there was a Zen center in San Francisco. I had never heard such a thing. I didn't know there was Zen practice. I never heard of Zazen or meditation. Nobody did in those days. But I met somebody who had been here, so I moved out here to study Zen, and so I did what anybody would do. I got the phone book. For those of you who don't know, there used to be a thing called a phone book. It was a thick book with very tissue-thin pages, And it would list the phone number of everybody in that area. Yes, so that's how you look things up in those days.

[05:04]

So I just went to the phone book and I looked up Zen, right? And I found out that there was a Zen center in Berkeley and I went over there. And I remember very distinctly a lot of stuff I have forgotten. This I remember very distinctly, standing on the street in front of this house. It was a small Victorian house, quite plain. No sign on the door that I could see from the street, but it was the right number. And in front of the house were two trees that were large, but not that big. On the right was a monkey puzzle tree. Very kind of unusual tree, but you see them around here. And on the left was a yucca tree. And both of those trees shed, you know, so that there would be monkey puzzle pieces and yucca shards, you know, on the ground.

[06:10]

And the gardener was raking up when I arrived the monkey puzzle leaves and the yucca leaves. And so I said to him, Is this the Zen center? And he said, yes. And I said, who's the Roshi? Because that's the first thing you want to know, right? Who's the Roshi? So I said, who's the Roshi? He said, there's no Roshi. There's just a priest. I said, oh, okay. Well, when can you come and learn meditation? And he told me. So I went away to come back for the meditation. And I showed up for the meditation, and I walked into the house, and the first thing you saw, a little bit to the left, was a very steep staircase that led to the attic, because the meditation hall was in the attic. So I walked up the steep stairs, and the priest was, the way the room was set up, the altar was here, and the priest was sitting next to the altar, facing the stairs.

[07:15]

And as you walked up, you could see the... the legs of the priest sitting there, and then this much, [...] and then this much. And by the time I got to the top of the stairs, I realized that the gardener was the priest. And it was Mel. And that's how I met Mel, kind of little by little. And I practiced... I hate to say this, because it's sort of sad, but true, I think, in my experience, that always the best time of something is at the beginning, when nobody knows what they're doing, and everybody is operating almost 100% on love and enthusiasm with no organization and no structure, and that's how it was. In those days, everything gets established as it must, and that's always good, and it's always difficult.

[08:24]

But then there was no establishment, and we just had a wonderful merry band of crazy Zen students living together and practicing together. It was really fun, and Sue was there in those days. I think you showed up later, right? We weren't there for very long. I wasn't there for very long because soon after that, within five years or so, I moved to Tassajara to practice. I really had a dream to be at Tassajara, which I thought was the most wonderful place to practice Zen ever, anywhere. And I still think that. So we moved to Tassajara and we were there for five years and before we knew it, we were swept up in the... crazy, wonderful madness of San Francisco Zen Center and all that it was in those days. So we didn't practice any more much at Berkeley Zen Center because we were too busy over here. So in a way, I maintained connection with Mel through the years, but although he was always my teacher, I was primarily working with teachers at San Francisco Zen Center.

[09:40]

So what I'd like to do is read for you the forward. I think that's what it's called. They asked me, when the book came out, they asked me to write the forward, which I did, and I'd like to read that for you in a short section of one of his Dharma talks. I think, as he says in the book, and maybe others will have more to say about this, he was writing this book for decades and decades and decades. He was friends with Jack Shoemaker, who was the publisher. Jack was a Berkeley guy. Jack loved Mel and wanted Mel to write his autobiography, mostly what Jack wanted. So, Mel agreed that he would do this and he sort of circled around it for many decades before he ever got around to it. I think that when he was ill and realized he wouldn't live very long, and then he got really serious about it. But you guys probably know more about that than I do.

[10:44]

So let me just read my foreword, because it sort of sets the tone for the book. Alan Sinaki wrote an introduction, which I'm going to wait for him to read when he's able. He's going to read it somewhere. I'll read the foreword. It is with great pleasure that I introduce the reader to my teacher and friend of many years, Sojin Mel Weitzman. I met Mel, I still call him that, though most people refer to him as Sojin Roshi, at the beginning of my Zen practice in the spring of 1970, which was not far from the beginning of his. Mel was a recently ordained priest, whose practice consisted of taking care of the grounds and building of the small Zen center he ran in an ordinary house on an ordinary Berkeley street, and of course, sitting Zazen faithfully every morning and every evening.

