Good morning. We always start with a sound. Oh, this is good. Sound test us. You can all hear? Pretty good. Okay. Sometimes it's not quite so boomy. That's a pun. My name is Lou Richmond, and the ostensible occasion of my lecture today is my recently received Dharma transmission from Sogen Roshi, Mel Weitzman. And so they asked me to talk about it, and I will talk about it among other things. I'm not sure I'll stay on that topic. Topics are not my strong point. In this sense, Senator, when we say Dharma transmission, most people understand that

[01:08]

that's your official recognition as a teacher. You get to wear a different colored robe, carry sticks, things like that, the outward manifestations. In my case, it's a little more complicated, maybe. And to explain that, I need to go back many years. I came to this place in 1967. Actually, I came to the Berkeley Zen Do, and my first teacher was Mel Sogen. So that was the beginning of everything, the middle of the 60s. I was a seminary student in Berkeley and saw an ad in the Berkeley barb for Zen. Does the Berkeley barb still exist? No. It was big in those days, believe me. That was where he went for everything. So I'm one of the people that came to Zen through a newspaper ad, very American.

[02:09]

And I sat with him, this small group in his living room, as often is the case. And one day I was sitting, and I heard some unusual sounds. I heard the rustling of material, and somebody sat in the head seat. And then I heard, I was close enough so I could hear this person breathing. And I could hear the regularity and, anyway, I could hear the breathing, very slight sound. And at the end of the time, I turned around, and it was Suzuki Roshi. He often came to the satellite Zendos in those days. So that was my first meeting with him. And I was his student here until his death in 1971. I have the dubious honor of being the most junior of all his ordinees.

[03:13]

I'm the 16th of his 16 ordained disciples, done shortly before his death. There is a tradition in Buddhism about the 16th disciple of the Buddha. He was so stupid. He couldn't get anything right, but eventually he was greatly enlightened. So I take some heart from that. And I lived here in this building in Tassajara in Green Gulch. I did, you know, I see that people are following that same path. We have three great, beautiful centers to practice, and so people are still doing that. And I actually had a teaching role in the last few years at Green Gulch. And that culminated in my beginning the preparations for Dharma Transmission,

[04:14]

to officially recognize me as a teacher. That was 20 years ago. Well, clearly something happened. 1983 was not a good year for Zen Center in many respects. And that was the year I left. And to this day, I think a lot of the old timers, those of whom who are still around, don't really understand why. And to tell you the truth, I don't really understand why. I don't think I could tell you, if you asked me, why anyone does things. But for the purposes of today, and for the purposes of elucidating the reality of Dharma Transmission, I'm going to try, because I think it matters, and I think it has relevance 20 years later to all of you. Many people think that I left in anger and disgust because of many things that happened during that time. That's probably true,

[05:17]

to some extent. But I think that if I'm honest with myself, and I had many years to look in the mirror and try to figure out whether I was being honest with myself, I think that at root it was time to leave. And I want to talk a little bit about this time to leave, because it's important in the life of a Zen practicer to know when it's right to do things. And it also relates to something else, which is a little harder to articulate, which I'll call authenticity, or personal authenticity. It was never really my idea to be ordained as a priest, which is something I'll come back to, ordination.

[06:24]

But it was Suzuki Roshi's idea, and I loved him, so I went along with it. And my own view is I think he was hoping to capture as many of us as possible before he died, so we'd be hooked in these masses of black cloth. So, among other things, I think I was angry at him, too. He ordained me and then died. I mean, it sounds ungrateful to say you're angry at somebody for dying, but you know children, when their parents die, among other things, they're angry, and it's a very human reaction, you know. It's a bad stroke of fate. And you're angry about it. But after 15 years here, doing the practice with great vigor and attention,

[07:28]

I think, in a sense, the events of 83 were a kind of excuse or catalyst for me to vamoose. I think what really was going on, as much as anything, was there were parts of me, and I'm a rather complex person, that weren't digested in this new, strange, exotic thing called being a Buddhist priest in America. And I didn't... At a certain point, I felt I had a really bad case of cultural and spiritual indigestion. You know, I'd taken it all in, whole hog, literally almost, and swallowed it, and it didn't take for a whole lot of reasons. There were parts of my life that I'd simply thrown on the sidewalk in order to be ordained, one of which was my life as a musician, which was really my first life.

