So I have very fond memories of this place, because I haven't spoken here, well, I came to class last year, in work as a spiritual practice, when my book came out, it was very good. There was a combination of residents and non-residents in that group. The book that I wrote was primarily directed toward people who work in the outside world at office jobs or high-pressure corporate jobs. My basic goal in writing the book was to try to point out ways in which people could not have to write off that time in their life as sort of a spiritual desert, but could find ways to do the traditional practices that you're all familiar with, mindfulness practices, breathing, meditation, visualization, practices of generosity, the bodhisattva's bow, all

[01:07]

those sorts of things while you're on your way to the fax machine. So it's a very out-there-in-the-world kind of book, because that really reflected my life. When I left here, I went to work, as Linda Ruth said it, at Smith & Hawken, which is still around, most of you probably know the company, at the time it was a burgeoning entrepreneurial garden tools company with a strong connection to Green Gulch. And I rose in the executive ranks rather quickly, it was a very small company, so that wasn't too hard to do. And then after a certain amount of time, the reality of having been a Zen monk for 15 years began to hit home, and I realized, how am I going to possibly survive in this kind of environment with the background that I have and the knowledge that I have from practice? So after 15 years of doing that, both at Smith & Hawken and in my own business, that really

[02:14]

was the genesis of my book. I do want to talk about work tonight in a way that I haven't ever done to an audience, so this will be kind of an experiment, but to this audience, I think it's appropriate that I do so. It's the kind of stuff about work that I really couldn't talk about in my book, because the book was really designed for general readership. But before I do that, I do want to say something about a major illness that I had, because I think those of you old-timers who know me would kind of like to know how it all turned out. And also, I think that it's hard for me to talk to all of you without your knowing this part of my life. About 20 months ago, July of 99, I was struck with a near-fatal case of encephalitis, a brain infection, and was for quite a long time quite profoundly disabled.

[03:24]

I couldn't walk, I couldn't talk, I couldn't do much of anything, and I had to learn how to... It was like having a major stroke. I had to learn how to do everything again. I couldn't play the piano, I couldn't do much of anything for more than ten minutes at a time. So that was a very profound experience, in addition to which I couldn't, even when I got physically able to, I really couldn't sit for about a year, for reasons I might go into a little bit further, because they're sort of interesting for those who do sit, that the brain rules, and there are things that can happen in the brain that can make it impossible for you to sit. Mel Weitzman recently quoted Tsukiroshi, who always seemed to say wonderful things, even long after he died, a quote from an early lecture I never heard, where he said, I think

[04:31]

it was in the middle of Zazen, he just suddenly said, he often would do that, he would just say something during Zazen, he said, sometimes Zazen doesn't help. And that was extremely helpful for me, to have Mel, because it made me feel a little better about the fact that that was my experience, it didn't help at all for a certain period of time. Now it helps me a lot, but there was a time when Zazen wasn't a thing. But I'm much better now, I've regained all my faculties, and except for a little low energy and that sort of thing, I'm pretty much all better, which is, from the Western doctor's point of view, off the chart completely. I mean, there's no medical precedent for it, they can't explain it, all I can tell you is that besides having very loving family members and friends, all of whom prayed for me, I was visited twice by a very talented Tibetan healer, and whether or not it was

[05:33]

he or some beneficent deity who saved me, I can't say, but he was there, and the second time came on his own, just because he intuited that without his coming I might not prevail. So I'm grateful to him as well as a great many other people. All that being said, let me get to the topic of what I wanted to speak about tonight, and I hope that there may be some time for discussion afterwards, because I'm sure that I'd like to hear from you. I have a feeling that work here hasn't changed all that much. There's still the fields, there's the kitchen, there's cleaning, there's all the sorts of things that people do in a monastic kind of environment. I suppose my first lessons in spirituality and work were just watching Suzuki Roshi work, and since probably very few of you ever knew him in the flesh, let me describe him to you.

[06:40]

He was about five feet tall, maybe on his tiptoes. He was a very small man, he weighed about 90 pounds, 100 pounds. He looked like a very gentle feather of a man until he did something like move a heavy stone and then you realized he was immensely strong, when he wanted to be. There are lots of stories about his strength. There used to be a fellow, unfortunately now no longer with us, named Alan Marlow, who was Suzuki Roshi's attendant. Alan was six foot four, about 220, so seeing the two of them together was really a trip. Alan used to walk around after this little man, and Alan, of course, was a very strong man, and Roshi loved stones, so down in Tassajara he would work with them, and the stones down there are really quite big. Some of them were, you know, weighed, I don't know, a thousand pounds or more, and Alan

[07:43]

would try as best he could to help Suzuki Roshi move these stones, and he told of one occasion where the two of them were trying to move this stone, and Alan was just, all of his might just, you know, pressing to try to move the stone, and then he felt something beside him, and Suzuki Roshi came up underneath him and started to push, and the stone just moved. This little man was way stronger than Alan. Alan was more than twice his size and twice his weight, so how he acquired that strength remains a mystery, but he was remarkable and very energetic and agile when he did things, and he was a great fan of work. One of his sayings used to be, was, clean first, zazen second, which is also a very Japanese notion that, you know, cleaning is, or soji is, very, very important, and I mentioned to Linda Ruth just before the lecture that I don't think that the Japanese zen style

