I come to face the truth and not to type those words. Good evening, everyone. I am speaking about the ten great precepts. Tonight, number two, not stealing. Many years ago, I was down and out in Los Angeles, working at everybody's bookshop for $1.15 an hour, which was minimum wage in those days, and living at the nearby YMCA. Sometimes, after supper,

[01:09]

I would drop in at a neighborhood bar for a couple of beers, and one evening, a well-dressed middle-aged man sat down next to me, very drunk, flashing a wallet stuffed with bills. The bartender served him a drink and then told him to go home and take care of his money. The man told me that he was from Sacramento and asked me to help him get back to his hotel. I wasn't sure about the direction. It was just down the block, so I walked him back to his hotel, and because he seemed to be having trouble walking, I went on upstairs with him to his room, and then he seemed to be getting sick,

[02:12]

so I went in with him. He used the bathroom, came out, and without a word, took off his gold cufflinks, took out his gold watch and his big fat wallet, and put them all in the dresser, changed into his pajamas, jumped into bed, and went immediately to sleep, leaving me to make my way out of the hotel alone. Well, I was not tempted to steal his valuables, but I don't know whether or not this was because I was morally strong or because I didn't have the nerve. Certainly, I fantasized for months afterwards about that wallet on the dresser. It would have been so easy to help myself to a year's salary.

[03:16]

It can be said that in my mind, I violated the second precept many times during the months that followed. Looking back on it, I realized that I also stole from myself in the course of the incident. It was generous of me to guide the drunken man back to his hotel, but it was reckless to accompany him to his room. I might better have raised a finger to the night man at the desk, and the hotel people would have seen my companion to bed. I was putting myself, the agent of compassion, in jeopardy quite unnecessarily. I was endangering my ability to help others at a later time. For suppose the drunken man had made some sort of fuss

[04:20]

while we were alone in his room, perhaps falsely accused me of something. If I am to have a police record, let it be for something I can justify from the ground of my dojo. There is another kind of stealing from oneself that happens right in the dojo, and that is the theft of time. Yamamoto Genpo Roshi used to call this the greatest felony of all. We steal time from our practice on the cushions to indulge in all kinds of silly business, and the biological clock ticks away relentlessly. We also take time from our lives as bodhisattvas

[05:22]

for all kinds of foolishness, altogether out of proportion to our natural needs for leisure. These are habits, beings with their own life that we must acknowledge and engage in dialogue. Time to sit. You can announce. I'll check you later. Fun time with friends and family has its place. Be firm, but be patient, and your time-wasting habits find their outlet in recreational activities. Back to move, or back to shikantaza, back to breath-counting. You can announce there on your cushions, and the old nick that wants you to take time

[06:25]

to rearrange the furniture in your apartment will go on hold. There is an appropriate time for that kind of visualization also. Still another kind of stealing on your cushions lies in the attitude of expectation. Practice is a step-by-step process, the perfection of character, as Yamada Roshi has said. But each step is full and complete in itself. When your step is just one of a series and nothing more, then the goal is never reached, and your life is wasted. Each breath, each point in the sequence of your count of your breath,

[07:33]

each move, that is the Dharma body itself. Don't deprive yourself. Not stealing, like other precepts, describes the mind, which comes forth in tune with circumstances from a position of rest. Bodhidharma said, self-nature is subtle and mysterious. In the realm of the unattainable Dharma, not having thoughts of gaining is called the precept of not stealing. Mind is peace, and because it is peace, it is also broad and generous. There is no thought of obtaining,

[08:36]

so there is full appreciation for the thing as it is. Dogenzenji said, the self and the things of the world are just as they are. The gate of emancipation is open. Just as they are is the realization how stuffed with one hundred dollar bills that wallet is. There is no thought now or later of putting them into my pocket. This is the broad and generous spirit of letting be, the perfection of charity or giving over,

[09:37]

the dana paramita. It is also the revolution that overturns conventional behavior. Stealing is a pervasive element of our lives and of the institutions in our society. For example, a large American corporation raises vegetables in the Sahel, near the Sahara Desert. These vegetables are flown to Europe where they fill the salad bowls of the affluent. The African workers on this giant farm are searched at the end of each day to be sure they are not smuggling vegetables home. Yet the corporation land they cultivated,

[10:39]

they cultivate, was once their own for gleaning and grazing and now they live at the very edge of starvation. There are many other examples. The economy at home and abroad is manipulated to provide a base of unemployment so that competition for jobs will keep wages at a minimum and stockholders will realize maximum profits. The natural world is exploited for short-term benefit to a fortunate majority. I have fortunate in quote marks. Fortunate minority, I should say. While other people, animals, plants, and the earth organism itself, suffer. A strong case could be made against exploitation economics.

