The question is the theme of the founding of Zen Center. Well, the founding of Zen Center was the fruit of my deciding to leave New York and see if I could find a Zen teacher. My interest in finding a Zen teacher came mainly from Ezra Pound somehow, and I suppose reading D. T. Suzuki. I had some idea if I went to California, I might find a Chinese Zen teacher who spoke Chinese probably and had a wide circle of acolytes behind him, around him, and I might be able to be nearby

[01:17]

I imagined in my image of this about 50 feet away from the guy, hardly able to be close enough to hear him, and he would speak only Chinese. And you don't speak Chinese. And I do not speak Chinese. But I had this idea that somehow just to be there would be good. Because you felt that Zen was a Chinese thing. What I'm teaching and practicing basically was created by the Chinese. I see. In contradistinction from Indian Buddhism. But what Japan has developed is a version or refinement or further articulation of Chinese Zen. And I knew very little about Japan. I knew much more about China. Because of the embeddedness that you had with Ezra Pound and Suzuki.

[02:20]

And D.T. Suzuki, yes. And also, one of the first books I ever bought, other than textbooks and novels, was the I Ching. I saw it in a bookstore in New York, and I immediately felt connected with it, and I bought the I Ching, and I studied it and things. So there was already some kind of resonant connection. In that wonderful translation, which was... And I got the coins, and now I have the sticks as well. That's right. We practiced that quite... So the sticks and the coins were functioning to get me to San Francisco, somehow. And... You were living in New York.

[03:21]

I was living in Hoboken. In Hoboken. I'd moved to Hoboken because it was cheaper and because when I was, this goes all over the place, but I was... And we're talking about the year more or less. I was living between C and D on 4th Street in a very Hasidic neighborhood. and very dangerous neighborhood. About what year? 1958. 59, 59. And I decided to move to Hoboken because two things happened. I got infested with bedbugs, as Frank O'Hara had in a nearby apartment up the road. And I didn't know it was bedbugs at first. I thought I had hives or something. I'd wake up in the morning with all this. And one night I...

[04:23]

thought, couldn't be bed bugs. So I got a flashlight, and after I went to bed, I turned on the flashlight quickly, and this sea of bed bugs disappeared through the sheet. And so I realized that. So then I made a contemporary mistake at that time, is I sprayed the bed with DDT. So then I went to sleep in it, And I woke up the next day with a head like crazy. And ever since then, if I smell DDT or anything like that, I have a immediately visceral reaction. So that visceral reaction also may have led me to California. But in any case, so because of that bed bug experience and the DDT experience, I was outside... two doors down from my Fourth Street apartment building, which is completely a Sloan, sitting where there was a street lamp.

[05:34]

You look for something where there's light, right? The old joke. So I'm sitting there, and believe it or not, I was reading Shakespeare. And while I'm sitting there, suddenly this whole group of kids, about 17, 18, etc., were running around the street in front of me, and one of them stopped, kind of one of the leaders, and he pulls out a gun. And he just stood there about 15, 20 feet from me with a gun pointed right at my head. And I looked at him, and I was absolutely certain he was not going to shoot me. But I looked at him, and he looked at me, and then he put the gun away, and then they started playing. Two nights later, a 14-year-old boy was killed on my doorstep. So I decided to move to Hoboken. Because I knew Paul Goodman had been at Hoboken, and I knew Paul Goodman a bit. I knew Paul also. Yeah. So... And I had an affair with his first wife.

[06:37]

Well, you probably did. I didn't know her. But I knew he supposedly taught his daughter how to masturbate, which, if it's true, I shouldn't have said that. Why not? Probably a mistake. Paul was a sexual... Active. Person. Multisexual active. Yes, absolutely. And a great writer. Yes. The lordly Hudson hardly flowing under the green road cliffs. It's a great poem. Yes. It's a great poem. He was a super... A literary figure in those days. Very honored. Yeah. I used to see him quite often at Bob Smithson's and other places. Bob Smithson did the Spiral Jetty and then died in a plane crash observing it. But he was a close friend. Anyway, so all of these things were going on and I... I had a kind of nervous breakdown when my sister, I had to bring my sister back to a mental hospital.

[07:43]

Oh, wow. And I saw her go into this room that was like bedlam. People running around. And I thought, oh, God, my poor sister, who'd gone to Smith College of the Mrs. Smith Scholarship. And yet she, anyway, and I, she wanted me to help her. I was not able to help her. And in some ways, I've been helping other people instead of her because I couldn't help her. She finally came to San Francisco and committed suicide living with us. Anyway. So I decided to go to San Francisco, and Earl, I saw Earl, he coming back from Italy. Because Earl and you had been in the Merchant? Marines and close friends, and I had lived in his apartment for some years and stuff like that. Where, in New York? 129 West 69th Street. Wow. Okay. And then I lived in Hoboken.

[08:44]

And so I saw him and I said, I'm having this, you know. And he said, stop babying yourself. And he said, you ought to go to California. And I thought I'd go to Los Angeles. He said, go to San Francisco. And it turns out he kind of hated San Francisco, but he thought San Francisco would be better for me than L.A. He was right. Yeah, he was right. So I went there. So I packed up all my stuff. I had about several thousand book library at the time and about five or six cats in Hoboken and a five-room apartment over on a street with 13 bars. And I could see the Hudson River out in front of me. Anyway, I was on the fifth floor. So I packed up all my books, left them at A. Bennett Book Service. I don't know, is this kind of detail interesting? Yes, absolutely. So I left them at A. Bennett Bookshop, where I worked for A. Bennett Bookshop, because they did all the shipping for Grove.

[09:52]

I wanted to work for Grove. And when I went to get a job at Grove, they said, go to our book service. So I did that, and then from the book service, I went to work for Grove, eventually. Wow. So I brought all these cartons of books, about 20 or 30, and left them in the A-bed at book service so that at some point I'd get them shipped, but I had no money. So Earl, I went down to the Greyhound bus terminal with Earl, and he bought me a ticket to San Francisco. And if I remember correctly, it was $82. And so I got on the bus, and you're on the bus for a couple days or something. Yes, at least. Yeah. I can't remember. More like three or four. Yeah. So I... And I think I had... $32 to my name, cash, when I arrived in San Francisco. And... So I...

[10:57]

Arrived in San Francisco. Did you know anyone? I didn't know I knew anyone. I just went. And I had one kind of suitcase, these vinyl-type suitcases that are hard sides. They don't have wheels in those days. And I checked it at the Greyhound Terminal in a locker. And then I walked around New York City. You mean San Francisco? I walked around San Francisco. And I walked a lot, all the way around, looking at things, and just didn't know anything. Random. But I did know the 8th Street Bookshop very well. So when I saw City Lights, I knew City Lights, because the parallel partner romance bookshop was City Lights. In New York, it was 8th Street Bookshop. So I went into City Lights. Yeah, I went into City Lights. And there was Shig. Shig. Do you remember Shig?

[12:01]

Of course I remember Shig very well. And Shig always told people he was an Eskimo, but he was Japanese. Yes. So I said to Shig, Hello, you know, I'm Dick Baker. I just came from New York. He said, do you know anybody in San Francisco? And I said... No, I don't know, but maybe I knew Don Allen was in San Francisco. Oh boy, yeah. So he said, oh, I have Don Allen's phone number. So he called up Don Allen, or gave it, and I called. By the way, I still remember Z-Lite's bookstore phone number, D-O-2-8-1-9-3. And I can call it, and it is still the next bookstore's number. Larry is still alive. He's still alive, though I just got a report from Helen McLeod, who's close to it, that she was just with him the last few days in New York and he's mostly bedridden, she says. I haven't been in touch with him for many years.

[13:02]

We were very friendly. I met him the first week that he came to San Francisco. Really? Wow. At Kenneth Rexworth's. Oh, really? Yeah. Well, I have known him And with his wife at the time. Yeah. And she was a lovely woman. Yeah. I knew him moderately well once he invited me to stay in his big sure house and things. But I didn't really know him really well, but pretty well. Pretty well, yes. So then I... So I called up Don Allen, and I said, Don, I'd only met him at Frank O'Hara a few times, but we knew each other sort of, and I'd worked for Grove Press, and he'd created the Evergreen Review. Of course. Yeah. I knew Don. Yeah. Also. So Don and I became very close friends, almost like a father figure mentor or something. So I called up Don, and he said, come on over, and there's a friend of mine just vacated an apartment in a room, in the attic room of the building I'm living in at 2370 Washington Street, I think.

[14:15]

And I said, oh, I'll come over. I don't know how I got there, but I did get there. And he said, Robin Blazier's here. And strangely, I'd met Robin Blazer in New York because for a while he worked as a librarian at the Harvard Widener Library. And when I was in the bookstores, I'd see him, and we just would talk now and then, briefly walk down the street. But I didn't have anything but this casual meeting him at bookstores. I mean, two or three times only. But there he was at Don's. And I don't think Robert Duncan was there, but maybe. And Robin Blazer's partner, lover at the time, And so I came over, and I rented the apartment up above, which was $32 a month, I think, or something like that.

[15:16]

I have to get these numbers straight. Yeah, it doesn't matter. Yeah, but I had no money, obviously, and I needed a job. So I went out the next day and went from bookstore to bookstore somehow, and I ended up working for Paper Editions with Lou Lengfeld. who owned Paper Editions and at Books Inc. If you remember Books Inc., the bookstore. There's still a Books Inc. in Carmel, but I think he doesn't own it anymore. And so I found a job the following week, and then I hung out often with Don, because Don was just downstairs, two stories, on the first ground floor. And various other things happened, of course. But I still had in my mind, I want to find a Chinese Zen master.

[16:19]

But I didn't know how to go about that. So I, of course, walked around Chinatown, looked around. I had no plan. I was just following my large nose. And... I started going because it was fairly near. Now another funny thing that a few years later I was living on Fillmore Street, 2518 Fillmore Street with Ginny. I had been in a small apartment first with Ginny over next to the Broadway tunnel going into North Beach, but just above that, the entrance. I had a one-room studio apartment. But when Ginny and I got together and then got married, I moved to Fillmore Street.

[17:21]

And then... And I met Jonathan Altman in New York briefly. He doesn't remember this, but I'm pretty sure I saw him and we went out. He suggested we go out and look for that guy who wrote books about psychiatry and he was kind of a little bit violent. What was his name? I can't think of it now, but he was quite fashionable and famous back then. We went out looking for him because he was supposed to be at some other party. Now, Jonathan says he doesn't remember this at all. But anyway, I knew Jonathan slightly in New York, but that's all. Yes. So then Jonathan shows up in San Francisco, right? And he says, I said, well, he said, I was told to look for you by a medium. What was her name?

