A lecture on Zen is always something in the nature of a hoax,
 because it really does deal with a domain of experience that can't be talked about.
 But one must remember at the same time that there's really nothing at all that can be talked about adequately.
 And the whole art of poetry is to say what can't be said.
 So every poet, every artist, feels when he gets to the end of his work that there's something absolutely essential that was left out.
 So Zen has always described itself as a finger pointing at the moon.
 And you must be very careful not to mistake the finger for the moon,
 and especially careful if the finger looks religious,
 not to suck it for comfort instead of following where it points.
 In the Sanskrit saying that we were discussing in the first of these seminars,
 "Tat Tvam Asi" - "That art thou" - Zen is concerned with "that".
 "That" of course is the word which is used for Brahman, the absolute reality in Hindu philosophy.
 And you're it, only in disguise, and disguised so well that you've forgotten.
 But unfortunately ideas like the ultimate ground of being, the self, Brahman, ultimate reality, the great void,
 all that is very, very abstract talk.
 And Zen is concerned with a much more direct way of coming to an understanding of "that".
 Or "thatness" as it's called, "tathata" in Sanskrit.
 So Zen has been summed up in four statements.
 A direct transmission outside scriptures and apart from tradition.
 No dependence on words and letters.
 Direct pointing to the human mind.
 And seeing into one's own nature and becoming Buddha.
 That is becoming enlightened, awakened from the normal hypnosis under which almost all of us go round like somnambules.
 It's extraordinary how much interest has existed in Zen in the United States,
 especially in the years since the war with Japan.
 And naturally I've often meditated on the reasons for this interest.
 I think first of all, the appeal of Zen lies in its unusual quality of humor.
 Religions aren't as a rule humorous in any way.
 Religions are serious.
 And when one looks at Zen art and reads Zen stories,
 it is quite apparent that something is going on here,
 which isn't serious in the ordinary sense, however sincere it may be.
 The next thing I think that has appealed to Westerners is that Zen has no doctrines.
 There is nothing you have to believe, and it doesn't moralize at you very much.
 It's not particularly concerned with morals at all.
 It's a field of inquiry rather like physics.
 And you don't expect a physicist to discuss authoritatively about morals,
 even though as a human being he has moral interests and problems.
 But as a physicist he is not a moral authority.
 Or if you go to an oculist or ophthalmologist to have your eyes adjusted,
 that is so you can see clearly.
 And Zen is spiritual ophthalmology.
 Another thing that appeals very much to Western students about Zen
 is that they've read their Zen from Suzuki and from some of my writings,
 and from R. H. Blythe,
 and these people present a rather different kind of Zen
 from that which you will find today in Japan.
 They present what is essentially early Chinese Zen,
 from the old writings, ranging from about shortly before 700 A.D. to 1000 A.D.
 And that Zen has a very different flavor from modern Japanese Zen.
 And so of course many of the people who go to study Zen in Japan
 disapprove of Dr. Suzuki thoroughly,
 and also naturally of my exposition of Zen,
 because we don't make a great fetish of studying Zen by sitting.
 In Japan today they sit and they sit and they sit.
 R. H. Blythe asked a Zen master,
 "What would you do if you had only one half hour left to live?"
 And he said, "I would do Zazen,"
 which means he would sit like the Buddha here and practice meditation.
 And Blythe had given him several choices.
 Would you like to listen to your favorite music?
 Would you have a dinner? Would you get drunk?
 Would you like the company of a beautiful woman?
 Would you take a walk? What would you do?
 Or would you just go on with your daily business as if nothing was going to happen?
 In other words, would you wind up your watch?
 So he was very disappointed in this answer.
 And he said, "You know, sitting is only one way of doing Zen."
 "Buddhism speaks of the four dignities of man,
 walking, standing, sitting, and lying.
 And so Zazen is simply the Japanese word for sitting Zen.
 There must also be walking Zen, standing Zen, and lying Zen.
 You should know, for example, how to sleep in a Zen way.
 That means to sleep thoroughly.
