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 can't be undone 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.
 The Hindus, the Vedanta society people, the Buddhists also say it 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 30 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 swill
 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."
 [laughter]
 [end of transcript]
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