Now, I hope you remember that this morning I was trying, in the brief space of 50 minutes,
 to give you a basic introduction to Mahayana Buddhism, the kind of Buddhism that is found
 in China and Japan, and the kind of Buddhism of which Zen Buddhism in particular is a sub-sect.
 And we are rather particularly concerned with Zen, since it has had such a fundamental influence
 in the shaping of Japanese culture and the arts of Japan, and since we are, in the course
 of this informal tour, going to be visiting a good deal of Zen monasteries and seeing
 a great deal of Zen-formed works of art, architecture, and so on.
 So I want to lead now tonight from Buddhism in general, or Mahayana Buddhism in general,
 to Zen in particular.
 Now Zen plays a little game with you.
 Whenever anybody like myself or Dr. Suzuki talks about Zen, all the other people say,
 because they talk about it, they don't understand it.
 Those in the words of Lao Tzu, "Who know, do not say.
 Those who say, do not know."
 And yet he said that.
 He wrote a book of several, eighty chapters or so, to explain the Tao and the Dō, its
 power, and nobody can help themselves.
 They've got to talk.
 Human beings are a bunch of chatterboxes.
 And when we've got something in our minds that we want to talk about, we talk.
 Now poetry, though, is the great language, because poetry is the art of saying what can't
 be said.
 Every poet knows this.
 You're trying to describe the indescribable, and every poet also knows that nothing is
 describable.
 Whether you take some sort of ineffable mystical experience at one extreme, or whether you
 take an ordinary rusty nail at the other, nothing is really describable.
 In the words of the famous Count Korzybski, "Whatever you say something is, it isn't."
 We used to have a professor at Northwestern who would produce a match booklet in front
 of his class and would say to them, "What is it?"
 And they would say, "Match booklet."
 He'd say, "No, no, no.
 Match booklet is a noise.
 Is this a noise?
 What is it?"
 And so to answer this, he'd throw it at them.
 That's what it is.
 So in this way, you see, nothing can really be described.
 And yet on the other hand, we all know perfectly well what we mean when we talk.
 If you know, if you've shared an experience with somebody else, then of course you can
 talk about it.
 We can all talk about fire and air and water and wood because we know what it is, and there's
 no mystery.
 So in the same way, when it comes to discussing something so esoteric as Zen, it can be discussed.
 Only Zen people play games with each other.
 They play little tricks.
 They test each other out by saying to somebody-- I remember when I met Paul Reps for the first
 time, who wrote that lovely book, Zen Flesh and Zen Bones.
 And he said to me, "Well," he said, "you've written quite a number of books by now.
 You must think you're pretty fancy."
 I said, "I haven't said a word."
 This is simply a Zen game.
 And people sort of feel each other out.
 There's a poem which says, "When two Zen masters meet each other on the road, they need no
 introduction.
 Thieves recognize one another instantaneously."
 So now, having got that off my chest, it's to say then if I were to give you a really
 proper and really and truly educative talk about Zen, I would gather you around here
 and sit here in silence for five minutes and leave.
 And in a way, this would be a much more direct exposition of it than what I'm going to do
 instead, which is talk about it.
 Only I have a feeling that you would feel that you were disappointed and somewhat cheated
 by this kind of behavior if I just left in five minutes' silence.
 So then, this word "Zen" is a Japanese way of pronouncing the Chinese word "Chan," which
 in turn is the Chinese way of pronouncing the Sanskrit word "Jhāna."
 And "Jhāna" is a very difficult word to translate into English, if not impossible.
 It's been called "meditation."
 Meditation in English generally means sitting quietly and thinking about something, and
 that's not what Zen is.
 Contemplation might come a little nearer if you use the word in a very technical sense,
 the sense that it was used or still is used among Catholic mystics.
 Perhaps that's something a bit like Zen.
 But again, contemplation, as we normally use the word, has a sense of inactivity, a sense
 of not doing anything, of being completely still and passive, whereas Zen is something
 highly active.
 So we really don't have an English word for "Jhāna," "Chan," "Zen."
 But I would say that we do know what it is because we do all sorts of things every day
 of our lives in this spirit.
 When for example you drive a car, most Americans, at any rate, drive cars since they were teenagers
 and are very expert drivers.
 And when they drive a car, they don't think about it.
 They're one with the car.
 Or when a rider of a horse is one being with the horse, when you watch a good cowboy or
 a cavalry rider, he's glued to the horse.
 He's like a centaur almost.
 As the horse moves, he moves.
 Which is in control?
 Is the horse riding the man or the man riding the horse?
 You practically don't know.
 Same way when you have an excellent dancing partner.
 Who leads, who follows?
 It seems as if you are one body and you move together.
 That is Zen.
 That is Jhāna.
 And so in a wider sense, when a person doesn't react to life on the one hand or try to dominate
 it on the other, but when the internal world of one's own organism and the external world
 of other people and other things move together as if they were and indeed are one and the
 same motion, that is Zen.
