This podcast is offered by the San Francisco Zen Center on the web at www.sfcc.org. Our public programs are made possible by donations from people like you. There's a poem by Rumi. Coleman Barks spent much of his life translating or putting Rumi into English free verse. even though he doesn't know Persian or Farsi. So some people have offered him great praise and other people have wondered, who do you think you are? You don't even know Farsi and so on. But the poem I'm thinking of is, he calls it, Colin Barks calls it the tavern. And the poem is... All day I think about it, at night I say it.

[01:03]

Where did I come from? What am I supposed to be doing? I have no idea. My soul is from elsewhere, I'm sure of that, and I intend to end up there. Meanwhile, I'm like a strange bird. from a distant continent sitting in this aviary with other strange birds. It's actually rather a Zen poem. Depending on your school of Zen, but our school, Suzuki Roshi School, as they said, Zen is to feel your way along in the dark and to sit without any idea of gain, to sit to be with everything.

[02:10]

The poem by Rumi goes on, he says, Meanwhile, who is it? Who hears sounds with my ears? Who speaks words with my mouth? Who looks out from these eyes? What is the soul? I can't stop asking. If I could taste one sip of an answer, I'd be free of this prison for drunks. Whoever brought me here will have to take me home. I didn't come here of my own accord, and I can't leave that way either. I appreciate, you know, various poetry, especially Comenbarks and Romain, another poet, William Stafford. I appreciate having a language that's evocative, along with the language of Zen.

[03:30]

But, you know, that poem is, because that poem is another way of, you know, arousing or awakening the mind that seeks the way. Another way to describe Zen practice, you know, is to be finding the way. And finding the way again and finding the way again. What is the way? And Rumi says, what am I supposed to be doing? I have no idea. He's finding, and then the part of the poem he says, this later, he says, this poetry I speak, I never know what I'm going to say. Outside the saying of it, I get very quiet and rarely speak at all. But it's wonderful the way that poetry, the poet, you know, is another way of saying Zen.

[04:35]

There was a period of Zen, you know, a thousand years ago, or more, where that was very important, who, to ask the question, who, who, who's upset, who's scared, who's angry, who's practicing, who, who is seeing, who is hearing, who, who. And you can't find it, but you keep asking. So I was invited to speak today because... Last year, the 55th anniversary of the Tessahar Breadbook came out in October, and this was the first Saturday that was available.

[05:38]

So I thought I'd tell you a little bit about the Tessahar Breadbook and how it came to be and what happened to it over the years as a way to visit and talk with you. Thank you so much for being here today. Thank you for being you. Finding out how to be you. Without even knowing. We find our way. So the Toss Our Bread book in some ways goes back to when I was 10. In 1955, I went to Washington, D.C. and to Falls Church, Virginia, to visit my aunt, my Aunt Alice, my father's sister.

[06:49]

And she made homemade bread. And I couldn't believe how good it was. It was amazing. And we'd come back from sightseeing, my brother and I, who's a few years older than I am, and there'd be the smell out to the street of homemade bread. That was so amazing. In my family, 1955, you know, there was white bread, puffy white bread. cellophane packages. Kilpatrick's, Langendorf. And, you know, some of us would take a slice and take off the crust and then wad up the white part until you had a marble. And you could have a marble of bread rather than several bites of foam.

[07:55]

Anyway, I found it astounding And then my aunt served the bread with butter in my family. Oh, we eat margarine because it's more healthy for you. Well, how long did that last? You know, hardened fats. Fats that are liquid at room temperature when they're hardened to be solid at room temperature do the same thing in your body. Oh, we didn't know that. And then she made homemade jam. And they had a cellar, and she'd go down to the cellar and bring up, and you'd go down the cellar, and there's jars and jars of jams and fruits and all kinds of things. So I don't know. What am I doing here?

[09:00]

I got to thinking, why are we eating the way we eat? Why do we eat puffy white bread when we could be eating like this? What happened? What happened? Why don't we eat homemade bread? And I thought, I will learn how to make homemade bread and I will teach others. I got home and I asked my mom, can you teach me how to make bread? She said, no, yeast makes me nervous. So, okay, I put that on hold and I learned how to make biscuits. But I didn't actually learn how to make biscuits. I learned how to take biscuit mix and mix it with milk and take a fork toss it onto the pan, and I learned how to open packages of Pillsbury biscuits, crack it on the counter, twist it open, take the biscuits out.

[10:13]

I learned how to bake. So as David mentioned, thank you, David, I started practicing in 1965, and then in 1966, my friend, Alan Winter, was practicing also at Zen Center, and he went on a ski trip with someone named Richard Baker. I think it was the last Zen Center ski trip, the February 1966, and Baker Roshi, who's now Roshi, told him about Tassahara, and that said we were looking, Zen Center was looking to buy land down there, which ended up buying Tassahara. And he said, why don't you get a job there?

