This podcast is offered by the San Francisco Zen Center on the web at www.sfzc.org. Our public programs are made possible by donations from people like you. Hello. How are you? Yeah, that'd be nice. You know, of course, the huge crowds will file in soon. I hear there's another concert that's just getting out up the road somewhere. Okay, good. Hello, Tassahara. So, I'm trying to figure out how to do this and keep this machine with me without messing everything up. Well, that's what we were thinking, but it might get... It might spontaneously switch off if I'm not careful.

[01:03]

It fell in. I'll carry it around. Anyway, how are you? The title of this talk was advertised as, or was Dogen really Dogen? And... I'll explain what I mean by that. Lately I've developed, or lately within the past few years, I've developed a little bit of a fascination with Christianity, particularly with the supposed historical Jesus, which is kind of an interesting topic. beginning with, for me, beginning with reading a book by a guy named Bart Ehrman called Misquoting Jesus. Anybody know that book? Misquoting Jesus is a... I'll tell you the little story of Bart Ehrman. Bart Ehrman was a kind of a convicted, is that the word?

[02:11]

A... a born-again Christian who was very convinced of the rightness of born-again Christianity in his youth. And as he got to be a teenager, he decided to go to college and study Christianity in more depth to become a better Christian. And in order to do this, he learned Greek and I think Aramaic and started reading the oldest texts available of the New Testament. And this shook his faith deeply because he started finding there were all these discrepancies. That he'd been told that the Bible that he'd been reading since he was a child was the inerrant Bible. unchanging word of God and now he was finding different versions of the Bible that said different things. So he went on the search and he was trying to find out what in the Bible was true and what wasn't. And the book is quite interesting.

[03:13]

I read a couple other of his books and then I started reading this book by the Jesus Seminar which tries to go through the New Testament and see which of the things that are in the New Testament can be reliably traced back to the historical Jesus and which can't, you know, which are just myth. And I started thinking, well, why isn't there anything, at least that I am aware of, in Buddhism like this? And there may indeed be things, research like this into Buddhism in... foreign languages or maybe there's research that I haven't found yet. But I don't see much of it. Most of the books I've seen on Buddhism accept the historical or the canonical history of Buddha as literal truth. I read a book by a guy named, oh Jesus, what is his name? Hajime something. Anyway, it doesn't matter.

[04:14]

Called Gotama Buddha. Maybe in the library. There's two volumes of it. And this guy goes into researching who was Gotama Buddha and what can we know about him and what does the history say and all this. It's an interesting and boring book at the same time. The subject matter is pretty interesting, but the way he goes through it is so methodical that it's really tedious, because he'll show you every variant version of Buddha's life story, you know, side by side, so you can read them for yourself. This is very exhaustive and exhausting. But as for Dogen... Dogen's an interesting character because Dogen, somewhat similarly to Jesus, has a kind of a set life story that most people who are followers of Dogen are familiar with. And I don't know if I should, I was trying to think of whether I should assume everybody in this room knows that story or not.

[05:19]

I wonder. I see yeses and noes. How about I'll go through the short version as I remember it, as it was sort of taught to me. Dogen was born in 1200 AD as the illegitimate son of a nobleman. And no one is... I went and dug out a bunch of books from the library, all of the books on Dogen from the library. and found that there's some disagreement about who this nobleman was. But in any case, he was raised in a fairly well-to-do setting as a noble and was given a very... good education in learning to read Chinese and learning to read the classics and this and that. But his father died when he was two years old.

[06:23]

His mother died when he was seven and according to certain sources that door is going to slam. See? I can predict the future. Now you should all be impressed by me. According to some sources his mother had wished young Dogen to become a monk but he ended up in the care of an uncle who wanted him to go into whatever it is that noble people do you know wanted him to become some sort of a secular educated person, but definitely not a monk. But at the age of 12 he entered a monastery and the story goes that it was a Tendai monastery. That's definitely factual. And he was dissatisfied with the Tendai teachings, particularly he heard that we are all endowed with

[07:28]

