This is Audible. Electronic University presents Early Chinese Zen 1 with Alan Watts.
 One of the things that is a really interesting problem is just why Zen has become so fascinating to many people in the West.
 Well, it's due very largely to the way in which certain people have presented Zen to the West, notably Suzuki and R. H. Blythe.
 They have made a great use of the Zen story or the anecdotes.
 There is a book of Zen anecdotes, these conversations between the masters and their students.
 They are called Mondo or question/answer.
 There is a book which is called the Mumontan and it's just a collection of stories.
 And I remember a friend of mine in England when this was first in circulation, getting this book when he was in the hospital.
 And he said, "I don't understand it at all, but it's cheered me up immensely."
 So the typical sort of Zen story where the student asks the teacher a question, "What is the fundamental meaning of Buddhism?"
 And the master says, "Wait around until there is no one here and I'll tell you."
 So later the student says to him, "Now there is nobody around, master. What is it?"
 And he takes him out into the garden and he points at the bamboos.
 And the student says, "I don't understand."
 "Wait around until there is no one here and I'll tell you."
 So later the student says to him, "Now there is nobody around, master. What is it?"
 And he takes him out into the garden and he points at the bamboos.
 And the student says, "I don't understand."
 And the master says, "What a long bamboo that one is. What a short one that one is."
 And this is a very, very straight story, you see.
 This is saying exactly what it's about in the plainest language.
 Only people overlook it.
 You know when something is right under your nose and you can't see it,
 and you go looking over there, there, there, there, there, and you're carrying it, you see, it's like that.
 And so Suzuki has explained that that's the way it is.
 That once when Saburo Hasegawa, who was a great Japanese painter,
 was at a dinner party here in San Francisco, somebody asked him,
 "What about understanding Zen? How long does it take?"
 He said, "It might take you 30 years. It might take you 3 minutes. I mean that."
 So you see the element of fascination?
 That it's right under your nose. You're looking right at it, you see.
 It's like you do get sort of strangely puzzled when you've lost something
 and somebody's kidding you.
 They're not pointing it out to you, but they say, "Why don't you see it?"
 It's right there.
 And you can't for the life of you, I mean it's far more interesting,
 that sort of situation than something that's really difficult to find.
 In a way you'd have to go digging under the floor, I mean if someone,
 if a treasure were concealed in the walls of this ferry boat,
 you know, you'd have to go digging through the walls and looking for all sorts of things.
 But here is the treasure concealed in full view,
 and concealed by being in full view, but in a place that's too obvious to look.
 So that's the flavor of Zen. And that's why it becomes so fascinating.
 Also, there are other elements in it that, it has a humor to it, which is peculiarly Chinese.
 I don't think the Japanese have quite the humor in their Zen that the Chinese had.
 And because, you see, this humor comes from Taoism.
 Say the writings of Zhuangzi, who was the great Taoist philosopher
 who lived shortly after 300 BC.
 He's the only really great humorous philosopher.
 And that flavor has passed on into Zen.
 And also, Zen is something experiential.
 You're not required to believe in anything.
 It doesn't have any doctrines.
 It entirely consists in a state of consciousness.
 Awakened consciousness.
 So as if I were to say to you, if you were puzzled about some, you know,
 what Tillich calls "concerned about being."
 What is this thing, life? Why are we here?
 Why is it suffering? Why do all these creatures multiply in different ways and shapes?
 Why are there ducks? Why are there trees? Why are there snails, clams, people, all that?
 For heaven's sakes, why? And why do they come and go? And what happens to them when they go?
 We all want to know that.
 So that's the kind of concern.
 And Zen answers this, not with an idea, but with a changed state of consciousness.
 What is it all about? It's like asking, "What's the pit in the middle of an onion?"
 And you pick off all the skins and so on and so on and so on,
 and suddenly you find you've got a litter of skins and no pit.
 There wasn't anything in it.
 And you might say, "Well, that's a hoax. It's a...
 Life is a deception.
 A tale told by an idiot."
