It takes a long time to sit down, I just noticed. I felt like that took about a half an hour to get all the pieces arranged. And take my time, not be rushed by all of you in the room. allowing that to come in as kind of pressure, but just to take the time and try to sit down. There's doubtless a metaphor there, but that's not what I was going to talk about. I just happened to notice that it takes a long time to sit down. Before going further, I'm just sort of remarking on this as a time of transitions, some transitions in my work life and transitions in our Sangha life, and just to say something about that.

[01:10]

At Buddhist Peace Fellowship where I work, my associate Lewis Woods is leaving after about five years or more. And he's going to continue on, I mean he's going to continue in relationship to Buddhist Peace Fellowship, but he's not going to be employed there any longer. He's going to go to graduate school and study philosophy and religion. And I think that's a really good move. what I'm discovering and trying to keep down a sense of panic about is how much I rely on him. What piece of the work and thereby kind of what piece of my life and all of our lives in the office he's been carrying and You know, sometimes you get glimpses of this, but you kind of don't get the full picture until somebody is going away or they're gone.

[02:30]

In his case, we have an opportunity to prepare and then we sent out, I think there's a job description on the bulletin board where we put ads in different places we're looking to hire. You start enumerating the tasks and thinking, who can replace this person? It's almost impossible to consider. And yet, I know that things will continue and that the person who will come to fill that space will not be Lewis, nor will it be a Lewis clone. It will be somebody else who brings qualities, talents, an edge, her or his own edge towards the world that will create a different mix in that particular arena.

[03:34]

So I look forward to that. I look forward to it a little nervously, but I do look forward to it, because each time somebody's come in, they've brought something else, and that keeps things interesting. On the other hand, old friends and close, intimate associates leaving is, there's some loss and grief there. even when they're going to something that you know will be good for them and good for the world. We've been sitting in the kind of larger Suzuki Roshi Sangha for the last week with a serious and very sudden illness priest or man by the name of Lou Richmond, whom some of you probably know.

[04:41]

I think he wrote a book, came out last year, called Work as a Spiritual Practice, which is quite a good book. And he taught a class on that, I forget, it might have been about two years ago, but some of you know him from that. And he was very close, He is somebody who has continued to raise really critical questions about the nature of our sanghas, what we're doing here in the West, are we replicating something that replicating forms and renewing mistakes that we're kind of adopting from another culture, or are we making something that is truly our own, something in our own bellies? So I really appreciate him for that inquiring spirit.

[05:49]

He came down with a case of viral encephalitis I think it was about eight or ten days ago and the prospects actually are not too good. So, I'm not sure whether he's going to live or not. And that is something that I think the larger Sangha is sitting with. Closer to home, Karen Dakotas left about a week or so ago. We had a farewell party for her and for Meili and for Mel's 70th birthday. It was a weekend before last. Karen has gone to Los Angeles with her husband Paul, who needed to go there for his work. It was hard parting for her because it was not necessarily something she would have chosen and I miss her and I know that others miss her.

[06:59]

And Meili drove off in a truck full of stuff and therefore, she left, I think she's leaving today. Is that right? 9 o'clock. Okay, so it's now 10.30 and you know, where is she? She's somewhere up on 101. She's probably in Cloverdale or something. You can visualize her if you like. She's smiling. Yeah, she's not driving. And I must say I have some joy for her in being able to at last make this move and take care of this wonderful group of feisty people up there in Arcata where she's moving. And I feel somewhat relieved. I don't think I'm going to have to go to any more goodbye parties or eat any more cake in saying goodbye to her.

[08:10]

There were a lot of them because Meili occupies a lot of different communities that that we share. Many of us here share some of those different communities. But it's, I think it's going to be, it's hard to see her move away even though she will be back. It's hard for me personally because we have been practicing together for a long time. I've learned and continue to learn a lot from her and because we were trying to work out a way of sharing, a way of working with the Sangha that was a partnership. And so there's going to have to be some adjustment.

