TS: Welcome to Insights at the Edge, produced by Sounds True. My name’s Tami Simon, I’m the founder of Sounds True, and I’d love to take a moment to introduce you to the new Sounds True Foundation. The Sounds True Foundation is dedicated to creating a wiser and kinder world by making transformational education widely available. We want everyone to have access to transformational tools such as mindfulness, emotional awareness, and self-compassion, regardless of financial, social, or physical challenges. The Sounds True Foundation is a non-profit, dedicated to providing these transformational tools to communities in need, including at-risk youth, prisoners, veterans, and those in developing countries. If you’d like to learn more, or feel inspired to become a supporter, please visit SoundsTrueFoundation.org.
You’re listening to Insights at the Edge. Today my guest is Edward Espe Brown. Edward Espe Brown was the first head cook at Tassajara Zen Mountain Center in the late 1960’s. And later, he helped found Greens Restaurant in San Francisco. He’s the author of several best-selling cook books, a new book with Sounds True called No Recipe: Cooking as Spiritual Practice. Also, there’s a new book created by one of his students, Danny S. Parker, called The Most Important Point. And Ed is also the subject of the 2007 film, How to Cook Your Life. I feel such a warmth of spirit, a warmth of being, talking to Edward Espe Brown. He even introduced me to one of his childhood nicknames. Here’s my conversation with Eddy Bear.
We are talking today in celebration of the publication of a new book called, The Most Important Point: Zen Teachings of Edward Espe Brown. And in preparation for this conversation, Edward Espe Brown and I were talking, and I said, “Can I call you Ed?” And he said, “Actually, it’s OK, because we’re becoming friends, becoming friends here in a conversation broadcast to others. It’s OK. You can call me by the nickname that my parents called me when I was growing up: Eddy Bear.” So, Eddy Bear, welcome to Insights at the Edge.
Edward Espe Brown: Thank you so much, Tami. I’m delighted to be back. It’s always a joy and a pleasure to speak with you and it happens so infrequently. One has to have a book come out to do it, so it’s great. Thank you.
TS: The Most Important Point, this title comes from a quote by Suzuki Roshi. Can you explain the title?
EEB: Yes. Well, I was practicing Zen at the Tassajara Zen Mountain Center starting in 1967. And Suzuki Roshi was still alive then, and eventually I became his disciple. One time in the ceremony, we publicly, each student asks the Roshi a question, and he answers. And he had been—this is a long answer to your question that’s just quite simple, but excuse me, so.
TS: Take your time.
EEB: Thank you. So he had been talking in that intensive week of meditation. His theme for that week has been “Zen practice is like feeling your way along in the dark.” And he would reach out his hand and his hand would move this way and that and feeling and he said, “You can’t go very fast or you’re going to bump into something, you’ll really hurt your nose. And you’ll stumble, so you have to go very slowly. You might think it would be better to have light and know where you’re going, but then you get in a hurry and you get less sensitive. And then you want other people and things to get out of your way so you can get to where you know you’re supposed to go. So it’s actually better to be more sensitive and go very slowly and feel your way in the dark.”
So my question after a week of the intensive meditation was, “Roshi, now that the sesshin is over, if I’m feeling my way along in the dark, would it be OK to have a party?”
TS: Good question!
EEB: And he said, “Yes, if you do it with that spirit.” And I said, “Well, thank you, very much. Thank you.” And after you say thank you, then you stand to bow and to turn and walk away. And I started to stand and he said, “The most important point . . . ” So I sat down again and started listening! “The most important point,” and he said it very slowly, “is to find out what is the most important point.” And I was, kind of, at the time, disappointed. I thought he was going to tell me the most important point. But anyway, that was what he said. And he used to say many things are the most important point, so the most important point is to find out what is the most important point.
So I started studying and using that. And it was especially useful when one is confronted with circumstances that are challenging or discouraging or upsetting. What’s the important point here? And I found that very useful. And over the next number of months, one thing after another would sort of pop into my awareness, like gratitude. “Oh, it’s important to be grateful. Oh, sincerity? We should be sincere, and be true to yourself. And kindness. Being kind, being compassionate, being careful with things,” and so on. And after about two years of studying that, I thought, “Oh, the most important point is to be finding what is the most important point.” And that he was right, and that you don’t just answer the question once and for all. You keep asking. It was a good question for me, and we wanted to share that with others.
Before we go on, I do want to mention that this is really unusual circumstance, because in many ways, my student Danny Parker put this book together. A real labor of love. Danny’s written three or four books on the Second World War. Spent 20 years studying the Second World War and wrote at least three, if not four or five books on the Second World War. And after 20 years he said, “I’m done with the Second World War, I’m going to do your book next.” He listened to over 300 of my talks, going back to 1974. I think some of the talks were as early as 1974, so that would be 35 years, or 40 years, or whatever. But I think the earliest one in the book may be only 25 years ago. And then he picked some out and edited them, and he put the book together. He picked out photographs to go in it. So it’s hard to understand it as my book and yet, I seem to have been involved in it somehow. But it’s a labor of love on Danny’s part and a labor of appreciation. Because he felt appreciative of the lectures, he wanted to share them with other people. As he thought there would be other people out in the world would similarly appreciate the talks as he did. Anyway, I wanted to get that in before we go right past it.
TS: Sure. And it’s clear that Danny Parker put the book together from these transcripts of talks.
EEB: Yes.
TS: But really, there’s a feeling of getting to know Eddy Bear and your teachings, and your sense of humor, and your warmth, and your kindness, and your goodness, that comes throughout the entire book. It’s a beautiful communication.
EEB: Well, thank you. And that’s thanks to your team of people.
TS: OK, now it’s interesting, when we’re talking about the most important point, I think people want to think sometimes, “Oh, now I know the most important point, check.” There’s this one answer. But really what you’re saying, is in situations you have to know what’s needed in that particular situation.
