Good morning. I spent the week, or many times during the week, kind of preparing for what I was going to talk about today. And then, two nights ago, I ran into Michael Wenger, who said, you know you're supposed to give a way-seeking mind talk. It's supposed to be about, kind of, to tell your story. And I said, well, I just did that recently here, and I didn't want to kind of bore people. So, what I thought I would try is kind of combining what I was going to do, and a way-seeking mind talk, and kind of weave them together. So, we'll see how that works. Actually, the first thing I thought of, this joke that I made up came into my head the other day,

[01:10]

which was, what's the difference between stand-up comedy and a Zen lecture? Stand-up comedy isn't always funny. The talk that I was preparing was about this, a koan. It's case 38 in The Gateless Barrier, and it's the case called The Water Buffalo Goes Through the Window. And the case is, it is like a buffalo that passes through a latticed window. Its head, horns, and four legs all pass through. Why can't its tail pass through as well? And in these Zen stories, a new kind of understanding and realization for me is that these stories are all about me,

[02:15]

or they're all about us. So, we are the water buffalo going all the way through the window, except for the tail. Why is that? The comment on this particular koan is, if you can get upside down with this one, discern it clearly, and give a turning word to it, then you can meet the four obligations above and give comfort to the three existences below. But if it is not yet clear, pay close attention to the tail, and you will resolve it at last. Don't worry, this will all become really clear. Well, the first image that I had when I read this koan was thinking about being at the birth of my children. And there they were, these creatures, passing through the opening of their mother.

[03:24]

First their head and their body, and there they were. And yet, it was as though there was some part of them that was still not born. There was some very, very important tangible part that was in this place before birth. So, that was the, I'm kind of relating this to this water buffalo story, that tail, that tail that doesn't go through the window. And I also thought of being with my mother when she was dying, and being with her for her last breaths, and holding her hand. And she died, and seeing, there was this feeling of her completely passing through this window from life to death. But yet, there she was. My mother's still there. She's still very much a part of me.

[04:26]

The buffalo in this story is a water buffalo that was a really important member of the farming family in Asia. And it represents, this water buffalo represents essential nature, represents, as I said, it represents us. The way each of us passes through the gate of Zen practice, opening to something new, having some insight. And yet, there's always this feeling of not quite all the way through, something's not quite right. You can pass through, you can feel like you're in complete pain, you're just kind of wallowing in pain and suffering. And yet, there's some, you know, you look up and you see a child smiling, or you feel some tinge of joy. Or you're completely filled with happiness and elation, and yet, there's some sense of pain, some sense of suffering.

[05:33]

When I lived at Tassajara, I had a very close friend, a woman named Carol Rankin, who had cancer at Tassajara. And then, years later, as she was quite ill, I can remember this phone conversation that my wife was pregnant with our second child. And Carol Rankin was just a few days away from dying, and was kind of waiting to die. And I kind of overheard the two of them on the phone, kind of laughing hysterically about this transition that they were both in, and that they were both looking forward to passing through this window. And we ended up naming our daughter, Carol, after this woman, Carol Rankin. And again, it feels like this buffalo. And I think that, you know, one of the lessons of this koan and of practice is that,

[06:50]

how can we live our lives, you know, beyond ideas of labels like successful and not successful, beyond fear, beyond greed, beyond looking for some safe place or something safe for ourselves. So, in this commentary on this koan, it says, if you can get upside down with this one, that is, if you can see yourself and the world upside down, from some unusual perspective, some perspective outside of success and failure. In our practice, you know, every day we make these vows to save all beings, and yet, knowing that, in some way knowing that we can't really save all beings, but yet there's this effort about getting upside down, seeing things differently and making that effort. And he goes on to say, only when we get upside down and see clearly can we give a turning word.

[07:57]

Only by turning our world upside down can our speech come from some place that's clear enough, unfettered enough to help others. And yet, no matter where we are in our practice, no matter where we are, we have to say something. And it's just, you know, there's no saying something without holding back, without looking for the perfect or right thing to say. Throughout my life I've had this, I've had this repeating dream that I had a lot as a child, and I have occasionally now, where I was standing on the moon, and suddenly decided that it was time to leap and jump off the moon. And I would leap backwards, and I would watch as my feet went over my head, and I'd be twirling, twirling in space,

[09:00]

both filled with the sense of fear and joy and wonder, and then I would suddenly land on the earth. And I would slowly be, I would be lying in bed, kind of in this half-waking place, half-asleep place, and as I would open my eyes I would be in this complete sweat, having traveled all that distance. And I felt, again, that feeling of being upside down, that feeling of turning your world upside down. Well, let's see. A little about my own, me as this buffalo. I'm this buffalo that grew up in New Jersey.

