Well, stretch. You've all been very patient. In 1969, and it's 1968, I packed up my library and whatever it was I wanted to keep from in Japan, fitted it all into a crate, a couple of crates, and had it loaded onto a ship and set sail from Kobe with my wife and newly born infant son, and set sail by ship back to the Western Hemisphere, leaving Japan for good. Although I made visits back, I was breaking my residence there, ceasing my residence there, and removing myself deliberately back to the

[01:03]

Western Hemisphere. With a number of complex thoughts in mind, one of them had to do with What kind of a role, I was wondering, could I play in helping make a place for a Buddhist practice in North America? By this time, 1968, 69, the San Francisco Zen Center had gotten going really strongly. When I went to Japan, there wasn't a single thing happening. When I came back from Japan twelve years later, San Francisco Zen Center, Suzuki Roshi, I mean Sasaki Roshi with Mount Baldy and in Los Angeles, Maezumi Roshi had gotten started. There was already a lot happening. More than I had even imagined ten, twelve years earlier when I went to Japan, there was quite a bit

[02:07]

of energy afoot. But at the same time, I felt very strongly that I was also reentering my American wilderness space, Turtle Island, the old continent, and that I wanted to be engaged with the emerging environmental movement. This was just before Earth Day. I hadn't been back but two months, and I wrote the Smoky the Bear Sutra and passed it out at a Sierra Wilderness Club conference. The following fall, I wrote a manifesto for how to save the planet. It's a good one too. It's called Four Changes, and it's reprinted in my recent book of essays, A Place in Space. Hey, it's still hard to improve on that. The only thing is doing it,

[03:10]

you know. It's great to have good ideas, but the implementation of them, that's another question. Then in the spring of that year, coming up around the spring of 1970, I was one of the people, as it turned out, who kicked off Earth Day. I gave the Earth Day talk over at Fort Collins, Colorado, Colorado State University. But there were Earth Day talks being launched that day all over the country, and that was the beginning then of the next round in American environmental work, the first round. Actually, it was the third or fourth round of American environmental work. The previous round had been the conservation movement of the 30s, just so that we have a memory that these things have existed before. So I was involved in kicking those things off in the 70s. I found myself wrestling with my divided loyalties to some small degree, namely the same two loyalties I'd always had, which were loyalties to the indigenous ground of North America

[04:19]

and loyalties to the Buddha Dharma, and wanting to honor both, and wanting to find a way to make both work. But I was not so divided as I had been earlier, and I saw what I thought I needed to do to resolve that gap, at least for myself as a personal thing. And so I made the choice in the spring of 1970 not to stay in the city, not to stay in the small town, but to take advantage of an opportunity that came to me to move to the mountains. And with my wife's agreement, we moved to a remote place up in Nevada County in the drainage of the Yuba River watershed on a remote ridge at the 3,000-foot elevation in an area which at that time had almost no population within miles,

[05:23]

way out on a barely passable dirt road, three miles from the nearest small paved road, a piece of wild forested property with absolutely nothing on it. We started with that and decided to build a homestead there and make a base there. And from that base, with the help of many good friends, a remarkable Sangha, and a remarkable natural community has evolved that is definitely in it for the long run, is definitely not going to go away, and is a source of strength and inspiration to me, and in a sense points a possible direction, one of the possible directions for how we might do our Buddhist practice here in North America.

[06:34]

I made a number of readjustments of my thinking and of my attitude when I came back to the Western Hemisphere. One of them was given to me by some American Indian activists at some powwows I went to. I started going to powwows again, political powwows, to reopen old connections and contacts with Native American people. And that was where I learned that North America should better be called Turtle Island. A name, an old Native American name, also, you know, a provisional name to give it for now, until we find maybe something that's even more authentic or more appropriate or older, but Turtle Island does refer to Native American creation mythologies here and there. And it was in use by, and is still in use by, some of the radical Native American groups. And I found it a very useful way of recasting my own thinking and helping to put life in this hemisphere in perspective,

