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. So we've been in this room for a few days with a circle of friends, new friends. talking together, and we thought maybe you'd be interested in hearing how we got here, and particularly how Pico was gracious enough to come to Tassajara. So I think it was last year, maybe late the year before, that Zen Center called me and said, would you be willing to partner with Pico Iyer on doing special benefit at Grace Cathedral? And... Having been raised as an Episcopalian, I thought that was a really wonderful invitation.

[01:00]

I had read some of Pico's articles over the years, not really knowing. I don't identify writers too often or know much about their history, but he's written many things in New York Times and Harper's and New York Review books, and he's written books and so on. He's quite well known by folks out there who read. And we agreed to do this. We exchanged some emails and decided we would leave that day of the event. And so we met on the steps of the cathedral. And right away, I felt this just amazing, kind and generous presence. And I thought, oh, this will be fine. This will just be fine. So we went in and we got inside the cathedral. And there were these two thrones up on top of a dais. A little different than this feeling. And so... We went up and he did a lovely reading. And the next day we did a workshop together and had such a wonderful time that I was daring enough to ask him if he would come to Tassajara and do a workshop with me here.

[02:07]

And he said, for 40 years, he wanted to come to Tassajara. So here he is. And he's promised to come back. Yes, thank you. Yay. So we don't have such a structured plan for this evening. We thought we'd maybe describe a little bit of what we've been doing in our workshop, which is really a gathering of writers and poets and readers. We've gone around to introduce ourselves, and now we actually know quite a bit about each other, having read some of our work to one another. We've done some writing exercises that we've shared. And it's been a really wonderful and intimate experience being here. So I thought maybe we would, first of all, Pico could say a few things about his thoughts about the workshop and his structuring of it, the parts of it that he's introduced to people, and then we could open up to your questions once we've done a little introduction, if that sounds good to you.

[03:11]

And of course, the main thing I've learned in the course of this workshop is never to structure anything, so... Any plans I had, I want to upend or throw out of the window. But when I was first approached for that event... I knew I was in the presence of deep intuition because nobody at Zen Center realized when they scheduled that event that secretly, known only to me and my wife, my favorite building in the entire United States was Grace Cathedral. And for 25 years, every time I come to San Francisco, I always stayed in the hotel across from it so I could slip in as soon as the doors opened at 8 o'clock and just walk through that silence for 15 minutes with the light coming through the rose windows and the rest of the day would make sense. And that set the tone for whatever would happen, which would often be a clamorous and cluttered day, but Grace Cathedral is the place that has always centered me. And so to have both Zen Center and Grace Cathedral in the same body, so to speak, meant a lot to me. And before I say anything else, by the way, I do owe three people here a great apology.

[04:15]

I'm such a seasoned travel writer that I not only have lived in Japan for 28 years without speaking a word of Japanese, but I'm incapable of reading signs even in my native language, English. So as soon as I arrived here, I went to the stone office and I saw the figures 7 and 9, and I thought it opens at 7 a.m., closes at 9 p.m. So yesterday at 8 in the morning, I walked right into the stone office. There were people having a a very intimate gathering, a private gathering, before the office opened. And I, a bull in a china shop stumbled through and interrupted their very private meeting, so heartfelt apologies to them. I didn't realize the difference between 7 a.m. and 9 a.m. So that's a happy aspect of being in Tassahara. You dispense with your watch, you lose all sense of time, and you bungle in on somebody's private meeting. As we were walking over here, Fu asked me, by way of explanation or definition, to say something about my name, where better to start. And I've always been grateful.

[05:16]

Both my parents were professional philosophers. And so they gave me, and I was born in England, and they knew that no English person could be expected to handle a multisyllabic, unpronounceable Indian name. So they named me after the maverick Catholic renegade from the Renaissance, Pico della Mirandola. And I've always been grateful to them because Pico has served me very, very well. Everybody can spell it. Everyone can say it. It's a good global name, and it belongs to almost every culture, which is how my life has transpired. But only many years later did I unpack my name, which is, in fact, Siddharth, Pico, Raghavan, Aya. And so my parents, in their wisdom, gave me the name of the Buddha. not knowing that I would actually leave my comfortable gilded palace in Rockefeller Center at the age of 29 to go to Japan to learn a little more about old age, sickness, and dying, and not knowing that I would later write an introduction to Hess's book and that the name Siddhartha would be an important part of my life.