[11:15]

So my friend Alan got a job at Tassahara, and he came back, said that I could probably, you could probably get a job in the kitchen. Why don't you come work at Tassahara too? So I went down to Tassahara with my friend, and I got a job in the kitchen. My job was to wash dishes and to clean pots. But there was this amazing bread. And I said to the cooks, can you teach me how to make bread? And they said, you bet. Because it's different if you're a cook and then somebody makes the bread, you don't have to. much as you might love making bread, but at some point you have enough bread to make, you have a baker, and then you can... We worked six days a week, and then we had two days off.

[12:22]

Not six days, we worked six days and then had two days off, or something, I don't know. It turned out to be the last year that Tassar was a resort. And so I started making bread, and people taught me how to make bread, and it turned out they had learned to make bread at the Ranch House Restaurant in Ojai, California. Ranch House Restaurant. You know, we learn things. In Zen, we call them ancestors. In culture, you know, we have cultural ancestors, we have cultural predecessors, and we learn how to do things, or we don't. Alan Hooker, it turns out, who I met years later, learned to bake bread in Columbus, Ohio.

[13:29]

He'd been a jazz musician and done everything that jazz musicians did. And he said, I bottomed out. I was in Columbus, Ohio, and I was walking the streets. And I saw a little room in a gabled building. And I thought, I'll live in that room. And he went up to the door, and it turned out to be the Theosophical Society of Columbus, Ohio. Can you believe it? How do these things happen? How do we find our way? Bottom out. It's the Theosophical Society. And they said, yeah, you can live in that room. And then Krishnamurti came. And then he got a job as a baker. And he learned how to make this bread with what's called the sponge method. You mix in some of the flour and let it rise before you mix in the rest of the flour. So I learned to make bread this way, which goes back. And then I was the pot washer, the dishwasher, the pot washer, and the bread maker.

[14:42]

And halfway through the summer, the cooks quit, or one of the cooks quit, and the owner said, why don't you start cooking? Take its place. So I had been the dishwasher, the pot scrubber, and the bread baker, and it took two people to replace me. Anyway. But I'm mentioning this because, you know, we sit with the ancestors, we sit with Suzuki Roshi, and the halls and lineage, and we sit with the bodhisattvas, with the Buddhas, and the sounds.

[15:45]

Let me, you know, obviously I can go on and on about whatever, but... The book. So once Sin Center started Tessahara, by mistake, and it's in, by the way, you can read, you know, David Shedrick's now has three volumes of Tessahara stories, so you can read about the first year at Tessahara and how the kitchen that I had worked in that summer of 1966 was torn down to get ready for the new kitchen that needed to build before we could open. But anyway, very confusing time. So we had a little kitchen in what had been the crew's dining room. Very small kitchen. Smaller than this kitchen here. And we started making food for 40 guests and 30 or 40 students. And for 70 people, the first practice period, tiny kitchen.

[16:59]

When... So I was the cook and then I was the baker. I was the head sando cook, the head guest cook. And I just worked. Sometimes for a month before having the day off. And I learned about how to be tired and keep going. And that you could get even more tired and keep going. And you could And you could not be able to do it and keep going. Isn't that the way it works? So once we had the guest period, we started having guest periods at Tassar and we had... In those days, 40 or 50 guests and 40 or 50 students, and we were making Tassara bread.

[18:08]

Now it's called Tassara bread. From the Theosophical Society of Columbus, Ohio. Anyway, people used to say, this bread is so good, can we have the recipe? And I'd say, if you want the recipe, You come into the kitchen tomorrow morning at 5 a.m. and we'll teach you how to make bread. Because it's not just numbers. It's how you do it. It's how you see with your eyes, smell with your nose, taste with your tongue, feel with your hands. See how things work. See how things go. So people started coming in. And then, sure enough, I teach them to make bread and I could do something else. And then people said, well, can you do a book?

[19:15]

What ends up in a book? I got to know, while I was at Tessera, Charlotte Silver and Charles Brooks. Charlotte was a teacher of sensory experiencing, or sensory awareness, she called it. And Charles was her husband. And I took classes with them, and they had become friends with Suzuki Roshi, and later with Richard Baker. And Charles would say to me, Ed, we don't need more cookbooks, we need more cooks. And I said, I'm trying to write a book that teaches people how to make bread, not that doesn't teach people how to follow a recipe. As it turns out, you see, there's a difference between following a recipe and seeing, smelling, tasting, touching, feeling, experiencing your life, and living from

[20:29]

what you experience from what you find out from doing that and the book became so much to tell about it but anyway it became a huge bestseller it was for a while known as the Washington Post that it was the Bible of bread making and it was selling 30 or 40,000 copies a year and it was about 10% of Sun Center's annual budget were the royalties from a book at $2.95, 10% royalties, and it was $30,000 or $40,000 a year. And Zen Center's annual budget in those days, $400,000. But I thought, yeah, and Bikaroshi had said, Ed, it would be best for your practice if you just gave all the royalties to Zen Center and not be different than other students. Best for your practice.

[21:30]

But, you know, I didn't have a feeling. I had the feeling of, like, it's something that came out of all of us practicing together with Suzuki Roshi practicing Zen at Tassara. And a book appeared. And I thought other books will appear, but not that many books have appeared. I don't know how that is, but somehow I seem to have been... Finding my way included finding myself doing books. But I did the book because people asked me. And I responded. So, you know, in some way, we are waiting to be asked. Waiting to be called. Waiting to be invited. So the first book, I didn't know, but that came out in 1970.

