That's a low spot in one's life. So this is the way it is. So it goes from elation to misery. So you experience all those things like everyone else. So then I want to say that when I met Suzuki Roshi, as soon as I felt because I knew sort of who he was and I remember, well, I felt that he was the Hasidic rabbi that I was looking for and never found because he had all those qualities. Very interesting. So I recognized all that in him. And I can remember sitting Zazen and going through the difficulties I had, but with his encouragement, dealing with those difficulties.

[01:12]

And I can remember having revelations about practice and about what he was doing. I remember wanting to run back to the zendo and bow down to him. that overwhelming feeling of gratitude. He used to say, you know, the difficulty you have, the people who have the most difficulty really benefit the most from practice. So I was a star pupil because it was really hard for me. I can remember walking, sashin, keeping my legs crossed. I remember the first sashin I did when I was sitting full lotus, and I didn't move the whole time except the last two minutes of the last period.

[02:21]

You know that one, don't you? And so I was so disheartened, you know, it felt like a failure. And Suzuki Roshi used to bow to us in his office at Sokoji. We all filed, everyone filed through his office and he would bow to each person and each person would bow to him. And you never knew what he was thinking. because he would sometimes look at you, sometimes look over your shoulder, and everybody would say, what is he thinking? But this is a kind of last-minute doxxon. It always threw you back on yourself, because you didn't know what he was thinking, so you had to figure out where you were. Anyway, so at the end, I was the last person out, and I said, I wanted to test him out, you know. Do you think I should continue doing this?

[03:25]

He said, oh, it's not difficult enough for you? He said, if you want, you know, if you want to find something more difficult, you should do that. Last time I was talking about Tatsugami Roshi and Tatsuhara. I have to go kind of back and forth to three different places. And I'll talk about Berkeley too as I kind of go back and forth. So Tatsuhara, that was the Shuso 1970 when Tatsugami Roshi arrived. He couldn't speak English, I couldn't speak Japanese, and nobody could speak Japanese. Dan Welch spoke a little, and he was a kind of interpreter, but it was difficult for him. And later, Katagiri Roshi came down, but Suzuki Roshi never did come down in that practice period.

[04:38]

So Tatsugami Roshi was the Ino at Eheiji for 10 years. I don't know, 60, something like that. And he was a heavy set man. And at one time he was a kind of champion wrestler at Heiji, because the monks used to wrestle each other. He was kind of a sumo type. He used to say that when he really put on a lot of weight, that the flab between his legs would flap together. But, and he used to laugh a lot, but one great characteristic was that he smoked. In those days, most everybody smoked, almost. I mean, I would say two-thirds of the people smoked. This was still the days when people smoked. I mean, I don't know if you remember this, but when I was growing up, everybody had ashtrays in their house. And when you were a kid, you made ashtrays out of clay, which your mother put in the house.

[05:46]

So ashtrays were a thing. And everybody smoked. And so it was very common. But Tatsugami was champion. He smoked all the time. And he had a little pipe, which we I think you can buy these in Chinatown. They're called opium pipes. That's what we call them. I don't think they are. They're just little pipes. And he had this shredded tobacco. And he'd take a pinch of the shredded tobacco and put it in that pipe. And then he'd take a coal from his hibachi. When you come into the abbot's cabin, you see this hibachi. That's that box that you see. That was Tatsugami Roshi's hibachi, I think. He left it here. And he used to sit around it and there were coals in there. So there's a way of putting coals in the hibachi, which you put your hands over the hibachi and you light your pipe.

[06:55]

So he'd take a coal out of the hibachi and light his, take, you know, a couple of puffs. And it was very satisfying for him. It was very satisfying for us to watch him do that. to watch him be satisfied. But he smoked cigarettes all the time and people when they go to town on town trips they'd order him all kinds of exotic smoking things. But little by little he organized the monastic practice at Tassajara. For instance, the Shuso used to go out and visit the sick people during Zazen, but what he did was he organized what we now call the Do and Ryo, somebody to do the Mikugyo, someone to chant, someone to do the Fukudo to do the

[07:58]

positions of the Dhawans. So that was a radical new thing. And he taught the Dhawans to chant. He had a marvelous voice. And his chanting was so ornate and beautiful. It just knocked everybody out. And so he was teaching people to chant that way. And the way he would do that is he'd walk around Tazahara and the Doan would come up to him and they would chant together. He said, you see me walking around, just come on up to me and we'll chant. And so the student would they would just do it together. And that's the way he taught everybody. So they would go through it with him that way, not just listening to a tape. But people forgot, you know, it's very hard to do it.

