I vow to taste the truth of the Tantra's words. I'd like to introduce Foo Schrader, who is the director of Green Gulch, and one of our priests, and has been practicing with Zen Center for 16 years. It's very nice to be here again. Long ago, in Japan, there was a great tea master whose name was Sen Rikyu. And Rikyu is considered to be the founder of the tea ceremony, which is practice in Japan to this day and also here in Berkeley and over at Green Gulch.

[01:05]

So I thought I'd begin by saying just a little bit about the history of tea. Powdered green tea was first brought to Japan by Buddhist monks who had been studying Zen in the great monasteries of the 12th century in China. And they found that tea was very helpful for their meditation, kind of like Pete's coffee is for us. And also tea had medicinal properties. It was good for your blood pressure and for headaches and hangovers. And apparently I've even heard that it seems to help, maybe, with cancer, cancer rate in Japan. So there's even a legend that's grown up

[02:10]

linking tea with Zen. And the legend says that Bodhidharma, who's the first ancestor of Zen in China, in order not to sleep during his meditation, took off his eyelids and threw them on the ground. And from these discarded little bits of Bodhidharma, the first tea plants grew. So as time went by, drinking tea became very popular among the merchants and the ruling classes of Japan, those who could afford it, the importers. And they would stage rather elaborate competitions to judge the finest utensils and the most perfect teas and so on. And so for a while, this little plant was kind of held hostage by the world of material excess, which humans really like.

[03:20]

And at the same time, Zen monks were developing their own forms for practicing tea, for offering tea to one another. And rather than meeting in large banquet halls, they met in small huts. with grass mats, tatamis, on the floor. And in one corner of the room they built a hearth, a sunken hearth, and inside was charcoal, and on top of that a steaming water kettle. And over time they began to include a small alcove in the room, and in the alcove they hung a scroll. a little bit like that one right there, Bodhidharma. There's Bodhidharma without his eyelids in the corner here. And the scroll was usually calligraphed by one of the Zen masters, and it would be quite special, usually a prized possession.

[04:30]

And the purpose of the scroll was to set a tone for that tea gathering. So often there would be a Buddhist saying on the scroll. When I went to New Year's tea at my tea teacher's house here in El Cerrito, she had hung a scroll that said, it had four characters, Chinese characters, and it said, a spring in the mountains, a thousand birds singing. Last night when I was going over this talk in my house at Green Gulch, I thought that the Green Gulch equivalent was that spring, near the pond, a thousand frogs croaking. So even though there were a lot of changes made in the tone and the setting for the tea ceremony, it was still

[05:38]

quite easy for human beings to forget why they came there and what they cared about. I was telling someone the other day, just before tea class, I practice with some people at Green Gulch every week, and I was saying to her, well, you know, the samurai had to leave their swords outside the tea room before they came in, kind of implying, you know, how those guys are, you know. And then I thought, It's interesting because for me, I have kind of a sharp tongue, which I'm confessing to you right now. And I sometimes slip into sarcasm. And I notice when I go into the tea house, I leave my sharp tongue at the door too. It's just not appropriate. And I find it very helpful to have a place where it's just not appropriate. A disciple of Sanrikyu once asked him, what precisely are the most important things that must be understood and kept in mind at a tea ceremony?

[06:50]

Sanrikyu answered, make a delicious bowl of tea. Lay the charcoal so that it heats the water. Arrange the flowers as they are in the fields. In summer, suggest coolness. In winter, warmth. Do everything ahead of time. Prepare for rain. And give those with whom you find yourself every consideration." The disciple, who felt somewhat dissatisfied with this answer because he couldn't find in it any secret of the tea ceremony, said to his teacher, well, this much I already know. and Rikyu responded, then if you can host a tea ceremony without deviating from any of the principles which I've just stated, I will become your disciple.

[07:53]

So even though you get the room just right and all the utensils are the finest and the food is delicious and so on, what's most important in the tea ceremony and I'm suggesting today also in and our life in general is this deeper meeting that happens between two people. The meeting between the host and the guest, or between a parent and a child, a teacher and a student, and so on. Now the meeting that happens in our heart And it's interesting to me, I sort of thought about that. I gave this talk, I hope none of you were there. I gave this talk. I was, but I'm trying to finish it. Oh, thanks. You can learn. Thank you. So, when I was thinking about going in front of everyone, this was over at Green Gulch,

[09:07]

I imagined that I would be really nervous, which I tend to be talking, and that I wouldn't be able to actually talk from my heart. I wouldn't be able to meet people, you know. And here I was trying to talk about that. So it's kind of funny. And I wondered a lot about what it takes to meet from the heart. what my responsibility is in sitting up here, coming out of the group and turning around to face you. I'm just one of you who turned around. But I feel more vulnerable in this position than maybe you do. You think that you're facing me, but I'm facing you. So then I wondered what your responsibility is for making our meeting come alive.