[06:20]

So my first name is an honoring of the Buddha. My second name honors a Catholic who ran out of the church. My third name is my father's name, and he was a theosophist. And my fourth name, Aya, is a very typically South Indian Hindu priestly name. So actually in my name, I have my whole global destiny, really. Being lucky enough to have learned from many traditions, but being too cowardly to give myself to any single one of them. I think... In terms of when Fu and I first met, I had never given a workshop before until Fu and I spent that day in Grace Cathedral. And none of you need to be told that a stranger meeting Fu feels so safe and so at home and so encouraged to bring out the best part of himself that when in the course of that day she invited me to come here this summer, I instantly said yes. When we arrived here two days ago, we were having lunch, and Fu said, well, you probably do quite a lot of teaching, don't you?

[07:26]

And I sprung on her, the truth I've never taught one day in my life. It's the first workshop, and the poor people who've had to sit on our circle are my lab rats, so to speak. But it's been a wonderful experience for me to learn about how to give a workshop. And... I was probably Japanese long before I set foot in Japan, but certainly 28 years there made me extremely habit-bound, routine-minded, and tyrannized by the clock. And so one thing that's been wonderful, Fu and I talked for 10 minutes by phone before the workshop began, and she said more or less what she's told us in the Zendo, just follow the wind, be the leaf borne along on the stream. Don't worry about anything, and you don't need to think out too much in advance, because really, The thing will only come together when everybody is in one room and we can follow the unspoken intuitions and needs of everybody around us. and liberated me from my rigid linear plan, which would have gone like a bullet train in the wrong direction.

[08:28]

So I now actually, for the first time in my life, feel slightly equipped to give a workshop in future. But what I think hit both of us last year, which is why it was such a harmonious conjunction, is that Fu was telling Dharma stories and introducing us into meditation a little. And I was talking about the writing life. and if somebody had come into the room 10 minutes late, they might have thought I was the one who was meant to be talking about meditation, and Fu was the one talking about the writer's life, because really I think it was interchangeable. And being with Fu and talking on behalf of Zen Center reminded me what a privilege it is that a writer is paid, these days not paid, but at least expected, to spend his whole life sitting. And I wake up every morning and I go to my desk and I sit and I sit and I sit for five hours trying to see beyond my projections, trying to see through my illusions, trying to hear that voice behind my own chatter and trying to hear the things I would want to say when I don't have any words at all.

[09:35]

And although I've never had a formal set practice and never been part of any religion, I realized talking to food that it's a great blessing that we write as a are allowed and encouraged to stop not taking ourselves seriously and to see that nothing is personal and to realize there is no self behind any of our self-styled inspirations. Because what I write... 10 in the morning is refuted by what I write at 11 in the morning. And when I read it at 3 in the afternoon, I wonder who is this outrageous, annoying stranger who committed these sentences. And then the next morning, it seems like pure revelation radiance when I read the sentence. And so the more time I've spent at my desk, I think the better I've been equipped to distrust my own. On the other hand, the less well-equipped I've been to be a writer, because now I don't even trust most of the things I commit to my paper. But it's an interesting challenge to see what lies behind one's thoughts and words. And that's part of what writing has given me.

[10:38]

And so I think when we were planning this workshop, we deliberately did no planning whatsoever. But on my part, I was thinking that poetry... is the part of discourse that comes closest to silence. And one of my favorite Buddhist artists of the 20th century is John Cage, and his great book Silence and all his books I read again and again for the reminder that music is what lies between the notes. and that when he stages a musical piece that's four minutes and 33 seconds of silence, he's really reminding us that we live in silence interrupted by noise rather than the other way around. That it's not the silence that is the exception, but the things that we're imposing on the silence that actually is at the heart of us and with us all the time. So I thought that the only thing I'm qualified to speak about is writing, but writing is ultimately... It's all about pointing at the moon, and it's all about pointing at where words run out.

[11:41]

And so maybe if I talked about poetry where it dissolves into nothingness, and if Fu was to speak about doing nothing and having no choice and the ways that that makes it a theater of our lives, we'd actually be joined as one, which I think is... very much the excitement of this workshop for me so far, partly because I think maybe half the people in our circle have been writers who maybe are very grateful to be introduced to meditation and the other half are perhaps people who have been coming to Tassajara for a long time who are very grateful to get a chance to spend time with Leonard Curran and Emily Dickinson and people who've tried to voice the sensation of really sitting in the stillness to watch things come and go. So... Of course, it's a treacherous thing to have a place in your head for 40 years, as I have with Tassajara.

