How to Bring Zen Into Everyday Life with Shozan Jack Haubner

our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving the right direction, how they feed their good wolf. Thanks for

joining us. Our guest on this episode is making his third appearance and it's shows on Jack Hofner, which is the pen name of a zen monk whose essays have appeared in the sun Tricycle Buddha Dharma in The New York Times, as well as in the Best Buddhist Writing Series. Jack is the winner of a two thousand twelve push Cart Prize and is the author of Zen Confidential, Confessions of a Wayward Monk, and Single White Monk. He's also the host of the YouTube channel Zen Confidential. Hi, Jack,

welcome to the show. Thank you for having me. It's gonna be back. Yeah, I should have said welcome back, because this is time number three. You were one of our very first guests and your book was called Zen Confidential, and I loved it. You had another book called Single White Monk, which I also loved, And as I was saying to you beforehand, I just love engaging with your work. You are a great, great writer, You are a funny writer. You've got a YouTube channel now, so it's just been

fun to be back in your world. And since you and I last talked, I have gotten very involved in Zen Practice, so we have that to sort of talk about also. But before we do any of that, let's start like we always do with the parable. There's a grandparent talking with their grandchild and they say, in life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always

a battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandchild stops and thinks about it for a second and looks up at their grandparents says, well, which one wins, and the grandparents says, the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in

the work that you do. You know, it's funny every time I know I'm going to come on your show, which, like you said twice, the third time, I spend some time thinking about this parable, contemplating it, meditating on it, and I always kind of come to the same place, but this time it's a little bit different. So I recently quit nicotine lossages, right, so I've been smoking for a while on and off. That I did the nicotine

lossages for a while on and off. And I think that this quote has the most meaning to me in terms of addiction, because you know, when it comes to energies like greed and hatred, I'm not so sure that those wolves are just bad or good. But when it comes to addiction. I have to not feed that wolf at all. So when it comes to nicotine, like nothing the part of me that craves nicotine gets even a taste of it, it's over. I'm back to it a

few weeks later, but with something like anger. Sometimes I give in to that energy and something shifts inside me, something needed to come out. It's a little bit, maybe embarrassing, and I may even have to make some apologies or something,

but it wasn't necessarily a terrible thing. Yeah, greed, I don't know about because because that was the other thing I think of the quote greed like sometimes I got to get my game on, get ambitious, get a little taste of you know, like getting more followers on YouTube or something. I mean, does that read? So it's an interesting quote. Like as an uncle, we talk a lot about attachment and not being attached to stuff, not being attached to good, not being attached to bad. Yeah, once

again you subbed me with your co on. Yeah. Well it occurred to me as you were saying that when you said I meditate with it, I was like, it could be a coon. I'm thinking about something you said about cigarette smoking recently, and when I say recently, I mean in the last several years. But you were talking about how you sort of picked up a cigarette abbit again after coming out of the monastery, and I love what you said. You said smoking isn't just bad for

you physically, like any unhealthy habit. It teaches you that it's okay to cave into your compulsions. I really like that framework. When we engage in things that we don't feel good about in many different ways, we almost make it easier to do them again in the future, in the same way that one cigarette isn't a problem, Like if one person only had one cigarette in their life, nobody would ever care. It's that one cigarette has a pretty good tendency to lead to two cigarettes. Yeah, yeah, yeah,

that's a great point. And yeah, I remember when I wrote that, because there was this feeling that I got out of the monastery. I was free again. I was just let out of the clink, and I was going to have some funds. So I would vommost cigarette from somebody, and you take that cigarette and inhale it, and this whole door opens up, this universe of possibility, like I can do this. Maybe I could lose my temper every now and then maybe I can take a drug, maybe

I can do anything. Like I'm teaching myself that it's okay to behave in a compulsive way. I mean, because I have that tendency, I have that bit of an addictive personality, and when I give it to a straight up addiction, there's a part of me that gets woken up and start saying, all right, let's see how far we can take this. Let's see what other areas flat

we can extend this into. Do you think that people who choose a monastic life have that tendency more broadly, I mean a monastic life is sort of the extreme version, the compulsive version of a normal spiritual practice, right, it's

like really taking it to the nth degree. Yeah, maybe, I mean I think people who are compelled to go on a monastic path are extreme personalities or have maybe an extreme decision, and like you go hard one way, and there's a part of you that wants it, that bad wolf wants it's piece of stake, you know, and it comes apart. So I found a lot of times monks have a addictions. They're really good about attachments. So and I can get tricky because then you hear monks

saying like, I'm not attached to drinking. I just like to do it all the time. And I know I have a little bit of an addiction, but I'm not attached to it. I approach it with the sense of humor, you know, I And if I don't do it for five weeks, I'm okay. But then somehow their life always comes back to it. They're smoking again or drinking again. You know, it's very interesting Somewhere in their mind they're not attached, but they're totally addicted. So some of them,

what's the difference? Yeah, I think it's an interesting question. When you were saying that, it made me think of all the different ways that I was able to say, yeah, I got a problem with drugs and alcohol. But here's why we don't all need to worry about this, right, Like, everybody, just step back. We got this. You know. So you got out of the monastery, and I'd like to explore the getting out of the monastery here in a minute.

But did you sort of have a little bit of a I'm gonna go crazy period because you had been so sort of regimented for so long, or did you find that a lot of your monastic habits kind of stayed with you, or once the context was gone, the habits were gone. The habits were gone because the habits were largely based on the schedule. Yeah, but the practice was there, the approach, the point of view, the way

of dealing with difficulties. How did the open minded and necessarily certain things I think shift after you do a practice for a while. Would you're probably figuring out and we realizing, of course, because you're doing was unpracticed out. But for me, certain things shift and they don't necessarily go back. So I get lazy with my practice, especially when I started out because everything was so new. I could go for a few days without sitting or something.