[09:13]

I have to make, it's going to be a large adjustment for me and I also, for everyone else, her absence will be an adjustment. But I also think that just as I was saying about Louis leaving, something else will come up that other people will occupy not the same space as Meili. They won't be Meili, but they'll be the community. I trust the community to rise to take care of itself. It has for many years, and it will. And any one person, any one person's absence will be felt as an absence, and yet our life here will be complete.

[10:15]

And in the effort to make that completion, to constantly renew the circle, that effort is part of, is really essential part of the practice that we have. So I just wanted to say something about it rather than let it go unacknowledged, these transitions. It's really important, I think, to recognize transitions and also to recognize non-transitions, to recognize people's presence. you know, to look around, even though we're in Sishin, for those of you who are here for lecture, we're in Sishin, a retreat for today, so we're not actually supposed to look around. But certain things happen during meals or during work period that gets enough laughs so you know that people are

[11:30]

catching on to things out of the corners of their eyes. So we appreciate each other's presence. We don't have to wait till somebody's absent. But the absences have, the absences raise one set of challenge. And actually the presences raise other sets of challenges as we all know. And that's actually a lot the style of this practice as I understand it. And it's coming to know how to work in community, how to carry yourself in community, how to deepen your own way of looking at yourself as one is in relation to everyone else. So I think there have been various discussions both inside and then criticisms from others outside the Suzuki-Roshi family.

[12:41]

We don't emphasize enlightenment as such or particular kinds of experiences but I think what which is not to say that it's not that it doesn't happen and it's not here and that when people open to reality it's a wonderful thing but the way we tend to what we tend to emphasize is that Zazen and the practice of Zazen, the practice of sitting upright next to each other, together, is not, that Zazen and character development are the expression of realization. And so there's an emphasis on that. How do we, first, how do we get along with ourselves?

[13:45]

do we treat ourselves? How do we take care of ourselves? And then how do we get along with others in the immediate Sangha, in our families, in our communities, in the world? And where we don't get along, where there are rough edges or parts that rub against each other uncomfortably, how do we work with that? How do we sit upright in the middle of that? So I think that's a main feature of our family as I am coming to understand it. So yesterday, I actually had a whole other thing to talk about, which I'm probably not going to talk about because things happened yesterday.

[14:48]

I can talk about it another time, but I may fold in some of it because I've been reading and thinking about and talking with people. One of the very well-known sutras from the Pali Canon, the Kalama Sutta, which is Buddha's encouragement for people to make a judgment about what is true based on their own evaluation, on their own mind, to find what is good, find what is wholesome, on looking at their own experience and what they take in. And I think that'll fold in to what I want to talk about, but it won't be so central. some of us we have a group of older students who all of whom have been head student or shuso here and we meet monthly and we talk about first we talk about how we are what's going on in our lives and then sometimes we talk about a text or an issue and yesterday

[16:14]

Sojin, the meeting before last, Sojin suggested that we might want to look at some parts of, there's a book called Zen Lessons, the Art of Leadership, which is edited and translated by Thomas Cleary, and it's basically some dynasty sort of snippets from some dynasty teachings and records of different Chinese teachers about basically about how to carry yourself, how to carry yourself in harmony with others. It's not specifically about leadership, or it is in the sense that it's actually encouraging everybody to be a leader. When I went to the store after he had mentioned this, and I got myself a copy because I'd never read it,

[17:23]

and felt like, I was opening a reading through it, and I felt like I had found the long-lost codex to Sojin's teaching. You know, it's like, oh, this is where he got it, you know? It's like, he's been stealing stuff from this book for 25 years. But actually, that's not true. Because the book was, I don't know, when did it come out? Not so long ago. Well, maybe in 1989, but I know that he was talking about these issues before 1989. So it's not the secret teaching, but it's pretty good because it actually confirms a lot of what he has been often painfully trying to convey to me, thick-headed as I am, and some of the others of us about how to carry yourself and sometimes he does it by talking about it and usually he conveys it in not doing something which can be enlightening or frustrating or in alternation or simultaneously or whatever.

