I live with technology all day long, so it's okay. I brought my own little piece of miracle equipment, too. Well, thank you very much for inviting me to talk here. I always feel like I'm coming home when I come to the Berkeley Zendo. When Mel and Peter asked me to come, they said, well, would you talk about your new book? And so I am going to talk about it some. But I've talked about it a lot in various audiences. I don't feel like my main job should be here to hawk my book. But the book is a number of different things. It's kind of a sequel to my first book. So it's about work, but work in a much wider context. And it's also about Suzuki Roshi, about the founder of Zen Center, founder of this temple. and the teacher of L and myself. And for you, I want to talk about the book more in the context of him, because I think as time goes by, people will look back and realize that Shinryu Suzuki was a very unique and important figure in the history of the Zen tradition.

[01:21]

maybe as important as the early founders of Zen, the Sixth Patriarch and Joshu and Matsu and Hyakujo, his favorite people. Before Zen became a sect or a religion, it was something fresh and direct. And that's the way he was. And my effort during my long 20-year hiatus from formal practice has really been to try to integrate what we do, the transformative path that we follow in Zen, into the everyday life of America. I'm an American, you're all Americans. This is a new world for Buddhism, for Dharma. And Buddhism has grown and spread since Suzuki Roshi first came in a number of different ways. And in a certain way, it's very popular now, very trendy, and also very practical.

[02:27]

There's lots of applications of basic mindfulness practice in medicine, in working with addiction, all sorts of things. Therapy. And yet the transmitted core of the Buddha's teaching is something that's not easy to co-opt or make simple or dumbed down or something. It's intrinsically pure. And one of the things that I think made Suzuki Roshi so special and unusual as a Buddhist teacher is that he always taught us from the highest level. He never adjusted the Dharma, tried to make it simple or like we weren't capable of being Buddha. He treated us all very seriously. It was his whole life taking care of us and bringing us to Dharma.

[03:30]

He, in a sense, gave his life for us and for you. When I come here, I feel his spirit so strongly, I think more strongly probably than any other place. And for those of you who didn't know him, it may not be exactly clear what I mean, but let me just tell you my experience. As Mel said, I after my long time in the wilderness, so to speak, although there's no wilderness in Dharma, but it seemed that way to me. And my long illness and many things that happened, I began to return to my roots and to Suzuki Roshi and to Mel, where I started practice. Mel was my first teacher. And starting to imagine that I could return to some role, formal role, as a priest, as an ordained person, as a conveyor of the Dharma.

[04:33]

But I wasn't sure. And I hadn't worn my robes in 20 years. And I came over here to give a talk, actually, I think. No, yes, to give a talk. And but before the talk, there was the Bodhisattva ceremony. So I was going to come over in my sport jacket and rock suit the way I had been giving talks. And Mel said, I think on the phone, well, why don't you wear your robes? So I started to say, well, you know, Mel, I don't wear my robes anymore. That's not what I do. But then I thought, well, why don't I wear my robes? So I wore my robes. It was a little like riding a bicycle. You know, you never forget. I put them on, and it all completely, I did it for a long time. So it was very familiar to me. But I felt a little, I wore this robe. This is the robe that Suzuki Roshi gave me when I was ordained. And I came over here. commented to Mel that it felt okay to wear my robes, but not entirely okay. And then I came in to join all of you for the Bodhisattva ceremony, and maybe some of you were there, I may remember.

[05:42]

And you did it with such sincerity, and I watched Mel bowing and everybody participating. You know, I felt something at that time. I felt my teacher and the power of the Dharma. And I realized I could do it. I've never, I've always been doing it. This kind of experience is not something you can read about in books. If you read Zen stories, there's some intimation of this. It's what it's about. It's something more direct than words or doctrines It says in the famous verse of the Sixth Patriarch that really is the touchstone of the Zen tradition, a special transmission outside the scriptures, no dependence on words or letters. When I read that as a teenager, it seemed very

[06:43]

kind of like beat zen, very unusual and special. But the real meaning of it is not so mysterious. It's just like human life is intrinsically like that. Everybody's life here is like that. And so somehow coming here in this zendo and bowing with all of you was a very important moment for me. So, This book, A Whole Life's Work, is really about the Bodhisattva vow, about the great vow to liberate all beings. And not as an abstraction, but I saw it in action with my teacher. I saw how you actually accomplish the vow, how you do it. And so early in the book, I talk about what he said about it. Shunryu Suzuki once said, I am waiting for the island off the coast of Los Angeles to come to San Francisco.

