At least a partial view of what this fantastic metaphysical construct is.
 And if you want to, incidentally, explore it further, the, alas, the literature is not
 too well available, but there is an excellent account of it in the second volume of Feng
 Yulan's History of Chinese Philosophy.
 And I think that's the best place to go.
 There is a book that, a little book that Suzuki wrote called The Essence of Buddhism, published
 in London by the Buddhist Society.
 And that also is an account of it, but it's harder to find.
 So now, how do we get from where we were to Zen?
 Well, it goes like this.
 In the Sutra of the Sixth Patriarch, the Tanjing, which was the collected teachings of the sixth
 patriarch of the Zen school, who, as I said, was a contemporary of Fatsang.
 And Fatsang died in 712 A.D., and Huineng died in 713.
 In his discourse, he gives a lesson on the art of teaching, the art of being a guru.
 And this lesson is based on getting people to be capable of polar thinking.
 Polar thinking is simply, well, it's not just thinking, it's a kind of feeling and a kind
 of sensing, wherein you see the going-togetherness of things that are thought to be mutually
 exclusive opposites.
 In other words, you wouldn't know you were right unless somebody else was wrong.
 Usually we think, then, the right and the wrong are mutually exclusive.
 But when you are capable of polar thinking, you see that they go together.
 A person who feels in a polar way sees figure and background going together.
 He doesn't see them as mutually exclusive.
 Now then, you see, when I was explaining the Jiji Muge, the fourth dharma world, or the
 fourth way of looking at the universe, which is the culmination of the Kegon school, I
 was trying to show this point, that all events have a go-withness with each other in the
 same way as a figure and a background.
 So in order to get this point across, Huineng explained that when a person asks you a question
 about something sacred, you give him an answer in terms of something secular.
 When he asks you about something eternal, you give him an answer in terms of the temporal.
 When he asks you about something abstract, you give him an answer in terms of the concrete,
 and so the whole way down the line.
 So when you read your Zen stories, which are always this apparently delightful nonsense,
 somebody says, "What is the fundamental meaning of Buddhism?"
 And the answer is, "A dried dung scraper."
 In Far East, they used not to use toilet paper.
 They had a stick they used instead.
 And this is the answer.
 You see, he has switched completely from the domain of life that is considered philosophical
 and sacred to one that is considered completely profane and unmentionable.
 Then on other occasions, it goes the other way.
 A monk says to the master, they're engaged in cooking, they're peeling potatoes or something,
 and he says, "Pass me the knife."
 The master hands it to him blade first.
 And the monk says, "Please give me the other end."
 The master says, "What would you do with the other end?"
 And this immediately has a kind of metaphysical flavor to it.
 So that he jumps, you see, from the practical question to the metaphysical.
 But if you ask him the metaphysical, he will always answer in terms of the everyday.
 And the whole genius of Zen is really this, that it has got a way of religious life and
 a form of iconography, the form of which is secular.
 And it has created a whole school of poetry where the deep philosophical matters are never,
 never mentioned, except sometimes by way of making a joke.
 Because what Zen tries to do, ideally, is to be completely cool, to create the religion
 of no religion, so that you don't notice it's around unless you're in the know.
 Now this is not actually true in practice.
 Many people are disturbed when they go to Japan and they walk into Zen temples and find
 that they have rituals and services, such as I've just been playing to you, that they
 have elaborate Buddha images and people are making bows to them.
 As a matter of fact, when Professor Houston Smith went to Japan and was being shown round
 a Zen monastery, he noticed that his guide, the particular master of the monastery, whenever
 he passed an image of the Buddha would stop and bow.
 And he said to him, "I don't understand this," he said, "because I thought you Zen Buddhists
 would burn up these images, as one of your masters did in one of the stories."
 He said, "I don't see why you bow, it might just as well spit at them."
 The master said, "You spits, I bows."
 But you see the thing about all this is, about iconoclasm, there are very different spirits
 of iconoclasm.
 The Puritan iconoclasts who broke down all the images in the English churches hated the
 images.
 They thought they were evil and wrong, and so they smashed them ruthlessly.
 But when a chicken comes out of the eggshell, the eggshell is not something to be deplored,
 it's certainly something to be broken.
 But had the shell not existed, the chicken wouldn't have been protected.
