We're very glad to have Leslie James with us this morning. Leslie is president of the San Francisco Zen Center and she's the mother of two daughters and a wife. has been very open and helpful to us in the last couple of years in making numerous kinds of different contacts. Well, melee started out with what I was intending to start out with. As I was in Mel's hut, I was just thinking of when my husband and I first came to the Bay Area, we came specifically to practice then because we had read the bread book.

[01:20]

and heard about Tassajara and written to Zen Center and found out you, of course, couldn't go directly to Tassajara, you had to come to the City Center first. So I came, we both came, but I came to visit both Zen Center in San Francisco and the Berkeley Zen Center. And when I came to Berkeley, I met Peter Overton and Liz, Liz Horowitz, and they were at the old Zen Center in Berkeley. And they were very nice and friendly, and there was homemade dishes, and they served me tea. And then I went to visit the San Francisco Zen Center, and was greeted by a friend, Keller. I don't know how many of you know her, but she was the guest manager, or the secretary probably, in the building, the Page Street building at that time. And it was very formal, she sat with a very straight back, and I was sort of... And I went away from that knowing that I wanted to go to the San Francisco Zen Center because it was clear that if I came to Berkeley I would have to get to know people, and I was scared.

[02:32]

So I thought, you know, I could sneak into the San Francisco, even though they might notice that I was not standing as straight as all of them. It was clear they weren't going to talk to me. They weren't going to bother me. I was sort of a fake hippie was how I thought of myself. I was trying to be a hippie but I knew deep inside I was a very conservative girl from Idaho and quite scared to be in California. So we went to San Francisco and what brought it up for me in Mel's hut was how I thought I was going to hide over there but then after however many years it's been I have to walk in here and face all of you in the new Berkeley Center. So it's interesting the surprises that come to you in this practice. This certainly isn't what I had planned. I was in 71, so 14 years ago. I've been most recently studying a book called The Awakening of Faith.

[03:55]

It's not a Buddhist sutra, it's a commentary on a sutra. It's a small book, but it's extremely dense. It's about Mahayana Buddhism, and it's sort of an outline form. The author of it seemed to want to pack all of Buddhism into this book about that big, or all of Mahayana Buddhism. But reading it I have... well actually it's a similar sense to what I used to have reading Alan Watts. You must be bringing back memories for me. When I used to read Alan Watts I had the feeling as I was reading it that I really understood everything now as I was going along, you know. But then I get to the end of the book and then I got stuck and I couldn't... figure out what was it he had been talking about and I kept feeling like I'd have to go back and read it again because it was so he had clearly worked it out so well in his mind and written it down in this book but I just hadn't been able to quite absorb it and I have that same feeling from this awakening of faith but it's I don't know why I had it with or why that

[05:10]

Happened with me with Alan Watts, but with the book awakening of faith It's pretty clear to me that it happens that way because the point of the whole book is not Even though it's very well worked out intellectually that's not the point of the book and it keeps saying in the book that The point is to actually do it that you have to actually do it or all this how it makes sense and how it all adds up it doesn't matter it just doesn't matter at all and what it's talking about actually doing is awakening your faith your confidence in suchness and it talks about suchness as being the It has two aspects. One is the absolute and the other is the phenomenal. The absolute is, you know, everything you can imagine the absolute to be.

[06:19]

It's very big and it's what is absolutely important and always present and never ending. Not divided up in little pieces. And the phenomenal is you and me and everything around us and everything our lives are made out of. And suchness is where the two intersect. It's where the phenomenal and the absolute come together. And in fact it says in several other places in Buddhism say that the phenomena and the absolute that well one way of saying it is phenomena is the same as the absolute the absolute is completely the same as phenomena so there isn't any there isn't any place where the absolute this big huge wonderful thing goes outside of phenomena phenomena doesn't exist inside of it it just is it that's all there is

[07:32]

But not only that, there isn't any of it but just what... there's just where it intersects. There isn't any other time or any other place. And to develop or to awaken your faith in that means to find the nerve somehow to live very minutely where that intersection is, you know, namely right now and right here and not drift off into preparing, that's a lot of it, preparing for, you know, whatever you have to prepare for, lunch or your life, looking for a job or... and also not drift off into regrets or wishing for the past or mourning something that you have messed up.