[11:46]

In those days, Mel was not a Zen teacher, but he was happy to practice Zen with whoever showed up. No internet, no advertising, just a phone book listing. The Berkeley Zen Center sign on the door was so small, you could not see it from the street. So when I walked up to the house, you know, there was a sign really around this big, Berkeley Zen Center. There was a coffee can on the table for whatever small cash donations might be offered, though never asked for, by the young, lightly employed people who were in those days virtually the only audience for Zen practice. As you will learn in these pages, Mel was a straightforward and completely unpretentious person, raised poor in Los Angeles during the Depression. This made him almost a generation older than me and most of the 1960s youth like me who became the first generation of Americans to seriously study and commit themselves to Zen practice in large numbers.

[12:57]

Mel had begun to practice half a decade or so before us, so on both counts, his age and his experience in Zen, in those days, five years of practice was a very long time. He was a senior person from the beginning. In these pages, he describes the earliest days of Suzuki Roshi's teaching in San Francisco as what came to be... the San Francisco Zen Center, was beginning to be formed. For the rest of his life, Mel carried these days with him. They formed his personality and his Zen life. Simplicity, dedication, and faith were their hallmarks. This book is divided into two sections of memoir, an edited version of his Dharma Talks. The memoir includes, besides vignettes from Mel's early life and memories of Suzuki Roshi and the San Francisco Zen Center, his impressions of Richard Baker, who as a very young man became the second abbot of San Francisco Zen Center after Suzuki Roshi's untimely death in 1971.

[14:13]

And Richard Baker Roshi was 36 years old. Can you imagine that when he became the abbot of this vast Zen Center? Suzuki Roshi was only 67 when he died, and he had been in America for only 12 years. A little explored dimension of the sociology of every American Zen in its relation to... a little explored dimension of the sociology of American Zen is its relation to social class. Most Zen students, then and probably still now, come from the white middle class. Most are college graduates, and in most cases, so were their parents. But some Zen students, Mel was one,

[15:15]

did not come from that background, did not attend college. Mel attended the San Francisco Art Institute, which in those days was almost like a trade school, and did not come from middle-class parentage. And although it was never mentioned, and maybe even was never consciously even noticed, there was a distinct class division within the Zen Center community. And Mel and Richard Baker were on opposite sides of that division. And this gave them oppositional views of Zen practice and of Suzuki Roshi. So this is kind of an interesting point, right? You don't hear about this. Richard Baker's father was a college professor, and Richard himself, a brilliant intellectual, attended Harvard, though he did not graduate. In Suzuki Roshi, Mel saw himself.

[16:19]

And you know, I think this is true for all of us, right? We choose the teachers who echo something in ourselves that we want to become and develop. And then we find that in the teacher. And somehow, a teacher can be big enough to have many different such models within him, and that was Suzuki Roshi. In Suzuki Roshi, Mel could see himself, a plain and simple Zen person, solid and devoted. Richard Baker, an impressive person, well connected to many of the intellectual and cultural leaders of the time, saw something else in Suzuki Roshi, a radical and quietly courageous foil for normative American culture. Mel's Suzuki Roshi was just doing the practice. Richard's Suzuki Roshi was remaking the world. And I think both of those were Suzuki Roshi somehow.

[17:21]

It's kind of amazing to consider. This difference between the two Suzuki Roshis and the two versions of Zen that went with it, which were identical in practice and doctrine, but divergent in tone and presentation, was the difference between Mel's and Richard's conditioning. So although Mel's views about Richard, as he states them here, may strike the reader as surprisingly critical and personal, and they are, they represent an important division, not only within American Zen at that time, but throughout Zen's history. There's two Zens, you know? Simple Zen practice for ordinary people on the one hand, which always existed in Japan from Dogen's time on, and Zen as a cultural vanguard on the other. You know, the Zen of the samurai and the emperor and the high culture and the poetry and all that.

[18:22]

Two Zens. Two Zen masters in America. I should mention here... that Richard Baker, with whom I still enjoy a warm relationship, ordained my wife Kathy and me together as priests in 1980 with our three-year-old children in attendance. We have twin sons who were three at the time. Although Mel was our first teacher and our last teacher, our Dharma transmission teacher, both of us, Kathy and I. Mel's rather strong remarks about Richard in this book illustrate another aspect of his character that might seem at odds with his modest approach to practice. He could be fiercely indignant when he considered something to be incorrect. Right? The talks section of this book represents many years of editorial work by Mel and many of his disciples to select and polish.