 So in precisely the same way, images, religious ideas, religious symbols exist in order to
 be constructively and lovingly broken.
 Because they are like opening a package.
 If there's no package, you know, you can hardly get the contents, because they'd fall all
 through your fingers.
 So something comes to you in a package.
 Packaging is so important and so interesting.
 Something comes to you in a package.
 Well it's like on Christmas Day, here are all these gorgeous packages with colors and
 gold and everything, and very often the packages are much better than what's in them.
 But you then, or everybody, proceeds to tear them apart and get what's inside.
 So from this point of view, the Zen Buddhists regard all ideas about Buddhism, about philosophy,
 about religion and so on, as so much packaging.
 And in order to get at it, you have to get rid of the packaging.
 So what happens then, when we get to the state I was talking about this morning, where you
 abandon completely all belief.
 You abandon every sort of way of hanging on to life.
 You accept your complete impermanence, the prospect of your death, of vanishing into
 nothing whatsoever, you see, and of not being able to control anything, of being at the
 mercy of what is completely other than you.
 And you let go to that, you see.
 This means that you even get rid of any god whatsoever to do this fully.
 You don't have a thing left to cling to.
 So this complete let go flips, and you discover, having made it, a new way of experiencing
 altogether in which you don't need any god because you're it.
 But also you don't cling to the idea that you're it.
 In other words, this is why Krishnamurti makes a certain kind of attack on people who are
 Vedantists and who believe that the human self is ultimately the divine self.
 He says, "Why do you believe in that?"
 See, because if you believe in it, you are making it a thing to hang on to.
 And so in a way then, you see, all belief in God is lack of faith.
 Has that ever struck you?
 You're still clinging, and so long as you're still clinging, you don't have faith, because
 faith is the state of total let go.
 So when, through some marvelous desperation, we get to the state of total let go, and then,
 you see, fantastically, religion, anything like religion, simply disappears.
 There's no need for it any longer.
 It's like you've crossed the shore, crossed to the other shore, you don't need the raft.
 Get off.
 Leave the raft behind.
 Now the other shore is actually the same as this one.
 You know, when you cross the river, when the mountain is in the distance, see, there's
 the other shore over there.
 It's kind of different from here.
 You can sit here and say, "Hmm, it'd be nice to live there, wouldn't it?
 See a place up there, I'd just love to live, because it looks so good from here."
 Then you go and you buy that house, and you sit there, and it feels the same as this place
 feels, because you're there, and how things feel are how you are.
 And you look back across here and say, "Gee, doesn't that look lovely?"
 There are mysterious trails going up Mount Tammulpice that look as if they led to that
 place that we were talking about this morning, the secret garden, which every child remembers.
 And they disappear through trees, and there's a kind of a mysterious little canyon, and
 you can hear the sound of a waterfall, and you know somewhere in there is that garden.
 I know as a matter of fact where it is.
 There is one.
 But always when you follow the road right through, it leads back to San Rafael and its
 suburbs on the other side, you see.
 I have been years seeking the ideal place, and I've come to the conclusion that the only
 way I can possibly find it is to be it.
 If you can find it in you, then anywhere you go is the ideal place to live.
 But it's so fascinating, projecting it outside and going on a look for it.
 I mean, this is the whole of fun, what fun means.
 So when, therefore, religion is abandoned, you are in a dangerous fix because you can
 very easily slip into madness.
 We were talking this morning about a vision.
 Lloyd brought up this question about the vision of a fourth dimension or another dimension,
 and anybody who looked at it went crazy.
 And this is a real danger, that people who have the mystical vision, whether through
 practicing yoga or Zen Buddhism or hesychast Christian prayers or by taking LSD, become
 a serious menace to society.
 And society gets really worried about them because they have, they are not taking the
 world and its concerns seriously any longer.
 They know it's an illusion.
 And if you really know it's an illusion, if you really know I'm an illusion, I don't
 know what you're going to do with me.
 I don't know whether I trust you.
 I don't know whether you're going to keep the rules.
 I just don't know about you.
 You've seen through it and goodness only knows.
 You may do anything.
 And if you're not sure of yourself and you suddenly see that all this is an illusion,
 there's nothing you can cling to, it's all relative, you may get bugged and you may go
 nuts.
 That's the great danger in all of this.