But the basic tendency I think stayed with me. But I definitely did have a period of going a little bit crazy. I felt so free, was like so ecstatic. I felt like just shot out of the womb, ready to rumble. Really wonderful. Actually, on some level, I think you said like coming out of the clink, like people

coming out of prison, can be an extreme experience. I do want to get into more of the monastery stuff, but I want to start with an idea that you talk about in a recent video of yours on your YouTube channel where you talk about that you know, a lot of us come to practice, you know, I mean, I've been doing Zen pretty intensely for the last number of years, but I was doing other Buddhist practices before that, and a lot of years of different kind of practices.

But that we come to these practices with the idea that the practice will fix us. I was wondering if you could say a little bit more about how you orient towards that now, because we are doing the practices for a reason, but expecting to be fick quote unquote fixed is maybe not the best reason. And maybe what is even fixed mean is something we could explore. But I just kind of wanted to dive deeper into that idea. Yeah. Yeah, that's something I've really been sitting with developing since I

got out of the monastery. Because now, in a sen the cake is baked. My teacher was dead, so he's not going to give teachers transmission to anyone. Like my lineage is in a sense almost dead because my teacher didn't give transmission. Right. So, like I said, my cake is cooked, this is it, this is what I am, And I look at myself I did my practice as the monastery did thirteen years, and I find myself thinking like, okay,

what what hell? What next? And there's a sense of sitting with the things I don't like about myself and I don't like about my life in the past. I think when I was at the monastery and I would sit on that cushion for hour after hour, day after day, we give a retreat after retreat, I think I had this idea that this problems inside myself, this good core suffering or craving, was going to dissolve all and this insight was going to sort of wrap my life and

change everything. And I, yes, I would be unhappy sometimes I'm experienced pain, but basically I would be cured. Basically I would be fixed. It was a really deep kind of idea that I had, And when I left the monastery got back out of the world, it was like it's not gonna happen, so what now? And so there's a sense of just kind of orienting myself a little bit differently, like Okay, I have these things that are not going to get fixed about myself, Like what do

I do with that? How do I live with that? If I'm not going to totally change myself and can I work with some of my bad qualities. You know, there's a lot of things you said in there that I'd like to explore, But the starting place I'd like to explore is this idea that your cake is sort of baked. Do you feel that that is just a choice you're making, Like, you know, what I've put in the dedicated focus on changing myself that I'm going to

put in my teacher's gone. I don't want to find another teacher, or I don't want to find another path, or I don't want to invest in the work whatever that is that intensely Or do you truly feel like the capacity for changing growth and you no longer exists. I think it's just going in a different direction now. It's not in formal practice. That's not the direction of

my growth anymore. It's in the smallest moments of my daily life, which we're always within kind of a romantic context at the monastery, because everything was practice, from washing your hands to chopping vegetables to doing co on work with your teacher. It was all formal Zen practice. And I did that, and I think it became time for me to go into the world and kind of unlock the dharma in the smallest, most mundane, most boring, reveal

ordinary moments. Yeah, well, I think for everybody who's on a spiritual path that is non monastic, I think that's the game that you just described. That's the thing. Like I have come to the deep realization and I've been working on through my spiritual habits programs that I lead in different things that like most people are maxed out as far as time goes, as far as their ability to meditate a little bit more, maybe they can increase

a little bit more practice in their lives. But the work that's going to be most fruitful is exactly what you're saying, you know, how do we bring these moments of clarity and openness and compassion and kindness to everything that we do? Which I think you know, Zen, the idea of the sort of work practice is what you're training to do, right, You're training to say, how can I make the most significant thing meaningful by giving it

enough attention? Yeah, I think that's completely true. One of the things realized that the monastery was and then getting out of the monastery really realized this was Okay, it seems like what we did at the monastery was your mind is going crazy. You've got a lot of suffering. Buddy, sit down in this spot. Just sit there. This quesion is gonna be soft, and we're gonna give you some rules to contain you so that you can just sit there. And I'm not gonna give you any instruction. I'm not

gonna tell you how to do it. There's gonna be no special mantra, no prayer to the Holy Ghost. You're just gonna sit there and figure out your mind yourself. So you sit there, and you sit there, and you sit there, and gradually you start to learn that there's a lot of noise inside your head and it you can ignore, and you learn how to just sit and breathe, and when the mind starts bugging you, you could do that breath practice and give yourself to the breath. That's

what I was kind of the monastery. So basically, the whole thing about sitting meditation is you're just learning how to do something simple completely, and sitting is like the simplest thing you could do, and that's not like you're training, and it's your tools. So if you can do that, if you can sit in one spot for a seven day retreat for eighteen hours a day and sit completely in breathe. You're gonna be able to go and chop carrots completely in the kitchen for formal kitchen practice. Maybe

you can break leaves completely. Maybe you can do the headmuck role completely. Maybe you can do co on practice completely. And each one of these activities. What I was taught was, Okay, you're giving yourself to it, and that thinking mind that you have it kind of dissolved and you connect with the activity. Now, thirteen years past, my monastic life is done. Now I have to come out into the world and

do that practice. You know, I could go back to do another monastery, do more coon practice, and do formal training, but the basic sort of task is always going to be the same, no matter what I'm doing, and no where or where I am, whether I'm at a monastery or out here in the world talking to you right now.