[07:46]

and seeing there to be a strong challenge, both political or cultural, maybe, and spiritual, in finding a home on Turtle Island, on making Turtle Island home for a whole homeless population. Namely, all these Euro-Americans, Asian-Americans, African-Americans, who still haven't figured out quite how to live here, or haven't even figured out that they ought to live here, or that they ought to know how they live here. There's a lot of unsureness, which isn't even recognized by people who live here, and I took that on as a question. Now, what has that got to do with Buddhist practice? I comforted myself with the line from Dogen, which is,

[08:48]

When you find your place, practice begins. Now, what did he mean by that? I decided to take him literally, and say, OK, my place means a real physical place. And I started with Turtle Island. All of North America, that's pretty big. It may not be cosmic. It may not be the whole planet, or it may not be the planet in all of its galaxies, with all of their countless Buddhas and Bodhisattvas out there in all the Chileocosms. But, you know, it's big enough. But in getting practical, I shrunk it down to Northern California, for the most part, and turned myself to the cultivation of possibilities, just within the idea of Northern California, the place of Northern California.

[09:50]

The idea of what possibilities? The possibility of a stable population that will live there for a long time. The possibility of a population that has reconciled and resolved itself with Native Americans, has been accepted by Native Americans, by virtue of its knowledge and its etiquette. A population that is cosmopolitan, and open and tolerant to a much larger world, but also has a good focus on who it is, where it is, and knows where it is in detail. Which is to say, knows the non-human neighborhood, as well as the human neighborhood. Has the good manners to be able to say hello properly to a common flicker,

[10:56]

as distinguished from a ladderback woodpecker, so that you don't insult anybody. And has the capacity to share and work with other people, and to give and help out when necessary, without utopian communal expectations. What we found on San Juan Ridge was that we had not an intentional community. It didn't come about that way. We had an unintentional community, which is much better. Because with an unintentional community, you can drop out of the community for a year if you're getting burnt out, or bored with people, and nobody is going to blame you for it. And then you can drop back in again when you're ready. Remembering that this is something I didn't quite make clear a little earlier, when I was talking about the curve of Mahayana.

[11:59]

The curve of Mahayana admitting larger and larger numbers of beings, and classes of beings into the fold, was also a curve of redefining what Sangha meant, what the Buddhist community was. The Sangha initially meant the bhikkhunis and the bhikkhus. Later it came to mean all good Buddhists who are seriously trying to help each other out, work with each other, and so forth. Finally, the Sangha came to be this organic world, and then it became this world. This is our great world Sangha, our great earth Sangha, by those extensions. Well, that gets to be too big. But in working terms, on the one side, the human community and its non-human neighbors, of a given area that we will take as a place that we're living, is one Sangha, human and non-human together, and maybe a few spirits and ghosts and demons, but we don't have to worry about them too much. And then that includes your own local Buddhist Sangha,

[13:04]

if you've got a little Buddhist Sangha in there somewhere, as we happen to in our area. And we don't really make much of a distinction between, that is to say, those of us who are practicing Buddhists, we don't think of it as a distinction between the Buddhist Sangha and the larger community, because even those people who never come and sit in the Zen Do, will be there for some other purpose at some other time, will be there for some other event, will be there for some other shared need, if nothing more than partying together, but usually there's more than that to do. I should also say that at the time I returned to North America, for reasons which I don't have time to explain today, I was kind of burnt out with traditional formal Japanese temple Zen. Admiring my teachers as much as I did, nonetheless, I didn't feel it was an institution that offered a whole lot to North America.

[14:10]

Nonetheless, there are many places that started replicating that institution here in North America, in varying degrees of fidelity, and I was dubious about that, and so I stayed away. I separated myself from almost all formal Buddhist organizations for the last 30 years, and actually find myself thinking more as an old-style Orthodox Rinzai Zen person with Japanese roots than I do an American Buddhist, because certain things about Japanese Buddhism are looser and more fun. One of the secrets about Japanese Buddhism is, they're not as strict as they look. Another secret about Japanese Buddhism is, they're not as hierarchical as they seem. They talk to each other, listen to each other,