 And yet, what you had missed in looking for the pit were the beautiful skins.
 See, that's the edible part of the onion.
 Whereas you may peel a potato, the onion is all skin.
 But, excellent.
 Now, what one has done under these circumstances is you have missed the point by being too eager.
 You have therefore overlooked what was obvious.
 And so, problems are made about the nature of the universe by asking the wrong questions.
 Is there something important here?
 Well, yes, we say there are certain things that are more important than others.
 We've agreed among ourselves, because we are people, that we're more important than seagulls.
 And the seagulls have agreed among themselves that they're more important than people.
 And they recognize their kind, and they pick out in life all the things that are significant to their needs
 as we pick out the things that are significant to our needs.
 And we say, "Now that's the thing that really must happen."
 But actually, nothing must happen.
 It just happens.
 And that's called "thusness" or "suchness."
 And so, Zen is concerned, the whole nature of Zen, is to get you back to seeing the suchness of things.
 It's a process of unhypnotizing.
 Now, when you see you have picked out things in the world that are the important things, the significant things,
 in other words, the things, a thing is a name for something you think about.
 All things are units of thought, like an inch is a unit of measurement, or an ounce is a unit of weight.
 A thing is a unit of thought. It's a think.
 And so, when you say you can only think of one thing at a time, you can only think one thing at a time.
 That's what it's saying.
 Because actually, you say, "Think of a thing, think of a tape recorder."
 How many things is a tape recorder?
 You know, it's a mass of stuff.
 A human body, likewise.
 But when that predicament is foisted on you, and you have divided life into all these things,
 then you are under the delusion that the world is all separated and disjointed,
 and that you are only something in the world.
 You forget by doing that, that you are, that your physical organism, let me put it this way,
 is something that the whole cosmos is doing.
 The real you is all that there is.
 The whole works.
 There's no real separation.
 I mean, when I say there is no separation, don't imagine that I'm saying that there aren't any skins,
 there aren't any outlines, there aren't any surfaces or lines.
 Yes, of course there are.
 But the basic lesson in metaphysics is that for every inside there is an outside.
 That's really all you need to know.
 Once you really understand that, you've mastered all philosophy.
 That the inside and the outside go together.
 People think that I'm in the inside, and you're on the outside.
 But where would my inside be without the outside?
 See, imagine a bottle which has an inside but no outside.
 It won't work.
 There's no such thing.
 Imagine an object with no external space around it.
 It couldn't exist.
 So the space and the object go together.
 Fits in the same way as your front and your back go together.
 And that's it.
 Only you see, we're taught by pointing out what things are important and what are not, to ignore that.
 So ignoring it is in Sanskrit, ignorance, avidya.
 And the Buddhists say, "Avidya is the beginning of the trouble."
 You just ignore how the inside and the outside go together.
 So, the work of Zen is to get people unhypnotized by this sort of thing,
 back to the point where they started in babyhood,
 but they never cultivated it because they were developed along other lines.
 It's called to regain one's original treasure that you received from your father and mother.
 Or what is sometimes called to get the unborn mind.
 That's a curious phrase, the mind that didn't arise.
 That is to say, what you are fundamentally,
 as distinct from what you pop up and declare yourself to be.
 Imagine, for example, a big fowl with many tits on it.
 All these are passages to a central source of milk.
 And so they unite together under the surface.
 Well, in the same sort of a way, you see, we are all united like that.
 We are channels through which it is happening.
 Only, we are sensitive only on the tip of the nipple.
 All our concentration is there at that point.
 And so we've lost the realization of being the whole thing.
 That happened very, very early in our infancy.
 Now, when you get it back, you don't become incapacitated.
 In other words, it isn't as if you lost the sensation and the comprehension
 of what we call the different things and events in the world, their names, their places,
 all that sort of practical knowledge.
 The knowledge, in other words, that is helpful for survival.
 You don't lose that.
 That you see all these separate things and people and events
 in a new context.
 You might say against a new background.
 In which you see that they're all one.