Does that make some sense totally? In the same video, you were talking about this idea of zen will fix us, you say, living in the present moment, it's hard because it requires us to accept the fact that things are never going to be perfect. Arriving at this understanding, making peace with it and then being energized by it. This is the point in the fruit of meditation practice, the first two parts of that making peace with it, you know, arriving at the understanding that seems not easy to do,

but fairly straightforward what you're saying. But how do we become energized by the fact that things are never going to be perfect? Yeah, that's a good one, because oftentimes, what I've got a problem that's pretty deep inside me, and I'm worried and anxious and upset, my mind will start chewing over it. So let's say it's like a money problem, and we're afraid I'm gonna not be able to pay this bill or something, and they're gonna send

me a letter. So there's a kind of really thrumming anxiety around it, right, And if I'm unaware of that anxiety, and I'm letting that bad wolf howl inside me, no matter how many different angles I try and solve that problem from, I'm still gonna suffer and I'm probably not going to make any headway on it. If I sit down on my cushion, if I hold the issue with some attention, like, Okay, this is the problem, and then I take a deep breath, and I'm still holding the problem,

but I'm not thinking about it. I am just breathing right and I'm doing my practice. I exhale completely and I inhale completely. Eventually, this is feeling of a little bit more looseness, a little bit more spaciousness, and I'm really focusing on the breath. But there's kind of an intention of I got this issue against this issue. I'm not going to touch it. I'm not going to solve it. It's red hot, but it's there. I'm holding it. Oftentimes, if I do that, something will shift and maybe I'll

have an insight into the problem. Right. Maybe in this case it's like, hey, you need to take money more seriously, or you need to take it less seriously. Right, I've been insight into it now. I feel energized. Now the whole thing has a deeper foundation right now, that's something to work with. I've got a path. It's not just a problem that I'm hitting myself over the head with. It's kind of a path and it has to do with my life orientation. Right, Like I said, take money

less seriously, take money more seriously. Right. The other thing that you said in there that I wanted to dig a little bit deeper into is learning to trust life. And listeners have probably heard me say this several times. I always end up back at this point. You know, I had a spiritual director for a while, and I've started to wonder whether it says more about him than me. But I'm going to assume it says more about me than him, which was every conversation we started on. We

always ended up at the end around trust. What can you trust in? And I hear people say you can trust in life now from one perspective, that seems preposterous. Right, life seems decidedly untrustworthy from the perspective of a single isolated human being, because all sorts of bad ship happens to us humans all the time. That is profoundly awful. Right, There are more awful things happening in the world right now than you and I would ever want to know

about at this very second. Right, So, in your mind, what does learning to trust life mean? I mean, I don't think you're saying that, like good things are going to happen to you personally necessarily, so I think you're speaking to a bigger reality. But I'm wondering if you can articulate it at all. Yeah, that's a really deep question. And I'm living in Vienna and Ukraine is like a border away, and I just imagine trying to trust life

when the bombs are dropping. Yeah, I mean my life is a blissful paradise compared to some people's lives, right, So totally, totally you're asking a really really deep question. I mean for myself. I mean, we were talking about surfing a little bit earlier. It's kind of like life. Life is the wave and you have to trust the waves, and sometimes you get thrown off the wave, you know, sometimes it was get drowned by the wave. But I had this experience when I was a young man where

it hit me. This is oftentimes I've said, it's discovered this experience a lot of people have, especially in the West. But I had this experience that there's something in this universe rather than nothing. Even if it's all made up in my mind, there's still something and whatever that is, I'm going to trust it. There's something going on. Right. There could have been nothing. There could have been no universe. There could have been none nothing, But there's experience, there's

here to call it. God to call it chance, call it dharma, activity, dharma kayah. And we don't always understand it. Like oftentimes I get in my head an idea about how things should be, and I get really upset and traumatized when they don't turn out how I think they should be or how I want them to be. But as my life sort of unfolds and I process these

horrible experiences, grow, move forward, move on, keep going. When I'm on my game, it's like the path couldn't be any rich, and the challenges created new dimensions of growth and experience that I have to be strong enough to be grateful for, strong enough and hulpful enough to be grateful for. But it's not easy. It's not easy and

not simple. Yeah, there was another line that you wrote about a relationship with the teacher and you you said it was intimate but not personal, And in some ways to me, that also points to what this trust, at least for me, gets at, which is that there is a way to be intimate with the world. There is an intimacy to the world. There is a unity to the world. When I zero into the personal just Eric or just the one person in Ukraine, or just the

child being abused right now. Right when I get that personal, there's nothing to trust. When I zoom back out, then I go, uh, maybe I can just trust that life is life, it is doing what it does. It makes me think a little bit about like I don't trust that we humans are going to solve climate change in time to save ourselves. We might, we might not, But I don't have any doubt that the world, the planet is going to be fine. Right, It's going to be okay. Life is going to do what life is going to

do there. And so there's something for me in that intimate but not personal phrase that you applied in a different element that somehow applies here for me too. Yeah, how that's the key to the whole thing. Like that was the switch for me, and it still is. The switch between the political or the cultural or the societal and the spiritual is a difference between the personal and intimate one can be having. And I have had really really bad experiences at a personal level. It's like a

horror show. But with my perspective shifts, I'm still intimately in the moment, but I'm not taking it personally. And now I think it' switched over into what I think is a spiritual perspective, which is that you're there, you're aware, you're connected to the situation, that you're not being destroyed by it. You're in it, you're intimate with it. But it's not a living hell. It's just a really interesting experience. Yeah,

