hopefully by next week and alanwatts.com also gives you more information on Alan Watts.
 Right now though we get to tonight's lecture, Transcending Duality, here on WFMU.
 For those people you've just been listening to, chanting the sutras on Koyasan, which
 is the sort of ultimate center, retreat, inner sanctuary of Japanese practice of Vajrayana,
 Mahayana Buddhism, are a bunch of boys who are just like American college boys who play
 football and they haven't the faintest idea what they're doing.
 Not today.
 They're doing this because their fathers have sent them there.
 Their fathers own temples and they've got to carry on their father's tradition because
 after all the family business has to go on.
 And they have no more idea what this is all about than the man in the moon.
 And you and I can sit here and we could get swinging with this music, we could dance to
 it and we could go very far out on it, which was what you were originally supposed to do.
 And for them it's a chore.
 It's a thing you have to get up for at five o'clock in the morning and you have to memorize
 all this and you have to get it exactly right and do it.
 And they've completely forgotten what it was all about.
 But it was originally there.
 It's a funny thing how this happens, you see.
 But you see how I was explaining to you this morning, how we have a rhythm between remembering
 and not remembering.
 You remember long enough to know that you're there because if you don't remember, nothing
 makes any impression upon you, therefore you're not there.
 But then when memory gets too much and you're too much there, then you have to realize that
 all memory is an illusion, that there is nothing except the present moment.
 And that there is no future, as equally no past.
 And then you're liberated.
 But when you get liberated, you have to come back in and play memory again.
 There's a cleaning process, in other words, you wipe off the blackboard and then you start
 writing again.
 And then you wipe it off and then you start writing again.
 And this is the process whereby life is kept going.
 So in the same way with these people.
 They have come to a point in the historical development of their way of life where they
 remember too much.
 It's not new to them.
 And all this therefore becomes what we call going through the motions.
 And that's all they're doing.
 And while they're singing all this kind of thing, they're thinking about, "For God's
 sake I wish we'd get out and smoke a cigarette and how can I get down into town tonight somehow
 and make that go?"
 See, their minds are absolutely off it.
 And so it comes to us as a new thing that we've never heard before.
 And we could sit around and really dig that.
 And you know, we could sit around on the floor and turn head over heels and jump up and down
 in rhythm with this music and really go out of our minds with it.
 And they've lost it.
 But you see, this is the way in which different cultures fertilize each other.
 When one culture loses its grip on what it has, it can toss what it did have to another
 culture which will take up the rhythm.
 And that's why everybody in the West, you see, is getting fascinated with Oriental culture
 and building themselves Japanese houses and so on.
 When you go to Kyoto, you go into a hotel, restaurant, so on, all the Japanese are eating
 Western food, all the Americans are eating Japanese food.
 And the funniest tricks I've had of playing this with the Japanese, the thing that really
 blows them up is if a Westerner wears their clothes.
 This they just can't possibly understand.
 They wear our clothes.
 And they're even blue jeans and all that kind of thing.
 And here they are all dressed up like Westerners, especially in the business suit thing, which
 is the acme of success and respectability and really being up with the world.
 Then some American comes around wearing a kimono and they giggle.
 Now giggling in Japan is not laughter.
 It's a sign of embarrassment.
 How could you?
 What's going on here?
 They don't understand.
 And because they've lost the rhythm of this thing and they have to go into our rhythm.
 Now we, in the meantime, will get into their rhythm and delight in tatamis on the floor,
 kimonos, tea ceremony, the Buddhist religion, chants, gongs and so on.
 And we'll get an entirely new thing out of that, just like they got it from China in
 the first place.
 And the Chinese got it from India.
 And then the historical traces of the thing are lost.
 We don't know where they got it from.
 But do you see, there is no such thing as a pure culture.
 A lot of people have a kind of compulsion about the propriety of being culturally pure.
 And they say, "Well now look here, after all, you're an American and you shouldn't go around
 wearing Chinese or Japanese clothes.