EEB: In that particular situation yes, yes. And exactly. People want to know the most important point, and then you’ve got it. But again, this is right in line with Suzuki Roshi’s most famous teaching, beginner’s mind. And how hard it is to keep your beginners mind. So a question like, “What is the important point? Here, now, today, this body, this mind, this place, this time?” Then it will awaken your beginners mind. I was at a class on Saturday and we were studying the difference between problems, challenges, and opportunities.
And sometimes, we experience something that is a problem or a challenge, and when it becomes an opportunity, it’s what is the most important point. Or, “What do I do now?” Or what . . . And “What can help here?” or “What can be done here?” It’s awakening. You’re turning the problem or challenge into an opportunity to grow, or to awaken, or to realize something, by bringing up a question. The wonderful thing about the most important point, is it’s not necessarily a question. But you can turn it into a question. What is the most important point?
TS: Now you mentioned that you became a disciple of Suzuki Roshi.
And this was in the late 1960’s, and he died in 1971. And I think many of our listeners don’t really know that much about him. Maybe they’ve read Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind but that would be about it. Heard a few quotes from him. Can you paint a picture of him for our listeners?
EEB: Well, you know, I don’t know if I can or not.
TS: Feel your way in the dark.
EEB: [LAUGHTER] You’re saying something. The most . . . David Chadwick was another one of Suzuki’s disciples. Ordained the same day that I was, which in September, the year that he died in December. And David, after Suzuki Roshi died, decided to collect Suzuki Roshi’s lectures and he created this whole Suzuki Roshi archive now, since 1971. An incredible amount of work, and many, many people, most of the people at [San Francisco] Zen Center were not interested in supporting him to do this. And David did it out of love, that he wanted to share Suzuki Roshi’s spirit and teaching with others. And he wrote a biography of Suzuki Roshi which is called Crooked Cucumber because that’s what Suzuki Roshi’s teacher, first teacher Gyokujun So-On had called him, was “Crooked Cucumber.” It was a term of endearment, you know.
So anyway, David wrote that. And I reminded of this too because David did another little book that’s now called, which is short, wonderful little Suzuki Roshi teaching stories, and it’s now called Zen is Right Here. It was, to start with, called To Shine One Corner, I think. “To shine one corner of the world”, Suzuki Roshi said, “is enough.” Just to take care of this moment is enough. But in the beginning of that book, someone is quoted as saying, “You may not remember what he said, but you will remember what you felt when he said it.”
And I think the most remarkable thing, how do you describe it, but Suzuki Roshi had a capacity to see people. And part of seeing people is to see right through. See right through people’s persona, their performance, their shtick, and to see the person. To see you, and to meet you on the spot. And it was right away.
The first time I bowed to Suzuki Roshi, I was wondering, “Is he going to like me?” And I looked in his face after I bowed, and I looked in his face, and there was not a sign of anything. Liking, disliking, appreciation, approval, disapproval. Not a sign of anything. And yet, I felt completely, utterly received. Completely met, and I was OK. And it’s so remarkable to meet anybody like that in our lives. Somebody… Who, all these years ever sees Eddy Bear? People say, “You’ve got problems. You need help. What’s wrong with you, anyway? You’re too much of a curmudgeon. You’re too angry. You’re this, you’re that.” People want to tell you about how they dislike your performance… without seeing you. And then, of course, they’re probably upset that you don’t see them, when they start telling you those things. And we have the idea that if somebody could just see how remarkable and special we were, then they would be bowing and doing all these things.
And Suzuki Roshi didn’t expect you to do anything. We over and over again, said, “Is there something we can do for you, Roshi? Is there anything we can do?” And he’d say, “You do your practice.” And we would give him things, you know, a book or a painting or oranges or apples, and he’d put them on the altar. And you’d think, “Wait a minute, now. Wait a minute. I’ve given that to you, what are you doing putting it on the altar?” And he would say, “You’re giving it to me because you see the Buddha in me, because you see the sacred in me. So I’m just putting the gift where it belongs.” And all of that, being able to see you and then having so little, if anything, to do with status exchanges. Like who understands and who doesn’t understand, and he was so gracious about that. I mean, David has all kinds of stories in his book.
But one time he had been out gardening at dusk hour and he did a lot of rock work, and eventually I did a fair amount of rock work with him, in the Japanese garden and the stone walls. And one time—and he’d always work in his zoris, his rubber thong sandals—he and Paul Discoe were doing carpentry. Paul Discoe was the same. And people always want you to put on your boots and it’s like, “Huh? We’re following the master’s way.” But he came back to his cabin and his… Anja, the person taking care of his cabin was there, and she saw him come to the door and then she brought a little pan of water and then she brought a towel. And he said, “When you see what somebody needs and you give it to them, that’s Kuan Yin, that’s a Bodhisattva, that’s wonderful, thank you.” So he made you feel so good that way.
I have not that many stories, but several stories which I could tell you if we have time, but quite remarkable that way. I’ll tell you one more, for now. I was just thinking about this in the last couple days, so it seems timely. He used to stand on the bridge. At Tassajara there’s a bridge between the main area, and then there’s cabins going from the main area on down to the pool and beyond the pool, a barn and some other dormitories and things. And he used to stand on the bridge, and every so often I would walk by. Because my cabin was the first cabin across the bridge, and my room was on the back so you could the doorway to my room from the bridge. And you have to understand, of course, that I was someone with extreme low self-esteem in my early 20s, and for many years. And what’s the important point, is it a good performance? Or whatever, you know, anyway, we were standing there and the thing was that the door to my cabin, the floor of the cabin was about two and a half, three feet above the ground outside of the cabin.
