Alan Tanaki. Alan has been a priest for 17 years. Alan is a priest here at the Berkeley Zen Center and has been a priest for 17 years. He is currently our canto, which means head of practice. He's been our canto for the past eight years. He has worked a great deal with the Berkeley And he's also a student of traditional American music, which we're going to be fortunate enough to hear a little bit of today. He is also a father and husband, and his family are residents here at Burton Tech. So thank you. Thanks, Marie. Yeah. Too many lives.

[01:12]

I should be a mechanic of this. I tried to fix this and now it's... I think we need a new... I need to work on this somehow. Good morning in this kind of very strange weathered day. Well, I should do it for this talk. You know, the Zen practice that we do, our tradition is all about relationships.

[02:18]

Relationships to each other, relationships in sangha, it's why we sit together and practice together, meet together, study together. relationships that we have in the rest of our life, relationships with all of the various, not just people, but the things that we encounter, how we hold them, how we treat them. And that all flows from a relationship to ourself. This continuing inner dialogue that we have, that we explore in Zazen, even though we're not supposed to be talking to ourselves. If you're talking to yourself too much, then we have to find the proper medication for you, not meditation. But in a sense, there's always, if you know, there's always this dialogue going on.

[03:25]

Sometimes it gets really quiet. Sometimes in Zazen, it's very quiet. And then, we are in complete harmony. There's no separation between our self and our soul, if you will, between our small self and our big self. There's just being. And yet in our everyday life, there's this constant dialogue. A few weeks ago, we had a Buddhist Peace Fellowship benefit with Robert Thurman, which was really great. And he said, I know that some of you are sitting there thinking, what am I gonna have for lunch?

[04:31]

or why did she say that to me? You have a variety of these thoughts right now. Even though you're supposed to be doing this activity, which is called Zen, that activity is actually encountering your mind with all of its proclivities. So I've been thinking about this and thinking about relational challenges that I experience. The primary one is in relationship to myself, is in where I have various kinds of expectations that are sometimes helpful, often very unhelpful, that I have desires, that I have ideas about myself or I have ambitions.

[05:36]

None of these are necessarily good or bad, but they all have to be encountered and they all actually have to be seen in a sense as transparent. In other words, I have to be able to explore them and see through them in order to be free. I'm just recalling yesterday, I got an email just before I went, which I made the mistake of reading, which is my compulsive sense, just before I went down to Zazen. And, oh, that was a really difficult period of Zazen. It was, you know, listening to every angry, argumentative voice that I had in my head and saying, in a sense, yes, and enduring it, keeping on, and just remembering my intentions.

[06:41]

I'm going to sit here with whatever is coming up and meet it. I'm not necessarily trying to think about things, but I'm not trying to repress them either. So I've been thinking about this question of relationality, and I don't know, about a month ago, a song came up to me, and I think I will sing it to you and then sort of comment on it. It's a Bob Dylan song, and it's from the album John Wesley Harding, which came out in 1967. I don't know how many of you, those of my generation are familiar with it. He recorded it actually about a year after he had a very serious motorcycle accident, kind of at the height of the real craziness of his career, and he withdrew to Woodstock.

[07:48]

kept writing songs and working on them with other musicians. He put out this album where his music had been in a very raw mode with a fair amount of anger mixed with the sweetness. Each of these songs is quite Quite a rough gem, I think. Very straightforwardly produced. Nothing to jar your sensibilities, but tremendous intricacy and thought in the words. And just in the album itself, I remember looking at this cover, which is kind of black and white and gray, and it had a picture of Dylan where he had, you know, he previously had this kind of wild hair and this real, you know, kind of almost chiseled expression and very edgy look that he had been cultivating for years. He was looking kind of impish, boyish, with his head cocked and his kind of smile on his face, and he's surrounded by these

[08:57]

Indian Bengali musicians, the Baul street singers from Bengal, who were just gathered around him by a tree. And it's like, well, what are they doing there? And, you know, that's just part of the enigma. We don't know what they were doing there. But they were pointing towards some other dimension in the music. So I'd like to sing this song for you. I feel like the singing monk. Right? You know, it's like, where's, you know, am I going to fly off or what? Dear landlord, please don't put a price on my soul.

