Well, it's good to be back and to see everybody again. I came back last Friday night and last Monday morning I talked about my experience in Japan a little bit. But I'm going to talk about it again. And I'll probably repeat myself a bit. So, I think that's inevitable. In this past week, I've been, I had a chance to slowly come back to America.

[01:04]

But it's been a, not difficult, but slow transition. I didn't experience any particular culture shock going to Japan, but I did on coming back. I don't know how I can explain it exactly, but I think part of it is jet lag. I slept for the weekend after coming back and it was very hard to orient myself to be here. But little by little I've been adjusting. Now that I've been back for a week, I can assess my feelings.

[02:09]

And the way I feel is very tender, kind of raw, as if my skin had been sandpapered. and very careful. In some way I feel, the contrast, I didn't realize until I got back that I feel very new, in many ways like a new person. And everything I do I try to be very careful that I don't make old mistakes, and that I try to do everything as well as I can, and also trying to be very careful not to recreate old habit patterns that I can see so easily.

[03:29]

And the kind of rawness or sensitivity is very strong. And over the past week, I've had feelings of anxiety, which I think comes from just meeting each situation in a fresh way and not reacting or responding in an old way. So that small things become very big. So I'm taking my time and trying to go slowly and accurately. carefully. So that's how I feel, generally.

[04:39]

My experience in Japan was quite wonderful. I really enjoyed being in Japan and the whole experience was very vital. For the first week, so I was there four weeks, so the first week was just getting used to being there. And the second week was starting, entering into the ceremony. We think of a ceremony as something which takes place at one time, but this ceremony takes place over a period of two weeks. So the second week was getting into, I don't know if you'd call it a ceremony, but into the pattern of the ceremony.

[05:47]

And then the ceremony happens after that first week, and then there's the second week of slowing down. And the last part, I traveled around a little bit, to Kyoto and Eheji, Eheji Monastery. Ordinarily, nowadays, we do the short, condensed dharma transmission ceremony, which takes place in two weeks. But the longer Dharma transmission takes place over a period of about three years. That's when Dogen was studying with Rujing, his teacher, their Dharma transmission took place over a period of about three years, something like that.

[06:59]

and there are several stages to it. But we almost always do the short, the condensed version. We do the whole thing and put it into a kind of short time space. But if you look at it in a realistic way, the Dharma transmission was actually done by Suzuki Roshi and the ceremony was done by his son. So in the seven years that I studied with Suzuki Roshi, over that period of time we had Dharma transmission and this condensed ceremony was the verification of that.

[08:02]

So I can tell you a little bit about the structure of the ceremony, but since it's not a public ceremony I can't really tell you everything that we did, everything that takes place. But the second week I would get up in the morning before Zazen and do a jundo around the temple. This temple, Rinzō-en, which is Suzuki Roshi's old temple, and now his son is the abbot there, is built about 550 years ago. So it's quite an old, beautiful old temple. And it has a pond in the back and a pond on that side and it's at the bottom of a kind of small mountain. The mountain comes right down and then there's the temple.

[09:09]

And so it has these beautiful gardens which are kind of wild, not manicured garden like so much of Japan is, but it's a kind of wild garden. Not wild, but unmanicured and very beautiful. I have some slides which I'll show you. I think next general meeting I'll show some slides that I took. So there are various altars in the building itself and outside. There's the cemetery and the treasure, the Sutra treasure storehouse is a building. And then there's the, a little shrine, which is up the mountain a little bit, which is the protector of the place.

[10:24]

And then there's the arhats, the statues of arhats which are on the hillside down the road. And all these places I would go to and offer incense and bow to each one of these places inside and outside the temple every morning. And then During the ceremonious part, I would do it in the evening as well. It's kind of interesting going into the cemetery at midnight, offering incense and bow. Especially since you have to kind of find your way. The path is kind of a little bit rugged in the middle of the night. So I did that every day, and then I would also do a little over a hundred bows every day, prostrations.