[08:46]

of work can really be understood unless you actually visit a Japanese monastery and watch the tremendous speed with which people work. That's kind of the expectation, and Suzuki Roshi was that way. He would work very quickly and thoroughly, and he actually, I was his attendant for one period of time, and he actually, you know, I was supposed to wipe the room down with towels, wet towels, and I was very clumsy at it and did it very slowly, what I thought zen people were supposed to do it, and one time he just came up, grabbed the towel away from me without saying anything. He just showed me how it was supposed to be done, and I realized I had a lot to learn about wiping down floors, you know, he was quite an expert at it from long years. So actually, what I really want to talk about tonight is, I have notes here, the four stages

[09:50]

of mindfulness and the four jhanas and its relationship to work, and if we have time maybe the distinction of what I would call work without distraction and work with distraction. So that's my topic terrain. So let me begin by quoting Harry Roberts, who used to be kind of a mentor here, hard to describe who he was, he was part American Indian, but he helped get the farm started, and he taught people here how to do work of various kinds, because he'd done a lot in his life. So he taught people welding, and he was an agronomist, so he taught how to work with farm tools and tractors, and he was a kind of jack-of-all-trades, very wise man, and he was always very annoyed. He was kind of a rough talker, you know, sort of a roughneck in some ways, and he was always

[10:57]

annoyed at the way that we here worked, it didn't seem to him that we'd made a real connection that he thought we should make between what we did in the Zendo and what we did outside the Zendo. We would crash the cars into things, and people would try to weld, and they'd run the flame through their hand, and he'd watch them do it, and he'd shake his head as they went off to the infirmary to get treated, you know, things like that. He didn't think we did too well, and it's true, in those days, most of the trucks that Green Gulch owned were full of dents. So I want to talk, I've thought about that comment for many, many years, Harry was very serious about it, because he knew how serious we were about our Zen practice and our Zendo practice. And so, in a sense, I'm dedicating the following to Harry, because I think that he's the inspiration for what I'm going to talk about. So let's start with Zazen, and the work of Zazen, and what goes on when we sit, and the

[12:04]

stages of that. This is very thoroughly laid out, particularly in the Theravada texts, like the Vasudhi Maga and others. Not so much, not so explicitly in Zen, but Suzuki Roshi used to talk about it as the four stages of Zen, or four stages of Zazen. He described it somewhat differently than I'm going to, but I'm going to use something of his language in doing so. The first, I don't know if you still do this, but in my day, the first type of Zazen that we used to teach people was counting the breath, the breathing. Is that still a practice? So let me talk about that practice, because that illustrates my point. I just really want to make a point. So if someone comes here for the first time, that's what they're taught, is to count the breaths, as a way to begin to learn how to harmonize and concentrate the mind.

[13:09]

And characteristically, I used to give Zazen instruction to a lot, so I have some experience of people reporting back, and the first thing people would tend to say is, oh, well, that's easy and kind of boring. I mean, one, two, three, four, what is there to that? They find it very easy to do for some while. Maybe this was your experience when you started, too. And that's what I call the first stage, is a kind of mindfulness, but it's very much in the mind. It's very much like sitting here and counting one, two, three, four, five. It's a very mental thing. And samadhi, or real concentration in its true sense, really hasn't begun at that point. But there is some preliminary sense of concentration, if you follow what I'm saying, because you are counting, and so you're not distracted with lots of other things.

[14:13]

So there is some beginning to be a calming and regularization of the mind. So we call that the first stage. I think Suzuki Roshi would call it normal thinking or regular thinking. But it's not like distracted thinking. It's concentrated thinking, but still very regular thinking. Then a person might come to practice instruction and say, I don't know what's wrong. I used to be able to count my breaths just fine, and now I can't do it. I'm losing track, and I'm 14, 15, you know, I'm getting all distracted. And they think that they're going backwards, that they used to be able to do this thing well, and now they can't. Well, actually, what's happening is the mind is actually beginning to settle, and the practice is beginning to deepen. And as a consequence, the mental faculty of what we call Manas, or the ordinary mind that

[15:27]

counts, is beginning to settle and not be so active. And consequently, you lose count. So actually, this is a deeper, a beginning to be a deeper stage of Satsang. Although most people don't realize that. They think that they're failing in some way, and they want to know what to do to get back to that old way of perfectly doing it right. Really the whole point of this thing is to learn how not to do it right. To let go of that and let the mind start to settle and harmonize. So this is what we would call the second stage of meditation, or sometimes we call it, say, second jhana. The word Zen comes from the word jhana, it's the same word. It means concentrated mind. And I think Suzuki Roshi's term for this was clarified thinking, or pure thinking.