Buddha nature or whatever I forget that that isn't the way they put it in the Tendai sect but basically we're all perfect just as we are and his question was well if we're all perfect just as we are why do we need to do all this stupid meditation and crap and nobody could answer him so he ended up going to a Zen monastery in the Rinzai sect and the teachings in the Rinzai sect didn't satisfy his longings either. He ended up going to China when he was 23 years old and stayed there for several years and then was initially apparently traveled around China looking into the different teachers he found there and was dissatisfied with what he found which was mostly again Rinzai style Zen teaching until he came across, I'm giving you the very short version, people who are in the kitchen crew know some of the stories because they're in the Tenzo Kyokun about how he ended up doing this but he heard about a

[08:40]

a master who everyone around here seems to call Zhu Qing, which is closer to the real pronunciation of his name. I learned his name is Tendo Nyojo, which is the way the Japanese pronounce his name. And Tendo Nyojo taught him Shikantaza, as his style of meditation and had this famous saying or this saying that Dogen liked to quote a lot, Shinjin Datsuraku, which is dropping our way of body and mind. And at one point Dogen is said to have heard this. teaching Shinjin Datsuraku and had a great awakening and come back and received his Dharma transmission from Tendo Nyojo, came back to Japan and eventually set up a monastic situation and taught Buddhism for the rest of his life and died when he was just 54 years old.

[09:42]

apparently, of tuberculosis, although there was no such diagnosis available to him at the time, but that's what people tend to speculate it was these days. So that's the short version of Dogen's life story. What's interesting, though, is that a number of scholars, particularly this... No, I didn't bring his book. Particularly Carl Bielefeld, Bielefeld, how do you say it? Bielefeld, is it Carl? Yeah, Carl Bielefeld, have written rather critical studies questioning some of this life story stuff. And one of the, if you want... I'm going to put this back, actually there's two or three more copies in the library of this. But the very first chapter of this is a kind of a really good encapsulation of most of what, uh, Bielefeld has been writing about the subject. Um, it's called Recarving the Dragon.

[10:44]

And it's where he takes, you know, some of these, uh, myths about Dogen and, uh, and puts them to the historical test. So there's an interest in studying the history of Dogen. Particularly, I'll just throw out a few sort of interesting factoids that I gleaned from reading some of this stuff. Unless I turn that off. Did I? Maybe I turned it off just now. Okay. Maybe she'll let you hold it and follow me around. Sorry. Go ahead. All right. I'll try to stay nearby. Okay. But anyway, a lot of this stems from a few certain things. For example, Fukan Zazengi, which I think a lot of people in here are probably familiar with Fukan Zazengi. Well, I've never been here at Tassahara when they've chanted Fukan Zazengi.

[11:47]

A lot of people. They've chanted anew. Anew, so that's why, because I never go to anew. We usually don't. So, Fukan Zazengi is usually loosely, the title is usually loosely translated as recommending Zazeng to all people. And the idea is to give a brief, succinct explanation of how to do Zazen that applies to everybody, whether monk or lay person, whatever. Traditionally, Fukan Zazengi is supposed to have been written in the year 1227, the same year that Dogen arrived back in Japan. However, Bielefeld, doing his study, can't seem to locate a version of Fukanzazengi that's earlier than 1233. And this version from 1233 is substantially different from the one that we know and love. The version that we know and love, according to at least Bielefeld's research,

[12:48]

probably dates from somewhere between 1242 and 1246, so considerably after he arrived back in Japan. Also, a lot of the biographical information that we know about Dogen comes from a thing called Hokkyoki, which is something like records of my time in China. It's my own newspaper. dumbass translation. And this piece of work was supposed to have been discovered by Colin Edo, who is Dogen's Dharma heir, sometime after Dogen died among his personal papers and is supposed to have been Dogen's own personal records that he was keeping, like little notes to himself that was never intended. for others to see. Also, though, Bielefeld casts some doubts upon this, because it has a rather convoluted history, this piece of writing, and when I open it up for Q&A, don't ask me to recite it, because I can't remember.

[14:06]

It's all very twisty-twirly as to when it was discovered and who discovered it, and so on and so forth. But Miles Sebelfeld finds the evidence somewhat dubious. He says, basically, he comes down to saying that Colin Ajo may indeed have found this among Gogan's papers, but that's by no means certain, given the trail of evidence that he's been able to uncover about it. Some of the interesting things, though, about... Dogen, like who he was, that are relevant to us, is what I'd like to get into, rather than giving a bunch of history and stuff. One of the things probably a lot of you have heard is that there is, and this is something that the scholars are starting to say a lot, that there is an early Dogen and there's a later Dogen.

