If you have a cart that has two wheels, you want to make sure that the two wheels are working well together in order for the cart to move. We have a saying that when the two wheels of the Dharma are working well together, the cart moves very well and smoothly. So, the two wheels of the Dharma are the spiritual wheel and the material wheel. When the spiritual wheel is working well, the material wheel will follow and also work well. So, on this basis, the Berkeley Zen Center has survived and done well for many, many years with two wheels of the cart turning together in harmony.

[01:17]

I think Master Dogen and everyone, all the monks, say that when the practice goes well, when the practice is sincere and people are practicing wholeheartedly, the practice place will survive and be supported. And it's always worked that way. Today we are having our open house and We're opening our house in a very transparent way. We don't want to hide things. We don't want to feel that there is some small group of people who are secretly making things up.

[02:29]

of transparency. We're opening the house and you can look into every detail. Or skeletons in the closet. And if you find a skeleton, let us know. But you're not supposed to look in the closet. That's one of the rules. Somebody may not want you to look in their bedroom, but you can look in. So what we are presenting today is what all of the fundraising in the past, recent past, has produced. what our projections in the future, for the future, need to be.

[03:40]

So that you have a picture of where your hard-earned contributions have been used and will be used. I have this feeling, you know, I've always been a very frugal kind of person. Where can I use this? You know, it doesn't matter how big or small it is. Where can I use this? That's kind of always been my philosophy. When we were on Dwight Way, our first Zendo, where we were for 12 years, when I saw a piece of plywood on the street, I would pick it up and use it somewhere. I never thought of buying anything. Never occurred to me to buy anything. So, you know, at that time we were paying $130 rent a month.

[04:43]

And Ron was living downstairs with some people, and we were living upstairs, and we had to zendo in the attic. In those days, it didn't cost much to live, if you were around in those days, in this didn't cost very much to live. So we weren't basing everything on money. We were basing it on our labor. So there were always people around to do work, who were willing to do this, whatever needed to be done, with a minimum of expense. And nowadays, Everybody has to work really hard just to pay the rent. $1,200 a month or $1,500 a month for two rooms?

[05:46]

I mean, anyway, so people have to work really hard just to pay the rent. Never mind all the rest of the expenses, right? So we use money now. instead of labor as the fundamental, what would you call it, engine that drives the repair cycle. So when you have four buildings like this, upgrading and repair and remodeling is always, something is always going on. I remember this building was a house. When we moved in here in the eighty-nine, eighty-eight, eighty-nine? Seventy-nine.

[06:49]

Seventy-nine. This building was a house with two apartments. So you see the divider. The divider was where the wall was. And on that side was one apartment and on this side was another apartment. We needed the Zendo, and we decided this would be the Zendo. And we had an architect, Ned Forrest, who volunteered his time to help us design this building as a Zendo. And so it took a while to do that. Somehow we raised money. The whole thing about moving into this place was that it was total hootspah.

[07:49]

Naive hootspah. Because we didn't have anything. We didn't have any money at all. Pardon? I asked people to contribute $200, which was a lot of money then, as a kind of basis for And we had about $16,000 or something. And prices were rising, rising, rising all the time in those days. And we managed to buy this property for $225,000. Four buildings. And we used the community room as a, what's now the community room, as a zendo. Bill Milligan and I, It used to be just a house. It had a wall between the living room and I guess the bedroom.

[08:52]

And Bill Milligan and I looked at each other and said, you know, this wall should really come down and make a big space. So he went out to his truck and got a sledgehammer. And we looked at each other and picked up the sledgehammer, and we tore down the wall. And we thought that, and we put up a beam, you know, as a support, but we didn't really need to. Because that building, 1929, on my right, has what's called a balloon structure. ceiling in the second floor. Usually you build a house with one floor and then you build the next floor on top. But you never find any building done that way nowadays because there are no two-by-fours long enough.

[09:59]

But that's the way that building was built, so we didn't really need to restructure it. But we didn't find that out until later. But that was a little room that we used, that space was our zendo at that time. And in order to build this zendo, we had to convert, of course, the building. And to convert, to take a building, to take living space out of the city. you had to compensate by putting it somewhere else. Because you can't just take a building and make a business out of it. People do that, but... So we had to... In order to do this, we had to find a space for a living space and substitute somewhere else.