[10:25]

My burden is heavy, my dreams are beyond control. When that steamboat whistle blows, I'm gonna give you all I got to give. And I hope you receive it well, depending on the way you feel that you live. Dear landlord, please heed these words that I speak. I know you suffered much, in this you are not so unique. All of us at times we might work too hard, to have it too fast and too much.

[11:33]

And anyone can fill his life up with things he can see, but he just cannot touch. Dear landlord, please don't dismiss my case. I'm not about to argue, I'm not about to move to no other place. Now each of us has his own special gifts. You know this was meant to be true. And if you don't underestimate me, I won't underestimate you. That's the song. That was kind of nerve-wracking.

[12:44]

So, this reminds me very much, there's a case in the Mumenkan, which is one of the Koan collections. It's case 12, about Zen Master Zui Gon. So every day, Zui Gon would wake up and he would call to himself, master, master. And every day, he would respond, yes, yes. And then he would say, be awake, be alert. And he would say, yes. And then he said, from now on, don't be fooled by others. No, I won't. And that's the dialogue in this koan. It's a great koan. And in Mumon's comment, There's a line he says, Old Zwegan buys himself and sells himself. He brings forth angel faces and demon masks and he plays with them.

[13:48]

This is This is actually, this is a description of Bob Dylan. There is nobody that I can think of who has taken on more voices, more masks, constantly shifting, kind of like a trickster coyote. And in this song, there's a shifting that's going on all the time. But that's them. Each of us actually has our own closet full. We've got our closets full of these masks and faces. And sometimes we don't even really know which one we have on. Other people can see them, but we don't necessarily have a clue. But we keep taking them on and putting them off. And sometimes actually it feels like they're glued on. and we're kind of stuck in our relationship to ourself or in a relationship with another person.

[14:58]

And it glued on, and we think, we make the error of thinking, this is our real face. But it's not true. Our real face is something deeper and wider and freer. And how do we encounter that? So I think this song, I'm gonna give you a kind of Zen interpretation of this song. There's lots of interpretations, you know. This song, there's all this commentary, you know, on a literal level. Well, it's about a tenant and a landlord. Well, maybe, you know, but I haven't heard many landlords who are actually putting, trying to put a price on a person's soul. Or another narrative about is it's about man and God. You know, so well, yeah, maybe. And then it's, there's the narrative that this is about Dylan and his manager, Albert Grossman, which is possibly the most accurate one.

[16:14]

But it's a mistake to We can never point directly to, you know, what a work of art is about. You know, they have a point of departure, but then it takes on its own life. And the perspective within the work is shifting. And, you know, as we understand from Zazen, we gradually encounter there is no fixed reality. So the artist is, putting something out, you know, or you know, the artist is giving you all he's got to give. And then for each of us, we have to find what it means to us. How is it helpful? How is it useful? If it's not useful, set it aside. So, You know, in the exoteric, the external sense, there's all these different narratives about what this song is.

[17:21]

I also think that this song is about a person talking to himself, to the various dimensions of oneself, the part of oneself that wants to put one in a box to see the limitations that we have, feeling that perhaps That's the safe thing to do rather than to take the risk to really step completely outside of that box into freedom and to figure out how to do that. This is very hard. So there are all of these different ways of looking at the song. But I'd like to go through it a little and then maybe leave some time for discussion. You know, it begins, each line, each verse begins with this kind of polite, connected, but formal address, dear landlord, whoever this landlord is.

[18:27]

And I do keep coming back to the landlord as kind of our small self. the self that thinks that it really owns the territory of our existence and then charges rent for it, makes us pay various prices. But it's good to treat that person respectfully, politely, and with some intimacy because It's none other than who we are. It's just one of those voices that the, it's what the sixth ancestor was referring to when he said, save all the sentient beings of your own mind. They're all in there.

[19:29]

And it's not that we're schizophrenic or we have multiple personalities. We have constantly shifting selves that are constantly arising being created, fading away into an insubstantiality. But they're there. They can't be ignored. So you have to be polite to them. And yet, the next line, please don't put a price on my soul. He's saying, see me. Don't see me. Don't treat me like an object. whether you're looking on the esoteric or the exoteric level, this is really important. If each of us is Buddha, if each of us has the same seed of enlightened nature, then that nature is beyond price.