 Or if I'm going to get very, very technical, as the Indian musicians like to,
 he would say they are non-dual.
 Because the word "one" is still a dual word.
 It has an opposite.
 "One" is opposed to "many" or to "none".
 Whereas this "whatever it is" that we're all on, doesn't have an opposite.
 Because it's everything.
 So the word "one" isn't quite the right word for it.
 So they use the word "non-dual", which is a kind of a fancy word.
 They use it...
 I mean, "non-dual" is of course the opposite of "dual".
 But they have a convention about it.
 Imagine when you draw on a flat surface, and you want to represent the third dimension of depth.
 You do it.
 Still using lines on the flat surface.
 But by a convention that we all agree on, certain slanting lines indicate this dimension.
 And we all know that.
 So in the same way in Indian philosophy, certain words are used to designate a dimension not in our ordinary way of thinking.
 Our ordinary way of thinking is either this or that.
 We think in dualities.
 And that may have something to do with the fact that our brain has two sides, and we have two eyes, two ears, and so on, two nostrils.
 This, and the way our ribs are formed, growing out of the spine, and two legs, and two arms,
 is that probably that structure is connected with the way we think.
 Either this or that.
 Will you have what's in the left hand, or will you have what's in the right?
 And...
 So, we can't talk about, we can't say anything sensible about everything.
 About the universe.
 Because we can't find something that's not the universe, you see.
 So, then what we do is we take a dualistic word and say,
 "It is to be understood that this word refers to what is beyond all dualistic ideas."
 If you look at it this way,
 in order to make a word mean something,
 I have to be able to say what is excluded from the meaning of this word.
 Like a box.
 If the box is there, there must be what's inside the box, and there must be what's outside the box.
 Now, I want to talk to you about a box,
 which is the ultimate box.
 The class of all classes, as logicians say.
 And there isn't anything outside it. Everything is in this box.
 Well, a logician would say, "That's absurd. There could be no such box. It wouldn't be a box.
 Unless you can show me that it has an outside. I'm sorry."
 Well, I'm going to get clever with this fellow. I'm going to say, "Yeah, I...
 my box has an outside.
 And the outside and the inside, however, go together."
 Actually, the box I have here is constructed in a peculiar way.
 You know what a Mobius strip is, don't you?
 You take a strip of paper, you twist it once, and you join the two ends
 to have a continuous strip.
 Now, this has a very strange property.
 It has only one side and only one edge.
 You can hold that strip of paper between your fingers and say,
 "Well, look here. I've got one finger on one side and one on the other.
 It obviously has two sides."
 Say, "Wait a minute."
 Take a pencil, a bright red pencil,
 and run it along that so-called one side that you think you have there,
 and keep going.
 And you will find, when you have followed the pencil back to the place where you started,
 that you never took it off the paper to go round to the other side.
 In the same way, you run your finger along one edge of it,
 and you keep running, and you'll get back to the point where you started from.
 And you will have covered the whole thing, both sides, both edges.
 Now, just put that now into three dimensions instead of two,
 and you have what's called a Klein bottle.
 I think somewhere around the house, I'll dig it out.
 We have the Life magazine book on mathematics,
 and it has a beautiful drawing of a Klein bottle in it.
 That has the same property in three dimensions.
 Now, imagine a world which has the same property in four dimensions.
 And you've got something like what our universe is.
 It's outside, it's the same as it's inside.
 Crazy.
 But you see, it's difficult to talk about that in the kind of language that we have.
 Just in the same way, mathematicians, especially in mathematics applied in physics,
 have ideas which they can express in their formulae,
 but which they can't tell the layman about it.
 Because in order to instruct the layman as to the meaning of these concepts,
 they have to put them into our ordinary three-dimensional sensory images,
 and they always distorted.
 So, you see, the view, that's why it said that Zen cannot be explained in words.
 Although it is, in a way, explained very clearly in words, in all these little stories.
 Nevertheless, these stories are not intelligible
 until you have what I can only call a new dimension of consciousness.
 You see, a lot of people don't really have depth perceptions.