[08:34]

It's awakening the confidence that actually there aren't any mistakes right now. Right now, as big and as wide as it is, is perfect. And it may look kind of messed up, in fact it is kind of messed up, but that's not a mistake. That's just the way it is. And the only mistake is to wish for it to be different And in fact, even wishing for it isn't a mistake because that's just part of the, you know, that's part of what's happening right now if that's what you're doing. It's always been a little confusing to me how to say something or how to, or what it really means to say that you shouldn't have regrets for the past or you shouldn't wish for something else.

[09:36]

Because Buddhism also says, even if you do that, that's suchness also. Or another way of putting it is a quote from one of the koans, the Soto koans, is that the, if I can remember it, the fundamental affliction of ignorance is the immutable knowledge of the Buddhas. So our very fundamental ignorance is the immutable, the unchangeable knowledge of the Buddhas. I had a taste of what it might actually mean A week and a half ago I went, Thich Nhat Hanh was giving a retreat at Green Gulch, and I went for just one day of it on Friday. And his practice is, well, he said in a lecture right after I got there, he said that the things that he was asking them to do during the retreat, during their Zazen period, during their meditation period, was to follow their breathing, be as one with their breathing as they could, and smile.

[10:55]

So they were supposed to sit there with this smile on their face. And right after his lecture, we did a walking meditation, which he also does, a very slow walking. And we walked down the fields at Green Gulch to about the third field. And on the way down, I tried to do this walking, this, you know, following my breathing and smiling. And I couldn't, every time I would start to smile, I had this enormous sadness. was coming up in me, which was actually, you know, it wasn't a, anyway, it was just a regular sadness. It's horrible. And it kept growing and growing and I wanted to smile. You know, I was only there for one day and besides there were lots of people I knew and I didn't want to make a fool of myself. So I kept trying to smile and not going into the sadness, but it wouldn't go away. And we got down to about the third field and sat down in a circle. So, you know, there I was before everybody and I kept trying because that's what we were supposed to be doing and tears started streaming down my face.

[12:06]

Luckily I had a Kleenex in my pocket and I could tell that it was sort of very pristine, you know, I could tell that I could just, I could easily just go with it and, you know, start imagining or discovering what I was so sad about I could probably think of lots of things, but I didn't dare think about them. I would have really made a fool of myself. Or I could try to suppress it. That actually wasn't working very well. I did try that some, but it wasn't working very well. And also, that wasn't the mood of the retreat, was not to suppress what was going on with you. But in fact, a woman asked, I don't know if she saw me or not, but she She asked a question of him at that point and said that often when she felt deep joy, she also felt deep sorrow, which was not what I was feeling. I was feeling regular old everyday sorrow, I'm pretty sure. But it was useful.

[13:07]

And he said that, I mean, she said, what do you do at that point? And he said, it's true that they often come up together or that what you want to practice isn't necessarily who you are at the time but it's still important to try to do the practice not indulge yourself in your momentary phenomenon so I continued to try to do that and before too long it actually changed I didn't stay weeping and wailing forever. But what was very interesting to me was this sort of pristine quality of, I don't know how else to say it, of not going, you know, the sadness was very real. It was very real, but it wasn't sort of overwhelming, like sometimes I can get into a mood.

[14:09]

It wasn't a mood, it was almost a physical lump or something. was there and could be worked around and explored quite physically. And anyway, I appreciated it a lot. One of the things that Thich Nhat Hanh mentioned in this retreat was one of the little stories that he, or not stories, anyway, he said, I think it comes from a Pali scripture, that if you're in the desert and you only have a muddy glass of water You don't dare throw out the muddy glass of water. It's your only water. You have to find some way to let it settle, make it palatable. You have to find some way to make it palatable. And we're our muddy glass of water. If you're an angry person, you can't just throw out the anger. Anger's all you've got.

[15:12]

Anger's what you have to work with and somehow make it palatable. Find some way of turning it into a Buddha. If you're a greedy person, you have to let it sit there maybe. Let a glass of water sit there until it settles. That's one way. That's what we try. Sitting there and letting the Anger or greed or whatever is going on with us settle down enough so that we can actually see it And drink it so we can actually accept it as ourselves I've been thinking... Well, recently I've been reading a fair amount of Jungian psychology and I don't know very much about it.