[18:51]

But just by his ability to stay present and try not to be reactive is one of the main lessons that I'm trying to learn. So we had a really lively discussion about this and then later in the day I I had a kind of unusual experience. I visited a man named Jarvis Masters, who's on death row. Actually, he's on death row, but he's even more isolated than that in San Quentin. And it was the first visit that I had had with him, and actually only my second time inside the gates of San Quentin.

[19:56]

And the discussion that we had really pertained very directly to the things that we had talked about earlier in the morning. But I thought I should, let me say something about Jarvis. Jarvis Masters, he's a 37-year-old African-American man who was convicted of a series of armed robberies in I think 1980 or 81 and was sent to San Quentin. And at that time he was 19. And he was pretty angry. A little later he became He was accused of participating in a conspiracy that led to the death of a guard in 1985.

[21:04]

He was actually charged with, there were three people charged, he was charged with sharpening the piece of metal. that was made into a knife that was used when this guard was killed. And of the three defendants, by some quirk of the legal system, he was the only one who received the death sentence. The other two received life sentences. In the course of working on his appeal, he had a private investigator who sits with us often, Melody Erma Child, who some of you, many of you know. And when she first met him, he was still an angry man. And she read through the stack of his legal record and she said to him a bit later when they had become friends, she said, well, I'm glad I wasn't in that Taco Bell when you came through in 1981.

[22:23]

And he writes, when he heard that, he was just appalled because he could imagine Melody and her children in there and him brandishing a gun, making everybody lie down on the floor. And among other things, that was something he felt terrible about. Melody, by Again, fate just keeps twisting and twisting. When we talk of ancient twisted karma, the karma is still twisting. It's not all back there. So Melody and Jarvis, in the course of working on his case and in the course of what was going on in her life, they ended up taking up

[23:26]

Buddhist practice together. They also took up writing practice together. They would go in after a while and she, because she was an investigator, she had different visitation situation than I had yesterday. And she would go in and say, okay, we're going to write for 10 minutes. You know, ready, go. And each of them on their own side would write whatever came to them at that moment for ten minutes and then they would read it to each other. And that's how both of them really worked on their writing. It's an amazing thing to do in that environment. But they also worked on their practice. And at the time, she had begun to do a Tibetan practice and was sharing that with Jarvis. She ended up coming here to practice, and he continued and has received an empowerment, essentially like receiving the precepts, from Chagda Tulku Rinpoche, who is a very well-known and lively teacher here on the West Coast, originally Tibetan.

[24:51]

And Jarvis has been practicing in prison now for 10 years. And he does not, he's not as angry anymore. I certainly didn't get it. I certainly didn't get that feeling. It's not that there aren't reservoirs of anger, but it was not anywhere near the foreground. So I've been corresponding with him for a couple of years. He has a wonderful book called Finding Freedom, which I recommend to you. And I also recommend Melody's book, Altars in the Streets. And they've been working together. I've been corresponding with him for a couple of years. And finally I realized, well, I should just go there. I guess I could go there, which kind of never occurred to me. And then I the bureaucracy getting, I was, my application was lost like twice.

[26:01]

And then finally it was approved. And then there are all kinds of, it is not easy to go visit someone in San Quentin, but it can be done. And so yesterday was my first time. For people who are in lockdown, and that's 5,000 of the 6,000 prisoners, The way you visit with them is by telephone. You go in this building, you go through one set of steel gates that opens electrically, you enter a space, it clangs shut, and then they, it's sort of like an airlock, and then they open the next set of gates and you go in and that clangs shut. And there are a lot of guards walking around. And you go down a hall to a sort of cinder block and brick building. You go down in this hall and in each hall there's like, you know, if you've ever been to the zoo where for the smaller animals where you look through windows to see them, it's kind of like looking at a diorama.