 They would look at the moon and see it as a disk.
 They don't see a ball.
 In the same way, a lot of people are tone deaf.
 They hear noises but never hear tunes.
 It's something like that.
 Suddenly, one day, you say, "Good heavens, the moon's a ball."
 Or you suddenly become alive to what it is that people dig in music.
 So, in just that sort of way, you can become suddenly alive to, I'll just call it,
 the oneness of everything that's going on.
 And you see that that's all you, and you are eternal.
 You're what there is.
 And there's nothing to be afraid of.
 Because we're coming and going, we go through a whole spectrum of feelings
 from the most rapturous pleasures to the most ghastly agonies.
 And it's all as insubstantial as weaving smoke.
 And just go!
 You know, just get with it and go!
 And then you have the basic understanding of Zen.
 Now, all that I've said thus far is simple introduction to what Zen is about.
 This way of understanding things arose independently in both India and China.
 In India, in what we call the tradition of the Upanishads, in Vedanta and Yoga and so on.
 Then in Buddhism.
 In China, in the form of Taoism.
 And they reached each other eventually.
 And the confluence of the Buddhist and the Taoist traditions came to be Zen.
 And this, the formation of Zen, really began in about 415 A.D. in China.
 With the students of a great Hindu monk, Kumarajiva.
 And in the following 200 years, 300 years, it slowly took form and took form
 until a very remarkable man by the name of Huineng, H-U-I-N-E-N-G,
 who died in 713 A.D., was the man who put it on the map.
 Who, as it were, brought all the threads together
 and could be called the real founder of Chinese Zen.
 Now we are going to, in the course of this seminar, we are going to look at the work of Huineng.
 But I want first, before we look at him, to look at some of the earlier people, especially Sun Tzung.
 Sun Tzung was a couple of generations before Huineng.
 Spiritual generations, that is, master people, master people, sort of.
 Who wrote the most succinct summary of Zen that exists, which is called the Xin Xin Ming.
 That is to say, the Treatise on Trust in the Mind.
 Mind with a capital M, which means many things.
 Mind is used in Zen. They use the word Xin.
 And when a Chinese says Xin, he points here.
 Kokoro in Japanese means the heart mind, the psychic center of gravity.
 But it means mind in a much wider sense than that.
 It means mind in the sense of, do you mind? Mind out.
 And it also means mind in the sense of space.
 Everything that we see is on the mind.
 Like the sound of the radio is on the diaphragm of a loudspeaker.
 So it's a very wide sense of the word.
 This morning I simply tried to give you a general survey of what Zen is about by way of being an introduction.
 And I was discussing the peculiar reasons for the interest in Zen in the West.
 And I was discussing the extraordinary way in which the sort of now you see it, now you don't implication of Zen literature
 has fired people's imagination and curiosity.
 That the feeling there is a new vision of the world in the aspect of its unity,
 as distinct from our ordinary vision of the world in the aspect of its multiplicity and broken upness, fallen apartness.
 And that this is something that you might somehow suddenly catch at any minute.
 It isn't that Zen is an easy thing, or that it's a difficult thing.
 It might be either.
 And it exercises this peculiar fascination by saying that the vision of the world in its unity is terribly obvious.
 It's right under your nose, only you're looking too hard in the wrong place so you don't see it.
 And so this is always the same puzzle as if I said to you,
 if you came here, you know, and said, "Well, we want some philosophical enlightenment," or whatever,
 and I looked at you in a funny way and said, "But you've forgotten something."
 You know, as if you hadn't got your pants on or something.
 What have you forgotten?
 You know?
 Who do you think you are, anyhow?
 "Oh, you see, I'm just me."
 "Oh, now come on. Don't give me that line."
 "Well, what do you mean? I'm just poor little me."
 "Oh, nuts. Don't put on that act."
 And essentially, you see, it's that kind of upaya which a Zen teacher uses.
 Upaya is a Sanskrit word meaning pedagogical techniques in spiritual disciplines.