[09:09]

You have to be, you have to love this thing in order to make it do, to do it well. So I said to him, I said, well, would you teach me too? And he said, you should learn from the shadow. It's very, that's a kind of Japanese way of speaking. You know, in the Sandokai, literally, the end says, through sunshine, we say, don't do things in vain. Literally, don't waste your time in sunshine and shadow. Sunshine means day, shadow means night. But anyway, so using these kind of terms, he said, you should learn from the shadow. In other words, to learn by observation, which is very much Japanese way of teaching. It's not so much we teach you, but you observe. I remember when I was receiving Dharma transmission from Hoitsu in Japan,

[10:19]

He was going through this stuff with me all in Japanese. I didn't know what he was doing. And finally at the end I said, will you teach me to do the wisdom water? He said, I taught you to do that during the sermon. Didn't you see that? Observation. You watch and you observe and that's how you learn something. So I did learn that way, actually. I learned to do the chanting by observing and absorbing that. So he and I got along very well. There were people he didn't get along well with, who a lot of people thought that he was taking over. and they kind of resented it. You know, they thought he was trying to take over Suzuki Roshi's place. And being at Tassajara, you know, he was the boss there. And it was fine with me.

[11:22]

There were people, you know, this was in 70. We'd been doing Tassajara for three years. And there were different kinds of people there. Some people thought that Tosahara was a commune. Because this was the era of communes. All up north, you know, all these communes of different types. And so when Totsugami came, people said, what's he doing? He's going to teach us the Eheji way. I thought, that's great. Let's learn the aging way. And these people were saying, we don't want to do that. Why wouldn't you want to do that? You know what we're doing? But this separated the practitioners from the communists. From the communalists. So a lot of people left and went to communes or whatever they did.

[12:28]

And the people who wanted to practice stayed. So that kind of set a stage for practice. And so he organized the kitchen practice. And we only chanted, when Suzuki rose up to that time, we only chanted the Heart Sutra in Japanese. Three times. That was our service. And nine bows. And echo. And so he introduced some of the chants to us. And then the Sandokai and the Dharanis. And then Peter Schneider put together a translation of the Heart Sutra, which was pretty, the basic Heart Sutra that we chant now. He put that together from various translations. And so that was the first translation we ever had of the Heart Sutra.

[13:32]

That was 1970. And so he introduced the chants and the way we do our procedures. And then I remember one time people said, you know, people go into the kitchen at night and take food. What do we do about that? He said, oh, put a lock on the door. And everybody went, a lock on the door? That was a radical. kind of thing to say, we're all supposed to behave ourselves. This is, you know, Ed Brown, you know the story of Ed Brown in the kitchen. He would sit on the counter at night and wait for people to come by. I'm trying to think of what else he did. I know he did a lot of other things. Maybe.

[14:37]

Yeah, maybe. I think we had Oryuki. We may have had Oryuki before that, but maybe he did. Maybe that was the first time we... Yeah. What? Oh, Corvincino. Yeah, probably Corvincino. I think it was. Yeah. Yeah, that was, I think we had Oryoki by that time. He taught me how to do Oryoki. I was the first person to have the priest bowls. Shizuki Yoshi taught me how to use the priest bowls. So yeah, we were doing Oryoki before that and But he just taught us all the procedures that we use, you know, the basic way that we do things and created a schedule that was more monastic.

[15:38]

So that set things up. In 1969, before that, was a very heavy rain, winter at Tassajara, where we were ill-prepared. But it was a wonderful time because we were snowed in. We were totally unprepared for that. Five feet of snow on the ridge. And I remember the town trip truck was You could just see the top of it in the snow. It was like an expedition to the North Pole, where you come upon something buried in the snow. And we had to dig it out and get the food out. But it was very, we didn't have much food.

[16:49]

We had wheat berries and brown rice. Wheatberries, you know, you have to chew them in order to get the nourishment. But you know how Zen students eat? They just swallow it. And I can prove it to you. Because the toilet's all backed up. And somebody said, we had a septic tank. Not a septic tank, a cesspool. Down at the lower barn. It's still a ... no. And so, the cesspool was a problem down there, you know. Something was burgeoning out. So we sent Reb down there. We had to dig down there and find out what's going on. So he uncovered it and dug down there.