[08:34]

And I think my music life has helped me all along in practice. I think musicians often take to this practice in a very good way, and I met some, when I was here over the holidays to do my Dharma transmission, I met some very wonderful people here who were musicians, and I thought, oh, the attraction continues. Musicians keep coming to Buddhism. I had a family and a young child, and I don't think that at all, my family life and my responsibilities to them had at all been integrated or digested in my practice, nor had it been, I think, in the institutions at large. That was a very experimental and new time with Buddhism in America, and the whole notion of family life juxtaposed with a kind of outward tradition, a tradition of asceticism and kind of proto-celibacy. I say that because we see how well celibacy works in other religious traditions.

[09:41]

My conclusion is that in many cases, particularly for men, celibacy has the effect of just driving your sexuality underground. And so it comes out in unhealthy ways. Much better, I think, to just deal with it. But anyway, there were lots of things in my life that I felt I needed time to integrate, to absorb, and so I left, and I did something kind of unusual. I wanted to... and some of this was just emotion, but some of it was, I think, real. I wanted to find out how much of all of this, all of this Zen stuff, I could divest myself of and still be with it. So I took off my robes, and I grew my hair, and I got a job in corporate America, and I didn't sit, and I didn't do anything that I used to do at all.

[10:51]

And I got sick. I got very sick. I had cancer and nearly died. And through all of that, I discovered that there was something that I couldn't get rid of from this practice. I think a couple of things. One were the vows that I took, the bodhisattva vows that you take when you're ordained. And the other was my love for my teacher, Suzuki Roshi. He still, to this day, is the most important person in my life and a person that I greatly respect almost more than anybody. So those two things, my vows and my relationship to my teacher, seemed to be ineradicable in some way, which was kind of a surprise. I thought, well, I can get rid of all of it if I want to. I'm the boss. I can do anything I want. Well, I couldn't, really. And that was an interesting and very sobering lesson,

[11:55]

that there's something about this practice that doesn't depend on outward form. It doesn't depend what you look like, the clothes you wear, the place you live, the kind of job you have, whether you have a wife or a partner or not. And I think that realization culminated in this time, when I finally was willing to, in a sense, come back and complete what I began 20 years ago. In the meantime, I've done a lot of things. I've been a corporate executive. I still own my own software business. I'm still a musician. I have a wonderful family and now a 28-year-old son. And after 20 years, the role of the Dharma transmission between Sojin, Roshi, and myself

[13:06]

has a totally different feeling than it did when I was preparing for it 20 years ago. I have no need for it, you know, for myself. It doesn't matter to me in a certain fundamental way. I have my way of being in the world and a way of professing my understanding of Dharma. I write books, give talks. But it does mean something to me in another sense, which is that it means something to other people, and it means something particularly to the people here. And so a lot of my experience of going through it and being willing to acknowledge myself as a teacher and be acknowledged as a teacher is a way of, as Mel said to me, and I think it was very... Mel and I go back 35 years, so I can say pretty much anything to him and he to me.