[12:45]

And when I was a teenager in Santa Barbara in the 1970s, and I heard about the emergence of Tassajara, I thought to myself, well, Japan has come to my neighborhood. This is a chance to see Japan. And I felt at home here before I'd ever set foot in Japan. Now coming here after 29 years of living in Japan, I'm at once moved by the things that are entirely Japanese. When we bumped down the road, my wife from Kyoto let out a cry of delighted exclamation when she saw the gate, and she knew that she was at home in every sense. And then also to be delighted by the things that you wouldn't find in Japan. I've lived in Japan for 29 years, and I've never been into a Japanese bathhouse. So to me, Tassahara is the classic, ultimate Japanese bar pass. It's my first experience of it, and I can't imagine a better one. So, happily, I have lost my train of thought. Good job. Yes. It took some doing, but I finally had to exhaust myself.

[13:46]

I can not only sleepwalk through life, I can sleep talk through life. I usually go to sleep at 8.30, so this is when I'm ostensibly fast asleep. But, yes. So it's dangerous to come to a place you've been dreaming of for a long time. But I think that what most has surpassed my expectations, because I knew already about the food and the Zen community, were all the new friends I met in this circle. And I never imagined I would be stepping into such rich and interesting and unexpected lives. So that's been a particular joy. So that's our cue to turn it over to you. the rich and unexpected lives that have come to meet us, and we really would be happy to answer questions. Some of the folks from the workshop might chime in a little bit and help say something about what's been going on for you or any of the others of the students who are here. We'd be happy to share.

[14:49]

Yay, thank you. You just started the workshop with this kind of astonishing statement to me that There were many different kinds of silence. And in your talk tonight, Pico, it occurred to me that, you know, if you've been in Japan 29 years without speaking the language, some is a kind of silence. Yes, yes. Maybe this is a poor example, but you talked a lot about managing your email, and I guess fortunately you're in an opposite time zone, so you get to live your day in that kind of silence, right? Mm-hmm. Yes, and I mean, it's a flimsy excuse that doesn't even persuade me, but I tell people if they're going to Japan, more important than learning Japanese is learning silence, because more than any other society on earth, I think Japan proceeds through non-verbal cues. One of the reasons I went to Japan is that Japanese are so good at listening, but that's a way of saying they're listening to what's not said, and they're looking at body language and what's

[15:54]

in the corner of your eye or on the tip of your tongue. And I think the ideal Japanese conversation, which is something I went there to learn, is a shared silence. When you go on a date to a movie in Japan, I think often each of you has a really stimulating experience, and then at the end of the movie you go home in silence together. There's no need... to talk about it or to have the clash of opinions or arguments. You've shared the film and then you share the silence. And we all know that with the people we're closest to, silence is the language that we speak. So Japan, more than most places, is anyway based on silence. A haiku is mostly what's not said. And I noticed my neighbors in Japan, if it's a hot day, each person will go into the neighborhood post office. That's sweet, this thing. In the same tone, they'll all say, it's a hot day, it's a hot day. They won't say it's scalding. They won't say, it's hot enough to fry six hot dogs. They'll say, it's hot, it's hot, it's hot. It's part of what makes it so relaxing there, because people are not impressing their individuality on sentences or the moment, but they're happy to speak for everyone, to be invisible, to be every person.

[17:03]

So, yes, there's a lovely silence everywhere, because one of the things that moves me in Japan is people are always going somewhere, and they're always doing something, but quite silently. So it's invigorating vicariously, but it's not deafening, as I found New York City to be when I was doing that. I'm curious. Yeah, so the question arose, what is it like to come out of that silence for you here at Tassajara? I mean, this must have required a tremendous amount of energy for both of you. Where does the motivation arise to come out of that silence then? And I'm so silent, I didn't even let you complete your question. I was already babbling halfway through. You can't live in isolation. You can't live in a Zendo. And a writer has to spend so much time alone. He, more than anybody, needs to learn from other people. We were talking a lot, and one of the moving things that all of us shared this morning was how do you...

[18:06]

go back out into the world after some of the clarity that you would find and the timelessness you would find in a place like this. And I must say, I didn't admit it this morning, but I've been going on retreat for 25 years to a Catholic monastery in Big Sur, and I find that I carry a glow with me as soon as I go back into the world, every time from it. But I'm also... more impatient than I ever get in that first couple of hours. In other words, I get so super sensitive, and I think this happens to a lot of people who are amateur monastics, that the world is too much of a shock for us to handle. Monks know how to commute back and forth, but those of us suddenly find ourselves in this enchanted space and then kick against the world. So it's curious that the people who hear from me immediately when I leave the monastery may get the worst of me, rather. The purest. But... I think for me coming into this workshop was made much easier by the knowledge that half of it would be silence and I would be taken into a rigorous and precise silence through the Zendo because I've never really done Zen meditation before, don't know even the protocol of how to enter the Zendo.

