It corresponds in its breadth of usage to the English word right. We use the word right in a very wide variety of contexts. If you look in a dictionary under right, it's a whole page of meanings. And dharma means something like right, rightness. Right also has a physical meaning too, as in upright, to make something usable. To set it right, or to write something, to put it back up so it stands up. And dharma means the rightness of the world, the way things... the laws or the underlying principles upon which the cosmos or the universe is based.

[01:02]

So it means something like the truth of things. And then it means, of course, the particular teachings of the Buddha, the dharma that is taught by the Buddha. The teaching is also dharma. So, taking refuge in the dharma... First of all is the willingness to recognize that such a thing exists at all. I think for many people it's kind of sad. To be willing to acknowledge that there may be some kind of non-arbitrariness to the universe that you can find out about, or either be in accord with or not be in accord with.

[02:11]

But somehow it seems that the direction of the last several hundred years has been to accept that idea more and more and more in the realm of the scientific world, in the realm of the physical universe, and to abandon that view more and more in the moral, ethical realm. Which was, of course, just the reverse. Prior to the scientific age, I think it was universally accepted that there was some God's law or some kind of universal principle of how to do things. And your immortal soul depended on knowing about it and acting in accord with it. And as someone I was reading recently was pointing out,

[03:33]

a behavior that we would take to be extremely bizarre, if not psychopathic, today was considered to be quite acceptable several hundred years ago. For instance, the idea of burning somebody alive for heresy. Today we think of that as insane, but it was actually a socially accepted practice that was considered to be rather compassionate in the sense that what was important for the society was the status of your soul. And as I understand the rationale, bizarre as it may sound today, is that you got somebody to repent, and then you burned them quickly before they had a chance to backslide, so that they could draw just the right moral tone and moral state. Looked at with several hundred years' distance, it all seems completely trashy.

[04:39]

At the time, I think the people who perpetrated this were the moral leaders of the society. They got burned anyway. But I think they compassionately did you in first, more suddenly, if you would have repented. Anyway, that's all based on the idea that the important thing in your life is some kind of being in accord with some moral principle of the universe. And the details of how atoms behave and so forth was not at all of interest to people. And now, we tend to, I think, very widely accept the authority of what the body of science tells us,

[05:40]

that yes, indeed, things behave in a certain way. And of course, the practical outcome of all that is threatening us all. In fact, we've figured out those things about the universe that we can manipulate and use them, that they are true, is what may destroy us. On the other hand, there has come more and more relativity into the realm of human behavior, and so it's actually rather difficult for us to imagine that there is some non-arbitrariness or non-relativity about our own choices and actions. Dharma here specifically means not so much the law of gravitation or magnetic attraction,

[06:42]

but the law of karma. And the inescapability of that, whether you believe in it or not, doesn't matter. The functional process will occur rather impersonally, as a kind of inescapable logic to the way we are organized. It's what I've been calling recently our hardwiring, using the computer jargon term. You know, the way we're wired together is just a certain way, and whether or not you understand it that way or not, you may have all sorts of other ideas about it, it just happens to be that way. And this is supposed to be the dharma which the Buddha did not invent, but discovered, or got an insight into, and is simply conveyed in very much the same way.

[07:45]

Scientists don't believe that they invent science, rather they discover it, or through observation or close scrutiny and repetition, checking things out, come to this knowledge. So, although there is no God exactly in Buddhism, there is a sense of, some sense of dharma as a kind of absolute, or it's not exactly arguable. Although you may not, it's perfectly acceptable to approach it with a certain degree of skepticism, you're not expected to take it at face value without question. In fact, the whole stream of teaching represented by Zen is more that you're required, really, to replicate the experimental process of the Buddha himself, and prove the dharma to yourself by practice,

[08:52]

that you're actually not expected to, or it doesn't, it isn't considered to be enough to simply accept it because you've read about it or because you've heard it, but also that you have to test it. So, taking refuge in the dharma doesn't mean a willingness to question your own presuppositions and beliefs, and a willingness to try out the worldview of Buddhism, but it doesn't imply that you accept it uncritically or without trying it out for yourself by experience. So you might say, again using the science analogy, that when you study science in school, a lot of how it's taught

[09:57]

is that certain classical experiments are performed in the laboratory by you, and you can see how that particular piece of knowledge was originally derived. And that's lab work, that's considered to be as necessary as reading about it in books, and you're not considered to be a well-trained scientist or biologist or whatever, unless you've done the dissections and you've actually seen it, and you've done the experiment, and you've actually seen how the knowledge was derived and on what basis. So, in the same way, there is an experimental body of experimental lore, mostly involving meditation and a lot of practices, which reproduce the insight into Dharma, which the Buddha and his successors are conveying. I can't push this science analogy too far, however, because it's not, you know, part of the Dharma that the Buddha discovered

[11:06]

is that we live in a non-repeatable universe. So you can't exactly repeat the experiment and get exactly the same results, because no two people and no two instances of the universe are precisely alike. So, what you discover is the Dharma as it is revealed through you and your own experience, which is to some extent unique. So that's why Buddhism can't be taught in a classroom, or it can't be taught like you teach English literature or something, because part of the process of teaching it to someone is inducing them to create it themselves, out of their own individual material, and at the same time you teach it, you also create something new. So in fact, the process of preaching the Dharma in the West is creating new Buddhism.