 And that is why a Zen monastery is at one and the same moment a place of total iconoclasm,
 of seeing through the whole thing, and yet at the same time it maintains a discipline
 as clean and strict as anywhere you can find.
 The combination of the two is simply marvellous.
 Unfortunately modern Japan doesn't dig it.
 But what they've done is to, they've well recognized that you cannot go into outer space
 and come back to this world without strict controls.
 It's exactly the same way when you're skin diving.
 You go below a certain number of fathoms and you experience weightlessness.
 Now a person who's not properly trained at that level will get happy.
 Now there's no reason why you shouldn't get happy, provided you keep your wits about you.
 Nothing matters at all when your weight vanishes, because after all you don't matter anymore,
 you have no weight.
 Nothing is weighty, nothing is important.
 And a person may at this point take off his oxygen mask and offer it to a fish, in which
 case he'll drown, he'll never come back.
 And if he stays down too long, he enjoys this too much, his oxygen supply will run out and
 he'll be lost.
 So he has a watch, and he knows according to discipline that at a certain time on this
 instrument he's got to come up.
 It's like when you had too much to drink and you're driving, you've got to watch your speedometer,
 drive by instruments.
 When you're in a difficult situation in an airplane and you've lost your sense of gravity,
 watch your instrument, don't trust your senses.
 You see?
 This is very important.
 In Buddhist imagery there are guardians of the directions of the universe, and they are
 all in the figure of Chinese generals, with clubs and swords and very fierce expressions.
 And they are always put at gates, you know, gates are north, south, east and west and
 here are the guards.
 They guard the entrances, but what they really guard is the directions, because it's absolutely
 important that we can agree on our time scale and on our north, south, east and west so
 that I can meet you.
 If we can't agree about that we'll miss each other completely, we'll never meet.
 And if we can't meet we can't have dinner together.
 If we can't have dinner together we can't love each other.
 So in the middle of nothingness, which is all this space here, see, which is nothing
 whatever, there are nevertheless directions.
 And think what a beautiful thing that is, you see, to set up directions in the middle
 of nothing.
 So for this reason, in the religion where anything goes and anything is allowed and
 no holds are barred, there is for that reason precisely a discipline and an order, which
 is pretty strict.
 But the spirit of the strictness is different than the spirit of strictness in theistic
 religions.
 See, in Buddhism there's no boss.
 That reality is not conceived in the form of authority.
 Because from their point of view that's childish.
 You're your own boss and you're responsible.
 If you want to belong to a society it's up to you if you want to conform.
 In other words, one of the interesting things is you can always cease to be a monk without
 dishonor.
 In the Christian church you can't, because you make life vows to get in.
 You promise forever to be obedient, chaste, and poor.
 And this is irrevocable, like Christian marriage.
 But in the Buddhist order you can leave any time you want.
 And they say, "All right, you've got many other lives ahead of you in which you can
 be a monk all over again, and if you don't want to do it this round you don't have to.
 And we're not mad at you.
 Just please, if you don't want to undergo this discipline, go somewhere else."
 And there's no dishonor about that at all.
 I have a friend in Los Angeles who runs a very fancy restaurant.
 He was a Buddhist monk for ten days.
 It was quite an experience.
 But that's all right.
 Okay, you try it.
 And if you want to stay here, we're very happy to have you.
 If you don't want to, we just assume you weren't around.
 Because you're not deceiving us, you know.
 If you stay and you don't really want to but feel you ought to, you're a nuisance.
 It's like a person who feels they ought to be unselfish and is therefore always making
 promises which they're never going to fulfill.
 It's much better to be frank and tell people what you honestly feel than pretend.
 So for this reason then, where there is no religion at all, because everybody's realized
 that the sky's the limit, there isn't any boss.
 There's nothing to kowtow to because you're it.
 It follows that you become therefore responsible for creating an order.
 Instead of submitting to the order, you create it.
 Next, you find that you can, having got rid of religion completely, well now everything
 becomes religious.
 That is to say, instead of having some kind of hang-up on universals,
 on vast, abstract, huge, airy conceptions, you employ instead things that are very particular,
 very temporal.
 Because of G.G. Muge.
 You remember the image that I used to illustrate G.G. Muge was the net of jewels, wherein every
 crystal reflects all the other crystals, every dewdrop on the spider's web reflects all the
 others.