[10:07]

I was thinking that maybe I should have changed the story to a mosquito, because there's a lot of mosquitoes in New Jersey, but there's not many buffalo that I know of. But I grew up in this, I thought that I grew up in what was a very sort of Ozzie and Harriet type world, in which it was in the suburbs of New Jersey, and everything just seemed great, and I was happy as could be, and going to school, and doing well. And I was totally asleep. I was so asleep I had no idea how unhappy I was. And I think of some key moments that brought me towards practice.

[11:12]

One was in high school wrestling. I was pretty much a loner and alone, and just kind of was in my own world in high school, just getting by, just doing what I was supposed to be doing. But the one thing that had a lot of passion and energy for me was wrestling. And two things. One is one of the schools that we wrestled was a school called J.P. Stevens that had one of the best wrestling teams in the state. My coach had this philosophy that you shouldn't be a big fish in a small pond, which was his way of saying we should get beaten up by the best teams in the state, even though we were a new, young, not very good wrestling team. So he put us regularly against the best teams in the state of New Jersey.

[12:19]

And there was this one team in particular that was almost always one of the best teams. And before the wrestling match, our team would come out onto the wrestling mat, and everyone would be kind of rah-rah-ing. We'd be kind of trying to psych out this other team. There'd be this real kind of loud cheering. And then we would sit down, and this other team, J.P. Stevens, they would walk out very, very slowly on the mat. And they all had shaven heads, and they all wore black. And they just kind of were almost like meditating. They were just gathering themselves. And I knew then that was the team I wanted to be on. Yeah. I also was really drawn by this.

[13:30]

I noticed in wrestling that the good wrestlers were very strong and quick and knew what to do, and that I became a good wrestler. I noticed that there was something really unusual about the ones that were the state champions. And I was really, as a senior in high school especially, I was trying to figure out what it was. Maybe I wasn't completely conscious. I wasn't having discussions about this. I remember it going through my head many times. What is it about these people who, the ones that always win and that win the state champions? It seemed to me that they didn't care about winning. It seemed like they didn't care about winning, and they weren't afraid of losing. And I cared about winning, and I was afraid of losing.

[14:32]

And I knew that that was in my way, and I somehow wanted to get beyond that. And a few years later, when I was in college, I had what I think of as my first real love relationship in which I was just totally in love with this woman. And I couldn't, it was just amazing to me that she actually wanted to be with me. She seemed so, she was beautiful and smart and sort of carefree, and I was totally asleep. And I could see, at some point I could see her moving away from me, or I thought that I was so worried about her leaving me that of course she left me right away.

[15:32]

And I felt, it was the first time in my, in some way it was the first time that I really experienced pain. And all of the pain from my childhood suddenly started coming through at that moment. And I realized that I didn't live in an Ozzy and Harriet life. My father was manic-depressive, and my mother didn't have a clue how to deal with it. And there was this tremendous sort of ball of pain in my growing up that I just kind of had put in this neat little place. And it was the pain of having, being left for the first time that brought, started to bring all that into focus. And at the same time, and I think I, some of you probably heard all of this, so excuse me.

[16:36]

But I, there was a book that I had to read for college called Towards a Psychology of Being by Abraham Maslow. And in that book he talks about, he, Abraham Maslow devoted his life towards studying what is it that separates, there's a certain kind of person that seems to be living more fully, that seems not necessarily happier, but has real powerful happy moments, and real powerful sad moments, and passion, and that they do seem to accomplish things in their life even though they're not particularly set out to accomplish those things. Things seem to happen. So again it was that, I remember reading in the midst of my suffering and depression at the loss of my first love, I was reading these words of Abraham Maslow and it just, I felt like his words just seeped into me.

[17:40]

And I had never really discovered reading until that. That was like, I think that might have been the first book that I felt like I got. And that I enjoyed. And that I probably finished reading it, I read it all the way through and finished it like at midnight and started again. And woke up three quarters of the way through at three or four in the morning and experienced that, oh, he's talking about that you can actually study yourself, that you can actually change, you can actually develop, but that the idea is to not be self-conscious and it's like what an amazing idea, what an amazing concept. And I went right out and started reading everything I could get my hands on having to do with mysticism and Eastern and Western psychology and discovered Alan Watts. Alan Watts was the first Zen book that I picked up at that time.