[11:02]

And so my idea was to always... The building next door had a lot of five and a half foot ceiling in the basement. So in order to compensate, we raised that building up and movers come in and raise the building up and we created the downstairs apartments, two apartments. That's compensation. That took quite a long time. It took about six months to do the Zendo. And then about two years to finish those apartments downstairs. Because there's nothing here except a bare room, but with some lights. But for the building next door, there had to be kitchens and all that. So putting up the structure was not so hard.

[12:03]

It didn't take so long. It's the finishing of the details that takes so long when you're doing something like that. We've never gone outside to solicit money for projects. And our members have always been generous in supplying money, funds for when we needed to do something. So my idea was, I don't want to nickel and dime people for money all the time. But when we needed something, we asked for it. And people always come through because they see the need for it. We often see churches draining people's money, you know, always asking for something. And I didn't want to do that.

[13:04]

So we've always maintained a kind of nice balance between sustaining our practice with dues and contributions. And when we really need something, to ask the Sangha, and the Sangha always supplies. Because the place belongs to the Sangha. This is your place. It's not my place. I do not own the Berkley Zen Center. And I'm only here through your generosity as long as I behave myself. Which I don't always do, but you're very kind to me anyway. So... Because the place belongs to the members,

[14:09]

the members have always supported it. It's your place. It's our place. And I can remember doing all this work. It was during the 70s, during the 80s, when we were creating the Zendo and putting the apartments in the building next door. The Sangha did the whole thing, mostly. Mostly the sangha did up most of the work. Young ladies with wheelbarrows and up on the roof. We did have carpenters at that time. My experience is that when you're doing a building project and somehow carpenters come out of the woodwork. So we did have members who were carpenters.

[15:14]

And they were going to do the work for low wages. But the work kept going on and on. And by the time we finished, we were paying them regular wages. And I can't remember how we got the money. And Zendo cost twice as much as what we thought it was going to. Zendo cost twice as much as we thought it was going to, yeah. That's one of the problems, yeah. But people did really good work. You know, we, Peter, Birkett and I went down and bought the cedar for this, the floor and the ceiling and, you know, the whole thing is made of, the whole interior is cedar. It was like third grade cedar. It was cheap. We always bought the cheapest stuff, you know.

[16:18]

And so we had it milled. And it was wonderful watching the boards come out. They had to be sliced in half and then milled to become a groove. And then they're a little bit thinner than three quarters. You've got to be very careful. It's soft wood, but it's very beautiful. You put the clearest wood in the middle of the floor, and under the tongs, where there's the most knots. But actually making it come out right with those joints, like these joints here are pretty good, right? Like one board meets the other from the two sides. That was the most difficult part of putting this thing, the interior together with making those boards match.

[17:25]

Looks simple, but it's not. I can remember Alan Block and I working to make one boat just two boards meet all day long. So we had all this wonderful volunteer labor of our members and we also paid some people, some carpenters, but we got it all done. And that work brought the Sangha together. It really brought the Sangha together. One thing with getting this property brought the Sangha together. And then doing the work brought the saga together. So. Peter, did you buy the doors from Japan? Oh, no, no. These doors, these doors were made by William.

[18:28]

His name won't occur to me. But he was a really wonderful carpenter. And he loved doing this kind of work. But he was very slow. Not slow, but he was... He waited until... He was very hesitant. He wanted to get it perfect. He wanted to get everything perfect. He was a perfectionist. And so he made the hinges. He made everything. This door and those two doors. He made that sliding bulb. Yeah, which works very well when you know how to do it. He did everything. In those days there was a group of carpenters who were really interested in Japanese joinery. And they were the kind of guys that would do this kind of work. Do you have any questions?

[19:41]

Way in the back. Yeah. Can you tell about the pillars? Oh, these pillars. Yeah. Thank you, Susan. These pillars. We decided instead of having a cross beam going across the ceiling, to have these pillars. And so Gary Snyder invited us to come up to his property and cut down the trees. So he helped us do that. And we have these pictures of us, you know, shaving the bark off. A whole heap of us went up there to do that. And we brought them back and there they are. Why are these beans canted? Oh, because they're warped. They're meant to be that way. There's a little warpage there.

[20:50]

Big frugal. Not sure about these beans, but in the other house, We put in four beams between the first and the second floor that were 14 inches high by 4 inches or 5 or 6 inches wide. And those were used lumber, you know, from piers. There's a used lumber yard in Richmond. So I wanted to use as much used lumber as possible. So that's where we got those beams. I'm not sure about these ones. But, you know, that's all well cured wood, you know. And it's much cheaper. So I always went for stuff like that. I would kind of like to add that if someone wants to do work, I'm sure that there's always still an opportunity.