 Okay, so then, I just happen to pick up this because it happened to be handy.
 I don't want you to think about fans and Orient and all that sort of thing.
 With this, all Buddhism can be taught.
 All the universe, all sciences, all philosophy can be demonstrated with this.
 Because this is one of the jewels reflecting all the others.
 When you pick up a link in a chain, all the other links come up with it.
 So with this.
 And if you ask me about what is the mystery of life, what is God, and I show you this
 fan, people look at you in a strange way and say, "I wonder what he meant by that."
 Well, the truth of the matter is, it didn't mean anything at all.
 Because this doesn't mean anything.
 Words mean something, because they refer to events and things that are other than the
 sounds of the words.
 But the things and events that words refer to don't refer to anything else.
 Of course, they are connected with everything else, but they don't refer to everything else
 in the same way as a symbol does.
 So that's why Zen always answers in terms of the completely concrete.
 What is this?
 Well fan happens to be a noise, which this isn't.
 This is what this is.
 Or alternatively, if you don't want to be hung up on it, it's this.
 Or this.
 So in just the same way, let's consider the advance that Zen makes in the world of art,
 or the world of painting.
 I showed you a Tibetan painting this morning, which was extremely elaborate, where every
 tiny space was filled, and where all of it was obviously religious.
 It was quite clear that this painting was an icon.
 Now Zen people don't like that kind of painting.
 I mean, it isn't that they have a real prejudice against it, but they don't usually have it
 around.
 Instead they prefer a style of painting in which there's an enormous amount of untouched
 paper, and where a brush has very swiftly and deftly painted some bamboo, sort of in
 one corner.
 Now the way the bamboo is put on the paper, alives all the rest of the paper, because
 it turns it into a lake.
 Without drawing a single line, a master can put bamboo on a piece of paper and turn the
 rest of the paper into a lake.
 Nobody can see the lake there, although nothing has happened, an empty space.
 Or it might be, a whole mountain might be there, but covered in mist.
 Because you see, he didn't use the paper as mere paper.
 You often see around, especially motels, they have, you know the kind of motel where you
 have flower prints over the bed?
 And there's a bunch of flowers taken out of an old book of etchings or something, put
 in a frame by some interior decorator, there was one, two, three, four, and so on.
 And always, the bunch of flowers is put bang in the middle of the piece of paper.
 Now you know what that does?
 That devitalizes all the rest of the paper, because it means the background has become
 unimportant.
 And this is always done by people who don't understand polar thinking, who don't feel
 that figure and ground go together.
 But all Zen painting, where you get this extraordinary relationship of figure to background, is done
 by people who feel and think, and actually sense, in a polar way.
 They see the space and the solid simultaneously.
 And that's why the Chinese place things in space the way they do.
 Even, you can't all see it from where you're sitting, a piece of calligraphy contains in
 it an extremely important relationship between the characters and the space.
 Now it would take me quite a while to go into all the details of that.
 But they have to be just the right size to accord with that space.
 There isn't only one way of doing it.
 There are several ways of putting the characters in a piece of paper that size.
 But in each way that you use, you take account of the space.
 You don't use the paper as mere neutral background.
 So when, for example, you will find so often that the Chinese painter takes his area, his
 rectangular area in which he's painting, and he will paint one corner.
 And say from the bottom left, he will strike up a bamboo stalk and flow leaves in the wind
 on it, and so leave the rest.
 This is a trick, you see, which uses and, as I said, vitalizes the whole of the rest
 of the area.
 And you don't do that simply by putting the figure plump in the center.
 So the whole art which has been inspired by Zen is based on polar recognition of the identity
 of space and solid.
 Solid and space.
 One implies the other.
 But this is always so unexpected from the point of view of common sense.
 People, in other words, think space is nothing and that it has no power.
 And so for this very reason, the architecture inspired by Zen is practically all of it playing
 with space.
 Zen emphasizes the luxurious richness of poverty, of rooms with practically nothing in them.
 Furniture-less-ness.
 And it has a luxury that's unbelievable.
 The uncluttered life.
 So I must say that somewhere I went to the house of a very great tea master where everything
 was absolutely gorgeously in order.
 Oh, it was the highest style, Zen taste, Japan, they call it Yamato-Damashi.