[19:16]

So for me, one of the main things I've been learning is from Fu guiding us into the open sea, as you put it. Mm-hmm. Yeah, just back a little bit to what you were saying about Japan. I think some of the things that struck me on my first visit after, I mean, I've lived in Zen Center, Japan, which is a little bit, it's not exactly Disneyland Japan, but it's a little bit like we created as close as we can some elements that we think of as Japanese and so on out of admiration for that culture. When I actually went to Japan, well, first of all, it was a big airport. That was kind of a shock. It was like... So what I had in mind, I was thinking of Dogen on the boat. But anyway, we landed, and there were, you know, airport terminal and big city. And I got on the elevator, and I'm talking to my companion, Maya Wender, who has been in Japan many times and speaks Japanese, and was my guide, my first visit. And I'm talking away, and she said, do you notice anything? And I'm like, like what?

[20:17]

You know, and she said, look around. And I'm on the escalator with her, side by side, and then I look up ahead of me, and there's nobody. And I look behind me, and there are people trying to get around me, and everyone else is on the right side of the escalator standing here, so the people wanting to go faster can go up, and I'm totally blocking the way. And lesson number one, no one told me. There was no sign or whatever. It's just like, pay attention, because all the signals are being given to you all the time in Japan about how to behave in this situation. It was actually obvious ones I noticed, and scooted myself over again. But another story that I really was moved by years ago hearing Rev. Anderson tell was when Suzuki Roshi was teaching the students here in the beginning days of Zen Center. They were just newly ordained. They were learning how to, you know, put on their okesa. And they asked Roshi, you know, can you please show us? And he got up and he walked away and they were all like...

[21:19]

Well, you know, so they're talking, talking, talking. And then someone finally said, oh, look, and there was Suzuki Roshi putting on his occasion. He didn't tell them how to do it. He was showing them how to do it. So I think it's one of the things that we're not so schooled in as children is how to look for what it is that we're being taught and how to model that by our own deportment. You know, how do you show people your practice? And I think that's one of our hopes. in practicing together, we actually can use our bodies to express what's inside that's not visible and to bring that sort of silent awareness that we, as a blessing, receive in the morning during Sazen into the way we talk to people, the way we handle objects and so on. So there's some hope of infusing our activity with the gentle silence that happens in the morning before the light comes up. I remember when I arrived in Japan, I met somebody from San Francisco who'd been studying, had a Zen practice there for 15 years and stayed with his teacher ultimately for about 25.

[22:25]

When his teacher passed away, I asked him, what did you learn from him? And he said, just how to walk through the world. And I think that's exactly what he was saying. Let's follow the body. I love the first exercise you did with us and I think I'm going to do it periodically. The first exercise we did in the group was to write for 10 minutes about what your sense of home is. It seemed really appropriate to me and I think many people have had this experience. I was kind of four years ago floundering around trying to get a daily meditation practice going. I could not do it. I came to Asahara and it just happened. It felt like home. It felt like my boonist home. It felt like my my practice home, it just has never left. And that sense of coming home, I think, is such a palpable, powerful force that Zen Center has brought into the world, whether it's City Center, Ringgold, or Tassajara.

[23:30]

I think we're just all enormously grateful for the sense of home, this place of happiness. Yeah, I was just grabbing it as a watering hole recently. We're sort of the concessionaires that are providing, you know, bag lunches and directions. Sign out if you're going on a hike, make sure you don't get lost. And then allowing people to find that nourishment that I think is here because we make it so. We've just created it to be that way. And you make it that way by coming and seeing it. Thank you for that. Hiko, I was really struck by your statement that the Japanese don't impose their individuality on sentences. Because I lived in Japan for over three years, and I've just been so surprised that that was a number of years ago, but that these pat phrases like, that those remained with me because I used them so often, and that I really didn't need.

