I'm not Mel, I'm her sojourn. I know many of you came expecting to see him. I apologize for not being sojourn. In the meal chat, we say innumerable labors brought us our food. We either say we should know how they come to us or let us know how they come to us, depending on where we're saying it. And recently, I've been thinking a lot, innumerable beings have brought us this practice. We should know how it comes to us. It comes a long, long way, and a group of us have been studying the way it comes in class, and at the same time, we're studying the way, looking at the images that were created as this way, our way, spread.

[01:20]

from India through different parts of India, through Central Asia, into China, Korea, and Japan. We haven't gotten to Japan yet. And then also looking at the southern transmission through Southeast Asia. And I found it very exciting. I seem to fall asleep at night with all these Buddha images with me, all these visions of Buddha from different cultures, and wake up worrying about how I'm going to learn enough of the academic stuff behind it and remember all the dates and the names and get the Pali and the Sanskrit and the Japanese, different names for people all in conjunction. So it has two sides for it. When I first started sitting, many years ago, we sat at Dwight Way and I used to go through this thing where every once in a while, a lot of people cried and saw us and then it was sort of the thing to do.

[02:42]

I don't know, it seems to come and go, it's a style. But all of a sudden I'd think, Maybe this isn't my practice. And the tears would just come flowing down my face. And then after a while I found myself thinking, oh my God, this is my practice. I'd have the same sort of reaction. This was an awful lot to take on. And I had breaks during my practice of maybe almost 10 years where I did not sit regularly in the Zen Dojo and I kept coming, trying to come back, but it wasn't a daily practice. But then someplace along this time, Mel gave a talk and said, you have to understand that we're not practicing Zen. We are practicing Zen, but this is, we're all Buddhists. This is the Buddhist practice. Well, then I had something else to worry about. because I had never thought about being a Buddhist.

[03:44]

I had, you know, Zen was this thing that had become my practice. And I came to Mill, you know, all ready to be kicked out of the Zendo, especially seeing that it was a quite small Zendo. And at that point, the Zendo was just packed. And I felt like it was my duty to get out of there to make way for the real Buddhists. And I, talked to Mil about it, and he just looked at me and laughed and said, don't worry about it. But in the meantime, over the years, I've come to feel like a Buddhist. And I think, for instance, things like the ceremony today, it's a Buddhist practice that in one form or another belongs to all. of Buddhism as far as I know. And I, instead of thinking, oh well, I'm a Zen student, this is out here and this is the right way, I've come to really appreciate the diversity of Buddhism.

[05:04]

And when I taught, I was just really grateful to have children from Southeast Asia and children from Japan and children from India who came from Buddhist families and to feel, you know, a really important part of this diversity. One of the things we've been seeing as we look at the spread of Buddhism, there have been places where there are, that Buddhism is the national religion. And you have to not only be a Buddhist, or almost have to be a Buddhist, but you will have to be not just a Theravadan, but a certain brand of Theravadism, if Theravadanism is a word. But overall, there's this picture of great diversity.

[06:05]

And I think the thing that is really exciting and has brought Buddhism to us as we practice it today here at Berkeley Zendo has gone through all of these changes. And some of the changes happened along the Silk Road, where there was just a tremendous diversity of people coming in. And we have Buddhist caves in Central Asia, and I apologize to all of those of you who've heard this before from me, where you'll have a Buddhist cave, but you have a picture of Jesus on Palm Sunday, because the Nestorians were there. or you'll have these little bodhisattvas that have sprouted very, very Western little wings that look like that you could see them on Valentine's Day, all there in stucco. This came to me and was sort of, took shape when we were in a hotel on our way back from vacation,

[07:20]

on Sunday morning, and I just happened to flip on the TV to find out what the weather was going to be where we were traveling to, and there was a rabbi speaking who, in the middle of his talk, said, well, if Hashem, if God, had wanted there to be one religion, he wouldn't have made all of this diversity. And it was sort of, Coming from Jewish background, that was sort of a neat addition to forming. Alan and I have been talking about the fact that the Theravadan Buddhists are up the block. They're not here by accident. Before they came, they spoke to Mel, and I know that that was part of them coming, feeling they would be comfortable here. And we've been talking about how separate we are from them when they're right up the block and that maybe someday we could arrange to take a field trip up there and visit them.