[12:13]

Even though its essence is the same, the actual experience of it for us is not the same, because we're not Orientals, we don't, we have a very different culture and so forth. So, I know this is confusing you to include this aspect, but all I mean to say is that Buddhism isn't exactly science. I had a dialogue about this with Dr. Abe once, a Buddhist scholar. He didn't really agree with me. I said, you know, Buddhism is a lot like science, because meditation practice is like doing an experiment on yourself. And he really didn't go for it. He felt, you know, that maybe we should emphasize the religion side of Buddhism. But maybe he had too technological an idea of what I meant by science.

[13:15]

I meant more the original sense that you try something out rather than just take it on faith, or believe it because Aristotle said so. You know, for many hundreds of years in Europe, basically, the authority for everything was Aristotle. No one really tried it out or tested it very much. And then people like Galileo and Francis Bacon dropped things down and watched what happened. And it was all very surprising. No one had really, I mean, it's amazing to think back and realize that for a long time it never occurred to anybody to do that. It just wasn't. But it's also equally surprising from an Orientalist point of view that in the entire history of Western society and culture, it never really occurred to anybody to do yoga and sit cross-legged for 10 or 20 years to see what happens. To an Oriental or Indian person, it seems like an obvious experiment to want to do. I mean, it's in a way the most obvious basic thing.

[14:15]

I mean, here we suddenly appear in this body and mind. What is it? What's going on? Well, let's sit down and find out, and then you do it. But in spite of its obviousness, no one ever tried it as far as I know. I mean, maybe you could say Christian mystics did a lot of solitude in this prayer and so forth. But the kind of yoga that we're talking about on the whole has never really entered or become a part of Western culture at all. And so a great deal of what is taken for granted as sort of obvious about the world in the cultures which Buddhism flourished in is not part of our experience at all. So we have a great deal of skepticism about it. We haven't done any of the groundwork. We don't have centuries and centuries of the gradual infiltration of that body of knowledge

[15:19]

into the general mix of things. Just as in our society there is a sort of infiltration into the general body of knowledge of some of the basic discoveries and tenets of science that we just more or less accept without really examining too closely, no one's really very amazed by a television set because it kind of goes along with what science can do, for sure, radios and TV. But you know, it took a long, long time for the acceptance of that method of progression to build up. So in the same way, the idea of dharma or of a way or of a Tao, some underlying principle of the way things go, is something which I think it's rather hard for us to have a sense of. Maybe we find that it offends our sense of individualism or freedom or something.

[16:29]

We feel as though we should be free to create our own dharma. We shouldn't be under some constraint of our thing. But that's a little bit like saying we should be free to fly. We human beings should be free to jump off a roof and fly. And there's no reason why we should be restricted from that. The reason that we don't think that is because, you know, I suppose somebody tried it once or twice. That was all the experimentation that was necessary to determine that it was not something that the average person should really attempt. The equivalent simply wasn't there. It's not in the dharma of things for us to be able to fly. And in the same way, certain things which we'd very much like to have be the case, for instance, we'd very much like for all human beings to be wonderful and good and behave the way they should, and they don't. And, you know, really one of the starting points of Buddhism, practically speaking,

[17:34]

is that one has to get through one's head the fact, the inescapable fact of what we call suffering, which means really that human beings don't intrinsically have it together to behave very well unless they're trained. We do not come out of the womb finished. And this is, you know, the dharma of our particular nature, the kind of consciousness that we have and the kind of beings that we are, is that we are not finished beings. And we have to... There's some special work that we need to do in our life to complete our potential, and this is called practice. And, again, in oriental society, the idea of living your life without a sense of practice,

[18:37]

in traditional society anyway, is rather bizarre. I mean, it would be like not being human or being like some aboriginal, hairy creature. But I think for us, we... Our image is more that as much as possible we should live free from all constraints or limitations and do what we want to do. It's just a very different idea. And, you know, as I think maybe others have mentioned, in Chinese and foreign languages, there is no word that corresponds to our English word, freedom, because it's not an observable fact of those cultures. Rather, there are words like being in accord with or the feeling of being one with the dharma in a way that you feel. Your inward feeling is you feel good. You feel at peace.

[19:38]

You have a feeling of freedom, but you don't have some arbitrary ability to do whatever you want to do. I mean, I think for Americans, freedom includes the ability to throw a tin can down, for instance, and just leave it there. That's part of what we think should be within our... Maybe that's on the edge. Now there is some renewed interest in trying to... But, you know, the initiative that's up is really to try to legislate that by greed, basically. By making it valuable monetarily, we're hoping to change people's behavior. Rather than, I think, you know, in Japan, it's much more the sense that you don't have a law about it that would be kind of absurd. But rather, you simply train your children to pick no one to throw things on the ground, which is shameful.

[20:42]

You know, you go and put things in the trash can, which would be considered low class, to any extreme, to just throw something down the street, you know, because someone else has to pick it up. So it's incorporated within what you just grew up with as the minimal acceptance of behavior in the same way that you wouldn't defecate in your pants, you know. I mean, in our culture, that would be considered, you know, pretty weird if you did that as an adult. I mean, I think we accept it as that. I don't think any of us would consider that to be, you know, a rational extension of freedom. You know, it all has to do with where you draw the line. But the idea of Dharma is more that real freedom or real liberation really means to find a sense of accord with the Dharma that's all around you,

[21:44]

which requires practice. You can't just do it instinctively. So again, part of what it means to take refuge in Dharma is to be willing to hold, to expose your own presuppositions about things, and a kind of attitude of radical questioning that can expose these hidden assumptions that we all live with. It partly means also to be willing to question the assumptions of your society, which require a certain energy. And it makes Buddhists, particularly in the West, rather like... not exactly necessarily in accord with the dominant assumptions of the society.