 Zen has been described as when hungry, eat; when tired, sleep."
 And when the student got that description,
 he said, "Well, doesn't everybody do that?"
 And the master said, "They don't."
 "When hungry, they don't just eat, but think of ten thousand things.
 When tired, they don't just sleep, but dream innumerable dreams."
 So in a sense, this sounds like the old Western truism.
 Whatever your hand finds to do, do it with all your might.
 But that's not the same thing as Zen.
 A lot of people like to see if they could sum up Zen in that way,
 in the Latin motto of the school I used to go to in England,
 "Agedum agis," "Act when you act, or while you act."
 There's a famous story which beautifully illustrates
 the current relationships between East and West.
 Paul Reps, who wrote, or rather drew a lovely book called Zen Telegrams,
 once asked a Zen master to sum up Buddhism in one phrase.
 And he said, "Don't act, but act."
 So Reps was simply delighted,
 because he thought the master had said, "Don't act, but act."
 And that, of course, would be the Taoist principle of wu-wei,
 of action in the spirit of not being separate from the world,
 realizing so fully that you are the universe, too,
 that your action on it is not an interference,
 but an expression of the totality.
 But the master's English was very bad indeed,
 and Paul Reps had misunderstood him.
 He had said, "Don't act, but act."
 [laughter]
 And you know, that is the sort of attitude
 that all clergy develop over the centuries.
 You know how it is when you go to church, if you do.
 So often the sermon boils down to,
 "My dear people, you ought to be good."
 And everybody knows that, but hardly anybody knows how.
 [laughter]
 Or even what good is.
 No, the fascination of Zen to the West
 is that it promises a sudden insight
 into something that is always supposed to take years and years and years.
 The psychoanalysts, if you're mixed up, they tell you,
 "The troubles you've got yourself into over all these years
 are going to go away in a day.
 And therefore it will take many, many sessions,
 maybe twice a week for several years for you to get straightened out."
 The Christians say that if you embark on a path of spiritual discipline,
 you get yourself a spiritual director
 and submit yourself to the will of God,
 but you may not get into the high states of contemplative prayer
 for very many years.
 Those, the Vedanta society people, the Buddhists, also say,
 will require many long years of meditation,
 very hard concentration, very difficult practice,
 and stern discipline.
 And then maybe you will make enough progress in this life
 to become a monk in your next life.
 And then you'll make enough progress to enter some of the
 preliminary stages leading to Buddhahood.
 But it's all likely to take you many, many incarnations.
 But when this artist, Hasegawa, was asked,
 "How does one see into Zen?"
 He said, "It may take you three seconds.
 It may take you thirty years. I mean that."
 And so you see, there is always the possibility
 that it may take only three seconds.
 Zen literature abounds with stories, you see,
 in which there's a dialogue, or what is called in Japanese,
 "mondo," which means question-answer,
 between a Zen teacher and his student,
 and these dialogues are fascinatingly incomprehensible.
 But it always seems to be that at the end of this swift
 interchange, the student gets the point.
 Sometimes he doesn't.
 I gave a book of these dialogues once to a friend of mine,
 who was deeply interested in Eastern philosophy.
 He said, "I haven't understood a word of it,
 but it's cheered me up enormously."
 So this book called the "Mumonkan,"
 which means the barrier with no gate,
 or the gateless gate,
 contains such stories as the student...
 I say student rather than monk,
 because Zen students are not monks in our sense of the word monk.
 Our monks take life vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience.
 And to make the grade, you're expected to spend
 your whole life in the monastic state.
 But I call the Zen monk a student,
 because he's more like a student in a theological seminary.
 He may stay much longer than the usual three years.
 He may stay 30 years or so,
 but it's always possible for him to leave with dignity
 and to graduate and to go into lay life
 or become a regular priest who keeps charge of a temple,
 can get married and have a family.
 And only very few graduates of a Zen monastery
 become Roshi, that Roshi means simply "old teacher."
 That is the man in charge of the spiritual development of the students.