[14:11]

And he said at one point, because the meat of this experience is not just the ceremony, which is very real and hard to verbalize, but it's also the preparations to it and the relationship of the two people involved. He said, you know, Lou, you're a very creative and imaginative person, but it's good to do things with people. And I really took that to heart. Mel is a wonderful teacher in that regard because he's so easy with people, and that really is, at the end, the root of any religious leader, is to be with people. And I think that a lot of what has changed and transpired within me is the willingness to once again be with the people here at Zen Center, which is my spiritual home, and let them be with me,

[15:13]

and do things like give this sort of talk with my robes on, which for years I wouldn't wear. Thank you. There's something else too. I think part of why I had such a strong case of indigestion, poisoning is probably too strong a word, but indigestion about all of this, is that I was very idealistic, as many of us were in those days,

[16:16]

and I had a sense that, well, you know, religious corruption is everywhere in the West, but at least in this Zen world, things are better. The teachers, the ancestors that have brought us this tradition, are really quite unusual people. They're special people. And probably that's true, but it's also true that that idealism is maybe an artifact of it's always easier to idealize something outside of your own culture. And just today in the New York Times, there was a big spread, this is now a mainstream thing, about a book that came out a few years ago called Zen at War. Do any of you know this book? Some of you do, many of you do. So it's now official, it's in the Times. During the war, Japanese Zen was very supportive, actively supportive of the militarist government.

[17:19]

Many of the leading figures who brought Zen to America, like D.T. Suzuki and Yasutani Roshi, are, through their own statements and writings, are deeply implicated in all of that. There are a lot of antisemitism that you can find, virulent antisemitism. It's pretty bad, and it's very demoralizing if you're at all idealistic. But one of the things you do in this Dharma Transmission, which is seven days, is you, every day, you bow, you do full bows to every one of the people from Buddha that they list. They have a list of the so-called unbroken line through India, China, and Japan to us. And as you do it, you know, at least for me, you realize each bow is a whole lifetime. It's not much for a whole lifetime, you know.

[18:23]

There's 92 of these people in one life, two lives. Can you imagine that your life is sort of summed up by one bow? And you imagine how it really was as opposed to how we imagine and how the propagandists of any religious tradition always try to smooth things over. You realize, you know, we've had trouble, serious trouble, in getting this organization to survive and to prosper, and this is true of many other Buddhist groups in America. And we could think, well, gosh, back then it was better. People weren't like this. But, you know, I don't think that's true. I think that in any tradition like this, there is the ideal and then there's the human realm, and they join in some way. I think that in the history of Buddhism, there have been bad teachers.

[19:24]

There's been betrayal. There's been robbers who come in and murder everybody in the temple. There have been wars. There have been famines. There have been all sorts of things that we don't really have in the hagiographic histories of all these people. And it made me feel better, actually, to realize that I was in the company of a bunch of human beings who tried very hard to continue the teaching of the Buddha in spite of everything. And I've often been asked about Suzuki Roshi. People say, well, gosh, he sounds like a saint, you know, must have had something wrong with him. Well, he had his many faults just like we all do. He really did. They weren't the usual sort of faults that you might expect,

[20:27]

but they were other kinds. And yet he sacrificed so much to come here, really probably his life. It probably shortened his life a good deal to go through the strain of all of this. But I think that what made him in the end a great teacher, a creative teacher, a teacher who was able to make a real connection with Westerners, totally outside of his culture, was that he suffered a great deal in his life. Many, many bad things happened to him. I won't go into them. You can read about it in Crooked Cucumber. That's his biography that David Chadwick wrote. It's interesting for people like me who knew him to read that book and compare how he was with us with how his life really was. None of that showed. It really had all been hammered out of him through the suffering, the human suffering that he went through.

[21:29]

And he was all the way for us. And it's a real inspiration. I think that there is actually a tradition within some kinds of Zen that after your formal training in the monastery and so forth, you leave, and really leave. You don't just leave to become some famous Zen teacher. You leave to be nobody. And if you're not willing to leave, they kick you out. Go. Be gone. And there is a phrase in Zen for monks who become attached or stay too long in the formal practice places. It's called the Black Cave of Demons or something like that. Anyway, for better or for worse, that's what I did. I'm a real prodigal son. I left and left quite completely and was content to be nobody for quite a while. Nobody in this context, anyway. I became somebody in some other context.

