Now this seminar this weekend concerns a subject which is so alien from anything that we understand
 in the West that it may stretch your skulls a little. I don't know. But as Westerners face
 certain forms of Mahayana Buddhism from the outside, they see what reminds them of total
 irrationality and superstition. And this in particular applies to a form of Buddhism which
 has several names and they're all, well it's really one form of Buddhism but it's named
 differently, and they are all sub-schools of Mahayana. It's variously known as Vajrayana,
 Tantrayana, or Mantrayana. You remember the word yana means a course, basically, sometimes a vehicle.
 And Buddhism is fundamentally likened to a vehicle or something like a raft which you use for crossing
 a river. Or let's say you want to get in at a door and you have to knock and you need a brick to knock
 on the door with, so you pick up the brick and bang on the door. That's a yana. It's an instrument,
 an expedient, a means, a technique, a method. And the Buddha's doctrine is called in Sanskrit the
 dharma. And dharma has a whole multiplicity of meanings but one of them is method. Although
 it's usually translated law in English this is not a good translation. So the yana, the whole
 idea of a yana is related to the idea of upaya which I have previously explained to you. U-P-A-Y-A
 meaning skillful means what we would call a pedagogical device or sort of trick because
 upaya in politics means cunning. But in religion or philosophy it means the skill of a teacher
 and getting something across to a student. And so the whole essence of upaya is really surprised.
 Because everybody wants a surprise but you can't surprise yourself because you know in advance what
 you're going to do. When you have hiccups then indeed you surprise yourself because you didn't
 intend to. And upaya and surprise is deeply connected with the whole inner meaning of
 Buddhism. Life has to surprise itself because if it doesn't you don't know you're there. Because
 you only know existence to the degree that there is a balance between knowing and not knowing. See?
 So there must be the surprise. There must always be something in you in other words that is sort
 of spiritual hiccups that happens unbeknownst. So a an upaya is a method of the teacher producing
 the surprise of enlightenment in the student and he uses a yana that is to say a vehicle or a course
 just like we say we give a course in philosophy or semantics or chemistry or something and so the
 course then is the the Mahayana the great course which includes ever so many different upayas or
 different ways the Hinayana the little course which has only a few ways. Now in the Hinayana
 they are very tough-minded and they stick to the notion that all enlightenment depends on your own
 effort. The Buddha is supposed to have said just before he died be you lamps unto yourselves be you
 a refuge unto yourselves take to yourselves no other refuge and in Japanese classification of
 Buddhist schools they have two that are respectively called jiriki and tariki and they classify all
 schools of Buddhism under these headings. Ji means self, riki means power. So there are ways of
 salvation or better more accurately liberation by your own power jiriki and then tariki are the ways
 by the power of another. That is to say liberation through what Christians would call grace rather
 than works and it's fascinating how the problem of faith and works or grace and works turns up
 in Buddhism just as it does in Christianity and it's really the same problem. You see in the
 history of Christianity there was a huge argument around 400 AD between a Welshman or a Celt by the
 name of Pelagius and Augustine of Hippo and Pelagius was a kind of optimistic Britisher who
 believed in muddling through and playing the game and putting your nose to the grindstone and so on
 and he believed that one's own will and effort could obey the commandments of God because he
 argued that God would not have given us any commandments unless we could have obeyed them.
 But Saint Augustine said that he missed the point entirely that if he had read St. Paul properly
 especially the epistle to the Romans he would have found out that God did not give us commandments
 in order that we should obey them but in order to prove that we couldn't. That is to say that St.
 Paul put it to convict us of sin that the law in other words was a gimmick, an upiah. Nobody was
 ever expected to obey the law. The Ten Commandments summarizing the law especially thou shalt love the
 Lord thy God with all your heart with all your soul and all your mind nobody can do that at all
 and so even the greatest saints are always beating their breasts and confessing that they're abysmal
 sinners because they've realized that they can't live up to the commandments. So therefore St. Paul
 taught that the law he said is a pedagogue to lead us to Christ and you see a pedagogue as the same
 meaning as upiah. So what the law does is make you feel absolutely awful because you can't obey it or
 do anything about it. Now the Buddhists have come to an exactly similar conclusion in the course of
 time because the Buddha was apparently in his original teaching tough-minded and said listen
 boys you better discipline yourselves see and you get to work and you cut out women and drink and
 possessions and meditate and control your minds. Well everybody tried this and of course they
 couldn't do it a few people did only they dried up. They found that was a kind of a Pyrrhic victory
 that what you gain by stopping your humanity and stopping your emotions isn't worth getting.