 So you could say in a very, very simple way that the real concern of Zen is to realize,
 not merely to think, but to know in your bones that the inside world inside your skin and
 the outside world outside your skin, going out as far as anything can go into galaxies
 beyond galaxies, is all one world and all one being, oneself, and you're it.
 And once you know that, then you have completely abolished all the problems that arise as a
 result of feeling that you are a stranger in the world, that you are set down in the
 middle of a hostile and alien domain of nature or people who are not you.
 This whole sense of estrangement, foreignness, to the world is overcome in Zen.
 Now let me illustrate this a little before we go into Zen in any kind of technical way
 by a few rather superficial but nevertheless significant facts out of Japanese culture
 and the place of Zen in Japanese culture.
 Japanese culture is, as you may have noticed, or was, as you may have noticed, extraordinarily
 ritualistic.
 There is a right way of doing everything, a good form, a proper style, and nowhere is
 this more apparent than in such practices as the tea ceremony or arranging flowers or
 knowing how to dress or knowing how to organize a formal dinner.
 The punctiliousness, the skill of these people in doing these things is quite remarkable.
 But in the same measure, as they are very skillful at doing these things, they're very
 worried about it.
 The whole question, for example, of bringing presents to somebody else.
 Have they given us more than we've given them?
 Did we remember this occasion?
 Did we remember that occasion?
 These weigh very heavily on the Japanese soul.
 The debt which you owe to your parents, the debt which you owe to your country and to
 your emperor, immeasurable, infinite debt, never can be paid.
 All these weigh very heavily.
 And therefore, in Japan, until the sort of breakaway of modern youth with its westernized
 ideals, this is a very nervous culture, concerned about whether one is playing the ritual correctly.
 A culture like that needs an outlet, needs a safety valve, needs a way out of this thing.
 And Zen provides just that.
 And so, by contrast, when you meet a Japanese who is thoroughly trained in Zen, he is a
 different kind of personality altogether from modern-day Japanese.
 He is, in manners, not studdedly courteous, nor is he brusque, but he's simply at ease.
 He gives you his whole attention, so long as you give him your whole attention.
 If you start wandering and frittering, he's got work to do and he promptly leaves.
 But so long as you are wanting to talk to him, he is there for you and for nobody else.
 And he sits down, and he really sits.
 You know, he doesn't worry about whether he ought to be somewhere else.
 And so, unable to sit with complete serenity in one place.
 You know, if you have half an idea that you ought to be worrying about something out in
 the garden, or that you ought to be cooking dinner, or that you ought to be down in your
 office or something, you can't sit where you are.
 You're not really there.
 You're a kind of gas balloon that keeps wanting to wander off.
 But these people, when you see, as you meet people connected with Zen, even sometimes
 the most neophyte, novice of a priest, has this atmosphere of knowing how to live in
 the present, and not to be fidgety and giggly and worrying about whether he's done the right
 thing.
 That's very much Zen style.
 Even though at the same time the Zen people do have a very exacting and demanding discipline,
 the function of this discipline is rather curious, is to enable you to be comfortable.
 It's to enable you, for example, to sleep on a concrete sidewalk on a cold, wet night
 and enjoy it, to relax completely under any situation of hardship.
 You see, ordinarily when you sit on a... you're out in the cold, you start shivering.
 Why?
 Because you're resisting the cold.
 You're tightening your muscles against the cold, and you get the staggers.
 But you are taught, if you learn Zen discipline, not to do that.
 Take it easy.
 Go with the cold.
 Relax.
 And all those monks in those monasteries here, they're as cold as hell in winter, and they
 simply sit there most of the time, and we would be frozen to death and miserable and
 have influenza and the Great Siberian Itch, but they simply relax and learn how to take
 the cold.
 So there's nothing about Zen discipline which is masochistic.
 It isn't to beat your body because your body's bad and there's a creation of the devil or
 something.
 It has nothing to do with that.
 It is how to be comfortable under all circumstances.
 But that again is something rather incidental to the main question of Zen.
 As I said, the Zen people, as you meet them and as you get to know their style of personality,
 are at ease in a culture that is not at ease.
 In a culture that is chronically concerned with protocol.
 And is it just right that is indeed a terribly self-conscious culture, where everybody is
 always watching themselves and having therefore second thoughts about everything.
 And so the discipline of Zen is to enable you to act without watching yourself.
 We would say unselfconsciously.
 But Japanese are as terrified of this as we are.
 They think and we think.
 If I don't watch myself, I'll make a mistake.
 If I don't hold a club over myself, I'll cease to be civilized and become a barbarian.
 If I don't discipline myself with all sorts of "mmmm" down on that as passions of yours,
 you will become like the monk of Siberia who burst from his cell and devoured the father
 superior.
 So this basic mistrust and so on in one's own spontaneity makes us wonder that if the
 Zen people are really spontaneous and they don't plan and premeditate and hold clubs
 over themselves, won't they become very, very dangerous people socially?
 Won't they go out and rape their mothers and daughters and murder their grandmothers to
 inherit their fortunes and so on and so forth?
 And Zen people just don't do that.
