The point of view of them and of Daoism has many curiously practical applications.
 And I wanted to start off this afternoon by saying a little bit about one very close to home, which is clothes.
 Now, when you notice how Western clothes are made, you will find, if you are experienced in packing, that shirts are difficult to fold, that suits are absolutely abominable, put into a suitcase, that women's blouses are the most curiously of conformations.
 Because none of our clothes conform to the nature of thought. We try to make the thought conform to the nature of our bodies, and the results are not always too edifying.
 When the Japanese adopt Western clothing, they look perfectly absurd, and they have no idea how ridiculous they look. Especially at a formal wedding, when they wear striped trousers, cutaways, top hats, with the girl in the traditional kimono and white headdress.
 It's the funniest looking thing on earth to see this match. Now we, it is true, do not wear Japanese clothes really elegantly.
 They usually push it a little down here, have a little bit of belly shank. They're all proud of that. It's called "hara", H-A-R-A. So you get the phrase "hara-kiri", belly cutting. Not "hari-kari", please, never say that. "Hara-kiri".
 "Hara" is a thing that really, if you practice then, you get a belly like rock, so if somebody kicks you in the tummy, they break their toes.
 Now, notice then, my sleeves are conveniently full of all sorts of things. I've got pipe and spectacles and things in there. And I stretch it out. But you see what's happened here?
 The rectangular pattern of weaving cloth is followed. The whole of this thing is constructed on rectangles. And so it folds perfectly.
 And it's extraordinarily comfortable. And the cloth follows its own nature. And in following its own nature, it creates a garment of considerable dignity.
 When I see old ladies going around in frocks, and they get those hats on that are all little flowers all the way around, and then they get, they're about this big around, and then they get a frock on.
 And they lean over and you can see the tail of the slip underneath. And maybe you see where their stockings are rolled up just above their knees. And that sort of scene is just terrible.
 When you get to be a portly old lady, you should have something that really covers you. And likewise, when you become a popular old gentleman, you should get something that is a graceful, flowing affair.
 I once asked a young Japanese who arrived in San Francisco. He'd never been in the West before. And we discussed Japanese dress and why it was being abandoned.
 Well, there are two reasons why it's being abandoned in Japan. Although it's superbly comfortable. One is you can't run for a bus in one.
 The other is that in order to clean these things in the traditional way, they rip the part completely. And they iron all the cloth elements separately and then sew them back together.
 Now, there's no necessity to do that. These things can be reconstructed as this one has been. This one is an adaptation to modern ways. It's made of heavy cotton.
 And it can be sent to the cleaner just like any ordinary suit. And it's much simpler to deal with than an ordinary suit.
 But this business about not being able to run for a bus is the whole point. Running for buses is an insult to human dignity.
 When you get about the age of 20, you should never hurry. Never. You can't hurry in this outfit. You have to walk at an easy pace and take rather shorter strides than you would normally.
 A Zen monk can take in his outfit quite a stride longer than that. He has a different gear. And they strive quite a bit.
 But in this, this is a sort of a dress for a scholarly gentleman who travels amiably along looking at things as they go around.
 It cuts you down without making you uncomfortable. It is patience. It is supremely comfortable in the sense that I would advise any man going to Japan,
 the first thing he does on arrival is to go to a tailor and have one of these made for him.
 Especially if you're going to go outside the beaten track, if you're going to be staying in temples.
 But then I don't advise that they wear kimonos, not western women, because they get treated like Japanese women.
 And if you're not used to that, you won't like it.
 The woman in Japan, the western woman in Japan should wear very full skirts and be very comfortable.
 If possible, don't wear corsetry and all those pulleys and lots of tackler arrangements that women have on the garment.
 Be very comfortable in full skirts. Slacks are not too well appreciated, but the Japanese girls are beginning to wear them.
 But I think for the western woman to wear a full cotton or heavy cotton or wool skirt is the ideal thing, which can just flow around and be comfortable.
 But men, especially traveling out in the rural districts, you'll find that one of the most uncomfortable things is to sit Japanese-style wearing pants.