 And we went into a little tea room and Jano, in a kind of experimental fiddling way, pushed
 aside a screen and inside was a western-style room, completely cluttered with papers and
 old clothes and everything thrown in there, whoosh, you see, because everybody needs an
 unconscious.
 A place you can, somebody, everybody, everybody's house has a basement or a closet or something
 where they throw everything away.
 That's just what I call the element of irreducible rascality.
 It's always there.
 But nevertheless, on the outside, the place where you operate, you know, they have this
 sense of complete clearness, which is the coincidence in one art expression of freedom
 and discipline.
 Anything goes, because you've got complete space in which you can do anything, and yet
 the space is disciplined beautifully.
 In the subject matter of painting, Zen people, of course, as I said, prefer the secular.
 Even when they paint saints, sages, Buddhas, and so on, they give them a secular form.
 That is to say, they look like just ordinary people.
 They don't necessarily have halos or special markings.
 They prefer that they shouldn't, that they should look kind of rustic.
 And they prefer to put on the altar, as it were, the tokonoma of a tea room, the alcove,
 in other words, is not, almost never adorned with a religious figure, but always with a
 naturalistic painting, rocks, water, vegetables, trees, whatever.
 So in the same way, in poetry, where the haiku is a kind of masterpiece of this way of feeling
 the universe, the haiku always celebrates a particular finite G-type, you know?
 G is distinct from ri, instant of life.
 In the dense mist, what is being shouted between hill and boat?
 And you, from such a poem, will remember, you know, some morning when you were at some
 gorgeous river estuary, and you couldn't see anything, and there's a conversation going
 on between someone calling down to someone in the boat from the hill, and you can't make
 out what it's all about, any more than you can make out what's on the other side of the
 river, and yet you know it is gorgeous somehow.
 But the very fact that you can't see makes it all the better.
 This is all there is.
 The path comes to an end in the parsley.
 This is called in Japanese "yugen," y-u-g-e-n.
 We have no English word for yugen whatsoever.
 But yugen...
 >> Holtzweger.
 >> Holtzweger?
 >> Yeah.
 >> More pleasant to the sight of your feet.
 Trail ends nowhere.
 >> Trail ends nowhere.
 But with a certain implication, that is to say, as I was just trying to describe the
 place up in the mountain, where somehow the trail disappears, and there might be something
 beyond.
 But the whole point is that you don't investigate too closely.
 Then you're the sort of person who, when you get in there, would spoil it.
 It's like you say, when you make love to somebody, do it delicately.
 Don't be too inquisitive.
 Don't be too probing, because that would injure what you love.
 But the real constant theme of the haiku is that it always incarnates the specific,
 finite, temporal, immediate moment.
 And with this, says more than you can say with any amount of abstract generalizations.
 Only, only, only, only, you always know that behind this, the people who make up the haiku
 are not bourgeois Philistines, who say, "Well, isn't the main thing simply to be practical
 and get on with your work?"
 The point about the haiku is this.
 It's something in human life which is very difficult to pin down.
 But it's when somebody comes on at you and says something, but you know that there's
 another meaning behind it, which doesn't have to be stated between you.
 And so you get a joke.
 So you get a tacit understanding about something.
 This looks like it's this, but it is that.
 A haiku does this in a very cunning way.
 It's the simplest possible utterance.
 Basho said, "To get haiku well written, ask a three-foot child to say, 'The robin's egg
 is blue.'
 You light the fire, I'll show you something beautiful, a great big ball of snow."
 This is a haiku.
 But something is conveyed by this, see, which we're not going to talk about.
 It would be bad form to begin with.
 It's like gentlemen in England don't talk about religion or sex.
 Oh, boy, you don't mention these things.
 It's not quite like that, but it's nearly like that.
 See, there's something got over to you by this, where the whole fun of the thing is
 that you don't mention it.
 But this is possible only when you know the Jijimuge thing, that every bit of experience
 takes in everything else.
 So in exactly the same way, we have a confraternity among us in our society today of hipsters,
 and they can, with a flick of an eyelash, make a whole crowd of people laugh who are
 in the know.
 Because they have seen that one single motion of an eye is the whole universe in operation.
 And the joke is that the people outside don't know this.
 But when I move an eyelash at you and you're in the know about this, you laugh.
 It's a very funny game.
 [LAUGHTER]


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