 And yet they are perfectly spontaneous.
 So then, let me try then and indicate how this discipline called Zen actually works.
 This will involve a little bit of letting the cat out of the bag, but it can't be helped.
 Let's go back to what I told you was fundamental to Buddhism.
 Buddhism is unlike other religions in that it does not tell you anything.
 It doesn't require you to believe in anything.
 Buddhism is a dialogue.
 And what I call the teachings of Buddhism are nothing more than the opening phrases
 or opening exchanges in the dialogue.
 Buddhism is a dialogue between a Buddha and an ordinary man, or rather someone who insists
 on defining himself as an ordinary man, and thereby creates a problem.
 I quoted you this morning our saying that anybody who goes to a psychiatrist ought to
 have his head examined.
 And in exactly the same way, in this culture, anybody who goes to a guru, a spiritual teacher,
 or a Zen master or whatever, ought to have his head examined.
 Or as the old Chinese master Tokuzan put it, "If you ask any question, you get 30 blows
 with my stick.
 If you don't ask any question, you get 30 blows just the same."
 In other words, what the hell are you doing around here?
 Defining yourself as a student and defining me as a teacher.
 In other words, you have raised a problem.
 And in the way of training of Zen, this is very clearly emphasized.
 If you go to a Zen teacher and you approach him in the traditional way, the first thing
 he will do is to say, "I haven't anything to teach.
 Go away."
 "Well," you say, "what are these people doing around here?
 Aren't they your students?"
 You say, "Well, they're working with me, but unfortunately we are very poor these days.
 We don't have enough rice, really, to go around and make ends meet, and we can't take on anybody
 else in this community."
 So you have to insist to be taken in.
 Every postulant for Zen training assumes immediately that the teacher has given him the brush-off
 in order to test his sincerity.
 In other words, if you really want this thing, you've got to work for it.
 That isn't the real point.
 The point is that you've got to make such a fuss to get in that you cannot withdraw
 gracefully after having made such a fuss to get in.
 Because you put yourself on the spot, and you define yourself as somebody needing help,
 or as somebody with a problem who needs a master in order to be helped out of the problem.
 So then, when you've done this, in the old days, of course, and it's still the formal
 rule among the Zen monasteries here, that when you are a postulant and you want to come
 in, you have to sit outside at the gate for a week, or maybe only five days, in a position
 of supplication, with your head bowed down on the steps.
 And they let you in at night, because they must give hospitality to any wandering monk,
 but you're expected not to go to sleep any of those five nights, but to sit there in
 meditation.
 And they give you food.
 But you sit and you sit and you sit there, and you make a damn fool of yourself, saying,
 "I insist on getting into this thing.
 I insist on learning.
 I want to know what the secret of this master here is."
 And he's told you from the start that he doesn't have a secret and that he doesn't teach anything.
 But you insist that he does.
 See that is the situation of everybody who feels that life is a problem to be solved.
 Whether you want psychoanalysis, whether you want integration, whether you want salvation,
 whether you want Buddhahood, whatever it is you define yourself as wanting, you created
 the problem.
 What is the real problem that everybody brings to these teachers?
 What is it all about?
 It's basically this, isn't it?
 "Teacher, I want to get one up on the universe.
 I feel a stranger in this world.
 I feel that it's a problem in that having a body means that I am subject to disease
 and change and death.
 Having emotions and passions means that I am tormented by feelings which I can't help
 having and yet it's not reasonable to act on those feelings without creating trouble.
 I feel trapped by this world and so I want to get the better of it.
 And is there some wise man around who is a master of life and who can teach me to cope
 with all this?"
 So that's what everybody's looking for in a teacher, the man who is the savior and who
 can show you how to cope with it.
 The Zen teacher says, "I don't have any answers."
 Nobody believes that because he seems to be so competent when you look at him.
 You can't believe that he has no answers.
 And yet that's the consistent teaching of Zen, that it has nothing to say and nothing
 to teach.
 A great Chinese master of the Tang Dynasty called Linji in Chinese or Rinzai in Japanese
 said, "Zen is like using a yellow leaf to stop a child crying.
 A child is crying for gold and the father takes an autumn leaf that's yellow and says
 'gold'."
 Or he said, "It's like using an empty fist to deceive a child."
 See, you've got a closed fist and you say to the child, "What have I got here?"
 And the child says, "Let me see."
 "Oh no, put your fist behind your back."
 And the child becomes more and more excited to know what the devil's in that fist.
 And fights and fights and fights and finally is practically in tears.
 Then suddenly you finally open the fist and there's nothing inside.
 So in exactly the same way, the person who is under the impression that there is something
 that we ought to get.
 See all this is dressed up in a big way.
 To be a Buddha, to know the answer, to finally solve the problem, to get the message, to
 get the word or however you put it.
 In other words, to be in control of your fate and of the world.
 Would you like it?
 If you could have it.
 And so all these powers are projected upon the Zen Master.
 He is a Buddha.
 He is a master of life.
 And if he is, the reason why he is, is that he has discovered the unreality of the whole
 problem.
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