[08:29]

When you think of the great lengths people go today to see the Dunhuang caves, it'd be sort of a nice thing to do. Well, when I think of one of the laborers that brought us Buddhism, I think about somebody we don't often speak about too much, and that is Maha Pajapati, who was Shakyamuni's mother's sister, but she was the one who raised him. And I've spoken about this before, a little at Women's Zeshing. We know about his father trying to keep him isolated, and we know how he went out.

[09:38]

And when he saw the beggar and the corpse, and I guess the third was the diseased man, he suddenly had to go out and search for enlightenment. Well, my firm belief being a person who's grown up with a lot of developmental child study and environmental studies, that Mahapajapati, who raised Buddha from the time that his mother Maya died soon after his birth, had a lot to do with Buddhism as we know it, because she was really raised Shakyamuni. He didn't just, you know, turned from this little person who had been isolated by his father into the person who, with this great compassion, without some kind of background. Maha Pajapati, who we don't seem to have any images of, but we do have some verbal record of her also, was the person who then later went out and argued with Buddha

[10:51]

to start an order of nuns and she was the founder of the first and the greatest, one of the biggest orders of nuns in India and made way for all of us women who sit here today in one way or another. Of course, Nanda's given a lot of credit for that. but for having interceded with Buddha when he had said no to her so many times. But she led a group of many women who wanted to be ordained and become members of the Sangha barefoot for, I've forgotten how many miles, I think it was like 131, which was quite a piece of civil action that I'm sure was as much a part of it as, at least part of Ananda's interceding for them as Ananda's intercession.

[11:54]

Well, right after Shakyamuni dies, I mean, I think, I'm not gonna talk about Shakyamuni himself very much because that's what we all learn about, and we see so many images and have a strong feeling for. We have a beginning of a lot of diversity. right at the first council where Makaka show and Ananda begin to get in arguments. Because we've got an oral tradition and each of them remembers different things. And there is the beginning of diversity there. Which somehow we have all survived. Some of us. Then there's another chant where we We used to say in the center, but now I think we only say it at tea at Tassajara. And it ends thanking the labor of many people and the suffering of many forms of life.

[12:59]

Well, I think one of the forms of life that suffered to bring Buddhism in the form we know it is very small. It's a silkworm. And there was a lot of other trade along the silk route. But the silkworm, which was bred in China as about the only domesticated, truly domesticated animal that is not a vertebrate. But silkworm, I'm not going to go into details, but it takes thousands and thousands and thousands of them, dead, killed, to make a silk Buddhist robe. But it was something that was wanted, this silk, all over the world. Not the world, the American Indians didn't want it.

[14:03]

but from Iran to Greece to India. And the trade was just tremendous. It was illegal to export them. And there are tales about how they got out and how they were snuck out. But of course, they are an insect that is plant-specific, can't eat anything else besides mulberry. And later on, I don't know, When Marco Polo came back, they did try to grow them in Italy, but that's a later story. So one of the things that to me has been very exciting is sort of the adventuring nature of this, this thing. And I've spoken to some people about the travels of Fashin in this wonderful journal of a man who traveled from 399 to 414, who was traveling for 15 to 16 years, depends on which record you read and which translation.

[15:09]

And the reason he was traveling, he was traveling from China to India. And there were a lot of monks who were leaving and going across the Silk Road from China that way to get, more accurate sutras and different documents from India. And I mean, this makes Lewis and Clark look like ninnies when you think about some of these trips. I mean, this is sort of the great, to me, one of the great adventure stories. But he starts out looking for, because his monastery does not have a good copy of the Vinaya. Am I saying that correctly? The Vinaya. And anyway, he wants to get a better copy. That's his prime reason for going. And of course, there's the three parts of the Tripitaka, the three main parts, Vinaya, which are the rules, the monastic rules and the rules for practice, the sutras,

[16:19]

And the third, which is still in the early stages of development at that time, is the Abhidharma, sort of the Buddhist psychology. Anyway, he starts out and he meets many people. It takes him 15 or 16 years. And what they're going for are the real goods from India. And I just want to mention, at the same time this is happening, Kumara Jiva is coming in the other direction. And what is he doing? We've already got Indian texts translated into Chinese, but the Chinese characters didn't match. And the main people who are translating have Taoist backgrounds. So Kumara Jiva comes along from India to China, and he's going in this direction, and he's helping to work out, really create words by combining different characters in the Chinese sets of symbols to create terms that are closer to the Buddhist ideals that are coming, and ideas that are coming from India.

