The function of a Zen teacher is to put his students in all kinds of situations where
 in the normal course of social relations they would get stuck.
 By asking nonsensical questions, by making absurd remarks, by all ways of unhinging things,
 and above all, keeping them stirred up with impossible demands.
 To hear the sound of one hand, to, without moving, stop a ship sailing out on the water,
 or to stop the sound of a train whistle in the distance.
 Magic.
 To touch the ceiling without getting up from one's chair.
 To take the four divisions of Tokyo out of your sleeve.
 To take Mount Fuji out of a pillbox.
 All these impossible questions are asked.
 And in the ordinary way of interpreting these questions, we think, well now, gee, how could
 we do that?
 See, that's a very difficult question that's been asked.
 And you have to think, what would I do to do that?
 Because we are caught up in a certain way of discourse, which the language game that
 we play, and the social games, the production games, and the survival games that we play,
 are good games.
 But we take them so seriously that we think that that is the only important thing.
 And this is to unstick us from that notion, and realize that it would be just as good
 a game to drop dead now as to go on living.
 Is a lightning flash bad because it lives for a second, as compared with the sun that
 goes on for billions of years?
 You can't make that sort of comparison, because a world of lightning goes also with a world
 where there's a sun, and vice versa.
 So long-lived creatures and short-lived creatures go together.
 That's the meaning of that saying.
 Flowering branches grow naturally, some short, some long.
 So this, then, is a scene in a Zen community where spontaneous behavior is encouraged within
 certain limits.
 And as the student becomes more and more used to it, those limits are expanded until eventually
 he can be trusted to go out on the street and behave like a true Zen character and get
 by perfectly well.
 You know what occasionally happens on the street when two people are walking down the
 sidewalk straight at each other, and they both decide to move to the right together,
 and then to the left together, and they somehow get stuck, and they can't pass each other.
 Zen teachers will pull just exactly that sort of stunt when going down a path and meet one
 of their students, to see if they can get him in a tangle, and can he escape from it.
 And you will find in everyday life that there is a very clear distinction between people
 who always seem to be self-possessed and people who are dithering and nervous and don't quite
 know how to react in any given situation, always getting embarrassed, because they have
 their life too strongly programmed.
 You said, I mean this is a common marriage argument, you said you would do such and such
 a thing at such and such a time, and now you've changed your plans.
 Not that the change of plans really caused any inconvenience, but just the feeling that
 when you say you will do something at a certain time, you ought to do it at that time, come
 hell or high water.
 Well that's being very unadaptable.
 That's being a stone kind of sticky thing.
 If it after all doesn't matter when we do it, and somebody is offended because the time
 has been changed, that's simply because they are attached to punctuality as a fetish.
 And this is one of the great problems.
 This causes many automobile accidents.
 Men rushing home to be on time for dinner, when they stayed late either working or they
 had to stop for a drink at some bar, or when the girl feels that she has to, if she has
 a fussy husband, and she feels she has to have the dinner ready at exactly a certain
 moment, she ruins the cooking.
 You'd rather have a faithful wife and a bad cook.
 I hope I'm not treading on any toes.
 So you see, we spend an awful lot of energy trying to make our lives fit images of what
 life is or should be, which they could never possibly fit.
 So Zen practice is in getting rid of these images.
 But it's so explosive socially to do that, and it so worries people.
 They get vertigo, they get dizzy, they don't know which end is up.
 And this happens, you know, if you've ever been in one of those Blab Lab sessions, where
 they call them tea groups I think, or something like that, where the people gather together
 without any clear idea of what this gathering is about.
 They know it's somehow self-exploration, but just how do you begin on that?
 And so somebody starts to push his idea, and then somebody else says, "Well, why are you
 trying to push your idea on us?"
 And then they all get into an argument about the argument, and the most amazing confusions
 come about, but sometimes they all see what idiots they're being, and then they learn
 to live together in a really open and spontaneous way.
 There was a very interesting dinner party once, where a Zen master was present, and
 there was a geisha girl who served so beautifully and had such style that he suspected she must
 have some Zen training.
 And after a while, when she paused to fill his sake cup, he bowed to her and said, "I'd
 like to give you a present."
 And she said, "I would be most honored."
 And he took the iron chopsticks that are used for the hibachi, the charcoal brazier, moving
 the charcoal around.
 He picked up a piece of red-hot charcoal and gave it to her.