[11:34]

And each time I would chant the name of one of the patriarchs, you know, the lineage that we do. Vipassi, Bhutsu, Dayo, Joshi. Very slowly. Vipassi, Bhutsu, Dayo, Joshi. bong, and then bow, and then the next one. So that would take quite a while to do. And those were the kind of standard things that I would do every day. And then the ceremony, actual ceremony took place at midnight, two consecutive, three consecutive nights. And there was a room made out of red silk, which is the dharma transmission room. So a very elaborate kind of ceremony.

[12:46]

And then we lived with Jackson Kwong sensei, that went with me. He went to Korea first, with Sang Sunim, to visit Sang Sunim in Korea, about 10 days before. And then we met at the Tokyo airport, and went to Minso-in together. And he helped with the ceremony since he had already had dharma transmission six years ago from Hoitsu. He could help. And Ekai, if you remember Ekai, or Matsu, he helped in many ways. He's been in Japan for the last several months, and he had planned to come when I had my ceremony, come to Rinzling. So he helped quite a bit, but he couldn't participate in the actual ceremony. But he was a big help.

[13:55]

And I look forward to when he comes back in November, to working with him when he comes back. So the three of us were there quite a bit of the time. And it was like we were part of the family. And Rinzoyen is not a training temple. more of a member's temple, a family temple. And this is most common in Japan. There are some training temples the size of Rinzō-in, maybe a little bit bigger. Rinzō-in, from time to time, has been a training temple, where they have an ongo, training period, But the most common is for the, right in Japan now, for the priest's son to go to Heiji Monastery for a few years and train, and then come back and take over the, inherit the temple.

[15:20]

And the temple is for the lay people. and they do services, sometimes zazen, ceremonies of all kinds. And it's like a church for the lay people. So that's what Hoitsu does. He takes care of, he's the priest there for the lay people, and he's also a head of the priest's council. And then they go to Eheji once in a while for ceremonies. But there's also a separate building, which is the zendo. But the zendo itself doesn't get used much. The zendo is about half the size of our zendo. A little more than half the size of our zendo. It's a very nice zendo. And the tatamis go the other way.

[16:22]

They come out this way. so that there's not as much sitting space, because each person has a tatami, and when they have an ongo or some sashin, they would sleep on the tatamis, going this way. But it's a very nice zendo, very simple. Very simple, nice zendo. I actually slept in a zendo. I preferred sleeping in a zendo because there was something nice about it, and there were less bugs. There are a lot of bugs in Japan. Especially in that part of Japan, which is kind of the Warmbelt, Shizuoka is right in the middle of Japan. Japan is very long. Shizuoka is right in the middle on the coast. And I made friends with my cockroaches, which are about that big, about that wide. They're very beautiful, but they're also a little creepy.

[17:28]

So the time of year was the end of summer and the beginning of fall, and it was still quite warm when we arrived, and a little muggy. And the bugs take turns, you know. for a few days there are a lot of cockroaches, and then they disappear, and then there are grasshoppers, and then they disappear, and then there are moths, and then they disappear, and then there are mosquitoes. And so they take turns. There's some overlapping too. But they have green incense. It's in a coil. Coil incense. And There are these cans about this big that you put the incense in and light it. And it adds mosquito deterrent. And I think it helps. They even have a little hook so that you can walk around with it tied to your belt. So when we were doing Samu with work outside, we'd carry this can in our belt.

[18:39]

But we got used to the bugs, at least I did. Bill always had to have his incense. But mosquitoes don't seem to bite me. I'm one of those people that it's not very tasty. So it didn't bother me so much. But also, if you let the mosquito bite and don't brush him away, you get a little wilt, but it won't stay there, it'll go away. But if you brush the mosquito, then you have to pay the consequences. So you just let him be there, then they go away. You don't have a very bad effect for very long. Anyway, So, Hoitsu, who is Suzuki Roshi's son, who gave me the Dharma transmission, was very busy.