[16:26]

I've never particularly studied it. I've never gone to a Jungian therapist. But I've found it very helpful recently. And I've been wondering what is the difference between that and Buddhism. And some of my thoughts about it recently are, like I said, I found it very helpful in looking at myself and getting a better sense of what's going on with me. It's helpful in the settling process, understanding what's coming up. But I also think there's a danger with us Westerners that we're... Well, another thing I've been reading just a little bit of is Dr. Bella's book, Habits of the Heart, and he talks about that in the West, in America in particular, individualism is our religion. You know, that at a very deep, deep, deep level, what we really believe in is the individual.

[17:28]

that I really at some very deep level believe in me and you believe in you and that's more important to us than any other values that which in other cultures like the community value or something might be more important in lots of other cultures maybe almost all other cultures but in America it's individualism and I think that it's a little bit of a danger for us or something that we need to watch how much, I know for myself, the things in Buddhism that I like the most, I sort of have an immediate taste for, are things that go right along with Jungian therapy and, you know, discovering myself and that, you know, sitting, sitting zazen and noticing what comes up for me. I don't have any intellectual problem with that. It makes sense to me that that's a good thing to do.

[18:30]

I do have some intellectual problem with something like seeing the refuges, you know, taking the refuges in the Buddha, the Dharma, the Sangha, following the precepts. I have an intellectual problem with, you know, I... Not that I'm sure it's good to do, you know, but how do you... It sounds so moralistic to me sometimes. So I feel a resistance. to something as just as out there as I'll just do the precepts. Why don't I discover inside myself what I really want to do and do that? Or taking a vow to save sentient beings. Those things are harder for me emotionally or intellectually to embrace. And I think that's kind of a common thing. But the danger, I think, is that we will think, because we have some difficulty with this, that it's not important.

[19:39]

And I think that that's our blind spot, that because individualism is so important for us, that it's very hard for us to embrace the... I don't know what to call that side, but that less... In a way, it's more subtle. You can't think it out as well. And to figure out what is the benefit, really, of service, of doing service, chanting, and bowing. Or what is the benefit of taking refuge in the Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha? I wouldn't even... I wouldn't want to try to talk about it so much, but I think that there actually is a benefit there and that it's quite subtle. Maybe the benefit is that it addresses our individualism. Our individualism is a religion. It breaks through that somehow to something wider.

[20:40]

Someone said recently in a lecture that I heard that Dogen, who started Soto Zen in Japan, brought Soto Zen to Japan, and he was basically a poet, and most of his things that he wrote, he doesn't talk about suffering very much, and he doesn't talk about taking refuge in the Buddha, Dharma, Sangha. He talks about this other kind of stuff, like one famous thing that he said, which I like very much is, to study Buddhism is to study the self. To study the self is to forget the self. To forget the self is to be awakened by myriad things. and to be awakened by myriad things, is to free your body and mind, the body and mind of yourself and others. So that's the kind of... that's the way he talks. He talks about sessions, meditating on sessions. But when he died, he was quite old and he was taken away from his monastery to a hospital.

[21:48]

and he wrote on the pillar next to his bed, I take refuge in the Buddha, I take refuge in the Dharma, I take refuge in the Sangha. And then he spent the last few days of his life, he could still walk, walking around his hospital room, repeating, I take refuge in the Buddha, I take refuge in the Dharma, I take refuge in the Sangha. And he was a very learned Zen master, but he went back to this sort of basic practice, safe practice. Anyway, as I said, I find that difficult to give myself to wholeheartedly, but I'm trying to look at it recently. What is my resistance to it, and how does it fit in with American Buddhism? What is Buddhism going to be in America? That doesn't pull together too well, but it's ten minutes to twelve, and I wanted to know whether any of you... Anything that you wanted to talk about?

[23:06]

Yes? I'd like to know what it means to you when Dogen says, the ten thousand diamonds are without salt. Well, the... The vipassana, you know, the insights... The insight that you get from from a Vipassana kind of meditation, looking at things clearly, is that everything is impermanent and everything is suffering, which go together very closely, and that nothing has its own self. or some independent self. So that's what I've always thought of that as meaning, that there's nothing that has a self that's separate from all the other things that surround it. It has... It's not that it doesn't exist.

[24:07]

It does exist, but it can't be sort of pulled out from everything else and held in space. It's just very dependent on everything else. Yes, I'm just curious how that reconciles with the deep individualism that you were talking about. Yes. I thought you said something about That sounds different than just ignorance. The question of ignorance feels like kind of a scratchiness in the back of my mind of the ignorance which I hold in the back of my mind. You know, delusions about self and others and stuff. That makes it sound, makes it feel like, makes me feel that my idea of self is not so stable as I thought it was.