 Pants in any case are only a country of the manhood. They're instruments of castration.
 And they should never have been worn by men. Pants are suitable for ladies, but not for men.
 Now, we, this is just an ordinary cold stone floor, but we found ourselves one morning in the great Zen temple of Eheiji.
 And we were in this great open temple, floored not with hard stone, but with Japanese tatami mats.
 And they're resilient and rather comfortable.
 There were about 500 Japanese pilgrims came there at four in the morning to sit and attend the Zen celebration.
 And the doors kept opening and draughts kept coming in.
 And there was a Japanese girl next to me wearing a sweater and slacks, and she was shivering and cold and sneezing.
 And then all the other tour members who were dressed western-style were horribly uncomfortable.
 I have this thing.
 And you can huddle down on the floor like that.
 And if you, you have to train a little bit in this, it's a little hard on the ankles.
 But you open your heels, and you sit between your heels, and the matting is soft and you're completely covered up.
 And you are warm and cozy.
 If you want to change and you get tired of doing that, you sit over that way like this.
 Or to the other side.
 But you will remain all the time covered and warm and at ease in a well that is geared to the floor.
 You see, our world is terribly comfortable.
 I mean, when I look at people in an auditorium like this, sitting on these particular kinds of chairs, I interiorly giggle.
 And I don't want to be rude, but they look like birds on perches.
 Human perches. Something has to hold you up, you see, and so on.
 Because in our culture, you see, we're not properly grounded.
 Of course, the Chinese have invented the most uncomfortable furniture on earth.
 The formal Chinese teakwood chairs are very comfortable, but very dignified.
 The way they can sit on those things, and everybody is a Frenchman at home.
 But being mated to the floor is a very fascinating way of life.
 There are certain things that we could suggest to the Japanese by way of improvement, and they will willingly learn.
 There are ways of stopping droughts that they haven't caught on to.
 There are ways of heating and there are ways of lighting that they don't understand and that we do.
 But they understand beds much better than we do.
 They understand baths much better than we do.
 And this light geared to the floor has this fascinating quality that you don't need to invest in an enormous amount of furniture.
 One of the things that we do is we have to move these colossal over stuffed couches, most of which look like gun emplacements.
 These dreadful things with springs in that are made for the feeble-bodied.
 But the floor is covered with comfortable mats.
 And once you learn the art of floor living, most teenagers know how to live on the floor.
 Because they like, for example, to read a book lying on their backs on the floor with their feet on the seat of a chair.
 Or pushed against the wall or some funny position like that.
 And I find when I give lectures and with a crowd that the young people come to the front and sit all over the floor.
 Now there's a Turkish proverb that he who sleeps on the floor will not fall out of bed.
 And there's a sense of getting grounded, you see, being with the earth.
 And that one of the, one of the, uh, possible factors of Zen meditation is that after a certain time of practice,
 you feel one with the globe, with the earth, rooted like a tree.
 Now, I'm not trying to say that we are too, we come off to be rooted.
 But Mr. Fuller would thoroughly disagree with me and say that the whole marvel of a human being is that he learns to be unrooted.
 That he learns to be completely mobile like a fish or a bird.
 And so that's true.
 But at the same time, to be able to relate to the ground and live on the ground and do without furniture
 is a great advantage and especially an advantage of this kind of clothing.
 Now you see, when a Japanese businessman goes home in the evening, he's been wearing western clothes.
 He's wearing a regular business suit and a black necktie.
 He's miserably uncomfortable all day, but he looks right.
 The minute he gets home, he puts on what's called a yukata.
 A yukata is a cotton kimono, usually made of striped material, rather light.
 In summer it is very thin cotton and in winter it is padded.
 But this is a bathrobe, essentially.
 And they relax in this and they are dancing, they do anything, you know.
 In the hotel, all the Japanese families come and in the evening they put on yukata.
 And suddenly revert to this more comfortable way of life.
 And they all take off to the bathroom, where they have a marvelous system of washing,
 which is a very, very hot tub, which can accommodate about, in a big household,
 it can accommodate six or seven people at a time.