[19:58]

He was always extremely busy taking care of the business of the temple. And his wife, Chitose, does all the work around the temple. They used to have an old woman who helped around the temple, Somehow she left, she couldn't stay there. And the children, the three children, go to school. And so there's really nothing expected of them. So the priest and his wife work very hard, constantly. People are always coming in, talking, wanting something. Or he's going out, doing some kind of ceremony. helping somebody in some way or doing something. So it's a very strenuous position he has. And his wife works very hard. She does all the cooking and washes the dishes and takes care of the kids and sweeps the grounds and also talks to people and takes care of business and so forth.

[21:02]

I pledge myself to do the dishes, wash the dishes every night after every meal. The meals were really good. I enjoyed Japanese. Of course, I always enjoyed Japanese cooking, and this was Japanese home cooking, which is even better. Actually, I miss the meals now. Something very warm about the atmosphere in Japan. And I kind of miss that. I don't know what it is, a certain kind of warmth and caring that goes into everything. There's a lot of white rice, which I'm not used to eating.

[22:06]

And even Ekai said that The white rice made him... He's Japanese. He said the white rice made him a little sluggish. He eats brown rice. He's been going to... While he's in Japan, mostly he's at Zuigakuin, which is a temple that was built in the last few years. New temple, but it's built in the mountains. And yet it's a little bit inaccessible like Tassajara. You have to walk for an hour to get there. There's no way to get there except to walk through the mountains. And it was built by some Soto Zen priests. Togari Roshi is a very young Roshi who is the abbot. He was here. about the time when we had the Sokoji, the new Sokoji temple in San Francisco was opened and he visited here.

[23:08]

But we didn't see him because he came during the day. And Eckhai wanted me to go to visit Tsui Gakuin, but I just didn't have time and I wanted to go. But the temple was built in order to concentrate on Dogen's original practice. through the years, over the last 700 years, Soto Zen practice has changed a lot from Dogen's original way. And these priests want to find out what Dogen's original way really was and to recreate that kind of practice. So that's what Ekai is doing with these priests. So he's staying at Suigakuen most of the time and learning that, what they feel is Dogen's original way, original practice, which is very different than practice in Japan now.

[24:12]

In Japan, the character of Japanese people is to be very quick, very speedy. Everything is speeded up in Japan. And they feel that Dogen's practice is much slower, much different, much slower and more integrated. And that Zazen and daily life was much more the same feeling. I'll be very interested to see what he comes back with, what he has to say about that. So most of the time I spent right at Rinzowen, at the temple, and studying.

[25:22]

and working on the Dharma Transmission Ceremony. And I really didn't have much time to see Japan, except the last four days. We would go into Yaizu, it's a little town at the bottom of the hill. Rinzouen is up against the mountain, and then go down this long road, and then some little village, houses, and then there's the town of Yaizu. And Yaizu is, a lot of people from Yaizu support the temple. And it's a town of about 100,000 people. And Hoitsu is very well known in Yaizu, and very well liked. He's a very popular priest. People like him a lot.

[26:23]

And he's, to describe his personality, those of you who saw him when he was here, saw him for a little bit. But he's very much himself. When he has to do ceremonies, He's very reverent, and when he's relaxed, he's very irreverent. But he really knows how to integrate his reverent and irreverent sides of his life. I was talking to him about it. I expressed that to him and he said that a Japanese priest, in his position, should be like the people, identified with the common people, and at the same time

[27:38]

be able to take the position of a priest or ceremonious person or a person who is above the mundane. to be able to come and go. And so he identifies very well with the common people, and that's why they like him so much. And at the same time, they respect him as a priest. One of the things that they do is at the temple is invite various groups.

[28:46]

One time it'll be a group of college students and they'll come and he'll give a lecture and then they'll sit down and one group of college students or maybe they're high school students, they came in the evening and he gave a lecture and he said, and then they stayed overnight. And they stayed in the hondo. The hondo is the main building, big building, where in the middle is the altar. And then on one side is the, it's really one big hall. But you can see that it's divided into sections. One side is for smaller ceremonies, and the other side is for teaching. And the middle is for service. And the traditional hondo has square pillars, maybe every 10 feet, about like these pillars here.

