This is Audible.
 Welcome to another talk from the Alan Watts Radio Series #2, Eastern Thought in the Modern
 World.
 This is the first part of a program recorded in 1965 at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur,
 California.
 Here Alan Watts delivers a brilliant discussion of the Hindu concept of karma and the Taoist
 easy way to escape it through cleverness, not muscle.
 From Hindu and Christian perspectives to Gurdjieff, Buddhism, T.S.
 Eliot and the Zen Pebble in the Pond, he reveals the way to see into the Tao without hesitation.
 It's part one of The Taoist Way.
 Here's Alan Watts.
 It is believed generally in India that when a person sets out on the way of liberation,
 his first problem is to become free from his past karma.
 The popular theory of karma, the word that literally means action or doing in Sanskrit,
 so that when we say that something that happens to you is your karma, it's like saying in
 English it's your own doing.
 But in popular Indian belief, karma is a sort of built-in moral law or a law of retribution
 such that all the bad things you do and all the good things you do have consequences which
 you have to inherit.
 And so long as karmic energy remains stored up, all the bad things you do and all the
 good things you do have consequences which you have to inherit.
 And so long as karmic energy remains stored up, you have to work it out.
 And what the sage endeavors to do is a kind of action which in Sanskrit is called nishkama
 karma.
 Nishkama means without passion or without attachment, karma, action.
 And so whatever action he does, he renounces the fruits of the action so that he acts in
 a way that doesn't generate future karma because future karma continues you in the wheel of
 becoming, samsara, the round, and keeps you being reincarnated.
 Now then in that case, when the time comes that you start to get out of the chain of
 karma, all the creditors that you have start presenting themselves for payment.
 In other words, a person who begins say to study yoga is felt that he will suddenly get
 sick or that his children will die or that he loses money or all sorts of catastrophes
 will occur because the karmic debt is being cleared up.
 And there's no hurry to be cleared up if you're just living along like anybody.
 But if you embark on the spiritual life a certain hurry occurs.
 And therefore, since this is known, it's rather discouraging to start these things.
 The Christian way of saying the same thing is that if you plan to change your life, shall
 we say to turn over a new leaf, you mustn't let the devil know because he will oppose
 you with all his might if he suddenly discovers that you're going to escape from his power.
 So for example, if you have a bad habit, say you drink too much, and you make a New Year's
 resolution that during this coming year you'll stop drinking, that's a very, very dangerous
 thing to do because the devil will immediately know about it.
 And what will happen will be this, he will confront you with the prospect of 365 drinkless
 days.
 And that will be awful, you know, just overwhelming.
 And you won't be able to make much more than three days on the wagon.
 So in that case you compromise with the devil and say, just today I'm not going to drink,
 you see, but tomorrow maybe, you know, we'll go back.
 Then when tomorrow comes you say, oh just another day, let's try out, that's all.
 And the next day you say, oh one more day won't make much difference.
 So you only do it for the moment and you don't let the devil know that you have a secret
 intention of going on day after day after day after day.
 But of course there's something still better than that, and that is not to let the devil
 know anything.
 That means of course not to let yourself know.
 One of the many meanings of that saying, let not your left hand know what your right hand
 doeth, is just this.
 And that was why in Zen discipline a great deal of it centers around acting without premeditation.
 As those of you know who read Herigel's book, Zen and the Art of Archery, it was necessary
 to release the bowstring without first saying now.
 There's a wonderful story you may also have read by a German writer, von Kleist, about
 a boxing match with a bear.
 The man can never defeat this bear because the bear always knows his plans in advance
 and is ready to deal with any situation.
 The only way to get through to the bear would be to hit the bear without having first intended
 to do so.
 That would catch him.
 And so this is one of the great, great problems in the spiritual life, or whatever you want
 to call it, is to be able to have intention and act simultaneous.
 By this means you escape karma and you escape the devil.
 So you might say that the Taoist is exemplary in this respect.
 That this is getting free from karma without making any previous announcement.
 Of simply, supposing we have a train and we want to unload the train of its freight cars.
 You can go to the back end and you can unload them one by one and shunt them into the sliding.
 But the simplest of all ways of unloading is to uncouple between the engine and the
 first car and that gets rid of the whole bunch at once.
 And it is in that sort of way you see that the Taoist gets rid of karma without challenging
 it.
 And so it has the reputation you see of being the easy way.
 There are all kinds of yogas and ways for people who want to be difficult.
 And one of the great gambits of a man like Gurjeev was to make it all seem as difficult
 as possible.
 Because that challenged the vanity of his students.
 If some teacher, some guru says really this isn't difficult at all, it's perfectly easy.
 Some people will say oh he's not really the real thing.
