Zentatsu Richard Baker Roshi and Tatsudo Nicole Baden Roshi: Shifting Perception to Change the World

Elizabeth Rovere
Hello and Welcome to Season Two of Wonderstruck. I’m your host Elizabeth Rovere. I’m a clinical psychologist, a yoga teacher and a graduate of Harvard Divinity School. I’m really curious about our experiences of wonder and awe and how they transform us. For our second season’s finale, I wanted to leave you all with something special. Earlier this year, I had the pleasure of recording an episode with Tatsudo Nicole Baden Roshi. She’s the director and resident teacher at the Zen Buddhist Center in Schwarzwald, Germany. Nicole is a Dharma successor of the great Zentatsu Richard Baker Roshi, and it was a great honor to also host Richard in our New York studio. He is the founder of Dharma Sangha and is considered to be one of Zen’s leading voices today. After Nicole and I concluded our conversation, I couldn’t resist inviting Richard to join his protege for a couple of questions about emptiness and hereness, and to share some of the profound wisdom he’s spent a lifetime gathering. Listening to Richard talk about the relationship between absence and presence, and the practice of noticing, feels both grounding and ambitious—words to live by, experience, and aspire to. And it all feels so timely. There’s no better moment to listen to Richard Baker and his teachings than right now.

Nicole Baden
Okay, so Baker Roshi, since we have this opportunity to talk about this now, we had this whole event yesterday with the topic of emptiness. And I was just wondering what your observations are, reflections are if you have any, regarding or relating to maybe the kinds of things that we’ve been discussing?

Richard Baker
Well, I was getting glad to hear you speak, toward the end of just now, about how practice is a craft. And I think when we recognize that practice is a craft and not a belief, it allows us to enter into the skills of attentionality, the skills of being alive. Yeah, like that. One of the things I, you said to me the other day, there’s no such thing as nothing. And that made me you know, my original, one of the original insights, which is, observation, was that years ago, I realized through practice, that there’s a connectedness that’s happening all the time. And I suddenly realized, I don’t know exactly how it happened, but I suddenly realized it’s language which is telling me that space separates—because I feel spaces connecting or something, there’s a connective tissue or generative tissue, as they say in Taoism. And so, I noticed that the my language, my speaking to myself, that space separates, I was noticing space separates because my language was telling me space separates. So, then I recognize that actually, you have mental kind of views which shape your perception. So, the mental views come before perception. So, perception is doing what your mental views are establishing. So, so for years, I kept evolving this sense of space connecting as well as separating experientially, but, in fact, always being present. And, and then that draws forth attentionality because the space is connecting only through attentionality. And then, the other day when you said, there’s no such thing as nothing, I thought, oh, exactly if there are no beginnings and no ends, if there’s an alwaysness to the universe, it’s an alwaysness, and allness then there’s always a hereness. If there’s always a hereness then there’s no emptiness, nothing is a, is a hereness. So, when you start feeling you’re living in a hereness it makes everything different. And that one view changes the world. I mean, it’s amazing, you can have a shift in view. And you’re such a tiny difference. Was there a beginning and end to the universe? Or is it just alwaysness? Well, if it’s alwaysness, then there’s always a hereness. And if there’s always a hereness, there’s no such thing as emptiness. So hereness is the absence of—hereness is a simultaneous absence and presence, which can’t go away. So that’s a way of speaking about emptiness.

Nicole Baden
Well, thank you. Thank you. So, you just talked about the shift from an alwaysness, which implies a hereness. And that being the way I understood a different way of inhabit, inhabiting really, the moment and existence maybe. So, with such a shift, now, that’s, as you’re saying, that’s a huge shift. It’s a small thing, but it can be a huge shift like that. Exactly. So, do you have anything to say with regard to what conditions? Are there conditions that would support a person to cultivate that shift? In other words, the shift needs to be recognized, I would think, or known or something, but then it also needs to be cultivated. What would you say? If any, are there conditions that would support for a person or even a whole group of people, even a society to cultivate a shift such as this one?

Richard Baker
Well, I think of Cézanne as a painter, right? And Cézanne led me to practice more than any oriental person. So, if Cézanne, when asked what he was doing, or he was, he said, I’m painting a sensation. So, he would use his brush, which engaged him physically in trying to look at the world. So, he’s looking at the world, which isn’t the experience he has from his culture, and his parents and family, etcetera. He’s looking at the world, but his experience is not the same as what everybody else is giving him information about. So, how do you step out of the conditions which prevent you from noticing, just starting to know, say, well, emptiness is a way to start to notice, you take away the categories. So, he in effect, in order to reach into a, into how he saw the world, he had to take the categories away, so he painted just a sensation, and that sensation would turn into a rock, or the sensation would turn into the bark of a tree. So, he wouldn’t know what he’s painting, he’s just painting a sensation. And then, oh, it’s that rock, or that person. So that’s rooted in an experience of empty intuitive experience of emptiness that’s happening already in our culture. And there are many examples of it, which lead us into: well, I can only notice this if I start being free of categories, to be free of categories is an experience of emptiness. So, I think it starts with attentionality. And then the attentionality, like to notice that actually spaces is there’s something connecting going on. So then, you, the conception, conceptuality separates from you the world, but it’s also a tool and instrumental tool that can focus your noticing. So, we have to get people to practice attentionality, to notice, knowtice, and then explore that, could that be possible you should explore. Is there a connective tissue? Is there something happening here? Will you start having synchronicity and all kinds of experiences? So, I think, the conception, then if you believe your own experience, trust your own experience, the conception then opens you to starting noticing differently, the noticing differently begins to confirm your experience. And then at some point, whoa, there’s a shift. And that shift is oh, now I’m on the other side of the experience. And I’m noticing the world differently. And that’s what in a sense a yogi is: you’re born into a world which assumes hereness. If you’re born into a world which assumes the beginning and ends, that’s what you experience. How to get out of that world into what you call, are calling, wonderfully, shared aliveness is rooted in, in, philosophically and conceptually, is rooted in an assumption of hereness.

Elizabeth Rovere
That was Tatsudo Nicole Baden Roshi and Zentatsu Richard Baker Roshi. Thank you so much Nicole, and Richard. To learn more about their work in Germany and Colorado, check out www. DharmaSangha.org and www.Dharma-Sangha.de. Thank you all for joining me for the second season of Wonderstruck. For more information about Wonderstruck, our guests and our events, check out wonderstruck.org, and please follow the show on Apple podcasts and Spotify, and subscribe on YouTube. We truly want to hear from you with your feedback, reviews and ratings. You can also follow us on Instagram, X, Tik Tok, and Facebook @wonderstruckpod. wonderstruck is produced by Wonderstruck productions along with the teams at Baillie Newman and FreeTime Media Special thanks to Brian O’Kelley, Eliana Eleftheriou, and Travis Reece. Thank you for listening and remember, be open to the wonder of your own life.