 It's like cutting off your head to cure the headache. So they realized that wasn't the way
 but that was why Buddha suggested it so that they'd find out. So then came in the new schools
 of Buddhism which said that you must be liberated by Tariqi and Ta as I said means other power. That
 is to say the power of something in you that is not your ego just in the same way as your heart
 doesn't beat at the will of your ego. So in psychoanalysis for example we would say that
 the unconscious has to be worked on and that it will be watered and nourished and so on and
 eventually the unconscious will have produced your integration. This is Jungian language not
 Freudian and you depend on that it's not you because of course integration means that you
 get the two aspects of yourself together and acknowledge them both as you the conscious
 and the unconscious the power of the ego and the power of the natural organism of the psyche.
 And so in every art one realizes there comes a point where your will is exhausted you've tried
 everything to make something work and it won't work and then to achieve the perfection of the
 art something has to happen of itself which we variously call grace, inspiration or Tariqi and
 the problem that everybody's always wanted to know is how to make that happen. Now you see if
 we knew how to make it happen it wouldn't be it because it would be something we were doing and
 it would be therefore the old story of just a simply an ego effort and so we don't know how
 to make it happen but if you just settle for that and say well sorry but there's nothing you can do
 about it everybody's just going to go home and forget the whole thing and commit suicide. The
 thing is therefore the state we call faith is the key and faith means that we know it will happen
 only we've got to wait only don't wait too hard because that will be ego effort again and will
 stop it happening. So the thing is to learn to wait soft that is to say in a state of openness.
 Well now how do you do that? There are all sorts of upayas you see means that help one to do this
 and one of them is this thing that I've been referring to as the Vajra Yana that means the
 diamond vehicle the Tantra Yana that means the web vehicle and the mantra Yana which means the
 sound vehicle sound in the sense of incantation. I may as well begin with mantra Yana aspect of it
 because this is the most perplexing to us from our point of view and doesn't make any sense.
 That you know there is an age-old belief in spells and that certain formulae said in the
 right way will produce results. All of this descends philosophically so far as Asia is
 concerned from the Hindu Upanishadic idea that the world is the creation of sound. The Hindus
 say that in the beginning was Vak which is exactly the same thing as saying in the beginning was the
 word as in the Gospel of St. John. But it doesn't mean the orders like give him the word the Vak
 means vibration and so the the the name that is fundamentally Vak is the Sanskrit word Om because
 when you say Om you begin at the back of your throat with O and you finish at your lips and so
 you take in the whole range of sound. And so this word Om is called the Pranava and it is the holiest
 of all names and so you can chant Om you know and really stir up things. And so all but Hindus and
 Buddhists alike use this word Om and will use it to set going a meditative state. This is very easy
 to do because it's awfully easy to concentrate on sound. It's much more difficult to keep your eyes
 still. You flicker because your eyes tend constantly to it's natural for the eyes to
 rove over things and you get have difficulty in stopping your eyes from scanning. But sound is
 very easy to concentrate on and the the whole point of a mantra is it's a method of digging
 sound. I hope you know what I mean by that because I purposely used a very slangy popular word to
 dig. That means get right down into so that you realize that the the flow the vibration of sound
 is a way in which you experience basic existence being here and you can learn everything from it
 because sound is not a constant. It comes and it goes it's on and off. You only hear it because
 it is vibrating and so herein is the lesson that life is on and off black and white life and death
 inside and outside knowing and not knowing. They're all in the vibration but it's easy to explain that
 in words but to understand it in your bones to feel it you have to learn how to listen to a sound.
 So then they invented this way of making chanting sounds.
 Now there are various ways in which this is understood by people in Asia. Incidentally I
 should say that this as a form of Buddhism what I'm calling Vagra Yana the whole movement sprung
 up in about the ninth century AD and is its geographical distribution is from North India
 into Tibet China and Japan and Mongolia and it is highly characteristic of Tibetan Buddhism.
 So then let's say there are various ways of understanding it. The word the formulas used
 for mantra are understood by the ignorant as being shortcuts. Instead of saying the whole
 sutra the whole sutra is summed up in the formula Om Mani Padme Hum and you can say that that'll do.
 You're a poor weak slob and out of infinite compassion the bodhisattvas have arranged to
 get you into nirvana instead of going through all the heroic efforts of those saints and sages and
 meditation practices you can just say Om Mani Padme Hum and in fact you don't even need to say it you
 can have it printed on paper and enclosed in a silver box on the end of a stick and all you
 have to do is rotate the thing. So the popular idea of this is the shortcut. The next idea of
 it is the one I've been sort of talking about which is that you concentrate on these formulae
 on these sounds and there's a third interpretation which is you might call the esoteric interpretation
 which was originally as far as I know the first person to really bring this up was Vasubandhu
 whom I told you about last week who lived oh shortly before 400 and he said the whole point
 of mantra is that they don't mean anything at all and that the word Om is completely meaningless
 and that all these various different kinds of incantations are totally senseless and the idea
 of repeating them is to liberate yourself from the notion that the universe means anything.