 So, one of these students in the book says to the master, Joshu,
 "I have been here in this monastery for some time,
 and I've had no instruction from you."
 The master said, "Have you had breakfast?"
 "Yes." "Then go wash your bowl."
 And the monk was awakened.
 Now, you may think that the moral of this story
 is, "Do the work that's nearest, though it's dull at wiles,
 helping when you meet them, lame dogs over styles."
 Or that the bowl might be a symbol of the great void.
 The all-containing universe.
 And probably the monk had washed it already,
 because they immediately, after eating in Japan and China,
 in a monastery, they would take tea and pour it into the bowl
 and swirl it around, wash it and wipe it out.
 So maybe he had already washed the bowl.
 And in that case, you might think that the master was saying,
 "Don't gild the lily. Don't," to use a real nice Zen phrase,
 "Don't put legs on a snake, or a beard on a eunuch."
 No. The point of that story is so clear
 that that's what's difficult about it.
 And all these stories resemble jokes in this sense.
 A joke is told to make you laugh.
 When you get the point of a joke, you laugh spontaneously.
 But if the point has to be explained to you,
 you don't laugh so well. You force a laugh.
 There is some kind of sudden impact between the punchline and the laugh.
 And so, in exactly the same way with these stories,
 there is expected to be something else than laughter,
 which is sudden insight into the nature of being.
 Nature of being, that sounds, again, very abstract.
 But it was, "Go wash your bowl."
 So, another story in this book concerns a master who said,
 "When a cow walks out of the enclosure, the corral,
 the horns and head, the four legs and the body all get through,
 but not the tail. How is it that the tail can't get through?"
 And nobody could answer this.
 Another story tells of a certain master called Bai Zhang,
 who was so good that he had hundreds of students,
 and they couldn't all be housed in one monastery.
 So he had to find one of the students who could also be a master.
 And so he arranged a test.
 He put down a picture in front of them all,
 and said, "Without making an assertion, or without making a denial,
 tell me, what is this?"
 And the senior monk said, "It couldn't be called a piece of wood."
 And the teacher didn't accept this answer.
 But the monastery cook came forward and kicked the picture over and walked away.
 And he got the job.
 And the commentator remarks, "Maybe he wasn't so smart after all,
 for he gave up an easy job for a difficult one."
 When an inquirer about Zen came to a master,
 they often, you know, they approach a Zen master with a kind of key question.
 What is the fundamental principle of Buddhism?
 Or why did the bearded barbarian come from the West?
 Because Zen is supposed to have been brought into China
 by a Hindu named Bodhidharma.
 Bodhidharma is always represented as having a huge bushy beard and very fierce eyes.
 Now, Bodhidharma always insisted that he had nothing to teach.
 And so, why did he come?
 That's one of the fundamental questions.
 You might say to me, I've often said when I'm giving a lecture,
 "I'm not trying to improve you.
 I'm not trying to persuade you.
 Persuade you to a certain point of view.
 That is to say, like a preacher would convert somebody.
 In fact, I have nothing to tell you at all.
 Because were I to presume that I had something to tell you,
 I would be like a person who picked your pocket and sold you your own watch.
 So, you might say, then, why do I talk?
 You might ask the sky, "Why are you blue?"
 The clouds, "Why do you float around?"
 Birds, "Why do you sing?"
 And we've been busy trying to invent explanations for all this.
 And so, there's this great Zen saying.
 One of the old masters said,
 "When I was a young man and knew nothing of Buddhism,
 mountains were mountains and waters were waters.
 But when I began to understand a little Buddhism,
 mountains were no longer mountains and waters no longer waters."
 In other words, when one starts scientific and philosophical inquiries,
 everything gets explained away in terms of its causes
 or other things that go with it.
 Or one sees that all the things in the world,
 what we think are separate things,
 are, as things, illusions. There is nothing separate.
 So, but he said at the end, "But when I had thoroughly understood,
 mountains were mountains and waters are waters."
 So, this is what's called direct pointing.
 If you ask me, "What is this?"
 What is this?
 Here's one answer.