I'm just thinking about my teacher. I got the sense sometimes that no matter what he was going through, he wasn't necessarily taken it personally. He was so connected to the moment, so inside of the experience he was still alive with it, but it wasn't like, oh, this is bad for me or good for me, And it really

made him a dynamic and interesting characters dancing with life. Hi. Everyone, I wanted to personally invite you to a workshop that we are offering at the end of October at the Omega Institute, which is in the Hudson Valley in New York,

and it is really beautiful this time of year. It's going to be a great chance to meet some wonderful people, recharge and relax while learning foundational spiritual habits that will allow you to establish simple daily practices that will help you feel more at ease and more fulfilled in your life. You can find details at one you feed dot net slash Omega. I'm really looking forward to meeting many of

you there. When I got sober in a twelve step program six years ago, right there was a phrase that when I first got it, it meant a ton to me, and it still does today, And it was this idea of free me from the bondage of self. And I had no idea how deeply connected that would be ultimately to Buddhist practice. But I recognized even then that when I am focused very much on myself, on my small sense of self, my small problems, my everything, that that does cut me off from life. It cuts me off

from that energy of life. You know, we talked earlier about being energized by these things. That bondage is self for me is what the entire spiritual path for me has been about, is how do I shake that or lesson that. I don't think I'm going to shake it, but how do I lessen it? Because when I do, I don't quite know what all happens. But what I do trust in is when I am able to let go of that to some degree, that I'm able to handle what life brings me and I'm able to flow

with life in a totally different way. Yeah. I remember somebody asked my teachers what enlightenment was, and he said, to sort of paraphrase and piggyback of what you're saying, the space between the moments where one is able to do that are just a much shorter. Oh yeah, because it self always arises, the angry, attaching, fearful, huddled up in your shell turtle self always arises. But the quicker you can shed that, the more quote enlightenment someone has

or is or manifests. I really like that. That's a powerful idea because it speaks to that self arising activity. It just happens. It's part of what it is. I talk to people about being able to do a behavior and do it consistently over a period of time, and I say that, you know, anybody is going to do anything for a long period of time. Broadly speaking, yeah,

of course you're going to get off tracked. What differentiates people who look like they have a lot of discipline or staying with something, it's just that the time they get off track is a lot less. So I've become more or less a daily meditator, you know. Plus after years and years on again, off again. And it's not that I don't miss days, of course I do. It's just that I don't miss weeks and months. You know, I miss a day and I go, all right, well,

let's get back on. And so I think speaking to that, you know, relating to how attached we are to self, is an interesting way to think about it. Like the space is smaller, right, right, It's interesting because if the space is smaller that you're sort of lost in that self, you're lost in thought. Then you know, at some point, I think we sit for a while, we get this insight. It's like they call it the backwards step. I think Dogan called it, and you get this insight into the

fact of what you're doing. Like when it works, like, okay, there are times when I'm forgetting myself. There are times when I'm connected to my surroundings and you notice that, and like, I think, these are these shifts that we have in practice, Oh, that is an enlightenment moment. I do manifest enlightenment. Maybe my enlightened teacher arguably manifests more of those moments closer together. But hey, I had one, right,

So okay, what happened? You know? Well, I was giving myself completely to dropping carts and I forgot myself, completely, forgot myself for a moment, and I loved the sound, like I was woken up by the sound of the knife hitting the cutting board, and it it's like music. You know, you have these moments like speeds. Back to a little bit when we were talking about earlier manifesting in your daily life outside of the sort of spiritually romantic setting of a monastery. Okay, how can I manifest

more of these moments in daily life? Because they do happen. Yeah. I gave a talk recently. The topic was sort of the confluence of spirituality and create ativity. I pulled up a chart and on one side was sort of like the elements that people study mystical experiences, say, here are the elements of a mystical experience. And on the other side of the chart was the things that psychologists refer to as flow. They look very very similar, right, you know,

they're talking about a lot of the same things. The reason I like that is I think it points to what you're saying is that we all have these moments. We may be looking for something that's really grand and amazing, but we all have moments where we merge with life. And the more we see that and notice that, I think it provides inspiration and fuel for practice, you know, for continuing on. Yeah, I've got so familiar with flow. I keep hearing that, and I know what there are

like parallels between that and the idea of somebody. Yeah, it's interesting to contemplate that and to sit with it. And I feel like there's something deeper in spiritual practice than what i'm as flow. But I'm not totally sure because I don't know the definition of that flow state. I actually think you're right. I think that they are

not exact. But you know, in a mystical experience, we might say, you know, there's a unitive element to it, right, and in a flow state, as you were saying the action and awareness, you know, the definition is they say, sort of action and awareness are merged, right, or you lose self conscious rumination. It may not be the exact same thing, but it's pointing in a similar direction. Or

mystical experiences are ineffable. People have a very difficult time describing as while you end up with phrases like flow or I was in the zone, you know, because it's ineffable. Time takes on different elements. Time is suddenly experienced very differently, So I don't think they're the same thing. You know, the experiences of Ken Show or of mystical experiences that I've had our way beyond the flow state of like practicing guitar and having the notes come out, but they're

on a continuum somewhere. And Americans were so obsessed with doing and being and I wonder if somehow bringing practice into our lives doesn't connect with this flow state, which is where we're doing things really well and not thinking about ourselves, because that's the way in. That's really a way in. And then we can almost pull back and say, what's happening when that happens. What's happening there, It's beautiful, it's a gift. It's almost like sacred if you want