So I had piled up some rocks to be able to step up to the door of my cabin. And one day we were standing out there and he said, “You know those rocks piled up outside your cabin? It doesn’t look so good.” And I said, “Yeah I know, and it’s wobbly, too.” And he said, “We pile rocks like that on top of graves in Japan. Not a good feeling.” And I didn’t think much about it but agreed, not a good feeling, and I didn’t know what to do. I wasn’t, at that point, doing rock work. I was working in the kitchen. And sometime later, I don’t remember how long it was, but one day I saw him in his cabin and he said, “Ed, do you know that big rock outside the office?” And I said, “Yes,” and he said, “I’m asking Paul Discoe to move that rock to your cabin this afternoon to be your doorstep, would that be OK?” And I said, “Oh, but Roshi, people love to sit on that rock.”
In those days, late 60s, a lot of people were still smokers, so people would sit on that rock and smoke cigarettes outside the office. Because you could get your mail in the office and then come out and have a cigarette while you read your mail. And I said, “People love to sit on that rock and read their mail and smoke cigarettes.” And he said, “We’ll get another one.” And sure enough, that afternoon I was in my cabin and they had put that rock on a metal sled chained to the back of— we had this 1949 Dodge Powerwagon.
And sure enough the rock was in the metal sled and coming across the metal bridge really loud. [SCREECH] So I knew the rock was coming. And then we moved it over to my place. Tossed all those rocks off the doorstep into the creek, and then slid over the other rock. We were using short lengths of two- or three-inch pipe, probably two-inch pipe, and you just get the end of the rock up and roll it forward on the pipe and then put more pipes in as you go along, and then pretty soon you’re taking the pipes out the back and putting them in the front. And you just roll it over.
I learned a lot about how to do things the easy way, doing rocks with Suzuki Roshi, you didn’t try to muscle it. Anyway, it was an amazing, amazing, experience. And it was just the right size. We didn’t have to dig it into the ground. It wasn’t going to go anyplace. We didn’t have to make it level. It was a magnificent rock. It was four, five feet long and at its widest about two foot wide and then it angled down to the ends. And then every time, when I would step into or out of the cabin, there was Suzuki Roshi. Supporting me.
TS: You mentioned, Eddy Bear, that you were a disciple of Suzuki Roshi.
EEB: Yes.
TS: You used that word. And you know, I think a lot of people don’t use that word in today’s everyday kind of conversation. There’s a nervousness around it. Like, “Could I ever really trust a human being enough to say that I was their disciple? Really?” Like “No, you know, I mean, I studied with them for a period of time,” or something like that.
EEB: Well, there’s being a disciple, considering yourself a disciple. But I had a ceremony of becoming a Zen Priest, being ordained as a Zen Priest as his disciple, ordained by him as his priest. Technically, I was his disciple but he died three months later. David Chadwick says that because Suzuki Roshi was not feeling that well, and David had the feeling, he thought at the time, “If we don’t get ordained, it could be years.” He already had the feeling that Baker Roshi wasn’t going be ordaining people. So David said that he’s the one who talked to Katagiri Roshi, and got Katagiri Roshi to do the ceremony on behalf of Suzuki Roshi.
TS: Yes. And as an ordained priest in Suzuki Roshi’s lineage, what do you feel is your responsibility to carry forward?
EEB: Well, that’s quite a question. And I’ve been struggling with that and struggling with that. Or, you know, working with that and working with that for years. Ever since. What is my responsibility? And coincidentally, we waited just long enough to have this interview that I can say yesterday, I opened my Zen center [Peaceful Sea Sangha].
TS: Congratulations!
EEB: Thank you. Only 50 years after, 50 years from when? Anyway—no, it’s not quite 50 years since I was ordained because I was ordained in 1971, so it’s 48 years.
TS: Yes.
EEB: Because typically, then, you do something to carry on your teacher’s tradition. And the most common thing is you have your center and you have your students. The reason I wanted to become a priest was I was so inspired by Suzuki Roshi, by who he was and how much he helped people. And I thought, “I would like to do that. I would like to be there for people and help them.” But many things over the years, I never really felt like, “Oh OK, I’ll have a center.” Various circumstances happened over the last number of months and weeks, and I have what was a rental unit on my property in Fairfax, and I had the tenants move out and I turned it into a meditation hall. So I’m now becoming my own benefactor. And I’m creating a meditation hall for myself.
TS: You know, as part of our conversation about the book, The Most Important Point, I wanted to pull out some of the important points that struck me, that were meaningful to me.
EEB: Oh, good for you.
TS: And talk about them with you if that’s alright.
EEB: That’s one of the things I appreciate about talking with you Tami, you do your homework.
TS: Yes, indeed. I always want to offer to people the most beneficial conversation. I want to help myself and people listening.
EEB: Yes, and you do that, rather than saying to me, “So tell us about some of the most important points in the book.” [LAUGHTER] So thank you, you do your part. I really appreciate it, thank you.
TS: I’m here to meet you, Eddy Bear. I’m right here.
EEB: There you go.
TS: So I loved this teaching: take the backward step.
EEB: Oh yes.
TS: And I’m wondering if you can unpack that for our listeners.
EEB: Well, first of all, the full expression is that meditation in a Zen tradition and the Soto Zen tradition is to take the backward step… to take the backward step and to turn your light inward, or to turn your light inward and to take the backward step. Or to take the backward step that turns your light inward. So that’s the full sense of taking a backward step, is you’re turning your light inward rather than outward.
And I associate this with, and it seems even more prevalent than it ever has, that our culture and even Buddhism and meditation, everything is presented, “What are you going to get out of it? How do you advance forward? How do you get somewhere? And where do you want to get to? And we’ll help you with that, and this teaching will help you with that. And we’re going to help you perform better, do your job better, be a happier person, be this, be that and become more successful. We’re going to take you to the next level, we’ll really help you out here.” And everything is presented. And I’ve done courses at some places where they give you a format for how you describe your course.
TS: Yes.
EEB: And you have to tell people, “In this weekend you will learn . . . ”
TS: Yes.