[18:23]

Barbara something who did, you know, did channeling. And he said, I went to see her and she said, this channel, you should meet Richard Baker or see Richard Baker. Well, he came to San Francisco and looked for a place to live. And so when I saw him, I said, well, where are you living? He said, I'm living at 237 Washington Street. He'd rented my room where I had lived before in Washington Street. He was sent to meet me, and he ended up living in the place I'd vacated with no connection with me. The synchronicity. The resident field. So anyway, so I lived there, and it was fairly near Japantown, and I started going to samurai movies there. Sometimes Don and I would go to Samurai movies together. And at some point, I...

[19:26]

Found San Francisco Zen Center. Now, maybe we should stop right now for a few minutes, okay? Okay, but the Zen Center had been established? No, no. It was not a Zen Center. It was just where Suzuki Roshi was the kind of missionary priest. I'm going to pause. Okay. Okay, now we're recording, supposedly. Let me just say about Jack Kerouac, I met Jack only once at a party at the Artist's Club. Sure. Larry Rivers was and so forth. Used to play. Anyway, Jack Kerouac came up to me. I, for some reason, had been somewhere uptown and I had a shirt and a tie on. Wow. As did Edward Avedisian. And so... Jack, rather drunk, came up to me and said, pulled my tie, and he said, who made you?

[20:31]

And I said, I've been made so many times, I can't remember. And then a few minutes later, Edward came up to me and said, Jack Kerouac just came up to me and asked, who made you? And I said, well, what did you say? He said, I'm a self-made man. That was my only encounter. Oh, and then Jack did a little drawing of me that looks like T.S. Eliot. And I think I have it somewhere. A little sketch. I don't know why he drew it. That was my only encounter with him. So let's go back to the question. of the founding of Zen Zen. Now, I apologize to the tape and the machine and everybody for digressing in so many digressive ways. But for me, my experience is I'm something like a cowboy with a herd of information animals And I've got to herd them in one direction.

[21:35]

As I try to keep them in the herd, they turn into anecdotes in this direction and that direction. But I'm herding toward the creation of the sensei. And you can hear me saying that, herding along. So I will be able to remember, recall at some point, how I first found out about it. There was, I heard there was sitting at the Soto Zen Mission. That's what we call it, Zen Mission. where Suzuki Roshi was newly installed as the priest, following the calligrapher whose name I can't remember quite now, but it will come to me. Me too. Roshi something. And in between there was another person who was a Buddhist academic and maybe scholar, who was the interim priest.

[22:43]

Maybe he was the son of a priest, but he was the interim priest before Sukershi came. And of course, if we Google Gordon Ronson Ford, we can find out the name probably of this guy. Yes. I have it somewhere. Yeah, I have it too. But anyway, so this guy was nice enough, but completely boring. He talked about Buddhism, etc. He was unbelievably boring. But I only saw him because he substituted for Sukershi a couple of times. But Suzuki Roshi came from Japan. Yeah. And he always wanted to go to America. But his teachers didn't want him to come to America too much. They didn't say no, but they kept giving him projects to do, like rebuild his own temple and stuff like that. So finally he got permission to come. And there's photographs of him in his robes. They gave him money to buy Western clothes.

[23:46]

But he didn't buy Western clothes. He says, I'm a Mapa, wear my robes. So, and when he first came to San Francisco, supposedly he went out begging on the streets. And it turned out he discovered that didn't work. So, but I know, I now I know how I found out about Sunsetter. I was with a friend of mine named who was a painter, not a really great painter, but gay, who I'd known in Cambridge. David something. His father was head of the Hawaii Honolulu Hospital or something. David Shaw, not Shaw, David something, anyway. I knew him, and I decided to go to the Samurai movie with him. or a restaurant, and we were in the George Fields Bookshop, which was the esoteric bookshop in San Francisco on Polk Street.

[24:49]

And so we were going to go to the Samurai movie, and while we were there, I was talking to David Walker, David Walker, and I said, And then, you know, this guy raises his sword. And I raised my sword like, imaginary sword like this. And George Fields was sitting at the thing. He said, you should meet Suzuki Roshi. Suzuki Sensei, he said. He was called Sensei at the time. And I said, oh, okay. He said, he's the other Zen, meaning not Rinzai. So I said, okay. And he said, he's giving a lecture tonight. So I went to the lecture, and I'd been to Tillich's lectures at Harvard, and the head of the philosophy department, named Aitken or something like that, who was clearly more alcohol than philosophy, and I found Tillich quite boring. So I sat down in this lecture, and he was what he was saying.

[25:56]

I'd never seen anyone. The only time I'd ever seen anyone similar was probably a Sufi named Shukrullah Ali in the Near East when I was working on a ship with Earl. There was this young man in his 30s, he seemed old to me at 20, with his son, and they were down in Massawa, Ethiopia, earning money for their family who lived up in the mountains. and they were unloading the ships and all, and he used to buy us Pepsi Colas and stuff like that. And he impressed me as the kind of person you want to be on this planet. So when I met Sukhirashi, he was the second person I met who, this is what I'd hoped a human being would be like. So I began going back. And I found out he did Zazen in the morning, so I arranged to, I was living on 2518 Fillmore Street, and I arranged, came down every morning, went to Zazen, and then I went back.

[27:04]

Where was the center then? It was 1881 Bush Street. Uh-huh. And so I started sitting there regularly and met Graham Petschey, who I just helped do his funeral recently. He became completely alcoholic and destroyed his life, really. But anyway, we were very, very close friends. It was a kind of bromance-type relationship. We were always with each other. And his family, his wife and his child, his son David, who's now also an alcoholic. I think. David was born a few days before Sally. So I'd never known married people up to that point. And when I became friends with Graham and his wife Pauline, I thought, if I start knowing couples, maybe I plan to get married.

[28:09]

And then I'd get married to Virginia, on May 26, 1962. So, this is in 62. When was it when you met Suzuki Roshi? Probably. Yeah, probably. In May of 62, I married Jim. And I suppose I must have started at Zen Center in around September of 61. And I must have arrived in San Francisco on the Greyhound bus in December of 59 or December or January of 60, somewhere in there. Good. So we're beginning to get a timeline. Yeah.

[29:11]

Now, you met Jenny after you were going to Zen Center? Yes. Pretty much the same time, but after. And I was working at Paper Editions, and we could almost say she courted me by bringing me chocolate-covered ants. I was I'd met her I ended up knowing quite a lot of artists Mike Dixon who became rather well known as a painter his wife Trudy Dixon edited Zen Mind Beginner's Mind and you had known quite a few artists in New York yes I had I hung out regularly in the Cedar Street Tavern, and Morris Lewis was there, and Rothko.

[30:21]

I don't remember if Rothko was there. I knew Rothko. Yeah, I remember the Cedar Street very well. I used to go to San Remo first. Absolutely. And then Cedar Street. I spent so much time in the Remo. And we met at that tavern down the street. Yeah. And then in San Francisco, because like the first day, I met Robert Duncan and Don Allen and Blazer and Jack Spicer and so forth. Wonderful people. Yeah. And I'd known about Jack Spicer and these folks partly from Earl, because when Earl lived in San Francisco, these are people he knew as a kind of San Francisco State kid who left high school at 16 or graduated at 15 or 16 and went to Oregon or the state of Washington.

[31:25]

Do you remember what date it was when you first met Errol and the Merchant Marine? Well, I left... Now we're back in the herd. I left... I decided I would take a year off from HAARP. It was the first step to deciding. In varying ways, I wasn't getting straight As, sometimes close to that, but I wasn't. I also didn't like the idea of having a Harvard degree because I didn't want to start with status. I wanted to start from the bottom. I wanted to start from scratch. That's one reason I… But it had been a family tradition in your family.

[32:25]

Well, my father had taught at Harvard and been a graduate student at Harvard. and my eighth great-grandfather, Thomas Dudley and Winthrop. As I understand it, Thomas Dudley had been the first president of New England and the second governor of Massachusetts. And his friend Winthrop was the first governor of Massachusetts. And Winthrop founded Boston and Dudley founded Cambridge. There was some competition between them about which would be the real city. And Dudley's daughter was Anne Bradstreet, the first poet of America. Female poet. Wow. And so, and when I was young, my family still had furniture from Lord Guilford Dudley written in the inside drawer.

[33:27]

You pulled open the drawer and it was written Lord Guilford Dudley. That was all sold and I had a great uncle who had six clipper ships. His name was Captain Dan Dudley. Booth Tarkington wrote about him because he was one of the last clipper ship owners. But he didn't end all at once. He had it successfully. That's amazing. What date was it when you were in the Merchant Marine with Earl? Well, I left, I decided at the end of my junior year to go to sea for the summer. So my aunt, Dorothy Dudley, had her partner at the time, later they were married, John Ginley, an Irish man. Irish friends with the Irish Mafia, if there's such a thing.

[34:32]

He arranged for me to have a letter which said something like, from somebody else who was head of the NMU or something, treat this boy with all consideration. So I had this letter. So I went to the, in the summer, probably, it must have been like June or something. June what? Well, I don't know. June, after my... junior year. Well, I was in the class of 58, so it had to be 57, 58, 56, 57, so it had to be 56. So I was in early summer going to the Union Hall. Well, it turned out Earl had been offered, Earl who, as I said, went to high school around 16 in Minnesota, in Michigan, Wisconsin, now in Wisconsin, Superior, Wisconsin.

[35:39]

He went to some college in Oregon, probably, and he only lasted a semester. Then he went to San Francisco and went to San Francisco State for about a year, maybe. Then he went to Los Angeles and became part of the Gerald Hurd, all this Huxley scene. Earl had a genius for connecting with people. And so even as a late teen, 20-year-old, people like... Gerald Hurd, you know Gerald Hurd? Yes, of course. All wanted to be friends with Earl. So he was included in whatever scene, whatever the hippest scene was. Yeah, he was very social and he was very good at it. And he was interesting. Yeah, anyway. But you met him actually... Well, so then he went to New York. And he worked... I can hardly imagine him working for an accounting firm.