 You should be where you are and what you are."
 Except that this was imported from Germany or England or somewhere else altogether.
 What we call being American.
 There is no such thing.
 Nobody has anything that is absolutely original and genuine.
 It's all borrowed.
 All originality is borrowed.
 Think that one through.
 Really think it through.
 Everybody is in debt to someone or something else who helped you on in life.
 You know, you had a parent, you had a father and mother and they put themselves out so
 that your life is in a way borrowed and you're in debt.
 And if you really think through how you got into business and made your living, somehow
 you're in debt.
 And yet on the other hand you have to claim that you're responsible, you put energy into
 it, you started it.
 And so this is the same paradox that I was talking about this morning.
 That the echo, which is memory, is simultaneously
 what tells you you exist and what traps you.
 So in the sense that it tells you you exist, it's an advantage.
 To the extent that it traps you, it's a debt.
 You're in debt.
 You should be thankful.
 Somebody gave it to you.
 Ultimately, in the Judeo-Christian tradition, the Lord God did it all for you.
 And you should be thankful.
 And say, "Anything bad that I did was from me.
 Dear God, anything good that I did was from you."
 You see?
 What a marvelous mix-up that is.
 But all I'm saying is this.
 There is a point in all this development where you have to say to people, "Please come off
 it."
 In other words, these boys here in Koyasan, I was aching to know enough Japanese to say
 to them, "Do you realize?
 What a great thing you have here.
 Couldn't you possibly enjoy it for a few minutes?
 And let's get together and all join hands around here and go through this again, these
 sutras, and really make it."
 But instead of that, they're going, "Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom."
 And they think it's...
 I don't know what they think it's all about.
 It's just the same way, I suppose I could play you a recording of British choristers
 singing at King's College Chapel in Cambridge.
 Beautiful, you know, those gorgeous voices.
 They're little boys.
 And they're doing it because they know that's what they have to do.
 It takes you much older to realize what the great stuff this is.
 You have to be very much older to see that hymns about what miserable sinners we are
 are really quite great.
 So I'm talking, you see, about the same process of what has been called flip-flop ability,
 whereby we switch from one attitude to another, one situation to another, and this pulse switch
 situation is the very nature of existence.
 That's why your heart does that.
 That's why all sounds, all light, everything is going, "Bloop, bloop, bloop, bloop, bloop,
 bloop."
 See?
 Because of that "Bloop," you know you're here.
 Well now, to round off this whole seminar on Mahayana Buddhism, I have to bring up one
 further subject altogether.
 We've discussed, you see, we started out at the very beginning with solid emptiness, which
 was the Manchamika doctrine of complete letting go of all opinions, of every kind of psychological
 and intellectual and spiritual security, because there's nothing you can grasp.
 We next went on to the Vijnapti Matra school, which is that everything is in your mind,
 and I showed you the difference between that and Western subjective idealism, that mind
 means something different in the Orient than it does in the West, because matter means
 something different.
 Matter in the Orient means form, shape, outline, structure, rupa in Sanskrit, and so mind means
 not the opposite of matter, exactly, but in a way what we would call the most material
 thing there is.
 And so the diamond is used as the image of the mind, because the diamond is harder than
 all other materials and can cut everything else, and is completely transparent.
 So this is their image of the mind, whereas our image of the mind tends to be the opposite
 of the material, to be instead of hard, something that you can wave through like air.
 Their image of the mind is the diamond.
 And then we've gone on from that point to see the Avatamsaka philosophy of the complete
 interdependence of all things in the universe, that is to say, that from any grain of dust
 you can reconstruct the whole universe, because any given grain of dust, every discarded nose-picking,
 every hair on a mosquito's wing, anything you can think of, exists only in context with
 everything else, so that you could, if you knew enough, reconstruct the whole universe
 from this discarded nose-picking or whatever it was.
 That's called Jiji Muge, the complete interdependence of everything.