[22:48]

I was going to say it makes Buddhists into rebels, revolutionaries. I don't think that's probably... that may be going a little too far. But certainly, to be a Buddhist in the present circumstance, it makes you a little bit radical, because you're operating at the level of basic assumptions and questioning. And as you can see with the next one, which is Sangha, you end up, through this experimental investigation into Dharma, you end up inevitably creating a somewhat different kind of society called Sangha. A society which is based on the principles of Dharma. Yes? Well, I think it's irrefutable, an important point to make, that in a Western culture, when a Buddhist is not going with the flow,

[23:53]

he's actually resisting, or she's resisting the inertia of the culture. Dharma is something that is absolutely over the moorings of that culture. Maybe that's what it's known as in America, going in a certain direction. Yeah, an entire society can be, you know, completely going in the wrong direction. That's certainly possible. When you're talking about lining yourself up, it's not just a matter of limiting. No, not to put yourself in accord with what, there's a phrase in Buddhism called the foolish common people. And, you know, this is a phrase that actually is a technical term. And it means, you know, just ordinary folks that don't have much sense of anything, and they do all kinds of things that you had best ignore,

[24:56]

because there's not much consciousness in it. So you align yourself in Buddhism with a vertical and horizontal society, a vertical society of the lineage or the predecessors of those people in each generation who have seen through the foolish common people and their doings and coming and going. And they are the society that you align yourself with and try to be in accord with. And horizontally, in your own society, you align yourself with those people who are committed to some kind of conscious life. And naturally enough, yes? It's a balancing act, then, to be able to function within that society while you're, in a sense, aligned with a different society.

[25:56]

And there's sort of a problem of being a balancing act. You have to function every day with certain people with certain values and meet those expectations. Yet, in a sense, you're aligned outside that. You know that you are a fundamental way of thinking. You run into sort of a balance problem. Well, that's where the whole idea of Sambha comes in to help you. Because the Sambha traditionally... And I want to start with talking about the traditional institution of the Sambha. The Sambha has never been an exclusive club of some kind in which you... There's a wall. There's never been a wall in which the Sambha is separated from the society. And on the whole, the history of Buddhism has been in the direction of breaking down the wall

[26:59]

to whatever extent it existed rather than building it up more strongly. I'm talking about the idea of the Bodhisattva vow of living in the world and saving all beings and so forth. I would say that Buddhism started out with more of a sense of a wall than it later came up with. There was more of a sense initially of the world being... the ordinary world being a dangerous place for spiritual practice. And that one should in some way retreat from it or minimize your contact with it. This tends to emphasize the monastic vocation. And that's what monks and nuns do. And early Buddhism tended to uphold the monks and nuns as the exemplars of those who seek Dharma. And everybody else was being somehow compromised. More and more, I think, partly from the pressure from the non-monks and nuns of the Buddhists who didn't exactly go along with this idea, there was a different movement in Buddhism

[27:59]

which maybe was parallel to it, which was more in the other direction. To treat the Sangha not as a refuge from this diluted society that you were in, but rather a refuge for the whole society. In other words, it was ultimately there for the benefit of everyone. And of course, for it to function as a beneficiary, it had to have some function, contact, and role within the society. That is to say, it had to participate in the society to a great extent. But the advantage, the critical advantage of the Sangha for an individual is that it gives you refuge. It gives you a place in which you can, the inevitable conflicts and tensions between the kind of effort you're making to live a more conscious, developed life

[29:02]

and the inertia of the society at large, which is always threatening to pull you down from that, is a Sangha that gives you support to maintain yourself. And if you look, for instance, at Zen Center, where have all these people come from? Who are all these people? I mean, how did they all get here anyway? Well, we don't really talk about this too much, but in fact, the fact that Zen Center exists and it's fairly well known, not only in the United States, but even in foreign countries now, means that from everywhere people find their way here. And whether or not they stay for any length of time or not, the mere existence of such a place and the fact that there are people maintaining

[30:02]

an institutional continuity of Buddhism is extremely important in people's lives. I'm sure you would probably admit that in your own life, but the difference between now and 25 years ago when there were only a few scattered books that you'd find hidden away in the metaphysical bookstores by D.P. Suzuki and a few other mysterious, exotic things, and now there's all these proliferation of actual Dharma centers where there are people trying to live the teachings, it's just a whole different thing. And already I think you can say that 20 years in the time span of Buddhism is not actually very significant yet. But still, even in 20 years, I would say that the founding of all these various Buddhist centers in the West is beginning to have an impact on society at large as well.

[31:09]

But it's very difficult for an individual to do much. Most the individual can do is join his or her energy with a Sangha which can then have sufficient impact too. So you relate to the society at large best, I think, through the Sangha, rather than... People often talk to me about how difficult it is for them as Buddhists, or dealing with some affinity with Buddhism, to try to figure out how to cope with your work situation or something, where other people are not that. And I'm expecting actually the kind of thing that we'll probably talk about as we go on in the class. But I wouldn't attempt to raise your hopes too high on that score, because there's not a whole lot you can do as one person. Just you against the world.