[19:25]

some of the many thousands of lectures he gave over the five decades of his Zen teaching career. He was still working on them with great pleasure weeks before his passing. They expressed in straightforward and often passionately eloquent language his basic understanding of Zen as a way of life and practice. Mel's understanding, as you will see, comes almost entirely from Suzuki Roshi. Just sit I just realized that there was a story that I included in here that is not here. The editor cut it out, I guess. This is the first time I'm noticing that. The story was... We were at some sort of an academic...

[20:27]

conference, Mel and I, with a whole bunch of other scholars and different people at Cal, at Berkeley. And one of the professors there, who we knew well, was somebody, like a lot of, you know, professors have critical intelligence. They're critical of things. That's what makes them smart, and that's their job. So this guy was very critical of Buddhism and Zen. And he was very smart, so he had given a speech. I can't remember what it was, but he was critical of Buddhism and Zen. And Mel got really pissed off hearing this. He was sitting in the audience. He got up, walked to the front of the room, stood in front of the guy, you know, like, this is how it was behind the panel, you know, the panelists are behind a table like this.

[21:27]

He got up from the audience as if one of you were to come up and stand in front of me right here and start wagging your finger at me and telling me I was wrong and shame on me and all that. Yeah, he did that. He would do that sometimes. Anyway, yes, I had that story in here, but I remember the publisher asked me specifics about the story, and I couldn't remember the specifics any more than what I just told you, so I guess it didn't make the cut. Anyway, Mel's understanding, as you will see, comes almost entirely from Suzuki Roshi. Just sit, just let go of complications, just live your life as it is, beyond your ideas of it. And we have so many damn ideas about our lives. That's the problem, isn't it? Right? We have so many ideas about who we are and who we are supposed to be.

[22:30]

Pay attention to the world around you, but don't get caught up in it. This is the unadorned and authentic Zen message, never needed more than now and never expressed with more integrity and steadfastness than Mel expressed it. He was my friend and teacher for 50 years, always reliable, always kind, always patient. It is hard for me to believe he is still not here. And yet, here he is, in and between the lines of this book. So I've gone on longer than I should have, but I'll just read you a few, just a little bit from now, and you guys are going to read more, I'm sure. The book, it's really nice the way they have done it. They have it divided into short-ish segments with little subtitles, kind of like Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind. This one, I'm going to read you a couple paragraphs from this part with the headline, Does Life Have Meaning?

[23:38]

A question was presented to me the other day about the meaning of life. What is that? What could be more meaningful than dropping our self-absorption and devoting ourselves to cultivating the garden of the mind? Just before that, he talks a lot about the garden that he tended at the old Berkeley Zen Center. What could be more meaningful than dropping our self-absorption and devoting ourselves to cultivating the garden of the mind? We are vegetable, animal, mineral, and human. When we take off the coverings and open our eyes, we can realize all these qualities in ourself. Our body-mind is not separate from the world. When we take care of the world, we take care of ourselves, and vice versa. The blood runs through our body, the heart beats,

[24:43]

the breath door swings, the thought bubbles come and go, the body ages, and none of it is controlled by me. It is the universal activity. This is what we belong to. There is a deep satisfaction that comes from cooperating with this universal activity, which is our true self. Maybe This is what self-respect is. Our practice is to find the meaning in each moment taking nothing for granted. A monk asked, Joshu, what is the meaning of Bodhidharma's coming from the West? He said, the oak tree in the garden. He also had a great awakening when he saw a peach tree in full bloom. So thank you very much for listening to me, and I hope you will read this book and enjoy it and read it again, because it's really pretty much everything you need to know about Zen practice is there, pretty much.

[26:00]

Thank you. This should work pretty well. This right. Maybe it'll stay on. Your ears are bigger than mine, I think. I am one of the more recent attendees of Berkeley Zen Center, having been there for 25 years. I feel like part of my responsibility in being here, not wanting to interrupt the flow of Norman's exquisite introduction to Sojin's life is just to acknowledge how the book came about on behalf of all the people who contributed to it.