 In politics it means cunning, but in the vocabulary of Buddhism or Hinduism,
 it means the expert cunning used by a teacher to surprise and trick his students out of their egocentricity.
 And then, therefore, in all these koans, dialogues, rough Zazen practices and so on,
 it's all upaya.
 It's a colossal hoax, but a very beneficent one.
 Now, the true Zen came to birth in China as a result of a sort of interplay between Buddhism and Taoism.
 Now, both the Confucians and the Taoists, although there's a certain puritanism in Confucian ethics,
 they all believe in the physical world as a good thing.
 The Taoist loves nature, the Confucian is particular about parents and family and all that jazz.
 The Buddhists of India, on the other hand, tended, very often, to be anti-physical.
 I mean, in other words, to be celibate, to be interested in getting out of this state of consciousness
 in which the world appears to us in its multiplicity.
 The Chinese never could get on with that.
 They didn't see any sense in that Indian attitude.
 So when Buddhism came to China, the Chinese did a flip of it.
 And they wanted a kind of Buddhism which, although it was sort of monastic in the Indian tradition,
 was not monastic in the way that it is in India, or in Burma, Srilanka.
 Buddhism for the Chinese is, to some extent, a thing which you go into for a time, and you attain enlightenment.
 Then you can come back, as it were, and do anything you want.
 You can have family, you can be a tramp, you can just play, any way.
 But they feel, with the whole tone of the Mahayana type of Buddhism, even in India,
 is that once enlightened you ought to come back.
 So the situation of a Buddhist monk in the Far East is, generally speaking,
 that he's not quite like a monk as we understand monks in the West.
 Monks in the West take life vows.
 They vow poverty, chastity and obedience until they die.
 But in the Far East, a Buddhist monk may go into the discipline for a number of years,
 and then return to lay life with no bad feelings.
 In fact, he may be considered a considerable success in having done so.
 So, that kind of trend in the Confucian and the Taoist attitudes,
 when it coalesces with Indian Buddhism, produces something very different from anything you find in India.
 And then, uniquely and outstandingly represents this sort of attitude.
 I have to explain this by telling a sort of a modern anecdote.
 James Campbell, who is, as you know, the editor of all the works of Heinrich Zimmer,
 and actually wrote them himself, out of Zimmer's notes, went to India.
 And he went to the greatest living guru in India today, who is an ex-policeman,
 and said to him, "The sutras say that all things are Brahman.
 Isn't this also true of the illusion of the Maya?
 Isn't that the way we feel every day, and just ordinary kind of human beings?
 Isn't that the Brahman too?"
 And this man said, "You know, it's interesting.
 That was the first question I asked my teacher."
 And he said, "Of course, they are."
 "Well, Joseph, nobody in India teaches that anymore."
 So, the guru took Joseph downstairs to all his students,
 and said, "I want you to meet a great Rishi sage from America.
 He really has found it, and you should...
 He will now give you a lecture or something. I don't know what happened."
 In other words, the Hindu tends to say,
 "Yes, in fact, all this world that you see now before your eyes
 is the divine, ultimate, non-dual reality.
 But of course, you have to find out that it is.
 And when you do, it will disappear.
 You will go into what they call Nirvikalpa Samadhi.
 That means, technically, it means being in a state of Samadhi without having concepts.
 But they mean something else by it.
 They mean as if all the shapes that you saw before you were suddenly to dim out.
 And instead, there is nothing but light.
 Maybe this light is slightly violet, but I don't know.
 Anyway, every kind of sensual experience disappears.
 Now then, the way in which you have to argue this with a Hindu Swami who takes this line,
 is to say that your position is still dualistic.
 Because you've moved from the vision of form to the formless vision.
 This is just changing places. This is not liberation.
 It's somewhere else on the wheel.
 And you know they have to admit it.
 And I once had an argument with a Swami,
 in which I brought up a point we were discussing this morning.
 He was referring to the Brahman, the ultimate reality, as the One.
 That Oneness has distinct multiplicity.