 And you wash outside the tub, standing on a tile floor.
 You take buckets full of water from the hot tub and throw them over yourself.
 The whole room is steamed. Steam also is a cantier thing.
 If you're afraid of being immodest, because the sex is mixed, you just can't see anything.
 So you wash off with soap outside, rinse off, then you get in the bath tub and sit.
 And you talk, conversation, you sit until you can't stand it.
 You've had enough.
 Then you can go back to your room and if you live in a private home,
 make a telephone call in advance, or if you live in a hotel,
 the manager does it for you and you get a masseuse, male or female, very often blind.
 And before you go to sleep, they'll come and they will use their fingers like little nibblers.
 They're not these kind of tough, Finnish masseurs who go "boing" and "bang" and knock you about.
 But very, very subtle, the vibration of the nerve ends.
 And you go to sleep. Great.
 And this is, you see, a highly civilized way of living.
 This is an aspect, I'm just saying these things to talk about, clothes and bath tubs and rooms,
 the show, this very important point,
 that Zen Buddhism is not like we think of religion as being spiritual.
 I remember years and years ago, it was in 1936 at the World Congress of Faiths in London,
 we had a meeting of all the faiths, and there was a final meeting,
 which was a great auditorium in Queen's Hall in London,
 and the chief representatives of the different religions were asked to speak on the supreme spiritual ideal.
 Well, you can imagine what an opportunity for hot air that was.
 And people got up and they talked about this abstract and that abstract,
 and brotherly love, and oh, it became sickening.
 Finally the little old Suzuki got up, with his eyebrows going like this,
 and he sat down with me.
 I am asked this evening to talk about the supreme spiritual ideal.
 I'm not at all sure what the word "spiritual" means, so I look it up in a dictionary.
 I cannot understand this word.
 I see spiritual people in this country here in England,
 but the spiritual people make very ugly material surroundings.
 I think spiritual, we Buddhists see spiritual material as the same thing.
 And then he went on to give a description of his garden and house at home,
 and to make the point that the West is confused.
 We think we are materialists, and we aren't.
 A materialist is a person who loves material.
 Wouldn't that be a fair definition?
 Do any of our cities look as if they were made by people who love material?
 Let's take Los Angeles.
 It is a junk heap.
 It is made by people devoted to the conversion of material into rubbish as fast as possible.
 I mean, lots of the things we make are rubbish even before they're thrown away.
 We can't cook properly.
 I mean, some of us can in our homes, and a few elegant restaurants.
 But by and large, the food that you buy in a journey across the country is fried and rancid as per reason.
 Now, to quote Lucious Deedy,
 it is just not loved.
 It's made by people who know that it's good food, you know, and you ought to eat it.
 And it's all scrubbed and soaked before being served.
 And it's, you know, but it's terrible food because the people who made it didn't love material.
 We are devoted, you see, in this war against nature to abolish the limitations of time and space.
 So we've got these jet planes.
 Now, jet planes aren't made by true materialists.
 They are beautiful pieces of engineering.
 And those people, they love steel.
 They love wiring and electricity.
 They know they can make it.
 But the use to which this thing is put, instead of being for a marvelous entertainment, you know,
 that zoom, you go off, and eee, they are so maneuverable.
 These poor pilots have to keep them still like that.
 [laughter]
 But actually, on one of these jet planes, you can have a real ride.
 They are tremendously tough.
 Beautifully airworthy.
 And so you could go to Hawaii, instead of just going straight like that,
 as fast as possible, while you're sitting and pretending they're in their living rooms,
 you could make circles.
 [laughter]
 Have a wonderful time traveling, you see, but you don't do that.
 So what happens is this.
 In abolishing the limitations of time and space, and conquering nature,
 Hawaii becomes the same place as Los Angeles.
 It is being Los Angeles-ized.
 And it is, Honolulu at present, is a cross between Atlantic City and Sunset Boulevard
 and a little bit of Tokyo thrown in.
 Because all places connected by jet are becoming the same place.
 Wake up in Tokyo and you don't know where you are.