[27:07]

First, we're here because Hoson Allen Sinaki, the current abbot, the successor of Sojin Weizmann could not be because of a rather serious illness that he is fortunately beginning to really recover from. And I wanted to send a few notes from him that he provided first and foremost. Dear Sangha friends, it gives me joy to speak from you from my hospital room in Marin. Just so you know, my recovery is going very well. And I'll speak to that. Sue and I went over there yesterday to talk with him about the presentation, and it was marvelous to see a man who had not been able to communicate at all for over two months be... articulate and to feel so much like his full self. It seems that cognitively I'm functioning pretty normally, I think. And now the real work for me is physical therapy and rehab.

[28:11]

It particularly gives me joy to welcome Sojin Roshi's new book into the world. The title of the book is Seeing One Thing Through. The title was drawn from a dialogue between Sojin and Suzuki Roshi. Sojin asked Suzuki Roshi, what is nirvana? Suzuki Roshi answered, seeing one thing through to the end. That is actually how Sojin lived. That was his commitment to this practice, to I can tell you having been there at the very end, to his very last breaths. The BCC community did our best to see this project through to the end, with particular help from a number of key people and from CounterPoint, and I'll say a word about those people in just a minute. Regarding this book, you will hear his voice as fresh as if he were in the room, and it's really true. When I read these lectures, I feel like I'm sitting with him in the Berkeley Zendo.

[29:16]

In fact, for many of these lectures, I was there, and I hear his voice just as present as when he was giving them. There's a stream of wisdom that flows through all of his talks and from his life itself. Like many of you, I am grateful to have that voice in my mind, in my ears, as we continue to practice. That's enough. I look forward to seeing you very soon. So I wanted to say just something a little bit about how the book came to be. And it turns out that, as Norman says in his wonderful foreword, that Jack Shoemaker, who was the publisher of this book, and Mel know each other from having, when Sojin was trading books, when the Berkeley Zen Center was first coming to be in the 1970s, he would go to Jack's then bookstore. Jack was the publisher for Counterpoint who published an important book called Shoes Outside the Door that was about a time of change and some difficulty here.

[30:29]

And Jack had in his mind that it would be important in Zen in America at that point of time to have another story written that was a different perspective on what was happening in Zen in America. And he felt that Mel's life and the work that he was doing at Berkeley Zen Center, a different kind of work, a work that was bringing Zen into lay practice, taking a lot of the same forms that are exactly what we use in Tazahara, but modifying them and simplifying them and putting them into people's lives in a daily way, developing a place where people could sit Zazen twice a day, Mel was there all the time, twice a day, for the first 30 years that Berkley Zen Center existed. There were sashins once a month. There were multi-day sashins four times a year that happened, all on the energy of his practice.

[31:33]

That was something that Jack felt was an important message to put forth as something that was different from the more Mormon says it so well, a kind of more formal and elaborate style that was happening here. In a way, a little bit more of an elite style. This is something that ordinary working people could do and still work in their lives. Sojin had a lot of respect for that. So that was the initial seed that Jack continued to try to water. Sue actually was responsible for a lot of the memoir that you see in this book. Those arose out of transcribed conversations that they had at the time Mel was getting ready to turn 80. So 15 or so years ago that was in works. And for some reason, Sojin couldn't add a whole lot more to that. So you'll see in this book, you don't really get to hear a lot about how the book,

[32:38]

what his role was at Berkeley Zen Center in a direct way, but the lectures all give you a sense of how he was able to encourage people, how he was able to recognize how practice manifests in people's lives and really bring that forth, and we'll read some selections that give you a sense of him in that venue. The book itself was compiled from Lectures that have been transcribed and edited for our newsletter, a bunch of other papers that were floating around. Some lectures, a difference of us remembered and transcribed and loved. And then another group of us, a lot of the senior students and other people ranked them and rated them. And then we put all that information together and presented it to Sojin. At that point, One of the practitioners who dates back to Norman and Sue's time, Ron Nestor, stepped forward and he said, he wasn't an editor, he wasn't a writer, but he had a deep love and understanding of Mel's teachings.

[33:49]

And he said, I want to help Mel see this through to publication. And he stepped forward to be the main person who really did the work of the book. He worked closely with a couple of people Kika Haleen and Raghav Bandov, who are two priests and lay practitioners, met weekly, sometimes twice a week, with Sojin and Ron and did the editing over a course of two, two and a half years. And when Sojin died, they continued to do that. Hozan is the literary executor, and he had the oversight and direction of how this book came forward. So I wanted to share how many hands of the sangha actually touched what's in front of you. And that's a really, really important aspect of Sojin's teachings. He called Berkeley Zen Center the one-room schoolhouse. So it wasn't the university, perhaps, of Tassajara and Green Gulch and city center, but it was a place when many people could come together and support each other.