[36:45]

But he got a job. He had to support himself. working for an accounting firm. And the accounting firm guy's son did not want the business. So he offered the business, just gave the accounting business to Earl. And Earl said, I do not want to become the owner of an accounting business. Can you imagine? But he hadn't worked on the ships in the Great Lakes, so he had merchant marine papers. So he decided to go to sea. So he was in the same union hall I was deciding to go to sea. And he noticed me. I was always sitting. I had nothing to do. They told me just to go sit in the room until the ship could come. And I'd shown them this letter. And Earl noticed I was sitting there drawing. I don't draw worth a damn, but I was drawing, you know. And Earl came over to meet me and asked what I was drawing.

[37:47]

And then we took the subway back to New York together. I was staying at my aunt, Dorothy Dudley's. He was at an apartment, 129 West 69th Street. And I... So we were kind of... becoming friends. Then he got a ship, because they didn't give out ships easily, because they had all kinds of relationships with who's this and that. It was a question between the NMU and the ship owners. Well, this was the SIU. SIU. Yes, okay. So we were in the SIU hiring hall, and Earl, in order to get a ship, had joined some kind of training program, which meant that you... swept the room or turned the lights off or something like that.

[38:52]

But also sometimes they asked him to deliver anonymously envelopes to somebody in Philadelphia, things like that. So they would supply him with a car and a driver, and he would drive to some address in Philadelphia, and then he'd go and knock on the door and get an envelope with that. So he did a few things like that for them. It's all sort of edgy mafia type stuff. So they were going to give him a ship before me. But they were only going to give either of us a ship that no one wanted. It was going to the Near East in midsummer, where when I went in Massasawa, Ethiopia, it was 146 degrees Fahrenheit. So he came over to me and said, we've got a ship. There's room on the ship for you, too, if you want to be on the Steel Voyager. which was the C-3 owned by the Isthmian line. I think it's Isthmian. That might have been the Robin Longship.

[39:53]

But anyway, so at that point, we got a ship. We were on the ship together, all together. I was two years before the mast. We came back for three months or so, and then we shipped out again to South Africa. We went to the Near East, Iran, Iraq, and so forth, and up the Euphrates. And all this time, Earl and I could just sit on the deck and talk about things. We told the other sailors we were cousins of some sort. So we could get two deck chairs and sit on the deck and read poetry and stuff like that. They all thought we were a little weird, but they accepted us. And so I did that, and then that's when I met Earl. And you were already reading Ezra Pound? I was reading Ezra Pound, and on the ship I read all of Proust. all the volumes. I read most of Ezra Pyle. I had a bunk bed, which the entire side of the bunk bed toward the center of the ship was books.

[40:57]

I slept next to the books. There must have been 40 or 50 books in bed with me. And the books were there? Oh, no, I brought them. You brought them? Yeah. And including James Judd's? Yeah. I even bought... Finnegan's Wake in a bookstore in Baltimore when we stopped briefly. And I still have the early Ezra Pound books and things I bought in Cape Town, South Africa. Far out. Yeah. And Earl was reading the same books. And he was reading Proust. Your books. His own. Of his own. Reading Proust parallel to each other. No kidding. Yeah. So we discussed each volume together. That's amazing. Yeah, so we had this connection of establishing not only a personal history together by telling each other about our lives for years, but we established a literary history so that Proust is practically like my past. I mean, it's like Proust created a life which is now part of my life.

[42:02]

But the two of you have very different backgrounds, right? Well, I was basically from the Midwest. I'd lived there from a year and a half old until 10 or 11. In Indiana? In Indiana. Well, my father taught at Culver Military Academy, because it was the only job, I guess, he could get out of Harvard and MIT during the Depression. And Earl? He lived in Superior, Wisconsin, or somewhere in Wisconsin, and he was a Midwesterner, and his Father worked in Alaska. But they lived in Minnesota, Wisconsin. And Earl was another foundling. And his family name was? McGrath. McGrath. And that was his father. Well, it turns out, I don't know how public this should be, it turned out he discovered that his real father was his father's brother.

[43:07]

I see. And so he has his father's brother's middle name. But he didn't know that until years later. And he had a sister and a couple of brothers. And when did he die? Oh, four or five years ago. Four or five years. As I said, he was... And you were great friends for... Oh, for my entire life. Yeah. And he taught me simple things, like how to order in a restaurant, how to function as a semi-adult. I mean, I was 20 and he was 25, and he was much more sophisticated. Although you had grown up in New England. Well, only in the summers. Yeah, in the summers. Because I lived in New England. My grandparents on my mother's side had a beach house at Fortune's Rocks Beach.

[44:10]

And we would spend the summer, three months of the summer there every year, up to about the middle of the war, when we could no longer drive because of gasoline restrictions. And so, obviously, you knew Earl before your connection to Zen and the Zen Center. Yes, right. But my connection to Zen and Zen Center was not separate from my connection to Proust and Ezra Pound and so forth. So I brought that sense of a literary world of experimentation and counterculture and suspicion of the Western culture and also... So the continuity is Indiana, New England, New York, San Francisco.

[45:21]

Yeah, right. And also Bohemian New York. Yes, because I lived in the village and I lived in Lower East Side and I lived in Hoboken and my aunt being one of the co-founders of the really the Museum of Modern Art with Dorothy Miller and Alfred Barr. I knew, because she lived right here on West 13th Street. Dudley. Dudley, my aunt. She was part of the Bohemian scene. She was almost married now. Spencer and Stuart Davis were friends. And so she was part of the... Calder was a friend. And in her apartment, she had little Calders that were given to her and all kinds of things. Paintings. So I felt... I brought my Bohemian... vision of life to the San Francisco Zen Center, which turns out the San Francisco Zen Center didn't like, didn't accept my bohemian view of the world.

[46:23]

And that was the crux of the crisis with the Zen Center. Yes, and that didn't happen until somewhat later. Yeah, so it was built into the situation that if I'm going to be an authentic practitioner, I'm going to be authentic to my bohemian feelings about how you don't have to be married, etc. On the other hand, you did get married. I know, but we had a semi-open marriage. Yes, you did. Yeah. When I did fall in love with Lucy, who I'm now in a lot of communication with, We both recognized we were falling in love. I think we were in the same book, but on different pages. We've discussed, the two of us, in recent years. But I left her in a motel in Carmel.

[47:26]

Well, I drove all the way to San Francisco and asked Virginia's permission to be lovers with Lucy. And Virginia gave me permission, and I drove back, and Lucy and I became lovers because my rule was the immediate people involved should know what's going on. So I followed that kind of rule, but that kind of rule wasn't sufficient for the San Francisco Zen Center. The problems at the Zen Center didn't come until what year was that? 82, 83. Yeah, so that's a long time from where we were talking about. That was what? A long time. Yes, right. Practically two decades. Yeah, so going back to the Zen Center. Because the next theme that we were interested in was your meeting with Suzuki Roshi, which we just passed.

[48:38]

But that meeting turned out to be a very significant long-term relationship. Oh, the basis of my whole life. More than any other single thing. I think we should talk about how that came about because obviously your first meeting with him was not necessarily that significant. Oh, it sure was. I went to the lecture and there he was and I felt I would say I didn't realize it till later. But phenomenologically, right now, when I'm looking at you, I'm actually looking at myself looking at you.

[49:39]

That you're interior to me. I'm experiencing you as a materiality. And then I project that interiority into the exterior. And I think it's exterior when it actually isn't. So that Somehow I had a feeling for that from quite young. And so when I saw Suzuki Roshi, I saw my projection of my interiority on him and his interiority on me, and I felt his interiority through my interiority. So I felt a profound connection with him instantly. as if I'd met myself in a better form or something. So the next day or a few days later, I used to go to Blanche's.

[50:41]

If you knew Blanche's, which was the kind of place where you could get chowder and various things down on the waterfront in the industrial area. Her husband, I guess, had a fleet of shipping of fishing boats or something. And I worked at Paper Editions, which was a warehouse down there. And I was coming back, and I would go out to lunch, and I was always reading, still the case. I decided to read something as I was walking back from lunch at Blanche's, going to work at the paper editions. And I opened one of D.T. Suzuki's books, and I was thinking as I was walking along, Well, I maybe should practice that, but I'm not good enough to practice it. And I opened up D.T. Suzuki's book, and he virtually never speaks about practice.

[51:45]

He doesn't mention it. I can't get the answer to that on Apple Watch. Well, go jump in the lake. So I... This is new to me. It never happened before. So I said to... So I'm walking along. I'd opened the book. I said to myself, I'm not good enough to practice here. And I opened the book and really the sentence that was right there was, to think you're not good enough is a form of vanity. Right. And I closed up the book and I thought, That's right. So the next day I started practicing, and I've never stopped since. Wow. That's quite a sense. Yeah. Now, when you started practicing, it was with Suzuki Roshi.

[52:49]

Yeah, completely. And what... What is the path from D.T. Suzuki to Suzuki Roshi? Well, D.T. Suzuki presented the ideas. I mean, in a way, from high school on, I was researching Does anybody have anything to say that makes sense to me about what our aliveness is and what our lives can be? And I concluded on the ship, reading Ezra Pound and reading Gita Sukhi and Buddhism and things like that, I concluded, Konsei, I concluded that concluded that Buddhism was the closest thing I knew because I was an atheist before I was born and my family was not religious at all and they were very scientific, evidential world was the only real world.

[53:54]

And that was both the Dudley side and the... My mother would sometimes say, God is goodness. And I'd say, why do you add the extra O? But basically, they were both atheists. I'm always an atheist. I would go into churches and I'd say, if there's a God, strike me down. Here I am. And your father's family was named... My father's family? Yeah. Was Baker and Honeywell and... And Honeywell. ...Gothwaite, no, Gothwaite and Hutchinson are my mother's side. Yeah. But my father's side is Honeywell and Baker and my mother's side is also Mason. I don't know. So the Buddhism... came to you first through D.T., Suzuki, and then through Suzuki Roshi. Well, Suzuki Roshi said to me once, or said to others in your group, but to me it was to me, I think he said, I don't remember how I heard this, but he said, I only have a certain number of years to be in America.

[55:11]

I need to find somebody already prepared for Buddhism. And he said, I think the preparation I need is somebody who's grown up in transcendentalism. That's me. I grew up in New England transcendentalism. And in a lineage which was against merchants, even though my Captain Danville, he was obviously a merchant if he had six clipper ships off and on. But still, the emphasis was you're an artist or a poet or you're a writer or you're a priest or a minister, but not a businessman. Though I've modified my views now, I'm somewhat more accepting of it. Business sensibility. I wish it was more responsible. My family is essentially socialist. But you spent a lot of years doing business of various kinds in the Zen world.