 And we have been working now with the idea of Tantra, of the web of the inner meaning
 of sexuality, and therefore of attachment, detachment.
 How those people who say, "Well, you shouldn't get involved with the girls," that's being
 attached and it's not spiritual.
 And those people who say, "On the other hand, you should get completely attached," I've
 been trying to show how this game has its own inner meaning.
 So finally, we've got to come round to one form of Mahayana that I haven't really discussed
 at all, to complete the whole scene, which is what is called the school of the pure land.
 And this is the most popular form of Mahayana Buddhism in the Far East.
 In China, in Japan, everywhere, the multitudes go for this kind.
 And it's all under the presiding image of one of those Jani Buddhas called Amitabha,
 whose name means "boundless light," and who is a sort of subdivision or aspect of Maha
 Vairocana, who is the Great Sun Buddha, and is therefore probably derived, historically,
 from Ahura Mazda, from Persia, the great sun god of the Mazdaeans and the Parsis.
 But although that may have been what set it all off, it has been greatly transformed by
 being canalized through Buddhism.
 Now you have all seen photographs of the Buddha at Kamakura, the Daibutsu, that enormous bronze
 figure that sits in a beautiful park with pine trees, the temple having long been demolished
 by a tidal wave, for which thanks be to God.
 Because if it hadn't been for the tidal wave, nobody would ever have really seen this figure.
 But there is at Kamakura this huge bronze figure, it's about 42 feet high.
 And here this creature sits, surrounded by a great busyness.
 Thousands of schoolchildren are all the time on tours, streaming by, photographers, people
 selling this, that and the other, souvenirs, exhibitions of dwarf trees and everything,
 they're all going on around.
 And here this thing sits and looks down forever.
 And nothing can hush it.
 I mean, let's put it this way, it hushes everything.
 But no matter how much turmoil of children, etc., is going on in this park, this huge
 face presides over everything.
 And you cannot ignore it.
 It subdues you into peace, without doing it in an authoritative way.
 It doesn't say to you, "Shut up."
 It just is so peaceful, that you cannot help catching the infection of peace that comes
 from this figure.
 And this is the figure of Amida Amitabha.
 Not the historical Shakyamuni Gautama Buddha, living in India, but one of the Jnani Buddhas,
 who is not manifested in the world.
 Now the religion connected with this figure is called Pure Land, Jodo, in Japanese, Shinshu,
 the true sect of the Pure Land.
 It comes, again, the origins are always in India.
 But the Japanese, under the genius of Honen and Shinran, who were medieval Buddhist saints,
 developed their own special variety of it.
 And this is a very strange religion, because it takes its basis as follows.
 We are living now in the most decadent period of history.
 That's what they say.
 And this comes back from the Hindu idea, that this is the Kali Yuga.
 This is the end of time, where everything is completely fouled up.
 And this started in about 3000 BC.
 February the 23rd, 3023 BC, the Kali Yuga began, and it's got to last yet for 5000 years.
 And then everything will fall apart.
 The universe will disappear out of sheer failure.
 So that now, nobody can be virtuous, because everybody who tries to be virtuous in this
 epoch of the world is merely showing off.
 It's not really pure.
 It's just pretending you're virtuous.
 It's a big act.
 In other words, so you give money to charity, not because you really love the people you're
 giving money to, but because you are under a sense of guilt and you feel you ought to.
 And therefore, because of that inescapable bad motivation, nobody can possibly liberate
 themselves from the chains of karma.
 The more you try to get out of your karma, that is to say your conditioning, your
 bondage to your past, the more you simply get yourself involved in it.
 And therefore, all human beings living in the end time of the Kali Yuga, or what the
 Japanese call Mappo, are just hopeless, hopelessly selfish.
 So in this predicament, you cannot rely on jiriki, that means your own power, to get
 out, to get liberated from self.
 You have to rely on tariki, which is the power of something else altogether than you, something
 quite different.
 So in the Jodo Shinshu sect, the tariki, the other power, is represented in the form of
 Amitabha, or the Japanese say Amida.