[34:59]

And he had such a wise way of seeing how people could help each other and empowering people to be able to take a small position, any position. If they were coming and coming around with any regularity, they wound up doing something at Berkley Zen Center. Thanks for hooking me up right. Special lightweight one. Thank you, Suzanne. So I want to start by reading one selection and then pass it off to Sue. This bridges from some things that Norman was saying. He's talking about his relationship with Suzuki Roshi and what he just observed about Suzuki Roshi when he chose to take him as his teacher.

[36:00]

He says... Every day at Sakoji Temple at Bush Street, I would see him enter the zendo from his office, light the incense, sit zazen, and do service. I had never seen anyone do that activity before. His life was devoted to sitting zazen, bowing, lighting incense, and the various other things he did. When there were so many other things to do in the world... Here was this person simply doing these things over and over again. Every day. And he had been doing them over and over every day for most of his life. I never thought of myself doing anything like that in what seemed in such a narrowly disciplined way of life. I was impressed by it. After a while, it occurred to me that his life was a mantra. Every day he had these tasks that he would do.

[37:04]

He was always concentrated and went about his activity in a light and easy manner. Somehow it was not just repetitive. It was dynamic. It was always producing light. One way to produce energy is to have something going on around in a circular path. If you hook up to a conductor, to the energy producer, the energy flows from it. It's a dynamo. That's why he had so much spiritual power. It wasn't possible to practice around Sojin without feeling that dynamism and being encouraged by it. He was always paying attention to his students. He would be in a room filled with 60 people and he would be noticing everyone and what they were doing. And it would show back up to you in Dokusan. It would show back up to you in the way he turned while you were beating the makugyo and maybe not quite keeping the beat.

[38:05]

He was always in tune, taking every moment in order to teach people. Does this work? It's on now. Yes, I can. Okay, good. Thank you. Thank you, Norman and Ryushin, for sharing. And it's really an honor to be part of this conversation. And it's exciting to be here. It's sad to be here in that I am here because Alan couldn't be here.

[39:10]

It's also an occasion for celebrating his incredible recovery that is ongoing. He's not finished recovering, but as his letter to us all shows, he's here with us. He's coming back, and it's wonderful. So I'm happy to share a few thoughts of mine about... my time with Sojin Mel Weitzman, my memories of Berkeley Zen Center, just a couple of things that I want to bring forth. And I met Mel. I, too, like Norman, call him Mel, but I also am happy to call him Sojin as a sign of respect. And people who meet him now at Berkeley Zen Center know him as Sojin, but we all called him Mel for years. And Mel is such a perfect name for him.

[40:12]

It's just this nice, short, round word, smooth word, perfect, so unpretentious, just Mel. And I met him about 50 years ago. And I first, before I met him, I was kind of a single hippie mom in Berkeley. And I... A friend of mine told me, there's this incredible place down in the mountains near Carmel, and there are these monks, then monks, living in the mountains, and they make the most incredible bread there, and you can just go there and visit. And so how cool is that? I thought, wow, I'll do that. And I left my two very young children with one of my housemates, who also was a single mother. spent the weekend at Tassajara, and I just loved it.

[41:12]

I was so struck by the monks padding along in their sandals, and I thought, wow, this is so cool. And I had zazen instruction in the old stone zendo, and I thought, gosh, if I didn't have these little kids, who I was very happy to have, mind you... I would come here and be a monk. Maybe I'll come here and be a monk someday when my kids are older, little knowing that that really did happen a couple of times. So anyway, but somebody there said to me, oh, well, if you like Zen, you live in Berkeley, right? There's a Zen center in Berkeley, which I didn't know about. So I found my way to Berkeley Zen Center via Tassajara. I went back to Berkeley and... climbing those attic stairs that Norman described, and there at the top of the stairs was Mel. And so something about there was Mel, I say that because one of the great qualities of not only Mel but of Berkeley Zen Center still is its there-ness.