EEB: “And this, what you’re going to get out of it.” Because that’s the way you present things. And it’s even true, of course, with cookbooks. “Ed Brown will teach even inveterate meat eaters how to produce vegetarian masterpieces.” Can’t we just cook and have a good time and enjoy ourselves? Or do we have to, if we’re going to cook, we need to make a masterpiece.
TS: Yes.
EEB: Who are you trying to impress?
TS: Yes.
EEB: Can’t we appreciate and enjoy being here on the planet earth and learn how to be with things, and do a little gardening and cooking and visit with our friends and be sweethearts? Rather than the pressure of performance, and, “You’re only as good as your last meal, how are you going to surpass yourself?” And I did that for a while and at Tassajara that was one of the things that had happened. I decided, “No.” I started out thinking it was my job to tell other people what to do and to get them to do it and that I should know how to do it and I should get them to do it the way they’re supposed to. I would teach them this and that and eventually I decided my job is to find my successor and make myself really unimportant.
Or as Naomi Shihab Nye says in her lovely poem The Red Brocade,”Here take the red brocade pillow,” but she says—I’m getting off the subject here—but anyway, at some point in the poem she says “No, I wasn’t busy when you came! I was not preparing to be busy. That’s the armor everyone put on to pretend they had a purpose in the world.”
TS: Yes.
EEB: And so, the backwards step is you take off your armor, and in our tradition you sit down and you face the wall. You don’t face the world, like, “How am I going to handle what’s coming next?” You turn, literally you turn towards the wall and in that sense, the metaphor is you’re turning inward. And of course just this morning somebody said, how they used to do a comedy routine of —I forgot the woman’s name, but she was a swami—and she says, “Oh yes, let’s go inside. Oh, what a mess!”
But classically, in Soto Zen you’re just sitting with it. Suzuki Roshi really emphasized no gaining idea. With no idea gained of where you’re trying to get to. And the less you have an idea of where you’re trying to get to then the more you’re going to actually notice. Then you, again it’s like feeling your way in the dark, you’re sensitive and careful and, “What is this? What’s going on here?” Rather than, “How do I get rid of this, and obtain that, and perfect this, and improve that?”
It all goes back, and of course Suzuki Roshi was, and I’ve heard stories about it, incredibly good friends with Trungpa Rinpoche. And one of my friends who studied with me at Tassajara later studied with Trungpa Rinpoche and he said that one time Trungpa Rinpoche said, “What is an advanced Dzogchen master doing in those Japanese robes?”, about Suzuki Roshi.
TS: Yes.
EEB: They really saw each other. And Trungpa Rinpoche was the same. Because he wrote Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism. It was all about that. So much “I’m going to become more spiritual.” Don’t you think that’s a rather materialistic idea?
TS: Yes.
EEB: And to have this, and of course you can sit for years, but occasionally you have no gaining idea. And of course one of the times you get to no gaining idea is when none of your gaining ideas worked out! And then you go, “Oh my God, I’m just going to have to sit here?”
TS: Yes.
EEB: “None of my plans for spiritual advancement have worked out, and now I just sit with this? Whoa.” And that’s sometimes when you get to no gaining idea. But it’s really quite brilliant, and no gaining idea is very much in Zen associated with taking the backward step that turns your light inward. I’m thinking of using this for my next book.
TS: Tell me.
EEB: Which I would actually write. Huh?
TS: Tell me.
EEB: OK. Well, in 1984, after I had been practicing at the Zen Center for 19 years, I was at Tassajara and due to varying circumstances, I was leading the Tassajara practice period. There were 22 students. Many things happened at practice period, but after a couple months, one day I came in, and I’m the head teacher so I come in with the final roll down of the han. And I come up to the altar, boom, boom, boom. Then I bow and I offer incense and there’s three big bells, and I bow. And then the head teacher walks around the room. It’s called the jindo, it’s the morning greeting. And then the students, who are facing the wall, you are aware of when the teacher is walking past behind you, and you put your hands up with your palms together, what we call in Japanese zengassho. You put your palms together, your hands in front of your face. It’s like a bowing without bowing, you put your hands together.
And I got, finally, to my seat and I sat down and I thought to myself, “Well, what shall I work on today? Concentration? Equanimity? Compassion? Generosity? Is there something I should be working on today? How do I advance my practice?” And a little voice said, and I don’t know where this voice came from, and it said, “Why don’t you touch what’s inside with some warmth and kindness?” And I didn’t even have to say a thing. My face is completely sopped, my robe was wet, tears were just dripping down onto my lap. So I started touching what was inside. And I had cried before that, but I had been busy being a Zen person.
So I started, in meditation, “Why don’t I feel what’s inside?” About a month after that, Katagiri Roshi came to visit, he was our interim abbot at the time. And I went to see him, and I said, “Roshi, I’m, in meditation now, I’m touching what’s inside. I’m wondering if that’s OK? Or if there’s something else I should be doing that would help me advance more in Zen practice? How do you gain something? How do I advance in practice?” And Katagiri Roshi said, and he was so straightforward, he said, “Ed, for 20 years I tried to do the Zazen of Zen master Dogen before I realized there was no such thing.” And the little voice inside me said, “Oh, right on schedule.” I’ve been practicing for 19 years, he’d been practicing for, he said, 20. What am I supposed to be accomplishing?
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TS: You know it’s interesting, Eddy Bear, because one of the things I picked up on was when you mentioned in this conversation how in your early 20s, you said that you had extreme low self-esteem.
EEB: Yes.
TS: And one of the things I wanted to hear about was how through your Zen practice and your life and work at Tassajara, how that became healed over time.
EEB: Yes.
TS: And it seems like you’re pointing to that in this sharing of how your practice started addressing whatever was coming up in your experience?