[15:08]

And the main difference between the early Dogen and the later Dogen is the early Dogen was all for lay people being able to practice Zazen as efficiently and get as much out of it, such a phrase can be used, as any monk. But in later Dogen he seems to go out of complete about-face and say that only amongst monastic bound people can understand Buddhism and Zazen, and forget it if they are Vakers. For us in the States, who are mostly not monastics, this is kind of troubling. If you're trying to be a good Dogen follower, and not a monastic, to read him saying that only monastics can possibly understand the stuff he's writing about kind of is a bit of a bummer.

[16:14]

I have my own personal view on the matter, which may or may not be true, but I found a little bit in the research that I'm not the only one who holds this view. And that is that it makes most sense to me to look at it this way he although he was saying all this stuff about lay people being completely unable to ever realize the Buddhist truth and all the monks being able to realize it later in his life during the same years he was also apparently rewriting Fukan Zazengi i.e. recommending Zazen to all people so he was either a bit of a hypocrite or something else was going on. And what I think was going on is, when I read these researchers who talk about there being, you know, Dogen having complete about-face and changing his mind, I wonder if they've ever done anything close to monastic Zen practice.

[17:22]

Because it's... If you know, I mean... I'm down here for about a month, three weeks, and I was here for a month last year. I haven't done a practice period here, but some of you have. If you can, you know, you know how hard it is to get through even just working here during summer guest season at the very least. Everybody in this room and some of you know how much harder it is to get through a practice period here. If you can imagine that in a place that's even more disconnected from civilization. Fukui Prefecture, which is where Eheiji... Oh, no, sorry, it's not... Is it Fukui? Oh, God, now I'm blanking. Anyway, I went and visited the prefecture where Eheiji is. I think it's Fukui. It is, even today... remote. I can't, I was trying to, I didn't go research and look in maps and things in the library.

[18:27]

I can't, I've lived in Japan 11 years, the first year of that on that side of Japan, the western side of Japan. I can't think of a single major city even now in Fukui Prefecture. I'm not sure Kanazawa might be in Fukui or not. At any rate, even if it's Kanazawa, Kanazawa's no great shakes. It's like Cleveland or something, you know. But And so at that point, there wasn't even a city like that. So you were way out in the middle of nowhere and doing this very hard monastic practice, a life that was probably almost unimaginably difficult for those of us who are used to complaining about toilets backing up and things like that. My take on it is he wrote and said a lot of that stuff about only monks being able to realize the Dharma as a means of encouraging the monks who were with them.

[19:35]

And he was saying it to them and for them. I often think of Shobo Genzo as a bit like Dogen's blog because he seems to have written these things for a certain particular audience and kind of put them out there on a regular basis, and it wasn't really something he was broadcasting to the world, necessarily, but he did have a certain audience that he knew he could count on listening to his writing, and he probably had some idea that his writing might live on after him, but he couldn't have been certain of that. And that's also another interesting aspect to all this, because I think some of you are aware of this, but some of you may not be, which is that Dogen, as the founder of Soto Zen in Japan, was known, well known throughout, you know, from the time he was alive until today.

[20:43]

His writing, on the other hand, was largely unknown until the 19th century, even by Japanese people. The Soto Shu tended to keep Shobo Genzo under lock and key, almost. And it was something that was studied by certain monks who were into that sort of thing, but it wasn't really widely disseminated. And it's only been in recent years that people have actually gotten to read it. So we're kind of, even now, at the forefront or at the beginning of people studying Dogen, even if we include Japanese who study Dogen in the mix. Dogen is really heavily mythologized, though, as a person. Some of you have seen that movie, Zen, right? The slightly ridiculous movie that was made of Dogen's life a couple of years ago and it's set to get to... I kept hearing about the DVD release and I kept hearing that San Francisco Zen Center was somehow involved in the DVD release.