[18:46]

And I decided, I think, in that moment, in that period, that what else could be worth doing other than this study? And being in the study of me and actually being able to help other people. I think in part, I'd also felt the pain of not being able to help my father who was in such pain of having an illness, having a mind that was not at all in his control and having a mother who had no idea how to deal with that and realizing that somehow what could be more important, what else could be more worthwhile than this study? And I started taking every class at Rutgers College in New Jersey, every class Rutgers had to offer. And it was for the first time I was engaged and really, really wanting to learn.

[19:53]

And I realized that I didn't just want to study this, I wanted to actually do it. And I didn't quite know what that meant. I just knew, I knew of one place. A friend of mine from college had just gotten back from San Francisco where he was at a place called the Humanist Institute. And it was a small community in San Francisco that did meditation practice and lived together and studied Eastern and Western mysticism. So I decided to take a one-year leave of absence from college and head to San Francisco and enroll in this Humanist Institute place. And while I was there, I started, someone gave me a copy of the Tassajara bread book and I started making bread. And there was something in the words of Ed Brown in this book of combining making bread as a kind of practice and caring for things.

[21:07]

And I had a job at that time, I was supporting myself by, the one skill I had was I could type. This was in the early, I guess it was 19, yeah, it was exactly 30 years ago that I first came out here, 1973. And actually this was another childhood memory was in junior high school, I took a typing class. And I played this, I had this game that I used to play in my mind where I would picture my fingers hitting the keys. And I used to, as I would think words, I would picture in my head what hand I was typing with. And this was, I was in eighth grade and I was really surprised that somehow I could type four times faster than anybody else in this junior high school because of this game.

[22:15]

And I thought, boy, there must be other ways to apply this too. And that's always been, I think that was part of my realizing how powerful our own minds are and the power of what we can visualize. In 1973 I was working downtown San Francisco and I was taking the number six Masonic bus that went right by here every morning. And every morning I would look out the window on my way to this typing job and wonder about this, remembering that this Tassajara bread book and that this building were somehow connected. And one day I got off the bus and I think it was in 1974 and walked in the door here and I was just completely, I just immediately felt totally at home the moment I walked in this door.

[23:20]

And it wasn't that people were particularly friendly because they weren't, but I liked that they weren't friendly. I didn't find them unfriendly, but no one seemed to care if I just walked right out or not. And I liked that. And I remember too, this will tell you a little bit how the world has changed, I really liked the fact that people were smoking and drinking coffee in this small room over here. And I thought these are just real, these are just real people here and that, and I just, I loved the artwork and the smell of the incense and the connections I had with people were, there was some realness to them. And I remember this voice in the back of my head saying, hmm, I think this would be a place worth spending ten years of my life.

[24:27]

And I think the, I immediately started coming here for meditation every, it's funny, I've never done things, I remember, who was it, it was a friend of mine who was a therapist was talking about, I forget what she was describing. She was describing about something she wanted me to do and how, she said, you know, like you kind of ease into it, like most people sort of ease into things. And I thought, I don't ease into things, you know, it took me a couple years to get the courage to leave college, but once I decided to leave, I just left. And then when I, once I walked in the door here, I just started following, I just like started following the schedule and within a few months I moved into the neighborhood and within a few months after that I moved into the building. And part of, at that time, the next place to go after living in the building was Tassajara and I was working, and I saved money to go to Tassajara and it was just unbelievable to me, this kid from New Jersey suddenly living in this Zen monastery.

[25:47]

And I went down in the summertime and I was the dishwasher when, this was before there was no electricity in the kitchen so all the dishes were washed by hand, and I just loved it, I was just so happy. And I was then, I worked in the kitchen and I was made, I was, because I had done a little bit of baking, I had done a little bit of baking and I was asked to be the Tassajara baker. And I knew almost nothing about baking bread or, and yet I felt that people's confidence in me and asking me to do things that I didn't know how to do was so powerful. And I think it was about after a year and a half at Tassajara that I was tapped on the shoulder.

[26:49]

And in those, again, things are different now, you know, there's no more, no more smoking in the building and no more, for the most part, tapping people on the shoulder and telling them, at this point it was a tap on the shoulder and said, it's time for you to leave Tassajara and go to Green Gulch and be in charge of the draft horse farming project. And I remember explaining that they must have misread my resume, that it was true that I was from the Garden State, New Jersey. And I was, and I did love gymnastics and I was pretty good at the horse in high school, but I had never, I didn't know a thing. I had never touched a horse in my entire life. And my job was to learn to farm with horses. And I got out there and I just loved it. I just fell in love with farming and horses. And one of the things I realized was that my father had been an electrician.

