That feels safer anyway. So we more or less know where we stop. We more or less know. So the questions had to do with... Thank you very much. My pleasure. And where do you live in California? I'm in San Francisco. In San Francisco. And you deal with all of the new high prices and all that stuff? I have a house, so I've been there for a while. All right, yes. You're not worried about it. Well, I mean, you've got to maintain it and everything, so it's unlucky. At the moment, it's all good. It was so nice to see you again. Absolutely. Bye-bye. Anyway, the questions had to do with what happened after you met with Suzuki Roshi and we went on beyond that and we were kind of up to the point where it had to do with you acquired Tassajara and then we were up to

[01:21]

Greens and Green Gulch. Yeah. Well, Green Gulch was started... This may overlap some, but it's no problem. Greens was started pretty shortly after Tsukiyoshi died. And he had told me, I know where I was going, and I didn't go there. He told me he thought we needed a third place where people could continue their practice. Now, in his imagination, I'm quite sure, he thought of that third place as a kind of little Buddhist village, like in Japan, after the monastery. And at the temple, then you live in a village. So I tried to... have the feeling, following his suggestion, that Green Gulch could be kind of like a little village.

[02:26]

Being the third after the Zen Center and Tassajara. Yeah. The third place one could practice. San Francisco is where people started, then they'd go to Tassajara. And then they might come back to San Francisco, but some people want to get married, have families, do things, etc. So he had, I think, a not entirely precise idea, but needed something that followed up on Green's, Green Gulch, rather, and followed up on San Francisco Tassera. So when I was offered sitting in a tent with Huey Johnson, the possibility of Green Gulch, and I met with George Wheelwright, and I met with George Samuels. We worked out the price, and I told you this friend of mine, with whom I'd considered starting a a mutual fund that only invested in, you know, environmentally responsible stuff, etc.

[03:33]

He's the person I called up who said he had $50,000 that he could take out of the market and give to us for a certain number of months. We raised the money and paid him back after those months. George was originally, I think, going to give it to the Native Americans, but at this point, George Sanders said, you've got to give it to somebody who can at least produce some money. So this is an invaluable piece of property, and we bought it for $300,000, if I remember correctly. Okay, so... And the $50,000 was kind of the down payment. Down payment, yeah. And then there was some kind of payment over a period of three years. I don't remember now. But it doesn't really signify it because you wound up owning it. Yeah, we owned it, yeah. And it's still working.

[04:37]

Not only did we end up owning it, at the point that GGNRA, the Golden Gate National Recreation Area, was being started. And it seemed that the people doing the Golden Gate National Recreation Area wanted Green Gulch, it's understandable, as their headquarters, the park headquarters. So they could, by eminent domain or whatever, have taken it away from us. So I wanted to establish that we could make it available to people and an important part of that coastal area including the park but it would be adjunct and separate. So I was worried enough and so was Huey Johnson who was the Interior Secretary sort of for the state, that we decided we should talk to, I think it was Udall, who was the Secretary of the Interior of the United States at that time.

[05:45]

So we wanted to meet with him. So we went to... We knew he was going to give a talk at Yellowstone National Park, Yellowstone. So... you and I flew to Yellowstone. And I had a contact in Vermont who was a friend of Udall's and could find out where he was. So we would, we had a rented car, I rented the car, and he was going to be somewhere, so we'd go there and then he would have left. He was giving talks at various places. So I'd call my friend in Vermont, who would then call the secretary in Washington to tell us the next stop where he was going to speak was such and such. And then we would drive and we could see his helicopter going over our head as we were racing. And finally, late in the afternoon, about 4 in the afternoon, we did catch up with him.

[06:47]

And Huey Johnson knew him, to some extent. So we did catch up with him at around 4 o'clock, I remember, I think. And we went up after his speech, talk. We went up and spoke to him. And I said what we wanted. And I think he said, you should appear before the Senate committee on the environment or something. So I went back and I made an appointment. And then I flew to Washington and made a presentation saying how we were going to use it and et cetera, and basically seemed to get their agreement that they wouldn't take it away from us. And then I came back and then we, trying to keep it more like a commune or a farm, we didn't have a monastic schedule. And I remember before Sukershi died, the San Francisco Zen Center, he said, there should be only one period of Zazen.

[07:57]

We don't want to, we have to basically, his feeling was we have to respect people's lives as lay people. So we had only one period. But everyone wanted two periods. I mean, if they're going to, particularly if you're going to come from Sunset or someplace to the San Francisco Zen Center, to come there for one 40-minute period, you know. So we did two periods, but we made the first period voluntary. And if you lived in the building, you had to go to the second period at least, but most people went to both periods. So the similar thing happened at Crestone, at Green Village. It was cold and foggy. Buildings were kind of not suited for community. And there weren't many people who wanted to stay there. So then I decided after I think maybe a full year, okay, we'll create a kind of another schedule, not like Tassajara, but another schedule. And I did not want to turn it into a place like Tassajara because Sukhiyurishi had made it clear to me, if you're going to do the 90-day practice period, which is what is really the core of a Zen monastic experience, Dogen says at some point, if you don't do the 90-day practice period, you cannot be taken seriously.

[09:20]

You can't... It would be even too much to ridicule you. So I... I brought in a schedule, but I didn't think Green Gulch would be a place where you could have an ongoing schedule because it's just too much and there's Muir Beach and there's Mill Valley and etc so and also if we did turn it into a monastic place which would have the 90 day practice period I thought that you'd have to partition the place you'd have to have like in Daitokuji you have one part of the monastic complex which is just for the monks and the other parts are for visitors and stuff like that So I never thought we had the money or the ability to partition it. So I kept it as a more lay practice center where people came on Sunday to the lecture and bought vegetables and stuff like that.

[10:28]

So after a year or so, I decided we need to bring a schedule in here and not a tasara schedule, but a schedule that works for lay people. but a schedule that gives some definition, which is a wake-up bell, etc. And as soon as we started that schedule, Green Gelt started to thrive. And there were less complaints about the fog and the cold, etc. So that's my answer to that. The location is ideal. On Mount Tamalpais. Yeah, coming down to the ocean, yeah. And I'm very acquainted with it because that's where our first Contact is the Only Love and other works were created, very close to... The Sly's Ranch, you mean? At the Druid Heights, which was... Druid Heights, that's Alan Watts' place.