[21:53]

Somehow, I don't know. But it's a slightly goofy film and And it is based mainly on a lot of the highly dubious biographical accounts of Dogen's life. Also, the one thing I was looking for in the library, but apparently it must have been a few years ago, the Sotoshu used to put out a magazine, I think they still put out a magazine, a little about this size magazine, and for a while they were serializing a little manga, a comic book, about Dogen's life that the only episode I can remember seeing clearly was involved Dogen being on a ship bound for China the rain and wind is picking up so he prays to some kind of a Buddhist deity and the Buddhist deity makes the rain and wind stop and he's able to get over to China that's the kind of level of stuff that's out there about Dogen

[22:56]

But this idea of trying to discover who the real Dogen was is... I mean, I always try to find what the practical application to it is. Because if... I was a history major in college, so I am very fond of history and kind of interested in it. But at the same time, to a certain degree, it's a bit masturbatory, frankly, because, you know, to a certain extent, it's impossible to know what really went on at any given time or what any person really was. This is what initially, when I first started out deciding I wanted to be, you know, find the truth and all that, bullshit that we get into sometimes. My first inclination was to study Christianity.

[24:03]

And I've since learned that there's a lot more to Christianity than Christianity as it was presented to me when I was a teenager. But Christianity as it was presented to me as a teenager in Ohio was the the literal truth of the biographical and historical details written in the Bible. And it didn't take long to figure out that, for example, John F. Kennedy was killed less than 50 years ago, and we still don't know who did it and how it happened. If we're talking about somebody who died over 2,000 years ago... It becomes ridiculous to say that we know what really happened at that time. And also this matter of who Dogen really was is of practical importance to anybody who is trying to study Zen under a teacher, right?

[25:05]

because it's important to a lot of us to know who our teachers really are. And there's some modern examples, fly, that come to mind immediately, and some of you are aware, who to their followers seem to be one thing and later seem to be something else. You know, Richard Baker's famous case around here. Trungpa Rinpoche, out in Boulder, Colorado. Well, actually, he was pretty open about what kind of person he was, but I think a lot of people coming to him later, coming to him from a distance, find out, you know, sort of build up a mental picture of him through his works, and then somebody tells him, oh yeah, did you know he used to have orgies and force people to pretend them? And they go, ah, oh my god! Um... And Edo Shimano, and everybody's heard the Edo Shimano story.

[26:08]

He was posted last year, was posted on the bulletin board. I think the New York Times even had a big article about Edo Shimano Roshi. He was a Zen teacher out in New York who apparently was using Dokusan room for purposes other than Dokusan. And people wonder what kind of a person he was. And that's an interesting thing. I was reading a book. Actually, I participated in the writing of this book. It's by a guy who's a friend of mine named Scott Edelstein. And he is now based in St. Paul, Minnesota. I knew him when he was living in Kent, Ohio a lot of years ago. And he was, Scott was a student... And also happened to be... I guess he considers himself to have been a student of Tim McCarthy, although he and Tim were the same age and met each other in college.

[27:16]

Tim McCarthy was my first Zen teacher. So I haven't seen Scott Edelstein for many years, but he contacted me when he was doing this book called Sex and the Spiritual Teacher because he thought I would have some... insight into the matter, uh, because he'd read my book, um, Zen wrapped in karma dipped in chocolate, uh, which has, uh, some hot scenes set in Tassajara. If you want to read a book that has hot scenes set in Tassajara, that is probably one of the few. Um, and, um, so, so he, he, uh, interviewed me, uh, about this book. And he also interviewed the other person who was in those hot scenes in the book. And he didn't use any quotes from her, but he used some quotes from me, although he didn't attribute them, which I thought was weird.

[28:16]

Because I said, go ahead and use my name. I don't care, because I already put all this stuff in my own book. but for some reason he decided not to. Anyway, every time I tell the story, I put that up, because it just baffles me, so I don't understand. Anyway, the book Sex and the Spiritual Teacher, Scott Evelstein, talks a lot about this matter of people who become disillusioned by their various spiritual teachers because they find out that those teachers have done bad things. or things that they consider to have been bad. And he... Let's see, how does he talk about this? He starts saying that one of the problems with this idea is people hear this stuff and say, well, how can this teacher who I thought was so good have done these so bad things?