[11:41]

At the same time, exploitation is not something outside my mind or yours. Just a few minutes of television is enough to show each of us how easily we are seduced by appeals for consumption. Mahatma Gandhi says, We are not always aware of our real needs and most of us improperly multiply our wants and thus unconsciously make thieves of ourselves. If we devote some thought to the subject, we shall find that we can get rid of quite a number of our needs, our wants. One who follows the observance of non-stealing will bring about a progressive reduction of his own wants. Much of the distressing poverty in this world

[12:46]

has arisen out of the breaches of the principle of non-stealing. Notice that Gandhi does not speak of reducing possessions, though that naturally follows, and it certainly did in his case. He speaks of reducing needs, and needs arise in the mind. Our world faces the gravest of crises because we have, all of us, become involved in a conspiracy to deplete irreplaceable resources in order to satisfy needs established in that very depletion process. As time goes on, oil and minerals will become scarcer and the kind of fascism evident in my example from the Sahel may become more commonplace

[13:47]

at home as well as abroad. The Gandhian scholar, the Finnish scholar, Unto Tatinen, says, there are two ways of avoiding war. One is to satisfy everybody's desire, the other to content oneself with the good. The former is not possible due to the limitations of the world, and therefore there remains this second alternative of contentment. Not stealing is contentment. No thought of obtaining. This starts much deeper in the mind than deciding to do without luxuries. It is none other than the open gate of emancipation,

[14:51]

anuttara samnyak sambhogi, the mind that experiences the transparency of all things and their intimate interrelationships. The application of this experience is more than sending an occasional check to charity. Here again, Gandhi is instructive. In India, we have got three million people who have to be satisfied with one meal a day, and that meal consisting of a chapati containing no fat in it and a pinch of salt. You and I have no right to anything that we have until these three millions are clothed and fed better. You and I, who ought to know better, must adjust our wants and even undergo voluntary starvation in order that they may be nursed, fed and clothed.

[15:56]

And as Gandhi made clear in his own life, it is in the social movement to reduce needs that there is hope for political change. Gandhi's communities can inspire our own dana paramita sangha. Some people suppose that because competition and acquisition are used in the exploitation of others, enlightened people should seek the ideal of non-competition and non-acquisition. Many years ago, Ann Aitken and I were teachers in a private boarding school which was established on the principles of non-competition. It didn't work. The young people were not stretched. Many became lazy.

[17:00]

Others found destructive, underground ways of competing. Competition can be very healthy. After all, conversation itself is a kind of competition and at its best in Zen dialogues, it saves all beings. When the self is forgotten, then the play is the thing and everybody gets high. And as to acquisition, Gandhi and the Buddha himself had a few possessions. Competition sharpens our realization and certain possessions are adjuncts of life. At what point do they go wrong? Well, I'll tell you a story. In Japan, as you know, monks are called Onsui,

[18:04]

cloud and water, and the implication is that they have no home, no ego needs, and no attachments. However, they do have a few possessions, a couple of anthologies of classic Zen cases, a set of bowls, toilet articles, robes, much as the Buddha did himself. When I visited Ryutaku Monastery in 1964, I found the community quite upset because a new monk was compulsively stealing the few possessions of the other monks. Each day, the senior monks held long consultations with the Roshi about this problem. I imagine that the literal position,

[19:07]

no stealing, or he violated the second precept, and the Buddha nature position, that there is no stealing and nothing to be stolen, were argued in these discussions, perhaps. But somehow, the outcome was the middle way of compassion. A year later, I visited the monastery and found the monk still there, and the community at peace. I suggest that such a difficult problem could not have been worked out if the monks had not realized somehow that the thief was one deprived of love, and he stole to share what belonged to others in a kind of perverse loyalty.

[20:10]

Dana, in this case, was the acknowledgment of responsibility to a confused fellow monk, as well as to personal things. You are my brother, and I love you. Each monk was somehow able to say, in effect. Thus, a pathological, destructive drive for love was corrected with no thought of stealing or protected, and the Tao was made real. Competition, acquisition, and possession go wrong when compassion is missing, when Dana is disregarded. Zhao Zhou, Zhou Xu, polished his realization in Dharma combat for twenty years in order to prepare himself as an instrument of compassion,

[21:14]

declaring generously at the outset that he was open to the teaching of even a seven-year-old child. Thus, he became one of the greatest Zen teachers. Acquisition and possession are generous when the state of mind is just as it is. The teacher of tea experiences the tea bowl and bows to the venerable kettle, but these days there are few such teachers, and tea ceremony is often just a kind of show with its religious function forgotten. Rilke deplores this same loss in European culture. Even for our grandparents, a house, a well, a familiar tower,

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their very clothes, their coat, were infinitely more, infinitely more intimate. Almost everything a vessel in which they found the human and added to the store of the human. Now from America, empty indifferent things are pouring across, sham things, dummy life. A house in the American sense, an American apple or grapevine over there, has nothing in common with the house, the fruit, the grape into which went the hopes and reflections of our forefathers. Live things, things lived and conscient of us are running out and can no longer be replaced. We are perhaps the last still to have known such things.