[11:35]

Well, Alan was there, but it was really Roger... Roger... Exactly. What's his name? Rogers? Summers. Summers. I used to call it the House of Orgy. Well, it was that, but it was a lot of other things. And the shop was a beautiful woodworking shop, and we built the seven-foot contact there, which was shown at SF MoMA and all over the world after that. And... It is still a community. Of course, Roger is long dead, but it's owned by the National Forest. Well, there was a number of houses there, and Gary Schneider lived in one of them. That's right.

[12:36]

Before he moved up to the Sierras. And Elsa Gidlow. Elsa Gidlow, yes. I knew Elsa quite well. Me too. And, you know... Yeah, there are about four houses, and the people who now live in them have tenure for the rest of their lives from the National Forest. And it's a historic area. Yeah, I lived there for a while, too. I don't know, some week or two or three weeks or something. Oh, I used to stay there all the time because we were... working and making the first multimedia pieces. And Roger was totally involved and helped us. That's nice. He was a contractor too, wasn't he?

[13:37]

Yes, he built houses and he was very creative and quite unique. He had a design concept where he would build a house, but the first thing he would do is he would set up frames for the windows, and that was the beginning of how he designed the house, by knowing where the windows would be, which was smart. I helped build several of the houses. Oh, wow. I worked as a carpenter. Uh-huh. Anyway, so Green Gulch continues to this day. It sure does, yeah. And it's been a very productive setting. And what you wrote recently about Europe

[14:42]

involvement in restaurants with Green's was more or less at the same time yes well we started Green's Green Gulch was about 1973-74 was when we got started Green's restaurant was more like 78-79 and yeah what was the Motivation to begin with, with greens. Green gulch or great greens? Greens. Yeah, well, let me think about green gulch for a minute here. Then we decided to, of course, farm there. And I invited Alan Chadwick, who was Paul Lee's protege in a way. From Santa Cruz, yes.

[15:49]

And Alan Chadwick, I again don't remember the details, visited Tassajara and helped us a little bit with the gardens there. But the inspiration of the rather extensive Esalen Gardens partly came from Alan Chadwick and partly came from Green Gulch. And Alan came and lived at Green Gulch for some time, but then he was He would just meet somebody on the street or he'd be hitchhiking and he'd bring them to Green Gulch and have them live there as farmers or as French intensive gardening people. Well, I couldn't make Green Gulch work. with this kind of unpredictable number of people showing up, how do we know who are they, etc. And they'd stay and then they were funky or they were crazy or whatever. So finally I said to Alan, if you don't stop, you're going to have to leave.

[16:51]

To Alan Chadwick. He was a remarkable human being. He was fantastic, fantastic. And so... And Paul Lee, I was helping Alan because he was a huge help and a genius gardener, but also because it was part of my relationship with Paul Lee and taking care of Alan. And Huey Johnson, who was the catalyst for getting Green Gulch, really wanted us to have Alan there. So it was a huge decision for me to say to him, And we started trying to find another place for him. We did, or maybe Huey found another place for him. But Huey at this point thought, maybe I should take Green Gulch. away from the Zen people and give it to Alan. So I knew this was a possibility, so I remember meeting with Huey and he was really, his preference was Alan.

[18:03]

He wanted Alan to be a gardener for people. And so Huey told me what he wanted to do and I said, And I convinced Huey. Because you felt obligated to him because it was through him. Yes, of course. But also, I also felt obligated to the property and how it would be taken care of. So, in the end, Huey agreed that we should stay. So then we developed the gardens, and we had to turn soil at that time into organic gardening. You have to let it fallow for a length of time, because you have to get the chemicals that were pre-induced as a cattle ranch out of the ground. But eventually we turned it into a flourishing garden, which was going to and did produce greens for greens, vegetables for greens. And we had for a while two horses that had been movie stars at one time in cowboy movies who did our plowing.

[19:11]

And we had chickens and we had ducks. And you built buildings. Well, we changed cow sheds into housing and stuff like that. And we built one big building called the Wheelwright Center. Right. And we built, it turns out Green Gulch, Green's, Green Gulch is in a stream bed. So when we tried to put a foundation in, we dumped what, I don't know, six trucks of cement in. It just kept disappearing, disappearing, disappearing. And finally it held, and then we built the Wheelwright Center, which basically I designed. And I was married there. Yes. To Judith? Yes, by you and Paul Lee. David Wecker was married there to Melissa. Alan Watts' funeral was there.

[20:14]

It's amazing what happened. to the third place and the fourth place. Well, it was, as I said in the earlier tape at some point, I felt I could not make Zen Center work unless it was after Roshi died, unless it was more complex. Because I said, either or, it's not going to work. It's got to have, and I think I said, that you don't know where your toothbrush is. Is it Tasa? Well, if it's the third place, you don't know where it is. So that was my... view and it allowed people to relate to practice in a more complex way than just either Tassajara or San Francisco because now it could be Tassajara and Green Gildersleeve and then San Francisco and then San Francisco and then etc.

[21:22]

And how did you confront the 90-day situation? Well, I never... brought practice periods to Green Gulch, only to Asahara. And then I didn't bring them in Germany until we had facilities that allowed people to stay on premise for 90 days. And that was Sukiroshi. I went over this with Sukiroshi. When he started Asahara, he actually asked permission in Japan for permission to do the 90-day practice period, which it took a while for China to give permission to Japan to do 90-day practice periods. So we got permission, and what Sukershi established, we have sufficient facilities that 50 or 60 people can live here for 90 days and not leave. So we never established those kind of facilities, as far as I'm concerned, at Green Gulch. So it was always a lay practice center.

[22:23]

The development of greens for the restaurant concept out of Green Gulch, it was out of Green Gulch. In a way, yes. Could you do me a favor? What is your name? Zandra. Zandra. Zandra. Z-A-N-D-R-A. Zandra, could you get me some more hot water in this cup? Okay. Thank you very much. You don't have to have any tea bag or anything, just more hot water. Ah, yeah. So it made sense. You were growing vegetables and green gulch, and you then developed some place to use them. Well, yes, but it was also that... There's facilities, and there's the people who make the facilities work.