 You have a vague feeling it's Japan, but you're not sure that it isn't San Francisco in some sense.
 It might be Los Angeles, it might be Paris, it might be Shanghai.
 It's all thrown together.
 And more and more, you see, every great metropolitan center of the world is becoming the same place.
 And this place is a junk heap.
 You know that book that published, God's Own Junkyard?
 It's photographs of our world, our civilization, what we're doing with it.
 And it's because we do not love material.
 The great symbol of the unloved material is plastic.
 Stuff called tiki-taki, actually, which is a mixture of plaster of Paris, paper mache, and plastic glue.
 And it comes in any flavor.
 And it's formless and has no texture.
 And, you know that song, they're all made out of tiki-taki and they all look just the same.
 Well, that is the symbol of the philosophy against material.
 Make material infinitely malleable.
 Make it as completely spiritual, in other words, as possible.
 Drink pure alcohol instead of wine.
 You see, that's becoming increasingly spiritual.
 Because what the spiritual person is looking for is kicks.
 In the sense of magic, Aladdin's lamp.
 Rub this thing and instantly anything you want will be fulfilled.
 And that is the one situation that nobody really wants.
 If you think about it.
 Let's take it in regard to sex.
 Sex is a highly desirable thing.
 But it is had on the basis that I get it exactly when I want it and wherever I want it.
 It ceases to be interesting.
 I'm very liberal on these matters.
 But there is nothing more sexually discouraging than a nudist camp.
 Where everything is shown and it becomes boring.
 Because you see, the nature of the universe, as I said in the beginning,
 is the dynamics of being are now you see it, now you don't.
 And that's also the basis of coquetry.
 Women in particular who are artists in coquetry should be a bit of difficult.
 They should cover up.
 They should conceal themselves.
 They're going to reveal later on, but not now.
 And if you don't have that kind of element in life, you've lost the point.
 So in the same way, if there is no distance to travel between one place and another,
 it's not worth going there.
 In Japanese architecture, for example, they don't even picture windows.
 Except occasionally they have them.
 They on the whole feel that if there is a view to be seen,
 you ought to make a little effort to go and look at it.
 So that when you look at the view, you don't do anything else.
 So you don't take the view for granted.
 So you climb up a little stairway at a certain point,
 where there is a moon-viewing platform, which looks out over a garden in a certain way.
 And then you can devote yourself to the view.
 But we believe in living in goldfish bowls.
 And we have these marvelous views, but before you know where you are,
 the view is somebody else's picture window looking at yours.
 And there's no privacy.
 Privacy is another important thing, especially when the population is increasing,
 and from which we have many lessons to learn from Japanese and Chinese architecture.
 The art, you see, when you live in a household where everything is made of paper,
 you can hear everything that goes on.
 All belly rumbles and such intimate noises are perfect public property,
 which you get to learn not to notice.
 They learn to see without looking and to hear without listening.
 And they manage to create marvelous privacy by the use of space,
 by the use of screens, and by using small interior areas to build gardens
 that in their architecture suggest huge interior spaces.
 Somebody in a small garden copies a Chinese painting,
 a great landscape of mountains and rivers.
 Doesn't do it, though.
 You must avoid when you make a Japanese garden.
 Please don't use toy stone lanterns, bridges, bronze stalks, and anything like that.
 That's just terrible. It's corn.
 I must sometime give a whole lecture on bad taste in oriental art.
 But don't use those things. Avoid them like the plague.
 You should use nothing but sand and rock and plants, and moss, particularly.
 Water.
 Oh, yes. No, but even if-- that's sometimes expensive. That's the point.
 If you can afford water.
 For example, in Kyoto, the gardens that can afford water
 very often have it piped in from the hill springs in bamboo tubes.
 And you know how those bamboo tubes come out over a stone
 where the top of the stone has been hollowed out into a pool.
 And that water is flowing down all the time into that.
 And the sound goes on and on and on, and there's a dipper there you can pick up and drink if you want to.
 But that's a luxury.
 And it's a luxury in Southern California, really.
 You oughtn't to have it.