[16:31]

The counting is still going on, but there's some accommodation to it. There isn't a sense, a same sense of effort. The thing is beginning to take on a life of its own and begin to move. Some people find this a little bit disturbing, but actually this is the beginning really of true Zazen, is when this sense of settling begins to happen. So that's the second stage. In the third stage, if we're still talking about counting, a new experience begins to emerge. Counting becomes clear again, like it was at the beginning, but there's a different quality about it. There's more of a sense that it's happening by itself, that the concentration on it is

[17:36]

self-perpetuating or self-motivated, and the sense of effort is gone. There's a quality of being able to sustain it without any sense of effort. It's a kind of lightness of concentration and of consciousness. This is what Suzuki Roshi called no thinking, but you still have some emotional feeling. So the intellectual part of the mind has come to rest, but the deeper forces of the mind, your emotions, your feelings, maybe anger, restlessness, sadness, those are still there. But the exercise of concentration is going much better, so people start to feel very good. Now I really know how to sit.

[18:36]

Then there may come a time when something deeper happens, and it's a little hard to describe, but this is the point at which counting begins to disappear as a separate practice, and there's just the breath. The breath is clear, and there's no separation between somebody called you and this breathing that's happening. There's just breathing that's going on. Suzuki Roshi called this the fourth stage, or deep stage, where even emotion is gone. You don't really feel anything. This is really maybe the real dharma gate or the true gate of zazen practice. At this point, you really have entered the gate, and then deeper practices from this

[19:44]

begin. But I don't want to go into that, because those practices don't really relate to work much. But these stages I've talked about up to now have their analog very clearly in the state of mind that you have in activity. So now I'm going to ... Is it clear so far, what I'm talking about? Okay. I think up to now, this all should be pretty familiar to you, because you're all sitters and you all spend a lot of time in the zendo. So from Harry Robert's point of view, you've been in the zendo, now we're going to come out and do something. So here is where the whole issue of work comes in, and what differentiates an ordinary non-practicing person's state of mind in work and a zen practitioner's state of mind in work? Well, it has very much to do with these same stages of mindfulness that I've been discussing.

[20:47]

So by way of illustration, let's take a task that probably most of you are familiar with. Dishwashing? How about cutting carrots? Because cutting carrots is a little dangerous. A little more dangerous than dishwashing, unless the water is too hot. But cutting carrots, you have a sharp knife, and you can cut your fingers. The stereotype that there used to be around in the world is that zen students work very, very slowly, because they were trying to be mindful. And I remember an incident at Smith & Hawkin. There was a time when a lot of zen students worked at Smith & Hawkin, and the warehouse manager came to me and he said, Lou, I guess you know about this zen stuff, don't you? And I said, yes, I do. He was just a regular guy, he didn't know anything. He said, I've got this guy from Zen Center working out in the warehouse, and he is so slow. I mean, could you talk to him or something? Because I don't know what to say. I mean, he's a smart guy and everything, but he's slower than anybody.

[21:53]

So I sat down and we talked, and the guy was an English major, and had been out at Green Gulch for a couple of years, and he worked in the warehouse packing boxes, which at Smith & Hawkin is a rather challenging thing to do, almost as hard as cutting carrots, because we had to pack boxes with shovels and little tiny widgets, and it was kind of an art to do it. You had to wrap it all up with tape and get it so it wouldn't shake around and make sure it all fit in the box, and it was a challenge to get it in one box rather than two, and so forth. And I asked this fellow what was going on. And I said, you know, John thinks you're pretty slow, and he said, well, this is great. This is just like Green Gulch. I get to be very mindful here when I'm working. And I said, yeah, but this is a business, and you're being paid an hourly wage. You've got to produce some stuff. He said, well, if I do that, I won't be mindful, you know, I'll be careless. And there was a guy named Dave who was working at the time, high school dropout, kind of

[23:00]

a chatterbox, drinking Coke, radio, earphones, always joshing around, cursing, fooling around, a real mess-off type. Anybody who's been to high school has met them. But he was really good at packing boxes, I mean, really good. Dave had a natural physical intelligence that was unparalleled. He could take a table of disparate garden tools, and he could be listening to rock on the radio and drinking his Diet Coke and telling dirty jokes, and the thing would go together. And man, you know, he would never make a mistake. You know, if the stapler had to go from the left side to the right side, it would just go. He'd staple it, move it to the left, he'd put the shovel in, he'd tape it up, he'd be telling a joke, he'd be listening to rock, you know. And it would just be, he was so cool, you know. And he was the best packer, I mean, they all kept track, and he could pack more boxes with less mistakes than anybody there. And, you know, it was just, and I pointed that out to my Zen friend, and he was really,

[24:07]

really insulted, you know. He said, look, I have a master's degree from, I don't know, Duke or something. You know, I really think that to compare me to this guy, you know, this Dave, it's just awful. You know, how can he be a paragon of anything? And I said, well, I'm not saying he's a paragon. I'm just pointing out that somehow or other, he can pack boxes with more adeptness and care, really, faster than you can. Just, it's a fact. So maybe you should check out what Dave is doing and see if you can learn anything. So that was kind of one of my formative experiences about this whole issue of mindfulness in work. So let's talk about cutting carrots, because that's something maybe a lot of you have done. If you've never done it before, you start out pretty slow, because it's a sharp knife, and you're not too familiar with the task, and carrots are uneven. They're all different, you know. So you have to be very careful and slow.