[23:36]

And the people who make the facilities work are their own inter-objectivity, their own dynamic and power. So we were... Thank you so much, Sandra. You look like a nice kid, are you? Yes. Yeah, well, that's good. And you should know it. It's important to know it. She knows it. So, baking bread at Tassajara, which we had to learn how to do, and Ed Brown was the kind of catalyst there. If we're going to live down there in the woods, you can't get fresh bread. We lived, you know, 30, 40, 50 miles from Carmel. And 17 miles of dirt road up and down to get into the place. So we became bakers. I'm not a baker.

[24:39]

I'm only a baker. But... In name only, I'm a baker. But we developed baking, and then more and more people wanted our bread. So we began baking bread in San Francisco and selling it. And at some point, we decided to get a bakery. So we found a bakery. I think we bought it for $17,000. Maybe it was $34,000 at that time. But no, we found a bakery, an old Italian man. He wanted to pass it on to his children, but his children didn't want it. So first we just kind of rented it in order to buy it. And at some point, he decided he wouldn't sell it to us. And I... I didn't want to do everything myself, so I've had other people keep meeting with him.

[25:44]

And he kept for, I don't know, months saying no. And then I went to, in the middle of a session, I decided I should meet with him. And my feeling was simply, I didn't have any plan or strategy or anything, except that I felt I want to hear him out, listen to him, And my guess is he wants to give it to his children. And my guess is his children don't want it. And my guess is we want to be the best second alternative to his children. So I went over and met with him. And after about an hour, he agreed to sell it to us. So we bought it. And then it wasn't big enough, and we bought the dry cleaner. I think there was a dry cleaner next door. Then we hung curtains over it, and we just, with our own construction crew, joined the two buildings, two spaces, and made the bakery.

[26:46]

And at some point, we got caught by the local building cut thing, and the building inspector was coming down the street, and he needed, supposedly, I don't remember, He needed a... He was looking for a match for his... to light a cigarette. And he saw this curtain, so he opened the curtain. He said, what's all this construction going on in here? So he kind of... Somehow they let us go and we built it ourselves. And the bakery was a huge success. There were lines going way down the street. And the name of it was? The Tassajara Bread Bakery. Then it became an... And I remember there was an issue because I didn't think the croissants were good. So I said, until we make good croissants, we're not going to sell croissants. It took them a year before I approved of the croissants. Before I approved them. And they were kind of mad at me. These croissants were good enough. But anyway. So the bakery was very successful.

[27:49]

The bakery then, then Deborah Madison... had the best feel for vegetarian cooking, all in all was probably the best cook in our community. And she'd cooked at Tassajara, she'd cooked at Green Gulch, and she'd cooked in San Francisco. So she had said to me, she wants to experiment with recipes. So I said, well, fine. And she said, can I cook for your guests? Well, I had to have guests, I don't know, once a week or every couple of weeks or something like that. People who might support the place, people interested in what we're doing, people who, you know, etc. So I would have, you know, have dinner with them at my house. Which was? In San Francisco, at the Victorian House. Yes, I remember it well. Yeah. And Jerry, yes. And Jerry Brown basically lived for four years.

[28:52]

almost six or eight years, in our San Francisco house that was his San Francisco residence. So we cooked for Jerry and government people. Jerry could have meetings at our house which could be more confidential than meetings in a restaurant where the waiters may talk about what happened at the meal meeting. And he was already governor governor yes yeah so he was so anyway she asked if she could cook for our guests well the number of guests i had regular and i'd sometimes it happened on the spur of the moment when she gonna cook so it didn't really if i remember correctly work out that she cooked maybe more than a few times for my guests supposedly so then she said to me at some point It'd be better if we had a small restaurant. Well, the concept of a small restaurant was based on the fact that we had a bakery, and we started a bakery.

[29:55]

So she thought, well, basically, the underlying assumption was if we could start a small bakery, maybe we could start a small restaurant. Especially since you had the opportunity of... providing vegetables from Greenville. That's part of it. But more than that was, at Tassajaro, we developed, because we had to, the necessity to become good bakers because we had to bake our own bread in the remote location. But also, we were cooking I don't know. I have to figure it out. 900 vegetarian meals a day. Because we were cooking three meals a day at Tassajara, three meals a day in San Francisco, three meals a day in Green Gulch. At one point, we had 90 people living at Green Gulch in every possible room. I remember Ginny and Renee came into me one day, and they said, Dick, you've gone too far.

[30:58]

And I said, well, what do you mean? She said, that little shed out there, about as big as this couch in the world. You have somebody living in there. I said, we don't have anybody living in there. She said, well, I think you do. There's a light on and it's 11 o'clock at night. And there's music coming out of it. I said, I think it's where we're hatching chicks. And the chicks need a light on. And it works better if there's some music there, tell us. So I said, we're not having people live there. But we have people living everywhere. So we had 90 people there. That would be 300 meals there. We had about 90 people in San Francisco living in the building, I think. And we had 65 people all the time at Tassajara. So we'd become inadvertently experts at vegetarian food. And The tradition in Zen is not like Catholic monasticism.

[32:02]

It's that there's two cuisines in Zen monasteries. One is the cuisine for the monks, and the other is the cuisine for the abbot's guests and visitors. And one is a very high craft vegetarian cuisine with multiple dishes, and the other is much simpler based on a carefully made farmer's diet. So the guest cuisine influences the monastic cuisine, and the monastic cuisine influences the guest cuisine. So I thought, well, we have developed a vegetarian diet and skills where it's not just a health food, it's a cuisine. So my idea was that We could present our skills at vegetarian cooking to the larger community.

[33:11]

And I also felt this is an indirect way to get people to feel okay about Zen Buddhism and to get people to take one of the fruits. Zen practice isn't just the Zen practice, it's also the fruits of Zen practice. And one of the fruits of Zen practice is how well you take care of property, how your architectural details, and also how the cooking is. So I thought, we'll present the cuisine that we've developed somewhere. So that was in my mind. And also, then Anne Howell who I knew sort of. I was part of the kind of general think tank scene of San Francisco or something. So she said to me once, we want to do something out at Marin Highlands or whatever it's called.