 We want something tough and difficult and when we see somebody starts out giving you
 a discipline that's very very weird and rigid, people think now there is the thing.
 That man means business.
 See?
 And so they flatter themselves by going to such a guy that they are serious students
 whereas the other people are only dabblers and so on.
 All right if you have to do it that way that's the way you have to do it.
 But the Taoist is the kind of person who shows you the shortcut and shows you how to do it
 by intelligence rather than effort.
 Because that's what it is.
 Taoism is in that sense what everybody is looking for.
 The easy way in, the shortcut, using cleverness instead of muscle.
 So the question naturally arises isn't it cheating?
 When in any game somebody really starts using his intelligence he will very likely be accused
 of cheating.
 And to draw the line between skill and cheating is a very difficult thing to do.
 See the inferior intelligence will always accuse the superior intelligence of cheating.
 That's its way of saving face.
 You beat me by means that weren't fair.
 We were originally having a contest to find out who had the strongest muscles.
 And you know we were pushing against it like this, this, this, this, this.
 And this would prove who had the strongest muscles.
 But then you introduce some gimmick into it, some judo trick or something like that you
 see and you're not playing fair.
 So in the whole domain of ways of liberation there are roots for the stupid people and
 roots for the intelligent people.
 And the latter are faster.
 This was perfectly clearly explained by Huineng, the Sixth Patriarch of Zen in China, in his
 sutra, where he says the difference between the gradual school and the sudden school is
 that they both arrive at the same point but the gradual is for slow-witted people and
 the sudden is for fast-witted people.
 Can you, in other words, find a way that sees into your own nature, that sees into the Tao
 immediately?
 And at the end of this morning's talk I pointed out to you the immediate way.
 The way through now.
 When you know that this moment is the Tao and this moment is by its, considered by itself
 without past and without future, eternal, neither coming into being nor going out of
 being, there is nirvana.
 And there is a whole Chinese philosophy of time based on this.
 It hasn't, to my knowledge, been very much discussed by Taoist writers, it's been more
 discussed by Buddhist writers, but it's all based on the same thing.
 Dogen, the great 13th century Japanese Zen Buddhist, studied in China and he wrote a
 book called Shobo Genzo.
 Eroshi recently said to me in Japan, "That's a terrible book, because it tells you everything.
 It gives the whole secret away."
 But in the course of this book he says, "There is no such thing as a progression in time.
 The spring does not become the summer.
 There is first spring and then there is summer.
 So in the same way, you now do not become you later."
 This is T.S.
 Eliot's idea in Four Quartets, where he says that the person who has settled down in the
 train to read the newspaper is not the same person who stepped onto the train from the
 platform.
 And therefore also you who sit here are not the same people who came in at the door.
 These states are separate, each in its own place.
 There was the coming in at the door person, but there is actually only the here and now
 sitting person.
 And the person sitting here and now is not the person who will die.
 Because we are all a constant flux, and the continuity of the person from past through
 present to future is as illusory in its own way as the upward movement of the red lines
 on a revolving barber pole.
 You know, it goes round and round and round and the whole thing seems to be going up or
 going down, whichever the case may be.
 But actually nothing is going up or down.
 So when you throw a pebble into the pond and you make a concentric rings of waves, there
 is an illusion that the water is flowing outwards.
 And no water is flowing outwards at all.
 Water is only going up and down.
 What appears to move outwards is the wave, not the water.
 So this kind of philosophical argument says that our seeming to go along in a course of
 time doesn't really happen.
 The Buddhists say suffering exists but no one who suffers.
 Deeds exist but no doers are found.
 A path there is but no one who follows it.
 And nirvana is but no one who attains it.
 So in this way they look upon the continuity of life as the same sort of illusion that
 is produced when you take a cigarette and in the dark whirl it and the illusion of the
 circle is created, whereas there is only the one point of fire.
 The argument then is, so long as you are in the present there aren't any problems.
 The problems exist only when you allow presence to amalgamate.
 There is a way of putting this in Chinese, which is rather interesting.
 They have a very interesting sign, this, it's pronounced "nyun" in Japanese, "nyun".
 And the top part of the character means "now" and the bottom part means the mind-heart,
 the shin.
 And so this is, as it were, an instant of thought.
 In Sanskrit they use this character as the equivalent for the Sanskrit word "shana".
 Then if you double this character, put it twice, or three times and I'll write the Chinese
 for ditto.
 "Nyun-nyun-nyun" means thought after thought after thought.
 Now the Zen master Joshu was once asked, "What is the mind of a child?"
 And he said, "A ball in a mountain stream."
 What do you mean by a ball in a mountain stream?
 He said, "Thought after thought after thought, with no block."