[20:34]

And it's beyond category. And it's beyond any box or compartment that one can put another into. The temptation is very strong. So that's what, you know, that's what he's responding to in this song. And then he says, my burden is heavy. My dreams are beyond control. Our burdens, our burdens are heavy. I just, if you think, I'm sure for almost all of us, we have our own suffering, we have our own physical illnesses, we have our own despair as well as our joys. We have to reckon with our shortcomings. And then, that's before we even realize, before we think about, or if you're self-centered like me before, those of us around us.

[21:39]

And, you know, if we went around this room, we would find the collection of suffering that we encounter in our relationships with, in those that we love or we're close to, is staggering. The burden is very heavy. Our burden is even heavier. And more and more, I'm aware that There's a war going on, literally, that is tearing at the fabric of our lives, tearing at the fabric of our society. If you turn on the television, every day you see terrible scenes of bombing and destruction. And this is a really heavy burden that we don't quite know what to do about. So on the one side, the burden is heavy. And on the other side, my dreams are beyond control. You know, the landlord can't control my dreams.

[22:43]

Nobody can control my dreams. In a dream, anything is possible, from the most wonderful to the most dire. And that is when we dream, we have like a direct, telephone line to a world beyond this one, to a Buddha field that we can never fully grasp. And yet, in this song, what he's saying, he's celebrating it. My burden is heavy, and my dreams are beyond control. So I have to take care of my own life, and I would like you to respect that. That's what he's saying to Landlord. And then he says, but when the steamboat whistle blows, I'm gonna give it all I got to give. So when causes and conditions arise, we really work hard in every aspect of our life, whether it's in our family, our work, our art, our zazen, we just throw ourselves into it.

[23:55]

That's what he's proposing. There's a line, several places from Zen Master Dogen who says you should practice as if saving your head from fire. That's giving it all you've got to give. Practicing with that kind of a single-minded intensity that You don't say, oh, my head's on fire. But wait, I have to have a sandwich. You know, it's like, it sort of has a priority. So what he's saying is when that steamboat whistle blows, then I'm gonna give it all I've got to give. But then he addresses the lender, he said, and I hope you'll receive it well, depending upon the way you feel that you live. So I give it all I have to give, and I hope that you'll receive it well.

[24:57]

But really, that's your work. So I say this, this is true in the song, this is true in the context here, this is true in our relationships, and it's true in our relationship even to ourselves, that things come up We make a tremendous effort and we have difficulty even accepting it ourselves because of this little line, depending on the way you feel that you live, because we think we want things to be a certain way. And that's our choice. That's my choice, that's the narrator's, what he's proposing is that I can't control how you want it to be. I can't control how you think of it. So I just offer. The singer is just offering, give it all he can give, and I hope you'll receive it, but it's kind of up to you.

[26:03]

In the second verse, So the first verse is, you know, I hope you'll see me. And then he says, dear landlord, please heed these words that I speak. So I hope you'll hear me. I know you suffered much, but in this, you are not so unique. So this is, you know, the easy Buddhist analysis or the one that comes up is, well, this is the first noble truth. that life is marked by suffering, and I see, you know, he's saying, I see that you're suffering a lot. It's not so unique, but it is your suffering, and I have to respect it, and I have to acknowledge that this is what you have to work with in your life.

[27:08]

And then he describes, I think, what he sees as the root of his suffering. All of us at times we might work too hard, but we know about that. To have it too fast and too much, we know about that. This is the second noble truth, that the cause of suffering is desire. that we work hard for what we think we want, you know, and our lives now, this is 1967 that he wrote this, our lives now, it seems like we're on a treadmill where they're ramping up the rate faster and faster and faster. And we think we have to stay on that treadmill. And, you know, it's like, we're running our asses off and we're working too hard to have it too fast and too much.

[28:24]

That's why we suffer. And what that suffering is like is what he describes in the next line. And anyone could fill his life up with things he can see but he just cannot touch. So this is the result of this craving. It's this kind of insatiable feeling that drives us so often. Now maybe there are Buddhists here in this room who are not who don't experience life that way. I hope so, you know. But this insatiability, I think part of the reason that I relate to the song is that I'm very much working with that. We fill our lives up with activities.

[29:32]

Some of us fill our lives up with things. We fill our lives up with strivings and ambitions and want positions and want recognition. We want to be seen and heard, we think, but we go about it the wrong way. We fill our lives up with things we can see, but we just cannot touch. Now that doesn't mean, you know, I can hold the guitar, you know, I can touch it, but I can't possess it. I can't possess anything that I desire. I may have a receipt for it, you know, or a contract for it, or a, you know, a diploma or whatever, but I can't touch that. And the really difficult thing, I think, is that you can fill your life up with things, even the very things that you want.