[27:10]

And so there are a series of windows probably about the size of one of those, one of our windows. And the glass is about yea thick. Uh, and in each, each one of those is a booth and there were maybe about 15 or 20 of them. Uh, and there's a prisoner waiting behind each one. And when they, when you find the person you're looking for, uh, you sit down and he picks up a kind of, uh, scratchy sounding telephone and you pick up a scratchy sounding telephone and you begin to talk. And I didn't know what it was gonna be like, but we just instantly began to talk with each other, asking a lot of questions about each other's lives, which then, I was wearing my rock suit, and he wanted to know, well, what's that?

[28:12]

He had never seen one before. That's kind of the small robe like Robin is wearing, like a bib. And he wanted me to turn it around, and I showed him what Sogen had written. And he said, oh, that's that thing that Joan Tollefson was writing about that she was always tearing up. I didn't know I was going to see it. I said, yeah, that's it. Right. And it's quite interesting because in our conversation Jarvis has been inside San Quentin for 19 years. For the first four of those years he didn't even have any visitors. And yet we can talk about all of these, I mean he knows all these people that are friends. He knew, I don't know if you've corresponded with him, but he knew Joan certainly through her writing, and he knows Susan Moon, and he knows Melody really well, and he had seen on the TV pictures of the KPFA demonstrations, and he thought he had seen Sue in the crowd, and all these different people.

[29:32]

It's interesting, because he has become a part of our lives, and yet I can walk out and, boy, he's not going anyplace for a while. So what was interesting was that we fell into a discussion about practicing. And the bulk of the conversation that we had was about how one might practice, how he has been practicing, what's problematic, and what's a challenge. And it's a difficult environment to practice in. It's not safe in many ways to practice there. Particularly, it's not safe to appear in any way superior to anyone else. Because if you do, somebody's going to call you on it.

[30:34]

And that calling is not going to be, it could be very ungentle. And he was describing how when he first practiced, first couple years, you know, how when you You begin to take on this practice and take on an aspect of mindfulness and you sort of walk slower and you talk slower and everything kind of slows down and it's like that's not a really functional way to be in the population of San Quentin. And he said, you know, he found himself And when he'd be in conversation, the little time that he had out of his cell, he'd go up to somebody and he sort of like touched them on the shoulder. And it took a long time before somebody said, you know, you're doing this. You know, every conversations we have, you're just, you're touching me and it's like, I don't, it's not really cool.

[31:39]

And Jarvis said, well, why didn't you ever tell me this before? I said, well, you know. you've got a bad reputation. I'm not going to tell you something that might piss you off." And Jarvis just thought he was being kind of Buddhistic and making contact with people. And it wasn't anything, it was just what was coming up in him and what he's had to gradually evolve in himself. And I think this is a place that we work at also was a way of being really committed to practice, which he is. He told me his schedule and basically he's doing meditations or prostrations or Vajrayana practice five or six hours a day. So that creates a considerable amount of energy.

[32:41]

what he's learning to develop, as I think we're learning to develop, is a practice that is, in a sense, signless, that doesn't have a lot of external marks, that doesn't, the difficulty that he had in the past was that people would kind of smell this guy who thought he was different than they were. And what he was finding as he continued in practice was that he was not all that different. That at root, what was driving him, the passions, the angers, the fears, were not different in kind than that of all the other people around him, and that includes the guards.

[33:56]

And still, he felt The mission that he got, if you read the chapter, there's a section in his book called Empowerment, where Chagda tells him his task is to help other people practice. But he also says, if you help one person to practice and that gets you killed, that's not so good. It's good, but it would be better if you worked on yourself and found a way to carry yourself so that you could help many people practice. And that is what he's trying to do. And it's extremely difficult because what I realized, and I hadn't quite got it until talking to him, was how isolated he is. How without a sangha, without any peers who will kindly correct

[35:03]

errors, faults, unskillful actions, or concepts, he does not have that inside in the way that we do. And so it's very hard to get that from books or tapes or TV programs. And the contact with people who are teachers, his own teacher, I think has only been able to come see him twice. And there's some other practitioners who come. And lately, Pema Chodron has been visiting him when she's out here, which is for a couple months a year. So that's pretty good. But it made me think, it just made me think, the discussion that we're having made me think back so much on the discussion we had had earlier in the morning. And I kept trying to say, well, gee, I wish I had brought this book.