[22:46]

This is the 55th anniversary of 2025. I first revised it in 1985, and I discovered that the original Tassar Bread book, it was written in Suzuki Roshi English. It said things like, put bread on board and knead with hands. It's easier to talk English if you don't use the articles and pronouns. And we had all learned to talk like him. So then in 1985, I had to decide, should I turn my book into English or should I continue keeping it in Suzuki Roshi English? They said, OK, I'll make it English. Put the bread on a board and knead with your hands. People said, and nobody said, why did you do that?

[23:51]

Just when I explained it, they say, oh, we thought that was your special language just between me and you, just between us. You were talking directly to us. But that was my aim, to talk directly to you, directly to the people using this book. And more recently, for the 55th anniversary, I have two friends. It's such irony, but they started baking, they both started baking from my book in 1970 in their mother's kitchen. in New York State. And one of them sold his bakery 30 or so years later for $35 million. And the other one has turned his bakery over to his son who's still making in four bakeries in upstate New York what's called Bread Alone.

[24:54]

They're making over 5,000 loaves of organic whole wheat bread a day. And they're aiming to become the first energy-sufficient bakery in North America. And they both told me, Ed, if you're revising the book, you need to make the ingredients by weight because then you get a consistent, reliable result. I said, if you're doing a bakery, that's what you want. But I'm teaching people how to make the bread that they make today and to not have a reference point for what would be getting it right. oh, I got it right. Oh, I couldn't do it. Just appreciating the way it comes out, tasting the bread of today. How is it? How is it today? And then you can appreciate it and enjoy it, and then you can also think about, well, maybe next time I'll try this or do that.

[26:01]

So it turns out that the Tassar bread book was published Zen, Zen practice, teaching people Zen. And she decided to keep it that way. After hearing from my two, these people started from my book, but they said, no, now you need to create a book to get it right and to have a consistent, reliable product. Because that's what we learned to do after we started with your book. Now, put it in weights, get it right. I called up my friend, a woman named Sharon Morrison, who now lives in Vermont. She was a nurse for the homeless for many years in Boston. I said, Sharon, what do I do? She said, today I just made some bread. I opened up the refrigerator. I took out the leftover almond flour.

[27:08]

A little bit of soy flour, some yogurt, some cottage cheese. Bread came out great. So it's not only, you know, it's using what you have available. You use what you have available and you turn it into something, you know, to offer to your friends and family. And we do that whether it's called baking bread or not. We're taking in moments of our experience and ingredients and then putting it together and sharing it. Bringing showing up and responding to the world that appears to us Interestingly, you know, the part I had to change most about the 55th anniversary bread book was the last thing in the book is called, you know, About Tassara.

[28:30]

And I had to explain, I felt like I had to explain that we had a Tassara guest season for over 50 years. And it ended with COVID. Some summers we were making bread and most every meal at Tassajara, we made bread or biscuits or muffins. And then we would make bread to sell. Some summers we sold over a thousand loaves of bread for people to take home. And, you know, for various reasons, the world changes and people change and COVID happened. And the Tassara, what had been this guest season with 70 or 80 guests and 70 or 80 students at Tassara, it's over.

[29:43]

And again, it's the way things go, isn't it? You start something and then you have a lifetime and then it's gone. And it passes, passes away. So I said, well, Dasar is still a spiritual Mecca. It's been a spiritual Mecca for the Indians before we came along. There's natural hot springs and sacred place and the practice it does are people are finding out how to practice how to live how to how to do practice sin together and they will um

[30:48]

You know, bring their resources, their intuition, their resilience, their way-seeking mind, and see what to do. But if you want to have Tazahara bread, don't go to Tazahara. Get out your Tazahara bread book and make it for yourself. Or, you know, as another poem says, another morning, you know, you wake up tired and afraid. Don't take down a book. Take down the dulcimer. Let the beauty we love, let the beauty we do be what we love. So you may be making bread or you'll find something to do.

[31:51]

to share what is in most in your life. How do you share what is in most? How do you manifest your love? And thank you for having me here today.

[32:55]

Thank you. That's not the end just yet. But close, close, close. Because I also want to, I mean, thanking all of you, but... I feel so grateful to be here today, but I also feel so grateful to have been able to practice in with Suzuki Roshi, with Katagiri Roshi, with Kobinchino Roshi. So many sincere, dedicated fellow students.

[34:01]

We're here because of, you know, everything is here. We say in the Heart Sutra, no eyes, no ears, no nose, no teeth, no tongue. No body, no mind. What does that mean? Well, do you have eyes? I have eyes. Yeah, but you don't have eyes without a head, without a body, without food, without water, without an earth, without the sun. You don't have eyes without the whole universe. We're in this amazing, you know, inconceivable world, finding our way. So thank you for finding your way.

[35:13]

We'll see how it goes, won't we? And on into the new year, huh? 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. Your financial support helps us to continue to offer the Dharma. For more information, please visit sfzc.org and click Giving. May we fully enjoy the Dharma.

[35:48]

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