[30:45]

You can even accomplish the things that you think you want and still suffer intensely because they don't give you what you think they were gonna. You thought, this is gonna make me happy, or this is gonna make me satisfied, or this is gonna be enough. If only I had this, or could do this, or could attain this, then I'd be happy. But it's not enough. It doesn't work so well. And so we're back, we're thrown back on our own devices. We're thrown back into a life of spirit, a life of zazen, a life of practice. We're thrown back on a life of things as they are.

[31:46]

And accepting them This is the challenge, accepting them rather than constantly wanting them to be some other way. So anyone can fill his or her life up with things they can see, but they just can't touch. It's kind of like the story of that fable of heaven and hell. Some of you have probably heard it where they're basically the same thing. You go into a room, like a dining room, and there's a big table. It's piled high with foods and you're sitting across from it. Unfortunately, your arms are three foot forks. Instead of arms, they're three foot beyond our regular arm, it's like really long.

[32:50]

So you can't, hell is, you're trying to feed yourself from all these wonderful things. You can't do it because you can't get that fork around to get in your mouth. And heaven is where you're feeding each other across the table. You're using the tools that you have at hand to help each other, and then you can be satisfied. And you have to take your time, because when you have a fork that's that long, three feet beyond my hand, it's like my aim may not be so good, so I have to be really careful. You can't do it too fast, and you can't try to put too much on the end of it. So then the last verse. Dear landlord, please don't dismiss my case. Please respect me. I'm trying to respect you. I'm speaking to you directly, honestly.

[33:54]

And it's interesting because this is the same artist who two years before had a hit song in Positively 4th Street. I don't know if any of you remember that. So Positively 4th Street, perhaps the most mean-spirited and nasty song that ever made it to the hit parade. It's unbelievable. And it ends, yes, I wish that for just one time you could stand inside my shoes and you'd know what a drag it is to see you. And the whole song, the whole song is just one kind of ad hominem attack and put down after another. This is the same writer two years later. So what he's saying is, please don't dismiss my case. Please respect me. And he says, I'm not about to argue. Arguments are pointless.

[35:04]

Our arguments are usually a way of staking out kind of the territory of self. You know, it's, if I were to make an argument, when you get into, when I get into an argument with somebody, I find, you know, there's this incredible, all these chemicals rushing through my body. And, you know, it's like, yeah, it feels really real. So the voice here is saying, I'm not about to argue. I'm just telling you how I see things. And they said, I'm not about to move to no other place. There's really no other place to go. Because we're both here. Me and the landlord. Me and you. Me and my family. Me and my teacher. Me and me. There's no other place to go. We're just here in a Buddhist called the Saha world.

[36:11]

Have you heard that term? the Saha world means the world to be endured yes this is this is where we are we're in this world that has to be endured and that's our our our practice is just a practice just sitting down in the Saha world because we've got no place else to go And then he has this wonderful concluding lines where he says, each of us has his own special gift. And you know this was meant to be true. Each of us is a Buddha. Each of us has something to contribute that's really special and unique. I look around this room and I know a lot of you. And to think of the gifts of just the people I know in this room brings tears to my eyes.

[37:27]

We all have these really deep gifts, we all have these human energies, and that's the way it is. This is the wonderful way that it is. And his last line is, you know, he's still asking for this mutual recognition. He's putting forth it. He's making a case. Please don't dismiss my case. My case is about let's really see each other. And if you don't underestimate me, I won't underestimate you. That's the last line. I would amend that. The challenge of Buddhist practice is actually, even if you underestimate me, my practice is, my intention is not to underestimate you. But either way, it's a plea that Dylan is offering.

[38:45]

Yes, let's see that we have these gifts to share and let's really value each other because we need each other, because what we have, whether we live in a family or a community or a workplace, or even what we have with ourselves, unless we can recognize those gifts, appreciate them, give them their proper estimation, then we are going through the world in a stingy and narrow and small-minded way. So anyway, I think that I've been trying to, I forget where these words, where the song came to mind for me.