 I said, "Ah, ah, ah, ah, Oneness has an opposite, and the Brahman has no opposite."
 "What do you think he said?" He said, "You argue just like a Hindu."
 Well, he knew very well. I mean, he was using loose language, as we all do.
 So, this was the thing, you see, historically, in the development of Indian philosophy
 that took place between about 100 and 400 AD.
 That they faced the fact that looking for a state of consciousness
 that's radically different from this state now, is just an escape.
 It hasn't really come to terms with the problem.
 The problem is, you see, that the state of consciousness you're in now,
 however lost up it may be, is in Hindu language the play of Vishnu.
 You are all Vishnu playing that you're in this mess, which is the part of the cosmic dance.
 So, if that's the case, dig it, you see. I mean, get with it. Be that.
 So, the Chinese caught on to this.
 And when, you could say, this very moment, this very world, this very body, is the point.
 Now. But if you see you're seeking something beyond all the time, you never get with it.
 You never hear. So, they saw that very clearly.
 So, this man, Sun Tzung, who I was talking about at the end of this morning's session,
 who is one of the first, I would say, really articulate people about Zen,
 who wrote the "Chin Chin Ming",
 he starts out by saying,
 "The great Tao, or the perfect Tao, is without difficulty,
 except that it avoids picking and choosing.
 Only when you neither love nor hate, does it appear in all clarity.
 A hair's breadth of deviation from it, and a deep gulf is set between heaven and earth.
 If you want to get hold of what it looks like, do not be anti or pro anything.
 The conflict of longing and loathing, this is the disease of the mind."
 Okay, now, if you take that quite literally,
 if you try to avoid picking and choosing, that's another kind of choice, isn't it?
 If you say, "I ought not to love anything, I ought not to hate anything,
 I ought not to take any extreme attitudes," you're still choosing.
 If I say, in psychological jargon, for psychiatric health, "You ought to accept yourself."
 You know? Accept everything that happens.
 Well, among the things that happen is the very concrete fact that there are things you don't accept,
 and that you can't accept. So you have to accept that.
 Now, do you see what this does?
 It's a very interesting technique.
 It's saying that you are, each one, a Buddha, enlightened, even before you've accepted yourself.
 You see, you don't have to do anything about it.
 But it's terribly difficult for human beings to resist the temptation to do something about it.
 So it says, "Okay, do that."
 If you want to practice yoga and meditation, go ahead.
 If you feel that would make you better, do it.
 But the point is that there's really nothing to do, there's nothing not to do either.
 You won't get this by sort of acting spontaneous in a phony way, but you can do that if you want to do.
 But you're it right where you stand, without making a single move.
 And that's what's meant, you see, profoundly, by avoiding picking and choosing.
 Actually, there's nothing you can do about it.
 You may get the illusion that your picking and choosing makes a real difference,
 that your choices really do change the nature of things, but they don't.
 And so, so long as you want to hang on to that illusion and play it, there you are.
 But actually, you are, as you live and all sit around this room at the moment,
 in the various stages of what you may consider subjectively to be goodness and badness,
 sickness and health, sanity and insanity.
 Every one of you is as much a splendid accomplishment as the shape of the clouds.
 And that's natural.
 You know, with all the funny hairdos and artificiality and everything.
 We're all like the birds.
 Only we have a complicated way of pretending that we aren't, so that we figure out we're something special.
 And that's it too, you see.
 But it is a tough job getting anybody to see that.
 So, what do they do?
 They have all these techniques, and they put you through the mill,
 because people won't accept this vision until they feel they've paid for it.
 Until they feel, they finally discover, after an enormous effort,
 like the student I told you about this morning, there isn't anything to realize.
 It really is fantastic.
 See, so all this is very direct and simple.
 So, not picking and choosing doesn't mean that you have to cultivate being detached.
 You can try that, sure.
 But then you find you're terribly attached to your non-attachment.
 Like you're proud of your humility, or something like that.
 And it just goes round and round and round.
 So, you know, come unstuck!
 Well, you always were unstuck, because you're in the flow.