[15:13]

and take everybody's needs into account in an amazing way. In fact, the truth is, in a Rinzai Zen monastery, all monks have an equal vote, no matter how senior they are or how young they are, they all have an equal vote. In a case of voting, and they often do have meetings and vote, a case of voting on an issue means, the Roshi and all of the monks, and the monks cannot vote the Roshi, and the monks can walk out on the Roshi, and they have sometimes, quietly pack up and leave, all of them leave at once, abandoning the monastery. The Roshi serves in a Rinzai Zen monastery, at the will of the monks. The monks actually, legally and theoretically, within the Zen system, are in charge of the monastery, and are responsible for the buildings. When a Roshi dies in Japan, after a year of mourning,

[16:14]

a committee of the monks who are in the group, go out, canvas the country, find some candidates, invite a Roshi to come for an interview, interview the Roshi, decide whether or not they're going to hire him, and hire him. And he serves at the invitation of the monks, and can be disinvited by the monks too, although they rarely do that. Out of respect to the office of Roshi, what they do is simply leave, if they reach a point where they can't agree with him. So, paradoxically, I felt that some Buddhist groups in America were paradoxically more hierarchical, and more tied to power games, than the models they thought they were modeling themselves after. Well, so I kept my distance. But I had plenty to do where I was anyway. And I thought of myself, and this is the model that I'm thinking of,

[17:16]

I thought of my work as being a matter of, say, making a lake. Oh, here it comes again. Rather than making a fish. We need both. The Buddhist centers and groups here, in this country, are engaged in making fish. They're trying to create Buddhists. Buddhist individuals. And my territory, and some of my colleagues' is to make the habitat in which they can swim. To make the community come about. To make the appreciation and understanding of what they're trying to do come about. To transform. These are all valid works. In some cases, we need to transform individuals. In some other cases, we need to transform the mindset of a whole society. And willy-nilly, I ended up, as a writer and as a poet, I suppose, too,

[18:17]

working on the whole society, to some extent. Or at least working on the West Coast society. But not in a vacuum. Not abstractly. Because every step of what I have done in trying to imagine a culture that could take advantage of Buddhism in North America, has been done in terms of the concrete experience of daily life and work with a real community and real politics here in California. Which means visits to the school board. Visits to the county supervisor's office. Writing letters. Going to meetings. And hassling on every possible level with real Indian transigent people. And sometimes with some really great people. And what I saw in Japan was that the network of Zen temples and other Buddhist temples was built on and presumed

[19:21]

a calmly, quietly, working Buddhist lay population of ordinary people who were far more deeply Buddhist than it appeared on the surface. That's what I ended up seeing. And what I would like to see in North America is to some degree a culture of ordinary people who can provide the same kind of community support for those specialized, more highly intense practicers that will want to give themselves 20 years in the Sodo so they can really do their Zen study. That's kind of the territory that I'm thinking of. And at the same time when I think of what a real community would mean, as I think you've already heard me say, it means to me a community that is grounded in its own natural environment as well. And that is, consciously or unconsciously,

[20:24]

living in such a way as to be here in North America on Turtle Island as inhabitants, not visitors, for the next thousand years. It took 500 years from the beginnings of poetry that dealt with nature in China until 500 years later they had some really good landscape poems and they were really getting into writing some poems about the Chinese environment from the 4th century A.D. to the 9th century A.D. We got 500 years to write some good nature poems about America then. This is a long-term project in the kind of artwork or dramatic work, you might call it street poetry, but you might call it field and mountain, I mean street theater, but you might call it field and mountain theater, of making an interesting culture happen here in the Western Hemisphere to which Buddhism would make a wonderful contribution. I thought I saw the sun a little while ago.

[21:29]

To finish this talk, I have a suggestion that at least in terms of local politics, on the state and county level politics, Buddhists, particularly Zen Buddhists, have the power to totally take over politics. Here's how. You've got to meditate a lot. In democracy in this country, actually is worked out, hammered out and fought out at meetings. To do democracy, especially on the county level, you have to go to meetings. Why don't more people go to meetings? Why can't you get people at meetings? What? Boring. Right. They can't sit still and it's boring. Now, who knows...