[24:42]

a whole lot else. But for you as a writer, how did you react to that? Because here in this country, that's what we want to express, our individuality of writing and in our speaking. And we don't always want to say, oh my gosh, it's pop, we want to say this. Whatever voice it will be on news. So how... How do you reconcile that? Thank you. What a good question. I think I was humbled and liberated by it, and I went to Japan for that very reason. So I was growing up in California in the 60s when everyone was told to be themselves. I thought there's a virtue in learning not to be yourself. And that's actually more helpful for many of us, insisting on our own individuality and difference from everything around us. And I think I was raised in an academic environment where the idea was to be original. And so it was very tonic to be taught the more honourable you are, the better. The more you are like everybody else. The more you are voicing exactly the same sentiments that were voiced 500 years ago or 500 years from that, the more you're part of a common stream.

[25:51]

So I felt it was a right corrective to somebody who is in New York City being pushed in the wrong direction quite speedily. As a writer, you put your finger on something essential because a writer... has to have something different to say to justify his existence. But when I chose Leonard Cohen's If It Be Your Will as the first poem that we studied, partly because it's a very distinctive prayer to either a god or a teacher or a lover. But again, there's no sense of I in it. And the words are very straightforward. And in some sense, if I were to share it to somebody coming into this room and say it, this is a Sufi prayer from the 13th century, or this is from Elizabethan England. They say yes. And so in some sense, a writer's mission is to speak for everybody and to find that place in himself that everybody recognizes. And I think that's as legitimate a kind of writing as finding your own voice, so to speak, in the notion that your own voice has to be different from everybody else.

[26:54]

Perhaps finding your own voice is really about finding that place in you that everybody shares and that everybody And we talked a lot at our workshop about how the deeper and more embarrassing the material that you bring out, probably the more universal it is, which is you're drilling so deep into a particular memory, a relationship with a mother, a burning house, whatever it is, that you find that core that everybody knows. And Japan being a society that seems more to work in groups, they're living much closer. to that core. As a reader, I sometimes find it's difficult to get into Japanese novels because they're deliberately flat and even and level. And just as with Japanese speech, people try not to make emphases, not to raise their voices, to almost be invisible. And it's for us a training in sight reading and a different kind of hearing. So I'm not always good at reading Japanese works.

[27:56]

but I'm glad for what they can show me about how not to prize myself while I think. It also makes me think of finding your own freedom and following the schedule of you. Yes. Well, when I did the workshop with Fu last year, she said the schedule is the teacher. And she was two days ago reminding us that freedom comes from actually for creating limits rather than dispensing with all of it. which is the heart of Japan. The haiku covers the whole universe precisely because it has to be five out of five, the seasonal references, and it's so tightly squeezed into a form that, again, you have to find that essential element, the autumn, the moon, and the boat departing into the mist or whatever it is. So that you know from having lived in Japan, it's also so much more friction-free that when I go to the post office, The person is going to be flawlessly polite and gracious.

[28:57]

And the people around me are going to be saying, it's hot, isn't it? I don't think that makes that in my life. Most of us have so much distraction already. We're in danger of overload. So it's much more soothing than going to the composer's office in Santa Barbara. He recommends that Levitic Republic is one of my favorite lyricists, amazing songwriter. I'm curious to what you think about his writings during this time, the Zen Chronosphere. In our workshop, I've been calling him or thinking of him as the most bottomless, deep Zen writer I'm aware of, actually. There's an extraordinary book called Leonard Cohen on Leonard Cohen, which is 600 pages of interviews over the years with him. Of course, one of the moving things about it is in 1967 or 1969, before he'd ever been introduced to his Zen teacher, he was speaking pure Zen.

[30:06]

And you were talking about in the Isle of Wight in 1970, the same thing. So he's probably one of those people who was a Zen practitioner before he knew the words. But... I spent time with him when he was doing his practice in Mount Baldy, and I was describing to some of the people in our circle how moving it was to see him going through Sashin, taking care of everybody around him, attending to his teacher absolutely silent as soon as the teacher came into the room, and making himself again... disappear in the service of the community and the teacher. And it's no surprise. The first record of his that explicitly came out of that 10 new songs was I Could Listen to My Secret Life or Alexandra Leaving Forever. You know, some fine Zen writers around. But whenever I see Leonard Cohen, I think, here's somebody who's taken no shortcuts. He's really done the work, it seems to me, as a judgmental observer. And here's one of the...