[17:51]

wheat berries. The whole place was stuffed. All the pipes were stuffed with wheat berries. But you were swelling up. But Ruvane, who was the gardener, was very innovative. And he said, we must eat wild vegetables. So people went out to the flats and we harvested all these wild vegetables that grew out there all winter. They're out there now. Dandelion leaves and roots and lamb's ears and lamb's quarters and miner's lettuce. And we made these great salads all the time. And it was all live food, you know, wild, live food. So we kind of lived that way during that time. But that was 69, that was before Tatsagami came.

[18:54]

And somebody walked in during that winter. You know, we didn't have any heat at that time. This was the only place there was any heat. And the only thing that everybody could think about was heat and food. The only thing, every topic of conversation ended up talking about food. We have this really easy practice these days, I have to tell you. But at that time, so many people smoked. We used to keep a can of tobacco called Top and some cigarette papers over there in the corner. And people would just come in and roll their own, right? But a guy walked in and he met the snow and he didn't know anything about where he was going but he said Tassajara is down this road.

[20:00]

So he got into his sleeping bag because it's so cold and he inched his way to Tassajara in his sleeping bag. That's what he said. At that time, we didn't let anybody stay overnight. But, given the conditions, we let him stay. But we took him out the next day. So, Reb and I took him out. And we had one pair of snowshoes. And Reb grabbed those. And this guy and I, we made snowshoes out of tin cans. We cut the sides out of five-gallon tofu cans. And they were about this long, wide. And put ropes, we made a hole and put ropes in them, tied them to our feet, and clanked Arutasahara to Jamesburg through the virgin snow.

[21:03]

It was wonderful. I hated putting my feet in the snow because it was so beautiful, but it worked. It worked. And then as we came down the road to Jamesburg, we took them off and put them behind some bushes. And every time I come to that curve in the road, I'd like to say if I could find some bushes in the bushes. Anyway, but we'd run out of top. And that was one sub-reason for me going out. And then we came back up the creek from Araya Sikko, a week later or something, and there were five or six of us, and the creek was swelled up, you know, and we had to get across it. So, David Chadwick, walked across the creek. It was just like really a torrent, it's ice cold. And he took a rope and tied it to a tree.

[22:08]

And we all took our clothes off and held our clothes above our head and walked across the creek with that rope. Those were fun days. I don't know if I can do that now. But anyway, so I just wanted to give you that little incident. Okay, so Suzuki Roshi died in 1971. And then Richard Baker took over. Richard Baker became the abbot. And My feeling was that when Suzuki Roshi died, that all of his disciples would work together to create a wonderful Zen center. But that was not Richard's idea. His idea was he was going to create whatever it was that was Zen center.

[23:12]

So he kind of scattered the family rather than unifying it. It was very disappointing to me And I was always very critical of whatever he did. And I felt more isolated in Berkeley. But Richard had great plans, and Suzuki Yoshi just gave it to him and said, do something. And I didn't feel so good about that. I thought, surely, you know, he would be more unified. But that wasn't his idea at all. But he was so powerful, and he knew so many people, and he had organization skills which were marvelous. So he really organized Zen Center in a way that was quite spectacular.

[24:15]

And one of the positions, I mean, the finance department, not finance, but the treasury was a place where you practiced. And there were always five or six people practicing in the treasury. And he had these big time business people come in and teach how to run the treasury and how to do fundraising and how to make things work on a financial level, on a high level. And it all worked up to a point. But Richard was so, you know, he had the meatiest touch. Everything he touched turned to gold. And so it was really hard to argue with him.

[25:18]

It was really hard to challenge that because he was so successful. I just wanted to do zazen and practice with everybody in a nice way. So when I went to Berkeley, I knew what I wanted to do. I wanted to have this zendo, And I wanted to do organic farming. So the Zen Dojo had this big, huge lot in the back. And I spent all my time, not all of it, but a good deal of time doing organic gardening. So I grew all these vegetables and I went out and I made compost. Eric Storley used to bring the garbage from Zen Center to Berkeley. And I put it in my compost pile. And then he brought his violin, and he and I would play music together. That was great.

[26:21]

That's the kind of life I like. And people would come by, and they'd help in the garden, and we'd talk about dharma. And I built up this library. People gave me contributions of books, and I would take the books to Mo's. which is in Berkeley, a big bookstore that gives you credit for used books. So I get all this credit and then I went to the Buddhist section and I'd get all these Buddhist books and then I'd read some of them. That's how I learned about Buddhism, is by getting the books and then reading them. And so I built up quite a library doing that. So I was having a great time, actually, developing Zendo, doing organic gardening.