[22:36]

Believe me, after a session, a meeting in the county supervisor's chamber is fascinating. So there's a key. Some of the people that I'm appreciating right now, this is winding up what I'm saying, that I've been learning from and appreciating just in the last year or so, a few years, Karl Bielefeldt in the Department of Religion down at Stanford, working on Dogen translations, teaching his students, coming up here and working with Zen Center on Texts. A man who splits, who gracefully handles both the academic world and the world of practice and is very modest in the process. Norman Fisher, who I think is another great model of a clear and intelligent,

[23:44]

curious and very bold teacher and leader. I mean, he's bold. You don't even know how bold he is. Ryo Imamura, the son of Kanmo Imamura, who's now in his forties and is a professor of psychology at Evergreen University, who worked for a number of years as a Jodo Shin priest and gave up because his congregation dried up. So he became a university professor. But Ryo is in the process of rethinking and reinventing, I think he is, Jodo Shin, and bringing that around to where it can be shared by a larger circle of Americans. Jim Harrison, the novelist and short story writer and poet. Look at Jim Harrison's little novels, especially the last two books, A Woman Lit by Fireflies and the latest one, Julep. Each one has three long short stories in it. Each one of them is doing Zen in the funniest and most remarkable

[24:48]

sort of redneck intellectual way. This will be pleasure, believe me, if you read these. Andrew Schelling, who is doing the most intelligent and graceful translations of Buddhist words from the Sanskrit these days. These are just a few of the people that I'm appreciating right now. And the Korean poet who came by last month, Ko Un, who was a Zen monk, and then he was a newspaperman, and then he was a political radical, and he went to jail. Now he's married to a lady professor, and all the way through he writes great Zen poems. And to the Hummingbird Sangha and the Wild Turkey Sangha. Now the Hummingbird Sangha, this is a model for you when you get out in the real world. You're already in the real world. This is a model for you when you don't have a big Zen center nearby. The Hummingbird Sangha is a two-person Sangha

[25:52]

over in the Oakland Hills. Michael McClure and his wife Amy that sit on the deck with the hummingbirds every morning and call themselves the Hummingbird Sangha. The Wild Turkey Sangha is me and my wife who sit on our deck every morning and the wild turkeys walk by. So we're going to have a network of two-person Wild Bird Sanghas. This is just the beginning. Thank you all very much for coming today, and it's 5 o'clock or almost 5. As I promised you, you can leave whenever you like. I'm not going to stay sitting here. I'm going to circulate around, and people can talk with me a little further. Maybe before we shut down, a question or two to wind it up. Yes? I wanted to talk to you about this idea of money. It's been talked about a lot, as if it's something that's coming to an end. As if it has some kind of solidity,

[26:57]

and it is a real glamorous word itself. So much quality, full of promise, such as it's very easy to attach a sort of sense of hope. And what I'd like to know is that there is a real, perhaps organic or biological basis in this idea. Do you think something is going to happen? The question is, do I think something is going to happen because the millennium is coming? I'm thinking about crop circles. Crop circles? Or is it just a human conceit? And people have been talking about the millennium. I'm trying to get this question back out so people can hear it, because you were just talking to me. So this young woman is asking, do I think that there's any reason to think that the millennium as an idea, as something that's coming like in two years, or whatever, is something to seriously feel

[28:02]

that there might be something happening or a change. Absolutely not. It doesn't mean a goddamn thing. This is just, whose calendar do you listen to? These are arbitrary time frames established by different cultures. This happens to be the arbitrary time frame that the Roman Catholic Church built on top of the old Roman calendar. Now it's true, some Christians will think that the world is coming to an end at midnight in the year 1999. They did the same thing in the year 999. They went out on the tops of the hills wrapped up in bed sheets and waited for the world to come to an end. And it didn't. So they said, well, maybe it's the next millennium. So, you know, I'm sure we'll see some stuff like that, but not to worry. And on the other side, do not expect utopia to be around the corner either. And I don't know about crop circles.