[25:17]

That question, that scratchiness, that's sort of like Oh, you mean... I see, so you think the affliction of ignorance means it's something that's sort of chipping away at your ignorance. Oh, I had thought of it as, you know, ignorance is an affliction. I don't know either. The affliction of ignorance. I'd have to think about it a little bit your way. I had always assumed that it meant ignorance is an affliction, but this affliction is at the same time the muddy water, you know, the immutable knowledge of the Buddhas. It says in this Awakening of Faith, it talks about ignorance as the movement on the ground of being, that there's the ground or the ground of being, there's what actually is, and then there's a movement that happens there, which is our thoughts.

[26:19]

and our thoughts cause anxiety, you know, they cause more movement, anxiety, and that that's what ignorance is. It's just that movement. Which is a little different from what you were asking. May I? I like what you said about the faith and the kind of delusional faith in individualism and how we're caught by that. And it seems as if All around the Zen community, people are arriving at perceptions that are similar to that, that the Sangha is important, that service is important, that community is important, and many different levels or changes that have to do with opening up the practice and extending one's personal commitment. I went out to Green Gulch, too, and it was interesting that Thich Nhat Hanh had children, that the children played such an important part in the Zendo, which is something new for us.

[27:29]

So I wondered if you could comment on what, from your point of view, changes are happening in terms of individual They were big. It's a time when our practice is changing a great deal, it seems to me. In some ways I feel like it's gone the other way most recently, you know, until... it was Zen Center until the chaos surrounding Bekaroshi. I would say there was more of a commitment to the group. There was more of a commitment to the group and at that point it became really clear to most of us that you can't do that blindly, you know, you do have to take very seriously yourself and your own commitment and your own psychology. And I certainly didn't mean to imply that I feel like psychology doesn't have anything to teach Buddhism.

[28:37]

I feel like for Westerners it really does, you know, that we have to. I don't know if it's because the way we practice is maybe more complex because we're trying to practice as lay people. And we're some combinations, as it was said, between monks, priests, and lay people. And that's a more complex life than just going to a monastery. But for whatever reason, I feel like, or maybe because this is Western, our psychology is different. I'm not sure. But I feel like we do have a lot to learn from psychology and from looking at our individual self and taking it very seriously. But in some ways I feel like what you were just describing, if I understood it right, is a kind of... we did a pendulum swing, you know. There was total sangha, anyway, in San Francisco. And then total individualism, you know. Nobody trusted... Well, the sangha was still very important, I think, to everybody, but, you know, people felt they had to take responsibility for their own lives.

[29:44]

And there was a great distrust of the forms and teachers. And in some ways I feel like it's somewhat swinging back to, I'm not sure what yet, but hopefully it's a kind of opening of our hearts to what is useful in the tradition also. And how can we make that, as your year-end letter said, how can we make that tradition relevant? And I think it'll stay much more diversified. I hope, that's what I hope, that it will stay, you know, that there won't be this kind of weight, which I don't think you've felt over here as much, of the pressure to be ordained. You know, that if you're a serious student, that's the way you show it, is to be ordained, because it just... It doesn't make sense, you know.

[30:47]

Buddhism is for all different kinds of people. So it can't be that everyone has to go on this one track. Is there anything else? It's probably about twelve. Yes? You were talking about the glass of muddy water. Do you let the blood settle to the bottom, or do you drink it? Well, you know, What's it called? Simile or something. It only goes so far. So, are you asking when you're sitting and you see something in yourself, or when you're living and you see something in yourself, do you, do you mean, do you, I'm not sure what you mean by let it sit or do you drink it? You know, I mean, where, isn't that something that you, you let settle? I mean, that falls to somebody, You let it sit as much as possible and avoid the mud as much as you could.

[31:53]

But are we doing that or are we saying that you drink the mud with the water? You have to drink it. In fact, there won't be any way to avoid it because you can't just sit there forever. You go out and do something stupid and it hits you in the face and you have to live with it. You said something that made me want to ask a question about the sangha, because I've now, for myself, accepted that I don't really understand what is meant by the Dharma, or at least the Dharma means, at least by my latest count, about eight different things. Even taking refuge in the Buddha is not a singular thing, because the Buddha can be many or one, so on, but I thought I was clear on the sangha until this morning, just us here in the Berkeley Zen Center, and now I realize that maybe the sangha has a wider implications.