[22:31]

And now I'm back at least in some certain way and feeling okay about it, pretty good about it. I think that it's funny to come back to a place you haven't been to in a long time, in this case 20 years. Although I've been here occasionally, but not really. I haven't spent time here. All the trees are 20 years taller in the courtyard, and yet I look around and people are bustling up and down the hallways, making the food, going to Zazen, doing almost exactly the same things I did, opening the door with some trepidation, who's out there, you know. And I realized, you know, it goes on. It goes on. One time I was here doing all this, and now other people are here. It's very comforting. And whatever we may think about the health or lack thereof of the institution and all that goes with it, there's something quite remarkable about creating a place like this

[23:40]

where people can come for the Dharma. It's not easy to do. There's only rare times when the resources and all of that come together to make it happen, but here it is. And we have just not one place like this, but three. One of the things I did during my time in the wilderness, so to speak, was I spent a lot of time hanging out with American teachers from other Buddhist traditions, Vipassana, various Tibetan traditions, because I wanted to find out what Buddhism looked like without the Japanese cultural coating that was on it here. And really my question was, or my koan was, what is really the core common practice that all of these traditions carry? Because then I felt if I knew that, I could come back here and be able to recognize in our tradition what things were authentically Buddhist and what things were more cultural.

[24:42]

So, for example, the robe, this brown piece of cloth, that's universal in every Buddhist tradition. There's some idea of a robe that you wear over your left shoulder. But this, this is Chinese court clothes from the 13th century. This is not, you won't see this in Tibet. You won't see this in Burma. And this is, under here, this is Japanese. This is a kimono. But this is Buddhist. And that's not a trivial thing for me to understand. And I also, many of these groups and teachers have thrown off and set aside the whole priest side of their traditions. So, for example, Jack Kornfield, who teaches up at Spirit Rock, when he was in Burma with his teacher, he was a monk. He took the 256 precepts. He shaved his head.

[25:44]

He lived very, very ascetically. But here, nobody at Spirit Rock is ordained as a priest. And I think the feeling there is in those traditions, to be a monk is to be without family, without possessions, you know, more like a Franciscan monk, really seriously a monk. And if you're not a monk, you're a layman. But it's interesting that the sense of transmitting the Dharma, the sense of recognizing the next generation of carriers of the Dharma, that is common. You see that in all the other traditions. There is some formal and informal way that Dharma transmission occurs in the Tibetan traditions, in the Vipassana tradition, in all the other traditions. So that is actually more fundamental, I think, than priesthood, which in our particular lineage is rather important. And Suzuki Roshi ordained people as priests,

[26:45]

and his successors have continued to do it. And now we have, throughout the country, I think, how many, more than a hundred or two hundred people who are ordained in the Soto Zen lineage, but who all live as laymen, most of whom have families, etc. So it's a little bit hard to understand exactly what it means. We're still figuring that out. But when I finished the Dharma transmission ceremony and all that went with it, I realized, you know, this is one of the core things that all the Buddhist traditions have, and I can feel comfortable with that. It is true that I was ordained as a priest, and inside I still feel like one. And my intention is to continue to be responsible for transmitting the Buddha Dharma to America. And I'm particularly interested in transmitting it at a level which will actually impact the society in real time.

[27:48]

This is my particular interest. I think one of the things that I felt very hard to articulate then, easier to articulate now, when I left 20 years ago, and I saw this in other Buddhist groups, is that I think those of us who come to Buddhism in America tend not to be too comfortable with conflict. You know, we wanted a quiet place where people could be kind to one another, you know, a kind of refuge or sanctuary, in a way, from conflict. And that's fine. I think that's okay. I was that kind of person. I think that for a certain period of time it's very important. And one of the things that practice places are, if nothing else, are an artificial world where the ordinary rough and tumble of conflict out in the world is attenuated, so you can feel what it's like when people actually are kind to each other.