 This great, beneficent Buddha figure, who everybody loves, and he's so strangely different
 from any kind of authoritarian god figure that we have in the West.
 Amida doesn't bombinate.
 He sits there serenely, quiet.
 He doesn't preach.
 And all you have to do is to say his name in the formula, Namu Amida Butsu, which means
 Namu, name, Amida Butsu, of Amida Buddha.
 Namu Amida Butsu.
 And all you have to do is to say that formula, and after death you will be reborn in a special
 paradise called Sukhavati, which is Jodo, the pure land, where becoming enlightened
 is a cinch.
 It has none of the difficulties surrounding it that we have in our ordinary life today.
 Everybody born in the pure land is born in the inside of a lotus.
 There's a huge lotus pond in front of where Amida sits with all his attendants.
 And the lotuses come up and they go pop, you know, as the bud breaks, and every time it
 goes pop like this, there's a new little being in there, who is somebody who said the formula,
 Namu Amida Butsu.
 And those are human beings who are now sitting on lotuses like Buddhas.
 And you should see, you go to Koya-san, and they have a great painting there, in their
 museum, of what it's like to arrive there.
 They have a huge panorama of Amitabha and all his attendants, and especially the Apsaras.
 The Apsaras are the heavenly girls, which you would call in Islamic religion, the Huri,
 from which we get the word "whore".
 But the Apsaras are very beautiful girls, plain looks.
 And they have one of them that is put on the front page of the guide to the museum, because
 she's so beautiful.
 As a matter of fact, the admission ticket is a colored reproduction of this Apsara,
 to the Koya-san Museum.
 And she is a girl playing a lute, a biwa, kind of a mandolin-shaped instrument.
 And she looks at you with lovely longing eyes.
 And so, this is welcome to Amida's paradise, where you will all sit on lotuses and be Buddhas
 without any difficulty.
 But the point is, all you have to do to get there is to say "Namo Amida Butsu".
 You don't even have to believe that it works.
 Now that is the religion of most Japanese Buddhists, believe it or not.
 In other words, if you really get this, and feel that that's really going to happen to
 you, you'll be grateful, and you'll try to help other people and be a Bodhisattva and
 so on, and be generally helpful around the scene.
 But the whole idea is that you cannot do it by your own effort.
 And if the moment you think you can do it by your own effort, you're a phony.
 You have instead to go completely with the other, to disown your own power and capability
 of being virtuous, unselfish, etc.
 So then, this kind of religion develops a peculiar kind of saint.
 And they call these people "myo-konin".
 "Myo" means wonderful, "ko" means fine, "nin" means man or person.
 There can be a woman, "myo-konin", that's not sexually restricted to men.
 So a "myo-konin" is a very special kind of character.
 There are stories told about "myo-konin".
 There is one, for example, a travelling man who comes to a temple during the course of
 the night, and walks in, and he takes the sacred cushions on which the priests sit,
 and arranges them right in front of the altar, and goes to sleep.
 In the morning the priest comes in and says, "What's going on here?"
 And the "myo-konin" looks at him and says, "Oh, you must be a stranger, you don't belong
 to the family."
 [music]
 And we will be back in just one moment with part two of tonight's Alan Watts lecture
 here on WFMU from "Transcending Duality".
 Alan Watts brought to you every Thursday evening, 6-7pm, here on listener-sponsored WFMU at
 91.1 FM, 90.1 FM, and on the internet at wfmu.org.
 Once again you can write to us here at P.O. Box 20111, Jersey City, New Jersey 07303.
 And alanwatts.com has more information on the late Mr. Watts.
 Stay tuned for part two of "Transcending Duality" up next here on WFMU.
 [music]
 [music]
 Or a "myo-konin" like Ryokan, who was a great, marvelous, kind of foolish man, rather like
 the Franciscan spirit, rather like the spirit of the Russian mystics.
 Ryokan one day came into a house where there was a kakemono, hanging scroll, of a tiger.