 And nothing is stuck.
 It all is changing, changing, changing.
 One is nothing but a flow of change.
 There isn't anything to hang on to.
 Nobody to hang on to it.
 You know, here is a decaying hand grasping at smoke.
 It's all falling apart.
 And there's nothing anybody can do about it,
 because what anybody is who perhaps could do something about it,
 that is falling apart too.
 It's what's meant by the doctrine of Anantman.
 There is no, the Buddhist idea that there is no permanent self.
 Because it's all falling apart.
 So, cheer up, you know, it's great!
 So, not knowing the profound meaning of things,
 we disturb our original peace of mind to no purpose.
 Original peace of mind is what I was referring to as the child's,
 the infant's, the baby's fundamental knowledge of the unity of the world.
 The oceanic feeling, so it goes.
 Perfect like great space, the Tao lacks nothing and has nothing in excess.
 Truly, because of our accepting and rejecting,
 we don't get the suchness of things.
 You see, I explained suchness this morning.
 How it's, the way everything is just like that.
 But we pick out some things as significant and other things as not significant.
 And this prevents us from seeing that all the insignificant things are in a way significant,
 and all the significant things are in a way insignificant.
 See, that I go on living is for me significant,
 until I don't anymore.
 But that means I'm going to run around busy, busy, busy, talk a lot, and work, and eat,
 and entertain, and do this, that, and the other, and it's a great dance.
 Actually, it has no more ultimate meaning than somebody sitting and going,
 (gibberish)
 One Zen master said, "From the bathtub to the bathtub I have uttered stuff and nonsense."
 That was his death verse.
 "The bathtub in which the baby is washed at birth, the bathtub in which the corpse is washed before burial."
 All the time he's been talking nonsense.
 And so all these birds are going around, (gibberish)
 and all these human beings are going, making this great hullabaloo and building houses and all that kind of thing.
 And it's all, well, it's just suchness, that's the point.
 So, neither follow after, nor dwell with the doctrine of the void.
 I mean, don't get hooked on the idea that things are empty, and therefore that this is a way of saying
 that the world is a ghastly sham, and something you ought to avoid.
 That's what this means.
 So, don't try to catch hold of this doctrine as if it would do you some good.
 And on the other hand, don't dwell with it.
 Don't get attached to it.
 For if the mind is at peace, these wrong views disappear of themselves.
 The mind at peace is not quite what we ordinarily mean by peace of mind.
 Oh, he quotes a thing here on the comment, "Neither follow after, nor dwell with the doctrine of the void."
 This verse, from another early Chinese Zen master.
 Getting rid of things and clinging to emptiness is an illness of the same kind.
 It is just like throwing oneself into a fire to avoid being drowned.
 When activity is stopped, there is passivity.
 Now, when activity is stopped, and there is passivity, this passivity, again, is a state of activity.
 You see, if you practice detachment, and being calm in mind, and free from all worldly passions,
 this in its own turn is a worldly passion, since you are attached to this new state.
 You see, that's the Chinese criticism of the Hindu viewpoint.
 Stay where you are.
 If you try to be spiritual, this is putting legs on a snake.
 And the snake doesn't need any legs, and is only confused by them when it gets them.
 But, you may have to try to be spiritual, or whatever the equivalent of this is,
 psychoanalyzed, integrated, clear, all the words that are used.
 You may have to try to do that, to find this out.
 But that everything you add in this way, by clinging to some idea of detachment, spiritual freedom, nirvana, whatever,
 all that in the end is an artificiality that will be sloughed off.
 So, you might say, to use Spiegelberg's phrase, "then is the religion of no religion."
 That the highest perfection of religion is just not to have any noticeable religion.
 See, the Daos don't have a religion.
 They don't preach, they don't pray, they don't recite sutras.
 But the human beings have to do this thing, and have Buddhas, and all that.
 And when you really get the point, none of that is necessary.
 But then you can have it, that's the kick.
 [laughter]
 Audible hopes you have enjoyed this program.


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