[56:14]

Not really. Really? How did you manage to establish Green Gulch, etc., etc.? Well, that wasn't business. It was establishing a place to meet with people. But it took a lot of money. Yeah, but I... I didn't make the money. I was given the money. And I was only given the money. I would only ask, I would never ask anyone for money just because they had money. Only people I knew or were interested. I remember when I started, when I first saw Tassajara, people said to me, how are you going to pay for this? How can we do this? We only have $6,000 a year. And I said, well, then we only have $6,000 to lose. We should start. I just, I've never had an interest in money at all. No, you have never had an interest in money, but you were able through

[57:18]

networking and relationships to attract people who... Yeah, that's true. And that's, in a sense, an ability which you cultivated or it cultivated you. Yeah. Well, I developed it. I mean, if I did... When you take aptitude tests as a kid, you know, in high school... My aptitude was always nothing to do with business, nothing to do with organization, nothing to do with institutions, completely. I was only interested in poetry and stuff, right? But I discovered I have administrative and organizational skills. Yes. But it was completely a discovery. I had no idea. Fortunately, it worked. was very productive. Yeah. Well, I remember I went to work because I had no job.

[58:21]

And I didn't want a job. I didn't want to be part of our society which creates wars. That's one reason I didn't want a Harvard degree. And so, you know, my image was I'd collect pop bottles and turn them in or something. Or I always worked in warehouses and things. I had menial jobs. But at some point, meeting Virginia, and then we had a baby coming. I had to support my family. So a friend of mine, or somebody I knew slightly, said, we worked for UC Extension. And he said, why don't you apply for a job at UC Extension? I think they need somebody. So Estelle Kane, Herb Kane's sister, was doing the Pablo Casals master class. And she wasn't Kane, she was Cone. Her maiden name was Cone?

[59:22]

Yes. Okay. Was Herb Kane's name Cone? Yes. Oh, they changed it to Kane? Yes. Anyway, one of my students was David Cohn at some point. Cohn and Cohn. From somewhere along the line, they changed it to Cain. Yeah. Anyway, yeah. So I went to work for Estelle, and I was hired as a senior clerk typist. Wow. At $319 a month. and I did not know how to type. So Estelle would dictate letters to me, and I've always been fairly incompetent and never learned anything. And so Estelle Cain would dictate a letter to me, and she'd say, do you have the letter ready yet? And I'd say, it'll be on your desk tomorrow morning.

[60:23]

So when she left at 4 or 5 in the afternoon, I would then start typing the best I could with my fingers, and I'd call up Ginny, because I'd never studied English, I'd never studied anything, I always just I just depended on my native wit to take tests. I hardly ever studied in school. I would call up Ginny, and I'd say, Ginny, where do I punctuate? How do I do this? She'd tell me on the phone how to punctuate the letter and things like that. Wow. I didn't know how to type, so I usually had to do it two or three times with carbon copies and stuff like that. and on onion skin. And then I would get it done, and when Estelle came the next morning, there was the letter. And I was very impressed with Pablo Casals. He, before the class would start, the master class, and a couple of the people had just been at the

[61:31]

Russian thing where Van Cliburn won prizes, a similar thing, you know. And he would come back and won second and third place in this Russian music thing, which Van Cliburn won at one time. And I would watch him, and he would just sit. And everything would be set up, and the things would be, and the students would come, and he would just sit. And I was really impressed with the feeling of it. And then he would get up and he would start and he'd say to somebody like, you know, you're hitting the note, but your hand is not beautiful. If you put your fingering this way instead of that way, your hand looks beautiful. And if your hand is beautiful, the note will be more beautiful. And how did you happen to be in this situation? because Estelle came and UC Extension hired me to be her assistant for the Pablo Casales master class.

[62:36]

Ah, for the Pablo Casales. And Pablo Casales, I still remember very clearly, he said to the people playing, he said, when you play, hear the one note. And he said, when I play, I know that the people in the front row are not really paying attention. I know the people up in the balcony are paying attention. I can tell which ones are paying attention and which are not. And I can feel sweat running down my side under my arm. And I hear the one note. And I thought, now that's a mind I want. That's a mind I understand. That's remarkable coincidence or synchronicity that that happened to you through Estelle. Yeah. And through you having that job, which that job turned into a very significant portion of your life.

[63:46]

Oh, yes. So then they were going to... I was only hired for this... short time for the public, so a few months. Gordon was director, head of UC Extension. He met with all the employees at some point, and he said, we have too much turnover. We need a better... So I went up to him afterwards and I said, you know, because I had a baby, so no job. I said, I'm just about to be turned over and I would like to continue working for UC Extension. So he sent me to Engineering and Sciences Extension, which was run by Ken Downs. And Ken Downs was a bit of a creep, ambitious, and he didn't get along with They were kind of enemies with the head of UC Extension.

[64:50]

But they hired me. And he hired me by saying, You know, I didn't know anything. I hadn't prepared myself for life at all. Still haven't. And I said to him, he said to me, well, I'll hire you if you can come up with enough programs that'll pay your salary. And I said, what do you mean programs? He said, well, we do programs here, you know. And I said, well, okay. And he... He said, come back with enough programs and show me the budgets and how you'll be supported. I didn't know how to do a budget. I didn't know anything. So I went home. But I do have some kind of intelligence. And I can think of a lot of things. I don't know why. So I thought of about 65 different projects, programs. And I tried to work out budgets for them.

[65:51]

I imagined 20 people coming and I looked up in the brochures how many to take. So I came back with five or six ideas and a whole list of other ideas. And he hired me. I didn't know what I was doing. And then I started programs. And that led to the LSD Conference, led to the Berklee Poetry Conference. But before that, there were other projects. Oh yeah, lots of, mostly I did special projects. And I'd started something called, with another person. We started something called the San Francisco Bay Area Science Guide. So we read all the local science magazines. and then wrote little articles about them and sent it out to high schools and things like that, if I remember it correctly. And so then I became, I ran this thing and I did the layout, I did the printing, I had a printer in Gilroy and I did the layout and I knew how to do it and I could set it up.

[67:01]

You learned, you self-taught. I self-taught all that stuff, yeah. So then they do the offset printing and then it would be, you know, fended around. So how many years were you there? And I also reviewed at that time Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, which was published. And that book, I thought, well, this is right. That was one of my introductions to the environmental crisis. So I wrote a review of that book. When was that? 1968. or something like that. Wait a minute. Okay. So... No, it had to be... It had to be more like 63. Yes. That sounds better. Yeah, 63, 64. And I worked for UC Extension for five years. That's all? I think so. I worked up until 68, and that's when Tsukuyoshi asked me to go to Japan.

[68:05]

Okay, and 68... You stopped working for UC Extension. So you started somewhere around 63. Yeah, and I did the LSD conference in 66, I think. I believe so. I did the Mercy Poetry Conference in 65. Mm-hmm. And when I did the Berkeley Poetry Conference, what I decided to do was I wanted to educate myself. So I thought, anything I want to know about now that I have this institution to work with, I can invite people from anywhere in the world or anywhere in America who I want to learn something from. So I can invite Houston Smith or... That's who I was talking about at the Divinity School. Yeah. Houston Smith. Yeah. Yesterday. And Houston Smith, I don't know if you were ever at a Harvard Divinity School, but he might have been. Yes, he was. Okay. Later he was at Syracuse. But he became a close friend of mine and became a board member of the Dharma Saga for a long time.

[69:12]

Oh, really? I didn't know that. He was a friend of the Reptileman. Yeah. He was a really nice guy. He was another person. E.E. Cummings has one of his most famous poems, is somewhere I've never traveled, gladly beyond any experience, etc. And when I first met Houston, I thought, he's somewhere I've never traveled, gladly beyond any experience. And I began inviting him to come to the conferences, that I did. So you met him through the extension? Through extension. So I invited him to come to conferences and other people and so I decided to do the Berkeley Poetry Conference inspired by Robert Duncan and other people. And Robert and I put together the thing. I worked with Dick Alpert to put together the LSD conference. I know. That was quite a conference.

[70:15]

And it was very troubled getting it together. It was, yeah. So anyway, all those things happened. Yeah, but, you know, we're skirting... a lot of issues and details going from the time that you met Suzuki Roshi through the five years of extension. So bring us back. Back to? Bring us back to where we should be in the timeline and in the discussion and the theme. Well, I'm not sure. The themes are limited, but the extensions, as we said yesterday, it's a mosaic. For sure.

[71:16]

So the question of your involvement with Suzuki Roshi starts with your meeting him. And then the question is, how did that relationship evolve and become so significant that it has inhabited the rest of your life? Okay, well, when I met him, I decided that he was the kind of person I wanted to have on the planet. So I decided to help him stay on the planet. So I decided to help him stay in San Francisco. And I remember once I sent to him, sitting in the back of the car with a grand pet sheet, after we'd been, I'd been practicing about six months maybe,

[72:25]

I said to him from the back seat, do you think we can do this, this practice? And he turned and looked at me, and he said, if you really intend to. If you really? Intend to. Because it was a question kind of westerner to me, and I didn't start it as a teenager. I'm starting as a 25-year-old. And he said, yes. And then David McCain, who died recently of Alzheimer's, I had a kind of bromance with, I guess it's called these days, If anybody wanted to know where either of us was, you'd just call up David and he'd know where I was and I'd know where he was. We hung out together all the time and we'd met in Blue Leg Fells, Books Inc. in New York, in San Francisco. Because I'd worked for Paper Editions and sometimes they'd be short of people on a busy holiday. They'd ask me to be a salesman at Books Inc. in San Francisco. And David also worked as a part-time employee at Books Inc.

[73:29]

But that... didn't have much to do with what was the next step with you. Yes, it did. So David and I became very close friends. We went to Big Sur on a scooter together, you know, my sitting in the back and him running. And I got my first contact with Esselstyn through David and that's driving down the coast. And Michael Murphy. And Michael Murphy. And first Dick... Dick... Dick Price, who was his partner. Anyway, so then David decided to move back to the East Coast. And as I said, he'd been very, very close friends. And David, so I took David out to a restaurant to say goodbye. I'd always walked by in North Beach some kind of flamenco restaurant. I don't know anything about flamenco.