[27:23]

I was even selling produce to some health food markets. I met my wife, Liz, here. I told you about that. And so... What? I told somebody. I said that I met her at the Narrows. Right? Oh, I told you. I met her at the Narrows. In the Narrows, you don't wear any clothes. I didn't wear any clothes. What? Now we do. Oh my gosh, I haven't been there for a long time. And we didn't wear, nobody wore clothes. And I was playing my flute and she fell in love with me. That's what she said.

[28:26]

So, what? You of course were completely indifferent. I was completely indifferent. And so anyway... She thought you were... She thought I was a... So anyway, we were... We lived together at the Zindo. And I made her a... a... a little hothouse for growing vegetables. But it was for growing sprouts. And she used to sell the sprouts to the market. So that was really sweet. And then that was before the big sprout thing. Before it became commercial.

[29:30]

And then it became commercial, and they forced her out. Now people say, oh, sprouts. And so somebody started growing sprouts on a commercial level and forced her out. But she'd make these sprouts, and once a week, she'd take them to the grocery store, and they would pay her for them. Anyway, so little by little, we were developing zendo in the practice there. And at some point, People felt that what was really happening was in San Francisco. So a lot of my people who were practicing with me moved to San Francisco and became students of Richard Baker, which was fine with me. I never tried to keep anybody with me or say, oh, you shouldn't do that. I always encouraged people to go. If that's what you want to do, please go. Because my bottom line of practice was, I sit zazen every day.

[30:39]

If someone wants to come and sit zazen, I welcome them. If they want to leave, I say goodbye. And no matter how long they've been practicing with me, or whatever our relationship with it is, that's always been my bottom line. And I've always stuck with that, and I've always felt okay about it. But what happens is, eventually, most of them come back. Maybe after 20 years, or whatever, which I didn't count on. But I've always had such faith, you know, that my practice would sustain me, and that whatever was happening was supposed to happen. So I always felt okay. If nobody came, it was okay. If people left, it was okay. I was just doing my practice with whoever was there. And actually, when people leave, I don't even think about her again until I see them. I'm just kind of focused on what's in front of me.

[31:43]

So I never tried to gain students. And I did not call myself a teacher, but people would come and they'd say, are you the teacher? And I'd say, well, if you feel that I'm teaching you something, or you're learning something from me, then you can think of me in that way, but I'm not going to tell you that I'm the teacher here. So I maintained that for a long time. And I felt good about that, because it helped me to not get ahead of myself. I felt if I'm going to be a teacher, someone is going to have to tell me that. So I was very careful to do that. My wife was always very good about keeping me in my place. True. She would never let me get ahead of myself or aggrandize myself or call myself something special. Our relationship is like this.

[32:48]

I see the glass half full, she sees the glass half empty. So I'm always encouraging her and she's always bringing me. So in 1972, Richard asked me if I would be director at Tassajara. And I said, OK. So we came to Tassajara, and I was the director for about two years, something like that. And we lived in the library, which wasn't the library then, but that's where we lived.

[33:49]

And it became the library later. And she worked in the kitchen, she worked in the garden, I was the director. And it was fine being here, but we hardly ever saw each other. Difficult being a couple here. And that's when I quit smoking. 1978. What I used to do was go to the zendo and sit zazen, have breakfast, do service, and come back and I felt wonderful. you know, clear-headed. And then I sit down and I smoke a cigarette. And then I go... My energy would just go... And I just got so tired of that. And I'd quit smoking before, but I always started again. But this time I said, I just don't want to smoke anymore. And I just stopped. And I have never wanted a cigarette since then. It was just so easy. I just walked away from it. And my wife said, well, I hid your cigarettes on that day.

[34:55]

That's why you stopped smoking. But she may have hid my cigarettes. She knew I wanted to stop. And so these two things happened at the same time. But it really is, I just walked away from it. I just didn't do it again. And I knew that if I ever did it again, I would start smoking. So I've never had another cigarette. I never craved one or wanted one. And I've always enjoyed my breathing ever since then. So then we left Tassajara and went to Mexico for a little while. That's always fun. Came back. Ed Brown and his wife Meg were staying at the Zendo while I was at Tassajara. And that's where he wrote the cookbook to Zendo. Zendo in Berkeley? In Berkeley, yeah. So I was always looking for, you know, we had this wonderful place that we rented for $30, $130 a month.