 Too little water here.
 So the artist makes his streams out of sand.
 And he rakes the sand in such a way that it becomes water.
 So with nothing but sand and rock, the most famous garden in the world is Trio Anji,
 which is made of nothing but sand and rock.
 And it suggests either a beach or an ocean with islands.
 It doesn't supposed to mean anything.
 Unfortunately, when you go there, the travel-- the tourist sort of trade issues little pamphlets in English
 on what each one of the rocks means.
 The person who did this had no such thing in mind.
 There's also a very, very funny Zen priest at another temple called Dai-Sen-In
 who doesn't speak very good English but has memorized a beautiful lecture in English
 which he gives on the spiritual meaning of the rock and sand garden.
 How you progress from the hard, crunchy rocks of human passions to the pure void of nirvana,
 where there's a large expanse with nothing in it but two mounds of sand on sand.
 You can hardly see them.
 And he gives this great style and verb.
 And one day I tweeted.
 I said, "You seem to think that this garden means something."
 He said to me, "The trouble with you is you're too skillful with words."
 [laughter]
 But he's a very nice fellow.
 He's got a little racket going there, you know, that's very nice.
 They have to have an explanation.
 They want to know what it means.
 People always take hold of a piece of Chinese art and say, "What does that symbolize?"
 Well, very often it doesn't symbolize anything.
 Now here we come, you see, to a most important point about all this.
 It's what we call the meaning of life.
 And you can't really appreciate this without being a materialist.
 Words have meanings.
 Because every word refers to something other than itself.
 The word "water" refers to a certain drinkable experience.
 And you know what water means if you've had that experience.
 But water, as a noise and as a set of letters, is not the same, is not itself drinkable.
 And so we could have a kind of a Zen saying, "Water cannot be drunk."
 You would now get the meaning of that, wouldn't you?
 It is terribly important, therefore, not to get hooked on words.
 Because to get hooked on words is the same thing as to get hooked, say, on money.
 Money symbolizes wealth in the same way that words symbolize the physical world of nature.
 Now money is a very poor diet.
 You can't eat it.
 About the only thing that you can do practically with money is use it for wallpaper.
 But yet people value money more than they value wealth.
 You know this experience when you go to the supermarket
 and you come up with your cart full of all these things you've bought.
 And the clerk brings up the thing and finally hands you a strip of paper about so long and says, "$30, please."
 People feel a little bit gloomy.
 "$30? Go on. But you've got the stuff in the basket!"
 Because the $30 is a symbol.
 And they're the abstraction, they're the spiritual thing.
 The stuff in the basket is the reality, that's the material thing.
 So then, to be a materialist and to reverence material
 is to begin to understand, you see, the secret of life.
 It teaches you, for example, to live here and now.
 Because the material world is an entirely present world.
 There is no past material world.
 There is no future material world.
 Past and future are purely abstract worlds.
 They're worlds one can think about, that have happened and have gone,
 but can be preserved in memory symbols.
 And the future world is a world that may happen.
 But the real world is entirely now.
 The great problem for mankind, you see, is to relate to the real world,
 which I will call the material world.
 To live in it, to be here,
 and to enjoy the fact that the material world doesn't mean anything.
 Now, see, this is very difficult for us to dig,
 because when we say something is meaningless, we mean it's a washout.
 It has no good.
 Words are meaningful.
 Now, supposing things were like words.
 Supposing this bamboo meant something.
 Like a word means something.
 What does this bamboo mean?
 Is it supposed to have some significance?
 To be a sign pointing to something beyond itself?
 Of course not. This is it.
 This fantastic creature, which goes, "Phew," like this.
 That's the point. That's what life is about.
 And if you can't see that, you can't see anything.
 So when they ask in Zen, "What is the Buddha?"
 which means, "What is the principle of enlightenment, the ultimate reality?"
 The answer is, "The bamboo tree in the garden."
 But that's not saying, you see, this is not being Philistine philosophy,
 which says to people, "Stop asking silly questions and get on with your dinner."
 You know, like you might say to some sort of inquisitive child.
 It's not that.