[32:13]

But through the support structure of the Sangha, I think you can do a great deal. Five or ten people together as a Sangha can do a lot more for themselves and for others than those same five or ten people each operating alone out there. There was a question? Well, to go back a little bit, when you speak of the Oriental culture in India, it seems to me like doing yoga. The culture is so old, and there's so much population, that after a certain time, one of the reasons yoga is popular is because it's a place to exercise, to feel oneself, to get in touch with oneself. Whereas we have a new world, and we're more open to physical possibilities. It's sort of like the Rajivic coming here, and he spends his time driving his car back and forth on the highway.

[33:13]

Whereas we're sort of learning about yoga and death, because the population is so... because we're human, conscripted, basically. And so, recognizing our conscription, we're also recognizing our need to experience yoga in India. Well, European culture is pretty old. It's been there for a couple thousand years. I suppose you could think of various explanations for the difference. I think probably the simplest explanation is as good as any, which is that it just didn't occur to us right in the beginning. It's something that has to... Well, it seems like it doesn't occur, because there's not enough conscription, and that when the conscription gets there, it occurs. And even in Europe, somehow, to begin with, they came here, and now there's sort of nowhere else to go. Yeah, but of course, in ancient India, there was lots of... There weren't very many people. It was a huge country.

[34:16]

It's just... There's many possible explanations. One possible explanation, which may not make us feel so good, is that there is some racial difference. That those cultures and genetic stocks had some more affinity to yogic experience. We're coming around to it a little bit remedially. I don't know what to say. Anyway, I don't know how fruitful it is to speculate on the reasons. It certainly does seem to be a fact that it's taken our culture a long time, in spite of many centuries of contact with the East, beginning with the European explorers way back in the 1400s and 1500s. You know, the Jesuits were the first Westerners to come to Japan in the 1500s. And there are Jesuit tracts about Satori and Kensho

[35:18]

and the teachings of the mysterious Zen school. They wrote about it, and they studied it, actually. And they had, actually, quite a lot of respect for it. In fact, the Jesuits' first impression of Japan was that it was a very civilized country by European standards, except for two things which the Jesuits found appalling. One was homosexuality, and the other was infanticide, both of which, at the time, were rather commonplace. And they just thought, well, you know, in an even country, what can you expect? But they're doing pretty well, given the fact that they haven't heard the good word. And, of course, the Japanese, on the other hand, thought that what they were seeing from the West was totally barbaric. And, you know, they couldn't believe how inferior we were compared to their standards. So these first contacts between these cultures pointed up a rather large...

[36:21]

And it is true that by most ordinary standards of health and being well-fed and cleanliness and all those things, Japan and China were the most advanced civilization in the world for some long period of time, for maybe about 700 or 800 years. They were definitely, in most major respects, more advanced than Japan. So it's true, these cultures are much older and just developed differently. Maybe developed with less discontinuity, so that the shamanistic roots of these practices which go back into the Stone Age were more retained. Maybe it had to do also with the historical development of Christianity,

[37:21]

which, for whatever reasons, purged itself of many of those strands within it which retained yogic practice, like Gnosticism and other things. Those things were historically purged from Christianity quite early and so did not remain in the dominant spiritual traditions of our society. And they were never purged from India or China, for instance, or China. So that also could figure in. I mean, for instance, apparently the doctrine of reincarnation was an acceptable belief in Christianity until the 1900s. Although that's not generally known. I've read that. But it is confirmed. But some council in the 9th century decided it was to go, so it went. And from that point on, there was no more reincarnation to be talked about. Unless you wanted to be one of these people that got burned. Anyway, it's interesting to speculate

[38:26]

why it is that we haven't somehow developed this side of ourselves. I think certainly the things that you say are true. I mean, in America, we don't even have the continuity of European culture with Latin American culture. We rejected even the extent to which there was continuity from Europe. That was part of what America was, was the rejection of Europe. And it was built by people who rejected Europe by failing away from it. So we're, I think, just now getting back to realizing what we were left behind with Europe, much less what Europe left behind. Anyway, we're getting a little bit far afield. I'm getting a little bit far afield, but I'm happy to field more questions. Well, if you think in the very long view of thousands of years, I don't really like the idea of the thought of any race being superior to any other.

[39:27]

If they were doing yoga 4,000 years ago, now they're building television sets and take over all of that, and we're practicing yoga. It just seems to me that maybe there's a pendulum shift, and it takes 4,000 years to happen, or something like that. Could be. Well, as I said, I mean, if you think you'd like that, I'm sure you would. I'm not saying it's my idea. It's just an idea that, you know, if you're honest, you can bring up. A lot of Orientals think that. I mean, there was a lot of the early Zen teachers basically did not see how people like us could make much headway in Buddhism because we weren't Japanese. I mean, that idea was prevalent even in the 50s. Well, a lot of people worry about Chinese building colleges, but that's not what they do. Well, let's get our cars to work first. I hope the Japanese have demonstrated a definite superiority at that level. I drive a Japanese car,

[40:28]

and it's going quite well. This goes back a little bit to when you were talking about being in accord with your surroundings and coming out of the womb somewhat imperfect and having to train yourself to be more in accord. Is there any idea at all, in Buddhist psychology, something I've gotten the feeling that there is, of children in some way being more in accord with things than adults, or that maybe you have some sense of accord with things that you may lose at some point in your childhood? Or is there any idea in Buddhist psychology of people becoming less wonderful through mistreatment than perhaps, you know, that maybe they came out of the womb a little bit more perfect and became less perfect through mistreatment in any way? Well, we have to get the right vocabulary to really discuss these things accurately. It isn't a matter of perfect or imperfect. You are born not blank, but with clearly delineated propensities for greed, hate, delusion. And the main reason,

