Marc and his guest Peter Coyote, an actor, director, screenwriter, and author, explore Peter’s story of how he became an actor, as well as his path to Zen practice. They discuss “precise forms for a flexible mind” vs. “flexible forms for a precise mind”, meditation, the power of ritual, the liberating effect of “mask” work, as well as bringing Zen practice into everyday life.

 

 

ABOUT MARC’S GUEST

Peter Coyote has performed as an actor for some of the world’s most distinguished filmmakers, including: Barry Levinson, Roman Polanski, Pedro Almodovar, Steven Spielberg, Walter Hill, Martin Ritt, Steven Soderberg, Diane Kurys, Sidney Pollack and Jean Paul Rappeneau. He is an ordained Buddhist priest who has been practicing for 34 years. Mr. Coyote has been engaged in political and social causes since his early teens and is a long time passionate advocate for wildlife and wild nature.

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EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

[00:00:00] Marc Lesser: Welcome to ZenBones: Ancient Wisdom for Modern Times. This is Marc Lesser. Why ZenBones? Our world is in crisis and ever-shifting. Now more than ever, more wisdom, clarity, and courage are essential, especially in the world of work, business, and leadership.

In this episode with actor and activist Peter Coyote, we dive into Peter’s story and how he came to Zen practice, and his acting path. We talk about meditation, Zen practice, the power of ritual, and the liberating effect of mask work, and as well as bringing Zen practice into everyday life. Lots of great material, so let’s dive in.

Welcome to ZenBones: Ancient Wisdom for Modern Times. This is Marc Lesser and I am just thrilled and happy to be here today with my friend and colleague, Peter Coyote. He probably doesn’t need any introduction. Peter has done amazing things in his life as an actor and as a writer. Many people will be familiar with Peter’s voice for the many phenomenal voiceovers that Peter has done. Peter is also these days inhabiting the body of a Zen teacher, as well as all these other things. Welcome, Peter, it’s great to see you!

[00:01:49] Peter Coyote: Thank you, Marc. I’m really privileged to be here.

[00:01:53] Marc: Maybe start by saying a little bit about what’s really calling to you these days. I know that you’re involved in Zen teaching, but really, I think of your core work as working for change in the political world and in the world of capitalism. It’s interesting to be all of the things that you’ve done in the world as an artist. In a way, being a Zen teacher is a bit like being an artist in a different way. Holding it all together, I think is… I often think that we all have some deep conscious or unconscious theory of change.

How does what we do help to change ourselves, grow ourselves, allow us to be? You just mentioned the title of your next book (which) makes me think of Suzuki Roshi’s Things As It Is. This expression about reality, living in the (you know)… I often think that what he meant by that was, the absolute world, the world outside of our thinking, of our experience even. Yet, we have to live. This question for me often is, how do we live effectively in both worlds. This Things As It Is— in the day-to-day world, but integrated with the world that I think Suzuki Roshi meant when he talked about Things As It Is.

[00:04:11] Peter: When I first heard that expression Things As It Is I thought it was a charming mistake by a Japanese speaker struggling with English. “Things” is plural, and “it” is singular. I don’t know how many years on my pillow it was before I sat up and said, “Holy shit.” No, it’s the whole ball of wax – there’s only one big thing and it appears as multiple things and he got it encapsulated in a sentence. I was flabbergasted by that. It actually gave me confidence in the applicability of Zen practice to my political aspirations.

I became an actor because, when I came out of the counterculture, I had played every card in my deck and lost. I was a heroin addict, I was a single father, the mother had run away. We hadn’t overthrown capitalism, we hadn’t ended racism, we hadn’t stopped the war, we hadn’t transformed the United States to the degree that I’d hoped. But when I thought about it culturally, I thought, well wait, we did make some dents here. The women’s movement, the environmental movement, the organic food movement, alternative medical practices, and alternative spiritual practices. We did have an effect and people are living that way.

But I was broke, my dad had lost all his money. So I had this skill as an actor and was working for Jerry Brown on some poverty government program, and running a state agency for him, but there was no salary attached. I had to make a living, I had one child, I was married, I had a wife. I gave myself five years to try the movies. I used to be an actor, and I had given it up to overthrow the United States culture. And I got lucky. I became an actor because I didn’t want to write for money because writing was actually sacred to me, or communication was sacred.

It created a kind of conundrum. I had already been at Zen Center, I came to Zen Center in ’74. By the time I started thinking about being an actor, it was ’76, and by the time I got my Screen Actors Guild union card, it was ’79. So I’d had a few years on the pillow, and I had this challenge to face, which is, that I was moving to Babylon. I was moving into a world that was based on ego, and the personality, and ambition, and greed, and all of these things. I thought, “How am I going to do this?”.

