Now, you know, those people you've just been listening to, chanting the sutras on Koya
 San, which is the sort of ultimate center, retreat, inner sanctuary of Japanese practice
 of Vajrayana, Mahayana Buddhism, are a bunch of boys who are just like American college
 boys who play football, and they haven't the faintest idea what they're doing.
 Not today.
 They're doing this because their fathers have sent them there.
 Their fathers' own temples, and they've got to carry on their father's tradition, because
 after all, the family business has to go on.
 And they have no more idea what this is all about than the man in the moon.
 And you and I can sit here, and we could get swinging with this music, we could dance to
 it, and we could go very far out on it, which was what you were originally supposed to do.
 And for them it's a chore.
 It's a thing you have to get up for at five o'clock in the morning, and you have to memorize
 all this, and you have to get it exactly right, and do it!
 And they've completely forgotten what it was all about.
 But it was originally there.
 It's a funny thing how this happens, you see.
 But you see how I was explaining to you this morning?
 How we have a rhythm between remembering and not remembering.
 You remember long enough to know that you're there, because if you don't remember, nothing
 makes any impression upon you, and therefore you're not there.
 But then when memory gets too much, and you're too much there, then you have to realize that
 all memory is an illusion, that there is nothing except the present moment, and that there
 is no future, as equally no past.
 And then you're liberated.
 But when you get liberated, you have to come back in and play memory again.
 It's a cleaning process, in other words, you wipe off the blackboard, and then you start
 writing again.
 And then you wipe it off, and then you start writing again.
 And this is the process whereby life is kept going.
 So in the same way with these people.
 They have come to a point in the historical development of their way of life, where they
 remember too much.
 It's not new to them.
 And all this therefore becomes what we call going through the motions.
 And so this is the same paradox that I was talking about this morning, that the echo,
 which is memory, is simultaneously what tells you you exist and what traps you.
 So in the sense that it tells you you exist, it's an advantage.
 To the extent that it traps you, it's a debt.
 You're in debt.
 You should be thankful.
 Somebody gave it to you.
 Ultimately, in the Judeo-Christian tradition, the Lord God did it all for you.
 And you should be thankful.
 And say, "Anything bad that I did was from me.
 Dear God, anything good that I did was from you."
 You see?
 What a marvellous mix-up that is.
 But all I'm saying is this.
 There is a point in all this development where you have to say to people, "Please come off
 it."
 In other words, these boys here in Koyasan, I was aching to know enough Japanese to say
 to them, "Do you realise what a great thing you have here?
 Couldn't you possibly enjoy it for a few minutes?
 And let's get together and all join hands around here and go through this again, these
 sutras, and really make it."
 So I'm talking, you see, about the same process of what has been called flip-floppability,
 whereby we switch from one attitude to another, one situation to another.
 And this pulse-switch situation is the very nature of existence.
 That's why your heart does that.
 That's why all sounds, all light, everything is going bloop, bloop, bloop, bloop, bloop,
 bloop.
 See?
 And so because of that bloop, you know you're here.
 Well, now, I've been trying to show how this game has its own inner meaning.
 So finally, we've got to come round to one form of Mahayana that I haven't really discussed
 at all, to complete the whole scene, which is what is called the school of the pure land.
 And this is the most popular form of Mahayana Buddhism in the Far East.
 In China, in Japan, everywhere, the multitudes go for this kind.
 And it's all under the presiding image of one of those Jani Buddhas called Amitabha,
 whose name means boundless light, and who is a sort of a subdivision or aspect of Maha
 Vairakhana, who is the great Sun Buddha, and is therefore probably derived historically
 from Ahura Mazda from Persia, the great Sun God of the Mazdaeans and the Parsis.
 But although that may have been what set it all off, it has been greatly transformed by
 being canalized through Buddhism.
 Now you have all seen photographs of the Buddha at Kamakura, the Daibutsu, that enormous bronze
 figure that sits in a beautiful park with pine trees, the temple having long been demolished
 by a tidal wave, for which thanks be to God, because if it hadn't been for the tidal wave,
 nobody would ever have really seen this figure.
 But there is at Kamakura this huge bronze figure.
 It's about 42 feet high.
 And here this creature sits, surrounded by a great busyness.
 Thousands of schoolchildren are all the time on tours, streaming by, photographers, people
 selling this, that, and the other, souvenirs, exhibitions of dwarf trees and everything.
 They're all going on around, and here this thing sits and looks down forever.
 And nothing can hush it.
 I mean, let's put it this way.
 It hushes everything.
 That no matter how much turmoil of children, etc., is going on in this park, this huge
 face presides over everything.
 And you cannot ignore it.
 It subdues you into peace without doing it in an authoritative way.
 It doesn't say to you, "Shut up."
 It just is so peaceful that you cannot help catching the infection of peace that comes
 from this figure.
 And this is the figure of Amida, Amitabha.
 Not the historical Shakyamuni Gautama Buddha, living in India, but one of the Jnani Buddhas,
 who is not manifested in the world.
 Now the religion connected with this figure is called Pure Land, Jodo, in Japanese, Shinshu,
 the true sect of the Pure Land.
 And it comes, again, the origins are always in India.
 But the Japanese, under the genius of Honen and Shinran, who were medieval Buddhist saints,
 developed their own special variety of it.
 And this is a very strange religion, because it takes its basis as follows.
 We are living now in the most decadent period of history.
 That's what they say.
 And this comes back from the Hindu idea that this is the Kali Yuga.
 This is the end of time, where everything is completely fouled up.