EEB: Well, and it was about that same time that I, one way or another, had the realization, and this visit with Katagiri Roshi kind of confirmed it, I realized that who you are and your value as a human being is not dependent on your performance, or your accomplishment, or your attainment. And it was right around that time that I had been thinking, and then I got it. “Who you are is not dependent on any of that and I am a sweetheart. I am a good person. I am a decent human being. I am sincere, wholehearted, and I’m doing the best I can. I’m offering, I’m sharing, I’m working on things, I’m studying. I’m working on communication skills, working on how to do various things, and how to be in meetings and how to do different kinds of work. But fundamentally, there’s nothing wrong with me, I’m fine.”
And somehow you know you hear this, and you hear this, and you hear this, but you have to get it. That who you are is fundamentally just fine. Who you are is not dependent on—and it’s related to of course, Suzuki Roshi saying, somebody once asked him, “Suzuki Roshi, who are you?” And he says, “I’m someone that you can see and listen to and talk to. And I’m someone you’ll never know, that none of us will ever know.” And that someone will never know, that’s who you are. And at some point, when one can shift one’s understanding of who one is to the you that is not—it was never an object in the first place.
We keep evaluating ourselves because we’re seeing ourself as an object. And then the object has different ages and different measures of success or failure, and has done various things or not, and you can asses that object. But you, the subject, has never been, you’ve never appeared, you’re never disappearing, you were never tainted, you were never pure, you don’t increase, you don’t decrease. You’re consciousness itself. You get in trouble, of course, if you say that consciousness itself is Jesus. But consciousness itself, we’re all just consciousness itself. And then we worry though, about all these assessments that are going around and all the… this compared to that.
TS: Yes.
EEB: So I got that more and more, and then it didn’t solve everything. You just end up with new challenges. [LAUGHTER]
TS: You know, I think it’s a very powerful statement to be able to say, Eddy Bear, to be able to say, “I recognize that the energy that’s me,” or whatever you want to call it, “is sincere and wholehearted.” Those are really beautiful things to be able to say about one’s self.
EEB: Thank you, Tami.
TS: And I’d love to know more about, because both of those words are very powerful to me, sincere and wholehearted.
EEB: Well, that’s wonderful. They’re powerful to me, too.
TS: What does it mean on the inside, to feel those things?
EEB: Well again, one’s value is usually determined in reference to others or to the world. And I’m right there with them. I’m right there with Michael Meade and other people who say, “We grew up, and you learn to fit in.” And Bly, Robert Bly. He would go on and on about this. You grow up, and you’re learning how to fit in. And then you put in the bag everything that doesn’t fit and then at some point, you’ve got a happier self or something in the bag. You’ve got all this, what otherwise would be gifts. You’ve them stuffed away because you know you’re not supposed to play, you’re not supposed to play with your food or do this or do that. Pretty soon you’ve got a lot of your childhood enthusiasm or exuberances, like most of us are too exuberant.
But it’s just learning to fit in. And you learn to fit in, and in order to fit in, (and Brené Brown talks about this too, you’ve got all these great CDs here with Sounds True.) And to fit in, you abandon parts of yourself. And to be sincere, you’re taking back all those parts and owning them. And sincere, I love the definition of. S-i-n is like s-a-n-s in French, without. And “cere” is wax. Without wax, and wax is what was used to fill in the blemishes in the statues. Or sometimes, if people clipped metal out of coins they’d fill in the space with wax to make it look like a whole coin. So, sincere is the blemishes show.
And it’s like Robert Bly’s poem. “Being yourself, is that like limping? Is that like limping?” Because being yourself, it’s not what the world is looking for. The world is . . . “Oh, look at that. That’s so weird. That’s so… this or that.” So the world will assess you, according to wherever they’re looking from, and it doesn’t measure whether you’re sincere or not. You’re who you are and you’re not trying to hide it. And you’re not trying to hide it doesn’t mean that you’re trying to flaunt it or show it, or emote it. But you’re who you are. And then that’s of course, a work in progress. And I used that, probably, somewhere in the lectures, I don’t know, I hope so.
But Zen master Deshan said, finally, the middle of this diatribe about Zen and how a lot of Zen practices, like it’s tethering donkeys, a post for tethering donkeys. But at some point in the middle of all that he says, “Realizing the mystery is nothing but breaking through to grasp an ordinary person’s life.” And I hear things, like that, I know, “I’m in the right school.” I’m not in a performance school. Although, there’s a lot of performance practice, I’m not in the performance school. I’m in the—another story about Suzuki Roshi is, of course he said, “Some of you are trying to be good Zen students. Why don’t you be yourself? I’ll get to know you better that way. Because being a good Zen student, how do you know who’s who? Who, who, is a good Zen student?” And sincere, you start to feel who. You start to sincere. You’re you. And it’s OK to be you. And you honor the things that happened. You’re you, and you’re not covering it over, you’re not hiding it. So, at various points I’ve set out to be sincere and I work on it, and sometimes I overdo it. You and I, I’ve shared too much with people. I don’t tell just anybody that I’m Eddy Bear, or they make fun of you when they’re talking about you.
TS: I appreciate this sincerity quite a lot.
EEB: “You’re just an emotional baby, you’re a puddle,” whatever. “You melt down too much in public.” I don’t have the requisite defenses, I guess, to withstand what’s going on. Yes, I get overwhelmed sometimes. But that’s sincere to me. And then wholehearted is, you decide, and each of us just keeps deciding, what are you going to give your heart to? And of course in Zen, the idea is you just practice giving your heart to each moment. You give your heart to sweeping, to raking, you give your heart to sitting. You give your heart to doing the dished. You give your heart to the conversation. You give your heart. Because if you wait to find something valuable to give your heart to it, you have no idea how to do it. So you practice with whatever’s coming up.
TS: Yes.
EEB: And another way to say give your heart is, I use that expression, I think, another one of Dogan’s expressions, “Let things come home to your heart. And let your heart go out and abide in things.” That’s a combination of Dogan and Suzuki Roshi and me.