[17:42]

I'm gonna read, if I may. There were a lot of pilgrims, but there were three that kept, that we know from early times, that kept incredible journals and who went from China. And the first is Fa Xin, who we're talking about. He started with these people, Hui Ching, Tao Cheng, Hu Ying, and Hu Wei, and with others to go together to India and try to obtain some of these rules. They started from Chang'an, crossed Lung Country, and arrived at the state of Western State, ruled by Chan Kuei. There they went into summer retreat. When this was over, they journeyed onto the state ruled by Nutan and crossing Yonglu Range, they arrived at the market town of Changye.

[18:51]

Changye was in a condition of great political unrest and roads were impassable, so the king, anxious about their safety, declared himself their religious protector and kept them with him there. There he fell in with another group. I won't read all their names. and they found that their errands were the same. They were from different monasteries, but they wanted to obtain the same kind of things, sutras and the rules for the monastery. They went into summer retreat. When this was over, they journeyed on again and reached Tuen Long, which is now one of our famous places, and it's at the end of the Great Wall, and it's sort of the beginning of Central Asia. Having stayed there for more than a month, Faxin and others, five in all, pushed on ahead in the train of an envoy and were once again separated from Paoyun. He's the one that was protecting them. They're now traveling.

[19:56]

After traveling for, I'm skipping here. After traveling for 17 days, about 1,500 li, the party arrived at the country of Shanshan, South of Labnor, the land is rugged and barren. The clothes of the common people are coarse, like those of the Chinese. The only difference being that the former used felt and serge. The king of this country has received the faith, and there may be some 4,000 and more priests, all belonging to the lesser vehicle. The common people of this country, as well as the shamans, practice the religion of India. with certain modifications of refinements and coarseness. So we're, I mean, 4,000 may be one of those Buddhist numbers in this case. That just means an awful lot. But all along Central Asia, you're getting these huge Buddhist communities. I'm just gonna read a little more from here.

[20:59]

The governor, this is before they got there. The governor of Chunwang gave them all the necessaries for crossing the desert of Gobi. In this desert there are a great many evil spirits and also hot winds. Those who encounter them perish to a man. There are neither birds above nor beasts below, gazing on all sides as far as the eye can reach in order to mark the track. No guidance is to be obtained save from the rotting bones of dead men which point the way. quite a journey to go to get some rules for the monastery. And of course, people were going in many ways. Later on, he tells that some of the people came with him. Many have died, and he describes how they died and what diseases. And then others decided to stay in India. But he then,

[22:02]

In the end, after traveling all the way around down south, comes back by sea. And this is what happens to him. There are huge gales on the first ship, and they have to actually stop, and he has to spend a longer time. I mean, we're talking about a journey, remember, of 15 or 16 years. And he had to stay in that country for two years, and he But during that time, he received more papers and more sutras. The gale blew on for 13 days and nights when they arrived alongside of an island, and then at eptide they saw the place where the vessel leaked and for with stopped it up, after which they again proceeded on their way. This sea is infested with pirates to meet with whom is death. The expansive ocean is boundless, east and west are not distinguishable, only by observation of sun, moon, and constellation.

[23:14]

And so they went on for more than 90 days until they reached Java. Again, they stopped. New ship. They finally are in this huge, again, in a huge, huge storm. And what, and Fa Xun has been practicing. He's been on the ship and he's been saying his sutras and meditating and the people on the ship decide that, they're mostly Brahmins, and they decide that it's his fault, that there's this Buddhist guy here with all of this stuff. And if they throw him and all of his images and his sutras and his papers overboard, they're gonna be all right.

[24:16]

But luckily, there's a very well-known merchant on the board. who acts as his protector. In some translations, it says he's a Buddhist too. And he says, look, if you throw him overboard, you're going to have to kill me. And because if you don't, I'm going to go into the king, who's also a Buddhist, and you're going to be in big trouble. This is going to be the end of your trading. And this is a very rough translation. So in the end, Faxin and all his sutras and things are saved and he brings them to China and spends many years translating them. Anyway, if you like adventure stories, may I recommend this. You can get it in a Dover reprint and it's really worth reading. Along, I think we've talked about how many people came along there.