[28:00]

And he, I think looking back, he pretty consciously didn't want me to do anything with my hands. He didn't feel that, you know, being a worker was what he, that was not what he had in mind for his son. And so I had never, I had really never done anything with my hands in terms of making anything. I think that was partly what drew me to wrestling so much. But out at Green Gulch, I was learning to weld and learning to sew harness. And was, and I had great mentors and teachers and just totally fell in love with them. For three years I was in charge of this draft horse farming project and didn't get killed. Though came close many, many times. One of my fondest memories was learning to cultivate potatoes. That we actually, that we planted these 30 and 40 yard rows of potatoes.

[29:13]

And then with two horses, being able to walk down a row of potatoes with two horses on each side with this old-fashioned kind of digging machine with a wheel behind it and walking down as the potatoes would come flying out of the ground. And unless you walked sideways and then the potatoes didn't come flying out of the ground and you went back. But, and then being at the end, getting to the end of the row and seeing this row of potatoes was this fantastic feeling. And then one day I got tapped on the shoulder again and was told it was time to go back to Tassajara and go work in the kitchen. And I, I think I was, I had realized that as much as I loved farming, I really wanted to be a Zen student and not a farmer. And that, and that was part of the, part of the tension at that time was, was I had, you know, I was, I was, I was following the schedule a little bit, but I was more following the schedule of the horses and of the cows.

[30:24]

And we were milking cows and raising horses and chickens. It was amazing. And, and some part of me realized that this was a lifetime commitment. And in fact, it was, we started talking about this as a three, that it was going to take three generations to really learn how to farm with horses. And in the midst of that discussion, I was tapped on the shoulder back to Tassajara, into the kitchen. And I was the assistant cook when Tia was the Tenzo. I think that was that summer. I was the assistant cook for a while. And then I was asked to be the, I was asked to be the head cook. And, and I think, I think around that time, I started, it started coming up for me that this one year leave of the absence really had stretched out to, this was, this was almost 10 years now. And, and my parents were really suffering.

[31:25]

And, and I was, and I was starting to feel that there was something not, there was something not complete. Again, it's that, it's that tail, that in some way that tail in this case started coming up for me that I felt that for me to really practice, I somehow needed to find my place in the world outside of, outside of Zen Center. And that that would be the only way that I could actually really be at Zen Center for me. And I was, so I was starting to think about what I was going to do next and had no clue. And then I was asked to be director of Tassajara. And I, I felt it was an opportunity that I couldn't pass on. And I spent the next year as director of Tassajara. I also got married and also had a, my son, my son Jason was born while, while I was director.

[32:28]

And I spent that summer, the first five months of his life walk, walking around, kind of holding my son in this snuggly. And, and I completely loved that job of, of being director. And I liked managing people and solving problems. And we rebuilt one of the bath bridges and I was working with contractors. And again, it was, it was a total, total surprise and mystery that I would like that. And realized that what I was actually doing was, in a sense, I was running a business, that I was involved in management and business, kind of came as a real shock to me. And I had this, I had this image of myself as doing, doing the early, early morning Tassajara schedule with, with robes on and formal breakfast and study and coming back to the Zendo.

[33:33]

And then at about 8.30 or 9 o'clock, as I would leave the Zendo, I, I felt, I had this little, this Superman image of suddenly my robes would come off and I would turn into this man, this business guy and I would go get on the, you know, go get on the phone and be, and be managing things. And there was no, I think I had no sense of myself as, you know, Zen practitioner or business guy. I was just, I was just living my life. I was just doing, I was just living each day and I was really enjoying each day and really looking forward to, to both this practice and this work. And I had this very strange, this very odd thought one day that, that this is what I would, this was it. I was going to somehow bring this business practice out into the world. And, and I was reading a lot of, again, I was reading a lot of books at the time. This was when a book called In Search of Excellence was very popular, which was a book about businesses and values.

[34:48]

And as I, I remember I was reading In Search of Excellence and Zen Mind Beginner's Mind and they seemed to be saying the same thing to me. They seemed to be saying that if you, if you develop, that you should, that you need to practice. That you, that whatever, in whatever you're doing, there needs, there needs to be a sense of studying yourself and living by certain kinds of values and, and helping other people. And that the, that the more selfless you can do that, the more you can accomplish and the more you can actually help other people. And it was the same, the same challenge. And I felt like I had really learned a lot. I had had 10 years of training in, at Zen Center and I knew very, very little about business. So it seemed quite natural to me that I would therefore go to business school. So I did. I left, I, I took a, actually this has been a 20 year leave of absence from Zen Center while I went to business school and worked in the business world. And I went to, I ended up being in, of course I went to business school on Wall Street.