[29:17]

How can this person who I thought was enlightened... have made so many huge mistakes about simple matters of human interaction and how people should behave among each other, with each other. And this causes a lot of people retroactively to think, oh my god, I've been following this horrible person. everything that person said must have been wrong and it can become a huge crisis of faith. And this is where this idea of discovering who Dogen really was and what his idea about lay people and so on becomes kind of practical to me. Because we all want to know who our teachers really are. But the question is maybe the wrong question. And it's something that Scott points out in his book that I think is quite true, is that the underlying idea within Buddhism is that no person, no thing in the universe is any single one unchanging object, that we all change, that we all flow through this life doing...

[30:40]

doing different things at different times. I think Shunyu Suzuki talks about how you wake up in the morning and become a shitter and so forth. I think there's a line in Zen Mind Beginner's line like that, you know, saying that you're not just this one thing that is an immutable object that happens to do... certain things at certain times, that what we do and what we are is kind of a momentary condition of the universe. And so this question of who our teachers really are becomes somewhat more difficult to answer in that. I mean, I, and it also kind of see I'm trying to pull a bunch of things together here it also relates very well to my own thing I you know I came here thinking I'm not going to do this at this talk I'm not going to get autobiographical but I'm going to do it a little bit and then I'll throw the floor open to people to ask questions in my own case

[31:56]

Who my teacher, my first teacher, especially Tim McCarthy, really was, has been an interesting question, because he was my introduction to Zen practice, and I'm forever in his debt for introducing, and sometimes I'm forever pissed off at him for introducing me to this thing that I now can't get rid of in my life. I see a few people know how I feel that. But who he really was became a bit of a question because I was with him for several years and then I moved away. First I moved to Chicago for a few years and then I moved back to Ohio and then I moved to Japan. And I can't remember exactly the chronology of it, but while I was away I started hearing things about Tim from people who other people who had been around him, that he was drinking himself stupid in the local bar night after night, and that he was... He's never been accused of anything really much more scandalous than that.

[33:10]

But, you know, a few other people were grumbling, and I was having a bit of a crisis. This guy, you know, I believed him. What's going on? And I reconnected with him and I found out that he was still who he was. There was something there. And he eventually gave up the drinking and set himself straight. No longer drinks at all. And kind of has reformed at least that aspect. But it was a bit of a crisis to... to have to wonder about this. But in reconnecting with him, I found he was somebody different. This may also go for Dogen. One of the things I forgot to mention, that I'll give you one little more fat plug, is one of the things that makes Dogen's life story a bit dubious is some of his stories about Zhu Qing, about Tendon Yeojo, his teacher, are not borne out at all by the existing Chinese literature about Tendon Yeojo, Zhu Qing.

[34:15]

In the very few things that are written in Chinese about Juching, the phrase Shinjin Datsuraku, dropping off body and mind, never shows up. He doesn't seem to be particularly concerned with Shikan's haza practice. He doesn't seem to even differentiate himself very much as a practitioner of Soto-style Zen. He doesn't seem to be terribly concerned with that, and according to at least some of the people who apparently read some of his Chinese stuff, he doesn't come across as really that outstanding. He comes across as just another sort of minor teacher, almost indistinguishable from the Rinzai teachers of the same time. So the portrait that we get in Dogen's writing of Tendo Yato is extremely different. And when I read that, I think, well, that's kind of the same way my... If I were to write a biography of Tim McCarthy, I'm sure it would come out quite different from the people I used to hear about Tim's exploits from.

[35:25]

So there you go. I've talked for half an hour, I think. 35 minutes. Does that spark anything? Does anybody want to say anything? You know, I understand that you were out of this The idea of setting something up on a pedestal and admiring sort of like a hero. Well, likewise, if you look at our popular culture, you know, a guy that fell wrong, a student of jazz, and then all of the like, idols and good jazz natures. That's how we made it out of a Christian. Yeah, the personal lives of jazz musicians are pretty. There was one fellow, a West Coast musician, who was white and son away, and killed himself. You know, I don't know all this. This is not why. I think it's important that his body of work still stands. I don't see why we have to dip into past lives and why it actually affects you.