[42:25]

It's just there, and he was always there. As others have said, you know, he was accessible all the time. And so Berkeley Zen Center really is, it continues to have that spirit about it of just being always there to receive people. And in the early days, when I started going there, I was, you know, I really liked the practice, but it was very challenging for me. And I... I was afraid that I was maybe too much of a sort of wild hippie. I had tons of long, wild hair, and I wore dangly earrings. And one time I said to Mel, you know, maybe I don't really belong here. Maybe I'm too sort of flamboyant or something like that. And... I mean, it wasn't really flamboyant in my personality, but I just thought, maybe I don't belong here. And Mel said, no, no, no, everybody belongs here.

[43:27]

There's room for everybody at Berkley Zen Center. And he always had that attitude. There was always room for everybody. People who were a lot more difficult than I was were welcomed there. And Mel, I think he really, he had trouble with some people, but he didn't let that stop him from welcoming everybody. I know he... That was one of his great efforts that I really admire. He also... Oh, well, I used to think, because he was so direct about dealing with the world and dealing with whatever was right in front of him always, I was impressed. He always seemed to know what the next thing to do was. And when I was... floundering around in my complicated life and had too many things to do or couldn't decide which thing to do. I would say to myself, what would Mel do? What would Mel do now? And then I said that to myself as a little guide for years.

[44:32]

And then one day, I don't know when it was, but Alan Sanaki had the brainstorm of making a bumper sticker, unbeknownst to me, which... Some of you may have seen, and I used to have one on my car until it decayed totally, but it had a photograph of Mel sitting zazen from the back, which Alan had probably taken, and it had the little words, what would Mel do, question mark, question mark. So I had that on my bumper sticker. So anyway, he was a guide in that kind of a way too. He was so practical, and he taught me in work period the old zendo on Dwight Way's On the Monday mornings, we would clean the zendo, and he had us, I remember when it was my turn, to wash the leaves of the rubber plant with a solution of milk and water. And who would think that was Zen practice? But that's what it was like.

[45:33]

So I mention these stories from the past and from long ago, partly because I just want to highlight... all the layers of time that are embedded in this book and in Mel's teaching and in Mel's life. And Berkeley Zen Center has changed in many ways and it continues to flourish. And the teachings of Suzuki Roshi, which came to Mel, flourished as Mel passed them on and added his own perspective. And now he's Alan Sinaki and Hosanna, I should say, and others and senior people and other people at Berkeley Zen Center are continuing the teachings. And it's not just one voice. It's so many voices carrying on these teachings of Suzuki Roshi. And I just want to say also that Berkeley Zen Center now is in a whole new phase. And...

[46:36]

There used to not be hardly any young people. Now there's... I mean, originally, we were all young. Everybody was young once. And now... And then we all got old. And then where are the young people? Well, now there's a lot of young people coming, all different kinds of people. And it is just so wonderful. And it has a lot to do with Alan's leadership and with the leadership of all the other senior teachers there, including Ryu Shin here. So people are... There's a very mature and wonderful... and group of leaders at Berklee Zen Center. Oh, well, I just would say that Mel really is sort of like my grandfather in a way. I mean, Berklee Zen Center is my home temple. I practice with Norman. I practice with everyday Zen. That's my primary focus of my practice as a sangha, but I go to Berkeley Zen Center regularly, and I just really feel as though Mel, he's my root teacher, and I had a relationship with him right up to the end, and I continued to see him and take walks with him until the end of his life, and have Doka-san occasionally with him.

[47:55]

So I'm just so grateful, and I'm so glad that his teachings, are seeing the light of day because they were not very much known, unlike other people's teachings. He wasn't really a writer person, so here we have them. And I did interview him considerably. A lot of times I put the transcripts, I edited the transcripts, and I made a little booklet about 15 years ago for his 80th birthday. called A Path Unfolding, and The Path Was Still Unfolding. And I think some of those are what also helped created the transcripts that were available for the memoirs part of this. But anyway, I wasn't really directly involved in this book itself, but I'm just so grateful for it. So I wanted to read you a couple of parts from the book, too.

[48:58]

This is, I'll read a little bit from the, two things from the memories section and the excerpt from the, and very short. This is before Mel started practicing at Berkeley's End Center, but it gives you a sense of his... his Zen nature, I think. He was working as a cab driver in San Francisco, and he was an artist. One time, a young customer pulled me over and said, what would you do if I pulled a gun on you? I said, if that's what you want to do, go ahead. I did not want to get down on my knees and plead for my life. He didn't say, your money or your life. I just felt that I didn't believe him. He wasn't really convincing. He was just... testing me, playing with power. The same thing happened again. The second time it was, what would you do if a guy put a gun to your head?