[74:32]

I don't know anything about it, but I thought Mexican flamenco restaurant. Why don't I try that? So I said to David, let's go to this restaurant, and I'll take you out to dinner. Of course, I had very little money, but anyway, I took him out. We were sitting in a booth. The window was behind me. I was two or three booths in on the right. He was facing me. He could look out the window and I could look into the restroom. And he said to me, while we were near the end of the meal, he said, you know, Dick, if we were really serious about life, I'd introduced him to secretion. He'd never started practice, but he knew secretion. And he said to me, you know, Dick, if we were really serious about life, we would just simply do Zen the rest of our life. And when he said that, Like an iron door came down.

[75:32]

Yes. I will do this the rest of my life. It was like an absolute fact. And let me finish. So then I... What is his last name? David McCain. M-C... M-C-K-A-I-N. K-I-N. Yeah. And so then he was super handsome beyond movies. He's gone now? He died of Alzheimer's three or four years ago. married to a poet named Mark Margaret. Quite a good poet. He was also a poet and novelist. Anyway, so the next day I took him to the airport. And I can't remember why I had a car. I had a borrowed rental car or something. But I didn't have a car. But I took him to the airport. And when I met him, came over to pick him up, I said to him, David, what you said to me last night That's changed my life.

[76:34]

When he said to me, if we knew we would do this restaurant, he didn't remember he'd said it. But for me, from that moment on, I had done nothing else. So there were several such moments, but that was the one which was as clear as I said, this is all I'm going to do the rest of my life. But it was motivated also by helping Suzuki Roshi. Because I wanted him to be available to other people. And how did you do that? How did I do what? Help Suzuki Roshi. Well, I found it Tassajara. But that was after this. Yeah, that was after this, but I was... My feeling was... I went to every lecture virtually. For five years, I don't think I missed Zazen once.

[77:36]

Maybe one or one and a half times I missed a morning Zazen for some reason. What do you think caused you to start doing Zazen and spending five years in pursuit of helping Suzuki Roshi? Okay, from the personal side, I felt Again, I have to put it in a context. I grew up, right? Obviously we grew up, right? I'm living in a folk Victorian farmhouse owned by the University of California Academy. Culver Military Academy. I know, not University of California, Culver Military Academy. I never experienced myself as particularly smart or intelligent.

[78:46]

I didn't think of myself as intelligent. But I experienced myself as different. And so I turned out to be intelligent. But it was like just part of being different. It wasn't like I felt I'm more intelligent or less intelligent. What I did feel is I was more different. So that, I don't know if this makes sense to you or to anyone, but so this sense of being different also meant I had no way to relate to what people were doing. For instance, I used to listen to H. V. Kaltenborn and Edward R. Murrow, who picked me up hitchhiking once in a Cadillac convertible when I was going between Cambridge and Boston. Smoke stains all over him and the car. But anyway, so Carl Born later lived in the town in Long Island where my family lived.

[79:49]

But Carl Born and Murrow and there were a couple others. My mother and father listened to every morning and every evening about the war. Roosevelt, I remember my mother sobbing when Roosevelt died. My family was somebody who voted for Wallace, the socialist, right? Sure. And so when I heard that American soldiers American human beings, whatever a human being is, which I don't even like the term because you can't get rid of the distinction between human and non-human. I've never liked that distinction and believed it. But I remember feeling this society creates people who are willing to go to another country and kill others. And that society creates people.

[80:49]

I didn't know about right or wrong, and the Germans are right, and we're right. I didn't think. What I experienced was our society promotes war, promotes soldiers, and I felt as a boy I'm going to have to be a soldier. Boys would eventually all have to be military. So I thought, I'm going to have to be in the military. So basically, somewhere around eight or nine years old, I decided I will not be a human being in any society which has armies. It was a strong feeling. I'm just not going to participate in it. And that's part of not getting a degree, because Harvard was clearly part of the research and the whole weave and weft. And heft. And so I... So when I met Suzuki Roshi, my feeling was... And I had gone through a period when my sister... When I brought my sister back to this mental hospital, first she'd been in the New York Psychiatric Institute, which is sort of like being in the Harvard of psychiatric institutes.

[82:01]

That's where I met Alan and Carl. Yeah, so she was there. I was a patient. So she was there, and she... Then she was out for a while, and she was there for about two years, and then she was in some kind of madhouse in Long Island. And my father, I went to see my father and mother. And my father said, and my sister was on leave from the mental hospital. I can't remember right now where it was, but I probably will be able to. And she was home for the weekend, and then with my father, we took her back to the mental hospital. And I saw her, this sweet girl, beautiful, smart girl. She was a very talented, beautiful, very intelligent girl, but she was... We took her there.

[83:12]

And I saw her go into this bedroom, if you know the bedroom. And then I went, and my father had been saying, we're going to give her electric shock treatment. And I'd known two or three people who'd gotten electric shock treatment. And I said, we cannot give her electric shock treatment. And my father, it was like at that moment I took over my family. that my father was going to do it, authorize it. And I said, don't. And he agreed because I had asked him, because I insisted. But then I went back home to Hoboken. And I sat down in a chair, looking at this, in the windows of a Hudson River out there. And I remember sitting there, and I was going, oh... And when I finally looked up, I'd been doing it for four or five hours, just sitting there.

[84:28]

And that's when I decided to go to California. Okay, now you've gotten way back. Yeah, but this was the move toward Buddhism and toward California. Okay. When I saw my sister, and I didn't know how to help her, couldn't help her. And you know, just to go forward a bit, Sukhiroshi, I was, the first Sashin I led, when Sukhiroshi was killed, I'd said to him a little bit earlier, no, we both knew he was going to die, of course. I said to him, where will I meet you? And he took his hands out from under the covers of the bed. He made a circle with his hands. Followed me.

[85:40]

Someday, but a few weeks later that he died. And his wife, I started the Sashin, never led a Sashin before, never been the teacher before or anything. I started the Sashin, and after I rang the bell for the first period to start, Mrs. Suzuki Oksa came downstairs into the Zen room and said, Suzuki, she wants to see you. So I went upstairs to his apartment and was in bed. I went to see him and I leaned down, put my forehead on his forehead and he died. Then I went downstairs, continued the sashi, and said to everybody that Sukershi had died, and then we laid him out on the floor of his room, and we all went up and sat with him for a while.

[86:53]

I don't remember the details exactly. This was what year? 1971, something like that. We can look it up. Yeah, sure. That's not a problem, but you've skipped from Just after meeting him to his dying. Yeah. Instead of... Well, I was talking about my sister. Yes, I know that. Well, one year later, I'm leading this session at Tassajara. Same session at Tassajara now. And they just have a crank phone with wires hung in trees to get out of the place at that time. No heat, electricity. And I start this machine, I ring the bell for the first period, and I hear the phone ringing in the office behind the Zendo.

[88:02]

I knew what it was. I got up, walked through the group, went to the phone, and Virginia told me, your sister's committed suicide. This was... Exactly one year later, exactly after the first bell of the first period of the Sesshin, the December Sesshin. Exactly the same time, conceptually, as Tsukushi died. A year later. A year later. So then I went and I continued the Sesshin. I said to everybody, my sister just died, let's keep sitting. So that was how I got to know him. That's why I went to Sukhriyoshi's death was to just speak about the fact that these two parallel things happened.

[89:03]

But before that I was trying to help Sukhriyoshi because I wanted other people to be able to benefit from his presence. So I did, from then on, after how deeply security affected me, and I went to every one of his lectures, I did everything possible to make other people have access to him. And those lectures exist? Yeah, I took notes at them. In those days, the first years, we didn't record them. because he didn't feel like they should be recorded. But then when people started having these small little mini tape recorders, they were recording surreptitiously anyway. So we decided, okay, we'll record. So the first years, they weren't recorded. But after a while, they were recorded. And they exist. And they exist. And I always sat in the front row... facing secret here because I was working full-time for the University of California and working full-time on a PhD

[90:10]

I didn't have much sleep. I've never needed much sleep. I can get along on two or three hours a night in those days, but basically I need four or five or five, but I could never even sleep seven hours. My back hurt too much when I was in bed that long. I never started sleeping more until after my radiation treatment for prostate cancer. That made me have to sleep more. So I didn't sleep much, but I could sleep anytime, and I slept during the lectures. So he would be talking, and I got the ability, and I still have it, to have conversations with people while I'm still asleep. So I would be like this, and he would say, Dick, would you read this poem? And he'd hand me the book, and I would read exactly where he left off. I wouldn't miss a beat. And so I'd be like this, you know, like this, and he'd say, Dick, would you not take the book? And I'd read. So he'd often have me read out loud. And also, at that time, a gaggle of Roshis came, or top priests came to visit Sekiroshi in San Francisco for some reason, and I met them.

[91:22]

He asked me to have something to say to them. So I said something about, if you bring a Japanese redwood tree to America, You've got to let it grow. You can't take its bark off and you can't take its limbs off. You've got to plant it as a Japanese tree and let America change it. So that's what I said. But I also had some other things. And he read it about Buddhism. And he read it and he said, Dick, don't show this to anyone. Hide your light. No one should see this. Until later. So I had this active relationship with him of feeling daily connected with him at the same time as I was motivated only to let other people have contact with him. But one of the things he did, which was I think I could never do it to a student, is we would sit zaza.

[92:30]

And then we would go, there were two doors, it was kind of biggish doors. We helped make, I was there early enough to help make the zendo, sand the floor and everything, part of that early stage. But there was another door to his office, which was beside the hall. So there was a hall and then stairs going down and this door at the head of the stairs. But when we left Zazen, we would all file out and bow to him. And he would be in his office. As we went through, he would bow. And one day, I went through the door and he didn't look at me. He bowed and I bowed, but he just And then the next day he didn't look at me, and the next day he didn't look at me, and the next day he didn't look at me. And I remember I thought, well, this is his problem. He's going to be my teacher, whether he likes it or not. And so it went on, and after about two months, maybe, two months, let's say, of this, and he's not looking at me,

[93:44]

And it continued every day. And when I'd see him other times, he wouldn't really look at me. And I thought, this is going to last a year. And one year later, almost exactly, I went out the door and he looked at me and smiled. And it was, you know, he wasn't going to get rid of me. And he was, I mean, let's assume it's a kind of test to see how deep my commitment was. And he used to say to me, Dick, you came in through the door, but you've got to be ready to leave through the window. So then our relationship continued. And I would discuss koans with him and I would bring questions about breathing to him and things like that. But my energy was in trying to make possible for other people, because it's not going to affect society if it only affects me. It has to affect other people.