[28:55]

But in the end, I think, and it's always been the case, I think that the most important role for Buddhists in the world is to know about conflict more than anyone. Nobody in the world knows how to deal with conflict. We've made almost no progress. You know what I mean? In the Middle East we see people fighting over land and God, and it's the same as it was in Roman times, Greek times, and you look at the solutions or so-called people come up with, it's the same as it was back in a thousand BC, basically suicide bombers, better weapons, now it's nuclear weapons, anthrax. And it may kill us all before too long. And maybe in one sense one of the reasons why Buddha Dharma has suddenly sprouted almost from nothing in the West

[30:01]

is because it's so necessary, because we need some tradition of wisdom that can help us understand a better way, a deeper way, to deal with human conflict. So my feeling, and myself certainly, is that you spend a certain amount of time in a training place in which conflict is rather artificially, in a kind of incubation sense, removed from the situation. One of the things you still see in a place like this is everybody bows to each other a lot. And you could do worse than start with that as a method of, when you bow to somebody it's very hard to kill them in the next instant. So we start with that, but I think that part of this notion of being kicked out or going out and being in the world is you get to test

[31:04]

how well the incubation has taken. And you begin to realize that part of your responsibility includes modeling what you know against the reality of conflict in all shapes and sizes, interpersonal conflict, institutional conflict, nation-state conflict, the conflict that is everywhere. I actually think that Buddhist centers should be willing to open themselves up to a little more conflict within themselves, because it's good practice at the very least. I think one of the reasons why things blew up so badly here in 83, which most of you probably weren't here for, is that we didn't know how to deal with the implicit, under-the-surface conflict that was there between people.

[32:07]

The shadow, you might say, of the organization, the practice, the institution. People saw things and couldn't talk about them. People experienced things and had to suffer privately. This is not healthy. This is not good. This is what leads to things like what happens in the Catholic Church. It's secret, the priests know better, don't say anything, etc., etc. This is true in almost any... Ivan Illich, who recently died and was a great writer in the radical tradition, said that an institution is defined as an entity whose activity is to defeat the purpose for which it was created. So I'm gratified to see, not just in this center, but in many Buddhist centers, that we're getting through the phase of, you might say, imitative practice,

[33:12]

where we're doing it just the way the Asians did it, and we're starting to be more ourselves within it, Americans. And this is good. One of the things that has to happen for practice to really flower, for practice to really work, is your whole being has to come to it. You can't leave things out. There can't be a quality of performance that doesn't include how you really are. And this is the flowering or maturing of practice. There's a great story I love to tell about this. I've told it before here, I think I'll tell it again, about a student at Tassajara in the early days. You know, Tassajara eats with their yoki bowls, very, very strict vegetarian diet, mostly rice and beans, tofu. But then they have town trips,

[34:13]

and you can buy all manner of candy and goodies to keep in your cabin. So, if you look at what people really eat, they eat a combination of very strict monastery food in the zendo, and then in their cabins they eat peanut butter and Twinkies. I dare say it's probably still the case to some extent. Well, this student felt very guilty about it. He felt that he was putting on an act to eat that way in the zendo and then have his Reese's peanut butter cups in his room. So, one day at midnight, one night, he brought all of his town trip food, all of his candy, into the zendo. He sat down in Zazen, he opened his bowls, and he put all the candy in his bowls, and he ate them that way with all the chants and everything, you know. Well, I find that very impressive, that he had the courage to do that,

[35:15]

and the realization that he wanted to bring who he really was to his cushion. He didn't want to just be an artificially good Zen monk. He wanted to be himself. And I think that was partly why I left, too. I didn't have a chance to be all of who I was here, I didn't think, and the circumstances weren't right. And so I spent many years slowly incorporating, testing out, does my practice really reach this area? Do I want it to reach this area? One of the first things I noticed when I went into the corporate world and got a job is, A, how angry people were a lot of the time, and B, how often they expressed it, and C, how much that was kind of all right. Very different than here. At that time, maybe it's changed, but at that time, it wasn't okay to be angry.