[23:17]

On us rests the memory, not alone of preserving their memory, that would be too little and too unreliable, but their human and laurel value, laurel in the sense of household gods. Pots and pans are Buddha's body, announces a sign in some Zen Buddhist monasteries, reminding the cooks of just as they are. Zafus and blankets, hammers and shovels are Buddha's body. I confess I am offended when I see zoris left every which way at the temple door.

[24:19]

I'm sure that doesn't happen here, but it does sometimes at our centers. When I see someone straighten his cushion with his foot, that I'm sure we would never see here. And when I see tools left in the rain. Things are altogether faithful. They follow the rules with precision. We owe them benevolence in return. When I first got acquainted with R. H. Blythe, who was the person who first interested me in Zen, this is one of the first things he said to me. Don't you think that things are faithful? I had no idea what he was talking about. And he quoted me that very sentimental poem

[25:23]

by Eugene Field called Little Boy Blue. And maybe you know that poem. How Little Boy Blue went to bed and didn't wake up the next morning, you know. And his little toy dog was covered with dust and little toy soldier covered with rust. And they're faithfully waiting for him there. And then he said, suppose you take this pencil. He took a pencil and stood it on its point. And he said, if you let your fingers go, it will fall over every time. Faithfully following the rules. Carelessness with precious things is a kind of stealing. But so is the greed of the collector. Once Nakagawa Soenroshi, Anne Aitken and I, visited a Buddhist teacher and healer in Honolulu.

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She was and is a remarkable personage, very charismatic with a large devoted following and a magnificent temple. But her preoccupation with money flawed her character. And every day she violated the second precept. Knowing that we enjoyed tea ceremony, this teacher led us to her treasury where there were a hundred tea bowls in boxes on shelves along one wall. She took down several, removed them from their boxes, unwrapped them one by one for our admiration. And each time she asked, how much do you suppose that one cost? And then, breaking the silence, you know, she would tell us. So many hundreds of thousands of yen. With such static in our ears,

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it was difficult to come forth and say each time, what a beautiful bowl. Tea ceremony carried within itself the seeds of its own ruin from the very beginning. For it was a way of poverty for the rich. On the other hand, Zen Buddhism in Asia is dying because its particular way of purity no longer affects the larger community. In the Buddha's time and down through the ages until a century and a half ago, the world outside the monastery walls just was. Despots and benevolent rulers rose and fell. And the individual dealing with personal difficulties could come to the monastery for a retreat

[28:30]

or to become a monk or nun. Today, the poisons of greed, hatred and ignorance fuel industrial and political systems that threaten the very structure of life. Air, water and food are depleted and poisoned. And the machine of death and destruction accelerates. The dojo has always been a retreat and a training center. But now the emphasis must be on training ourselves as a dana paramita community to become a new growth within the shell of the old society. To begin with, this is the perfection of charity within our own sangha as we take care of each other and encourage each other. Unresolved conflicts within the sangha

[29:35]

interrupt the flow of love at its source and mock our volunteer programs in the community. With harmony among ourselves, however, we can find inspiration in the broad sky of samadhi and in the takuhatsu of the Buddha and his successors to reach out to the world. Do you know takuhatsu? Takuhatsu is the trip that monks and in some cases nuns, usually monks make outside the monastery in their old robes accepting rice and money from villagers and townspeople in order to support their temple. But they chant, you see. Either they chant sutras at the back gate

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of each house that they come to or in other traditions they walk the streets slowly just chanting Ho Ho And that very low sound when chanted by a line of maybe 18 monks pervades the whole city. You can hear them for blocks right through the traffic sound. That Ho does not mean Dharma in this case. It means upaya. The Ho of Hobe. Upaya or of course upaya means skillful means but it also means compassion.

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And this is showing the bowl of the Buddha in the world. The Buddha was a wandering saint and his very presence brought peace to those who met him. Ahimsa was a personal way of life for his sangha but the Buddha's day is not ours and we can learn from Gandhi how ancient teachings of non-violence can be applied in our world of imperialism. We can also learn from and join with other communities of compassion in our own time. Groups with concerns that range from civil liberties to peace to ecology. Groups which are in effect already teaching Dhanaparamita. Buddhist Dhanaparamita communities are in the vanguard

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of a non-violent movement for social change with Christians, Jews and humanists. But the Bodhidharma and Dogen Zenji delineate the special contribution that Buddhist communities may offer. The broad and generous state of mind which gives rise to Dhanaparamita is the realm of vast emptiness, nothing holy. In Bodhidharma's words, the human condition of the fallen away body and mind. To quote Dogen Zenji, it is the dojo of emptiness, the formless ground where the tea bowl is realized as just that tea bowl. In itself and in symbiosis with every element of the universe

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including oneself. In practical everyday terms, it is where we take care of our friends. This is the miracle of ordinary life for everybody now. For the dojo is at last my home, your home and the sangha is our community that flows outward in limitless circles from our center of peace. This very place is the lotus land as Hakuin Zenji said, right now and not yet. And the not yet is our action of bowing to each other and seating ourselves on our Zafus and our work of showing the Dharma in a world of crisis.

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