 If you had a cigarette in your hand, that might be another answer.
 A Zen master was once talking with me,
 and he said, "When water goes out of the wash basin, down the drain,
 does it go clockwise or anticlockwise?"
 And this was all phrased in the middle of a very ordinary conversation,
 and, you know, it just seemed like a speculative question.
 And I said, "Oh, it might go either." He said, "No!" Like this.
 Now he said, "Which came the first, Daigo or Hen?"
 I said, "Dok dok dok dok dok!"
 "Ah," he said, "that's the point."
 Now, it is saying too much, I warn you,
 to say that Zen is trying to point to the physical universe
 so that you could look at it without forming ideas about it.
 That is saying too much, but it is the general idea.
 It's in the direction of being the right idea.
 Zen people speak of the virtue of what they call "Mushin,"
 which means "no mind," or "Munen," "no thought."
 That red lantern says "Munen" on it, "no thought."
 And this is not an anti-intellectual attitude.
 The ordinary simple person is just as bamboozled by thinking
 as a university professor.
 You can think intellectually in a no-think way.
 That's the art.
 It doesn't mean not to have any thoughts at all.
 It means not to be fooled by thoughts,
 not to be hypnotized by the forms of speech
 and images that we have for the world,
 not to be hypnotized by them into thinking that that is the way the world really is.
 So if I say this is a fan,
 it isn't.
 To begin with, fan is a noise.
 And this doesn't make the noise "fan,"
 but just "woosh."
 But it can be many other things than a fan.
 It could be a backscratcher.
 Very well.
 All sorts of things.
 Don't let words limit the possibilities of life.
 Actually, this fan has an inscription on it
 written by a Zen master who is a hundred years old.
 And it says,
 "I don't understand. I don't know anything about it."
 So that goes back to the story of Bodhidharma,
 that when he first came to China sometime a little before 500 A.D.,
 he was interviewed by the Emperor Wu of Liang.
 And he, the Emperor, was a great patron of Buddhism
 and said, "We have caused many monasteries to be built,
 monks and nuns to be ordained,
 and the scriptures to be translated into Chinese.
 What is the merit of this?"
 And Bodhidharma said, "No merit whatever."
 Well, that really set the Emperor back,
 because the popular understanding of Buddhism
 is that you do good things like that,
 religious things, and you acquire merit.
 And this leads you to better and better lives in the future
 so that you will eventually become liberated.
 And so he was completely set back.
 So he said, "Well, what is the first principle of the holy doctrine?"
 And Bodhidharma said, "Vast emptiness and nothing holy."
 Or, "In vast emptiness there is nothing holy."
 So the Emperor said, "Who is it then that stands before us?"
 The implication being, "Aren't you supposed to be a holy man?"
 And Bodhidharma said, "I don't know."
 So the poem says,
 "Plucking flowers to which the butterflies come,"
 Bodhidharma says, "I don't know."
 And another poem like it,
 "If you want to know where the flowers come from,
 even the God of Spring doesn't know."
 So anybody who says that he knows what Zen is, is a fraud.
 Nobody knows.
 Just like you don't know who you are.
 All this business about your name and your accomplishments,
 your certificates, what your friends say about you,
 you know very well that's not you.
 But the problem to know who you are
 is the problem of smelling your own nose.
 When the great Japanese master Dogen came back from China
 in about the year 1200 to bring his school of Zen into Japan,
 they asked him, "What did you learn in China?"
 He said, "The eyes are horizontal, the nose is perpendicular."
 This man went on to write a tremendous book about Zen.
 They are so contradictory, these people.
 Don't expect consistency out of a Zen master.
 Big, big book, called the Shobo Genzo.
 And I talked with a Zen master about this book in Japan,
 and he said, "Oh, that's a terrible book.
 It explains everything so clearly.
 It gives the show away."
 He said, "You don't need any book for Zen.
 The sound of the rain needs no translation."
 So you see, it is this kind of way of going about things,
 this method of Zen, that has so fascinated the West.