[25:09]

And so, yes, you're being very mindful. This is, remember the four stages I talked about. This is like the first stage of counting the breath, you know. You can do it very well in a certain fashion, and your carrots are cut beautifully. But it takes a long time to cut those carrots. Now, have any of you been to a Japanese restaurant at all recently or ever? Have you ever watched the sushi shop? Have you ever watched them cut vegetables, you know? And then very slowly, they'll reach out for something, and then they'll bring it over, and then very, very fast, and then slow and fast, you know. This is 10, 15 years of mastery of these skills, you know. It has nothing to do with speed. It has everything to do with your state of mind and the harmonization of the body and the mind in what you're doing. What's common to all these different ways of working is attention.

[26:14]

Attention is the key to all of practice. It's the secret. There's a famous Zen story about Ikkyu. Some of you may have read about Ikkyu. He was a famous... He was a mess off like Dave, except he happened to be the illegitimate son of the Japanese emperor. So nobody could say a word, believe me. He got to be abbot of a big Zen monastery at one point. But he had affairs with prostitutes and wrote bawdy poetry and pissed on Buddhist statues and did all sorts of very crazy things, all of which is written up in many books in the library about him that you know about. But there's one famous story about him that I love. It's in my book. Just because he was abbot doesn't mean he wasn't Ikkyu. He was still the same guy. Wealthy patron came and said, Oh, venerable abbot, please, could you write me some calligraphy? Now, the hidden agenda here is that to get a calligraphy from a famous abbot like Ikkyu,

[27:20]

whom everybody sort of secretly knew was the son of the emperor, was a big coup. And you could go home as a rich patron and hang it in the altar and get a lot of points for that in Japanese culture. So it was a big deal to get Ikkyu to do calligraphy. And typically, a Zen master would write some kind of poem or a quote from a Zen koan or something very, you know, elevated. So Ikkyu said, sure, he'd do that. And they got the materials, picked up the brush, and he wrote the character for attention or mindfulness on the scroll. And he sat there. And the patron didn't know what to say. It was so far from what he was expecting that he was nonplussed. Yet, this man was of such high status, he couldn't be criticized. So he said, venerable master, I wonder if perhaps you had something more you wish to write. And Ikkyu said, oh, yeah, fine. He took the scroll back and he wrote the same character again, attention.

[28:21]

Gave it back. And the patron tried one more time to politely ask the abbot if he would please finish his Zen aphorism. And so Ikkyu, this time quite irritable, he wrote attention, attention, attention. So there were five of the same character. And that was the scroll that the patron got. So this has always been a very important story for me because the lesson is very clear. This is the key to everything, paying attention. But there's lots of different ways to pay attention. And as we go deeper into practice, we find that attention develops or migrates from being a conversation between subject and object, in which subject pays attention to the object, like you're paying attention to the carrot very closely and the night very closely to or counting your breath

[29:25]

to subject and object becoming intimate or close and not so clearly differentiated. And finally, subject and object disappear and there really isn't anything but the carrot. And maybe in the end, there isn't anything. Even the carrot isn't there. It's just the activity itself. So if you keep in mind or think about a sushi chef you watch in a restaurant or anybody who's very skilled at something or any skilled restaurant worker cutting carrots who cuts them extremely fast, extremely accurately, but with great attention, or maybe not even attention that you could notice, maybe that person is so good at it that they can be talking to somebody else and still make no mistake. Dave the Packer, you know, who was really so good at packing in some way, he had actually some natural physical samadhi. I've worked with him and I saw it.

[30:28]

He had a kind of talent for this work and he could do it better than anybody, even though in a superficial way you would look at him and say he's not paying attention. But how could he not be paying attention if his work is so good? So attention maybe needs to be written five times because there's actually five different kinds, at least five different kinds. In this monastic environment where a lot of your work can be done, luckily for you, without distraction, unlike the larger American workplace, you have the opportunity really to bring the lessons of the zendo out into your activity and begin to practice with the various possibilities of attention in the same way that you do when you're sitting. And in fact, that is really the payoff, if you will, of sitting practice.

[31:32]

You don't sit to sit, you sit to live. And living is activity, is working, is ultimately in our tradition the manifestation of the vow to liberate all beings. That's what you're here to do. And the work in the zendo is really to develop the capacity to do that in whatever activity you're in. So when you're picking vegetables, sentient beings, um, you can pick them very, very slowly, one by one. That's one kind of attention. You can pick them very quickly and sloppily. That's a kind of inattention, but there's something going on there. You can pick them very quickly, but very perfectly. And your own state of mind can be attending to your work, not attending to your work, thinking about your boyfriend or girlfriend, uh, or very much, uh, I mean, if a sushi chef with those super sharp knives

[32:35]

starts thinking about boyfriend or girlfriend, I think they might lose a finger, you know? Uh, part of the 15 years of training, you know, when a sushi chef traditionally in Japan, first two years that all they do is sharpen. Two years just to sharpen. They learn to sharpen the knife. Can you imagine how dull that must be in a certain sense? I don't mean to be funny about dull and sharp. Now, why do they do that? Because they're cultivating a certain very, very, uh, attuned kind of attention or mindfulness. And only when they can sharpen the knives to the master's satisfaction are they allowed to use the knife. I suppose it has something to do with knowing how damn sharp the knife is, uh, that they practice sharpening the knife for so long. And, um, only after many years are they allowed to do advanced techniques like, you know, that very thin slicing of fish that they do and other sorts of very elaborate things. These are all manifestations of, um, a kind of, you might say,