[21:53]

We haven't completely walked away from that. I was just thinking while you were talking that, you know, about that we need to use money more now and that's like us, you know, I sort of have to take supplements now that I'm getting older and buildings need some stuff. So it's kind of like the, you know, there's probably a lot more, well, there's even more gray hair in here now than there was 10 years ago when I started. So, you know, we've had to, to sort of grow in that way. That's right. That's a good point because my way is to not use money. But we have people who know how to use money. And so we've made a wonderful compromise. All the time we're kind of compromising and finding the balance between how to do something ourselves and how to use money.

[23:05]

And I think it's working really quite well. So we're very, very careful. There was recently a earthquake retrofitting that needed to be done. And we got estimates of $50,000 and $300,000. And we ended up doing the work ourselves for almost nothing. So you can spend a lot of money if you want to. No. A couple of questions. Talk about the altar a little bit and where it came from. This altar? Yes. Yeah, that's a good point. The altar that we had an altar that was built by one of our members a long time ago and it's still on that table. And someone, actually, Daniel Leonard, who was a great scrounger, someone had given him this walnut

[24:19]

And I think it's a wonderful kind of walnut, it's a California walnut or something. And he just gave it to us, big sheets of walnut. And so I kept it for years, a long, long time, many, many years. And then one year I decided to, I thought it would be good to use it and build the altar. And so we went to Paul Disko's shop. You know Paul Disko? Paul Disko is a builder. He built Larry Ellison's, that big property of Larry Ellison's. A big Japanese-style palace in African. And so Paul was a censioner. student who Suzuki Roshi sent him to Japan to learn Japanese carpentry.

[25:23]

And he came back and he's been doing all these wonderful projects. And so we had him build this altar at his shop. And there was enough of this left over to build the altar in the Kaisando of Tassajara. Kaisando is the Founders Hall in Tassajara. So if you go to the Tassajara Founders Hall, you see the same wood there. So that's where that came from. Everything has a history. I'm reminded of how experiences, you know, can stay with us such a long time. So you talked about picking up pieces of plywood, and I like that. I hope you still pick things up. But I was just looking at this bowing mat. And I was pleased to see that it's sort of worn out. And it reminded me of an experience at San Francisco Zen Center in the late 70s or early 80s.

[26:30]

And it was announced that we got this beautiful new bowing mat for the Buddha Hall. And they told some amount of money just made my hair stand on end. Maybe it was $5,000. I don't know if I'm making this up or what. But I couldn't believe it. And around that same time, there was a purchase of a Tara statue. This just burned itself into my memory. I've never spoken of it. But now I am, because you talked about picking up plywood. And the statement about that Tara statue was, it's so beautiful. And it was a steal at $12,000. I really hated that. So, I mean, I just wanted to say that I appreciate your frugal approach to things. And when was the last time you picked something up on the street? Here was made at Greenbelt somehow green.

[27:47]

There was. I don't know. I'm not sure who it was, but said, I think the Berkley Zen Center would. We'd like to make a value for the Berkley Zen Center. So this is what they made. It looks like my grandmother's couch. But it served us well. It's wearing out, and we need it. It'd be nice to have another one. Somebody can make it. Peter? I'd like to celebrate how much we've learned, being on the curve of gaining some sense of how, in this transition, where we're or using money a little more, I would learn what it takes to work together carefully in the same spirit as when we ourselves were here hammering nails all the time. I think the project of different repairs and renovations on the house here where Alan and Laurie live upstairs was a situation where we got a really good fresh look at that.

[28:59]

like that, where it's not as... I think what happens, in one way, when you're using money, you really start to involve a lot of other people, but not necessarily in the community. And those people get involved in your decisions. So we've learned a whole lot about how to approach a situation where we're working a little bit differently. And I'd just like to say that's something that I think is We're also learning from each other and the circumstances we place ourselves in. Well, that's right. And also, you know, designing. As an example, the back porch of the kitchen. The back porch of the kitchen.

[30:13]

We decided that we were really going to do something with that space. And so then there's the question. Let's see who should be involved in dealing with that. So we decided that we would ask everybody what they thought, which is. A wonderfully terrible idea. But I think it's OK, you know, because you don't you can't follow everybody's idea, but you get so many suggestions and then you have to refine. And people have to accept what we what the refinement comes up with. So that's a good process. Because there's so many tensos who use the kitchen and so many people who, you know, what's going to be for storage and what's going to be for passageway and where do you put this, where do you put that?