[50:02]

I said, well, if that's what you want to do, go ahead. He put the gun down and said, I'm sorry, please forgive me. I'm really ashamed of myself. So that's Mel's way of teaching. then this is another memory. Let's see. Well, I think I'll skip that one just in the interest of time and go to a passage at the very end. This is from the talks. And I need these. So this is from a section entitled Letting Go. And he lists a number of ways of letting go.

[51:04]

And this is the very last way of letting go that he talks about. Another way of letting go is this. To let go is not to regret the past, but to grow from there for the future. True repentance is to acknowledge, turn around, and go straight without turning back. Suzuki Roshi taught about a woman walking with a large jug of water on her head. The jar fell backward off her head and smashed on the ground, and she just kept walking straight ahead and didn't look back. I will tell you a little story. Some years ago, maybe about 45 years ago, we were in Hawaii. We went to the beach. It was isolated. There was a restroom and it was getting late. There was nobody around, no telephones, no cars, nothing. And I went into the restroom. Somehow the lid of the toilet dropped.

[52:06]

It dropped into the toilet. I dropped it and it fell into the toilet and broke it. Then the water just kept shooting out and it was flooding everything and there was no way to turn it off. And there was nobody to call. And there I was. This is a great example of admitting to being totally helpless. And so we got in the car and ran away. And then, this is the very end of that section, and I'll end with this. Now, this is the end of the section life, birth, and death. I am able to not hang on to anything. That's my secret. I believed my teacher when he said, don't get caught by anything. I really believed it. And then, not only did I believe it, I started acting it out. So that's where I'm at. Don't get caught by anything. I'm able to not dwell on something.

[53:09]

I don't have much anxiety. I'm going to die. I'm on my way. What should I do? Worry about it? Everybody does this. Nobody escapes. This happens to every single person that's ever lived. What should I worry about? What's there to worry about? I'm just not that kind of a person. This is what I decided when I was young. I said, I'm just going to live my life all the way up to the end, and when it's time to go, I go. That's life. Life is death. So we experience it every moment. Here we are. Next moment, here we're not. This happens every moment. Thank you. So we can do some. I think we have time for a question or two here. And then after that, this whole party will move to the conference center, where you'll be able to continue to have conversation with our three speakers.

[54:18]

as well as get the book. Does anybody have a question? The abbot does. Thank you all very much for being here and for sharing your experience of Mel. I'm wondering if, I haven't read the book yet, but if you can maybe say something about how you saw his teaching change over time. What did it... Did it change? How did it change? How did it grow deep in something in terms of his own maturity as someone expressing and manifesting the Dharma? Was that something that came forward for you? Don't make it so easy, probably.

[55:26]

Thanks. Yeah, I wasn't around during the really early years of his teaching, but I do know some of those lectures and some of his style was really a little bit more out of the book and trying to be sure that people were exposed to basics of Buddhism and basic ideas in Buddhism. In the last 15 years of his life, he really turned to mine really deeply Suzuki Roshi's understanding, and I felt like he was, in a way, lecturing a love letter to Suzuki Roshi, really taking the depth of Suzuki Roshi's understanding, the simplicity, particularly the ability to hold the complexity of life, that there isn't just one side to things, there's always two sides to things, and translate that into what it looks like, what it feels like to live a life from that place. So his teachings got very, in a way, simple and very deep to those points of how you actually live a life as a Zen practitioner.

[56:32]

One more question here. Did Mel have a family other than the Zen Center? I mean, did he get married? Did he have children? I really don't know anything about that. Yeah, that's easier. Thanks. Yes. Hold it close. Yes. How's that? So Sojin was married to a wonderful Zen practitioner in her own right, although someone who has, I'd say, a little ambivalent relationship with calling herself that, Liz Horowitz, who... They met at Tassajara, and there's a lovely story that actually did not make the cut into the book about how that happened.

[57:45]

They have one son, Daniel, who's now in his early 40s. But in a way, it's kind of an interesting question. I think he was very much a married man, but his family, his life, really was the community, and whatever students needed, he was always available for. not to the exclusion of his family, but his will as a spiritual teacher was the first and foremost in his life. All right, we'll end here. And in a few minutes, you'll be able to go up to the conference center and there'll be tea and cookies and a chance to talk to our three speakers today. hear stories about Soja and Mel Weitzman, get a copy of the book, and just enjoy this beautiful day.

[58:41]

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