to look at it like that. So what's happening there? Totally in the same way that like when I'm playing guitar and when I'm like really playing, And what I mean by that is something is arising. You know, I'm not practicing something, I'm not thinking about what I'm doing. It's just all of a sudden, now there is a piece of music that is coming out of the guitar that did not exist ten seconds. It doesn't even matter if it's a good piece of music, particularly it's some

play didn't exist. And when I'm able to move out of the ego sense, the ego is, oh, look at this great thing I wrote. When I move out of that and I look at it, what I'm left with is a real mystery, which is like, I don't have the foggiest idea how that happened. I can't recreate it, you know, I can't do it on will and there was no thought process, you know. And so I think

it's a way in. Yeah, it's a way in and thinking about it, and it's a good way to live, I think, as opposed to orienting yourself towards outcomes and metrics and quantifiable results, you know, quantitative results. Just I mean that's what we were taught at the modest dissolving into activity, like playing a guitar in a flow state with activities you really love. And then it's like, Okay, can I do this when I'm sitting on a bus?

Can I be aware of all the thoughts that are going through my head, all the places I'm trying to escape mentally because I don't want to breathe in this potential COVID air, listening of the traffic outside, crammed in with all these people you have oring in German all around me. Is I don't understand? You know? Can I do that flow state here? Can I dissolve into this activity? Yeah? That's one of the reasons why monastery life was so difficult.

It was like training you to be able to dissolve into any activity and hit that flow state or somebody or something even deeper. Yeah, yeah, all right, let's move directions here a little bit, and I want to talk a little bit about your later days in the monastery, and I just have to read a couple of things you wrote. One of the things we're not getting in this interview is how damn funny you are. And so I'm gonna just read a little bit and then allow you to kind of pick up and take it wherever

you want. But there's just a couple of passages that had me cracking up. You said, you know what, don't talk to me about workplace dysfunction until you've attended a meeting with your hundred and five year old non English speaking Zen Master and six sycophantic board members. That begins with the discussion of the monetary's tenuous finances and ends with the whole group expecting to raise one thousand dollars to build a new Zendo meditation hall. And you say,

but that was Roschi. He usually slept through board meetings. When roused and asked for his opinion on, say, getting new fire insurance through Lloyd's of London, he would listen to his translator nod and say something like, very good question, but what is fire and then give a three hour dharma talk. So I just love some of these stories. I mean of you trying to make sanity out of this place, you know, the hundred and five year old

non English speaking Zen teachers. A lot of great stories from that time, but also I think a lot of real stress for you in that time. Yeah, that's a good way putting it. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, and in retrospect, great stories, but yeah, during the time, an incredible amount of stress. I mean I had forgotten about that story you just read, but that happened exactly as you read.

I mean literally, we my teacher couldn't teach anymore. He got too old, and he had a bout of aspiration pemumonia, and so he was kind of he was retired, but he wasn't really talking about it. So a month passed since he had gotten out of the hospital. It was like, all right, Rosy, you got a bunch of students stuff at the monastery, bunch of monks and nuns waiting for you. What's the plan, you know, And he never really gave

us a plan. He never really spoke to it. I mean, he was there mentally, but something had shifted in him where he was over that portion of his life. You know. It was interesting, like part of my experience coming out of the monastery and not going back into a new situation with the new teacher was just watching him exit formal zen practice and not really look back. That makes any sense, I mean, he said, yeah, but you know,

build a new zendo. Raised a hundred thousand dollars, but there wasn't any plan to do anything with it after I did that, you know. And prior to part of Rosy's life, he was really proactive, really involved in every aspect of it as to life. But after he got sick, went through that came out the other side. It was it was kind of over how long from that sort of period of him getting sick coming out of the hospital, you were sort of the abbot at this point? Is

that an accurate statement? These terms get so tricky because, um, you know how it is that is really hierarchical, and a lot of this hierarchy is a little bit mysterious to Western people because we look at hierarchies and we look at like a dominance hierarchy. We look at like the alpha, right, And in Japan, especially when when I went there and I visited the monasteries, I saw much more of a dynamic between all the different levels and

layers of hierarchy. So it's kind of like this big unit where you needed the zen master at the top, but there was a bit of a wig wig attitude around it. Like in America, I think your hierarchies are more set and if I'm coming across, but we take these things more seriously than in my experience, the Japanese, like they would joke about their zen masters and maybe poke fun at them, but then respect the role. You know.

So we were all waiting for an appot. So an abbot runs the place like fully, I was like a manager. I would They called it the administrative abbot because I wasn't allowed to do co on practice, because nobody in our community was just roshy. And I wasn't allowed to give tassio, which is a certain kind of dharma talk where you're like speaking from the dharma, not about the dharma.

So these two things, being able to give tassio and being able to give cohans would make somebody a zen master in our lineage, but Roshi, and that's what we came to Roshi for. When he stopped doing those two things, he didn't give anybody else permission to do it. So we're all just kind of waiting. So I was a manager, but I wasn't really the abbot. Did you expect you were going to be given dharma transmission and that you would step into that role? Did you have that hope?

Did you think it was going to happen and it just never came to fruition? Or not really? For myself? I never did okay, Okay, I didn't really present him. I thought my teacher was really, really deep and I knew I wasn't there, and in order to get transmission, you would have to be able to better him. If you will you know, I don't know. Yeah, got it, Yeah, answer all his co os, and he's got nothing left for you. And that never happened with me, so I

didn't think so. Yeah. I thought maybe he would have some sort of plan for his lineage to continue, and I was surprised when that didn't happen. But yeah, you go on to say about this phase, You say, this is how religions get started. Spiritual communities keep going after the founder is gone. The disciples keep everything the same even though everything has changed. The living example becomes a ghost haunting the former grounds, the practice becomes a parody.