[34:18]

It's where you go through the tunnel just after Sausalito. That's part of the government property. The government was moving their military out of San Francisco. So I went out there with her and maybe Stuart Brand, maybe a few other people, I don't remember. But we looked at various things, and I had a few ideas, but nothing. And then she said, as a kind of afterthought, and Fort Mason, where Green's is, Fort Mason we're also going to have to do something with. And there's these buildings. I said, well, I'm thinking of a space for a restaurant. So she said, well, I'll show it to you. So I went and looked at it, and here's this great, big, empty warehouse. The windows were high up. You could see the bay. And I thought, this is fantastic. We could make it work. Everyone told me that there's no walk-in traffic. No, it's an abandoned warehouse area. I said, it's by the bay.

[35:20]

And it has parking. I think we can make it work. But it's huge. And I said, and my feeling was, You know, when I spent time in Los Angeles and when I spent time in New York, right away you meet everybody because the artists and the society and the poets and the academics all have kind of venues where they hang out together. San Francisco didn't have that. And I thought, I know all these academics from Berkeley and Stanford, and I know the artists and the poets, but there's no common place to meet. I said, Greens can be the restaurant, whatever. Then it was just a space. It wasn't called Greens yet. Greens can be a space where I bring people in the Bay Area together in a convivial way. And it actually turned out that it worked.

[36:23]

And it was very interesting too. The people who went to the bakery, which was so successful, had not much relationship to Zen practice. But the people who came to the restaurant developed an interest in Zen practice. You're there longer, you're not just buying a product, you're eating, you're seeing. And I wanted the waiters... to be part of the presence. I wanted the waiters to all be practitioners. Oh, really? For sure. I didn't want it to be a business. I wanted it to be a practice place for the waiters and a practice place for the feel of practice for the clients. And I wouldn't sell alcohol except when I asked the Dalai Lama's permission. Wine with a meal, but you couldn't order a glass of wine before the meal started. So now I think that beer and wine, in my feeling, is a practice place and one of the main precepts of Buddhism is you do not sell alcohol.

[37:26]

And you're responsible. I mean, legally, if you sell alcohol, in a bar, and the person has a car accident at home, and you can be sued. And there's that Buddhist idea. It's similar. You're responsible for what happens to people. You can sit down and listen. It's not interesting. I guarantee it. So the beginning... When you initiated Greens, this was in the, what? 60, 70, 77, 78. And I went to Japan, and when I came back, I knew it was going to open. And that's when I bought the BMW, because I knew it was going to be successful. Then Earl, I knew, like, paid for it.

[38:28]

So it's been going ever since 78. Yes, it has. And it's tremendously successful to this day. It still has all the time I'm talking. So it's a long life for a restaurant. Yes, it's a very long life for a restaurant. And does it belong to... Zen Center? Well, the building doesn't. It's rented at some sort of rate from the Fort Mason Foundation. I can't remember the details now. But my feeling was I have to turn a nowhere space into a somewhere space. And so my feeling was that... Because it was just a big rectangle, and I could not imagine a big rectangular box with a bunch of tables in it.

[39:34]

Being a restaurant, I didn't want to eat in. Ask anyone else to eat in. And again, I wanted it to be a practice place. So, shall I go on and let you write? No, that's fine. I got it. So I, um... So I remember standing outside the restaurant and looking at it. And at some point looking at it with Paul Disko. And we agreed, first of all, there had to be, we had to raise the floor. Build a platform floor. so you can see out the windows. And also, as Paul said to me at the time, who was head of a, at one time we had a 35-person construction crew full-time building things for the center. And he was a kind of genius carpenter and went to Japan and studied carpentry too.

[40:38]

He said it would be useful to have this platform floor because we can run all the plumbing and electricity underneath it and that is to dig into the cement floor. So the first thing he did was build the platform. I also asked him to build, make two beautiful doors of wood for the front door. And I also had to explore the name, and I think it was Sim Vandra came up with the name Greens. We were trying out, my mother was involved and she said the pulsating orange, the pulsating peach or something, so my mother was crazy. So we came up with the name Greens and then I thought, There has to be a journey. If it's going to go from nowhere to somewhere, how do you turn a nowhere or an anywhere into a somewhere?

[41:47]

I'm just on a little farmer's market here in the garden. I have a garden down here. A farm. A farm. You know, when you're on this street out here, it's interesting. It's much more sophisticated than a couple blocks. I thought Seventh Avenue were more sophisticated, but this is actually more sophisticated. Better shops, better residents. Well, old Chelsea is really beautiful. It's all like old townhouses and, you know, a lot of buildings from the early 1800s. It's nice. Ready? Yeah, I'm just going to stare at you. Oh, it's a perfect holder for the... Anything. I love that piece. If you were selling pieces, I'd buy it. It's yours. No, no, no. It's yours. You've got to allow people to do things like that. Well, I also like your table.

[42:51]

Anyway... Oh, yeah, thanks. What? I can't get it in my luggage. Sorry. I hope I see you again sometime. He will. Maybe I'll get Sophia together with you. So I need a card or something at some point. I will get... Yes. Give one to Gerd or something. Cool. We'll do. All right. Bye-bye. You'll see each other on Sunday. Yeah. I'm going to the reading. Me too. Anyway... The ownership of Greens as the restaurant, now it changed after I left. I don't know why. From my point of view, if it's going to be part of a not-for-profit organization, and we're not going to pay usual business taxes, All the employees, as much as possible, should be Zen students.

[43:56]

And I also knew that the IRS really wanted to do something about the Mormons who tried to turn all of Utah into a not-for-profit. And they didn't want to lose a key case with us, which would be a precedent for them. So I knew that, and I realized if we were careful and we really made it a practice place, it would be all right not to pay taxes. That meant then that the salary should be a little lower than commercial. but that people could get credit for going to Tassajaro. And also, when a woman had her period, she could get off from work easily. People could get off from work to go to Seixins. So we only had three nights a week we had dinner, and we had five or six days a week lunch. So it was a schedule which I thought would work for people better than a regular commercial schedule at a regular commercial restaurant or someplace.