[33:38]

applied Zazen or take, as Harry said, taking your Zen practice out of the Zen world and into the workplace. Um, the highest stage of all, and this is the really the secret, uh, stealth weapon of my book, is that actually the kind of practices that I wrote about in the book, which are trying to do these sorts of things in a highly distracted, uh, profit-seeking, greedy, um, not very caring environment of corporate America is really the highest challenge of all. It's the highest practice. And, uh, if you can do that, um, I, I've never claimed in my book that I did it. I claimed that I tried. And I think it's a, it's really the fundamental challenge of the whole society. Um, and this is one of the little, uh, uh, you might say, incubators of that alternative mode of work to, uh, bring, uh, that kind of sense of concentration

[34:42]

into a highly distracted environment that has no sympathy for that kind of attention at all. If you can keep your wits about you in that kind of environment, then you can be, deserve to be called a, uh, a work master. I know somebody who really can work. And, uh, to be able to be a vice president of marketing and advertising agency and have the same, um, presence of mind and attention as a sushi chef. Um, I have yet to meet that person, but I'm still looking. And, you know, I'm in the business world still. And so I have my eyes out. And, uh, if anybody thinks that I'm the one, uh, because I wrote a book about it, um, I'm humble enough and honest enough to disavail them of that. It's very hard to do, but I, I did try. And when I was sick, I learned that there's a kind of paying attention that you could do when the actual physical,

[35:44]

uh, brain cells that, that make attention possible are physically damaged. I had to try to do that. Um, uh, that was, that was the biggest challenge of my life to try to pay attention when, um, I literally did not have the, um, the, the brain capacity to do it. Um, that was a very humbling lesson. Um, you should all be very grateful to your brains that they work as well as they do. Because, uh, as a survivor of a time when my brain didn't work much at all, I realized that even in that situation, it's possible to make some kind of effort. Um, and, and during my time of rehabilitation, uh, I met people who were much worse off than I was, who'd had strokes or who had Parkinson's or had epilepsy, realized that, um, uh, this,

[36:49]

this notion of attention that EQ was so adamant about in spite of the sort of protocol of the patron coming to the abbot and the abbot writing something that would be impressive on the patron's wall, IQ obviously had no patience with that. He wanted to write what mattered, um, that there is a kind of attention, uh, that's so deep that it, you really can't even talk about it. All you can do is do it. And I think that those of us who knew Suzuki Roshi, and I think I'll conclude on this note, who knew him, uh, as a teacher will all agree that his deepest teaching was wordless. Uh, it was just watching him and being with him that counted the most. And I can't really explain what I mean by that, uh, except to say you have to have been there. Uh, he was a very special person and, and his energy still pervades all of Zen Center.

[37:52]

Um, that's why you're all here. One little man, uh, 100 pounds, uh, a wisp of a person, um, who even when he was dying of cancer could, um, move huge stones. Um, it was a very moving thing to remember. And it's been 30 years since he died and, uh, he still is the beacon in my life. And, um, probably one of the reasons I survived, um, the illness that I had is because I had a strength that I didn't know I had that came from him, I think. Um, he too, uh, faced and actually succumbed to a fatal disease. And, um, it was amazing to watch him dying in Page Street. Um, walking around in the halls, uh, barely able to stand up. Completely normal, cheerful, exactly as he always was.

[38:54]

No indication that anything was amiss, you know, just friendly, you know, uh, to his last breath. He was just the same. Um, it's a lesson that I will never forget. And those who were there will never forget. It was astonishing. Um, but he had a power that, um, goes beyond anything that I've talked about tonight, but it underlies everything that I've talked about tonight. And I hope that, um, maybe some of what I've said has been useful to you, uh, maybe has some practical application. I picture all of you doing, uh, the various things that I used to do here, you know, and, uh, think about your, your efforts to sort of figure this all out. This Zen stuff and, you know, Sao Zen and work and following the schedule and, you know, what does it all mean? Uh, I'm not sure I know any more than you do, but, um, for what, since you asked me to say something, I, I've done my best.

[39:56]

So I'm happy to talk with you as, uh, much, as little as you like. I'm not falling asleep yet, although I may very soon. Yes, hi. I wonder if you could say something about saving all beings and how you see that as being manifested by someone who may be making that vow as they cut carrots or whatever, and also how you see that is manifested in your sushi chef who is very skillfully doing the task that they're doing. You mean as opposed to the first person who may not be so skillful? Well, the first person may or may not. The first person is more aware of some deeper purpose. But has an intention to, uh, follow the Buddha Dharma.