[10:10]

What do you have to do? What's the job of the host and what's the job of the guest on each occasion? So a tea grower once invited Rikyu to come to tea at his home. And this man was a farmer, not a full-time student of tea ceremony or a full-time Zen monk. He was a farmer, full-time farmer. And he was very happy when Rikyu accepted his invitation. So he led Rikyu to his tea room and sat down to make him tea, but the man was so nervous that his hand shook and he dropped the tea scoop and he knocked over the whisk and a number of other kind of terrible things to do.

[11:19]

So Rikyu had brought one of his students with him that day and the student was very embarrassed of the man. and he could hardly watch. Rikyu, on the other hand, in all sincerity, said to this man, that was the finest. So on the way home, Rikyu's students said, well, Master, how is it that you could pray such a clumsy performance? And Rikyu answered, This man did not invite me with the idea of showing off his skill. He simply wanted to serve me tea with his whole heart, and I was deeply struck by that sincerity. So, I think what we've all been learning from our teachers in the Zen community is that we can't do this practice by ourselves.

[12:28]

It's just not possible. And I think when you begin to know that, you actually even long to be alone, to get away. But in fact, we're always touching and being touched by the world that surrounds us. Moment after moment, we're in contact. So I guess the thing we need to do is to get with the program. to fully engage in the giving and the receiving that's going on all the time. I heard a very funny story at Zen Center a long time ago, and I don't know who told it or even if it's true, but it's still a funny story. There was an American couple who were going to go to Japan and they had

[13:34]

even studied Japanese in preparation for their trip and they were determined to go to places out of the way where other tourists wouldn't be. So when they got to Japan they found this incredible inn off in the woods and it was just what they dreamed of. So they crossed the little bridge and went into the restaurant and sat down and there were only Japanese people dressed in formal kimono. And next to them was an older couple who had just been served their meal. Delicious looking meal. So the waiter came and greeted them and gave them a menu which they couldn't read. So the woman said in her best Japanese, well we'll just have what they're having. So the waiter nodded, and then they watched him as he walked over to this couple and began talking to them.

[14:37]

And then all three of them were looking at this American prince, you know, like, okay. And they all bowed deeply, and the waiter began cooking up his food and took it over to them. So it's important that we're always willing to be the guest to whatever comes, or willing to be the host to whatever goes. To know what your task is and to do it fully, wholeheartedly. Around the Zen centers or the Buddhist community, We call this a kind of celebration. It's a celebration of practicing the Buddha way.

[15:40]

We all join hands and make a big circle around the fire. We create a kind of rhythm or a dance together. And we especially like to do this dance very early in the morning in rooms like this. and we sit together and we listen to the sounds of the city and we wait for the birds to sing. I once waited tables at Green's Restaurant in San Francisco for several years I noticed pretty quickly, actually, that most people didn't really relate to me when I came to take their order or when I brought them their food.

[16:43]

In fact, they didn't want much to do with me at all. And I learned not to take it personally. The rest of us waiters had a good time with books and so on, but we didn't really have much connection with the people who came, our guests. But the most important thing that I learned was that I was doing the same thing. When I went to restaurants and when I went to banks and gas stations, I wasn't really relating to the people that I met there. And I was acting as though it wasn't really happening. And then I noticed that they were doing the same thing. It was a kind of agreement we had not to really be there. And then I noticed I often was doing that with friends and even with my own mother. Just kind of agreeing not to really be there.

[17:45]

But to be polite and take care of what we had to take care of and then go on. And I wondered if we were trying to save up our, what we might suspect is a limited supply of intimacy. That sacred core of our being. So I don't want to give the impression that I don't do that anymore, because I do. And I find when I notice that I'm doing that, it's often because I'm either asleep or I'm just too lazy to deal with what's actually happening. You know, to welcome and accept wholeheartedly what's right there in front of my face. So one of the reasons that I personally that I study Zen and that I study tea is that I don't want to miss my life.

[19:01]

I don't want to sleep through what's happened. And I don't know how it is for all of you, but for me, I feel like I just got here. And I was only recently born. I'm still kind of wet. But all the evidence is to the contrary. I'm starting to get these little loose flaps. My hair has turned gray. I don't know how that happened. And I feel as though I really don't know very much, and I don't understand anything. And yet pretty soon it's going to be time to die. We had a Japanese teacher, a very old woman, Nakamura Sensei, who lived at Green Gulch for about 17 years and taught tea.