[25:29]

We've got the Greeks, we've got the Iranians, we've got the Jews, we've got the Christians, we've got the people whose names I never can pronounce correctly, the Manichaeans, but we have a huge diversity. And what has happened that helps the spread of Buddhism in China and helps develop, besides Bodhidharma coming, which we know about, is before that the Northern Way comes. into the north and conquers large parts of China. And we don't know too much about them. They're probably Mongolian. What we do know is the Chinese considered them barbarians. That's how they described them. And they came, come in, and the Chinese want nothing to do with them. They don't want them to have to adopt the customs of that time. And so the Northern Way are very happy to adopt and develop this new religion that's coming, Buddhism, and to spread it in the North, and they support it a great deal.

[26:36]

And we see in Tung Wan to this day a lot of Northern Way murals and sculpture, which is now spread all over Europe and a lot of America. People came in parts of it, As I've been, especially as I've been trying to find as much as I could about Central Asia, part, there doesn't seem to be too much, too many art objects reproduces them. I think partly until recently, and I think partly it's because politically half of it has been in China and the other half has been in Russia. So we haven't had a tremendous lot of Buddhist materials published on that until just recently. And here comes another person whose labor, I think, accidentally

[27:37]

had a great deal to do with what we know now about this part of Asia and in a way affects how, what we know about Buddhist images. And his name is Andrew Darziel. I think it's how you pronounce it. And he is a Scotsman who manages, and a soldier who manages to get himself killed in Central Asia. And the British send out a lieutenant whose name I don't remember, and some troops to find him and avenge his death. But the lieutenant who goes, in going, finds a Sanskrit medical record that, in searching for, however you say this, Dahlil's killers, finds this record and this starts this huge wave of all of these archaeologists who come and start unearthing all of the rooms and also get to Dunhuang eventually and start spreading all of this stuff all over where a lot of it is now locked in British museum or museums in Paris or some of it is decorated items in homes in America.

[29:08]

But anyway, they discover a lot of sutras, including the oldest printed book, which is the Diamond Sutra. And there are these records now that have barely been touched by scholars trying to find out more about the Buddhism and other cultures of that time. So Buddhism spreads through China and then becomes suppressed. It spreads into Korea. Oh, I'm sorry, I forgot the point I was about to make about these images. One of the things as we've been preparing for this class and looking at all of these images I've been doing is I've been, a couple of years ago I started collecting some slides, but I've now been making a lot of slides from a lot of books

[30:18]

And then every, when I get the photographs back, I have to sit in my kitchen and, you know, project them and look at them and see which are the best. And I'm a very bad photographer, so I'm usually taking, you know, at least two exposures of each book. And what I'm looking at, it occurred to me, are images of images of images, you know, because here's somebody's photograph of the image and that I'm taking a photograph of this image, and the image then is representing something even farther back, that is, representing Buddha or Bodhisattva. And I'm just sitting there thinking, you know, this is really pretty strange. And the little image is on the wall of my kitchen, and at that point, the sun comes out, and the reflection the sunlight comes into the room and the shadow of the leaves in our maple tree just sort of engulfs this Buddhist image.

[31:23]

And all of a sudden it's right there. It's one of those really joyful, encouraging moments in practice that it's all right, it's all together. It isn't the image of the image of the image of something else. When I close my eyes for a minute, I can see that image mixed right there. I've spoken a lot about the diversity in this, and I guess the thing that I'm forgetting, which is a thing that perhaps in class we've emphasized more, is the unity, this desire to keep things the same in a way, of having images. small images that will go from country to country and then be reproduced in larger forms, little diagrams of the exact proportions of the Buddha image that should be carried from one country to the other.

[32:34]

So when the craftsmen make the images that they are the right proportions and they follow the descriptions of Buddha way back in the sutras. So I guess to me the really exciting thing about all this is that the difference in the way Buddhism has managed to reach and move through so many cultures and yet has kept that core, both in the images that are created and in the Buddhist, whatever we're going to call it, Buddhism itself, whether it's gone into Tibet or wherever it's gone. Some of the really exciting parts for me have not been intellectual, but the ones that have been just really funny.

[33:38]

I have this giant book of Buddhist temples that my staff, Japanese Buddhist temples, that my teaching staff gave to me as a gift when I retired, and it's so big I can't really handle it right without putting it on the floor and lying on the floor and reading it. And I was reading it, I read one of the stories about how Buddhism came to Japan. Of course, this is getting pretty close now, I mean, because we get our form of Buddhism through Suzuki Roshi and through Japan, though we've changed it a lot. And the story goes that, well, what's happening is we get it not directly through China, but through Korea. And then Korea is in three parts at that point. It's divided into three countries. And the northernmost, which I think is pronounced Pechke, but I always want to call it Pachka, is up there.