[31:18]

So it's a good process because it involves everybody and it acknowledges everybody who wants to be acknowledged. And I think acknowledgement is really very important because when people feel neglected or not seen or not heard, is not so good. So, there are two ways to run an organization, or there's more than two, but the two extremes are one person makes all the decisions, and the other extreme is everybody makes the decisions. Everybody making a decision means that decisions rarely get made. Because there's always talk. But there's a kind of compromise. And to err on the side of discussion, I think it's better because I've been through both sides.

[32:27]

When I became abbot of San Francisco Zen Center, the abbot before made all the decisions. And then Zen Center turned out to do the opposite, where there was committees and committees and committees, and nothing ever got done. Everything got done very slowly. But it was better than one person making a decision. And then people would say, gee, you know, it would be so much easier if one person just made the decision. So anyway, it goes back and forth, you know. And that dynamic is important. Without the dynamic, I just want to sort of reinforce what Linda said about, I don't know, the modesty of this place is just wonderful. You know, and the way in which you pick up stuff from the street. We now call that recycling.

[33:32]

And the way everyone participated is, you know, I feel it all the time being here. This is very important. So I wonder if you can I know at one time there was thought that there was a possibility that the building next door would open up. And we were, you know, it was that was in the 90s. I guess the building next door opens up every once in a while. Yeah. And we get put our foot in and get caught. It closes the trap. Well, it would be a very big and different. It would be a whole different bottleneck for a bigger monastery or living space or Zendo or whatever would happen. But the way it is now is wonderful. And I just don't know if I can comment about a modest approach to I can't tell you about it.

[34:35]

My feeling about that is that the Chinese restaurant thing, when there's this little Chinese and Thai restaurant, there's a little hole in the wall, and then there's a line around the block for people to get in. But the people who run the restaurant don't understand why that is. And so they say, as soon as they get a little money, they say, let's expand and modernize. So they expand and modernize and the line disappears. It's only the mystique is gone. Right. So I want to keep our mystique of being small. It's great when it's really crowded. It's OK. When you have the big plate, you feel, where is everybody, you know? So I like that.

[35:37]

And we've been through the cycle, many cycles of next door and never work. And that will never happen. And I doubt that. And besides, the more you have, the more you have to take care of, and the more dedicated people have to be to doing that, and it's a great idea idealistically, but practically not so good. You know, my ideal, when I was, when I moved into Dwight Way, Hiroshi asked me to open the place, get a place, and so my ideal was to sit Zazen, for a Zen student, to sit Zazen study and garden. So I had this huge garden at Dwight Way and that's where I spent my day and then doing Zazen and study and work and so forth.

[36:43]

For me they created a great matrix for practice and of course not everybody can do that, right? work to do. And that still continues. When we moved in here, many years, I rented a garden space next door. That's why the gate is there and all that. And I spent a lot of time fixing that garden and putting in the pathways and everything. And then she took it back, but that's okay. It's her property. We pay rent, though. But it was nice. I remember the kids, you know, grazing in the garden. You know, when the kids were very little, they would walk through the garden, pick strawberries, you know, and pick beans. And it's just like, it's wonderful. So anyway, that's kind of my ideal. But that was the way I centered myself in practice.

[37:52]

So, what's next? One of our spokespeople can tell me what's next. What's next is we invite everyone outside for a celebration. We'll have a few brief remarks about getting everybody oriented about the tour of the building. There's food, there's going to be music. We will all convene again outside in a couple of minutes and then we'll bring people together very briefly for a few remarks just so we can orient everybody to what the possibilities are for the morning. And we'll show everybody. OK. So you can wander around and wander through all the buildings and then you can come into my office if you want to. I'll be there. We're opening all the doors so everyone can get a chance to leave behind the door. And if you have an opinion about the back porch, it's a tour with guides.

[39:02]

Yes. Yes. There'll be people. It's not just looking around. Oh, yeah. Yeah. And we'll be on every building to ask questions until you know what's been done there. So are you on your own from one building to the other? Yes. So it's not guided like oil ram. Peter? I just read years and years ago how in China at one time, when monks were ordained, great numbers of them were ordained. That's right. They burned maksa on their heads. The entire place at his quarters and everything opened up. They were allowed to wander anywhere. You don't have to bring back.

[40:01]

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