TS: I like it, it’s a good soup.
EEB: As Dogan said, it’s usually translated, “Let things come and abide in your mind.”
TS: Yes.
EEB: But mind is “shen” which is heart/mind, so I would prefer to use heart, because I think that’s more the feeling. Things come, not come and fill your mind, no. They come and fill your heart. And they come home to your heart and you invite them home to your heart. And then you let your heart go out to things. And it doesn’t happen because you have such a big heart. It happens because you practice giving your heart to things.
TS: Yes. You know, one connection, Eddy Bear, just to share for a moment, that I’ve seen in my own life, is in giving up any idea of gain, there’s more available to meet each moment in a heartful way. Because I’m not going anywhere.
EEB: Absolutely.
TS: Those two ideas have been very connected in my own unfolding.
EEB: Yes. Absolutely, yes. Without that, because if you’re gaining again that’s like, you have a lot of light and you know where you’re going. And you know what you want to gain, and then you’re getting insensitive and you’re pushing things out of your way, and you want to accomplish something. When you’re not doing that, you have much more of your awareness available for “How are you? What’s happening here? What’s for dinner?”
TS: Yes. Exactly.
EEB: Feeling your way along, and, “What do we do next? Where is my heart being drawn to?” Which is another aspect of this. It’s not quite as simple as “let these come and abide in your heart, let your heart go out to things.” But it’s also finding out where your heart likes to go. And I decided that was the Zen for me. I mean, there’s Zen and there’s Zen and there’s Zen, so I like the Zen of sincere and wholehearted and giving your heart to things and letting things come and abide in your heart. But anyway, not everyone understands it that way.
TS: Now in terms of letting the blemishes show, so I did watch this German film that was made about you, How to Cook Your Life.
EEB: Yes, yes.
TS: And one of the things that stuck out for me, and I’m sure it stuck out for anybody who watches this, is there are a couple scenes, maybe you know what I’m talking about, where you are unbelievably angry. You were so angry that you couldn’t get the wrapper off the cheese and it was stuck…
EEB: That was a setup, by the way.
TS: Was it? I was curious about that. So it was kind of like, maybe not.
EEB: I told Doris, I said, “But, Doris, people aren’t going to . . . ” “It’s just a movie.” “Yes, but people watching the movie aren’t going to know that it’s just a movie.”
TS: Yes, I thought, “God, Eddy Bear needs some anger management stuff.” But tell me about why that was important to include in the movie that way, whether it was a setup or based on whatever.
EEB: Well, that was Doris’ idea.
TS: OK.
EEB: She said, “You’re in a movie because you’re not Thich Nhat Hanh and you’re not the Dalai Lama, you let your emotions show. And people are going to be able to relate to that and they’re going to be able to identify with you, and then they’ll listen to what you have to say.” So that was Doris’ idea, and some people feel that way and other people—I’ve watched that with groups of people who are so entertained and energized by seeing the movie, and then other people who are just so engaged in criticism and judgment. “Why are they making a movie about him? I’m a better Zen student than that. He doesn’t know how to control his feelings.” So when I watched it with a group of Soto Zen Buddhist teachers, 20 or 30 of them, years and years ago, close to when the movie came out, at a teachers conference at the San Francisco Zen Center, the first thing they asked me is, “Your mother died when you were three, and you were in an orphanage for four years?”
It’s really different what people see in that movie. Part of the movie is what you see, of course. So anyway, that was Doris’ idea. I was thinking about this too, lately. I never asked Doris, “Would you make a movie about me?” Doris was at Tassajara and she was at some of my cooking classes, and her daughter was there. Her daughter was 16 or something, or 15. And she said, “Ed, do you want to make a movie?” And I said, “Sure.” And I said, “In fact I’m going to be in Austria next year.” And she said, “Where’s that?” And I said, “Scheibbs.” And she said, “I can film you there, I’m in Munich.” So sure enough, she got it all together to film the movie the next year, which was 2006, and then it came out in 2007. But that was her idea, that people would see me as being more on the same level as they were on and not as somebody higher, some authority talking down to them. It was more like a friend.
TS: Yes.
EEB: And this was the difference between, by the way, I’ve thought about it a fair amount, obviously, or not obviously, but I’ve thought about it a fair amount. I sometimes say there are two kinds of teachers. And one kind is masterful, they do not melt down in public. And there’s many examples of masterful teachers. And then some of them, though, they say, “If you do what I tell you to, you too could become masterful.”
TS: Yes.
EEB: But really, what you’re learning is to do what they tell you to. How masterful do you become, then? Then you’re like, and the situation would be, the famous Chinese Zen story was, the teacher said, “All of you gobblers of dregs, if you keep on like this when will you have today? Haven’t you heard there are no teachers of Zen in all of China?” And gobblers of dregs is, you chase around after what other people say.
TS: Yes.
EEB:And since it’s the dregs of their life, and then you’re going to follow and you’re going to keep gobbling these dregs. When will you have today? When will you be you, and be sincere and wholehearted and do something that comes from your heart, that’s from the depths of your being? Or what in Zen is called, Suzuki Roshi used the term, “true nature.”
TS: Yes.
EEB: To know your true nature and to express yourself fully. So anyway, there’s this masterful Zen teacher, and then you do what they say, and there’s another teacher that says “Oh, you’re scared? Me too. What do you want to do? Shall we sit together? Shall we go for a walk? Would you like a cup of tea?” It’s a little bit like, I was listening to another one of those Michael Meade tapes and he said, your child wakes up in the night and comes in and says, “I’m scared.” And then you say, “Oh, it’s all OK.” No, it’s not all OK. You don’t know that it’s all OK. You might just as well say, “Yes, me too. I’m scared too. What should we do? Let’s turn on all the lights! Let’s check all the doors! Let’s have a cup of hot chocolate!”