[29:04]

That's probably teenagers. Okay, it's not. But, I mean, aliens from outer space don't know about the millennium either. You know, that's not their calendar. What do you think is fueling this conversation? That the whole world is having, or at least the Western world, about this idea of something coming to happen. It's Christian eschatology. It's the Christian calendar still lurking in the backs of people's minds. Plus, it's a number, 2000. That's all it is. It's just a number. If it was a different calendar, it would be a different number. The Jewish calendar doesn't say 2000. The Chinese calendar doesn't. The Indian calendar doesn't. Nor does the Japanese calendar. So I consider this, you know, it's an interesting hook to use for a conference. And why not?

[30:06]

But, you know, and it's as real as the reality of us being excited. I mean, I've got some, some 1974 Cabernet Sauvignon that I'm keeping until the night of 1999. We're going to have venison and good red wine. Yeah. I would just like to say that it's deeply reassuring to know that you're out there in the woods doing all these things. Well, it's deeply reassuring that you're down here doing all these things too. Thank you. There's a marvelous way in which the things that you're interested in can represent symbolic ways such as interconnectedness. From science to technology. Thank you. I respect your interest in it, but... But I was just looking at it from the air. Yeah. It doesn't feel like you can conceive of it. It isn't, yeah. I'm looking forward to the year 2015 happening. What's wrong with right now?

[31:08]

Well, this year's the Olympics. LAUGHTER The Millennium is like the Super Bowl. LAUGHTER Well, yeah, we could sell more television time if there was going to be a winner. It's true. LAUGHTER I tell you who's going to be the winners and the losers is the people with the computers that aren't going to get the calendar straight. Yeah? I have a question about the Central Valley. The Central Valley. Yeah. I live in the pier. Uh-huh. And it seems that there is a... There's a practice of undertaking in the Central Valley. I think that's true. Populist expansion and it looks like the growing loss of the Central Valley...

[32:09]

Yeah. You live in Fairfield, huh? Yeah. The topic is the Great Central Valley and what to be done. The loss of croplands, the loss of habitat, which I am very aware of and totally sympathetic to. And just briefly, to speak of it a little bit, to put it in this perspective, most Bay Area people rarely get out into the Great Central Valley. I don't know about you folks here, but there's a huge population of Bay Area people for whom the Bay Area and the coast is their idea of California. And if they do go over to the Great Central Valley, they think of it as awfully flat, awfully hot and awfully ugly, which I can understand, you know, at first sight. But also spending more time there, and I spend a lot of time there now, I think it's beautiful. And it's a most remarkable area. And there are patches of waterfowl refuges

[33:13]

and original vegetation and riparian streamside forests that are just lovely. And the soils are outstanding. And so it is a real concern that the valley is being so trashed, first by industrial farming, and now by suburban spread. And I don't know what can be done about it. What can be done about it, I'll tell you what can be done about it is do not vote for any more water bonds. Do not let any more water be put into the California water plan system. Choke off the water. This is going to be a big issue. They want to get more water loosened up now. They want to build some new dams on the Yuma River. There should be a point at which we say no more messing with the watersheds, no more messing with the water systems, no more commercial selling of water

[34:13]

from northern California to suburbs in central California or all the way down to southern California. That would be one of the ways to manage that. You know, like Putak Creek people managed to get some water back from Lake Berryessa for Putak Creek. What they cut off was Vacaville and Fairfax. So our suburbs have to learn some limits, have to learn some austerity, have to learn to shrink down so that salmon can still be in Putak Creek, which this year salmon were running again in Putak Creek. Putak Creek is a little invisible, ugly, unknown, despised stream that runs through the UC Davis campus. Nobody ever sees it except some of us fanatics. Thanks for raising that. Actually, see, there are answers to some of these things, too. One of them is to understand water politics and water selling politics. I think what Roger said, whiskey's for drinking, water's for fighting.

[35:14]

Water's for fighting. Fighting over. I never heard that. That's good. I'm curious if after you've been in it, or during your reading of the poem, have you at any point thought to yourself, boy, here's a problem. Absolutely. When Alan first read the poem Howl Aloud at the Sixth Gallery in the Marina, he had not long been into it before I felt, and I think a number of other people felt, this is a powerful poem

[36:18]

that is going to change things. It was instantly evident that this is a transformative text that is going to touch people everywhere. And it was true, of course. That was a very strong moment. Yet, you know, three weeks or a month earlier when I went by Alan's little cabin in Berkeley, he was working on this new poem. I said, what are you going to call it, Alan? He said, I think I'll call it Strophes. He was serious. He had not yet himself quite gotten it, you know, what he was doing. It took a while before he realized that he had indeed made something remarkable. And then he called it Howl. Yeah. Oh, that's just a little piece of Chinese history.