[94:45]

So I really got involved with trying to make the Zen Center work. Graham Petsche was the first president. We talked together. Graham and I arranged the 501c3 not-for-profit status. I picked the name Zen Center. and I designed the stationaries and center. But Graham had been there a few months earlier than me, two or three, and he had a little more seniority, and he was the president, and I was the treasurer. But actually, Ginny was the treasurer. And when was that? 1962 or three. Okay. Now, that's really the beginning of your trying to help Suzuki Racing. Yeah. I need to eventually, or now, you telling what the steps were about your helping and your relationship so we can get the continuity from the Zen Center being established

[96:01]

through a 501c3 and things that happened at Tassajara and Green Gulch and et cetera, et cetera. Well, let me pause it and go to the toilet again. Okay, me too. I certainly see everything, almost everything leads to everything else. There's nothing for me, and so that's just the way I think and feel. That's true, but if we don't identify what leads to what, it gets lost. We don't want to get lost. We want to have a continuity. whether that is established now or at the end of the year, but as long as it's possible to make it work and edit it. I suppose once this is transcribed, one can take the various units and rearrange them a bit.

[97:09]

Absolutely. But let me say, if I respond to the question of my commitment to health institutions, That is rooted in my feeling that I didn't want to be part of a society which made war. I agree with that. And how that affected me was it wasn't just that I didn't want to be part of a society that didn't make war. I could not understand why everyone didn't feel the way I did. Well, because, you know, you're not a traditional pacifist. Yeah. It's a more... global feeling about violence and militarism. I share it. It's a very difficult subject in this society.

[98:10]

It was interesting, I heard that the audible book of Tishman, what was his name, who did the biography of Einstein. He also did Steve Jobs. Yeah, it's quite a beautiful book. And in it, Einstein develops from being a pacifist to, after his experience with the Nazis, to no longer being a pacifist. Anyway, let's not go there. So let me just say that My feeling was so desperate, not only because I didn't want to be part of a society with war, I found it difficult to identify with society in a fundamental sense because I couldn't understand why everyone didn't feel the same way. Why would they kind of blindly go along in a society? So when I met Suzuki Roshi, I saw him as my only hope.

[99:13]

I saw him in his teaching. as the only hope I could feel that something could be different. So that made me want to have other people have connection with Shikiroshi because I thought that that community of people who connected with Shikiroshi might then be a unit which could change society. Well, what interests me is your personification of Suzuki. which led to your practice and the Sanghas and your whole rest of the practice is one thing, but the the community and collaborative nature of Zen Buddhism which is separate from his persona and which exists as the basis of your belief now.

[100:30]

Intent, yeah. become a subject that we are going to have to go into in all kinds of phases, but right now we can concentrate on the personification between the time you met him and the time he died, because that's a single subject, theme. And it includes a lot that you have mentioned, but you haven't really elaborated. Well, what comes to mind when I'm speaking with you now about it is, you know, since I worked at the University of California, I knew the campus well, and I was... in the evening, maybe 7 o'clock or something, I don't remember exactly, the time I was walking across the campus and there was a big crowd around Sproul Hall, one of the places where you have meetings.

[101:38]

And I wondered, what are all these people out there for? So I went, and I couldn't get in because it was about 10 people deep at the front door. But I knew the building well, so I went around the window and climbed in the window. It was a summer night. Climbed in the window and sat on the windowsill. And there was this little Indian man with all kinds of flowers. What are these things called from Hawaii? Lays. Lays. About three or four layers of lays around his neck, and he was a tiny little guy. I didn't know, it was the Maharishi, but I didn't know who he was. But I watched him and he was talking in this Indian accent, you know. I got there maybe 10 minutes before he ended. So I listened to him for a few minutes and then everybody started getting up to go out. And they went out to the So I followed out, didn't go out the window, I went with everybody. And somehow I ended up standing about as far as I am from you, from him, and he was getting in a car and they were talking about, with his people, talking about going to Canada.

[102:48]

And while I'm standing there, about this far away, I suddenly felt, he's all right. And then I said to myself, why do I say he's all right? And I realized, non-consciously, I had coordinated my breathing with his, and I was standing there breathing with him, and that made me feel, he's all right. I could tell what kind of mind he had from that. And that was a moment, not only when I felt this connection with him, But when I realized I'd become a different person through Suzuki Roshi, I realized I was now, without knowing it, coordinating my breathing with everyone I met. And I didn't know, I picked it up from Suzuki Roshi, but it was never specifically taught. But in general, particularly in Zen, most of the teachings are codes that you open up. It's a do-it-yourself practice.

[103:50]

They give you a hint, but it's up to you to open up the practice. And then the practice really belongs to you. Now with many Buddhists, they give you steps and stages, but strictly speaking, Zen gives you hints to see if you could pick up on the hint. So I picked up big time on the hint of somehow of being with Sukseshi that when I listened to him giving a talk, if my breathing was coordinated with his, I heard his voice in a different way, so I'd learned that. Let me just say that when I went to Japan first in 1968, I discovered you couldn't do like in New York, call a taxi by a signal. They don't relate to signals, they relate to gestures. So for the first couple of months, every time I put up my hand, the taxi just drove by me. You know, a taxi driver would do that.

[104:50]

And they were just driving by me. And one day, I started gesturing. So if the taxi's over there, you kind of gesture to the taxi. And if it's a near taxi, you gesture different. As soon as I started gesturing, the taxi stopped immediately. So that's a kind of physicality, embodiment of a bodily culture that is... how the teachings are designed for, but how do you get that? So I got that in that sort of way with Suki Breathing. But I also remember going similar, sitting on his couch, he's facing the door, I'm sitting beside him, and we had to turn toward each other to sit on the couch, because couches, you know, don't let you face each other. So we turned toward each other, and I asked him, this was some time... After probably, he stopped speaking to me for a year, stopped looking at me for a year.

[105:52]

I said to him, I said to him something about breathing. I'm into some kind of, because you know that breathing, it's not just about attention to breathing, it's attention to each inhale and to each exhale and to the bodily experience that goes with each inhale and each exhale, which is also the... the root that puts you outside the Newtonian time and space, because your attentional skills would develop to just be on each moment, each moment, and then continuity becomes a delusion, and each moment in each moment becomes how you experience things. So I said to Sukhirishi somehow, I'm exploring breathing and this or that. I don't remember exactly what I said. And he started, he changed the topic basically and said, many people think they're practicing Zen or are concentrated, but they're, right now I can't remember exactly what he said, but they're only concentrated

[107:18]

or something, but what they're doing is only on the outside of them and not on the inside of them, something like that. And so I'm listening to him, but while I'm listening to him, my body is watching him, and he changed his breathing to show me the breathing I was asking. He didn't say he was doing it. And I found my body then learned from him what I was asking about breathing while he was distracting me with this question about concentration. So that was a typical teaching experience with him. It was like a diversion and a demonstration, diversion and demonstration. And so that was kind of the texture, the weaving, the texture, the fabric. of my daily life with him, while at the same time I was trying to be the person who would connect him. Somebody would be in big trouble, psychological trouble or something, and they would talk to me about it because they couldn't talk to him so much because he spoke English, but really they needed to speak in English.

[108:30]

So I would go in and I would talk to him. In English. In English. And I used to help his English get a little... After a lecture, I'd say he used a double negative or something like that. He accepted it. He didn't like my always correcting him. So anyway, so I would talk to this person and suggest they beat the situation. They'd go in and they'd talk to him for ten minutes. Hello? Hello? Yes. I'm fine. What's up? Well, by July 1st, I hope. But I haven't sold the house yet.

[109:31]

I mean, it's for sale. Where? Where? In Cresco, where I live. In New Jersey. And I'm moving into the city. Oh, okay. Yeah, well, I'm reading on Sunday at the Parkside Lounge. Steve isn't coming because he's busy, but... It's at 4 p.m. No, no, Parkside Lounge is 317 East Houston Street, Attorney. And it starts at 4 p.m. Jeff Wright, Jeff Wright. I don't know.

[110:40]

But Hudson Street is not a parade street. Anyway, I'm around. I'm in New York. I'm in the city right now. Yes, you have my email, right? Gerdstern at gmail.com. Okay, well let me know.

[111:47]

It sounds very interesting. I'm not sure, but I'll certainly try. Well, let's see what happens. Let me know. I'm in the middle of a meeting right now. I'm around until Monday or so here in the city. Okay, man. Take care. He's had a Keith Haring kind of flavor. There's little boxes. Yeah, she does the shoes.

[112:48]

Yeah, I can see. She calls them doodles. Anyway... So let's just finish that one plot, and then we can stop, I guess. Which is that... So they would go in to see Suzuki Roshi. Oh, we forgot to pause the machine. Maybe that's it, right? So he would go in to see Suzuki Roshi, and... come up feeling, oh, it's all dropped away. I feel great, right? He solved the problem. They come up with some sort of feeling that he'd solved the problem. So I would go in to see him afterwards and I'd say, thank you for helping so and so. And then he'd ask me, what's going on with the person? He would have no idea really what was going on or what was disturbing the person, but just his presence. would make the person feel that somehow they could drop it. That was when I thought, jeez, I can listen to it and I can understand it with a certain degree of sophistication psychologically, but Tsukiyoshi can do something I can't do.

[113:50]

Because his presence was the... His presence was the catalyst. The solution, yeah. The problem was not... Yeah. He didn't have to understand the problem. No, he didn't. He just had to be present in a way that the person felt a different kind of humanity, a different kind of aliveness. And that's something that you recognized. I recognized it and wondered if I will ever come close to that. Because it was your intention. No, it was not my intention. It was my... observation that it existed, but I didn't even dare hope I could do it. I just felt, he can do this, I'll try to help him have contact with other people. Whether I could ever do it, I don't know. So, what were the next steps that you took to help him? Well, we looked for sites for a place like Tufts, because he said to me at some point, no one is really getting this teaching.

[114:57]

He implied that I was making use of the teaching, but I in fact was sort of pretending San Francisco was a monastery But I made a mistake at some point of saying to somebody that she had said I was the only person making sense of his teaching. And I said it in confidence to a person. That's not a big deal. But he told somebody else, and pretty soon I heard, one of the angers in the Zen Center was I'd said I was the only person getting the teaching. But anyway, he said something like that to me, and he said, I need a place where I can meet with students face-to-face. So we started looking. We looked in the Russian River, and we ended up looking at Tassajara, and then we bought Tassajara. So we... Who's we? The San Francisco Land Center.