[41:29]

and anybody who lives with children knows that it doesn't take you long to start expressing it. And on the whole, they express it less restrainedly than adults do. I mean, adults, you know, learn that you can't scream and stamp up and down and throw a tantrum and roll on the floor to get what you want. If you do, little men come in suits and put you away. The main reason that children appear to us to be somewhat more innocent and so forth is that it takes them a while to get patterned in it. Their patterns for those behaviors don't run so deep. They have more ability to let go. They don't harbor things. Harboring quality is something that you develop by karmic repetition. But there is no idea in Buddhism that somehow children are innocent or pure

[42:32]

because in fact, observably, they're not. Well, I didn't mean exactly that, but I guess sort of two things. Partly I meant the idea of the patterns being acquired, because it's not so much that they're actually born with the patterns, but they're born with the propensities and the patterns get etched deeper. Is that right? That is right. And then I meant if there's some idea that they're less subject or less prone to dualism or to perceive things in a subject and object kind of way or is that somewhat acquired? I'm not sure that I got this idea, but somehow I had this idea that there was an idea in Buddhism that when you're a child you might be able to... That's sort of what I meant by being in accord with your surroundings, that children might be able to perceive things differently.

[43:36]

Yeah, well, if they do, if they do, the problem is it doesn't really count. It doesn't really... It's sort of insignificant that that's true. I mean, that is true. Children on the whole aren't so involved in their thinking as adults are because they don't think so much. So in that sense, you might say they're slightly less dualistic in their perceptions. Their perceptions are more, you know... But it's not awakened perception. It's that your misperceptions have not yet awakened and they're bound to awaken. So it's nothing that you can really look to very hopefully. Children lose it, that's all, quite naturally, as they become more and more interested in trying to get what they want, as all human beings do. And I'm afraid that the idea of children

[44:39]

being more pure and innocent is just not really much of a Buddhist idea. If you want to talk about somehow a good impulse in people's children, or otherwise, like towards generosity or being loving or something, is that belief to be completely acquired, that children... that you come out of the womb without any... Let's say, you come out of the womb with impulses to grieve, hate and delusion, or the potential for that, or the other potential too? Yeah, you have both. And the conditions that you live in determine how it goes for you. You know, you develop according to the law of karma, and that's partly your surroundings and circumstances and so forth. If you're in good circumstances, you develop well. If you're in bad circumstances, you develop poorly. But it's not like you have to train them to be generous or loving. The impulse is there. Yeah, you have to train them. It seems to me the first impulse after the child, the infant, I think one of the first stages in infancy

[45:41]

is that a child discovers that it's not part of everything else. It's separated. And then it must make demands. And those first demands are based on survival demands. So the first sort of push is to make demands and to grasp and hold on to those things which gives the infant, you know, as it grows into it, again, a baby and a child within security. So it would seem those are almost, that's almost instinctual behavior. What then has to be learned are that there's a case that goes along with the gift. And that the first things that happen are that the child can make some demands. The child's main job is to grow up. And Buddhism really is an adult affair, I must say. It's, you know, it's, I mean, I think the main Buddhist idea for children and child raising is that you raise the child in such a way

[46:44]

that the Dharma is accessible to them when they're old enough to see it. But practically speaking, at the earliest age I've ever seen anybody practice Dazen, sort of from their own observation and feeling of why you would do it, is about 15. And that's about, I wouldn't go much earlier than that. I think you have to go through the work of making an adult body and mind with as good a circumstance as your parents and society can provide. And there are many spiritual geniuses who had some great spiritual insight at the age of 7 or 8. But on the whole, the basic situation of children is that they're just rather unconscious. And everything that they do, good or bad, is on the whole not too conscious. And you might say,

[47:52]

something I've, some way I've tried to explain this before, is that Buddhist practice is continuation into your whole life of what you do when you're a child. You sort of figure out how to survive, what the world's all about, and so forth. And most people just don't continue that. They stop when biologically the process is completed. But that's really the point at which practice begins. That's when you have the equipment necessary to actually make something. But in a sense we've figured out our physical survival. So the survival you're talking about is that once we in a sense have figured out our physical survival, we realize the same thing is that there's a whole lot more than just figuring out your physical survival. So then you have to ask the question, what's going on? What did I get here for? And that's where you sort of move into that. That's right. And so that's why I say

[48:54]

it's in a sense an adult affair. And if it comes earlier in your life, it's a precocious, it's a precocity. And some people are spiritually precocious. They have a spiritual crisis in early adolescence or something like that. And it's the kind of crisis that for other people happens to be young that felt that it was natural to have it in midlife. That was a time biologically when it was natural to begin asking ultimate questions or religious questions. Characteristically in Buddhism, if you look at the literature of when they imagine people becoming monks and so forth, I think they felt it was an affair of early adulthood. That the decision to seek the Dharma was something that would occur to you about the age of 20. And I don't think they allowed anyone to be fully ordained into the Sangha before the age of 18. There's plenty of literature that says 20.