[37:28]

Although it's one that, you know, Buddhist scholars remember by heart. Pardon me? Oh, the lesson, let's see, the lesson is what? That you are Zen Buddhists. Or some of you are. Because that's due maybe to the Buddhist persecution of 845. There were a variety of schools of Buddhism flourishing in China. Then they had a five-year stretch of a nutty emperor who came in for a short reign who was totally crazy about Taoists and totally hated Buddhists. And he destroyed temples, destroyed libraries, melted down their bronze bells and their vajras and paintings. It was extremely destructive. Drove monks and nuns out of the temples and monasteries, made them return to lay life,

[38:30]

basically just shattered the Buddhist world in about three years. The only school of Buddhism that rose from the ashes of that was Zen. And they say that it recovered because it did not depend on words and letters. A direct transmission from mind to mind. They had lost their libraries, you see. They had lost their religious icons. They had lost their paintings. And the Zen teachers and the Zen monks and nuns had simply gone back into lay clothing, were working as fishermen and peasants, came back and reestablished their meditation halls with the simplest of stuff and picked up and went on. And so they say because of the way that Zen was taught and transmitted, it was able to recover whereas the other schools didn't. That's an interesting story. So that's why there is Zen Buddhism today. You could say.

[39:32]

Yeah. Yeah. I wanted to draw you into the inter-religious dialogue a little bit in the sense that when you look at your vision for becoming place-based, you draw a lot on being a follower of the Dharma and also understanding the people who came before you, the walking and walking. For those people who are curious, are interested, do we need to run off and all become Buddhists and learn about Native Americans to be place-based here in America? What about those people who are Christians, who are Jews, who are Muslim, and so forth? How do you begin to involve them in this vision that you have for the world, for living in this world? That's a very good question. I hope you heard that. He said for some of these things to come about, does everybody have to become a Buddhist? What about the Christians and the Muslims and the Jews?

[40:34]

I don't know, really, if Buddhism will ever make a big dent in Western culture. It may well not, in any institutional way. But it has a couple of things to offer that are very powerful. In the nature of cultural assimilation and history, these may well be taken up and be, in their own way, quietly transformative in these other traditions. I certainly will hope for that. So what Buddhism has to offer to Christians is that they include an ethic for non-human beings in their moral code. For some inexplicable reason, Judaism and Buddhism accidentally overlooked that. They just forgot it, that we should be kind to the cat and say thank you to the cow and maybe even let them go to heaven.

[41:41]

But that is easily rectified. In fact, there are green eco-Christian groups around right now who are busily talking about let us have an environmental ethic, an ecological ethic within Christianity. They can do it. The Jews can do it, and the Muslims can do it. It's eminently sensible and morally attractive. The other thing, and in doing so, the steps to becoming a person of place here in North America are easier too, then, because you're willing to say we have a relationship and a certain moral obligation to other beings than just humans. So let's take all of that into account. Say that as a Christian, say that as a Jew, say that as a Muslim. The other thing that Buddhism, and in particular Zen, has to offer to the Western world is that they take prayer seriously, is that they learn to pray.

[42:42]

It looks to me like it's been a long time since Christians believed in prayer and made prayer work the way it could work, that took contemplative prayer seriously, because prayer, if you go into it, becomes a form of meditation, becomes a reflection, is a mirror to who you are, that raises the question of self and non-self. And indeed, to go a step further, the Catholic Church has had contemplative traditions in it and still has a few contemplative orders, but the contemplative orders themselves confess, we sort of don't know how to contemplate. How do you do it? And that's why they've been sending their own priests and nuns to sit in Zendos. And that's why there are some secret crypto-Zen Catholic order