You’re not trying to deny the difficulty in that situation, the problems. You’re actually trying to be rather realistic. And the fact is that none of us, and come on, now, the first Noble Truth in Buddhism? The fact is, you have so little capacity to be masterful or in control of much of anything. That’s the first Noble Truth. Things cannot be controlled, your experience cannot be controlled, life cannot be controlled. Everything is out of control. What are you going to do? Somehow, people still love it that there are masterful people out there and that you can listen to them and they’ll help you.
TS: Yes. If we called this first type masterful, would we call this second type more like a friend or companion?
EEB: Yes, more like a friend or a spiritual companion. I think of it as a friend in the dark. But that gets kind of funny, because like, uh oh, Michael Jackson?
TS: No, that’s not what we’re talking about, it’s fine. It’s a different kind of friend in the dark.
EEB: I know, so you have to be careful with your language so I don’t know, so, spiritual friend, companion. Somebody that you don’t have to hide all these things from. Who’s going to accept you, even though you’re not hiding.
TS: Yes.
EEB: And you’re not running away, and you’re showing up. You’re showing up with who you are and what’s going on with you, and it doesn’t mean you’re trying to burden anybody with it, but you have the difficulties you have. And of course, that’s a whole other topic about the difficulties that you have. And it’s not your lack of skill. There’s this whole thing, if something painful is happening, there’s this pretty common idea, you must have done something wrong. That’s child thinking, excuse me. I mean, there’s sun and dark, and light and day, sadness, happiness, and the experiences in Buddhism come because of your karma, or whatever you say. But things arrive and disappear, and it’s not because you’re good or bad. We all did our best growing up and we have a lot of residual stuff in the bag, I call it the bag, that we need to haul out and grow up and examine and look at and acknowledge and say, “Hey!”
TS: Now, Eddy Bear, there’s one more thing I want to make sure we have time to talk about here before we end.
EEB: OK.
TS: Which is, you mentioned how this group of Soto Zen teachers and priests, when they saw the movie How to Cook Your Life, the thing that came up for them was, “Your mother died when you were three years old and you lived in an orphanage for several years?”
EEB: Yes.
TS: There’s a section, a small chapter in the new book, The Most Important Point, called “Zen Practice and Meeting Early Childhood Trauma.”
EEB: There is? OK.
TS: There is. Small section. Here at Sounds True, this is a topic that has been very interesting to me, and we’ve published a lot on it. Which is trying to understand how does our spiritual practice help us with the resolution of childhood trauma? And how do we need to bring in other psychological approaches, work with a therapist, etc., and I wanted to hear your views on this.
EEB: Yes. I feel a little chagrined or embarrassed to admit that I don’t actually have views. Except that, I’m in this school, and if I want to send you my book about this, can I go ahead and send it to Sounds True?
TS: Indeed.
EEB: It’s the book where I describe being Eddy Bear, it’s my book that’s called By All Means. I’m in the school of “by all means.” Yes, you can do Zen practice. I was reminded of this, by the way, just yesterday or the day before, Sounds True sent out an announcement of Diana Winston’s book, and she’s talking about different kinds of meditation and what they’re good for. It’s not as though one is more valuable than the other. I have the feeling that it might be that under the right circumstances, spiritual practice would be great. I found that I needed other things to do, other things besides just Zen practice.
And after 20 years of Zen practice I did 15 years or so of Vipassana practice and a lot of retreats with Jack Kornfield, all kinds of people, at IMS in Massachusetts, and so on. I had to do other things. I’ve done many things. I did a wonderful Process Workshop with Myrna Martin, which I found out some things in that. I have a very intuitive and brilliant, brilliant, hands-on healer that I work with for many years now, and especially in the last couple years, a lot. Not everybody understands things quite the same way, and it seems important to be able to acknowledge. It’s just a simple thing of, “Excuse me, but this is not about today, is it?”
When you’re in childhood trauma, it’s hard to realize it’s not about today, it’s not today. Something is surfacing, something today triggered to your own persona and it’s reconstellated and there you are and you’re two years old or you’re three years old, and mom’s just died or . . . whatever it is. You don’t realize you’re two years old three years old. And then, I also found out that, ironically enough, I found out that I had been doing in Zen practice I had learned how to do what’s called physical displacement. Or spatial displacement, spatial displacement is the more general word. Men tend to do spatial displacement and women tend to do temporal displacement. This is something I studied largely with Lansing [Barrett Gresham] through Integrated Awareness, which is what I was mentioning. They’re in Petaluma, California now. Brilliant, brilliant, man. I just went to a workshop there on Saturday.
The thing about spatial displacement, when I found that out I was at one their workshops. And for spatial displacement, you become aware of it, you put the awareness in your left leg. The awareness that could be your left leg, you put it in your left leg. And then you put it anywhere else but your left leg. You can put it in your right leg or across the room, or wherever you want, just anywhere but your left leg. And you do that with your left leg, your right leg, your left arm, right arm, your abdomen, your chest, your neck, your head. And then it’s, “Damn! This is just like meditation.” So I think you need to be working with some pretty well-developed people. I’ve since then worked with people, I did four years of energy classes with a woman in Berkeley named Lynda Caesara. She’s the most brilliant person I’ve ever met, besides Suzuki Roshi. And she can see what’s going on with you.
TS: Yes.
EEB: It doesn’t mean she’s going to tell you, because she says, “It’s better if I don’t tell you, because you’re just going to get resentful if I tell you. You’re going to have to figure it out for yourself and then you can check with me.” But if you ask the right kind of question in class, you’ll get an answer. Phenomenal, phenomenal things that people are doing out there that help you become aware of not just where your body is, but when your body is. You can say, “Well, I’m here, it’s today, yes, in my dark, soundproof studio,” wherever you are. “I’m sitting outside in the sunlight, here I am.” But where you are inside, that’s taking the backward step, but it turns out that there’s a lot of different things that you can end up doing if you don’t know any better.