[36:02]

And I had, you know, downstairs, upstairs, an attic Zendo. Wonderful Zendo in the attic. The attic was like, it had four sides. four sides, and just a big wonderful space, you know, with two by fours, steep stairs. And we really loved this place, you know, it put so much work into it and effort, but it was a rented place. The land, the owner would never sell it to us. I would keep wanting to buy it for years, I wanted to buy it, but he'd never sell it to us. And it was at the time when there was an energy crisis. And property prices, that's when they started to escalate. You could buy a house like the one we had that were going for something like $50,000, $45,000. This is this huge, huge place. And he kind of sensed that the housing prices were going up.

[37:09]

But everything just skyrocketed at that point. So I went, I took my bicycle and I rode up and down all the streets in Berkeley looking for a place for us to move to or buy. And I learned a lot about the streets of Berkeley. And this woman, who was a nurse, said, well, I know this guy, after looking quite a while, who has these two properties with four houses. And he wants to get rid of them. He wants to sell them. And he will sell them to you. He likes you guys. He'll sell them to you for $220,000. And I thought, oh, that's a lot of money. Ha. But we didn't have anything. We didn't have anybody. I'll tell you what I did. One time, I don't know if you remember EST. Remember EST? Well, Werner Erhard invited psychiatrists and religious leaders to a free EST event.

[38:20]

A free EST party. And so he invited me. And so I went, and usually it costs $200. Boy, $200 to go to something like that, that's asking a big price from people, a big commitment, because $200 then was a lot of money. And I thought, hey, I'll ask everybody to contribute $200 to our fund as a way of getting us going. And so I did, and I kind of sold the idea of buying this place, and people contributed. It was hard for a lot of people to contribute that much money. But a lot of them did, a lot of them contributed less and some more, but it still wasn't anything. But it got the energy going to buy this place. So here we were buying a place for $220,000 and we didn't have any money to speak of. But the owner, what he did was he allowed us to buy the place from him without telling the finance company.

[39:32]

There was a time when you could, there's certain finance companies that would allow you to do that. But this one changed their policy right around that time. So it was not their policy to do that. So we kept it quiet. But we actually bought the place. We were paying the money. We were paying his mortgage. But we wanted to build it. the buildings, the property. People loaned us money. We had to pay a lot of money down and so forth. So anyway, there was a lot of enthusiasm and everything just worked. The finance company didn't find out about it until after about 10 years or so. And by that time, they just refinanced us. So all this kind of stuff was new to me.

[40:36]

When I first started, I showed people $5 a month dues, and I kept it in a tobacco can. And if I needed some money, I would take it out of the tobacco can. I lived from tobacco can to mouth. Richard came in 1970, right? Yeah, something like that. I used to contribute a lot of money to the United Way. I stopped doing that when we bought the place. Then we bought this place. That was a big development, and we could have a good number of residents. We had four houses. One house was a zendo, and the other three houses were residents.

[41:46]

So, we designed a zendo. We designed one house to be the zendo. And we had to fundraise for that because we had to tear it all apart and make it into a zendo. And that was a big project. But everybody helped, you know, it was like we were all there with pitwoods. Somehow when you need building done, carpenters appear. It's true. When we first started Tassajara, we needed carpenters and carpenters appeared as students. And then they disappear when you don't need them. So anyway, the same thing happened to Berklee. Carpenters disappeared. And so the carpenters were working on them and we had to pay them. And that got a little messy after a while, because I think it went on and on, you know. You say, well, it's going to cost this much, and it'll be done in this amount of time. But that's only kidding yourself.

[42:49]

Whenever you have a building project, you always fool yourself. You always say, oh, so it's going to cost this much, when you know it's going to cost this much. And you say, it'll be done this time, and you know it's going to be done much further in the future. But you have to kid yourself, otherwise you never do it. Anyway, but it really brought everybody together. Everybody contributed. People were out there, we were out digging ditches in the mud, and then we raised up one of the houses, this big two-story house, in order to put, this is a little complicated, but in Berkeley, You can't take living space off of the city property, because living space is so limited. So in order to build the Zendo, we had to add some living space that we took away from that building.

[43:51]

So I had to raise a two-story building and build a story underneath it, which is what I kind of wanted. I had a kind of partial basement. So we got house movers to lift it up, and we built a whole story underneath the other building so that we could make this building into a Zindo. So it was years of work. Years of work. And I remember that people were living up there in the house and was up there and they had to climb a ladder and then drop the marble on the floor and it rolled out. And it kind of teetering like a little bit. Anyway, so right about that time, My wife Liz wanted to become a nurse for some reason. She said it never attracted her, but after her mother had a stroke, she realized that she wanted to be a nurse.