[43:48]

or Catholic monasteries where they are quietly doing Zazen, because actually Zazen is the best way to meditate, don't ask me why. I think it's because you keep your back straight. And this is a great gift. This is a great gift to the world of serious contemplative religious practitioners, that they may take this and deepen themselves with it. So the two most important things to the religious world, prayer and the ethic of non-killing, will be and can be beautifully enhanced by the lessons from Buddhism. And if Buddhism can do that much, forget what you call it. That may be what the future has. Let me flip it around and ask then, what does Buddhism have to learn from the other traditions? What does Buddhism have to learn from the other traditions? I don't know quite what tradition Buddhism is learning it from. I guess like equality

[44:49]

in the matter of relationships between men and women. Those were cultural practices in Asia. Buddhism is learning to empower women here in North America because of that grand old American liberal egalitarian impulse that is still with us to some extent. Which has, from the egalitarian liberal standpoint, argued first against slavery, then argued for the equality of women and the vote, and more and more into the feminist world. And some of these people from the liberal mindset are also arguing for animal rights and for a liberal mindset argument for the environment. That is the trajectory of the Enlightenment and Thomas Jefferson's mind frame

[45:53]

at the beginning of the American era. We have actually, the United States has philosophically some very good roots in the Enlightenment, in deism, in the understanding of democracy, and in the intelligence of the founding fathers. Most of that is like sort of gone by the boards and forgotten by lots of people, but they are very good roots. And so we can hope to make use of those and nourish those. Yeah. Marriage as Zen partnership. Well, marriage is certainly partnership. And if two people have a practice, they can work a lot with each other much better. You know, this is something I've seen

[46:55]

is that just the shared basis of a practice will stop a couple from scrabbling with each other, from deliberately or willfully misunderstanding each other, from getting emotional, so that they'll stand back for a second, say to themselves or even say out loud, hey, wait a minute, we know better than this. Take a breath and come back to it much more calmly. But then, you know, that simply is saying that a Buddhist practice gives you a way to take a breath, recover your sanity, and deal better in any way, in any case with the world. You know, that's what it's for. Nyogen Senzaki used to say, you know, our first Zen guy in North America, Senzaki used to say, one breath meditation, all you need. Just have a one breath meditation. In the middle of a big noisy meeting,

[47:56]

stop, have one breath meditation. Try it, you know, if you haven't already. So we bring that, you know, to our relationships with each other, too. Yeah. Yes. I just wondered, what was your opinion of Kerouac and Alan Watts as far as the impact on counterculture in our society? How did they impact you personally at all? Well, first of all, Kerouac and Alan Watts are two very different people. So they each had a different kind of impact. My sense of Jack Kerouac at this point is that he was an extraordinarily good writer with a remarkable sensibility and an extraordinary gift for language and a very interesting and funny kind of insight into human beings and a deeply compassionate heart. And I think that comes through

[48:59]

in all of his novels. But he makes his mark in the world as a writer. He leaves his mark in the world as a novelist, as another American original, another original, unique, sort of eccentric American novelist. And I wouldn't want to make bets, but I would be willing to hazard a guess that he'll be counted among the 10 or 15 most interesting and important novelists of the 20th century, you know, in another 100 years. Alan Watts is a very different kind of person with a very different kind of role. And there's no doubt that he contributed to a very broad interest, curiosity, appreciation for Buddhism and for Zen and for Taoism here in America. Many, many people loved him. He was much admired and much loved. Sweet, gentle, playful,

[50:01]

imaginative, informal, creative, very giving, out there traveling and talking a lot. And occasionally there were people who would criticize him because he hadn't done serious Zen studies or that kind of thing. So what? You know, he did what he did beautifully. And in terms of helping people understand their own situation, he did a great deal of good. And I admire and respect him highly for exactly what he did. And in time, you know, right now people aren't remembering him so much. Boy, he was a big presence in the Bay Area in the 50s and 60s. He was really a big presence. He'll come back. People will understand what Alan did and appreciate it again in the near future, I guess. I think that the time is about to come around, you know, when we're going to be evaluating our West Coast