And so, I had to analyze: “what are my options?” The first option was, I was going to have very little effect over what film got made. I was basically a Campesino, I was basically up for hire. I thought, all I can do is say yes or no. If the film is too odious, I don’t have to do it. What I could affect was the way I make the movie. That’s within my control. That’s where Zen practice really came to help me. I thought, I can show up on time; I can be prepared; I can be non-competitive; I can treat everyone equally, the star, the director, the PAs, the cook, whatever it is. I can just do my best. Moment after moment after moment. If I take the most enlightened possibility in any moment, I’m doing as well as I can.

I don’t think of that as any grand strategy at world change. It literally was an economy. I did 160 films, most of which I remember as either being called “mortgage” or “tuition.” But the political work and the Arts Council actually gave me a platform and a little bit of celebrity, which I was very uncomfortable with. Because celebrity itself violated my worldview where one person was the center of everything.

I just saw a movie where Tom Hanks is a naval commander, and he basically wins World War II by himself. There’s not even a woman in the movie. It’s just him running back and forth on a battleship, doing everything. And I thought, that’s the worldview of a Hollywood star. But I lived on communes, my relatives were Jewish communists, and socialists, and labor organizers. That’s not my worldview, I don’t like it. And so I kept trying to subsume it and just meld and Zen Center was a community where it was safe to do that. They didn’t care if I was an actor or not, or a celebrity.

I was really changed by Zen Center. I was changed by a number of things that I grew to be a little critical of, but not judgmental. For me coming out of heroin, hair down to my ass, feeling I had lived a life of freedom. I was already enlightened, I just needed a few polishing touches and I’d be fine. To be dropped into this community of somber, disciplined people who might get up and leave the room while I was talking, it made me psychotic. I just kept saying, “What is this place? Who are these people?”

Little by little, there was something about the schedule, there was something about so many people that were just really, genuinely nice and trying to be the best expression of themselves, that I settled into a rhythm. I began to understand the utility of the forms, how the forms give us boundaries and give us a kind of, like you can trust your body, because we have a form of zazen, you can relax and let anything come through your mind. You don’t have to be attached to it. I did that for about eight years, and I was in a funny, privileged position.

I was working for Governor Brown, and then I was a movie actor. My wife Marilyn was very well networked and connected at Zen Center. She ran ALIA, she ran the mailing list in the office, she knew everybody. I was also a peer of Baker Roshi’s and a peer of Governor Brown’s. I was in this invisible university luncheon he ran every week. So, I had a bifurcated view of Zen Center, and the bifurcation bothered me. It bothered me that I would eavesdrop on a conversation of a couple of women debating whether or not which $200 lampshade to buy for an infant’s room.

My wife was working for $200 a month. It bothered me that students were getting up at 4 in the morning to bake bread, but they didn’t have time to sit zazen. All of the surplus capital of their labor was going into a white BMW that the Abbott was driving. It just rankled my commie-Jew sensibilities. But I had enough grounding in Zen to sit with it. I’ll end this monologue and then let you in. As time went on, I began writing these two books called Vernacular Zen, in which I wanted to loosen the gift wrapping of Japanese culture.

In every culture, Buddhism wrapped itself in the gift wrapping of the culture. Buddha was born in Nepal, it was a Hindu culture. All the stuff about reincarnation, that’s all Hindu. Buddha didn’t really teach reincarnation. You don’t have to know anything about it to understand Buddha. Then they went to China and it merged with Daoism, and Confucianism, and went to Japan and merged with Shintoism, and in every place, it changed. Then because we had the good fortune to have Suzuki Roshi and the chain of Japanese teachers, it got kind of crystallized into what I call “high Anglican Zen.”

My friends and my teacher tell me that Suzuki Roshi had almost no ceremonies at all. Everything was very, very informal. Little by little, teachers came from Japan, and they taught what they knew. And at a certain point, I think Baker Roshi decided that it was probably easier to raise millions of dollars to build Tassajara, and City Center, and Green Gulch, if it was this orderly, impressive discipline thing than a bunch of crazed hippies like a lot of the older students were. I thought about that a lot. And because I was so changed by Zen Center, I don’t want to impune the Japanese culture.

I still do a lot of chants in Japanese. I still wear my robes to do ceremonies. I have a little zendo and zabutons and zafus and stuff, but I realize that as long as Zen appeared foreign to Americans, it would subtly exclude people who were never going to shave their head, who were never going to take ordination, and who were never going to hear these very human states translated into plain vernacular English. That’s what I’ve set out to do, to tightrope between my training for eight years in Japanese forms, and then my life as an American with an intention to make it widely available.