[116:05]

This was after you founded the 501c3. Yeah, several years later. And you got the money together and you bought the site at Tassajara. Yeah. And Suzuki Roshi inhabited that. Yeah, he went back and forth because he had the Japanese congregation to also take care of because he was the priest, and so he'd do funeral ceremonies and things in San Francisco. So he went back and forth. So you're not just talking about the Zen Center, you're talking about another congregation? Well, the Japanese congregation had very little to do with the English-speaking congregation. So he had two things. He had the Japanese congregation. You'd be walking along with one of the Japanese people, like Hagiwara-san, who I knew well, and we'd be speaking English.

[117:15]

And we'd go into the temple door, and he would switch to Japanese and would not speak to me in English. It was like in there was Japan. And so he took care of that. He and I, when I, Graham Petsche had gone to Tassajara, had used to take little trips with his wife, Pauline. One of the trips they took was to Tassajara. So one day, and he told me about this place. So one of the days, or he told me, no, he told me about the road to China Camp. He told me about China Camp, which is at the top of the mountain. Down here is, oh, here is Carmel, and here is Tassara, and at the top is a place called China Camp, named for the Chinese who built the road. Highway 1. No, just a dirt road into the hot springs. I got you. And white folks couldn't do that kind of labor.

[118:19]

So he told me about China Camp. So at one point with Virginia, I decided, and Sally was a little girl, we'd go camp out at China Camp. So we went to China Camp. while we slept there and while we were there there was some hunter hunter types they were shooting at things the trees and in fact I even complained to the Ranger these guys are just shooting around and I said to Virginia, let's find out what's at the end of the road. We didn't know if there was anything at the end of the road. I was curious. So we drove, it's 13, it's about 13 miles all together. China Camp is probably seven miles from Tosa. So we drove down there and we found Tosa. It's kind of half abandoned hot springs. So then I thought, geez, maybe this is available. I found out that Fred owned Discovery Bookshop across the street alley from City Lights Bookshop.

[119:29]

He owned Discovery Bookshop. I found out that he had been the partner of the owner, or was one of the owners. So... That wasn't Fred Martin? Fred... It was something else. Yeah. Fred Martin was Larry's first partner at City Lights. No, this was Fred Roscoe. Yeah. I'm pretty sure it was Fred Roscoe. Okay. So I called up... I'd known Fred Roscoe because I knew Ferran Getty, and I knew the two bookstores, and I shopped in both. So I called up Fred Roscoe, and he said, Yes, uh... The Beck's were my partners, and I sold my half of partnership to the Beck's, Bob Beck. And so I thought, well, I'll get in touch with the Beck's. But I was busy at the university and everything, and my graduate work and everything. So it took me a full year before I got in touch with the Beck's.

[120:33]

And when I got in touch with the Becks, they were willing to sell or they're trying to sell to Sunset Magazine. And I found out later that they had bought the entire property for $65,000. And they only paid interest on the $65,000. But they wanted to sell it for a huge amount. And they own three pieces of property for $65,000, each 160 acres. Well, the horse pasture, the survivor, we called it at Tussle Hall. And it's been homesteaded in the Homestead Act, 360 acres, and they control all the water. Each piece controlled the water of the whole canyon and valley there. So when I wanted to buy Tassajara, what I talked to the Becks about, Anna Beck and Bob Beck. And they had a child who had childhood diabetes, which is serious.

[121:39]

Nice little girl. And so Bob, first they wanted to sell it, the Sunset Magazine said, but all of their various deals fell through. In fact, Allen Ginsberg said to me at some point, Maybe Bob Dylan would help you buy it. And Dylan would help us buy it, maybe, Alan said, if we give him a place in the valley of his own. And I said, no, we're going to buy it just for the Zen practice and no contingencies. So I met with the Beck several times and they wanted a $60,000, etc. And I said to him finally, 11 o'clock at night, I said to him, we can't raise that much money. It's not possible. So I called up, I brought Suzuki Yoshi to Tosca. And he was the first time I'd ever seen him really excited.

[122:43]

He got driving out of Tassajari, got out of the car, and walked along as I'm driving, walked along looking down in the valley. He said even in China there isn't a place remote like this. Wow. So then he got back in the car and we drove out. And we stopped at a diner. which I used to stop at regularly, and it's in the KQED film on Tassajara. And we stopped there at one of those machines where you put in a nickel or a quarter and you get an answer. And I said, let's ask this machine whether we should buy Tassajara. So I put in a nickel or whatever it was, and you push something, and this piece of paper came out. And I can't remember now, I kept the visa for a couple of years, I can't remember what it said, but it said something like, without a doubt. So then we went to San Francisco, and then I started the negotiations with the Becks.

[123:48]

And at some point, I gave up, and I said to Bob and I, I said, it was about 11 o'clock at night, I said, we cannot afford this. So I called up Suke Roshi, and I knew he was already asleep, and he answered the phone. And I said, Roshi, I'm sorry. They want a businessman's price. We are not businessmen. And I thought we were going to have to give up. And Bob wanted to sell us part of the property over the ridge. And I said, this isn't going to work well. We have to buy the whole thing. Not the other 260 acres, but at least we have to buy them, or it's no deal. So I told the security, it's not going to happen. It's a businessman price. We're not business people. And I hung up. And then Bob said, okay, let's start negotiating again. Because he knew I meant it. And then that's how we came to $300,000 price over 10 years at some kind of thing.

[124:55]

And the person who helped us was Chester Carlson. And Chester Carlson, who invented xerography, used to send somebody named Ping Ferry, who was a kind of friend and associate, as a guest to Tassajara. And he would see how we were running the guest season, etc. And then if we... He felt good about it. He told Chester Carlson, and we'd get a $50,000 check. And so it was Chester Carlson who made Tazara possible through his invention of serography. Wow. Theorography was David Padworth, wasn't it? No. David Padworth did basic systems. Yes. And he sold basic systems to Chester Carlson. I got it. And I met Chester Carlson, who was sitting with... David and Ram Dass in New York, where Ram Dass was staying. Wow.

[125:56]

And Ram Dass, and right then, I got a phone call from Oksan, Sukhriyashi's wife, saying, Sukhriyashi's been invited to something they're calling the Bee Inn. And Sukhriyashi talked to me on the phone, and he asked, do you think I should go? And I said, well, why not? You know, Ginsburg's a friend and everybody. So he went to the B and he sat on the stage with everybody. But I'm in New York with David Padlu and round us. And David was just buying or getting a boat to live on for a while. He said, you should meet Chester Carlson. So I went to Rochester, New York. And what's his name? Kepler, he tried to prevent me from meeting Chester Carlson because that was his funding. But they came anyway to my talk at the group, and then afterward we became friends, and then he supported what's religious and made testimony happen.

[126:58]

Okay. When you had negotiated the price and you got the funding, you started inhabiting Tafahara. Well, we had to buy it. So I designed a brochure. And my concept of the brochure was to make something big and folded in a complicated way. so that you had to kind of call your wife. Mildred, I don't know how to open this thing. Would you come over here? And we unfolded together. So I wanted a physical, not just a mental relationship. I wanted it to be a physical piece of paper that engaged you. And it raised quite a bit of money. And we mailed it to 15,000 people or something like that. But I knew something about mailing from working for University of California Extension.

[128:02]

So I knew how to do that. It's funny, the Jungians and the psychologists wouldn't support it at all. They felt a competition. It took a decade or two before the psychotherapeutic community had any respect for Buddhism. So once you bought it... Once we bought it and actually owned it, And the brochure had worked sufficiently for that year. And with Chester's help, I don't know exactly the exact details, we moved in. And we had a caretaker there who was Jeanne Campbell's husband. Jeanne Campbell was the sister of Dan Welch. And his name was Howard something. And he did an extraordinary thing. The buildings were pretty funky. And at one point, he was up on the hill, and he looked down, and he thought, this building is just too funky.

[129:05]

And he went down, and he tore it down. And Sukriyoshi, he was supposed to be the caretaker. So Sukriyoshi and I went in. We'd go in periodically to see what we should do and how to take care of it and move in. And one building was gone. So I asked Howard to leave. He's going to tear down buildings when we're not there and not ask us. So anyway, we moved in, and we did the first... practice period and there's photographs of me being security I felt the Sugi Roshi shouldn't be the only priest and there should be some Westerner who was also ordained So I have no religious interest. I have no interest in being a priest. None. Zero. It's against my best, my better instincts. But I decided I should do it because there should be some Western.

[130:06]

So the night before the opening of Tassajara, Sukhriyashi ordained me, shaved my head, and there was a big ceremony. And then the next day, we had the opening ceremony of tasar. And then we started a three-month practice period. And we don't know how, but people came from all over the place, down the road, to participate in the first practice period. Maybe 150 or 160 people. We don't know where they came from, how they knew. We didn't advertise anything, as far as I remember. Anyway, so we started Tangario, which is where you sit for three or four days without breaks. And by this time, you had... gain knowledge of a certain amount of the practice. Yeah, well, I'd been practicing regularly from 1961 to 62, to 65, 66, 60, and there. So I'd been practicing regularly for five years.

[131:08]

And my legs don't fold very well, etc., but I can do it. So we had Tangario, and over half the people left Tangario, and they were partying in other buildings where the rest of us were sitting because they just couldn't do it. They had no idea what they were getting themselves into. So, pretty soon, about half the people left and about half the people stayed, and we had our first practice period, and Suzuki Rishi made me the first head monk, the first shuso. Generally, you're not the shuso until you've done several practice periods, but that wasn't possible. So I was the first shuso, and I was ordained the night before the opening. Is that a good place to stop? Well, and it kept going. Oh, yeah. It's gone every year since then. And so that was the first step toward getting a place for Suzuki Roshi to actually have a geographic presence aside from San Francisco.

[132:34]

That's right. And it was before Green Gulch. Way before Green Gulch. It was in the mid-60s, and Green Gulch was 79. Really? That late? Wow. Green's restaurant was 79. Green Gulch was... I'd have to figure it out. Wow. Because... So then, again, I don't have much business instinct. And for instance, when I did Deep Greens, as you've seen part of what I've written, and you'll see in that, I wanted it to be a practice place disguised as a business, but not a business. And I tried to keep the prices low, and I tried to keep, you know, and it's after I left, they really conceived me as a business and opened all the time. When I was head, since then I was only open for three nights a week for dinner, and I think three, and five or six lunches.