[36:31]

We're accepting tokens. Yeah, I think that's a good point and I wish I'd come up with it myself because that's a really good analogy that I like a lot. Because there are a lot of, and I can think of musicians myself whose music I really admire. One bad example that comes to mind is Ted Nugent. I used to love Ted Nugent. And then I started reading about his politics, and then for a while I was like, I can't listen to Ted Nugent anymore, because he's this horrible right-wing hunter and does all this gun fanatic and NRA stuff. And yeah, and later on I started thinking, well, it doesn't matter, you know. some of the, I know it's very low-brow, but I like Ted Nugent. He did something that it comes, like you're talking about the jazz musicians, and for Dogen too, I think it's probably even a better example.

[37:32]

It comes from someplace beyond who that person was. My impression of Dogen is that he was a guy who as much as possible tried to keep his personality, his sort of individual personality or karmic personality, if you want to use the previous terms, out of his writing and to address things that were more universal. And when he does talk about himself and his own personal past, he uses it in service of what he's trying to convey about something deeper. So yeah, I think that's good. Um, I had an idea that we attribute our practice, we attribute what we're doing here, we attribute to the Shomu Shizuki and to Dogan and to, I don't know, and to, you know, Rinong, Bodidama, etc.

[38:38]

Many of these figures, especially the Bodidama presence, are almost purely mythical. Yeah. But it seems to me that I think it's not so much that we actually believe that shit. It's more like we exemplify what we're doing here with these characters and with these figures. And it's kind of like we're creating their history based on what we're into. based on what we're doing here. And I feel like I'm totally okay with that fostering to mythology. And I feel like even my own history is probably just mythology. Yeah, I think so. I think one of the important things, important aspects, especially sort of Mahayana,

[39:39]

is its acceptance of mythology as mythology. I mean, the best example of that is the Mahayana Sutras, which are often attributed to the Buddha as immediate followers, but we know they couldn't have been written by them. They were written that way as sort of a fictional device, and we accept that. It's kind of what's the difference between Theravada and Zen. When people ask me to try to explain the difference between the two, it seems to me the essential difference is that Theravada has tried to... Both were trying to find the true essence of Buddhism. They both decided that what it was about was the meditation practice that Buddha taught. But whereas Theravada rejected all of the Mahayana sutras because they're historically doubtful.

[40:40]

Zen sort of accepts them even though they're historically doubtful. But I also think a lot of this has to do with sort of veneration of the teacher is something that I've often been... had a lot of problems with. It's sort of an artifact, I think, in a lot of ways, from the time when Buddhism first came to be studied seriously in terms of practice. I should say practice rather than study, practice seriously in the West. It came at a time when people were looking for gurus and superhero figures. I wrote a article once whose title, I can only remember the title of it, but it was something like, why can't we accept good spiritual advice unless it comes from Superman? Which I think is the way a lot of people kind of view it. If they hear this stuff, it has to have come from a person who is a perfect person.

[41:51]

And if you find out that person isn't perfect, then... you start to be doubtful of the work that that person produced. But I don't think you need to be so doubtful. I mean, the work stands separately, like you said, with music and musicians. It's very much like that. It's something else. Or something like that. Yeah, that's really interesting. Oh, I'm going to... I'm preparing for a student giving class. And it started out that I was going to talk about the admonitions on shines. So this is about how we should do things. This is what is recommended as a pattern of living. And then totally I was looking up something else altogether or trying to And in the end of the Pali Canon graduate sayings, there was a disciple Buddha asking, who should we look to so that we'll know how to live?

[43:05]

I mean, that was the question, who should we look to so that we'll know how to live? And he says, good question. And then... He goes through a very brief little speech and says, you should know, in you, when you look at somebody, you should know if that's the way you want to live. So it kind of amazes me, but it means that when we read things, something that's reflecting back to us from our instinct, for what we hope for. And ultimately you have to figure it out for yourself.

[44:05]

People ask me that all the time, who they should follow. And it always makes me think of the Ozzy Osbourne song called Light Up the Water. Ozzy's talking about all these people are asking him who they should follow. Imagine asking Ozzy Osbourne, but I guess we don't do it, right? And then there's don't ask me, I don't know. You've got to figure it out for yourself. And also it kind of revolves around this question of Zen teachers as role models, because I've seen my own teachers do things that I certainly don't wanna emulate. And yet I find them extremely admirable people, even so. And it's on some level difficult to resolve because you wonder How can you do this?