[00:14:57] Marc: That’s great. I love hearing your story. I also arrived at the San Francisco Zen Center the same year you did, 1974. A year later, I went down to Tassajara and got this complete immersion. It’s interesting. I’m currently the co-chair of the San Francisco Zen Center Elders Council. I’m really getting to see up close the  enormous transition happening, I think not only at the San Francisco Zen Center, but Zen practice throughout the western world is grappling with, in what way are all of those forms core to Zen practice. And in what way are they… as you, I think were saying, they’re a barrier, they can be a barrier to entry.

I also teach a little bit; I’m teaching a class right now at Spirit Rock. What’s super interesting is that the world of Vipassana, this other form, has this whole other history, which is not through Japan, but more through Southeast Asia. Somehow a decision got made to let go of pretty much all of the forms and ceremonies. One could be critical of all of that. Although it’s interesting.

I’ll share with you, I was co-teaching recently with a Vipassana teacher, and I used the phrase that I’m sure you’re familiar with, that Suzuki Roshi sometimes used was “precise forms for a flexible mind.” This Vipassana teacher turned to me and said, “Here, we talk about flexible forms for a more precise mind.” I thought, “Wow, this is fascinating. These are two different perspectives, two different theories of change, as it were.” In the Zen world, the theory of change basically is just sit down and face the wall and everything will be great. That’s the primary teaching.

The primary theory of change is sit down, be quiet, and everything will reveal itself. I didn’t discover until I started teaching meditation at Google that I didn’t know how to teach meditation to Western people. Google engineers needed a lot more direction and precision than just sit down and face the wall. I had to learn, and I feel like I’m still learning how do you bring these practices into the Western world without all of, as you say, the Japanese gift wrapping, and I love the forms too. In some way, one could argue that they’re important, that they’re vital. I’m becoming less convinced of that myself.

[00:19:08] Peter: I’ve done fundraisers for Spirit Rock. I think of them as cousins, but I firmly disagree with the decision to get rid of ceremony because people need ceremonies. That’s been my intention. Ceremonies, when they’re orchestrated correctly, they actually change you by going through them. There’s a difference between living with someone and being married and having expressed your vows in public to witnesses. I feel that that was a little radical. I also feel that that phrase, flexible practice for precise minds, our mind is wild.

The mind is wilderness, and the idea of rendering it precise is like turning it into bonsai instead of redwood trees. I would argue that if everything is precise, where do we find the freedom? Where do we find the part of formlessness that is just the roiling energetics? To me, I’m very much in the Gary Snyder school that the mind is wild. Maybe that’s my affinity for Zen is that I’ve learned from these forms. You know this yourself, that when people come to you, they’ve said to you probably many times, “I’ve tried meditating, but I just can’t stop my mind.”

You just want to shake them a little bit and say, “No, no, no, that’s not the point. We’re going to teach you how to detach from your mind. Let the mind be the mind, and you put your energy in the body in this form. It will ground you and give you a safe place to let the wildness of your mind, the energetics of your mind be what they are.” The universe is nothing if not diverse, and I certainly don’t argue with other people, but I find that I’d rather have strict form and a free mind than a mind that’s like a bonsai tree.

[00:21:24] Marc: I think that it’s interesting… I notice that in the work that I get to do with executives in the business world, I think there’s something, Peter, about what I think of as perspective taking as a practice. For example, I think one could easily argue precise forms, flexible mind, precise mind, flexible forms, I think actually they’re the same thing. That if we get underneath it, I think what the Vipassana people would say, they’d completely agree with you. However, what they would say is we just need a little bit more form to understand our wild minds.

That without a little bit more precision about how we pay attention to the breath and how… see, whereas, because core original Buddhist teachings– and Buddhist teaching was actually quite precise. The four foundations of mindfulness, for example, now it’s often in Zen practice places, you don’t get to those until you’ve been around for years. Find, oh there is all of this precision, there is all of this instruction. It’s interesting that it’s to me “things as it is” is almost always a “both/and.”

[00:23:24] Peter: No, it is. I think you’re right to stop me. You’re right, it was a little one-sided. Let me loop back to the subject of art for a second. First of all, artists are people who see the world differently than the world is taught to them, and because of that, they’re forced to create their own grammar and syntax in expressing it. Their art form is the grammar and syntax, whether it’s dance, whether it’s song. Whatever it is, is the way they make their perceptions communicable.