[36:11]

And went to, spent two years at New York University and got my MBA degree. And came back, came back to the West Coast and I started a business called Brush Dance, which I actually started 15 years ago. And for the past 15 years I've been running and growing this business that makes greeting cards and journals and calendars with spiritual themes. And we make things like with the poetry of Rumi and Thich Nhat Hanh. And we take, we take, we just, we have a license now with the Dalai Lama and with the poetry of Hafiz. And again, it just, I started this company with, my initial idea was to make things out of recycled paper.

[37:14]

And I was making, you know, greeting cards and wrapping paper out of recycled paper. And the artists who I knew were people who were connected to Zen Center. And it was kind of an accident that what we were making were, were spiritual things. I didn't know they were spiritual things. They were just things that I liked. And it seemed, I was really surprised how much other, other people also resonated with what we were doing. I wanted to, I can tell one, there's one story from my, you know, being, having left Zen Center and being on the East Coast was, at business school, was one of the most difficult things that I had ever done. And I can remember trying to get a job in Manhattan while I was, I think this was just before I started business school. And I went, I was in a, I went into a temporary agency, you know, on the East 50th Street on Madison Avenue up on the 40th floor with my suit and tie and handed in my resume saying that I was looked at, my one skill was typing.

[38:37]

And, and I remember sitting, I was sitting in the reception area waiting for these people to come back to me. And I, I could see in this office this group of people around a desk talking to each other and whispering and they were kind of laughing. And I could see one of them sort of point over towards me. And, and I heard one of them say, there's a Zen monk here looking for a job. And my resume, you know, my resume said I was, you know, this Zen monk, you know, like, it, I, one of the books that I think about writing is a, how my resume transformed over, over that six month period of trying to find a job. I think my last resume, I was the human resources director of a resort in Southern California. So just, I'm going to kind of, I realize it's time for me to kind of wrap up here.

[39:52]

But here I am. I, I, I live in Mill Valley. I have two teenage children. I, I was, I was the head monk kind of shuso here during this past winter. And it was an amazing, I, I took a, a three month sabbatical from my family and lived here and commuted each day to work and followed, followed the schedule here. And I'm amazingly grateful for that opportunity. And, and I'm, I'm both, I'm beginning to move back. I feel like I'm being pulled back to practicing inside the temple and practicing outside the temple. My home is also, Norman Fisher, who's a teacher here, his office and practice place is in my house and we have a little zendo and, and studio downstairs.

[41:03]

And so I'm very much moving towards this kind of what I feel like this trying to, again, it doesn't even quite feel, it feels almost artificial to talk about it as trying to integrate Zen practice and work practice. I feel like I'm, I'm just trying to live my life as, as fully as I can and, and take care of my life and family and people as, you know, with the most, you know, in the most full and wholehearted and authentic way that, that's possible. And, and seeing how I continually screw up and continually don't, you know, don't do it. And I think of one of my, my son is now 20 years old and the other day he said, he said, look at you dad. He said, you're short, you're balding, your teeth are crooked, you're not really that smart.

[42:15]

We're not wealthy and, and I can beat you at every sport that you can name. And, and I, I felt really proud of him and I felt, I felt, I felt proud of him that he, he thinks that I have a really strong ego or something. And, but it's, it was kind of wonderful that I, I thought that, that he could, that he could say that to me. And I do feel, I feel tremendously connected to my, to him and to my, and to my daughter as well. My daughter, my daughter's not quite, she's almost, a good day is a day that my daughter doesn't yell at me. But she yells at me with great, great love. It's, but I'm always screwing up. I'm never quite doing it right with, with my, my 15-year-old daughter. It's really, you know, I won't let her do things like drive a car without a license.

[43:18]

She, she just thinks I just don't get it. I'm going to stop with a, reading a poem from Hafiz. Hafiz, as some or most or maybe all of you know, is this 14th century Persian poet. And this poem goes like this. Forget every idea of right and wrong any classroom ever taught you. Because an empty heart, a tormented mind, unkindness, jealousy and fear are always the testimony you have been completely fooled. Turn your back on those who would imprison your wondrous spirit with deceit and lies.

[44:21]

Come join the honest company of the king's beggars. Those gamblers, scoundrels and divine clowns. And those astonishing fair courtesans who need divine love every night. Come join the courageous who have no choice but to bet their entire world that indeed, indeed God is real. I will lead you into the circle of the beloved's cunning thieves. Those playful royal rogues, rogues, the ones you can trust for guidance. Who can aid you in this blessed calamity called life. Thank you very much.

[45:15]

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