[31:08]

I've spent time with lots of monks from many traditions, and with the exception of the Dalai Lama, I'm not aware of seeing many monks who've given themselves to that practice more intensely than he. And I was going to say in the circle this morning, but I forgot to say, that every time, which is not often, I go and intrude on him in Los Angeles, I come away and I think this is actually the single most impressive person, other than the Dalai Lama perhaps, that I've ever met, for kindness, for modesty, and for attentiveness. And one of the things he does, as many of you may know, is that when his friends, and he did this even with me when I didn't know him very well, I'd come to his house and he'd say, should we sit in the garden? We'd sit there, and it's a tiny garden with a little sun encircled of flowers. We'd sit just as Fu and I were sitting. And he'd just sit there. Absolutely. So again, he'd be sharing the silence. And the first time I experienced this, we probably spent 20, 25 minutes like this, and I thought maybe this was a gentle hint. And I said, you know, well, Maybe it's time for me to go. And he just looked at me and said, please don't.

[32:10]

And I stayed, and I realized for him, he felt the best encounter and the most intimate thing we could share was just sitting in silence together. And that's, among other things, a lovely way of bringing the Zen monastery right into the heart of broken central Los Angeles. You know, you were referred to as Thomas Merton on frequent flyer by one of your... Yes. It's a very good description. I mean, it's a curious thing for a travel writer to be sitting and talking about stillness. But, yeah, it might have come up before. I mean, it goes back to the first question about coming out of silence, to be in a... more verbal situation like this. But I think of all our experience as kind of a gathering. It's like going to the market and gathering materials. And then for me, stillness is where you actually cook the meal. Travel or our experiences, whatever we happen to do, parenting, going to our jobs, I think of that as kind of decorating the surface and the walls of our home.

[33:18]

Stillness is where we lay the foundations. And so... So yes, I am tethered to United Airlines. But Thomas Merton is what I'm reading in C-26D. As some of you probably know, I've been lucky enough to know that Dalai Lama, since I was 17... And every year when he comes to Japan, my wife and I travel right by his side for every minute of his working day from 8.30 in the morning to 4.30 in the afternoon. Of course, it's a remarkable privilege. And we get to have lunch with him every day and attend all his public meetings. But we also, he's gracious enough to let us sit in on all his private audiences with old friends and religious leaders and scientists. heavy metal musicians who want to give a Buddhist twist to their songs sometimes. And you all know, you've all heard him, I'm sure, that very human-engaging, disarming way in which he speaks.

[34:27]

And in fact, the last time I saw him in Japan, he said that when he was growing up in Lhasa, Tibet, he thought Buddhism was the best religion on earth for only one reason, which is he'd never really been exposed to any other tradition. And then he remembered meeting Thomas Merton in 1968 when Merton saw him three times in Dharamsala. And for the first time, the Dalai Lama excitedly could exchange notes with a monk from another tradition. Do you have to be vegetarian? Are you allowed to watch movies? Are women allowed into the cloister? I mean, they're very technical, like two car mechanics getting to nuts and bolts. But he said as soon as he met Thomas Merton, he saw that there was this other tradition that was just as radiant and transforming for a different kind of person. And, you know, it's been the particular beauty and blessing of his global life that, from our point of view, he's the first Dalai Lama who's come to our neighborhood and from whom we've been able to learn directly. But from his point of view, he's the first Dalai Lama who's been able to come to the US and take democracy and bring it into the Tibetan community to travel around the world and see that women are given opportunities in every tradition

[35:38]

and for the first time allow women in the Tibetan community to get doctoral degrees and to be abbesses. To delight in his conversations with Western scientists to such a point that, as you probably know, he's made part of his month's curriculum, the study of Western science. And I see somebody who's in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition here, so I better not say too much because I'm speaking out of ignorance, and I hope I'm not distorting it too much. But... It's a wonderful thing to see him living out every day the notion that when a Tibetan Buddhist meets, for example, a Catholic monk and they have a real conversation, the Catholic becomes a better Catholic and the Buddhist becomes a better Buddhist. And that's been part of the grace of his life, I think. Would you mind telling those three things you said really set your life in a particular order? I was so moved by your story about Narita and the fire. Yes. And there was a third one, which I'm... That's why I'm asking, because I really like to be reminded what the third one was.

[36:38]

The third one, I think... The third one might have been my moving to Japan. Was that it? Maybe. Oh, was that right? That was it? Yes. And then the fourth one... Ah. Yes, there was the fourth one, I think. Yes, you have to come. Which was discovering the monastery in Big Sur. Ah. Ah. Yes, but I think, I see most of the phrases in this world of people who have already heard this, so I don't want to necessarily... All four? Okay, I'll try and make it, I feel like. So when I was 26 and I made my first trip to Southeast Asia and I was going to Thailand and Burma and Hong Kong and Macau, on the way back I had to stop at Narita Airport in Japan and I had a morning to kill, so to speak, before boarding my plane. And I didn't know what to do, but I saw an advertisement for a free shuttle bus into the town of Narita.