[40:57]

And let's take as our example, a sushi chef who isn't interested, but nevertheless is doing a good job and paying attention the way that you described it. Well, what comes immediately to mind, and you can look this up, is the, um, in Three Pillars of Zen by Philip Kaplow. There's a description, uh, it's about his master, Yasutaka, and there's a description of five kinds of Zen, or five kinds of, let's say, attention or concentration. And, um, the third of the five or the second of the five, the second of the five, yes, is called, um, non-Buddhist Zen or Zen outside the way. That is concentration. Good examples would be martial arts teachers, or, um, sushi chefs, or people that develop, um, I mean martial arts masters are often have tremendous samadhi power.

[42:02]

But they kill people with it. So that's not a very good manifestation of the bodhisattva vow. But they have, um, um, perhaps great meditation skill. So Yasutani classifies that, uh, very clearly as related to Buddhism, but not really a part of it. So there's a, there's a, an overlap, two circles, you know, between, uh, Buddha Dharma and samadhi, and then samadhi and then non-Buddha Dharma. And then there's some intersection where you have, you can, you can also have the reverse. You can have somebody who is a very deep, um, practitioner and a very deep, uh, lover of the dharma who can't concentrate at all. You know, uh, there's the famous, uh, example of the arhat, the 16th arhat, the sweeper. I love him. He was a simple-minded. He was kind of an idiot, everybody thought. Couldn't do anything. Had no concentration ability.

[43:05]

But he was the 16th arhat. He was greatly enlightened, uh, because of his heart, not because of his samadhi power. So samadhi isn't everything, but it's, it helps. Uh, but at the same time, the vow isn't everything either, but it helps. So at the extremes, you can have the vow with hardly any samadhi if the vow is strong enough, and you can have great samadhi with hardly any vow. And unless you have a very practiced eye, it's sometimes hard to tell the difference. So people might get totally wrapped up in some martial arts master and think they're greatly enlightened, and they're simply greatly concentrated, and they're actually, in their own state of mind, cold-blooded killers. Uh, there's a, there's a phrase in the Vasudhi Maga that I love. Um, there is actually a dharma. I'm getting very technical here, but for your benefit. I forget the Pali word after all these years, but it means wrong samadhi.

[44:07]

Um, I forget the words, but the example that it uses is this dharma. This capability of the mind is that which causes the murderer's knife not to miss. You can look it up. So a murderer has great samadhi, uh, in a certain very crude sense of the word, but completely antithetical to anything called the vow. Does that make sense? Yeah. I remember that when you bring it up, that that phrase always stuck in my mind. Wrong samadhi cause. They recognize this, the monks who built the Abhidharma, that, that samadhi. In fact, it says in the Abhidharma, this is all coming back to me now, um, that, um, samadhi itself is ethically neutral. People in sports. Yeah. People in sports, you know, like there's the psychic side of sports, that book by Mike Murphy about quarterbacks who, you know,

[45:08]

time slows down and they see a light and they throw the book. Well, people think there's something spiritual about that. It's samadhi and it's definitely out there, but it's not, you know, it doesn't have much to do with what we do, but it's not entirely unrelated. You know, there's some, well, we shouldn't, we shouldn't put down people in sports. Sometimes those people in their hidden lives have a real spiritual bent because they are so good at what they do and so concentrated, or maybe later in life, they, they can come to it. So concentration is good. Thou is good, but they're two different things, you know, and when they come together, then you have one good, uh, Buddhist practicer. Yeah. You mentioned earlier that the corporate environment being very greedy and very kind of unfriendly to mostly that sort of intention that we have, what made you want to work there?

[46:10]

Um, I didn't say I wanted to work there. Um, I needed to work there. Um, I had a family, I had to make a living. I worked there. Why anybody works anywhere, you know, is, um, uh, just, you know, sheer necessity. Um, no, I didn't want to work there. It was not something I wanted to do at all. And I didn't like it most. That's an honest answer. I, I, I wish I could give you some profound, uh, uh, purpose in mind, but it was really pretty practical. You didn't feel like you could find a way to support your family and then take it more away from the environment? Uh, yes, if I really made a, an effort, but that happened to be a time in my life when I was pretty confused and didn't have a lot of time to think about it. So you're right. Yes. I'm, I'm sure I could have come up with something better, but, um, Smith & Hawk and also at that time, you know, as I say, there were a lot of

[47:13]

areas, Patagonia, all the sort of new age businesses, they all fell back into the pit in a sense that, you know, you can't really escape the fundamental mission of what business, uh, is all about is about money. And, um, it took me a while to figure that out. So I was maybe a little more idealistic than I should have been. And also I, as I say, I wasn't thinking too clearly at the time. Mm hmm. Yeah. I have two, um, two questions. One is while you were, you know, so ill, did you, I've been wanting to know this because we chant for people who do well-being chants all the time for people who are dying. And I was just wondering if you had, what was your, did you actually experience that, that when you said many people prayed for me and all, I was just wondering what the experience from that side was, if you can even describe it.

[48:14]

That was one thing. And the other thing was about the body. Some of the remarks you were making to me about sitting and finding your body again. Well, to the first point, um, yes or no. Um, when I was in a coma, a very, very deep coma, a coma that the doctors said I would never come out of, I actually was dreaming constantly. My mind was continuously active. Nobody knows this, but I, you know, I've written a book as I've told you about it. It's coming out next year. You can read about it. I had hundreds of dreams, all of which I remember. And, uh, the, the medical, uh, machines were registering no brain activity. So, fooey on them. And I had one, one dream that I'll tell you because it answers your question.