[45:03]

But of course, what happens is, in people's minds, it shifts very quickly toward the standard in the society. The standard in the society is a certain salary, etc. Why are we underpaid compared to other people? Well, the more it just became a job, and the more it was no longer placed in preparation for going to Tassajara, That happened, and so then we had pressure that I was the kind of boss who wouldn't pay. I was not paying people enough. I was exploitive. But my feeling was we wanted to keep it as a not-for-profit place, as a practice place. And I didn't want to charge the kind of prices for the meals that I would have to if we paid taxes. Hmm. So anyway, so in conceiving of the restaurant, so the first was the platform.

[46:10]

Then how do I create a a space which has a narrative in it. You go from nowhere to somewhere. Well, the street was just flat warehouse type, I think, one after another, completely nondescript, and in front was a kind of road, but it was just a warehouse instead of a delivery road. So we made extraordinary doors that Paul Disko made. And then you come in, and the first thing I wanted was a choice. Okay, so the choice was, and we had to do it, because you have to have a wheelchair entrance. So there was a long platform going up to the left, which was the wheelchair place. And... And... And then to the right were stairs, which I wanted, I don't remember now if they did, widened slightly as you went up, so you're moving into a space.

[47:20]

Then I wanted you to get up into the space and still not have it quite the restaurant. So we put a bakery outlet there, and somebody had given me a painting of Carl Appel's, which is probably worth a lot of money now, and I hung it above. I don't know if they still have it or where it is even, but sometimes I thought maybe if they're not using it or it's not part of the restaurant anymore, I should get it back. But anyway, there was the bakery, because I didn't have any of Edward's paintings there, so I put the Carl Appel painting there. And it was an outlet where people could come and buy bread and stuff like that. Now it's been changed into greens to go, where you can buy food to go. But, because the bakery closed, the bakery went bankrupt. Really? Well, they expanded into a wholesale bakery and they couldn't make it work and it went bankrupt. As I understand, I wasn't there. That's after I left. So...

[48:22]

The first thing you do, you come up the stairs. First of all, there's a table and I designed all the tables based on shaker furniture. So all the tables were designed. I had them made. And so in the front there's a table and there was a big vase and big flowers. So first you have the two doors. Come in, you have a choice of where to go. You make a choice. And the flowers. And you can't see in, there's a wall, so you can't see the water yet. So you come up, and still you can't quite see the water. So you are at the bakery. Some people just come to the bakery and leave. And then there's the maitre d'. And that the maitre d', well, still you can't quite see the water because I wanted the idea of a narrative space.

[49:24]

I wanted a kind of space that swirled. Maybe it was because of the ocean and the bay. So when I talked to J.B. Blount, he had this fantastic piece of wood which almost is like a breaching whale. It surges up. And we had to really, it looks like it's going to fall over because it's bigger at the top. So it had to be really bolted to the cement floor below, and we had to build the platform around it. Whoa. So I wanted this. And still you can't quite see the ocean or the bay because there's this big sculpture. So this big sculpture, almost like a breaching whale, swirls about just like that, like a big wave or something. And then you go past the sculpture a little bit, and there's the bay. Okay. Then I wanted some kind of fractal relationship to the original site.

[50:25]

In other words, the original site space is just a big rectangle. So I thought that should be honored in some way. So I did that simply, with Edward Avdyssin's help, put one board across the... So basically the kitchen has to be somewhere. So we decided the kitchen, because the kitchen also has to have an entrance where food can be delivered. So I put the kitchen entrance down at the far end, and the first entrance you come to had Paul Disco's beautiful doors. And the delivery entrance was down at the other end. So that meant the kitchen would be in that corner toward. So you come in, so the kitchen is a rectangle. And it creates a rectangle where the dining tables are. And I had a kind of war. Joan Larkies had a friend who agreed to be the voluntary pro bono architect of the place, because normally I would have asked Sim Vanderen, but maybe we'd ask Sim Vanderen for too many things or something.

[51:34]

So Joan offered this, so I said, fine, just do it. So at some point, the proportions of the dining room didn't work for me as a fractal of the larger space. And I said, we have to move the wall a meter, three feet, two and a half feet, I don't remember exactly, and make the kitchen a couple, two or three feet smaller. He refused. And I said, you're going to move it. So he quit. And then I brought Sim Vanderen in. So from my point of view, it's very important that the main dining room, which is only defined by one board across, goes to the kitchen wall and etc. next to the bakery. That one board created a fractal version of the larger space. So you felt you were in a bigger space.

[52:36]

Now the bigger space is obscured by the kitchen and the sculpture and the platform. But somehow the bigger space was there in the smaller space. So that was my feeling there. And then, but the dining room extended also over on the other side of the sculpture. And there was a bathroom over there, which had been the bathroom toilet room for the workers who went to a machine shop or something like that. So I turned that into a little cubbyhole dining room, and I called it Wittgenstein's Fly Bottle. Kind of a little bit pun, where there are flies, because it used to be a toilet. And so I had printed in very careful letters over the curve of the door, Wittgenstein's Fly Bottle. But of course, after I left, nobody understood why the hell he did that. So now it's painted over. Really? Yeah. Is it now... a different kind of a business.

[53:38]

Well, now it's a business. Yeah. It's open 364 days a year. And it's not, it's not belongs to Zen Center. They created some kind of corporation which owns it now. I see. But it's still totally, as I understand it, totally controlled by the San Francisco Zen Center. That's great. Yeah. I guess. I mean, although you, I realize that you're not an integral part of that completely no i mean but they can't quite get rid of the space as soon as i left they took out edward abdician's paintings wow and i felt edward things are great i wanted it also the whole space to be a challenge first it's a challenge The food is a challenge. Vegetarian food. You can't order meat. Second, it's a challenge. You can't order alcohol in the usual way. Third, it's a challenge. There's art you sort of don't like. But I wanted art which some people will like and some people won't like.

[54:41]

That kind of complexity is interesting to me. And it's a challenge. And in the toilets, I put squat toilets everywhere. Because they're healthier. Even though Japan now has, you know... But for Westerners to go in and squat and lift... But anyway, women, I heard, squat to pee anyway and aim at the toilets because they don't like to sit down on toilet seats sometimes. Anyway, I'm not a woman, so I don't know. And also I want the men's room and women's room to be designed differently. So they weren't just standard, you know. So when you're in the men's room, you thought, oh, it's all black, and there's these big barrel toilets, and there's a squat tub. And then I wanted them to go back to the table and say to their spouse, Oh, the women's room is completely different. Then we began to have tours of the women's room by the men, and the women wanted to see the men's room.