[08:01]

This is a quote from Zen My Beginner's Mind. You probably have all seen it in there. From one of his students I write, he had learned that geologically Catalina Island off the coast of Los Angeles is moving slowly north a few centimeters a year and will eventually reach San Francisco. As a Buddhist priest, Suzuki certainly would have felt a kinship with that kind of time frame. Buddhist literature often speaks of thousands of lifetimes and cycles of millions of years the Buddhist worldview accepts the vastness of time and space as well as the gradualness of human change. So I go on to, that becomes the governing metaphor of the whole book. That is, that metaphor of the island moving from Los Angeles to San Francisco is a metaphor for the great bodhisattva vow. And it's very profound when you actually stop to think about it.

[09:05]

It's a geological metaphor. So maybe the island moves two or three centimeters a year. I think what's notable about this story is that Suzuki Roshi really liked the image. He liked the idea of the island, how slow it was moving. It made sense to him. as an activator of the great vow. It's how it actually is. It's how it actually is in practice. It's how it actually is in human life. And so I take the metaphor a little further in the book and imagine six billion of us all on the island together, helping the island to move, but confused. A lot of confusion on the island. Some people on the island want everybody on the island to be like them and get rid of all the people that aren't like them. Some people want to push the island the other way, south.

[10:09]

Some people want to blow up the island. Some people notice that the island is becoming slowly uninhabitable, but other people don't want to notice that. All sorts of things. This is our world. And yet, somehow, beneath all of that, there's this great work, the great vow, that is the root, the essence of our practice, the development of consciousness, which is the greatest mystery that there is, consciousness itself. Mind. You know, when Buddhism, in English, the texts say mind, mind with a capital N, it's not quite right because mind to us means the mental world, that which thinks. That's not really the mind we talk about. Mind means awareness itself. There's so many different languages in Buddhism, so many different traditions.

[11:17]

The actual word in Chinese is shin, and it means something more like essence of mind or the heart. Sometimes shin is translated as heart. And in Sanskrit, the word, there are many, many words for heart. things having to do with the mind, but the one that probably closely, most closely matches Shin is Vidya, which means consciousness or conscious awareness. So consciousness, the development of consciousness over centuries, millennia, thousands of millennia, 500,000, a million, two million, two billion years. This is the vastness of the bodhisattva vow. And when we practice Zazen, when Suzuki Roshi practiced Zazen, you simply directly rest in that vast work.

[12:21]

So the title of the book, A Whole Life's Work, what it means is the Bodhisattva vow. That's our whole life's work, whether we know it or not. And then the book goes through all the different kinds of work that we do, not just livelihood, which was my first book, but the work of parenting, the work of being a student, the work of passionate avocation, your hobbies, the work of growing old, the work of being a monk, which is what all of you are doing here. All of those are genuine, kinds of work that are, you might say, subcategories of the great work, the whole life's work, which is the bodhisattva vow, which is both incomprehensible and inconceivable. In the book, I tell many stories, not only about Suzuki Roshi, but about the early days of Zen Center.

[13:24]

And there's a story in there about one of the early students at Tassajara, And I won't read the story. I don't want to read a lot from the book today. I want to talk about the book and about Suzuki Roshi. But in brief, the story is that Suzuki Roshi gave a lecture on the Bodhisattva vow. However many beings there are, I vow to liberate them all. So afterwards, this student who was very serious student said, well, Suzuki Roshi, I can't take a vow like that unless I understand it, unless I can do it. I mean, I don't want to promise to do something I can't do. And Suzuki Roshi said, that's because you're still operating in your selfish mind. It was like a crack of thunder in the room. It seemed harsh for him to say that, because this person, we all knew this person. He was a very generous, sincere person.

[14:26]

He didn't seem selfish at all. And so they had this wonderful dialogue. It's actually, the whole dialogue is in Branching Streams, the book about Suzuki Roshi's Sando Kai lectures. It's in there, so you can read the whole mando. This is a mando, dialogue between teacher and student. And at the end of the dialogue, it was a very nice dialogue because both the student and Suzuki Roshi were trying to communicate what they felt. And finally, and Suzuki Roshi was actually very sympathetic. He understood completely. At the end, he said, well, maybe if I were younger, I could be your friend, but now I am not your friend. And the students started to cry. And that was the end of the dialogue. There was no more conversation. This is an authentic American Zen dialogue, very deep, very wonderful, and a great teaching.

[15:27]

I was there. I think Mel, you may have been there too. You know the moment. And Suzuki Roshi, it's what I said at the beginning, he refused to treat us as less than great, as less than capable of being fully Buddha. And so he wasn't going to coddle us, you know, and say, oh, well, you know, for you Americans, I'll change the quality of the vow so you can understand it. He wasn't going to do that. He remained, he rested in the great inconceivable domain of that vow and trusted that in the long run that is the best way to teach something. So that's always been my inspiration. It was the inspiration that created this Zen Do in many places and the spirit.