 And he was a very simple man, very direct person.
 He looked at the tiger, he was sitting there, he thought he was alone in the room.
 He looked at the tiger and he said, "Aaaaaaah!"
 And suddenly he noticed that there was a servant girl, sitting quietly waiting for the host
 to come in.
 And he said to her, "Shh!
 Don't you tell anybody about this, they'll think I'm crazy."
 Another time, he had great ability for calligraphy, doing beautiful writing.
 And people were always trying to get his calligraphy from him.
 And he was cagey about it.
 It wasn't so easy to get it.
 So one day a very, very great man invited him for dinner, and again left him alone in
 a reception room where there was stretched out on the floor some absolutely gorgeous
 paper with ink and brushes just waiting there.
 And he got so fascinated that he just couldn't resist.
 You know, like a child, he simply couldn't resist doing his calligraphy on that piece
 of paper.
 And suddenly, as he realized he had done it, that he had spoiled this gorgeous paper, you
 know, which was incredibly expensive, the host walked in.
 And he apologized, he said, "Really, I don't know what to do.
 I'm so sorry I couldn't resist the temptation to make some things on this beautiful paper."
 And the host said, "Oh, please don't worry about that."
 Because he had now possessed himself of a priceless object of art.
 This man's work today sells for thousands and thousands of dollars.
 So this is the spirit.
 I'm telling these anecdotes to try and illustrate the spirit of what's called a Mielkonian.
 The in the swing of realizing that all the very great thing in life is not your own doing.
 That it comes from the side of things, the flip, in other words, of experience that you
 call other.
 There are some people who still believe it comes from the split in experience you call
 yourself.
 The Kiriki people.
 The Tariki people believe it comes from the other.
 But now what happens is this.
 When you penetrate deeply into the doctrines of the Pure Land School, the simple people
 believe that there really is Amitabha Buddha sitting on his golden lotus surrounded by
 all those apsaras.
 Only from Japan, 108,000 miles to the west, there is a paradise where all those people
 sit and where you will be reborn when you die.
 And the simple priests of the sect in the country villages today still insist that that's
 what you should believe.
 But the sophisticated priests don't believe that at all.
 They know that Amitabha is in you, only it is that side of you which you don't define
 as you.
 When you say, "I have a body," instead of saying, "I am a body," that's because you
 feel that your body happens to you.
 But it's something you got mixed up with that was given to you by your parents.
 You don't say, "I beat my heart on purpose."
 You feel that your heart is something that happens to you.
 So all that side of things that you experience as a passive recipient of it is Tariki, other
 power.
 And so they're making the point that that is what liberates you.
 And the meaning of this is, when you say that it is the Tariki side of things, everything
 you define as involuntary that happens to you passively, if you say that's what liberates
 you, the meaning of that is that that side of experience is also you.
 In other words, the sky is blue, but you are blueing it.
 And you're doing it with your nervous system, which has a certain structure, as a result
 of which the light coming through air looks blue, because it does so in terms of your
 nervous system.
 But you are blueing that sky.
 Maybe you are interpreting that activity as something which you don't do, but that just
 happens to you.
 So a person who gets completely hung up on the idea that he doesn't blue the sky, that
 there are certain things he does on the one hand, and they're a rather small, restricted
 group of events, but on the other hand there's a huge set of circumstances which happens
 to you, and you disown that and say, "I'm not responsible for it."
 Therefore as a result of saying you're not responsible for that, you become its victim.
 And you start objecting to it, and you play the game that this was all put on me.
 So this way of Buddhism is to teach you that what is put on you saves you.
 And if you will just get with that, and accept automatic liberation, which you don't deserve,
 because you didn't work for it in just the same way as you have said by your own argument
 that you didn't build Mount Tamil Pais.
 There it is over there, a huge erection of rock, and you say, "Well I didn't put that
 there.
 It's beautiful, I love to see it and climb on it, but I didn't put it there."
 Okay.