[55:42]

That was all part of my idea to create some challenges. This was a period that you were involved from the late 70s until... 83. 83. And what happened after that was that you... had a... Some misunderstandings. To say the least. And you changed your place of residence. Well, yeah, can we come to that in a minute? Yes. I can continue. So I wanted this movement from opening the doors, suddenly in a different space, can't quite see it, but it's beautiful woodwork.

[56:43]

Detailed woodwork, because I think the... I like a level of attention to detail in the architecture and the woodwork, which is similar to the level of attention you have to bring to Sao Zen. It's an attentional... Basically, the whole thing about yoga culture is not intelligence, but attention. It's about developing attentional skills, not cognitive skills. So I want that awareness of attentional skills to be the first thing you saw when you saw the two doors. Then you came in and you saw the flowers and the shaker-style table. And then the choice of. And then, so there's a kind of narrative here of that. of entering the space, going past the sculpture, which was in three locations in this big, huge, breaching burrow.

[57:46]

Then there's dining tables. You can even sit at the sculpture and eat, too. Then there's the fractal dining room. Then you go through the dining room, and then there's the two toilets. And then we also had to create a space for the waiters to happen. How to do that was more Sim's design than mine, which is how to make the back stairs from the kitchen up to where the waiters could change into their uniforms and things like that. Now, what I didn't do there, which I would have liked to have done, is I, at the restaurant I did that survived only for a while in Santa Fe, I wanted the waiters to be like a Caldermobile. So all the waiters had to wear primary color shirts, red, green, blue, yellow. And as they moved through the room, I thought of them as a Caldermobile. Now, I would have liked to have done that green, but I didn't think of it until I got to Santa Fe.

[58:54]

But people had certain, I can't remember, we had some kind of fairly uniform way they should dress. And so... You went to the toilets and then you came back And the kitchen was there. So that basically was the concept of the restaurant. And then when you sat down, you went from the collective space of waiting for a table to the private space, this personal space. And there, then, you had the... So the schools... The basic concept was your concept. Every measure down to the millimeters was mine. And this was an initial enterprise for you.

[59:58]

Yeah. Because you had never done this before. Never done it before. But I thought a lot about restaurants. all these years and how you make that transition from the collective space of waiting for a table to the personal space and what it feels like when you're coming toward the restaurant and you're not in the collective space yet and then what happens when the waiter comes and enters your space and not to have music in the space and And then how to bring the presence, in this case of the bay and the Boulder Gate Bridge in the distance, into the space. And so I had a very clear sense of a picaresque journey in the restroom. And a journey, too, when you came back from the toilets, back into the windows.

[60:58]

rectangular windows and of course the fractal space dining room was also echoed in the windows. The windows were also rectangles and we kept that. It must have been a very satisfying experience. Yes, it was, but it was like, how can I say, it was, everything I did was a satisfying experience. It was like I was in a flow of trying to make things happen. This was just one example of trying to make it happen. It wasn't really so different of trying to make green cups happen or trying to make Tassajara happen. But it was all interrelated conceptually in how people... the space people inhabited and the practice space people inhabited.

[62:06]

And basically it was... The original initiative was your deciding to help Suzuki Roshi carry out his... And I recognize it had to include society. There had to be a permeable relationship, not a cultish relationship. a permeable relationship to the larger society. Part of that permeable relationship was greens and the bakery and the greengrocer that we did. Now, And of course, growing our own vegetables was part of it, as we did greens, green garlic. But also it was that we were sharing the skills we learned and being a community and cooking vegetarian food and the baking.

[63:13]

So it was all, and tofu, it all came from our doing things together. So now one of the main persons who was funding the restaurant wanted me to be one of the owners. He would be an owner, maybe the Zen Center would be an owner, and I'd be an owner, and we'd share the profits. But it was unthinkable to me. I didn't want to be personal. I had to belong to the center, and it shouldn't be a business. So I said no. So we made contributions that were contributions and not investments. Wow. So the next step for you after this, let's say after 1983, was because of? My relationship with Anna Hodgkin.

[64:14]

Anna Hawkin, the wife of Paul Hawkin. But Anna and I fell in love. And I had my bohemian values, that was fine, normal. And when I had an earlier relationship with Lucy Bennett, who wasn't married, I think I told you, drove all the way to San Francisco to ask Ginny's permission. And I would say we had a semi-open relationship, but not completely open relationship. But Virginia's view was as long as we spent the same amount of time together and made love, same amount daily, daily, weekly, look, whether I had an additional woman in my life,

[65:30]

If it didn't change her personal and sexual life, it was okay, it seemed. But Anna and I never became lovers. We just fell in love. And people think we were having a long-term affair, but we hadn't. And Jenny was still... Yeah, I was still married to Virginia. Yes. And when, after Anna and I fell in love, I met with her husband and told him that I'd fallen in love with Anna. And, but we'd not been lovers yet. And then, at some point, we decided, because the It turned into a huge crisis. And Anna and I thought, well, we ought to make love at least once.

[66:33]

And we did once, that's all. And we're still very close, Anna and I. And Lucy and I, too. Is Paul still alive? Oh, yes. But he's, I don't know, he's the father of, three of her, two of her children. And I don't know what their relationship is. But she lives in Marin County, in Mill Valley. And Lucy lives in Tennessee. In Tennessee. Yeah, she married a man named Clay Calhoun, who used to be a practitioner, who turned his family He lived at Green Gulch, and he turned his family kind of horse farm or something in Tennessee, partly influenced by Green Gulch, I believe.

[67:39]

But I haven't seen him in years, but him in regular correspondence with Lucy. And so my bohemian view of being true to being in love caused a huge crisis. Yes, with Zen Center. With Zen Center. And... And there were people on various sides of the... You can't believe the emotion. I mean, at some point I met with the board. I mean, I was chief priest when I first came back from Japan. And you were Dharma here. Yes, but when I first came back from Japan, I heard that some people were thinking of turning Tassawara into a place to take acid.