[16:28]

I talk about that story and many others. The book is peppered with Suzuki Roshi stories, Suzuki Roshi teachings. One time in a lecture, which was a lecture on the koan, everyday mind is the Tao, which is a famous statement in the Zen tradition, Suzuki Roshi said something like, Even though you are at Tassajara, it may not be a good monastery.

[17:37]

Whether it's a good monastery or not is up to you. Even though you may live in San Francisco, if you actually understand the Prajnaparamita Sutra, the Heart Sutra, then San Francisco can be a perfect monastery. It's easy to study a teaching like that and rush right by it and say, mm-hmm, yeah, that's good, right. But there's actually, if you slow down long enough to actually hear it, there's something very important in there. Suzuki Roshi was not interested, I think, in coming to America and replicating some Japanese religion, Soto school or something. I see all the literature now coming out of Zen Center is, oh, we're preserving the Soto Zen teaching of Suzuki Roshi.

[18:37]

Maybe, I'm not sure that he would exactly buy into that. The Soto sect in Japan is some kind of big religion. and with priests and laymen and thousands of temples and a whole structure, big institution. From the age of 23, it was pretty clear that the young monk, Shunryu, wanted to come to America and get away from all that, start over, where things were fresh. And finally, he got his chance at the age of 57. You know, people think, we've already recreated some kind of myth. People think that Dogen, is Dogen here? Oh, hi. We think that Dogen is, you know, the great founder of the Soto school, and the Shobo Genzo is the great teaching of Dogen, and it rolled along, and Suzuki Roshi's the inheritor of that, we're the inheritor of that.

[19:38]

It really didn't go that way. Many of you may not know that Dogen and his entire body of teaching was totally forgotten for 500 years. It wasn't until the 19th century that some reformists in the Zen tradition began to read what he actually taught. And actually, the Soto school as we know it today is something that was invented by people 100 years later who wanted to make it into a religion. And it's pretty clear that Dogen's only interest and only teaching was Zazen itself. It's not clear that he ever chanted sutras or did service or did any of the things that we do. So it's hard to know what a real teacher's teaching is. Maybe in Suzuki Roshi we'll be forgotten soon and it'll be 500 years before anybody picks up Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind out of a library and reads it and says, oh, this is pretty interesting. We don't know what's going to happen.

[20:39]

That's part of the mystery and wonder of this island, slow-moving island. And I think one of the great strengths of Suzuki Roshi's way is the way that he didn't just teach patience, he modeled it. Patience is not exactly the right word. Kshanti, the Paramita of Kshanti, it means something like forbearance or willingness to wait forever, something like that. So I talk in the book about his teaching on patience. Shunryu Suzuki talked about patience.

[21:46]

I quote a gatha, a verse, out of the Buddhist tradition. The misery I have to endure in realizing enlightenment is immeasurable. It is like probing a wound to stop the pain caused by what is lodged therein. That's the kind of feeling you get from the old Indian style Buddhism. And then I say, Shunryu Suzuki talked about patience too, but he did not use traditional Buddhist texts or terminology. Instead, he talked about frogs. Suzuki loved frogs. Even as a boy, he seemed to have a natural sympathy for these creatures. In Suzuki's biography, Crooked Cucumber by David Chadwick is this story. The young Suzuki overheard some older boys talking about going to a nearby creek and capturing and tormenting the frogs there. Suzuki quickly ran to the place and splashed all around, frightening all the frogs away so they would be safe from the older boys.

[22:49]

Once in a lecture, Suzuki vividly imitated the way a frog waits for a meal. It sits utterly still, Suzuki said. I don't call him Suzuki Roshi in the book, because that's our term. For the public, I just call him Suzuki. David Chadwick had the same. demonstrated by showing us his most immobile meditation posture until a little insect flies by and then zap. Suzuki lunged forward on his meditation cushion, his tongue protruding, becoming for the moment a hungry frog snapping up the morsel on its long tongue. And then he laughed quietly to himself for what seemed like a long time. In Not Always So, Suzuki has this to say about frogs. I always admire their practice. They never get sleepy. Their eyes are always open and they do things intuitively in an appropriate way. When something to eat comes by, they go like this. They never miss anything. They are always calm and still. I wish I could be a frog.