[49:54]

20, that's what I thought. That's what I couldn't do when I was younger. They do have these child monks historically, but that's not considered that's just, you know, more like church school or something. So the actual decision to practice is one that you have to make yourself. It's sort of like being old enough to drink or drive or something, or old enough to vote. You have to have a kind of, the ability to make an adult decision. Yes? One thing I did have to ask you is that if you would like your child to grow up with the right set of attitudes or the right set of attitudes or morals, would you say that you want to do whatever possible to teach that child a thousand steps of appreciation or even 200 steps

[50:55]

that you would try to avoid teaching the child thousands of steps so that it would naturally have an inclusive mind and it would naturally be able to appreciate how to set goals down carefully or to not stop and see or find a way to... So that then practicing, Dante would not be a big difference in their life if you did monumental, sort of great teaching with them, their life would grow up so that that's something that they can do. Well, it would be nice if it were that straightforward. But unfortunately, it's a lot more complicated raising. In principle, Japanese children are raised just the way that you say. But very few Japanese young adults have the slightest interest whatsoever in anything having to do with religion. Because there's a lot more going on

[51:55]

in a child growing up than just the parents. You know, it's the whole society and their peers and just what seems to be happening. I mean, amazingly enough, most of us were probably not raised that way. And yet here we are, a few months of studying Buddhism. And in societies where Buddhism has been present for centuries, as somebody was saying, now they're interested in video games and TV. It's something that has come up in the society and culture and it's not accessible to them anymore. Karma is very mysterious and it doesn't operate... I mean, it isn't... You know, on the whole, the whole doctrine of rebirth and reincarnation is not central to Buddhism. It's sort of something that Buddhism took on from India and Hinduism because it is what was happening. But still, there is a sense that

[53:00]

it's very difficult to really adequately explain what happens to people on the basis of what you see in just their life, this life. You raise one person perfectly and you do everything for them, they become a criminal. You raise somebody like Eleanor Roosevelt who had this horrible childhood where everything went wrong, she was maltreated, and she became a saint. And there are examples that all of us know that it's very hard to... All you can say is that the way in which people develop is not exactly fully accessible to the rational mind. And that's certainly true of children. And, you know, children... I mean, to go back to Flora's question, children vary very dramatically in the way that they are. Any of the people we've had, four or five of them, can tell stories about how radically they differ

[54:02]

from the word go. From the moment they come out, they're just different. And some children seem very non-dualistic and innocent and all that. Other children are profoundly dualistic. They're dualistic from the first hour. Actually, you know, what we mean by non-dualistic thinking is not really what children do. I mean, it's a little bit more like... I really can't get into it in much detail, but it's... The way children are resembles that. Let's put it that way. But it's not for anything like the same reasons. It's more like the full possibilities of desire and selfishness haven't yet occurred to them. They seem to be floating in a sea of innocence, but it's not exactly the same at all. It's something that, if it were, you know, then this whole business would be much easier

[55:04]

because you could just try to somehow freeze it and keep it from being perverted or distorted. But actually, I think the message here is that this is a profound existential problem for all human beings, and it doesn't come naturally to anyone. In fact, that idea is something a little bit like wishful thinking, that there's no real shortcut. And in the text that you read in Buddhism about this, the proof that they give you is that they just point to Buddha himself, who is the spiritual genius par excellence, and basically he had a terrible time, as did most of the great spiritual teachers, and also that it does seem to be historically the case that those people who developed into the greatest sages worked the hardest at it. And there was hardly anyone for whom it came easy.

[56:08]

And there's an interesting point that Suzuki Roshi mentioned several times, and if not Kamui Sensei, the tea teacher here mentions too, she mentions it to me a lot, which is that if you're superficially skillful at something, you have a knack for something, you actually end up having a very hard time mastering it. So in some ways, actually, historically, those who had the most difficult spiritual journey made the best teachers, and had the most impact on people in society. And those who had an easy sailing, on the whole, because we're not talking here about some kind of being able to draw, we're talking about seeing through, or fundamentally addressing, the universal condition of human beings. And from that point of view, the more you suffer, the more you get it.

[57:13]

If you're insulated from all that, you get nothing. That's why in Buddhism, the devas, the celestial beings, who for some long period of time are carnically immune to any suffering, are considered to be quite sorrowful creatures, because they don't learn anything. They just live in this... And, you know, Buddhism just kind of absorbed the idea that such beings existed without really examining it too much. They say, if there are such beings, then they're in a very bad situation, because they can't get in touch with anything, they don't suffer, they don't have bodies, they don't die. And what will happen to them is that eventually this good situation will end, and they'll feel quite terrible that they wasted so much time. What that means for us, practically, is that any human being who's in a situation like that, where they're insulated from all the facts of life,

[58:17]

so to speak, are in a very dangerous circumstance. Because when they wake up to it, they'll have so much remorse and feeling like they've missed out, that it'll be very hard for them to recover. Yes? I just saw The Chosen that night. The Chosen? Botox. Oh yeah, about the hostage? Yeah, the spiritual leader. The rabbi, the father, comes to grips with that very problem of his son in a very unusual way. Introducing him to suffering, to compassion, the feeling he's so proud to give. I was in New York, and I almost went into it, and I somehow thought it was one of these exorcist-type movies. The Chosen, you know, and so the shiny... I didn't want to say it, but I missed it. It's exactly what you're talking about, the rabbi deals with it. Yes?