[68:44]

And they thought, we'll just go to a meeting and become members and vote ourselves into the leadership. So I decided to try to stop that. So I worked with lawyers to create, where the Catholic Church is, the basic place is owned by the chief priest. So I created Sukhi Rishi as the chief priest. He was still alive. I don't remember exactly when it happened, but the concept was, you know, and that I was the chief priest. So in fact, I could have just fired the whole board. I was the authority. And I'd set it up so there was a kind of partnership between the chief priest and the board, but the chief priest had the final say. So I could just fire the board, but I couldn't do that because I said, look, the sangha is also me and so forth.

[69:50]

So I can remember I went to a board meeting and I realized this had caused a huge crisis. Couldn't believe the emotions and upset and sense of betrayal. I remember at some point I slid off my chair and get down on my knees And I said, I am so sorry I've caused this. And Yvonne Rand shouted at me, get up on and off the floor. Get up, sit on your chair. So I sat on my chair again. And there seemed to be no amelioration possible. People were crying and people were upset. And then they had meeting after meeting. I was attacked for having a daughter who went to Brown. And Paul wasn't on the board, right? No. No? He wasn't? No, but Paul threatened to sue the Zen Center. Oh, he was never on the board?

[70:51]

No. And he got... I got really weird letters saying, we know you, we're going to expose you, and if you don't start behaving yourself, we're going to destroy you. I found some of the letters. I don't know if they'd be useful for this archive. Well, you know, the archive is the archive. We have that meeting on Monday. So, the whole story of that is another story. Maybe we leave it for now. But I stayed around for a year. I went to Germany to two conferences with the Dalai Lama. I'm going to go to the bathroom. Okay, and I will put it on pause. Okay. No, I don't think so. I don't think it's at once. I think, you know, we're now at a place which is... A difficult place. Difficult place, yeah. So if you want to stop, we can stop.

[71:52]

If you want to go on, we can go on. All I can say... Do you want anything to eat? No, no, I think I'll just walk back and... I don't know what you're... Yeah. Well, I had breakfast at the hotel this morning, and that's fine. That's nice. Well, okay, so if you think we should stop, we can stop. Well, let me say something since I put it on record again. It's up to you. All right. So when... I can't go into all the levels of detail right now, but just in a practical sense, what happened, you asked what happened next. I said, well, this happened... Frank Barron said to me, I've never known anyone who's gone through something like you've gone through, hasn't even committed suicide or gone crazy. Really? Yeah.

[72:53]

So, you know, I don't know. That's not my impression at all. I mean, I've known people who have gone through horrible things. You know, the fact that Alan accused me of I guess throwing Neil's thing out. It was very difficult for me. What if you had hundreds of people doing it at the same time, not just Al? Well, it was many people at the same time because at least six or more literary publications published published the fact that I had done that. And it was only one guy in England, David Moore, who came up and said, I don't think that somebody like Geert Stern, now that he really knew me, would ever have done anything like that.

[74:06]

And, you know, he was the only one. But everybody in the literary world thought that Pallon Yeah, I understand. It was correct. It's amazing that it was found. Yeah, it's great that it was. Yeah, and I knew exactly what happened. And I knew exactly that Alan had lied. So, you know, it was odd. But I don't know how much of a detail we want to go into for this next problem. I don't know. We'll see what happens. But to say something about it. Yeah, we need to say something about it. I think we need to be clear about the impact it had on you personally.

[75:07]

And we don't need to go too much into what the other people were saying. Yeah. Involved with because the book never really surfaced. The book? Shoes Beside the Door. It never surfaced? No. It was a bestseller. No, it wasn't. Oh, sure. It was still selling. Really? Yes. It was remanded very quickly. Well, maybe there was an overrun. Oh, but it's everywhere. Really? I've seen people's libraries. No kidding. Yes. Oh, no. Wow. It's still on sale. No kidding. Yes. I had no idea. Yeah. He did supposedly three versions. This was the worst version, but they thought it would sell the best. And why the publisher did that, and I'm convinced it was the shock that gave me prostate cancer.

[76:13]

Wow. And... Well, then, you know, so if you don't want to continue now, then we're going to continue tomorrow morning. Yeah, well, let's share it tomorrow morning. It's fine. But let me just say a couple of things. Yeah. Just to put the structure. So this happened. I talked... The only person I talked... I talked to Eric Erickson about it. And I went through, I talked with, also I talked with somebody who had been at the Princeton Institute of Advanced Study and had everybody turn on him at the Princeton Institute of Advanced Study. So I thought he'd kind of empathize with me, but he didn't. Well, I talked to him about what happened. I can't think of his name right now. You didn't talk to Paul Lee about it? But I talked with... This guy, and afterwards I found out he told people.

[77:16]

But anyway, I went and talked to Eric Erickson. Maybe for two and a half hours or something, we went through the details. And I sat in his house in Maria Nurse's place, wherever it was. His wife was in the other room. And at the end he said to me, well, you understand it. Now you just have to live it, live through it. It was during the period? Yeah, right at the beginning. And so I just decided, so for me, people like Frank Barron, I talked to Frank Barron about it psychologically in dreams and things like that. He always made himself available. Personally, we went to Europe together. We did things together. It was great. But the person who emotionally stood by me the most clearly was Mike Murphy. Really? And also Jerry Brown.

[78:19]

Wonderful. Jerry Brown called me right after that and said, Dick, whatever this is about, I'm with you. Jerry is great. But Michael was really available as a friend. Wonderful. Unequivocally. I've never... I've known him, but I've never known him well. I knew his parents. Because in the 1940s, when I first went down there, they had the place. The movie East of Eden is partly based on them and the two brothers, which are Michael and... Dennis Murphy. Right. Anyway, so I decided, so, I mean, people, you know, there's somebody who went to Harvard in three years as a fabulous person, but he's quoted as saying, I'm going to bring the wood for Baker's Immolation.

[79:24]

I mean, the vehemence, the hatred the sheer emotional directed at me all the time. And I survived because, I mean, when Frank said this kind of thing, I thought, well, yes. But for me, it was like, this has happened. This is what these people are doing. I know what I did. I know how I felt. My My life is to continue to practice. Now, how am I going to practice in this situation? So I practiced in this situation, which included walking to Tassajara. But I wasn't walking as a retribution, as some people thought, or something, or repentance. I just had always thought, I'd like to walk to Tosara sometime, find a route. So I suddenly, in the spur of the moment, I couldn't do anything, so I walked.