[20:07]

And she used to say to her students, Every step you take in the tea room, you should take as if it were your last. And I feel that this kind of idea, this idea of impermanence, can be very useful to us. It can help us to appreciate how fragile and precious our life actually is. Yesterday I was visiting a friend of mine who has a little baby boy. His name is Bryce. Bryce couldn't get out of the birth canal in time, so he didn't get enough oxygen. So he may not live very long. He's very beautiful. He's just a perfect looking child, but he doesn't have much of his brain working. So by noticing how fragile and precious our life really is, I think it's possible to break through this layer of laziness and apathy and actually ask those questions that we are embarrassed to ask, like, who are you?

[21:31]

And who am I? And why did you come here today? Is there something we need to do? Can we help each other? Or can we get out of each other's way? And I wonder what's our task? At the beginning of the tea ceremony, the host kneels at the entryway and says to her guests, I will now make you a cup of tea. And then the host enters the room and brings in the utensils and places them very carefully and particularly down in the room.

[22:40]

And then bows to the guests again and says, please make yourselves comfortable. Which is a pretty funny thing for her to say, because in the tea ceremony, you're sitting there in a posture called seiza, which is basically you're kneeling, like this lady here, with your buttocks on your heels, and you're sitting straight, and you're not talking. And the ceremony goes on for a very long time. So it's pretty clear pretty soon that you are not and will never be comfortable. So it took me a long time, in fact a lot of years, to realize that what she was actually saying was, please make yourself comfortable with the situation that you're in. You know, that's a very sweet thing to say.

[23:43]

She wasn't actually trying to make it better for me. She didn't expect me to go get a chair. But actually, knowing full well that what I was going through wasn't easy, she was wishing me all the best. So in Buddhism, we call this the mind of compassion, the bodhisattva. enters the world of difficulty in order to be with other humans. And then right there in the middle of an impossible situation, she does something possible, like making a bowl of hot green tea for a friend. And it's really strange,

[24:45]

That tea is incredibly delicious. On the other hand, sometimes I think that there has to be an easier way. And I wondered if maybe I could just move to Hawaii In fact, I have an aloha shirt in my wardrobe, and I've had it all my adult life. It has big pink flowers on it. And I keep it as a kind of totem of the possibility that there's an easier way. And then I realized that, well, no matter where I go or what I do, you're all going to be there.

[25:50]

And then what? How are we going to be friends? So the bodhisattva vow is something like nobody gets to go to Hawaii until everybody is completely happy. Well, that's better. Good. And we can all go together. So, when the time comes, everyone has had their sweet and drank their tea, then the host takes the utensils back out of the room and she kneels again at the entryway and says, it's finished. And then she quietly closes the door. And then all of the guests get up and slowly look at the room once again.

[26:57]

And then they all leave and go back to their separate lives. So last month, in February, I went to a winter tea at Green Gulch. It was really nice. They had candlelight. We all read poetry to one another. And when I left the room and was headed home in the dark, across the lawn, I became acutely aware of the separation I was feeling from my fellow humans. And I became kind of startled by how conscious I was of the world around me, the light from the stars, the sound of the little critters rustling around in my ears.

[28:01]

And it made me nervous. And it felt as though that this gathering in the tea house with this nice company of friends had been like a mask, which now was removed to reveal this other relationship that I have, that each of us has, alone with the entirety of the universe. And I longed for some kind of distraction, like a song, or I considered running, another possibility. But eventually it was okay, because I got home and there was another friendly mask, and by the time I put my things away, I simply forgot that I had been afraid. So I think the question for me really is, you know, how much can I stand of intimacy?

[29:05]

How much can I bear to stay close and not turn away? Am I willing to be known? Am I willing to engage wholeheartedly in knowing others? despite my clumsiness and even my cruelty. It's pretty easy for us to love the tea grower, but it's not so easy to love Rikyu's disciple, the uptight little jerk. So I think what's important is that we remember that everyone we meet, everything we meet, is only ourselves, but myself in the form of you and yourself in the form of me. All my life, false and real, right and wrong, tangled, playing with the moon, ridiculing the wind, listening to the birds,

[30:25]

Many years wasted seeing the mountain covered with snow. This winter I suddenly realized snow makes a mountain. Thank you very much. Do we have a question? I don't have a question, but I wanted to tell you that I have one of those Aloha shirts. They're all stored away, slowly molding.

[31:38]

It's hard to let go. Last night there was an event at a small press distributor in Burma. And it was given in honor of Hawai'i. And it was really quite interesting because there were Hawaiians there who wanted to have everyone in the room write down words that And it just strikes me as interesting how we have been so conditioned to think of that state and that place in the way that t-shirts tell us.