[59:19]

I have a question that came to me earlier here around this business of comfort, or this idea of a child reaching out in the survival level, but we operate a bit beyond that. Moving beyond survival, we then question our existence. It seems to me that we can take that much further, and I asked some questions about this in lots of religious contexts, about the idea, at least in Western society, that one has to come from a comfortable situation before one really starts looking at these kinds of experiences. So, on the other hand, it then implies that people that come from poverty or people who have less access to certain kinds of comfort and educational experience are therefore denied opportunities to experience freedom. I wonder if you've heard of that situation. Have you seen that in other, particularly Japanese culture, how that relates? Well, in Japanese culture, they have a very strong sense

[60:23]

of taking the best possible care of their children. That's why Kono Roshi, this Japanese Roshi we visited, found it very hard to understand how we could possibly try to make monastic practice work with families, because from a Japanese point of view, when you have a family, your first responsibility is to your children, to your wife if you're a man, to provide for them, to give them education, and not to deny them things. He just was amazed that we were trying to do that, because obviously you can't maximize that if you're living in a situation which is more closer to a subsistence. Although I think, actually, he may not realize it, but our kids are living pretty normal lives, and I don't think we're denying anything. But still, I think the value in that society is that you can do the best that you possibly can for your children up to a certain point, and then you just hope for the best. But, you know, this... this business of...

[61:27]

It's very mysterious how it is that people... ... Then there's the question of who stays. It's the kind of game that we can play sometimes, that I play to see if I can predict, from first glance, who will stay. I'm getting pretty good at it, and Baker, she claims to be quite good at it. Part of it, you sort of get the knack of who... who seems to be the kind of people that would stay. Or the people that, if they go, you sense they're going to be back. But it isn't exactly intelligence, or anything. It's not something you can exactly put your finger on. It really has a lot to do with just the underlying intention to do it,

[62:28]

which somehow gets awakened. And... if you're the kind of person that just isn't satisfied without somehow scrutinizing this aspect of human life, then you just are drawn again and again to practice it, and you enter it. And... So there are lots of people who are initially drawn to it, and then it lies hallowed for 20 years, or 30 years, before it resurfaces. And so forth. Yes. Go on. I'll be waiting. Yes. But don't you... isn't there a type of soil that would be more nourishing to a seed? Like, in terms of society. If society holds certain values over certain others, in terms of compassion, and cooperation, and so forth,

[63:29]

over, maybe, aggression, and grasping things for yourself, then the seed might be more likely to bloom, it seems. And also, can't... can't there be people within a society who may not actually be here with us, but they have very Buddhist feelings, and they're still a member of a broader sangha? It seems to me there aren't certain things in the world that help to nourish the seed, or the conditions that we can work towards. Well, America is in a very unlikely place, with a lot of Buddhism, from what you just said, but here it is, in all honesty. And it is true, the last form of sangha that I wanted to mention is the so-called Maha Sangha, the Great Sangha, which is everybody. Can you elucidate what the Great Sangha is specifically? Well, the historical sangha, that is, the monks, nuns, laymen, men and laywomen. And, you know, the second kind of sangha

[64:31]

is your sangha, the people that you're actually practicing with, your companions on the path, whose names you know, particular people that happen to be with you. It's functionally your sangha, and that's what actually supports your practice. I mean, there have been, Buddhism as a sangha has been around for our entire lifetimes. I don't think it's been very stimulating or supportive to many of us, that there is Buddhist syndrome. It hasn't had much impact on us. Although, technically speaking, that is the sangha. But, if your friend starts to practice, then you may start to practice. So, practically speaking, the sangha means the people that you're actually with, from flesh and blood, whoever that may be. And then, the widest version of sangha

[65:33]

is all beings, not even human beings, frogs, toads, are the sangha. And, that's the sangha in which you fulfill your vow to liberate all beings. Yes? You said, a few minutes ago, that children don't get as much as adults do. And I interpret that as they're not as involved in the practice. Baker Bush said a couple of weeks ago that most people don't think much. And I've kind of been short on that. In terms of, I don't think much. I'm wondering what the distinction is in thinking of that, what thinking is, and what that blue, that blue line right there is. Well, I think what Einstein said, if someone asked him if he ever carried a notebook around so he could write down his ideas, he'd say, young man, I've only had about three ideas in my entire life. That's great.

[66:37]

I think what Baker Bush is talking about is intentional, vivid thinking. It's almost like a valley. And the inner dialogue that runs through our head all the time is, you might say, more like the fruit of our karmic past are running tapes. It isn't a current, it isn't karma in the strict sense. It isn't a current, intentional act in the present moment. So it has very little power. It has only distracted power. It doesn't have motive power. And the kind of thinking that produces something is a thought like, I've got to do something about this nuclear issue. Whatever happens, I've got to do something. That's a thought. Because it

[67:38]

has implications. It's consequential. You can change your life on the basis of it. Whereas, you know, just sort of lying in bed, you think, gosh, I'm scared. You know, you get up the next day, you're still the same person. You're not doing anything differently. So I think you can tell by the consequences, whether it's... And I think children, like my kid particularly, is just, you know, constantly in a fantasy world. It's just his bed. He, he, he'll just he'll just sit there and tell stories to himself, even aloud sometimes, you know, endlessly. But he really isn't thinking exactly. It's more like an inner movie or something. We're used to what inner children think. But we don't have a very accurate language for all these distinctions. It's true. And so it's hard for us to talk about it. But I think you can observe the difference very well.

[68:41]

It's interesting, you know, there's a funny story that Lou Welsh tells, which I kind of like the story. Lou Welsh is a poet, you know, well-known poet who wrote Rainbow. As an example of what poetry is and what the difference between the language of poetry and ordinary language he said he was walking along in a tour of one of these hot springs places like at Yellowstone where there's little railings and these bubbling pools and boiling water that are kind of dangerous. And there was a tour guide, a young person, maybe a college student, who was giving a can thing. Now in his school it's called a self-explanatory 215 degrees. He was just doing it very mechanically without much sense of thought. And while he was doing it a couple of kids started to climb up on the railing. And so suddenly in the middle of his dialogue he blurted out in a very different tone of voice, whose kid is that?