[29:54]

But they're all over the building. And you can just put screens up, even between the pillars, and make any kind of room you want. That's the wonderful part of the Japanese building, is that you just design the building the way you want it. You put up the building, but it has no walls. And you just put the walls in, take them out, and create the room that you want, create the space that you want. And so, living in the shuryo, the shuryo is the monk's quarters. That's where we lived. We were always moving the walls around and creating new spaces for whatever we needed them for. And the hondo is quite big. So all these maybe 50, 60 students could come and sleep overnight. They'd just bring their futons with them and their dinner in a kind of a noisy bunch. After Zazen, they stayed up all night, you know, talking and eating their dinner, and then they went to sleep.

[31:01]

Then they got up the next morning and did Zazen again. And then there was a group of old women. The old women really loved the temple. And they loved the priest. I remember seeing pictures of Suzuki Roshi when he was the abbot there. and just get a class. They were all old women. So the old ladies, old women, and he'd give a lecture. And they understood his lecture. The lecture he gave for them was very different than the lecture that he gave for other people. because they understood what he was talking about. And then they sent Zazen.

[32:02]

And I remember this one old lady couldn't get up. They had to lift her up. But they're probably the most sincere. and the most devout. So that's kind of the temple life is like that. And it's sometimes private ceremonies for a family in the other part of the hondo. After, the day after dharma transmission, dharma transmission takes place in the middle of the night, midnight. And the day after, Ekai and Jaksho and I did takahatsu in Yaizu. Takahatsu is begging. And so we had these, we put on these white leggings and white gloves.

[33:13]

And although we didn't wear the gloves, we wore the leggings. Then you hike up your robes and put a belt, tie them up with a belt, and then pull it up over your behind. And it's so that it's up. And then they had a hat, a straw hat. I have some pictures. Actually, Bill Jockshow has the pictures. I'll try and get them for him. And then Hoitsu drove us into Yaizu, and we had a little bell. And so we started off in a procession with our bells. And so Ekai is very used to doing this. That's the way he gets around in Japan, actually. When he wants to go someplace, he'll just go to the train station, or the town, do Takahatsu and of course you have your bowl. People put coins in the bowl and he usually gets enough to pay for his transportation and then they go someplace.

[34:21]

That's how he got to us. And so he's used to doing Takahatsu and he showed us how to do it. So what you do is chant some short sutra like We did the Shosai Myo Kichijo Dorani. It's pretty short. You can do Ime Juku Kanon Gyo, or something longer if you want to. But we decided to stay with something short. And I started getting a little bit nervous, and I realized I couldn't remember the I had to repeat it over and over again to myself, because I didn't want to make any mistakes. Because you go down the street, and you stand in front of a store. The stores are mostly open in Japan, not so closed like ours. They just open the whole front. At night, they close them up. And then in the daytime, they just open them up.

[35:24]

So you're just standing right there in front of the store. And then you start chanting the Ramayana two or three times, depending on the feeling. You know, if you think that someone's coming, if you feel that they're going to, someone looking in their purse for some coin, then you chant it again, you know, give them time. You chant it in a loud voice. And then you go on to the next door. people just ignore you, you know, they see you there and they just go about their business, and then sometimes they, oh, you know, get a coin, come out and give you the coin, and then you say a little gata for them, a little response. I can't remember that one. I had it written down. And then you say, ohayou gozaimasu. Usually you do takahatsu in the morning. That's most Tradition wants to do it in the morning, like a monk.

[36:27]

Monks go out in the morning and do their Takahatsu and then they come back with whatever it is they get. Because they only eat one meal a day, traditionally. So you don't go out in the afternoon. The noon meal is the monk's meal. So, We did this whole, I was surprised how far we got. We went down the street, the main street of Lazo all the way to the end. And then came back on the other side of the street. And then went down some more streets. And the interesting thing is that there were some streets that didn't have very much on them. They're kind of like the backside of town. But we went to those places too. down those streets and didn't miss any. You can select places to go, but the best way is not to miss anything, just to go from one to the next without really expecting anything.