[44:55]

So she went to nursing school for four years. You don't have to do that. You can be a nurse after two years or something, but she wanted to do the whole thing. And at the same time, she got pregnant. About halfway through, she got pregnant. So then I'd carry him around in my backpack during the day, and I'd feed him the expelled milk, you know. And he was very good, you know. He was a good little boy. And I'd have meals with people. He'd sit down in the middle of the meeting and play with his stuff, you know, and just completely absorbed in his own thing, not bothering anybody. He was wonderful, up to the first five years. And then we moved. My wife said, I want to have a house of our own. I want all of you to beware, you couples, that things will change no matter what you think.

[46:00]

And I said, you know, I have to live at the Zendo. You know, I can't move out of the Zendo. This is my life. And then sometime later she said, you know, I really want to move. I really want to have a house. And I said, I know that. That's very nice. You know, I appreciate what you're saying. And then sometime later she said, You know, I really want to have a house. I want to have my own house. And I said, OK. I didn't even think about it. I just said, you want that? OK. I didn't think about what that would entail for me or anything. I just said, OK. And so her father gave us the money. He gave her her inheritance. And we made a down payment on this house. And it was very hard for me to change because it put me out of contact in a way, in the same way that it was before.

[47:09]

But, you know, other people took up that contact that I had. And it made, you know, I'd have to get dressed and go to the Zen Dojo and get undressed again. and put on my robes and all this. But it just became my way of life. Then I started riding my bike to the Zendo. So I get on my bike at five in the morning and ride to the Zendo, which is what I always do. And I realized that's a plus because that's where I get some of my best exercise. So, and then, you know, there are advantages and disadvantages. I found out some of the advantages, although it took a while. So that's kind of my way, you know, is to ride the bike in the morning and go to the Zendo,

[48:18]

and do zazen and tokusan every morning and take care of the business and see everybody. Every Saturday we have a Saturday program all morning and then we have a lecture and then once a month we have a one-day sitting or three-day sitting or five-day session or seven-day session. It's a very vital place. A lot of, you know, good strong activity going all the time. And little by little, you know, the Zen does build up to just a really big core, a large core of dedicated people. And they take care of it. Every time I come to Tassajara, when I was avid at Zen Center, which I haven't talked about yet, I could come to Tassajara and know that everything was taken care of. Just like now. I haven't given Berkeley a thought since I've been here.

[49:24]

I haven't contacted anybody to say, how is it going? Nothing. I just, however it's going is the way it's going. But I think it's going, I know it's going okay. So I feel that's a real accomplishment that this practice goes on without me. I had a difficult time with Zen Center and Richard Baker. I can't even tell you how difficult it was sometimes. because I was always a skeptic and a critic of what was going on in Zen Center.

[50:27]

But I said to myself, you can't get rid of me. Zen Center doesn't belong to anybody. It doesn't belong to Richard Baker. It doesn't belong to me. It doesn't belong to anybody. It belongs to the students. I'm not gonna go away because I really have a lot of, Zen Center means a lot to me, and I feel an obligation to stay with what's going on, to stay with Zen Center regardless of what's going on. So... You know, everybody, the priests, well, Richard, you know, when Suzuki Yoshi was abbot, he ordained about 15 priests in the last couple of years.

[51:28]

And, but his focus was very much on lay people. And when Richard took over Zen Center, his focus was on creating a priesthood. So he ordained a lot of people as priests. And they became the Sanzen students, the students that he really paid attention to. And the lay Sangha took a back seat. It was a very different emphasis. And So it was a very strong priest practice. And it changed the feeling of Zen Center. I was, of course, a priest and interested in priest practice, but I was also interested in lay practice.

[52:33]

And I was not so interested in formal priest's practice, somehow. and not the way that Richard was doing it. I was interested in bodhisattva practice, whether a person's a priest or a layperson, and my whole feeling about practice is to treat people equally, both priests and laypeople equally, and not focus on one or the other. but focus more on who's practicing and what their sincerity is in practice. So I was a little, I felt a little funny when Zen Center, the emphasis in Zen Center was on priest practice. And Richard had a way of having everybody relate to him, but not relate to each other.

[53:39]

And that created a kind of hierarchical supremacy in Zen Center, which was very powerful. But it was powerful in one direction. So the students didn't have a lot of contact with each other. They always had contact with him. But because there were so many students, people would have to wait for maybe two years to talk to him. It's time to quit. And I'll continue again. Sometime. That we decide on. Okay.

[54:28]

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