 It's that if you understand that this now reality,
 symbols refer to past and future, remember, to the elsewhere,
 to the non-here and now.
 If you understand this here and now, you are there.
 You've arrived.
 And there are no further problems.
 So when they say in the Hindu tradition, "Tat Tvam Asi," "That art thou,"
 or, "This world is Brahman,"
 which means, "The witch from which there is no witcher,"
 they mean just that.
 Just exactly that.
 Arrive here.
 But here, you can't understand it if you look for meaning in it.
 When Ren Tsai, a great Chinese Zen master, was asked,
 "What is the meaning of Buddhism?"
 He said, "If there is any meaning in it, I myself have not delivered it."
 Now, that is the sense, then, of seeing.
 That the whole universe is nonsense.
 That just as you can hear Hindu musicians when they sometimes play rhythms,
 they go, "Dit dee dit da, dit dee dit da, dit da dit da, dit da dee da dee da dee da dee,
 da dee da da da da da da da dee da dee da dee da da, dit da dit da da da,"
 and they make all kinds of funny noises like that.
 What's it all about?
 When we like to dance, clap hands, most people do.
 Most people like to spend most of their free time engaged in some kind of a rhythmic activity.
 Singing, dancing, hitting balls around greens,
 the various things of that kind are absolutely pointless.
 But hooray!
 I mean, what are birds singing about?
 The mockingbird gets up there and makes those extraordinary noises.
 Which are very artful.
 Mockingbirds have learned to imitate nightingales.
 There are no nightingales in the United States,
 but people play records of nightingales when they play the biggest birds of Rome.
 The mockingbirds of Southern California have picked up the nightingale song.
 But these are ridiculous birds.
 They go on and they make all these noises, but there's no point to it.
 Except doing that.
 So the whole universe is doing that, it's playing.
 And we take it seriously.
 We say, "Oops, we made the birds very funny."
 What do you mean?
 So a Zen master once wrote this poem when he was about to die.
 He said, "From the bathtub to the bathtub, I have uttered stupid nonsense.
 The bathtub in which the baby is washed at birth, and the bathtub in which the corpse is put before burial.
 All the time I've been talking nonsense."
 So I remember a letter, which the great Soke Anse Sasaki,
 the New York Zen teacher for many years, wrote to one of his former students,
 who aspired to be a novelist, and who wanted to write novels which would help people understand Zen.
 He said, "You mustn't do that."
 He said, "You, my friend, are raising waves when no wind is blowing."
 Don't write any story to the human being.
 Write it to the great sky.
 That here I am studying Buddhism, fifty years, and all I have learned in this time is great nonsense.
 It is spring today, and I go out to get my shoeshine.
 And there is the shoeshine boy, shining a lady's shoe and holding her ankle.
 And two nuns go by in their ghostly black robes.
 And he looks at them and winks at me.
 And this wink doesn't mean anything.
 You think of the great story tellers.
 Canghurst, O. Henry, so on.
 They don't have any message.
 They're just talking about life in a beautiful way.
 As it rolls on, as the water flows.
 That is the great art. You do that.
 I remember the same way we had some time ago a discussion in Kyoto with Morimoto Roshi.
 A marvelous dinner party.
 And we were talking about the work that is being done in Japan to translate Zen literature into English.
 And Morimoto Roshi shook his head and said, "I don't think that's necessary."
 He said, "You can use any book you like to teach, then. You can use the dictionary."
 He said, "I make a koan for my students."
 What is the first word in the dictionary?
 Think that one over.
 Or he even said you could use the Bible.
 You could use Alice in Wonderland.
 He said, "After all, the sound of the rain needs no translation."
 That's the most interesting thing I heard in Japan.
 Except the sound of the rain.
 When we were having an early morning lecture from the Roshi, Oda Roshi at Daitokuji,
 one of the great Zen temples in Kyoto,
 it was a very interesting affair.
 Because they came in and they beat all sorts of drums and rang bells.
 They had marvellous rhythms going on.