[49:22]

I won't tell you the whole dream, but anyway, I was in a farm very much like Green Gulch and I was visiting there and I was walking down a path. And this old black man said, Oh, you, you ought to go see Guido. He's in charge here. So I went down to see Guido and Guido was this cheerful Italian guy. He said, Oh, come to the barn. We're going to have a drink. And, uh, he had this Italian accent, you know, so we went, I followed him down to the barn. All these people were there and he said, well, we know why we're here. You know, it's because of Roberto. Roberto is no longer with us, but we all remember him. We pray for him. We love him. And we're going to have a drink for Roberto. And I had this wonderful sense of all these strangers, uh, letting me into their circle and their family. And I was part of it. I felt so wonderful. It was like this, I had this big Italian family. It's very stereotypical, but you know, the dream just picks up on TV or radio or whatever.

[50:26]

You know, the dreams were highly paranoid. In the dreams, all the doctors are trying to kill me, for example. I mean, dreams try to help you, but they don't have, they're not very smart most of the time. So this dream was a very nice dream. And he had a keg and I figured it was beer, but turned out it was whiskey. Drew out these big tumblers of whiskey, you know, big glasses, you know, and we all had and we gave a toast to Roberto, you know, we drank and we all felt warm and wonderful and everybody was, you know, embracing me. So what does that dream mean? I think it means that at some level I sensed that so many people were out there thinking about me. And it came into the dream because I never had, most of my other dreams were about trying to survive. But that dream was about being loved by wonderful people.

[51:29]

So that's one answer. The other answer is that I was too sick to know what was up, which end was up. So at any conscious level, I barely knew who my wife was. I was in a highly altered state of mind, barely conscious and hallucinating quite a lot. So I'm glad that so many people cared about me, but at some fundamental level, all I was trying to do was survive. So that's my other answer. As far as your question about the body is concerned, I told you before the lecture that for the first year after my illness, because of where the illness was in my brain, my sense of my body and breathing were highly distorted and almost hallucinogenic. Actually, they were hallucinogenic. And so trying to do Zazen was a very unsatisfying and quite frightening experience because I

[52:37]

functioned much better when I had something to do. My mind kind of mobilized its limited damaged resources when I was eating a meal or watching television or doing something. But when I was just being there, the awareness of all that was seriously wrong with my nervous system was overwhelming. And so it was too hard. I felt very bad about it. I felt like it was a real weakie that I couldn't sit. I was supposed to be a Zen student and student of Suzuki Roshi. I'm supposed to be tough and everything, but it was too hard for me. I wasn't strong enough. Maybe somebody stronger, maybe Suzuki Roshi could have done it, but I couldn't. And I tried. I found chanting worked. Chanting was the practice that worked for me because I became, for a while, a faith Buddhist. I chanted to Amida Buddha with these beads.

[53:38]

These were actually the beads I used. And to use the voice and to chant and bow and something devotional, something that was more like work, actually, than like sitting, worked for my nervous system. So that was an example where a kind of activity samadhi or work samadhi, you know, in Tibetan Buddhism, that's a very important part of training, is those kinds of practices were much more successful for me in easing my suffering than Sazen. It wasn't until about a year that Sazen began to coalesce again. And I actually could, I mean, I'd be sitting there and I felt like my breath was somewhere across the room. I couldn't find it. I didn't even feel alive or something hard to describe. It's hard to describe neurologically damaged states unless you're in them. There's no words to describe.

[54:40]

Oliver Sacks has written some marvelous books about people who've been neurologically damaged and how strange it is. Very strange. You've probably all seen the movie Rain Man. The autistic man who can do lightning calculations in his head. It's sort of like that. You're in this world of surpassing strangeness. Luckily, I'm not there anymore. I hope that answers your question. Thank you. How much longer should we go? Well, we usually end around 8.30, is that what time it is now? But maybe take another question or so? Would that be fine? Sure. I kind of have a different experience of what you're talking about, kind of stages of learning to do something or it would be a job or work and then getting more attention as you go. It seems like for me, well, for instance, like harvesting baby lettuce.

[55:42]

I work on the farm and at first it was like, I was a lot, I was really slow and it was like needing, you know, count the lettuce, count every one. And my attention just needed to be so there to be able to keep count and to do it right and really get, you know, everything trimmed right. And now it's like I can something, something in me is like memorized how to do it with my body, how to trim. And then the counting just happens and I'm right on. But my mind can be like thinking four different things while I'm doing this and I can do it perfectly, but I'm totally distracted. No, that's part of it. That's certainly a stage. That distraction is not a bad thing. I talked about that when I talked about counting the breath and then you find you can't do it very well or then you can do it.