The disciples never grow up, nobody moves on. So that's kind of where you found yourself, and that's when you made the decision to leave. Is that sort of accurate? Yeah, yeah, I think so. It's my interpretation. Um, it's a little bit harsh, but sometimes we have to be a little

bit hard. I think when you have a teacher who's really really strong, like Sazaki Roshi was, it's easy for his presence to linger in the community like long after he's gone, and that leads to developments in the community, like the people in that community becoming like I don't know an alumni association of all the folks that used to train with this teacher. I don't think that that's

honoring the strength or the power of that teacher. And so I think when the teacher dies, you know, if he hasn't named his successor and the lineage isn't continuing in that way, you gotta let him die. Something as seriously has to die, fall into the earth, dissolved, so that's something new can be born. And even if it's just something tiny and small, if it's real, I think that's a proper continuation of what that teacher started in you.

But there is this tendency when you have a really strong teacher to just kind of like keep the thing going that the teachers started. And all the people get together and they argue about what this statement that the teacher said meant and what that statement meant, and they cling to his words, and they always quote him like lawyers quoting a precedent from a previous case and never speaking from their own personal experience. And I think that's really kind of the trick, is like you have to

be small. You can't use your teacher as sort of your justification, your spiritual bodyguard anymore to push everybody and you stand on your own two feet, you know. Yeah, And then you and I talked about this in the last episode. I don't think we need to go into a ton of it again. There was also as this was all happening, there was I don't know how you would phrase it, their allegations against your teacher of impropriety of different sorts, which also really kind of ripped the

community apart. Yeah, they stuck a stake through the heart of the community. Really, I would say sexual misconduct like I never experienced myself personally. I heard different accounts from different women, and I would be uncomfortable using the term. Yeah, ROSSI committed sexual misconduct, which can refer to a wide variety of things. But that was always in the community. It was always a problem. It was always almost like

a cancer in the background. But it finally came out when an ex monk kind of wrote about it and published something on a website, and then it just exploded, like within weeks. It was in the New York Times, and although it was like articles in Japan were coming out about it, so it was like a huge, huge scandal, and not just that this wound was exposed that had been kind of hidden for the longest period of time.

I wasn't going to bring up the most famous resident of the monastery, except that you wrote an essay about it not too long ago. So I am now clear in talking about Leonard Cohen again, which I always want to do because I'm such a huge, huge fan of his. You know, it still blows my mind that you used to sit next to Leonard Cohen and meditate, and he was at your wedding ceremony and all kinds of other things. But I just don't want a fan boy out on that.

What I do actually want to talk about, though, is something related to him that you were writing, and you were saying how he told you a story about how ros She's eccentric wife had tried to sue one of his students, a writer who was all so Leonard's friend, and that Leonard wound up footing the legal bills for both parties while hiding the fact from each other. And you love that. But you started off by saying, you know, well, Leonard got a pass, he did not have to choose sides.

I both resented and respected him for this. But then you go on to say Here's what I did not understand. I did not have to choose sides either. You choose to choose say a little bit more about that, Yeah, I think specifically just speak to that quote. You know, everybody comes into practice with their own bag of problems and capabilities. Right, Leonard had his you know, he said himself and born under a lucky star. Right, he had a bit of a different saddus in our community. I mean,

he was Leonard Cohen. You know, he's just he's never just going to be a guy sitting in his ropes on the one hand, and the other he really was just a guy sitting in his ropes, and in a lot of ways, he was a bad bunk like the rest of us, and the kind of a lay bunk who never really jumped in and all the stuff. So, you know, I made a bit of an identity out of being a monk, Like it was all I had. I wrote my essays about Zen and I was a monk, and I chose to kind of identify with that role

and to get sucked into the drama. And when the scandal hit, for example, I take personally the damage that was being done both within and without to our community I mean, I chose to go through that experience. It would have been very very hard for me to sort of pull back and just let the thing unfold. But I could have done that. I mean, instead, I just kind of got totally pulled into the situation. I mean, that experience had a lot of gravitational pull and a

lot of us really got sucked in. But I do think it's it's always a choice, Like you don't have to respond a certain way when found you were in a role where some response I assume was required. Right as administrative abbot or whatever, Right as one of the leaders of a community, some response is required. You say, though at a different point, that we're not gonna have

time to get in get into all this. But your wife Slash Roscy's other attendant, and you said nobody did more than her and I to deepen and solidify the split within our SONGA you picked a strong side. Do you have any sense of what you might have done differently? And I'm not looking for necessarily real specifics, because most people listening aren't going to know the situation well enough. It's more how could you fulfill the role that you

had to play as a leader? How could you do what you thought was the right thing, and yet also maybe not land so firmly in one place, or do you sort of feel like you did the right thing, but had I behaved differently, the outcome of that whole situation and that whole series of events would have been totally different, leading me to say something different now. So in retrospect, I don't think I would change anything that

I did. I mean, it was my imperative to make a public statement sort of apologizing for the role that myself and other priests had played in the culture of misconduct. In retrospect, though, I hope that and I think it did serve the purpose of the people who felt like they hadn't been heard over all these years were now we were acknowledging them, And in that sense, I think it was good. In another sense, I think you can't speak for your teacher, and maybe sometimes it's better to

stay silent. You get into politics when you start making statements like that, and I'm not sure how ultimately helpful that is. It may have been the case that I and maybe others should have just sat back and let the kind of the community dissolve fall apart, not try and say that or salvage it or speak to the misconduct. I don't know in the end. Yeah, yeah, when you're reflecting all this, you're sort of talking about two roles, right,