[36:17]

Nobody expressed it, and it wasn't okay. I'm not saying it was okay. Some of this anger was quite destructive, but you'd go into a meeting, and people would pound on the table, they'd yell, they'd express themselves, and I started to do it, too. And I thought, well, I'm feeling much more like myself. All my 15 years of Zen training hasn't totally eliminated my capacity to get angry, and it felt kind of like a relief. And I didn't feel like I wanted to show anything of my Buddhist years in that situation, but it's interesting that somehow, over time, people saw it. They would come into my office and close the door, and they would say, you know, I'd like to talk to you about something, or either I can't really talk to anybody else. And, you know, I didn't want to be a priest, but being a priest kind of came to me in that situation, and I began to realize that that was another way in which what I'd done here couldn't be easily rubbed off, that it changes you.

[37:21]

It changes you in some fundamental way. So, I guess I could say, what's different now? Part of what's different is I don't feel like I'm putting on a performance anymore. Suzuki Roshi once said, when you are you, then Zen is Zen. What does that mean? Very cryptic. But, you know, many times things your teacher says, it takes 20 or 30 years to figure it out. Not because it's that mysterious, but because he's speaking from a place where you kind of have to live it. You can't just understand it with your mind. And, somebody, a very good Dharma friend of mine

[38:29]

who had Dharma transmission somewhat before me, some years before me, said that part of his understanding was that when you're really ready to thoroughly accept who you are completely in the context of the practice, then you're ready. But that's a very tall order. It takes a long time. I'm 55 years old, and I feel like I'm in many ways just beginning to understand certain things. And why should I be surprised? No one said that this is a quick fix. It's not. And it's not that I think that we Buddhists can fan out into the world and snap our fingers and make the conflicts that are destroying us all go away. We can't. It won't happen. But, over time, if we stay with it, and if we're willing to be with all of it,

[39:30]

there's a great poem by Lew Welch called, well, it's often thought of as being called, Ring of Bone, but it's called, I Saw Myself. I saw myself, a ring of bone, in the clear stream of all of it. And I vowed to be with all of it. This is a wonderful expression, I think, of what we're really about here. It's not about outward form exactly, though the outward forms are important. It's not about having some great spiritual experiences, although that's important too. You tend to forget about them after a while. It's about being willing to bring all of it in, whatever it is, and not leave anything out. So it doesn't look so good, maybe, for a long time. Suzuki Roshi loved these ungrammatical expressions in English. He was quite really fantastic with the English language,

[40:36]

but he had certain phrases, one of which was, looks like good. And looks like good, I've been trying to write about this, looks like good is a genuine koan, really. It's something you can't quite get your head around. But looks like good, looks like good. When I was doing my various things in the seven days, there were various people here that were assigned to help me, and there were things they were supposed to do, put down mats, light candles, and stuff. And they didn't do it quite the way it was supposed to be, maybe forgot the candle, or the incense wasn't lit, or something. So maybe it didn't look so good in a certain way. If you think that good means somehow doing it a certain way, there's a very strong temptation in Buddhist practice to fall into looks like good.

[41:39]

You want your outward appearance to be amenable to people. You want to be well-regarded. You want to be a light. You don't want to make a mistake. But looks like good is only a stage. There's a certain point at which looks like good can't be sustained, and something else takes its place. Some of you may know that I was very ill a few years ago, and my brain was damaged, and so I didn't look good at all. My behavior was very strange, and I cried all the time, and I was frightened of everything. It's extraordinary how damage to your brain can totally change you. All of that went away after a while, but at the time I just felt so humiliated that I didn't look at all good to anybody, at least of all to myself.