 And they made obeisances to the Buddha and the Roshi laid out a carpet and prostrated himself several times to the Buddha
 in preparation for giving the Buddha a message.
 And the Buddha sits on one throne, his image, and immediately opposite on another throne is the Roshi.
 And he engages in a dialogue.
 And one of the students takes a book stand and holds it up in front of him.
 And from this he reads, you know, he has this, oh, he's beautiful, he has this big rosary, you know, like this.
 He breaks it on him and he gives on this lecture.
 The commentary on one of the great Zen classics.
 And everybody is handed copies of it in Chinese.
 There's a whole bunch of kind of weird swinging Westerners who go in and sit on it too.
 And they all read this.
 The monks sit opposite on one side, the Roman or the Western visiting students sit on the other side.
 And he gives this lecture.
 And in the middle of it it started raining.
 And the rain came down on that roof like thunder.
 He didn't raise his voice.
 The slightest difference went straight on.
 The Buddha didn't make a slight noise.
 What you hear makes no difference.
 Just listen to the sound of the voice.
 Now, I can explain this to you in a poem.
 But this regards letting you in on a little bit of scholarly information I have for you.
 There's another section, other than Zen, which is called Shinshu, which means the true school.
 Or Jodo Shinshu means the pure land, the true school.
 And this is the easy way of doing it.
 Because you can't, they say, this world and its practical problems and all its commitments and involvements
 make it too difficult for ordinary people to become enlightened.
 But this has all been taken care of in the higher worlds because there is a great Buddha called Amitabha,
 in Japanese Amida.
 And he has made a vow that anybody who repeats his name in sincerity will at their death be born into his special domain
 where it's a cinch to become a Buddha.
 Everything's made easy.
 And when you get there, you know there will be a great pool, vast, vast pool, think of that pool, in front of this Buddha.
 And every new person, a lotus pops up in the pool and the bud opens.
 And there's a new person from this world sitting in that lotus.
 And eventually that lotus is going to be as big as the universe.
 And there's going to be you as the Buddha sitting on it, you know.
 And then your lotus pool in front of you and all those new lotuses coming out.
 [laughter]
 So all you have to say to get this scene is Namo Amida Butsu.
 That means Namo, name, like the French say Namo, Namo, Namo, Namo, German Heil, Latin Ave, Namo Amida Butsu.
 Butsu means Buddha.
 Namo Amida Butsu.
 You count around the word.
 Namo Amida Butsu, Namo Amida Butsu, Namo Amida Butsu, Namo Amida Butsu, Namo Amida Butsu, Namo Amida Butsu, Namo Amida Butsu, Namo Amida Butsu, Namo Amida Butsu, Namo Amida Butsu, Namo Amida Butsu, Namo Amida Butsu, Namo Amida Butsu.
 And you'll be quite sure.
 You only need to say it once, so you'll be quite sure by saying the rosary.
 Well anyway, there's something in this.
 It's not as superstitious as it sounds.
 And so Zen people and Shinshu people sometimes get together.
 Well, there was a Zen master who had a student whose background was Shinshu.
 And the Zen master felt that this student was getting warm, getting near the point.
 And so he said, why don't you write a poem that expresses your understanding?
 So he said he would.
 And our saying, Namo Amida Butsu, is called Nembutsu.
 Nembutsu is remembering Buddha.
 See?
 This character, Nyan, that means now, mind, underneath it, to remember.
 Or it means to think about, whole to mind.
 It means also an individual thought.
 And Buddha...
 Oh, I'll cheat and write it the modern way.
 I'll do that now.
 Nembutsu.
 So the poem that he wrote was, when the Nembutsu is said, there is neither Buddha nor oneself.
 Namo Amida Butsu, only the sound is heard.
 Like the sound of the rain, which needs no translation.
 But the Zen master said, it's alright as far as it goes, but it's not perfect.
 Write it again.
 The man thought it over and came back with another form of the poem that says,
 when the Nembutsu is said, there is neither Buddha nor oneself.
 Namo Amida Butsu, Namo Amida Butsu.
 My criticism is that he added one line too many.
 Now, let's have a brief intermission.


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