 And everybody who reads about Zen wonders if somehow, you see,
 this understanding is right under your nose.
 You know how it is sometimes, you get a little bit of a headache,
 and you say, "Oh, I don't know what I'm doing."
 And you get a nose.
 You know how it is sometimes, you get a crowd of people to come into a room,
 and you put something in the room that's absurd,
 like suppose there was a balloon floating on the ceiling.
 People could come in and not notice it at all.
 Or, you know, somebody puts on something weird,
 some kind of a funny necktie or something,
 and you say to a person, "Well, haven't you noticed?"
 A woman in a new dress, you know?
 "Haven't you noticed?"
 He said, "Well, what is it?"
 "Well, it's right under your nose. They're staring you in the face, but you don't see it."
 And Zen is exactly like that.
 So, I might say to you all, "What did you forget when you came in here?"
 Maybe you forgot it long before. Something you forgot.
 And you think, "Is it this? Is it that?"
 I say, "Oh, no, no, no. It's much simpler than that."
 It's very, very obvious.
 And this makes it all the more difficult.
 It is very obvious.
 The master, Bokuju, was asked,
 "We have to dress and eat every day, and how do we escape from all that?"
 In other words, "How do we get out of routine?"
 And he said, "We dress, we eat."
 He said, "I don't understand."
 Bokuju said, "If you don't understand, put on your clothes and eat your food."
 Another Zen master in quite recent times was interviewing a student.
 You see, all these stories I'm telling you are connected.
 And what I want you to do is to grasp intuitively the connection.
 He was interviewing a student, a Western student.
 And he said, "Get up and walk across the room."
 He got up and walked and came back.
 He said, "Where are your footprints?"
 Another monk asked Joshu, "What is the way?"
 Dao, Chinese, the Dao.
 He said, "Your everyday mind is the way."
 "How do you get into accord with it?"
 He said, "When you try to accord, you deviate."
 So, here is this extraordinary phenomenon.
 Now, let me say, having presented you with all these fireworks,
 let me say a few sober things about Zen as a historical phenomenon,
 which we can put it in context with other things in the seminar we've been studying
 about the history of Oriental philosophy.
 Zen is a subdivision of Mahayana Buddhism.
 And as you know, that is the school of Buddhism
 which is concerned with realizing Buddha nature in this world.
 Not necessarily by going off to the mountains,
 or by renouncing family life, everyday life, etc., etc.,
 as if that were an entanglement.
 But realizing in the midst of life,
 the possibility of becoming a Buddha.
 And so, the great ideal personality of Mahayana Buddhism is the Bodhisattva,
 a word now applied to somebody who has attained nirvana,
 but instead of disappearing, comes back in many, many guises.
 There's a famous painting of one of the Bodhisattvas in the form of a prostitute.
 And Bodhisattvas in Zen art are often represented as bums.
 There's a beautiful one over there by the furnace, painted by Sengai,
 of the bum, Hotei, or Putai in Chinese, who's always immensely fat.
 And he's saying, "Buddha is dead.
 Maitreya, who is supposed to be the next Buddha, hasn't come yet.
 I had a wonderful sleep and didn't even dream about Confucius."
 And he's just stretching and yawning as he wakes up.
 So, Zen is Mahayana, Indian Mahayana Buddhism,
 translated into Chinese,
 and therefore deeply influenced by Taoism and Confucianism.
 Zen monks brought Confucian ideas to Japan.
 And the origins of Zen lie, actually, around the year 414,
 at which time a great Hindu scholar by the name of Kumarajiva
 was translating, with a group of assistants, the Buddhist sutras into Chinese.
 One of his students taught that all beings whatsoever
 have the capacity to become Buddha, to become enlightened,
 even rocks and stones,
 and that even heretics and evil doers have the Buddha nature or Buddha potentiality in them.
 And everybody said he was a dreadful heretic.
 But then a text called the Nirvana Sutra came from India, which said precisely that.
 So everybody had to admit that this man was right.
 He also began to teach that awakening must be instantaneous.
