When an inquirer about Zen came to a master, 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. And 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 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. 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 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, egg or hen? I said, duck,
 duck, egg. Now 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. 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 whoosh. 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 100 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 AD, he was interviewed by the Emperor Wu of Liang.
 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. I talked with a Zen master about
 this book in Japan, and he said, "Oh," he said, "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."
 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 can 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,
 now? Haven't you noticed?" He said, "Well, no, what is it? What is it?" "No, 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. 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. I 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 in 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."
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