One of the things I’ve been doing for about 40 years, and I’ve been doing it with a lot of businessmen, people who are not actors, as I run these improv and mask classes. If I work with you for about half a day, and I stress your sense of self a little bit, I give you exercises that change your posture. I give you exercises that change your status. I give you exercises where you’re in a circle making up a song to a rhythm, and the rhythm is implacable. As soon as the person next to you is done, you have to start and say your line and you have to leap in without thinking.

By the time you’ve done a whole host of things like that, I put a neutral mask on you, and I hold a mirror up in front of you. It’s never failed in 45 years that the person’s personality disappears and they somehow take in a holographic personality from the mask. They get about 10 minutes of gravity-free freedom because with the absence of their self went their self-consciousness, their self-criticism, their second-guessing, and I query them, I interview them. I do three at a time, they start interacting with each other.

Every student will do this three times, change masks three times, and find three different characters. I use this as a loss leader. I call it enlightenment light. This is what sets people up to understand Buddha’s idea of no fixed self. One of the ways it applies to businessmen is it actually teaches people to get out of their own way. To get out of their constructs of mind to try to find actually their authentic voice that comes over the spinal telephone. It’s a weird amalgam of acting and improv and comedy and masks, but it has very practical applications.

For instance, if somebody’s describing a problem that they’re having at work, I’ll say, “How would the guy you discovered in the mask today do it?” All of a sudden, they’re in a different universe and they get a completely different look at the problem. When I’m teaching voiceovers and these guys are trying to be good and professional, and I say, “Do it like you did to this masked crazy woman.” They do that, and all of a sudden everything comes to life. Now the voice might not be appropriate, but they can then do it in their own voice, and all the surprises will be there.

I keep looking back to “wild mind” as the closest image I can get to Buddha-nature. The formless, roiling energy that’s always generating forms. The only way that I can see of approaching it is through things that frustrate your inherent following/believing everything you think. Whether it’s sitting zazen, whether it’s doing exercises that make you uncomfortable, something has to impede habitual flow to put you in touch with authentic flow.

[00:27:45] Marc: I want to come do one of your workshops. Actually Peter, what really struck me is that in a slightly different form, it is so similar to the work that I do in the business world.

[00:28:01] Peter: I bet that’s what made me think of it.

[00:28:04] Marc: That in some way, one way that when it’s done well, meditation practice could be taking the masks off, who are you when you take the masks off. The work that I used to do a lot of work for Google engineers, and they would say, “What we like about these programs are we get to take our game faces off.” There’s a game face that you put on at work and you take it off. Then I’ve often thought that one of the most impactful exercises that we did was just get people into pairs and practice listening.

In order to listen, it means you have to take your own mask off and be curious about who this other person is. I was surprised that was like, and still is, I feel like, my son makes fun of me, he says that what I do for a living is get people in pairs and listen to each other. Yes, that is a lot what I do.

[00:29:20] Peter: Ouch, ouch, ouch.

[laughter]

Marc: Actually, it’s amazingly impactful having, whether it’s using an actual mask or sitting in front of another human being and seeing that you have to remove your own mask to some degree in order to actually listen. It’s like, wow, listening through what ears? Through what heart?

[00:30:05] Peter: Yes, this thing about masks has fascinated me for years. I’ll send you this book, but when I was in the San Francisco Mime Troupe, I put on a mask, and all of a sudden this nice Jewish boy from Englewood, New Jersey, disappeared. There was this cabarrus old curmudgeon with a Yiddish accent, who was wildly inappropriate. I loved this guy, I could say anything. My first line on stage was an ad-lib, where I introduced my daughter, this whiny daughter. I introduced her, I said, “The reason I love my daughter, she killed my wife in childbirth.” [chuckles]

The audience fell out, and I knew I could do it. All the parts of myself that I had tried to polish and tame and make into a nice studious, yeshiva nudnik, is like gone. I got the first glimpse into wild mind. I wrote this book this year where I’ve just written about all these exercises and integrated them with Buddhist theory, and businessmen seem to like it.

[00:31:22] Marc: Beautiful. My similar experience was many years ago taking an improv and writing class. I loved the writing, but the improv piece just frightened me. I remember I was hiding in the back of the room, and the teacher says, “Marc, why don’t you come up here?” She had me come up in front of the room, and she says, “What should we do? What should we do for you?” She said, “Let’s try this. Why don’t you say, ‘I hate.'” Actually, she did it over and over and over and got me really worked up and then let me loose.

Again, this whole, I blurted out, “I hated high school graduation where they lined us up by height, and I was the smallest one, I hated that.” I just went on and on. Then I was surprised how without any thinking or trying, I transitioned little by little into love and into appreciation. One of the more deepest and profoundest ways of feeling it, but I needed to access the hate part of me that I generally tuck away into the corner.