[133:37]

But that was so women could take a break when they had their period. People could take time off for sashins, accumulated time. So I really saw it as a practice place disguised as the Greens. The Green Gulch led to Greens. And Tassajara led to the Tassajara Bread Day. But again, at Tassajara, it was... I can't think of his name right now, but it was his idea, which it wouldn't have occurred to me, his idea that we should keep the Tassajara guest season going. And then I thought the idea was great, because it seemed to me wrong, just because we bought it as a Zen Center, to cut it off from all these people who wanted to come, not so many, but who wanted to come to Tassajara for the hot baths and things like that.

[134:49]

So I agree. The first practice period was in the summer. But after that, we did the 90-day practice periods in the fall and spring, so the summer was open for the guest season. But then the summer guest season began to support the place. But that business decision came from this person who had started businesses. So for me it was just a way to keep the people who had been coming there, I shouldn't cut them off, they should be able to come. But he pointed out, this is a business possibility. So we started the Picasso, our guest season, which years later, it's the most, fastest booked place in the whole Carmel, Monterey area. And it's still operating. It's double booked within a week or two after it opens. Wow. And Green's is still going after 30 years. Yes. I've been there. Yeah. All right.

[135:50]

Now... All of this, including Greens and Green Gulch, eventually led to your beginning Colorado and Germany. Well, yes, of course. But it really was the crisis in 1983 which meant I had to resign and leave. which led me to found the place. But the name, Dharma Sangha, I'd chosen when I was in Japan. Because in Japan, I thought, if I come back and the community isn't really ready to do this in a way that's really, if it's too diluted, Americana diluted practice, I'm going to start a separate group.

[136:51]

Which community? The San Francisco Zen Center community. Okay. It wasn't really committed to real rigorous practice. I would have started a separate group. I'd already picked the name Dharma Sangha. But I came back from Japan and Sukhyoshi died and I became the successor. And the only person I'd ever told that I was in 68, Sukhyoshi asked me to be his successor. I was at Still Point in some little retreat center on the way to Tassara. You were there? I ran to Kiefer at a place called Still Point. And I, for one or two nights, Sukershi and I were there on the way to Tassara. And after, as we were leaving, Sukershi said to me, you don't have much self. You don't have much sense of self as a comparative self.

[137:57]

And he said, I want you to be my successor. And I said, okay. So that was the Dharma air. The Dharma air is successful. And I didn't know what that meant, but I loved Sukhya Rishi. So I would do whatever he said. I mean, I would practically jump off a cliff if he'd ask me. And I knew I had that feeling, but I knew he would never ask me to jump off a cliff. So I went to Japan, but all the time I was in Japan, I knew he wanted me to be his successor. And I told Mike Murphy before I left, Sukiroshi has asked me to be his successor, and I don't know what this means. And when I came back and he was ill, I didn't know what it meant. I didn't think this was a big job, important job, I'm up to it. I just said, so could you ask me to do this? I'm going to do it. I had no thoughts about it as good, bad, or indifferent, or important. It's just I was going to do it. I knew I didn't have the... to do it but I knew I was going to do it and so when I came back he died and I just started doing it the best I could what you had at that time was the center of

[139:16]

Plus Tassajara. Plus Greens. No, not yet. And Green Gulch was not yet. Oh, I see. So right after his death, all you had was the Zen Center and Tassajara. Now, I knew, my feeling was... And before I left, before Sugrishi died, he said to me, we need a third place where people from Tassajara can continue practicing. We need a village, a commune type place. So I started looking for a place after he died, because he'd given me the command, in a sense, imperative to do it, and permission to do it. So I started looking for a place. And I was pretty close to Stuart Brand at the time, and Stuart had stayed with me during a crisis in his life in Japan for some months, weeks.

[140:30]

So I was part of the Whole Earth Foundation, or whatever it was called, coming out with money from the catalog. And we were having a meeting in a tent down the peninsula way somewhere. San Mateo, or is that down the peninsula? No, that's in the Marinside. Anyway, down there somewhere, we're in a tent, a teepee, right? And Huey Johnson was there. And I said, at the end of the meeting, sort of, Sikirishi's died, and he suggested we should have a third place for people after Tassar and San Francisco practice, kind of village. And Huey Johnson said to me, I really hope this is being recorded, because I don't want to go through this all again.

[141:35]

No. I said, Hugh Johnson said, there's this place, Green Gulch, which George Wheelwright has, who was the co-inventor of Polaroid. I don't know if he told me that at the time. And he wants to give it away or sell it or do something. So he said, the man who's handling it is George Sanders, his lawyer. So I, shortly after that, got in touch with George Sanders. And at the same time, Sterling Bunnell, you know? Yes, of course. Sterling, another one of my few non-Jews I know. Sterling Bunnell had said to me, he had property which he could give us. that he had bought as an investment or was available. He was willing to give it to the Zen Center. And I thought about it.

[142:37]

I thought, it's just too far away. I can't make it work. And my feeling was, I can't make Zen Center work unless, if it's just Tassajara or San Francisco, Tassajara or San Francisco has to be more complex. And my idea was, it has to be complex enough that if you lose your toothbrush, you don't know where it is. Is it at Tassajara? If it's not at Tassajara, it's at San Francisco. But if there's third place, you don't know where it is. So the complexity that comes with three, I said, I can only make San Francisco Zen Center survive if we have the complexity of three. So I said, no, I can't use your property, Sterling. And we gave it to Bill Kwong. Bill Kwong started his center there. Because his place he had, he didn't own. I don't know where Sterling's property was. Well, it's where Bill Kwong is now. Sonoma County or something.

[143:37]

Oh, Sonoma County. The call was Sonoma's answer. He's been there for years and years. But he first had property, which he didn't own, which I warned him about. I thought I did, anyway. That if you're going to have property, you own it. Because you don't rent or lease it because... Once you have a center there, it should be for in perpetuity. I will only accept, I will only start a practice place in those conditions. So, Green Gulch I pursued with George, what was his name? The attorney. The lawyer, the attorney. George Sanders. And with... Wheelwright. With George Wheelwright. And they had offered it free, I believe, to an American Indian tribe, but the American Indians on the way to sign the papers and get the property had a fight. They were in two cars, and they stopped the cars and had an argument, and they drove off, both of them, and never went to the meeting.

[144:44]

So they had decided that they weren't going to give it away They were only going to sell it, but for a nominal price. They wanted somebody who had enough, enough together to buy the property. So I said, we'll buy it. And I didn't have any idea how to do it. But I called up a friend of mine who I'd met when I was in Boston. Ned Johnson. I remember. Edward C. Johnson, his father initially, but Ned. And the woman. Wasn't that the woman who did the tea ceremony? No, that was Mildred. Her name was John Stone. And her husband, and they did the tea ceremony together. Millie Johnstone, and she, her husband was head of Johnson Steel, or one of the steel companies up there.

[145:53]

They had a lot of money. And they helped fund Ada Roshi's group. Not my group, but I know her. But Ned Johnson, Edward C. Johnson, owned Fidelity Mutual Fund. And his sister, uh, No, and his daughter, I can't remember her name right now, but she started the Cambridge Bougie Society. And somehow, through her, I met her father. And her father and I had an instant kind of connection and friendship. And he started supporting the Samson's Crescent Center. And then when he died, Alzheimer's, I believe, he, I think, asked Ned, his son, who's 88 or something now, maybe six or seven, don't forget the Zen Center, and Richard Baker.

[147:03]

Hi. Hi. Somebody who has a key just came in. You two haven't moved. Well, we've been moving back and forth a little. We're just finishing up, I think. So, I don't know. You'd have to ask your partner. It's going very well. So he... If it's recording well. If it's recording well, yeah. So... So what was I saying about that? Ned Johnson. Yeah, what about Ned? But anyway, Ned, yeah, Ned offered me a job working for Fidelity while I was in Japan. And I thought if I worked for Fidelity, I would probably get paid a salary in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, and I could support the Zen Center that way. So I left San Francisco, Japan, flew to Boston, walked in as a surprise to Suzuki Roshi and said, I'm going to Boston and I'm going to work for Fidelity, be trained by them.

[148:21]

uh and he was clearly did not like it didn't like anything about it and at one point he just wanted to go to new mexico with me to just train me because he felt he would die and there'd be no successor so the fact that i would go and do business for whatever reason for the center, was anathema to him. But I went, and they put me up in the old-time New England club, the something club. I stayed there and worked. But it's not something. I have no interest in making money. I remember this whole scenario because I was involved. Yeah, because you were in Boston at the time. And you stayed with us. What's her name? Sheila Campion.

[149:26]

Exactly. And then Sheila Campion went to see me in Japan. Something of a hip lord. But Then Suzuki Rishi became sick, was sick, so I said to Ned and everybody, I can't do this. They paid me something for three months and I returned the money to them. Then when they sent me one of the month's salary back, I said, at least you can have one month's salary. Why was I telling you that? Well, because eventually it wound up with money for Green Gulch, right? No, indirectly. Yes, that's right. There was somebody there named Buckley.

[150:30]

Anyway, I knew him because his sister practiced at Tencent. And we became friends. And he and I decided in 66, not 66, anyway, 68 or 69, that we should start a mutual fund together which only invested in things which were environmentally responsible and didn't harm the environment and didn't invest in coal and things like that. So we both thought of that. He ended up doing something like that, but I went back to Japan and I never did it. But I always thought if I'm going to be involved in business, I'm going to do something that's a different kind of business. So he's the person I called up, and I said, we have a chance to buy Green Village. It's going to be $300,000 over so many years, a similar deal to Tussauds. And he said, but I need a $50,000 down payment.

[151:34]

He said, by chance, I'm just taking $50,000 out of the market, and I'll send it to you. But I need to put it back in the market in so many months. So I said, great. So he sent me the $50,000. I bought Trust Green Gulch. And then I used the next several months to raise $50,000 and paid it back. Like that. Hey, no business, no money, just chutzpah. Chutzpah. Intent and chutzpah. And, you know, progress is made toward the triple three. The three centers, yeah.

[152:34]

The three centers. And Dharma Sangha is something that you came up with While you were in Japan? The name, Darla-san, in case. In fact, I was going to buy the apartment that Owsley used when I did the LSD conference. It was a great two-story apartment nearby. And I thought, I'll just start a group in that apartment. But then when I had to leave the Samson Cuisine Center, and it was in disgrace...

[153:08]

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