[69:42]

And to Lou that's like a poem, you know, that's like a real thought or something that cuts through the undercurrent of mechanical memorized or habitual talk. That's the difference. He wrote a whole essay about whose kid is that? That to him was the essence of what it means to write a poem. It's to somehow maintain that tone of intentional language. And that's what really makes a great poem too. You can get one line like that pretty easily but to get a whole poem that doesn't slip back where usually what happens in a middling poem is that you have two or three lines usually the first one that inspires you but then because your level of craft is not up to it you end up writing a commentary on it rather than maintaining to be or not to be

[70:46]

that is the question whether to know the effectiveness so that each word you just keep going wow it doesn't stop and those are the things you remember when you see them arrive and become part of the language. I was just going to say that Lewis Carroll had a whole poem come out of one line but the snark was the Boonjum scene. That's right. On the whole kind of a boring poem. That was what started it. He woke up in the middle of the night and he had this line Johnson's line I wrote a whole term paper on that. My crowning achievement was a psycho-historical examination of Lewis Carroll's state of mind My crowning achievement is a college student In practice when we talk about emptying the mind we're in fact talking probably about dealing with the gargles what do you call that?

[71:47]

The chain the inner dialogue the inner dialogue when you talk about emptying the mind I assume that you're talking about trying to dispense with the inner dialogue and perhaps free the mind from the intentional thinking is that what emptying the mind is about? Well first of all I don't think that we generally would use the phrase emptying the mind Oh I thought I ran out Oh I'm sure you did I think you might say that through the process of sitting it may be that the mind will empty out that's a little different you don't make a conscious effort to do it because if you try you'll find that it rather defeats itself but rather you may come to without really realizing how you may come to suddenly a state of consciousness in which you're just not doing it anymore

[72:48]

for a while and of course the minute you notice it you start doing it again but this state of mind we call Samadhi and it comes to you rather than something you produce it comes to you by not doing something else for a long period of time is this the issue that something you're and you can't get out of the way to practice it more it was in relationship to the fact that your mind has continual thoughts and I guess that sort of raises a question in my mind the point is that you get rid of the thoughts but you disengage from them so that they come and go I guess most of the time when you're playing the tape when you're practicing or wherever you tend to run with whatever's coming and going so it seems to me that it's unrealistic to expect those waves to stop it's just to let them come and go well it's unrealistic to expect them to stop sometimes because that's the way that you can notice that there's

[73:49]

something more fundamental than the waves but it's unrealistic to expect that water will not have waves much of the time but the point is if there's no wind you'll experience clear water sometimes and then for the first time you notice that there's water rather than just waves and the problem is that most people of course identify themselves with the waves of their mind not with the mind itself and so we need to have some experience of our mind directly but and once you've had that your experience of waves or even distracted thinking will not be so difficult for your life it won't have the same it won't catch you in quite the same way because you're not identifying with it anymore so

[74:50]

there is a kind of yogic practice in which you consciously attempt to cut off all thinking but it's not considered to be a buddhist form of meditation and the reason is that it's more like a god's meditation in buddhist parlance or a deva's meditation that is to say it's one of these celestial realms where you feel very very good and there are certain gods or devas that actually live in that realm permanently it's called the formless heaven of no thought and again they're considered to be sort of sorrowful figures because they don't have to grapple with the problem of thinking a little bit and a lot of early western interpretations of buddhist literature thought well that's what buddhism must be about it's awfully dead pessimistic sort of it's the grim pessimism of the east that is sort of somehow tied in with the poverty of

[75:52]

calcutta or something it was a way to dismiss the east but in fact this is i mean it's very likely that there may have been lots of buddhists that got into that it's one of the common mistakes in meditation practice because it's illogical you think well thoughts are the problem so let's stop it that's a very childlike way of thinking about it and that's partly why you need teachers and to identify with this vertical sanda which is vivid to you in the written records of the teachings and the lore that's handed down is that you don't have to go through those kinds of mistakes the historical buddha spent about four or five years it seems perfecting such practices before he decided that it was not ultimately grappling with the basic problem it was rather a kind of athletic

[76:52]

spiritual technique to reach a certain very specialized state of consciousness which you know I saw a picture in an old life magazine of one of these yogis and there are a few of them even today they can bury themselves alive and have one hand sticking out for three or four days they don't seem to breathe they have a heart beat and those kind of super normal capacities can be developed medical science doesn't quite have an explanation for how someone can survive like that but they even wired these people up to EGs and so forth and they stopped they shut down in a kind of state of suspended animation but it has almost nothing to do with Buddhism any more than running a nine eight hundred yard dash makes

[77:53]

you a good person it may or may not it depends on what use you're making of that ability it's conceivable that the world's most deadly criminal could run a nine eight hundred yard dash so Buddhism is fundamentally ethics that's why this class is a good introductory class because really the purpose of this class make people who behave like the Buddha not necessarily people who have some extraordinary spiritual powers they may incidentally have such powers and later they're probably not getting them is it going? yeah oh it wasn't going oh you're getting way too soft oh

[78:53]

you're already sitting in the back i'm sorry i'm going to have to go i'm going to have to go rest i'll see you in the football i think i'm going to

[79:02]

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