[36:09]

And the fact of the matter is, you can't bring, I can't, as a visitor, I can't bring anything in there. I had to go back to my car to leave a little unbound notebook and a pen, because I wasn't allowed to take that in. You can bring a key. You can bring a picture ID. Oh, I also had to go back in my car to bring my reading glasses. They said, well, are these prescription? I said, no, sorry, you can't take them in. I said, well, I was just joking. I said, well, gee, maybe I should have said they were prescription glasses. And the woman said, but that would have been lying. I mean, she was fooling around, but she was also telling the truth. Yeah, that would have been lying. And I said, well, I'll send you, we were talking about this book. I said, I'll send it to you. He said, well, you can't do that. You can't even, because he's in the adjustment center, you can't even send him books.

[37:13]

You can have them sent from a bookstore. They have to have like a bookstore in premature on the envelope, but the security is really high. But what we were talking about and I'm taking a long time getting around to this, were these two sections that stuck out my mind in Zen lessons. I'll read them to you and then maybe I'll stop and leave some time for discussion. So the first section, which is number 81 in this book, is called Correcting Faults. Yuan Wu said, who has no faults? To err and yet be able to correct it is best of all. Since time immemorial, all have lauded the ability to correct faults as being wise, rather than considering having no faults to be beautiful.

[38:16]

Thus, human actions have many faults and errors. This is something that neither the wise nor the foolish can avoid. Yet it is only the wise who can correct their faults and change to good, whereas the foolish mostly conceal their faults and cover up their wrongs. When one changes to what is good, virtue is new in every day. This is characteristic of what is called the ideal person. When one covers up one's faults, the evil is more and more manifest. This is characteristic of what is called the lesser person. So it is that the ability to follow what is right when hearing of it is considered difficult from the standpoint of ordinary feelings. I have to read that again. That's a hard sentence. So it is that the ability to follow what is right when hearing of it is considered difficult from the standpoint of ordinary feelings. To gladly follow good when seeing it is what is esteemed by the wise and virtuous.

[39:22]

I hope you will forget about the outer expression of the words." And this other section, 83, which is called Winning People. Yuan Wu said to Librarian Long, if you want to order a community but do not work at winning people's hearts, the community cannot be ordered. If you work on winning people's hearts and do not take care to make contact with those in the lower echelons, people's hearts cannot be won. If you try to make contact with those in the lower echelons but do not distinguish the good from the bad, then those below cannot be contacted. In trying to distinguish good people from bad, if you dislike it when they say you are wrong and like it when they follow you, then good and bad cannot be distinguished. Only the wise adepts do not dislike to hear how they are wrong and do not delight in having others go along with them.

[40:25]

Only the way is to be followed and this is how people's hearts are won and how communities are ordered." So that's what I was kind of thinking on as he and I were talking and it was very painful not to be able to share the exact words with him. I mean ultimately I can send the book but both of us were sharing stories from our own experience of how we failed and how we didn't want to hear corrections and how what small successes or how we could build sort of mansions of ego on anything that anyone praised us for.

[41:28]

And how we make the, how the thrust of the practice is to keep us looking at the impermanent and completely flimsy nature of those houses of ego and actually help tear them down. But to do it in a way that doesn't tear one house down over here and build another house up over here, that's, boy, that's really hard. Really hard. So I think I'll stop there. Maybe it hasn't come quite full circle, but I'd like to take questions for a few minutes or comments. Something you said just made me think about, there was a time, it seems to me, there was a time when people were a lot more critical of one another, and that praise and compliments were, it was rare.