[37:33]

And so the places with houses, Japanese houses are right on the street. And in a place like Yaesu, there are no sidewalks. There's the street and then the houses. And sometimes there's a white line down the street, you know, it says, let's pretend that this is the sidewalk. But it's really just the street. And so the house is right there, so you walk, you don't have to go very far, you get to the house, and you're right up there, and you just face the wall, or the door, and chant. That's very interesting, doing that. You don't know if anybody's there or not. But you hear something rustling inside. Somebody opens the door, gives you something. So that was a very unique and incredible experience to do that.

[38:34]

And we also had straw sandals. Straw sandals. I don't know if you've ever worn straw sandals. They lace up your ankle, but they're a little rough and kind of short. By the time we were through, after about three hours, it was a little bit hard to walk fast. But we wanted to do it again, but we never had the opportunity. And then we counted our money and went to a restaurant and ate lunch. And then we put Ekai on the train to go back to Zuigakuen. And then we took the bus back to the temple.

[39:39]

People on the buses are very polite, very nice to us. But it must have seemed strange to see. Jokcho is Chinese, and everybody thinks he's Japanese. And they are always surprised when they find out he can't speak Japanese. So he and I were quite a pair. He's a Japanese-looking guy who can't speak Japanese, and he's a gaijin. But they treated us very well, and we mumbled and stumbled along with our small vocabulary, looking in our books. So maybe you have some questions that you'd like to ask. If there's any significance to

[40:44]

So that's the main part of the ceremony is Heaven's at Midnight. But those are the, I don't like to say secret, because secret is a funny word, but a private, you know, it's one-to-one transmission. And so it's not something that you disclose. So that's why I really can't talk about it. But what I can say is that what it's... it's about becoming part of the... it's being made a member of the family of the Buddhist patriarchs. That's what it's about.

[41:53]

So it's interesting. My question is just around the issue of midnight. Well, I think that the issue of midnight comes from when the sixth patriarch, if you're familiar with the Platform Sutra, the fifth patriarch gave the sixth patriarch dharma transmission at midnight. And I think that's why that's traditional that way. Excuse me? Were you impressed with Eiheiji? Oh, Eiheiji. We went to Eiheiji in the last four days. We went to Kyoto to see my friend Peter and Jane and stayed with them. And then the four of us went to, Jaksho and I and Peter and Jane went to Eheji and stayed overnight.

[43:03]

Now Eheji is one of the two head temples for the Soto school in Japan, training centers, and it's Dogen's original temple, original monastery. Ekai met us there. He had trained at Eheji several years ago. So he showed us around. But it so happened that they have the training center, and then in the last few years they built a guest center. And the guest center has its own zendo and its own everything. But because unless you have sat Tangario, you can't sit with the monks.

[44:06]

Unless you've actually trained at the Heiji, you can't sit with the monks. Although, Joksho and I could have sat in the Gaitan. The Gaitan is just outside the Zendo. But at that particular time, The guest hotel, as we call it, was full of laypeople, and they were there for some kind of ceremony. So the place was really packed, and there were about five young monks taking care of the whole business. So when we went there, we had a bath. They had a lot of trouble trying to decide what they were going to do with us. But they woke us up at 3 o'clock in the morning in order to sit at 4. We were just kind of walking up and pacing up and down, waiting.

[45:07]

And as it turns out, they didn't have zazen that morning, because we had a 20-minute zazen in the guest zendo. means for the lay people, the ceremony, the morning ceremony, took the place of zazen because there was so much. And so we spent, we went to the, after doing a little bit of zazen, we went to the hondo, where they had these long ceremonies. It's very different than the service that we have ordinarily. Very dramatic. They have cymbals and bells. It's great. But the service was about two and a half hours. And we had to sit seiza all that time. But that was not their usual morning service.