[45:08]

Or you wonder, well, can I just pick and choose? But I think you're certainly saying you have to. You have to pick and choose, right? Because you're just kind of built that way and you're going to do it anyway. But on the other hand, you can't just blindly follow something. You can't just engage in blind imitation of something else. For one thing, you don't have to work. The teacher who ordained me is a 91-year-old Japanese man, and there's no way I can follow exactly what he does. Anyway, Tim, he's 10 years older than being an American, but I still wouldn't want to blindly follow. So, yeah. So, I don't know. I don't know. There you go. I don't know is most intimate, isn't that right?

[46:12]

Not knowing is most intimate, right? Go off on a tangent. I was just going to say that I don't know. Two things. One, I know that I entirely agree with the idea that the work stands on its own, only because work tends to always have, I think, a function, a social, political, cultural function, or whatever, and, you know, whether it's the intention of the person, the musician, or the writer, or whatever, for something that, a function that can do to it, but people after the fact can vary, but I think work always comes with an intention or an agenda of some sort. So, that said, what I was really curious about was what you said about the shovel guns are not being put out for mass consumption until about 200 years ago.

[47:28]

I'm wondering if there are any theories where you have thoughts on What was the reasoning behind that? Because clearly there must be some reason. There's several things. Let me see if I can remember all the different ideas. I probably can't remember many of them. One that I liked really well was that the later teachers within the Soto organization couldn't understand Shogo Genza themselves. and didn't want to publish it for mass consumption lest they be asked about it, to explain it. Which is, I don't think, completely unreasonable. So then eventually people figured it out and they understood it? Well, I don't know. I don't know. I think maybe curiosity, kind of a general curiosity about what... When it was sort of rediscovered was at a time when a lot of old Buddhist writing was being rediscovered and Japan was trying to... re-mythologize its own history and find its own national heroes.

[48:31]

And Dogen was a good guy to look to for that. And he turned out to be really good. Better probably than the people who discovered him thought he might be. Another one that I just recently came across was that, let's see, it was some of the things that he'd said about other Like, the Rinzai organizations were becoming powerful, and some of the Stobogenzo contains a lot of anti-Rinzai rhetoric. And they didn't really want to put that out there. I think it was because, if I remember correctly, one of the emperors was a patron of a Rinzai teacher, and it was not good to put this stuff out there that kind of... ranted against Ginza. So, you know, and those are the two sort of main theories that I've heard.

[49:35]

So they're mostly theories of why it was kept under wraps. Yeah. I mean, I don't... Not so much why you said, but, oh, here, now let's pull it out. Yeah, I guess, yeah, just to try to make him into a national hero, I think, was the main reason. Um... What you said earlier sort of sparked off something, but I started getting into the other thing, and I can't remember what it was. About the work standing on its own. I don't think I was exactly saying the work stands on its own, but it's... Something important is being conveyed that is a little beyond the person who conveys it, and about their intentions. You know, I get, I get a lot of, I've been, this is going to sound like bragging or something, but I put on my blog that I was going to Tassahara. And so far since I've been at Tassahara, I've gotten three letters from people who read the blog saying, you know, like letters.

[50:41]

People took the time to write letters and send them here and spent 44 cents on a stamp and everything. to say nice, encouraging things to me, which is really sweet. But I think, I wonder, this matter of intention, what I intend to do. I like being self-referential when I talk, and I hope that it carries something universal, and it's not just me talking about myself. But... That aside, sometimes I think my own intentions in sort of writing about Buddhism and lecturing about Buddhism are probably not as pure as people think. I mean, everybody has dozens of thoughts in their heads when they go to do something, you know. And... among the many thoughts that occur in my brain sometimes in writing is, God, I hope this one sells a few copies.

[51:46]

I hope it sells better than the last one and I can stop having to work a day job. This kind of thing. So people will ascribe to you or to any teacher these lofty motives of which there probably are some. In my own case, I find it difficult, I find it much easier to admit to the baser motives in my own work than any lofty ones. But this may be a result of my upbringing. My dad, I remember he was dealing, my mom was very, very sick, and my dad became her sole caretaker towards the end of her life. And he was just doing a monumental job, you know, sacrificing himself and doing all this stuff to just make my mom's life livable and comfortable. And I said, Dad, you're a saint for doing all this. And he said, shut up, don't say anything like that.