[80:27]

We should include that. Well, I walked. And from there we go to the government settlement? Yeah. But I took a full year to see what would happen. I lived in the apartment. There was so much hatred, I'm told, that people were scared to come visit me because they'd be seen going in the door. As you remember, I wrote a review. That was years later. Really? She was outside the door. She was outside the door. It was much later. Ah, I got you. This happened in 83. She was outside the door in like 87. No kidding. It was four years. That's a long time. Yeah. And things, maybe even later, I'd have to look.

[81:27]

But anyway, I... I waited a year to see if things would get better. Because... From my sense, my sense was I was married to all these people. I expected to know them all my life. I expected to be practicing and make life decisions with them and through them and suddenly They didn't want to make life decisions with me and through me. And so I had to reevaluate everything, and everything I'd developed at Green Ghost in San Francisco and so forth, I had to walk away from. So I waited a year. And then David Padwell called me. It's on. And then David Padwell called me and said, maybe you'd like my house in Santa Fe.

[82:31]

I said, okay, I'll look at it. So I went to Santa Fe and I started living there, 84. But anyway, it was a whole process and of course I went to Europe and I was in two conferences with somebody in the Zen Center, the same person who wanted to bring wood to my emolition, said, if you go to Europe, we'll never let you come back to San Francisco. It was almost like they didn't want me to have any identity outside of the Zen Center. And I had no identity outside the Zen Center, so they were completely in charge of the narrative of my identity. But in In Germany, Dalai Lama was extremely supportive. He said the Oracle, the Tibetan Oracle, said everything's going to be all right. And I had a good contact with him, and he just made himself completely available. How did you manage that relationship?

[83:36]

How did it happen? Well, Dick Blum, when the Dalai Lama... wanted to come to, that Dick Blum had been a mountain climber or used to go to Nepal. He knew the Dalai Lama. The US government would not give the Dalai Lama a visa because of China. So he got the Dalai Lama a tourist visa. But then he got the mayor of San Francisco to give police protections to the Dalai Lama when he came. So as a head of state, because the federal government wouldn't recognize him. So then Dick Blum called me up and said, could he stay at Gringotts? Would you take care of him? So the Dalai Lama in 88, one or two.

[84:38]

And we had a big meal for him with a hundred people or something at Green's as a special thing. But Dalai Lama stayed at Greenville's for eight days and in those days he had no entourage, just a few people. And we just hung out together for eight days. So then when the crisis happened in 83, it happened that I was invited to give a lecture at this conference in Altbach, Austria. And the Dalai Lama was also invited to the same conference. I actually got confused and I thought this was the conference that the Transpersonal Association was doing in Davos. So I called up probably, who does, Stan Grof. I called up Stan Grof or somebody and said, Is this conference the same conference, the Davos conference?

[85:42]

He said, no, no, this is a different conference, but since I'm talking to you on the phone, won't you come? So I came to the Davos conference, where the Dalai Lama was, and I came to the Altbach conference in Austria, which the Dalai Lama was at both. And I was told that threatened that if I go to those conferences, you will not have a place here when you come back. But I went anyway. I said, geez, how can you tell me that? I'm going to go. I gave talks about it. And that's where I became friends with him. with Rupert Sheldrake and a whole bunch of people. So you had known the Dalai Lama already? Yes, because the K'nei Green Gels were in caves. So then I'd known that his Holy, and I'd known Thich Nhat Hanh, because I'd given some talks in New York to Thich Nhat Hanh, and we'd become friends. And then he came and he wanted me to have a place in France with him.

[86:49]

And he wanted to build a retreat for himself at Tassajara. Really? And it was during the Thich Nhat Hanh's visit at Tassajara that Anna and I really completely fell in love. And that's why the shoes outside the door thing, because people noticed her shoes were outside the door at my cabin. so i was in uh an ecstatic state with her but we weren't lovers and uh so then when then uh when i went to germany for the two conferences afterwards i went to and stayed with Thich Nhat Hanh for about a month or so. Where? At his place in France. and I'd wash dishes. The French people are short, and the French people from the 1700s or so, when this farmhouse was built or whatever it was, were really short.

[87:55]

So the sink was way down here. I had it down there on my thighs, and I had to bend way down, but I washed all the dishes. And Steyer took it on. He had me editing some things and looking at things. And then I went back to America. he wrote a letter to the Zen Center saying Thich Nhat Richard Baker is the hope of American Buddhism and Catherine Thanis then, who is now dead, who used to work with me at what then became My Disciple, but first worked with me at UC Extension when I was organizing conferences. Then she became a student. She read this letter from Thich Nhat Hanh and she said, Baker Roshi can even snow the Dalai Lama in Thich Nhat Hanh. People were calling me a mind fucker.

[88:57]

So anyway, so then I came, then I still waited out a year. Gerald Weishler, who's now one of my main successors, met me at the Davos conference and then came and sent a sister to practice with me. But after a year, it wasn't going to get better, so I moved to Santa Fe. I could stop there. And I called the new organization the Western Zen Center, but the legal name was the Dharma Center. And that was in 87? Oh, 87. All right. And Lawrence Rockefeller was somebody who just continued supporting me. And Ned Johnson, I could no longer pay for Sophia Sally to go to Brown, so Ned Johnson took on paying the remainder of his own Fidelity Mutual Fund.

[90:09]

He finished paying for her education for a couple years. Sally nearly had a nervous breakdown. She really could hardly study when this all happened. Where is she now? She's now teaching art, and is a painter, artist, at the Athenian School in Oakland. Wow. Which is a prep school, an associated school. Conceptually, it was solemn. The school that Marie Louise's great-grandfather started, strangely. So he helped her and Lawrence, I went to see him in New York and he helped me buy the property in Santa Fe. And he was like, Dick, you're going to need some money. And I said, yes. And he said, I think I told you this the other day, he said, let's start with $300,000. And the check will be waiting for you when you get to Preston.

[91:12]

Get back to Sanford. Wow. Yeah. That's not... Those details aren't quite correct about the amount and the dates, but I think we can strike that out later. Okay, good. All right.

[91:35]

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