You're talking about the role of a monk and a writer. Right, You're talking about Leonard's great writing around this, and how great writing suggests it doesn't decide. It opens up the problem, it doesn't solve it. That is the work of the artist. But you were not just an artist, right, you were also in a position of leadership, and leadership's job is not to open up the problem and not solve it,

right Like. Unfortunately, when you're in a leadership role, you know, we are called to guide things at one direction or the other, and so I just have a lot of sympathy for, you know, kind of where you were going through all that. Yeah, that's a good point. I think, actually what the whole situation exposes that I'm just not a very good leader. More and more the artist's mentality, which is to sit with ambiguity rather than to try and lead people through it. Yep. Well, leadership is difficult,

particularly when you are a not really given authority. Right, You're you're sort of in a semi leadership role and then a tsunami rolls through. Right, you may not be leadership material, but I wouldn't write yourself off completely for that one situation, because that's pretty rough going. What we can write you off as having is the Hobner hes right, right, right right, you know, we know you've got the Hobner hecks,

which we can get into a little bit. But there's this image of you talking to your father, right and him describing that when you are a little baby, you are nursing at your mother, happy as could be, and then you sort of just pop up and you're not happy. He says, basically, you're not even happy there, you know, and you're thinking to yourself, where else would I ever

be happy? And your dad's telling you the story because you need to know what you're dealing with, right, You can't change what you are not at some zen monastery. It was there from the start. The best you can do is make peace with it. It's your dad is a trip. Is your dad's still alive? Yeah, he's still alive. Yeah, he's very healthy. I don't know how he's still alive. He lives at a diet of like canned beans and doughnuts and angel food game. He's healthier than all of us.

A bug and Wisconsin, is that right, those those hardy Midwesterners. You also tell about his father's brother, drunken, schizophrenic hobo who got murdered riding the rails. The other hoboes lit him on fire and pushed him right out of the moving railroad car. You want to know why your dad asks you? You say, I leaned forward all ears I do, and your dad says, so do I. This is a great,

hilarious chapter. And the reason I think you're such a great writer is you do something that I think all my favorite writers do, which is I am laughing and then I am either crying or deeply reflecting sentences later. You know, it's one thing to be funny, it's one thing to be deep, but it's a different thing to be both so close together. It's a real gift and you have it. But you're talking about this idea of trying to work with this idea. Your dad's basically saying, look,

as a family were cursed. Absolutely, we're not made to be happy. We're not going to be happy. And you talk about that your ideas, you're going to teach your dad how to see this differently, and then you go on to say that you needed to take your own medicine. Say more about that. I don't remember what I meant

by take your own medicine. But I've always had this idea, I don't know what it is, that I can somehow solve things about my parents that seemed to me to be problems and that seemed to me to have blatant solutions, you know, one of which is my dad's ongoing combat with monotheism. So he rejected it when he was younger, but he's still carrying around this sort of apparatus of the theological mindset, and SI can't get rid of it.

So he's always sort of semi embracing the idea of God and completely at war with it at the same time. And somehow I wanted to just try and flip that switch where he can see what I saw when I first got introduced to Buddhism, especially the idea of of no self right. So I've always had this idea that

I can introduce him to this notion. We always have the same conversations, and I always come back around to this point, and then I find a way to present the basic Buddhist teachings to him, and I feel like I've done it perfectly, and I wait for the switch to be flipped, and then I think in this case that I wrote about, He paused and then he said,

I want to tell you about big was. So he told this long story about how a friend of his had run over a deer in the street and he went to get the deer and he was going to throw it in the back of his truck, and then he saw something flash in the front just went up in front of his truck, and then Bigfoot came behind

him and sold the deer. And so basically, my dad was telling me the story because what I had just told him about Buddhism was so crazy that he now felt like he had a spiritual ally insanity that he could tell his crazy a story to about Bigfoot. So at that point I just gave up and said, you know what, I completely give up on this project of converting My dad to said, yeah, well, you also talked about, you know, the conclusion that you know, we are an alien race that was mixed with monkey d n A.

I went backpacking. I don't know, it's been a year and a half ago, and I wanted to learn how to backpack, like put all your stuff on your back, hike out in the woods, and and live out there for a few days. There's a guy who offers a service to do this to you. He'll teach you to

do it. It'll help you get your gear lists. So I do all this first night we hike out, we're standing around the camp fire, it's getting kind of dark, and then he just starts in on exactly the same thing that really the only conclusion you can come up with is that we are the results of aliens mating with monkeys, you know, so that we would be a

race of slaves. And I'm just having this moment of like, who if I just entrusted myself to write you also say that somewhere in there, I got an earful about about how et put the christ Bunn and Mother Mary's oven. Is that your dad's actual quote or you paraphrasing him. I'm paraphrasing, very very sort of sarcastically paraphrasing his basic premise, which is exactly what you're backpacking buddy said, which is, yeah, there's no way that we made the leap from apes

to humans without some supernatural alien DNA. Yeah, it's exactly what my dad believes. I mean, I suppose it's possible. I don't rule anything out, but does seem to me to be less likely. The medicine that I mentioned is you said, listen to yourself for once, instead of trying to get everybody else's attention. You are not trapped in your own special Hobbner hell, haunted by ghosts who bear echoes of your DNA. Take your own Buddhist medicine, which

basically is you are free. That's right. Yeah. You know, whenever I go home and I'm around my family, it's like I think it was Rob Doss who said, if you think you're enlightened, just go spend a week with your parents. Yeah, that this appears you of that notion,