[34:42]

And they have a lot of relationship to Japan. And what are they trading the Japanese for? They're trading the Japanese are sending warriors, soldiers, And in return, Japan is getting Buddhist images, teachers of calligraphy in a written language, which they don't have until that point, and priests, Buddhist priests coming in. And at one point, the Korean leader presents an image to the leader of one of the clans. And this clan is ready to support Buddhism, where another clan is very much against it. And he presents this image, and they go out and find a house, and they consecrate a temple. And not only do they have to make a little house into a temple to put this in, but they're looking for some people who are consecrated, or not consecrated, have,

[35:52]

Ordain, that's the word I'm thinking of. You consecrate. Well, we all know about that. Anyway, they can't find enough people, so they find three nuns, three women who they ordain as nuns, and they have this shrine. But at this time, there are tremendous problems in the country. There's an epidemic of disease and of course what happens again, just like the storms, it's all the fault of the Buddhist images. So they take the Buddhist images and they throw them in the canal and this is supposed to solve all the problems and cure the disease. And it looks like Buddhism in Japan is almost at an end. And of course these stories tend to be sort of apocryphal. But then the head shrine of the other group bursts spontaneously into flames, probably lightning, and burns to the ground.

[36:59]

So Buddhism comes back with a bang and goes on from there and develops. But when I read this story, I was literally, as I said, I had started out on the ground with this book, and it was one of these just, for me, an incredible moment. I was literally rolling on the floor in laughter, thinking this is part, in a way, of what has brought me, brought us here, and has created this practice for us. I wanted to really say one more thing and to point out that when Suzuki Roshi came, we were very fortunate then that he came. The Japanese Soto congregation here brought him over.

[38:02]

And in a way, we were fortunate at the time that he came When so many people in this area were looking for something else, whether they were looking through drugs, or through politics, or a combination of all, or religion, or through a combination of all of the above, we had something very fortunate. And there's this diversity again, and this sameness, which I think even when we look at the different students, of Suzuki Roshi's and the way practice is developing with Bill Kwong or here, or even places, the different places that Mill or Sojin practices, how it can be different even in the translation of a chant from here to Tassajara to Zen Center to Green Gulch. And even in this small corner, there's that diversity.

[39:08]

I think one other thing I wanted to mention is that just before Suzuki Roshi died, Kansa was here, and one of the things he said, at least for me, it was the first time I thought about it, that one of the things that American Buddhism was going to, the two things that American Buddhism was going to have to come to terms with were women and democracy, And I think that here in this practice we've certainly been watching that develop and working with it constantly as we make decisions and things change here. I think we have a little time for questions or discussion or comments. They were very quick to sort of reconsolidate that power.

[41:18]

The stories you hear are, well, it was too far away or, you know, it was hastily assembled and the women were in some other place, but you can kind of guess what was really going on there. So that history is, and we're still working with it a lot. One of the things that sort of interested me was that Makaka, at least according to the reports that I have read, which, you know, are all passed on orally for so long, that Makaka Sho, or Mahasapia, who is in a way our first ancestor, and some people count him as the first ancestor, because he's the one that holds up the flower, for instance, Enlightenment and the other hand he one of the things he was angry at Ananda about was for supporting women in the practice of this first order and this is supposedly one of the differences of the first council.

[42:27]

I don't think Ananda was at that council. He was excluded from the council. I guess, yeah, I had listened to that. He came, they let him in the door and just started to help her recite, yeah. And that one, well, we'll stop there. Because I think there's so many versions of everything that... Well, the point is that it's political. That it was political back then. I'm not advocating politics, I'm just saying there was a social context for this. One of the... One of the things we're working on now, many of us, is finding a suitable female image for the altar.

[43:31]

And we thought we had had one until I really researched the image that we thought was Maya and found out that it was not. So we're still on the road looking for Peace. I have two comments on that.

[44:54]

One is just as we've been talking about the diversity and the sameness in Buddhism, I think you could say that about men and women. But I think that the differences are often politically and socially developed rather than any basic ones. I'm not going farther into that. But the other I think we find that people have talked about is that the longer you practice, the more you find the other side of that nature. And we see it in images sometimes when an image that may look very, very female is a representation of a male who's a bodhisattva or Usually not an arhat, going back to the political side, but a bodhisattva, or a representation of Buddha, or a female form of counterpart of Buddha.

[46:06]

@Text_v004
@Score_JJ