And after I stopped spatially displacing so much, then I started . . . one of the reasons you spatially displace is so you don’t temporally displace. So then I started having years of temporal displacement. The simple thing in Myrna Martin’s workshop was, “Look around the room. This is today.” And you look at these seven or eight other people who are in the workshop with you, and the teachers. And you look around and you see the room like, “Oh, this is today. It still feels kind of scary, but this is today, huh?” And you get a little reassured. I finally worked with somebody, my friend who also knew Trungpa Rinpoche, he’s become a hypnotherapist, Jack Elias. He does Finding True Magic. So I’ve done all these different things. And Finding True Magic, Jack is the first person who . . . I mean, it’s not like this isn’t Buddhism. It is Buddhism, but you hear it in Buddhism and you can’t just practice it, you need help. You need to work with somebody. And mostly, there are not a lot of great teachers out there, I’m sorry. And I don’t consider myself one of the great teachers. But some of these people I worked with, oh my God. They are great teachers. I don’t compare.
TS: Even though you said you didn’t have a view on my question, you have offered one, just in the three words “by all means.” That’s a powerful perspective.
EEB: Yes, by all means. That’s why I started with that.
TS: Now Ed, there are a lot of things we could talk about. But I think as a final question here, just to wrap this up…
EEB: You’re so good at this, Tami! Thank You! Wrap it up!
TS: We’re going to wrap it up now, I want to talk though, to that person out there who is potentially feeling some kind of real adversity or struggle in their life right now. You said you recently went to a class—
EEB: Yes.
TS:—that was on problems, challenges, and opportunities. I want to talk to that person right now, who’s suffering in some way. That’s why they listen, this person, to Insights at the Edge. Because there’s several sections of The Most Important Point that direct themselves to this question of “How can we orient ourselves towards adversity such that it makes us stronger? Builds us? Creates access to resource?”
EEB:Yes. Access to resources. I’m taking a moment here to see if I can find a place to start. Because I don’t want to start too far back, and I don’t want to jump too far ahead. It seems like one of the first things to do is to find things that you can do that lessen the intensity. I used to take walks, I used to walk around Marin County, in West Marin where I lived off and on for some time. You can walk out at the beach, you can walk in the hills, you can walk in the woods. I used to do a lot of walking. Physical things are often very helpful. I did yoga, yoga made a huge difference. I did qigong, the qigong I do, and I put it up on YouTube, you can start doing Ed Gong, it’s not Ed Gong the dermatologist but Ed Gong two series with Ed Brown, I’ve got my Zen robes on. [YouTube search: Edward Espe Brown “ED GONG”]
And doing something physical, and the energy starts moving, and you’re not feeling as stuck. And the volume of everything can kind of go down. And you begin to have—I mean that’s very basic—to have enough resources to meet the difficulty, so you’re not just spending all your time in overwhelm. And that may also mean where you live, where you work, but the simple thing is to find just the things you can do without the bigger thing of changing your job or your living. What helps you have some stability in your life? Some ease, some wellbeing? Nowadays, sometimes I think, “That’s about it.” When you start to have ease and wellbeing, and you’re noticing that, and you start to realize you have resources. You have resources available to you, and you have skills and tools that you didn’t know about, which is your presence, which is not in overwhelm.
That’s associated with your presence and overwhelm, because we think it’s the loving thing to do, to go in there with this poor, suffering person, and join them. And many people have said, “If you’re going to go down in the pit with who is suffering, then you’d better know how to get out.” I went down in the pit with someone who was suffering, me, for years, not knowing how to get out, and then we’re just both down there in the pit together. But if you can go for a walk, have a cup of tea, talk to a neighbor, see a friend, do some qigong, yoga, some people do dance. Some people do singing. I’ve mentioned the things that I do. But you start to feel your good energy, and then you have resources.
It’s also similar, by the way, I’ve started doing just a little bit from a book, I think it’s called Focusing. You take something disturbing inside and you imagine a bench next to you and you say, “Excuse me, I’d like you to sit on this bench here.” And I started doing that in meditation. Nobody told me that in Zen. But it turns out, that’s pretty nice. You take what’s difficult and you put it outside. And then pretty soon you start to feel like “Oh, I’m OK, I got entangled in that problem. I got entangled in those memories and those pictures. I got entangled and then I got sucked down with it. So I need to put that enough at a distance, it’s not like I’m trying to get rid of it but I can put it at enough distance that I can start to feel well and safe and good.”
And then you’re also in a position to ask for help. Beginner’s mind, and “What do I do, and how do I work with this? What are the possibilities?” But you begin to have some basic wellbeing. So I think just the simple things to do to have some basic wellbeing, and there are times when I didn’t understand this, but then I’d have to do . . . I’d literally have to do yoga for survival, “I need to do yoga in order to survive the pain. I need to do qigong so that I’m not just a puddle here. I need to do this.” And I found that the physical activities were, at some point, when I was in the more acute stages of things, I found that physical activity was much better at sitting. I could sit, but it wasn’t as effective for coming to this place, this sense of wellbeing and goodness, and flow of vitality. To me, you get that a lot with movement, which is also what got me through Tassajara originally, was that I worked in the kitchen. I wouldn’t have survived if we were just practicing meditation. So anyway, there you have it. By all means.
TS: You know, Eddy Bear, I feel your heart, and the kind of alive, broken-ness of a huge heart. That’s what I feel.
EEB: Thank you, sweetheart, my pleasure.
TS: Thank you, thank you so much.
EEB: All right. Have a good afternoon. Blessings, love you.
TS: Blessings. I’ve been talking with Edward Espe Brown. There’s a new book which is a collection of his Zen teachings from over 350 lectures, edited by Danny S. Parker, a student of his, it’s called The Most Important Point. With Sounds True, Edward Espe Brown has also published the book No Recipe: Cooking as Spiritual Practice.Thanks so much for being with us.
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