you know. And then my my dad comes along and like he has these ways of just throwing this net over my spirit, my story spirit, and pulling it back down to earth, you know, And one of those is, yeah, we have this Hobbner hacks and there's kind of a sort of a craziness and an anxiety in our family, and it's probably in our epigenes, and it extends back to the hobo who got that on fire and pushed out of the train car, and it ends through and he'll name several of my nieces and nephews who seem

to have the same kind of anxiety, and he'll tell

me this manifest is really clearly in me. And then I try and cure him of his all perhapses by Buddhist teachings of no self, and really, in the end, my dad's on his own path, and I need to take my own medicine and just remember, like we're talking a little bit about earlier, I could be intimate with some of the facts around my personality and my family history, but I don't have to take that personal history and some of these facts where my personality as Bible, you know,

right right, I really am free. I really am free on these things. And it's deep that you don't have to slip into the roles that are waiting for you when you walk through the door at night you go see your spouse, or when you walk through your childhood home and you go see your father, like it's a choice.

You don't have to get into those rules. Yeah, I think that stuff is so interesting because there's no doubt we are a result to some degree of causes and conditions, right, whether those causes and conditions are the way we were raised, the culture we were raised in, our genetics, those things play a role. But how do we talk about those things in a way that helps us acknowledge what's actually there so that we can see it, so that we can work with it, but not then become subservient to

it or not believe it's destiny. It's it's that balance. And and a word that I really like is tendency, right, Like I have certain tendencies, but those tendencies can certainly be adjusted, you know, That's all they are. They're a tendency and that seems to strike some middle ground for me.

That works. Well, yeah, that makes sense. Yeah, tendencies the other like cloaks or robes or rolls that we just slip into, we wear and we masks personas, but not fundamentally the some of our parts were manifesting the source, if you will. That's fundamental. Yeah, and that I think really important to remember. Rain or shine. Yeah, there's somewhere in all of these essays. You just had a line

that really hit me. It was talking about this idea of no self right, which is sort of what you just said, which is we're not the sum of all our parts. Were all these different parts, but we're not exactly the sum of them, and we're not some little thing that sits right in the middle and holds them all together. But you used a phrase that I really loved, and you said no self, which means complete self. Those are two words that seem very different, no and complete,

but it really resonated with me. Do you want to say more about thinking of it in that sense the way I was taught to look at it. I mean, it's very specifically relates to my teachers what he called the takata z and he talked about making relationship and it's kind of a homespun phrase, but it has deep meaning for me anyways. So for example, when we're just sitting on the cushion, how do you manifest no self? Right? It's a bit of a canard, right. My teacher was

proactive about it. He would say, well, you can't drop the self because the self can't drop the self. It's a vicious circle. You can't just forget the self or or use the mind to get rid of the mind. Like all these things are part of the problem. They're circular, so you have to give the self away. That's how you manifest no self is you give the subway, so you complete the self. You get out of your own way and you give yourself to the breath. So it's

always like through your something other than yourself. That's how you manifest no self. How else right? How else? I mean? He used to say I need a hundred percent, And what he meant by that is like, it's not I'm gonna do this activity, whether it was breathing or chopping the carrots in the monastery kitchen or doing your co on practice with Roscy. It wasn't nine I'm gonna do that percent. But five percent to me is going to kind of be watching. It's got to be a d percent.

That's no self. And so you you give the self completely to whatever the activity is right, and then you're gone. That's the complete self when there's no self right. But then, amazingly I was taught that the surroundings always give rise to you again from that complete self. You're timing little you know, Eric or Jack arises like conditional self. It's there again. So that sort of the nuts and bolts of the tetargetazet that my teacher taught and you can

do that in any situation whatsoever. What I like about is that it's proactive, like you do something. Yeah. I love this idea too, that you write that the self is standing between me and something else. You're describing a bird, um, and maybe we'll get to that in a minute, but describing a bird. That the self is the thing that sort of standing between you and the bird, between you giving yourself and having full relationship with the bird. And

I love that idea of making relationship. Of my favorite quotes about Enlightenment, to circle back to earlier Enlightenment quotes is I believe it's Dogan said enlightenment is intimacy with all things. That is always really resonated with me, because intimacy with all things means, as we said earlier, I'm I'm not thinking about myself or I am feeling myself

in all things. And that's the way in which I like that idea of complete self speaks to like, oh, I'm seeing all of it as myself in some way, yeah, intimate with it and and um kind of that recognition. I look at you and I see myself. I mean words are a poor descriptor, but it's kind of my teaching you to talk a lot about how the mother

sees her child, and it's like there's no separation. The child is smiling the Welsh like exact same time, there's no separation between self and other in that instance, and that was a handy metaphor for him for the intimacy that one is trying to develop through sudden practice with all activities and all all things. Yeah, yeah, well, I think that is a great place for us to wrap up. You and I are going to talk for a few minutes in the post show conversation because you have posed

a question that the world needs to know. The answer to which is can a computer answer is in co on, So we're going to talk about that in the post show conversation. Listeners, if you'd like access to this post show conversation all the other ones we've had ad free episodes and the joy of giving a gift to a program that you love, go to one you feed, dot Net, slash join Jack. Thanks so much for coming on. It's always such a pleasure to have you on. We'll have

links in the show notes to your Patreon page. I highly recommend your videos are great, you're posting essays there, and you are, as I've alluded to multiple times, I think, an extraordinarily talented writer. So thank you so much. Thank you for having me on. It was really fun, really invigorating. If what you just heard was helpful to you, please consider making a monthly donation to support the One You

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