[56:44]

But then I guess I miss talking about the stage where you're doing it, but your mind is off somewhere else, but you're doing it. That's a stage too. That's a kind of concentration. I wouldn't worry about it. It's an inevitable stage in the process that the fact that you can do it and yet your mind is free means that your concentration is pretty stable. But it's maybe not, you know, you're not a lettuce master yet, but you're pretty good. Something like that. But actually, you know, someone once asked Suzuki Roshi, all the time when I'm in Zazen I'm thinking about things and his answer was, what's wrong with thinking? So at some level, if you're doing a good job and you can also think about other things, then maybe you shouldn't be so critical of yourself. Maybe that's pretty good. There's no God on high that's looking into your mind and saying, oops, I see a thought

[57:50]

there that has to be wiped out. The fact that you have that freedom to do a good job and also think is pretty good. There's a certain freedom to that. I think probably the sushi chefs think about lots of things. They're good enough to be able to do that. But the master sushi chef, the one that wears the purple clothes, he's probably just thinking about the fish. Yes. Can you say anything about Dave's mindfulness? Well, Dave is kind of like, I forget your Zen name, Susan. Like Maya's question, you know, he had a kind of non-Buddhist concentration ability. He was like a natural martial arts student. If you go to martial arts school, every so often somebody comes in and they can just do it. They have a knack for it, a talent, a Bruce Lee kind of prodigy type person. Their life might be a complete wreck and probably it is.

[58:51]

And in all other respects, they're not very admirable, but they have this ability. And Dave actually got fired not long thereafter, not because he wasn't a good worker, but because he failed to, he was drinking too much and he failed to show up on time. So I'm not holding him up as a paragon in much of anything, except that he was a real good packer. And I think that's all I really brought it up for is just to point out that this whole issue of mindfulness and attention is kind of complex. And the Buddhist literature recognizes that, goes into some great detail about the different ways in which concentration is manifested. And remember what it says. Concentration by itself is ethically and spiritually neutral. It has no particularly good or bad qualities in and of itself. What it has is infused into it by your character. So a person with good concentration and good character is a highly admirable person.

[59:59]

A person with good concentration and bad character is a person with good concentration and bad character. I wouldn't trust him with much. Maybe one more, if there is one more. No, maybe not. I can say one more. Yeah. Well, I don't know what I was going to say. Oh, well, I don't want to argue this, but I mean, because I practice martial arts, and I don't think that, I think that some of it's, I mean, I don't think martial arts is to kill people. I don't know, just that point that you... Some of it is. I studied martial arts, too, and I studied with teachers that made it clear that if you got to a certain level that they knew killing techniques and they would teach them as part of the curriculum. You're right. I mean, that's 98% of martial arts has nothing to do with killing people, but I was thinking the origin of martial arts, let's say in Japan particularly, in the samurai class was

[61:01]

very explicitly, that was their job as the warrior class, to learn how to kill and kill effectively. We no longer use it for that purpose, but I don't know, what kind of martial arts do you study? Aikido, which is very peaceful. Yes, I studied Aikido, too, but believe it or not, there are killing techniques in Aikido. If you've never heard of them, ask a black belt to let you know if they've ever heard of them. Okay, I will ask them. Yeah, not very many people will talk about it, but I studied with somebody who did, and you sort of have to go to Japan. Did they say Kung Fu was invented by Bodhidharma or something? Well, they say that Bodhidharma invented a lot of things. But the Buddhist monks used to practice Kung Fu, right, in China, right? Absolutely, and one of the reasons they did is because they walked a lot on pilgrimage and they had to defend themselves against bandits, and they weren't allowed to carry weapons that was against the precepts.

[62:02]

So they had to have some method of surviving. So, you know, this is a whole separate discussion, but there's a whole range in martial arts. Aikido, actually, I knew somebody quite well who studied with Ueshiba, who was the founder of Aikido. Ueshiba went to China to actually refine his understanding of Aikido before he invented Aikido. Aikido is partly Kendo, and it's partly an ancient Chinese martial art called Bagua, which is very circular in its motions and tone, and was one of the techniques studied in the monasteries by monks. Karate literally means empty hand. It means no weapon, and it was the technique used by... So I hope I didn't offend you in any way by saying...

[63:03]

No, I think thanks for telling me that. ...that martial arts is about killing. It isn't now, but believe me, at one time, that's what it was used for a lot. And there's a very horrific book, which I almost hesitate to tell you about, but it's called Zen at War, and it's probably in your library. And if you think that the practice that you all are practicing has nothing to do with killing or martial arts or bad things, read that book. It's quite sobering. The Zen sect in Japan was very implicated in some of the very bad things that happened in World War II. And my feeling, and the feeling of many of the people, including the author of that book whom I know, is that the Zen school was patronized for many centuries by warriors. And we talked earlier about corporations. Money talks, and temples should always be careful where their money comes from.

[64:06]

If professional killers build your temple, you have to be a little careful about what the quid pro quo might be. Maybe they want to know how to concentrate better in the temple so they can be better on the battlefield. So the Zen school in Japan has a very complicated and special history, and it's closely allied with the samurai class. The samurai class were, after all, master swordsmen, and their job was to fight. But this would all be classified in that section, in the Five Pillars of Zen, under non-Buddhist Zen. He explicitly talks about martial arts in that section.

[64:50]

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