 Well, she instantly, she had very long sleeves on her kimono.
 She whirled the sleeves around her hands and took the hot charcoal, withdrew to the kitchen,
 dumped it, and changed her kimono because it was burnt through.
 Then she came back into the room, and after a suitable interval, she stopped before the
 Zen master and bowed to him and said, "I would like to give you, sir, a present."
 And he said, "I would be very much honored."
 And of course, he was wearing a kimono, something like this.
 And so she picked up a piece of coal and offered it to him.
 He immediately produced a cigarette and said, "Thank you.
 That's just what I needed."
 Now, you know in the same way that we have this in our culture, certain people who are
 comedians, who know how to make jokes and gags in a completely unprepared situation,
 face them with anything, and they somehow come through.
 So that is exactly the same thing in a special domain as Zen.
 Only a master of Zen does this in every life situation.
 But the important thing is, to be able to do this, this is the secret.
 You must remember, you can't make a mistake.
 Now that's a very difficult thing to do, because from childhood up, we have had to
 conform to a certain social game.
 And if you're going to conform to this game, you can make mistakes or not make mistakes.
 And so this thing has gone into us all the time.
 You must do the right thing.
 There's certain conduct appropriate here, there's certain conduct appropriate there.
 And that sticks in us, and gives us a double self all our lives long, because we never
 grow up.
 Do you realize that the whole of life plays a game, which is a childhood game?
 There are three kinds of people.
 Top people, middle people, and bottom people.
 And there can't be any middle people, unless there are bottom people and top people.
 There can't be any top people, unless there are middle and bottom people.
 And so it goes.
 And everybody's trying to be in a top set.
 Well if they're going to be there, there's got to be someone in the bottom set.
 And the people who do the right thing, and the people who do the wrong thing.
 Here in Sausalito we have this very, very plainly.
 There are the right people, the nice people who live up on the hill.
 Then there are the nasty people who live down here on the waterfront, and they grow beards,
 and they wear blue jeans, and they smoke marijuana.
 And whereas the other people on the top of the hill drive Cadillacs, and have wall-to-wall
 carpeting and nicely mowed lawns, and their particular kind of poison is alcohol.
 Now the people who live on the top of the hill know that they're nice people.
 But they wouldn't know they were nice people, unless they had some nasty people to compare
 themselves with.
 Every in-group requires an out-group.
 Whereas the nasty people think they are the real far-out people, whereas those people,
 those hillbillies are squares.
 And they wouldn't be able to feel far out unless there were squares.
 See?
 These things simply go together.
 But when that is not seen, we play the games of getting on top of things all the time.
 And so we're in a constant state of competition as to, if it's not, "I'm stronger than you,"
 it's "I'm wiser than you," "I'm more loving than you," "I'm more tolerant than you," "I'm
 more sophisticated than you."
 It doesn't matter what it is, but this constant competition is going on.
 In terms of that competition, we can, of course, lose place and in that sense make mistakes.
 But what a Zen student is, is a person who is not involved in the status game.
 That's the real meaning of a monk.
 He is not keeping up with the Joneses, and to be a master he must get to the point where
 he's not trying to be a master.
 The whole idea of your being better than anybody else simply doesn't make any sense at all.
 It is totally meaningless.
 Because you see everybody manifesting the marvel of the universe in the same way as
 the stars do, and the water and the winds and the animals.
 And you see them all as being in their right places and not being able, really, to make
 mistakes, although they may think they're making mistakes or not making mistakes, and
 playing all these competitive games, but that's their game.
 Now I only say if that game begins to bore you, and it begins to trouble you and give
 you ulcers and all kinds of things, then you raise the problem of getting out of it.
 And therefore you start to become interested in things like Zen.
 That is simply a symptom of your growing in a certain direction, where you are tired of
 playing a certain kind of game.
 You are as naturally flowing in another direction as if a tree were putting out a new branch.
 So because you say, "Oh well, we people are interested in higher things," you see that
 depends still on the differentiation of rank between the superior and the inferior people.
 But when you begin to see through that and grow out of that, you don't think any more
 of this superior and inferior classification.
 You don't think, "We are spiritual people who attend to higher things as distinct from
 these morons who are only interested in beer and television."
 This is simply our particular form of life, like there are crabs and there are spiders
 and there are sharks and there are sparrows and so on.
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