[37:39]

which turned out to be, 25 years later, I discovered a pilgrimage site. And one of the great pilgrimage sites that people will walk for 45 miles in Tokyo to visit. But to me, it was just an airport town. And I spent four hours walking down around that airport town on a late October day when, and this is the beauty of the Japanese autumn, blazing cloudless blue skies as we had two days ago here. And yet the passage of the seasons and the turning of the leaves and the coming of the dark everywhere. And after four hours of that, I decided to move to Japan, happily for no reason at all. And that's probably how I knew it was the right thing to do. Just an intuition told me this is the place I belong. This is the place where I probably have been. And this is the place where I always should be. And then soon, so three years later, I left New York City. to live in a Zen temple in Kyoto for a year, and all I knew of a Zen temple was pictures of Tassahara I'd seen, and the poems of Basho I had read, and then I found that the temples were actually real life, real work, so I bailed out after one week.

[38:47]

But actually put myself to a single room on the back streets of Kyoto, no toilet, no telephone, no bed, really. and figured whatever happened there would open doors different from the ones I'd had on Park Avenue and 20th Street in midtown Manhattan. Yes, close to midtown Manhattan. And in my third week of my monastic life or year, I met my wife. So I had to think a bit harder about what monasteries really mean. and why I was trying to flee from the world in the monastery, rather I was not going towards something, but going away from something, perhaps, and mostly what I was going towards was just a dream. So I had to cut through those illusions over the next 20 years. And then I came back to my family house in Santa Barbara, and just as I was finishing my book about my non-monaster killer, my house fell down in a forest fire. the kind of thing that happens in California all the time and around the world all the time, and just a version of what happens to every one of us at some time or another.

[39:57]

And so I lost everything in the world, and the next morning, or that night, I went to an all-night supermarket and I bought a toothbrush, and the next morning, when somebody said, where is your home, that toothbrush was the only home I had. So I'd always believed, growing up between cultures, that home was not the place where you lived, but it was what lived inside you, the people you care about, values that guide you, the songs, the books that keep on going around in your head. But I had to live from that day onwards because I did have no house, but I couldn't be homeless in a deeper sense. And then while I was sleeping on a friend's floor in Santa Barbara in the wake of that fire, somebody told me about New Camaldoli, which many of you know because it's, I think, almost part of a brotherhood or kinship with Casahara. And as soon as I arrived there, I found the monastery I thought I'd been seeking in Kyoto. Not that I'm Catholic, but somehow, just as you meet somebody, regardless of her name, her definition, or her passport, she's the one who brings something out in you, and she's the one you can talk to.

[41:02]

Somehow that place became the one that unlocked something in me. And where, as soon as I stepped into the room, my... needless thoughts and anxieties fell away and I was living much closer to my senses. I loved it in the Zendo when I think Fu yesterday said, one of the things about this practice is coming back to your senses. And in every sense of the word, waking up to the world around you and coming out of the stupor that the mind creates. So it had that effect on me. And then my challenge was not to make that an addiction, and not to project my own romances on that because, of course, I'm just a visitor there and the monks are working all the time, as you are, to allow retreatants the chance to have that special experience. And then the question we've all been discussing in our group these last couple of days, which is when you've been lucky enough to be reminded of who you are or what's true and what's not true or you've said more of that than you would know in Times Square, how do you bring that back into the world and how do you sustain it

[42:09]

in the midst of all the illusions you carry around with you, which is probably something that takes a lifetime not to figure out. So those were four moments that I suddenly saw that my life went in a very different direction, partly because it had nothing to do with me and nothing to do with my choice, and that life had a much better plan for me than anyone I could devise. So time going, Greg? 9.15. I'd love to be hearing about you. In fact, I don't think you ever quite told me how you came to Tazahara. Probably the community here knows that. I don't think they do. It takes someone to ask you, you know. Well, how long do we have? I was born at a very... To 9.20? Five more minutes. Oh, okay. That's plenty of time.

[43:11]

There's a sort of string of memories that I have repeated so often that they've become almost true. So one of them is I went to San Francisco. I grew up in South San Francisco, which is a sort of airport town south of San Francisco. It doesn't even have its own name, which we would often comment on. And I went to San Francisco State, and at San Francisco State, I arrived there in 1966, which was just on the verge of revolution. It hadn't quite happened. My first day at State, I'm not going to happen. Anyway, I get to State, and I had my regular, you know, normal clothes on that we wore before 1960s, and there was a sign that said, no smoking. which seemed pretty clear, bright red letters. And beneath the sign was this very large African-American man with an Afro smoking. And I thought, this is great.