[33:04]

Could you say something about that? Yeah, all three of them sort of flow together if you boot it on the sangha. if you let them go as wide as they want to go. One of the things that it says in this book is that suchness permeates into your life in a couple of different ways. For some people it permeates in as the transformation body of the Buddha, which is that all the different kinds of beings see Buddha in their own image. So we see Buddha as a person. And we see him as a particular kind of person. We see him as a person that is very wonderful. To be short since it's twelve o'clock. And so some people are encouraged by

[34:09]

seeing someone who is clearly a mature, developed person, a Buddha of some sort, and that's the transformation body of the Buddha, and it encourages people. But more developed people see the bliss body of the Buddha, which is in all different forms, it isn't stuck in any particular kind of form, It has myriad kinds of forms, and all those forms have myriad marks, and the marks have myriad subtle marks, and you know, that kind of thing. So that everything is Buddha. And then at that point everything becomes Sangha too. It's everything practicing. Everything is practicing together. Everything is Buddha helping you to realize suchness, or realize Buddhahood. and everything is also your Sangha. Of course, technically, the Sangha is those people who have taken vows, whether formally or not, but taken the vows to save all sentient beings and to end desires, to do good, to avoid evil, and to save all sentient beings.

[35:33]

Help confusion? Yeah. Good. Yes. We go past 12 o'clock. Oh, you do? I was told several times I should end at 12. Well, I never noticed the end at 12. I like to be right. You may have noticed. It would be a first if you did. OK. It's five after already, so. In many communities, usually not necessarily in Zen centers, Well, maybe whether it's similar or not, a bigger question for me is how much of that is useful for us.

[36:52]

I think we have to do more than I've noticed Kategori Roshi doing, for instance, because so many of us are not able to I think different people have different levels of ability to sort of let things ride into the surface, you know. That if there are emotions going on, or that it bothers some people more than it does others. And in certain situations, like at Tassajara, my first training period there, Bhikkhu Rishi said, right towards the beginning, this training period we're going to practice mind only. So whatever comes up for you, think of it as just your mind. And so during that training period, and during many training periods at Tassajara, what happens is you just, you try to see everything as your mind, and everyone else is trying to do the same thing, right? So, if you, if the mud slips out, you know, and you have an angry encounter with somebody, still, you don't have to sit down and work it all out necessarily, you just see it as your mind, and you trust that they're seeing it as their mind, and the next time you meet them, you know, you bow to them,

[38:11]

And you take it as something was going on with you. And that's very freeing. It's very freeing. And you can just work on it yourself and you don't have to work it out with that person. And that works. I found it worked anyway to a large extent at Tassajara where I could trust that other people were doing that same thing. And in fact I have a fairly high level of I can stand a fairly high level of non-communication. But I noticed that some of my friends, they can't stand it, you know. Something's going on under there and they get upset. They need to know what's going on, whereas I... It's not a positive thing that I can stand, and a lot of it is because I don't notice it, you know. I've managed to brush it aside for the sake of peace and harmony. It's a family trait. So I think that in Japan, anyway, the feeling I get is that the culture is set up so that, in fact, you can go along.

[39:21]

It doesn't run into as many snags as we do if things are going on under the surface. People still know how to behave, but here we don't necessarily. So I think we have to do more of that than our tradition has in it. But on the other hand, obviously, some of that just confuses things, you know? It just builds it up more and it's... I don't think there's any easy answer. I think we have to really feel our way about when do you need to... I don't think there's any doubt about as aware as we can be ourselves of what's going on with us. I don't think there's any harm. You know, we'll never be too aware of what's going on with us. Even our... And it's not as easy to say and intellectually believe, but when you start looking at yourself and see what's there, Sometimes you really think, it would be better if I didn't look at this. I'll encourage it. The wild man will break out of the cage if I look at it.

[40:25]

But I think that's not true. In fact, the wild man breaks out when we're not looking, and that looking can't be wrong. But expressing is... You know, it's a question. You have to question, when do I express it, in what way, so that it's actually helpful to people. Shall we stop now? I'm not trying to get out of here, I'm enjoying this. It's very nice to be here today. Thank you very much. especially nice because I heard that from Robert, the director at Tassajara, that it's 26 degrees in Tassajara, so you can feel sorry for Mel. Were you going to say something? He mentioned an author. Robert Bella. He's a professor at the University of California, Berkeley. And his book that he did with several other people is called Habits of the Heart.

[41:30]

Thank you.

[41:33]

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