[51:04]

and our Bay Area cultural history of the last half century. People will be looking back and saying, wow, what a ride, you know, from 1955 to the year 2000. This place was, this whole Northern California and Bay Area was just a remarkable hotbed of artistic, literary, spiritual, political creativity. And people are going to look at that and say, Alan Watts was a big part of that, you know, so I think that's coming. And Suzuki Shunryo Roshi, he'll be right in the middle of that. Richard. Can you say again the name of the redneck intellectual author? Jim Harrison. He wrote the novel called Legends of the Fall, which was made into a movie. He's done a lot of writing. And he is an old Zen student, him and Dan Gerber. There's a wonderfully hidden

[52:05]

and tucked into his stories, but you'll see it. Yeah. I was going to ask if you could talk a little about that connection between Zen and the arts, because there always seems to be that connection in Japan. It seems like it's carrying over here in contemporary American society. Buddhism and the arts. There were a few times and places in the history of Buddhism where art was thought to possibly be an obstruction to spiritual seriousness, but not too many. Basically, unlike Christianity and unlike Islam, the Buddhist world has enthusiastically encouraged artists and has felt that art has a strong role to play, and has thereby launched

[53:09]

an extraordinary richness of art throughout the Indian and Far Eastern world. Just an extraordinary amount of art. Beautiful paintings, sculpture, and then what I take to be also Buddhist art, Far Eastern landscape paintings, East Asian landscape paintings, although they are not explicitly Buddhist. I have come to think of them as Buddhist art, particularly Zen art. Many of the great landscape painters were Zen-trained people, so that's an interesting thing. So, Buddhism is not hostile to art. In what ways, how does it express its non-hostility? Well, one way is, a certain area, a big area of Buddhism, doesn't even think of art as art. It thinks of it as instructional materials. The mandalas and thangkas of Tibet are instructional materials. Those are teaching devices. They help you teach people.

[54:10]

They help the lecturer lecture, and they help you remember what the 12-fold chain of causation is, and what the six paths are, etc. And they are extremely helpful if you are assigned to do visualization exercises. So, that is an entirely worthy territory from the Buddhist standpoint, instructional materials. The Buddhist icons, the Buddha figures and Bodhisattva figures are also, in a certain sense, instructional materials, inspiring instructional materials. But you know, they must have gone beyond that into some very deep meditations to come up with such perfect representations. Guanyin or Avalokiteshvara was seen in somebody's meditation. Every one of those figures that just glows, Manjushri, Amitabha, and the ones that are unique in their ways, like Fudomyo, each one was seen in a meditation

[55:12]

and was revisualized. And the artists then that did that work were honored and are honored in the Tibetan tradition as meditators, as visualizers. They do it, you know, people say, well, they do it by following the diagram, they do it by rote. Within their own tradition, they say, oh yeah, we have the diagram we follow, but you can't really do it until you have, in your meditation, seen it rise within you. Rise again. Come back again. So that's like what we were saying earlier, what are gods? What are deities and spirits? They are things that rise again within us. You have to contact them again. So there is a place, you know, looking at it in this light, within us, where you will be able to see the beautiful Bodhisattva Tara or any number of other figures. And so that's part of the sense of what Buddhist art is and what it does. And in the literary arts, in poetry,

[56:13]

a kind of not too ideological, non-dogmatic sweetness and poetic skill prevails. So that it can be argued that much of the great poetry of Tang and Sungnye Tse China, which doesn't talk about Buddhism much, has a strong Buddhist underpinning, just as the painting does. And then if you read R.H. Blythe on the history of haiku, he feels, and I think in some ways he's justified, that what the haiku tradition ended up doing was some of the highest art in the world. And some true Dharma art, highly refined, highly compressed, arriving at a very beautiful shorthand sense of the phenomenal world with the Dharma woven into it. So yeah, all art and song is sacred to the real,

[57:15]

the mountain spirit says. Or in the noplay called Bananatree, where a banana tree comes out and does a dance, a banana bush, she's the main character in this noplay. And she says, all art is offerings to the Buddhas. So that's one way of looking at it, offerings to the Buddhas. That's a nice question. Well, it's 5.30 now, and maybe we can wind it down, folks can head for home, and I'll hang out here a while longer. Thank you very much.

[58:12]

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