[00:32:51] Peter: Did you ever read this book by David Brazier called The Feeling Buddha?

[00:32:56] Marc: I don’t know it. No, but I will get it.

[00:33:00] Peter: Well, let me recommend it because he has the most logical translation of the Four Noble Truths, much more logical than what we’re taught; suffering exists, there’s a path of the– He goes back to Buddha’s first speech after his enlightenment, and so it’s Dukkha, Samudāya, Nirodha, and Magga. Dukkha, which was translated by a lot of Christian translators as suffering, tends to concentrate on the mental aspects. What Buddha actually defined Dukkha as, was birth, death, grieving, loss, illness, mourning, being stuck in situations that you don’t like. And being held away from situations that you do like. 

And he points out that none of this is your fault. Buddha called it a noble truth. If truth means anything, it means “real,” and noble means, if anything, “worthy of respect and dignity.” The second noble truth, you can’t do anything about either, which is Samudāya, when you’re afflicted by something, things arise. Somebody cuts you off in the car, you want to give him the finger. When you’re too hot, you move away from the fire. What he points out is that these two kinds of global pressures are like the energy that move our life. They just keep the pot bubbling and boiling. 

The third one is the only one where we can begin to actually affect which is called Nirodha. The image is a clay wall that’s built around the edge of a fire pit. It stops the flames from leaping out of the fire pit and burning the village or the crops. It’s like gasoline. If you throw gasoline on the ground, it just creates havoc, or it just burns off harmlessly. If you put it in the container of an engine, it does “work.” Meditating is the containment.

The people who run from affliction and run from what arises, are filling the bars and the mental hospitals. They’re shopping and they’re seeking power, and they’re in the wrong beds, but once you learn from meditating that you can contain anything that arises, they’re ephemeral. Then you can prepare to walk the eightfold path, which is the blueprint for modeling the life of a Buddha in your own. It’s so workable, it’s so useful. It’s so much less metaphysical. I forget why I explained that, but something you said.

[00:35:57] Marc: To me, in some way, I’m thinking about where we started with me asking you about theories of change. In a way, the Four Noble Truths and the eightfold path are Buddha’s theory of change or his experience of change. You talking about the work that you do with executives around mask work, this is another way of cultivating things as, you can say things as it is, but how do you live it? How do you embody it? How do you bring it in? As a person, how do you live it? As a teacher, how do you help open other people’s bodies and minds to seeing it, living it, feeling it?

[00:36:46] Peter: Let me just challenge the word theory for a second because when you first said that, I thought, “I’m going to be a failure at this because I can’t think that I’ve ever theorized the path for myself, had a life plan.” I just stopped me cold. What I love about my whole understanding of Buddhism is that we are modeling the life of a Buddha, who demonstrates to us how we can live a noble and dignified, and helpful life. In the midst of it all, we’re all living in a peppered wind. We’re all afflicted all the time.

To me, it’s less a theory than it is an actual pedagogy of how to do it. At least I’m more comfortable with that because I’m not very good at theory.

[00:37:44] Marc: I’ll go with that. Practices to cultivate change, a way of being to cultivate change. Peter, we could go on, I feel like you and I could talk for days, and we should, I will come to visit you. I’m wondering, would you like to do a three-minute meditation as a way of ending today, just kind of something, just sitting together?

[00:38:17] Peter: Yes.

[00:38:18] Marc: We can just sit quietly. Why don’t we just stop for a minute or two, and then if there’s anything you would like to say, just as we end here today?

[00:38:27] Peter: Absolutely. I was going to say I don’t do spoken meditation. I don’t guide people, but I’m happy to sit always.

[00:38:34] Marc: Sit quietly for two minutes. Two minutes as a way of just taking all this in, taking it in, and letting it go.

[pause 00:38:49]

[00:40:23] Marc: Peter, anything– Closing words?

[00:40:26] Peter: Yes. If we think that the Buddha died 2,500 years ago we’re following a dead man. If we model the life of the Buddha in our own, Buddha is alive.

[00:40:48] Marc: Thank you. What a joy to get to hang out with you. I look forward to visiting you and look forward to reading your books.

[00:41:01] Peter: Thank you.

[00:41:02] Marc: Beautiful. Thank you so much.

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[00:41:10] Voiceover: Listen in each week for interviews, teachings, and guided meditations. You’ll receive supportive tools for creating more meaningful work and mindfulness practices to develop yourself, to influence your organization, and to help change the world. Thank you for listening.

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