 It's a kind of all-or-nothing state.
 I don't mean that there aren't degrees of its intensity,
 but once you see the principle, you see the whole thing.
 As they say, when the bottom falls out of the bucket, all the water goes together.
 Those men then promulgated the way of sudden awakening.
 The Dharma came later.
 And he is supposed in legend to have been followed by a line of six patriarchs, of which he was the first.
 The second was named Eka, I'm using the Japanese pronunciation,
 who was formerly a general of the army.
 Then the third was Sosan, who wrote the Shinjinmei, which is the most marvelous little summary of Buddhism in verse.
 And so on till they came to Eno, the sixth patriarch.
 You know perhaps more familiarly his Chinese name, Kuineng.
 The problem, you know, with what you read in books is that the spelling is terribly confusing.
 You see, this guy, Huineng, most people say Huineng.
 And they've also read a text called the Sutra of W.E.
 And they say Wailang.
 But this is simply the Cantonese way of pronouncing the same characters, and this is the Mandarin way.
 So then Huineng becomes Wailang in Cantonese, almost say Hui, Wei.
 Huineng, Wailang. And in Japanese, Eno.
 Totally confusing, but it's all the same man.
 And he died in 715 A.D. and he's the real founder of Chinese Zen.
 He emphasized the whole thing and was the, at least his collected discourses are contained in what is called the Platform Sutra.
 And any student of Zen should read the Platform Sutra.
 Fortunately there's a new translation from the earliest form of the text done by Wingsit Chan, published by St. John's University in New York.
 It's a Catholic university.
 But, Eno really fused Zen with the Chinese way of doing things.
 And he emphasized very thoroughly, do not think you are going to attain Buddhahood by sitting down all day and keeping your mind blank.
 Because a lot of those students who practiced Dhyana, which is the Sanskrit for Chan, which is the Chinese for Zen, which is in turn Japanese, means meditation.
 Or contemplation perhaps would be a better translation in English.
 And everybody thought that the proper way to contemplate was to be as still as possible.
 But according to Zen, that is to be a stone Buddha instead of a living Buddha.
 Now I can knock a stone Buddha on the head, clunk, and it has no feelings.
 And so it's a stone Buddha.
 There was a famous Zen master called Tungka, who went to a little lonely temple on a freezing cold night.
 And he took the Buddha image, one of the Buddha images off the altar, split it up and made a fire.
 And when the attendant of the temple came in the morning, he was horrified.
 He broke the image and Tungka took his stick and started raking in the ashes.
 And the temple priest said, "What are you looking for?"
 He said, "I'm looking for the sali, that is to say the jewels that are supposed to be found in the body of a genuine Buddha when he's cremated."
 So the priest said, "You couldn't expect to find sali from a wooden Buddha."
 "In that case," said Tungka, "let me have that other Buddha for my fire."
 That's, you see, the difference between living Buddha and stone Buddha.
 But a person who thinks that in order to be awakened, you have to be heartless, to have no emotions, no feelings,
 that you couldn't possibly lose your temper or get angry or feel annoyed or depressed.
 Those people haven't got the right idea at all.
 "If that's your ideal," said Eno, "you might just as well be a block of wood or a piece of stone."
 What he wanted you to understand is that your real mind, while all those emotions are going on, is imperturbable.
 Just like the sky, when you move your hand through the sky, you don't leave a track.
 The birds don't stain the blue when they pass by.
 And when the water reflects the image of the geese, the reflection doesn't stick there.
 So to be pure-minded in the Zen way, or clear-minded is a better way of translating it,
 is not to have no thoughts, is not a question of not thinking about dirty things.
 One great master of the Tang Dynasty, when asked, "What is Buddha?"
 Believe it or not, answered, "A dried turd."
 So it's not that kind of purity.
 It is purity, clarity, in the sense that your mind isn't sticky.
 You don't harbor grievances.
 You don't be attached to the past.
 You go with it, with life.
 Life is flowing all the time.
 That is the Tao, the flow of life.
 And you are going along with it, whether you want to or not.