 So he was using, of course, the mind of the child as the innocent mind, the mind of a
 person who is enlightened.
 One thought follows another without hesitation.
 The thought arises, it doesn't wait to arise, as when you clap your hands, the sound issues
 without hesitation.
 When you strike flint, the spark comes out, it doesn't wait to come out.
 And that means that there's no block.
 So thought, thought, thought, nyun-nyun-nyun, describes what we call in our world the stream
 of consciousness.
 Blocking consists in letting the stream become connected, chained together.
 In such a way that when the present thought arises, it seems to be dragging its past,
 or resisting its future, saying, "I don't want to go."
 When then, the connection, the dragging, it's better to call it, of these thoughts drops.
 You've broken the chain of karma.
 If you think of this in comparison with certain problems in music, it's very interesting.
 Because when we listen to music, we hear melody only because we remember the sequence.
 We hear the intervals between the tones, but more than that, we remember the tones that
 led up to the one we are now hearing, and we are trained musically to anticipate certain
 consequences.
 And to the extent that we get the consequences we anticipate, we feel that we understand
 the music.
 But to the extent that the composer does not adhere to the rules, and gives us unexpected
 consequences, we feel that we don't understand the music.
 And if he gives us harmonic relationships, which we are not trained to accept, that is
 to say, to expect, we say, "Well, this man is just writing garbage."
 But of course, it becomes apparent that the perception of music, the ability to hear melody,
 will depend upon a relationship between past, present, and future sounds.
 And you might say, "Well, you're talking about a way of living that would be equivalent to
 listening to music with a tone-deaf mind, so that you would reduce, you would eliminate
 the melody and have only noise.
 And so in your Taoist way of life, you would eliminate all meaning and have only senseless
 present moments."
 Up to a point that's true.
 That is, in a way, what Buddhists also mean, by seeing things in their suchness.
 What is so bad about dying, for example?
 It's really no problem.
 When you die, you just drop dead, that's all there is to it.
 But what makes it a problem is that you're dragging a past.
 And all those things you've done, all those achievements you've made, all these relationships
 and people that you've accumulated as your friends, all that has to go.
 See it isn't here now.
 I mean, a few friends might be around you, but all that past that identifies you as who
 you are, which is simply memory, all that has to go.
 And we feel just terrible about that.
 But if we didn't, if we were just dying, that's all, death wouldn't be a problem.
 So likewise the chores of everyday life, they become intolerable.
 When everything ties together, all the past and the future, you feel it dragging at you
 every way.
 Supposing you wake up in the morning, and it's a lovely morning.
 Let's take today, right here and now, here we are in this paradise of a place, Big Sur.
 And some of us have got to go to work on Monday.
 Is that a problem?
 For many people it is.
 It spoils the taste of what's going on now.
 When we wake up in bed on Monday morning and think of the various hurdles we've got to
 jump that day, immediately we feel sad and bored and bothered.
 Whereas actually we're just lying in bed.
 So the Taoist trick says, simply live now and there will be no problems.
 That's the meaning of the Zen saying, when you are hungry, eat.
 When you are tired, sleep.
 When you walk, walk.
 When you sit, sit.
 Chen Tzu, the great Tang Dynasty master said, in the practice of Buddhism there is no place
 for using effort.
 Sleep when you're tired, move your bowels, eat when you're hungry.
 That's all.
 The ignorant will laugh at me, but the wise will understand.
 And so also the meaning of this wonderful Zen saying, day, of the character for the
 sun, day, that is, good day.
 Every day is a good day.
 On condition, you see, that day-day is like nyan-nyan.
 They come one after another and yet there's only this one.
 You don't link them.
 This as I intimated just a moment ago, seems to be an atomization of life.
 Humans just do what they do.
 The flower goes poof, and people go this way, go that way, and so on, and that's what's
 happening.
 It has no meaning, it has no destination, it has no value, it's just like that.
 And when you see that, you see, it's a great relief.
 That's all it is.
 But then when you are firmly established in suchness, in that it's just this moment, you
 can begin again to play with the connections.
 Only you've seen through them.
 And but now you see that they don't haunt you, because you know that there isn't any
 continuous you running on from moment to moment, who originated at some time in the past and
 will die at some time in the future.
 All that's disappeared.
 So you can have enormous fun anticipating the future, remembering the past, and playing
 all kinds of continuities.
 This is the meaning of that famous Zen saying about mountains are mountains.
 To the naive man, mountains are mountains, waters are waters.
 To the intermediate student, mountains are no longer mountains, waters are no longer
 waters.
 In other words, they've all dissolved into the point instant, to the kshana.
 But for the fully perfected student, mountains are again mountains, and waters are again
 waters.
 Audible hopes you have enjoyed this program.
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