[44:17]

This is my place. I found home, you know. And I really did love going to school there. It was very multicultural, very diverse, huge population. I thought it was heaven, and I really regret that it ever ended, and I really long for it to be back again. Someday maybe Zen Center will look like that. But so they had a course list. It was many pages long. And one of the classes was Zen basketball, which was described as you show up on a basketball court, but there was no basketball. So, you know, I didn't take the class, but I was intrigued. That was my first contact with, you know, other than... David Carradine playing, you know, grasshopper. So, you know, there was TV, then there was reality in college. And then I took myself off to the mountains of Wyoming.

[45:18]

I lived in Jackson Hole, wanting to get away from President of the United States at the time that the anti-revolutionary forces were coming into play. So I just went away to the mountains. And while I was there, I worked in a bookstore, and there were about five books on the occult and mysticism and religion in the bookstore. And one of them was in my beginner's mind. And it was the only book that actually was beautifully made. It had beautiful paper, and there was a picture of this amazing person on the back, Suzuki Roshi. And I just bought the book, and I tried to read it. I didn't understand anything in it. I just thought it was a beautiful object, and it is. It's a very beautiful object. So that was my first real talisman for Zen, something in my hands that had value. Anyway, fast forward, I decided to go back to San Francisco to get a teaching credential so I could get a job in Jackson Hole rather than just do seasonal things.

[46:22]

And when I was there, I got a job downtown. The Trust for Public Land. And we were being made lunch by the Zen Center. So that was one of our bonuses for our... We had very low-paying jobs, but we got free lunch every day. And it was fresh bread and cheese, and these quiet monks would come in and make food, and we'd all kind of look at them. And Yvonne Rand, who some of you may know her name, she was on our board of directors, and she would kind of float in and... Richard Baker called on the phone and said, do you know who I am? And I said, aren't you the abbot of the Zen Center? He said, that's right, I am the abbot of the Zen Center. So I made these touch points for the Zen Center, and then it turned out that my boss, John Nelson, who, you know, I say these names, and if you all were 30 years ago, you'd know who I was talking about, but John was a wonderful man, and... I said, well, who are these people? And he said, well, I live at the Zen Center, too. I thought, my God, it's like we're totally infested with these Zen Centers.

[47:23]

And so he said, do you want to come to dinner? And I said, sure. So I went to the Page Street building. And as soon as I got to the stairs and the doors opened, I can almost cry at the memory, there were these people. I thought, this is my tribe. You're my people. I wondered where they'd all gone. And they were quiet, and they were mostly wearing black clothing, and they were all going into the Buddha Hall for service. And then we had dinner. It was silent serving. We served each other across the table. And I, yeah, that was kind of all I needed. I just thought, this must be, this must be where I belong. And I think I was right. And it's been, I was 29 then, I'm 68 now, so... And I check myself now and then. I say, am I grateful? You know, is this good? Did I make the right choice? And it's always yes. You know, I'm so grateful that I made that decision to stick it out.

[48:24]

There was thick and thin through those years and many doubts many of us had about our ability to actually model what we believed to be the right way to live. And... You know, and I count on this next generation, those of you sitting here now, to actually prove that to yourselves, too, that you can do that and make people feel welcome that this is a place they can find a home. So that's my story. Am I right in thinking that quite soon after that you spent three years living in Tazahara? I was here for three years and recently came back to leader practice period, which was a... I said the first day of the practice period, I said, you know, I sat there when I was a new student, Tongari student, and I sat there when I was in the kitchen, and I sat there when I was in the office, and I sat there when I was, you know, childcare, and I had a seat in that room over there over three years. Each of those seats were places where I had really been anchored down for practice period, and each one of them was like kind of personally, oops, sorry,

[49:33]

Personally, you know, yeah, myself, I was there in each of those seats. Deep memories of those spots, the adamantine seat, you know, the Buddha sat on it. I will stay here. And yeah, it's a good thing to stay. Stay somewhere for at least a while. Well, I hope you all sleep well and... We are so grateful to be here. Your hosting of us is spectacular. You'll be leaving tomorrow and our guests for the retreat, but I hope we'll all meet again. Thank you so much. 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. Your financial support helps us to continue to offer the Dharma.

[50:33]

For more information, visit sfcc.org and click Giving.

[50:39]

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