[23:50]

I wish I could be a frog. This is what our great founder teaches. Suzuki's frog story is charming until we dig deeper and see the story from the point of view of the frog. The frog, motionless and with full attention, is not performing a circus trick for our benefit, nor is it there as the subject of some spiritual homily. It is there because it is hungry. That is why it is willing to stay there until the fly comes along. Suzuki Roshi liked frogs because the way frogs sit is something like the way we sit in Zazen. Waiting for something, maybe, but... If you wait with some sense of expectation or measurement, okay, I'm going to wait one hour for a fly, and I'll set my timer, and if the fly doesn't come within an hour, well, that's it for the day.

[24:58]

I'm gonna go home. That's not the way a frog works. The frog is hungry. The frog suffers. The frog is in the rain and the cold, and it's hard to be a frog. Every frog has a difficult time. Even the big, fast frogs have a hard time. Even the small, weak frogs have a hard time. Every frog has a hard time. And if you have some idea about how you're going to get the fly, you'll never get the fly. In fact, the whole quality, the frog does not have a thought about flies. It just, you know, It's sitting is too basic to be thinking that way. It isn't calculating, it's just, you know. But if the fly comes, you know. So, if the frog gets sleepy, as all of us do from time to time, have any of you ever gotten sleepy in Zazen?

[26:07]

No. If the frog gets sleepy, the frog might miss the best fly there is. If the frog becomes nervous or agitated, moving around, changing its legs on the cushion, then the fly will be scared away. You can see why, I wish I was a frog. This is not some humor piece he's trying to amuse us. I wish I was a frog. Beautiful. And also, It's not intellectual. We all have an appreciation for the frog. And this is our basic style in Zen. A frog is a better teacher for us than some sutra, actually. And even better than a frog is to sit like a frog. Then you're actually inside the whole frog quality of the story, and it's not a story anymore, it's you. Each of us is the frog. So we all are hungry, we all want something.

[27:10]

Human beings have a much more complicated body and mind than a frog, so we think about flies all the time. Flies in the future, flies in the past, big flies, small flies, good flies, bad flies, flies everywhere. You know, our mind is full of flies, but you know, you can't eat a mental fly. Only a real fly nourishes. So what is that all about? So it may seem like a completely separate story from the story about the Bodhisattva vow and you're still operating out of your selfish mind, but it's not really a separate story. There's lots of ways that Buddhism is being taught in America now, and it's all very good and useful. But I am hoping that over time, the teaching will coalesce more around the notion of a vow.

[28:16]

Because if somebody were to jump up in front of me and say, quick, tell me what zazen is, 10 words or less, I'd say, I don't need 10 words. I just need one word, vow. It's the expression of vow. And a vow is something you can't quite, you know, I talk in the book about what a vow isn't. So I say, let's try the word out. Okay, I vow, I say in the book, to eat a piece of candy, a Hershey bar. I vow to eat a Hershey bar. We'd never say that, would we? I mean, you don't vow to eat a Hershey bar. I mean, you could say it, but it would sound ridiculous. I mean, why would you need a word like vow? Just go eat the candy bar. It's a very superficial thing. You want candy, go eat it. There's nothing deep about it, you know. So that's not a vow. That's just a desire. And then you eat the candy bar and you forget about it. Then I try out, okay, I vow to get back at my ex-wife.

[29:22]

Well, yeah, I mean, people can think that way for years. It's a kind of steady thought. One day I'll get my revenge at all that she did bad, you know, the things that she said. And that's maybe a little more serious, but it's not a vow, really. It's like a obsessive thought. An obsessive thought is not a vow because it's not rooted in something that's deeply true. It's rooted in some emotional trap. But if we say, I vow however many beings there are in the world, however many creatures, I vow to liberate them all, that's a vow. That's a vow because And this was the question in that dialogue. It doesn't make any sense. It's not literally conceivable.

[30:25]

You can't possibly, what does it mean? It's ridiculous. And that's why it's a vow. That's why it's a vow. It's not operating, as Suzuki Roshi said, in a selfish terrain. You know, maybe his English wasn't so wonderful. If he'd had more command of the nuances of English, he maybe wouldn't have said selfish. He might have said something a little bit more polite. But he said selfish, it's okay. We should be tough enough to endure a word like that. And maybe he meant self-centered or self-focused or self-limited. Anyway, something you can draw a circle around and say, that's it. And I think what's special about our tradition and about our practice is that we're constantly being encouraged not to do that, not to find something conceivable enough that we can draw a circle around and say, that's it. That's the vow. I understand the vow now. I can do it. It's OK.