[46:16]

Usual morning service is about an hour. First they have zazen and then morning service. And so it was a little bit unfortunate that we didn't come at a regular time. But still, it was a wonderful experience. And to be there was a wonderful experience. And later, we had a nice interview with the guest lecturer. The night that we arrived, all the laypeople had a lecture given by the guest lecturer. And as it turns out, he gave a lecture about, although it was all in Japanese, we found out that he was talking about his experience in Seattle. He comes to Seattle for about two weeks every year. He can't get away for any longer than that, but he loves America, and maybe that's why he's the guest lecturer. He talked about how he gave a lecture in the prison in Seattle.

[47:27]

I'll tell you about that sometime. So, he's a good friend of Eckai's, and Eckai wanted us to meet him. So, he told us that they were very happy to have us there, and to wear our robes in the in the hondo. He said it's like they really need to see people coming back from some other place, like America, and wearing robes, and kind of verifying the dharma to them. back to them. There's a word for it, which I can't remember, but it's like coming back, the Dharma coming back. And he said that everybody really appreciated that very much.

[48:35]

And someday, maybe next year, he's going to come to America again, and if he has a chance, he'll come by here. for a few days, and I'll show him around here in Zentsen. And we also visited, on the way to Eheji, we visited a training temple. What's the name of the temple? I can't remember the name of the temple, it slips my mind. But the teacher there is Harada Roshi, Hoshinji, it's called, Hoshinji.

[49:39]

And Philip Kaplan studied there, and Yasutani Roshi studied there. A lot of people studied there who we're familiar with. They studied there in the 50s and 60s, 50s. And I like the place very much. And Harada Roshi is a Soto Zen teacher. He's the teacher of my friend Peter and Jane now. And they go there for Sashins. And he's going to come to America pretty soon. And I'll show them around and hopefully he can come here. So there's a whole, actually there's a whole kind of group of lineage of teachers which is indirectly connected to our lineage, which I'm just finding out about. And I'd like to go back to Japan again and find out more, stay a little bit with some of those people and find out more about that.

[50:50]

And I think that some of those people will eventually come here just to see what we're doing. And so I'm very eager to make contact with them. I think that we can benefit by making more contact with teachers in Japan that are good teachers. And so then Ekai took us around to, showed us around Eheji, and we got permission to go into the Founder's Hall and offer incense and bow. And we also went up to the main gate, Above the main gate is the Arhat's Hall.

[52:01]

And there are 500 Arhat statues above the main gate. And that was really a wonderful experience. Not everybody goes up there. Around 10 o'clock in the morning, the place just gets jammed with visitors. Just hordes of visitors walking through the hallways. So we left around noon because we had to come back to Rensselaer, and then the next day we left for the States. But it would be nice to go back to Ehechi again and stay for a while. I think my visit, if I went back to Ehechi, would be quite different than the last visit, the first one. Does anyone take care of Rinzōren besides Hōjutsu Rinzōren?

[53:07]

Just the two of them? Yeah. But he did have a disciple who went to Eheji. He had one student, one who was a monk. who was there, but now he's at a aging. So from time to time someone else shows up. If you want to go and stay with him, do a little work, find out what that's like, do a little samo, probably be okay. It's a wonderful place. After coming back from Kyoto, it was so nice to come back. It's very quiet. It's in a bird sanctuary. They made it a bird sanctuary.

[54:11]

And they grow tea and tangerines in that area. And the tea plantations up on the top of the mountain. I didn't go up on top of the mountain. I didn't have time. The tea all over the place. Tea, rice, and tangerines. I think of mandarin oranges. But anyway, I look forward to working with all of you from now on. And I would like to see our practice have good vitality. And if we get stale, if we're stale in some place, I would like us to see why that is and to open our practice up so that it's really beneficial to all of us.

[55:21]

So right now I'm looking at everything that we do carefully, and I'd like us to look at it together and see how we can really make it vital. So I hope you'll do work with me to do that. Thank you. ♪ The sentient beings are nervous ♪

[56:01]

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