 You're like people in a stream.
 You can swim against the stream, but you'll still be moved along by it.
 And all you'll do is wear yourself out in futility.
 But if you swim with the stream, the whole strength of the stream is yours.
 Of course, the difficulty that so many of us have, is finding out which way the stream is going.
 But certainly, as it goes, all the past vanishes, the future has not yet arrived.
 And there is only one place to be, which is here, and now.
 And there is no way of being anywhere else, none whatever.
 If you understand that thoroughly, your task is finished.
 You then become instantaneous, and also momentous.
 So this was Eno's principle.
 As I said, he died in 715, and he left five very great disciples.
 Who taught, substantially, the same sort of thing.
 But as things go, then they became, these disciples had disciples, and those disciples had disciples, and there's a genealogy.
 And Zen broke into what are called five houses.
 And these, some of them didn't go on.
 Zen went on in two main forms.
 One is called by the Japanese Rinzai Zen, after the great master Rinzai, who lived towards the end of the 9th century.
 And the Soto school comes from another line, and they have a slightly different emphasis.
 Soto is more serene in its approach, Rinzai more gutsy.
 Rinzai people use the Koan method in Zen study, Soto people don't, at least not in the same way.
 But this period between the death of the 6th patriarch, Eno, and about the year 1000, is the golden age of Zen.
 These were the really formative years.
 And after that, Zen began to decline in China.
 It became mixed up with other forms of Buddhism, and it suffered the fate of many, many forms of meditation type or yoga type discipline.
 It got a little bit sidetracked into occult and psychic matters.
 What are called in Buddhism Siddhi, or the development of supernormal powers.
 For Zen, this is completely beside the point.
 But they did, it got involved with Chinese alchemy, with Taoistic alchemy, and all sorts of foolishness in that direction.
 But a very strong strain of Zen went to Japan.
 The first being, in about 1130, the monk Eisai, and then about 1200, the monk I told you about, Dogen,
 who founded the great, beautiful, gorgeous, galapshous monastery at Eheji, which exists to this day.
 Now, in this golden age of Chinese Zen, the main method of study was walking Zen, rather than sitting Zen.
 All monks were great travelers, and they walked for miles and miles through fields and mountains,
 visiting temples to see if they could find a master who would cause their spark to flash.
 To get what is called in Mandarin "wu", or in Japanese "satori", or in Cantonese "ng".
 This always rather fascinates me, the way this character is written.
 The word "I" in Chinese is sometimes represented by this right-hand side of the character alone.
 Five mouths, five senses.
 This one means your mind or heart, the heart-mind, "shin".
 Now, when we say, "Well, something very surprising happened, my heart came into my mouth."
 Here it comes into all five.
 So this character means awakening. It's the same in a way as the Sanskrit "bodhi", which I explained to you in the talk on Buddhism.
 Awakening from the illusion of being a separate ego locked up in a bag of skin,
 discovering that you are the whole universe. And of course, if you do discover that,
 and you see into it all of a sudden, it's a shock, because your whole common sense is turned directly inside out.
 Everything is the same as you've always seen it, but completely different.
 Because you know who you are, you know what the devil were you worrying about.
 What was all that fuss? What was all that to do?
 It was part of the game.
 Everything from one point of view is fuss.
 And to do? To do, to do. What is there to do?
 I must read you in the second session a poem by James Broughton called "The Birds of America", which is all about that.
 But...
 When you wake up, you see, and discover that all this to do wasn't you, what you thought was you,
 but was the entire works, which we can just call "it".
 That you are it, and it is it, and everything is it, and it does all things that are done, and then that is a great surprise.
 But it sounds tasteless.
 It sounds empty, it sounds void.
 Because if I say, "Well, you're all it", that is a statement without the slightest logical sense.
 Because we don't know what is it, unless there's something that isn't it.
 But if it's both all is's and all isn't's, then we can't think about it.
 But, nevertheless, it is highly possible to see that that's so, in a way that's so vivid it brings your heart into all your five mouths.
 Bye.


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