[32:53]

And to go to that place, you know that you spoke about it deeply in tea, and to bring that kind of mindfulness to that awareness that the t-shirts tell us, but what's underneath that for, you know, for the place as it is and for the people that are native to that land. I don't know if I'm making sense, but I just was really struck by their, the discussion that's being had, and the discussion here as a companion a deeper meaning. and letting go?

[34:28]

Well, I really don't have any control. The skis belong to themselves. They're just molding away. They're not mine, they never were mine. And someday they'll let go of me. There was a wonderful book that, it's called, maybe you can tell me the author's name, it's slipping at the moment, The Memory of Old Jack, Wendell Berry. And it's just a remarkable story of this old man standing on the porch remembering himself as a young farmer and his dreams and his first team of horses and so on. All anyone else sees is this old man standing on the porch. But he's still totally alive in his memory.

[35:38]

The last scene in the book just was one of the most powerful scenes I've ever read, where Wendell Berry says, and then the fields let him go. There was such a sense that this man had belonged to the fields. I think that's true for us. We're kind of arrogant now. We think all this stuff belongs to us. But I think it's more true that we belong to this stuff. Could you say something a little bit more about how you're describing intimacy? Because a lot of the kind of connection that happens certainly in tea or in Zen practice is really non-verbal. Sorry, I missed one of the words you said. Intimacy. And achieving intimacy in a way that's not sort of traditional, verbal, burying your soul.

[36:39]

Because that's not what you're talking about. You're really talking about kind of a non-verbal connection, just sitting for a long time. And I guess I wonder about how the difference in vulnerability from that process versus the kind of process we usually associate with intimacy, which is telling people things about yourself. Burying your soul or burying your ugliness or whatever. It's interesting, it's an interesting practice that's pretty common to what some of us have experienced already in doing monastic practice or in also studying tea, some of these forms which are pretty old forms that humans have discovered, where we don't really ask each other about ourselves.

[37:44]

It's kind of rare that we sort of say whatever it is about my kids and my Vacation last year and all that sort of thing that I mean it's fine to do that But it's a very interesting thing to meet people on that deeper level almost on the level of their physical body And not so much in the level what do they think they are? their story about themselves, but how you actually receive them with your senses and I feel very intimate with the people I practice tea with but I don't know what they do for a living They all wear kimonos, so when they come to the house, they just all look Japanese. I don't know much about them, and I think one is a travel agent. I mean, I've sort of heard rumors, but I know them really well, really well, in this very interesting way, very unique way.

[38:48]

So I don't know, I think it's something that you almost need to experience. And I think it's actually what happens here too. You can sit with people for years and not know their story. And even when you know their story, it doesn't necessarily change anything. I remember at Tassajara we used to all comment that we could tell each other by our feet going by. I knew whose feet those were. That's usually reserved for husbands and wives and lovers or something. It's not so common that we know each other that well to know our feet, our hands. Or how someone thumps on the walkway. Here it comes. Old thumper. I'd like to share a different story of intimacy. My family lived in Israel, and my mother lived with my sister and was in the advanced stages of Alzheimer's when she died.

[40:10]

And when I went to see her for the last time, she never recognized me the whole time that I was there. And even when my sister said, oh, this is Betty, which was the name I was known by, She just looked at me and said, oh, that's funny. My name's Betty, too. Which, of course, her name wasn't. But then when I left and said goodbye to her the last night, she just turned to me and she said, I don't know why it is. I don't know you. But every time I hear your voice, it touches something very deep in my heart. And it was a great gift to me, of course, to have it. There is that intimacy which sometimes we don't even recognize, and it's there. How do you take care of your sharp tongue?

[41:42]

I try to keep my lips closed. It's very fast. It seems to be attached directly to my brain. It just comes out as one event. I actually had practiced silence for a long time, because I was aware of how I was harming. That was the first step, was to notice that I was harming people, that they were actually cringing at various times, when I thought I was being funny. So it took a willingness to be cruel, to accept that I actually had cruelty. It was the first step, and that was probably the hardest one. Kind of made me sick. And then it's like, okay, what am I going to do about that? It seems to be true. It's not easy.

[42:51]

If I get going too fast, it starts, it gets out of control, so it helps to go slow. And to really, like the tea room's good because it's a nice container and a big reminder of you're not here to be, you're not the feature of this place. Something else is gonna happen here. You're just taken care of. So, I don't know, I think it's gonna be a lifelong practice for me. Maybe get a little duel. Oh, thank you.

[43:44]

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