[42:40]

I got to learn how much I really still depended on looking good in some way, or being competent, or being able to do things well. One of the big lessons of that time was realizing, to my immense surprise, that people would love me even if I didn't look so good, and also that it's not a bad thing to be quite deeply humiliated at various times in your life. That's not so bad. You can learn a lot from that experience, just as you can learn a lot from being deeply betrayed. To be deeply betrayed by a person for whom you have great regard and whom you trust is a terrible thing, and there's no way to make it not terrible. But as far as this looks like good thing is concerned, it really helps to cut through that difficult stage. I wish I had brought, I forgot to bring,

[43:42]

a wonderful poem that a Tibetan Buddhist American teacher just sent me. It's by a 19th century hermit poet in Tibet named Patrul. The poem is called, Advice to Me from Myself. And it's just so great. I wish I had brought it, but maybe if I paraphrase it in my own words, it will even be better. Basically, he's a teacher, he's had Dharma transmission, he has students and all of that. In the poem he says, What do you think you're doing? You can't even meditate and you're trying to teach people how to do it. You hit your little bells, you do your ceremonies, you do your visualizations. It's all about as valuable as goat shit. Stop trying to fool people. Stop making all these plans. He just goes on and on like that. And at the end, he basically is putting himself down in a certain way,

[44:46]

but very humorously and very charmingly, saying, you know, none of that really matters. What I'm really trying to say is, you have to give up everything, everything, everything. That's his last word at the end of the four pages. It's a marvelous statement of somebody who's free of a lot of things. And at the end he says, Advice from Patrul exactly according to his capacities. He said, Don't worry if you can't understand Buddhism. Try anyway. May it be fruitful. That's how he ends it. It's very inspiring, very inspiring. I'm sure he was a wonderful teacher and considered very wise by his students. But inside he could laugh at himself in such a wonderful way

[45:46]

and didn't take himself at all too seriously. This is not something you can learn how to do from the outside. You have to bang around in your own life in whatever way it takes. And sometimes it may take something quite strong before you get to that place. So, I haven't really talked about Dharma transmission at all in an explicit sense, and that's okay. One of my other Dharma buddies, when asked about it in a meeting, said, Well, we don't talk about it. We don't talk about it because it's mysterious, although it is. You pretty much say, Well, when you've been married 30 years, we can talk about it. It's not like when you're with your spouse it's so mysterious. It's just that there's 30 years in there.

[46:48]

How can you possibly explain how it is? I've been with my root teacher, Mel Weitzman, for 35 years. I can't explain how it is that I'm willing to be with him in this context. It's mysterious from the outside, but in the inside, it's just the mysteriousness that goes with any intimate human activity. And there's no activity more intimate than the work we do on the cushion. We think at the beginning that we're meditating. It's us, it's I there on the cushion meditating to be different. But the more you meditate, the more you realize that this I you think is there is not exactly what you thought. And when we begin to understand that, we're on a path that lasts forever.

[47:48]

And as I discovered to my somewhat sure grin when I left here, you can't get rid of it. So don't start unless you're willing to see it through. And I see for all of you it's already too late. So this business of the I and how the practice of meditation starts to poke holes in it is something that Buddhists have been writing about and talking about for millennia. I'm actually going to be giving a workshop here two weeks from today in which we will look at some of the ways that Buddhist teachers and Buddhist monks in various ways have tried to help us, orient us in time and space. This orientation is sometimes called the Abhidharma. And the Heart Sutra that you chant every day, Avalokiteshvara Bodhisattva, is all about the Abhidharma,

[48:52]

although you wouldn't know it to read it. The simplest answer you can say if somebody asks you what Buddhist practice is all about is you can say, well, it's not what you think. But if you think this or that, it's okay. I'm kind of notorious, I suppose. Somewhere back there in those dark days I wrote an essay called The Myth of Dharma Transmission. And I tried to elucidate and poke holes in a lot of the assumptions, a lot of the thinking people had about what it meant. And now, of course, that's come back to haunt me in a certain way. But I still believe the basic point that I made, which is the essence of it is two people who know each other well.

[49:54]

The only addition I would make to that statement is that even if they don't know each other well, it's all right. So thank you for being with me this morning, and good luck.

[50:14]