[31:27]

I get it. It's accomplishable. I've counted up all the beings in the world, and I've got a plan for how to liberate them. That's a very American thing to do. We've got a strategy. You've got a strategy paper, white paper. In business, they would do this. OK, how many beings are there? Let's get it down on paper. You know, let's, where's the research? Where's the market research? How many, how many beans? I mean, just tell me how many beans there are. You know, let's get it, let's get the, how many people do we need? Let's job it out, you know, subcontract, outsource. There's lots of people out there. Let's get it done. You know, that's, you know, I, I, I think that actually Dharma will, will, will, will go this way a lot in America because it's our style, you know. You know, or we can approach our own practice that way too. And it's Zen as it, it says in Zen Mind Beginner's Mind, as Zen advanced generation after generation, it became more and more impure.

[32:29]

Do you know this statement in Zen Mind Beginner's Mind? What does that mean? You know, more and more, the Zen tradition itself began to contract itself into something that could be conceived of. So, something that could be accomplished. So in about the 10th century or 11th century, they collected all the things that the Zen teachers had said for the four centuries preceding and made it into a book and said, okay, if you understand all of this, these koans, Then you've accomplished Zen. And so Zen started to, and then later on in the 18th century with Hakuin, I'm digressing a bit, but I'm making a point. They collected all that into about 500, and there are stages. And there are some Zen centers in the country today where it's like karate. You get sort of a rank. When you pass 10 koans, you get a 10-koan rank, and then 20, and then 50. And when you've passed all 500, then wow, it's like the frog with the fly.

[33:35]

You've got it. And that's what another word that Suzuki Roshi used to describe this way of practice was candy. He said, that's candy. Now, he wasn't exactly critical of candy. He understood the usefulness of candy. And I think you might, if you really pressed him, he would say, well, a lot of what he said to us was candy, because he knew that we might get discouraged and go away. So occasionally he'd dole out some candy, but not too often. But you can't, as I said, it was a coincidence that I used the Hershey bar as an example, but candy, you can't vow with candy. Candy is very much in the terrain of accomplishing something. We can get our hands around it. And it is within the realm of our self-centered or self-defined or self-contained world.

[34:38]

So, Zen then becomes something else to master, something else to accomplish. And certainly when I was young, gung-ho, male remembers, 20 years old, yeah, bring it on. I shouldn't say that, that's gotta be. I wanted to be the most accomplished Zen person there was. I think young people, particularly young men, sometimes go that way. So you have to give people like me something to chew on until they get tired of that idea. In my case, there's a basic truth in Zen practice. If it's easy at the beginning, it will be hard later. And if it's hard at the beginning, it's not so bad later. I'm very much an example of the first, and it doesn't matter. it's gonna take a long time regardless. So I'm a good example of the first kind.

[35:40]

There are certain ways, because I'm a very kind of smart person, quick, that Zen seemed easy, but later on it was very hard. So those of you who are having a very hard time, it's difficult physically to sit, don't think for a minute that somehow you're not as good as the person who can sit for an hour without moving or who gets all the, understands everything quickly. I can tell you from experience that, um, what we're doing here isn't in the realm of fast or slow or easy or hard anyway. And, um, unless at some point you go through some hard things, none of this makes any sense. That's why the frog is not just some cute story. The frog is in pain. And I think why Suzuki Roshi liked frogs is frogs, for whatever reason, maybe they're too stupid, which is not a bad thing in Zen practice.

[36:48]

They're too stupid to move. They just sit there. And yet they're totally alert, waiting, and ready. So anyway. This book is a number of different things. You know, when you write books, you have to sell them. So I tried to write it so it appealed to people that didn't know much about Buddhism or were interested in applying some basic spiritual values to the work they do in their life. I wanted to make sure that there was A good bit in there about the work of being a parent, because this is an area of deficit in Buddhism historically. There aren't, as I say, any parent sutras in the tradition, and there need to be, so we need to write them. And what we're doing in America, practicing Zen as householders, with families, with jobs, is the great new frontier of Buddhadharma. and we shouldn't, even though it's hard and even though it seems like we may be second-class citizens compared to the wonderful, beautiful-looking monks walking around.

[37:56]

That's another example of easy and hard. If you think that it's harder to practice in as a householder, well, it's not exactly That being hard is actually very good. So I wanted to provide some encouragement in the book for people who are family people who may not be able to practice monastic life. But in the end, the book is inevitably, I think, all my books, including the one about my illness, is really about the dharma and about the person who brought me and inspired me and still inspires me to dharma. So I hope that if any of you do get the book, that you'll understand that the heart of it really is to try to, in my own meager and quite inadequate way, explain something about the person who started all of this, who founded this temple, and who ordained me.

[39:06]

Not so bad, huh? Right on time. OK, we're going to shut down the technology. Stop.

[39:24]

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