[39:52]

It was in some brush fire of interpersonal conflict that flared up. I can't remember whether it was here or at Buddhist Peace Fellowship or, you know, something in another arena of my life where I might have felt not fully seen. And yet when this song came to mind, what I realized was Not only did I not feel fully seen, but the correlative was also true. I wasn't seeing the other person. I might be seeing them as an obstacle. I might be putting a price on their soul. How can we not do that? How can we really see each other as unique, as Buddha,

[40:54]

whatever that means to us, as having the full capability and potentiality for awakening, which can be really, which I can learn from and be helped by and try to return the same in kind. So I think that's where I'd like to end. for today and leave some time for discussion. Thank you for hearing this kind of experiment. Any comments or thoughts? Mark. Berkeley Zen Center. For me, it's me. I mean, the most useful way of looking at this song for me is the incomplete way and unhelpful ways that I see myself.

[42:08]

Ways that I... The stories that I tell about myself or the price that I put, you know, as I... I'm no good at this, or I'm really good at this, but then I'm no good at this. So that's the most potent part of it for me. How much rent do you pay? Well, I think that we live, look where we live, you know. There's no rent control in here. The rent is really sky high and I can't afford it. Let me tell you a little morning dialogue I often have. Morning can come at any time of the day. Master? Yes. Yeah. Wake up.

[43:12]

Don't be fooled. I will be fooled. Get back in your hole. Get out of here. Can you help me? Well, you're doing the same thing. You're playing with angel faces and demon masks. You just have a propensity for the demon masks. Yeah, it's just playing. This is the Saha world. It's the world to be endured. How we endure it? Sometimes it's really hard. and painful, and sometimes there's playfulness and joy.

[44:18]

You have some choice about it. So I think the challenge is how do I keep opening up? How do I put in a wedge that I can create a little more opening in the direction of liberation? I think he's got an idea. Oh, good. You want to tell us? You can keep it secret, too. No, just not wedge, but get Sir Lee Master to come out and play. Yeah, right. Don't just take him so seriously. Find out what he enjoys. Yeah. Or she. Yeah. It is a good one.

[45:47]

I always had this idea. I was talking with a friend this week, you know, looking back at these early concerts that we had in New York by a group, put on by a loose aggregation called the Friends of Old Time Music, where you had these great master traditional musicians who would play with fantastic, they play their music with fantastic intensity. And the same thing is true in the jazz world. Tremendous intensity in every note and in every expression and in every activity. Give it all you got to give. And yet the feeling on stage, you know, it's like if you watch TV or watch a concert, these people are throwing themselves around the stage and thrashing about and looking like they're really digging into their soul so deeply. It's like, I've got to get this expression out and throw it out there. You know, whereas these people were just They were playing with intensity and calm.

[46:49]

Ordinary, it was ordinariness, like ordinary mind. So it's like, yeah, you take what you do seriously, but you don't take yourself seriously. You have to take yourself really lightly. When you take yourself seriously, you got a big problem, but you should take what you do seriously. Yeah. It's really true what you're saying as far as to do that, instead of saying, oh my god, I haven't done this. You know, just back up a little bit.

[47:51]

And just say, well, you know, there's reasons for everything here. So don't panic. Just lean a little bit this way. Lean a little bit that way. And more important is to have this balance and peace amongst the various masses. So you can see something else. Yeah, I do. I mean, you need to take that moment, but it's got to be, uh, I think if it's scanned better, uh, judge might be another word for landlord, uh, in this setting. It's to the extent that which we, it's when we judge ourselves, um, We really make it hard for ourselves when we're in our evaluative mode, rather than just creating a sense of spaciousness where we can have that moment to do it.

[49:03]

And this is the method of Zazen instruction. When we have Zazen instruction in there, you're taught, well, you count your breaths. You're instructed to count your breaths. You count from one to 10 and then start over. And chances are you're gonna get to like two. know and then you start if you notice when you notice that you start over and you start over without any judgment without any notion of success and failure because if you get caught in success and failure that's that's the hell realm that you live in that moment time for one more and then stop yeah It's like, don't come through here.

[50:31]

And I remember, like, almost towards the stage, and out of, like, the corner of my ear, I hear somebody speaking English. And I speak Hebrew, and I'm like, that way. And so I started walking, and I, [...] And I didn't have this... I didn't have this idea that I was going to get there. I just had this curiosity, and I didn't want to say I would have left. I'm going to leave that uncommented. It's a wonderful story. Thank you.

[51:30]

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