 And what did you do?
 You didn't make your skeleton.
 You may have thought out some clever things and done some things that were constructive
 in human life and you got paid for.
 But how did you manufacture the consciousness which you needed to do that with?
 How did you train your fingers?
 You know, you can with these dexterous thumb-finger meeting instruments do all kinds of skillful
 things, but how did you arrive with a hand like that?
 And you say, "Well, I don't know, I'm fearfully and wonderfully made.
 God gave me these fingers and I have accepted them from God as talents, as gifts, and I'm
 supposed to do the best with it I can."
 But in all this, who are you?
 Who is the recipient of these gifts?
 Well, of course, nobody would ever think there was a gift unless there was a recipient.
 Just as nobody knows there's a sound unless there's an echo.
 Just as nobody knows there's, um, I'm here unless you're here.
 It's all the same duality.
 And all these dualities are basically a non-duality.
 That is to say, they are one process under the surface, diversified.
 So then, in this kind of Buddhism, which is called Tariki, the Buddhism of faith, we come
 to exactly the same conclusion that the Jiriki people come to.
 In Zen, which is Jiriki, you work it out by yourself, damn you.
 You know, you grit your teeth and you meditate on this koan and you knock yourself out day
 after day after day after day because the master has challenged you to be spontaneous,
 be genuine, to be completely sincere, to give him, to be, you know, to throw yourself away
 and look at all this Zen training with its meditation and its long hours sitting in the
 cold dawn is saying to you, "Come on now, get rid of yourself.
 Throw yourself away.
 Stop caring whether you live or die."
 You see?
 Then you'll be liberated.
 You'll be, you'll just love it when you're not in your own way anymore.
 Just imagine if you didn't worry, ever.
 It's saying, "You worry just so long as you hold on to yourself.
 Now throw it away.
 We're going to put you through a discipline.
 Boom, boom, boom, every morning.
 And we're going to harden you.
 We're going to make you so that you, you see, you join this order, you don't own anything,
 we just put a robe on you and you'll be begging, you'll be eating nothing in particular."
 It's a terrible diet.
 And you'll be nobody.
 Dig that because then you'll be free.
 And they call a Zen monk an unsui which means cloud water because he drifts like a cloud
 and flows like water.
 Now make that, you see?
 And so they, with their jiriki, all try to make that thing.
 But then they discover that they want it so badly.
 They want to be unsui.
 They want to be detached so badly that they are really just as selfish as anybody else.
 And so then they come to a paradox that so long as I'm trying to get it, I can't make
 it.
 Well so then from the other point of view, the Tariki people are saying, "Well you can't
 make it and you have to rely on the other, or what Christians call grace, to realize
 it."
 Well that is simply a complicated, well maybe not so complicated, it's a way of saying to
 people who think in symbols, "Don't you see that self and other go together?
 That you don't need to cling to yourself because you have everything you called other and that's
 you too."
 But you only realize this if you explore it.
 If you go to an extreme.
 So you can go to the extreme by pursuing the idea of total courage, of letting go of everything,
 of being a true Zen monk and abandoning all your property and living in a barn and sitting
 in the middle of the night in the cold and eating rice and pickles and so on.
 And you can explore liberation that way.
 That's going to an extreme.
 But eventually you'll come round to the same point as the person who goes to the other
 extreme which is no effort whatsoever.
 It comes of itself only.
 He gets in a kind of bind too.
 Because when am I making no effort?
 Even if I say "Namo Amida Butsu" I'm doing something about it.
 I've got to stop doing, saying this "Namo Amida Butsu".
 Saying "Namo Amida Butsu" is so easy.
 But it's still a little bit work.
 And I mustn't do any work at all.
 How can you get to the point where you don't do any work at all?
 You just mustn't do anything.
 And you find yourself that that is as difficult as the other situation was.
 You see?
 To do nothing, really do nothing, with perfection is as difficult as to do everything.
 [Piano music] [Applause]
 [Music]


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