[52:47]

My dad doesn't get angry very often, but he got a little angry then, you know, and told me I was not allowed to say that. And then my sister has a similar story about it. So, you know, that's my thing. So I think a lot of times, the motives that somebody brings to the intention, I mean, people talk a lot about intention as being such a great thing, and I tend to wonder if intention is all that important, you know, on some level. Yeah, I don't know, maybe intention was the wrong word, but I guess I was thinking that the first thing that came to my mind was like the films that you write through Saul, who made those Nazi films that are just incredibly gorgeous, you know? Oh, right, right. I know the ones you're talking about. But they, you know, are in the service of... Of Hitler. Yeah, and so there is something, like, I mean, that you can't... I don't think you can take those films just as they are without... And not that Tolkien had such malevolent... No, but, you know... Motivation.

[53:57]

I mean, people can divorce... Artists are always sort of famous for being able to sort of divorce themselves from their surroundings. I mean, there's lots of stories like that where somebody does something beautiful in the service of... Yeah. But that's an extreme case. I'm doing what I do in the service of evil. Evil. I don't know about suppressed. I'll tell you one thing that I find quite interesting that I read fairly recently, which is The way we usually learn Buddha's life story contains an episode in which Buddha is sitting under the Bodhi tree and he's meditating.

[55:04]

Probably everybody here knows this story. And Mara comes and tries to tempt him with the things of the world. Then he touches the ground and Mara goes away and Buddha then becomes enlightened and everything is cool. That's the way the story is usually told in that Nakamura, that was his name, Hajimi Nakamura. In the Nakamura book, I remember Nakamura, if you want to say it right, he mentions that, though this is the way it's come down to us, when you look at the earlier versions, some of which are still in existence, of Buddha's life story, the temptations by Mara don't just, it isn't just one temptation by Mara that occurs just before he becomes enlightened and then goes away. there are stories of Buddha being tempted by Mara throughout his life. And I don't think we need to read these as some sort of mystical visit by some sort of supernatural being.

[56:06]

I think there are ways of explaining that Buddha himself had doubts, he had times when he might have done things that people didn't think were quite nice, you know, and so on and so forth. But those stories were... didn't make him seem so heroic, so eventually they were changed, and all the Mara stories were put into one, and then we forget about Mara for the rest of his life. So, yeah, another good book to read, if you want anything along that lines, is Stephen Batchelor's latest book, which is called Confessions of a Buddhist... Atheist, yes. I almost said materials. Buddhist Atheist. Um... And among other things, that book is an account of Bachelor... I forget why he does this, but he tries to retrace some of the steps of the historical Buddha by actually going to the places where Buddha was and sort of walking the distances that Buddha was supposed to have walked and things like that.

[57:08]

And through that, he starts to develop a different picture of who Buddha was. And one of the sort of interesting things for me is he develops a different... picture of who Mahakashapa was, who's one of the guys whose names we chant every morning, that Mahakashapa may not have been this great saintly person. He may have been a rather ambitious person who sought to consolidate the religion that he saw could be formed and become the head of it. and that it was later mythologized to him having received this great direct transmission from Buddha. And the truth is probably somewhere in between. He probably did have some sort of understanding that Buddha recognized, but he was also, you know, he pulled things together. He was sort of the Richard Baker of Erlich. I mean, we have Richard Baker to thank for this place we're all enjoying. So, should I stop there?

[58:10]

I don't know if I'm... what the time meditations are. It's usually an hour. Okay. I know that Dharmon people make use for this room as well, so. Wow, when you do that, you look like one of those Bodhidharma. Well, does anybody have anything else? Break it up. Well, thank you for being a fine audience. I didn't mention Godzilla during my talk. But I had the shirt on the whole time. I hope that makes up for it. Good, thank you. Thank you for listening to this podcast offered by the San Francisco Zen Center. Our Dharma Talks are offered free of charge and this is made possible by the donations we receive.

[59:14]

Your financial support helps us to continue to offer the Dharma. For more information, visit sfcc.org and click giving.

[59:23]

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