[42:52]

If anyone ever said, thank you very much, or you did that really well. So I was wondering, do you think that that has changed a little bit, and if that's useful or if it's not useful? Well, I think it's changing and I think it's changed. I think it's a lot looser and I think there's a lot more appreciation. I think we are constantly learning how much we depend upon each other. And I also think there's further to go for each of us. And there's we need to find the skillful ways to communicate what we know, what we know to be helpful, what we know to be unhelpful, or what we feel is helpful or unhelpful ourselves in the way that somebody else is, say, working with us.

[44:01]

That's a challenge, but I think it's not the important part is to acknowledge, to keep acknowledging the helpful, encouraging, and I think that gets back to, I think there are many sections in this book, and looking at how Sojin is teaching, I feel like it took him about 10 years before he started telling me what I was doing that was bugging him. And I'm not exaggerating. I'm really not exaggerating. For the first 10 years or so of practice, he was incredibly encouraging and never was heard a discouraging word. And I would say for the last five years, The correction of faults has been somewhat unstinting, but we can do that because

[45:07]

there's enough intimacy and there is. It's not like it's without appreciation. There's always enough, it's always balanced by mutual appreciation, but it's not easy. We had had Dogasan the day before, I think the afternoon before yesterday, correcting a fault, which I hadn't ... it's like I had gone there to correct a fault that I thought I saw, but somehow he turned it around and I felt okay about it. I actually felt really okay about it. And then when I read When we read this section yesterday morning, I was actually close to tears, because I realized that that had been a real expression of trust. ...is done.

[46:13]

Yeah. Right, right. Oh, encouragement. I thought you said... Okay, I misheard you. I thought you said, uh... I thought you said correction. Uh... Right, right. No, that's... When I, when I came to Berkeley Zen Center, uh... 25, 26 years ago, nobody even talked to me. I've said this before. I was here a whole summer, almost every afternoon, and not a single person talked to me. I think they showed me what to do, but I certainly didn't receive any encouragement. I didn't receive any overt discouragement, but it wasn't encouraging. I think it's different.

[47:17]

I like to think it's different now. that is as insane, whether it is or not. Praise and blame are all the same. There's something in that passage that you read that suggested that the way that you win hearts is not necessarily by overt praise, overt blame, overt correction, overt encouragement, but by yourself following the way. And what I have felt at Zen centers from the leaders is a kind of stillness and a containment and a modeling. And there's a gentleness and a compassion. I think of May Lee, who did do that, reaching out the first time I came and found out my name. And then shortly after we were over at City Center for Blanche's induction as abbess,

[48:21]

And Maylene had only learned my name once, and I saw her on the stairs, and she said, hello, Catherine. It was a wonderful experience. That was an acknowledgment. That was her being, she wasn't either correcting me or questioning me. I think sometimes, I think there is a way to correct that doesn't carry weight. It sort of says, I know you are here to practice, I know you're doing your best, I give you that, and here's something that might help you. Well, it's a really mutual dance, though, because there's a way of offering criticism that doesn't carry blame, but there's a way of taking it that some of us are in the habit of feeling

[49:38]

blame you know and so the practice I think encourage us to step back take a breath turn your awareness in and try to understand what really did just what was that transaction and if one feels blamed you know what's the is there a root to that you know is what's my piece of it if I feel blamed But this gets polished through practice, I think. I think we have time for one more. I just, to me, I experience failure. I picked up on that part of what you were talking about, the whole issue of recognizing failure and using that as an opportunity. It seems like failing or knowing that you're failing is one way to kind of get through delusion, that it's so hard to get it being pointed out as a way to kind of get into that part of yourself or awareness that you don't have another entrance into.

[50:49]

Right, right. And that, you know, one of the things talking with Jarvis, just looking at his situation, you don't get any lower in society than he is at this point in time. you know, his dignity is intact, his ability to practice and look at his own failures and to find avenues of choice, you know, even in this very narrow realm that he inhabits, it's really pretty inspiring. Well, thank you very much. Bings on!

[51:39]

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