 All those forms of Buddhism which are associated with the Vajrayana are what is called tantric and
 tantric the word basically means web structure warp and woof. Well now tantra in Hindu context
 is a discipline that is sometimes called the fifth Veda. There are four Vedas which are basic
 holy scriptures of Hinduism. The fifth Veda is as it were the esoteric one. Now according to the
 four Vedas in order to be liberated you have to give up physical life that is to say you must not
 eat meat, you must not have sexual intercourse, you must not take alcohol or any kind of consciousness
 changing substance. There are various other things I forget them all. But in tantra the whole idea is
 liberation through the forbidden things. That is to say liberation in the world, belonging to the
 world, participating in the world. And sometimes it is therefore called the left-hand path. Once
 there's a Hindu story you know that the Brahma was asked the question who will gain to union with
 you first he who loves you or he who hates you and Brahma replied he who hates me because he
 will think of me more often. So you can other words attain to liberation by one of two ways.
 One is by complete altruism and the other is by total selfishness. And the the moral of the whole
 thing is that if you are completely and consistently selfish you will discover that yourself is the
 other. That you don't really experience yourself at all except in terms of others. When you say I
 love myself what do you mean? You mean you love being alive and when you push it you see this is
 the point to push it to an extreme. So the the left-hand path is a very dangerous way of going
 about things because nobody approves of it. I was discussing this morning with my father that
 sometime in the distant past we had witnessed a comedy wherein the stage was set of a man asleep
 in bed in a highly Victorian bedroom with all kinds of fancy furniture and terrible stuff you
 know. And the alarm clock goes off and he wakes up in a total rage. He immediately picks up his
 shoe and smashes the alarm clock. He then gets out of bed in fury. He rips the sheets to pieces,
 overturns the bed, finds a hammer somewhere and starts breaking up all the crockery, the windows
 and it's still the place is a total demolition. Finally there is left in one corner one of those
 enormous standard lamps you know all the sort of bugles on it. And he takes several runs at
 this and finally he picks it up and he flings it in the air and as it comes down it bounces. It's
 made of rubber. And this is the flip you see that and that's the surprise I was talking about in
 the beginning. Satori, sudden awakening, it bounced. You know you thought you were going to crash and
 you bounced. And you see this is this is the whole thing about Buddhism. We all think we're going to
 crash. And it must seem that way because otherwise it won't be a surprise to bounce. So if in other
 words you press your selfishness and you go into this whole question of what do I really want?
 Supposing I could have it, supposing I have all the money, anything I can think of, what is it I'm
 after? And you explore all the sensations you can imagine, all the delights of pleasure, all the
 ecstasies, all the drunks, all the orgasms, all the anything you can think of, go right through to
 the end of it. What is it you're looking for? You say, "I want to be flipped. You know I want to be
 let out of myself." Well when you're let out of yourself that's altruism. He that would save his
 life shall lose it. He that loses his life or loses his life shall find it. You go one way or the
 other and it all comes to the same thing. All right, so in the same way, take the path of meditative
 discipline on concentration. Where somebody is sitting there with a stick and says, "You attend,
 see I'm the master." You follow that way. See what you want to get that out of that. Try and
 get rid of yourself. That's one way of doing it. And there's certain kind of people who ought to
 take it that way. They want to. They don't know they're here unless they hurt. And that's the
 right way for them. We shouldn't condemn it. It's just like there are certain kinds of plants that
 grow this way. There are certain kinds of plants that go this way. And so there are many types.
 On the other hand, there's the mantra game. Where people say, "Oh this is so simple to do. You really
 don't have to chant it at all. It's just the shortest formula and it's this kind of cut." And
 then they get going into this thing and they get fascinated. Singing, "Om Mani Padme Hum." So
 something like that. Or like those Pure Land Buddhists in Japan, "Namo Amida Butsu, Namo Amida
 Butsu, Namo Amida Butsu, Namo Amida Butsu, Namo Amida Butsu." And it eventually comes,
 "Namanda, Namanda, Namanda, Namanda, Namanda, Namanda, Namanda, Namanda, Namanda, Namanda,
 Namanda, Namanda, Namanda, Namanda, Namanda, Namanda, Namanda, Namanda, Namanda, Namanda,
 Namanda." You know? And you really get with it. And when you get with it, you suddenly realize,
 it's doing you. Now what's the difference between you and it? Self and other. Self power,
 other power, jiriki, tariki. It's all one. Only you play it isn't. Because you have to do that.
 I say have to, that's not quite the right word. You do that in order to create the sensation of
 existence. Just call now you see it, now you don't.


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