 And this started in about 3000 BC.
 February the 23rd, 3023 BC, the Kali Yuga began.
 And it's got to last yet for 5000 years.
 And then everything will fall apart.
 The universe will disappear out of sheer failure.
 So that now nobody can be virtuous, because everybody who tries to be virtuous in this
 epoch of the world is merely showing off.
 It's not really pure.
 It's just pretending you're virtuous.
 It's a big act.
 In other words, so you give money to charity, not because you really love the people you're
 giving money to, but because you are under a sense of guilt and you feel you ought to.
 And therefore, because of that inescapable bad motivation, nobody can possibly liberate
 themselves from the chains of karma.
 The more you try to get out of your karma, that is to say your conditioning, your
 bondage to your past, the more you simply get yourself involved in it.
 And therefore, all human beings living in the end time of the Kali Yuga, or what the
 Japanese call "mappo", are just hopeless, hopelessly selfish.
 So in this predicament, you cannot rely on "jiriki", that means your own power, to
 get out, to get liberated from self.
 You have to rely on "tariki", which is the power of something else altogether than
 you, something quite different.
 So in the Jodo Shinshu sect, the "tariki", the other power, is represented in the form
 of Amitabha, or Japanese say "amida".
 This great, beneficent Buddha figure, who everybody loves, and he's so strangely different
 from any kind of authoritarian god figure that we have in the West.
 Amida doesn't bombinate.
 He sits there serenely, quiet.
 He doesn't preach.
 And all you have to do is to say his name in the formula "Namo Amida Butsu", which
 means "Namo", name, Amida Butsu, of Amida Buddha.
 Namo Amida Butsu.
 All you have to do is to say that formula, and after death you will be reborn in a special
 paradise called Sukhavati, which is Jodo, the Pure Land, where becoming enlightened
 is a cinch.
 It has none of the difficulties surrounding it that we have in our ordinary life today.
 Everybody born in the Pure Land is born in the inside of a lotus.
 There's a huge lotus pond in front of where Amida sits with all his attendants, and the
 lotuses come up and they go pop, you know, as the bud breaks, and every time it goes
 pop like this, there's a new little being in there who is somebody who said the formula
 "Namo Amida Butsu".
 And those are human beings who are now sitting on lotuses like Buddhas.
 And you should see, you go to Koya-san and they have a great painting there in their
 museum of what it's like to arrive there.
 They have a huge panorama of Amitabha and all his attendants and especially the Apsaras,
 and she looks at you with lovely longing eyes.
 And so this is welcome to Amida's paradise, where you will all sit on lotuses and be Buddhas
 without any difficulty.
 But the point is, all you have to do to get there is to say "Namo Amida Butsu".
 You don't even have to believe that it works.
 Now that is the religion of most Japanese Buddhists, believe it or not.
 In other words, if you, of course, if you really get this and feel that that's really
 going to happen to you, you'll be grateful and you'll try to help other people and be
 a Bodhisattva and so on and, you know, be generally helpful around the scene.
 But the whole idea is that you cannot do it by your own effort.
 And if the moment you think you can do it by your own effort, you're a phony.
 You have instead to go completely with the other, to disown your own power and capability
 of being virtuous, unselfish, etc.
 So then, this kind of religion develops a peculiar kind of saint.
 And they call these people "myo-konin".
 "Myo" means "wonderful", "ko" means "fine", "nin" means "man" or "person".
 There can be a woman, "myo-konin".
 It is not sexually restricted to men.
 So a "myo-konin" is a very special kind of character.
 There are stories told about "myo-konin".
 There is one, for example, a travelling man who comes to a temple during the course of
 the night and walks in and he takes the sacred cushions on which the priest sits and arranges
 them right in front of the altar and goes to sleep.
 And in the morning the priest comes in and says, "What's going on here?"
 And the "myo-konin" looks at him and says, "Oh, you must be a stranger.
 You don't belong to the family."
 Another time, he had great ability for calligraphy, doing beautiful writing.
 And people were always trying to get his calligraphy from him.
 And he was cagey about it.
 It wasn't so easy to get it.
 So one day a very, very great man invited him for dinner and again left him alone in
 a reception room where there was stretched out on the floor some absolutely gorgeous
 paper with ink and brushes just waiting there.
 And he got so fascinated that he just couldn't resist.
 You know, like a child, he simply couldn't resist doing his calligraphy on that piece
 of paper.
 And suddenly, as he realized he had done it, that he had spoiled this gorgeous paper, you
 know, which was incredibly expensive, the host walked in and he apologized.
 He said, "Really, I don't know what to do.
 I'm so sorry I couldn't resist the temptation to make some things on this beautiful paper."
 And the host said, "Oh, please don't worry about that."
 Because he had now possessed himself of a priceless object of art.
 This man's work today sells for thousands and thousands of dollars.
 So this is the spirit.
 I'm trying, I'm telling these anecdotes to try and illustrate the spirit of what's called
 a Mielkonen.
 The in the swing of realizing that all the very great thing in life is not your own doing.
 That it comes from the side of things, the flip, in other words, of experience that you
 call other.
 There are some people who believe it comes from the split in experience you call yourself.
 That's the Jiriki people.
 The Tariki people believe it comes from the other.
 But now what happens is this.
 When you penetrate deeply into the doctrines of the Pure Land School, the simple people
 believe that there really is Amitabha Buddha sitting on his golden lotus surrounded by
 all those Apsaras.
 Away from Japan, 108,000 miles to the west, there is a paradise where all those people
 sit and where you will be reborn when you die.
 And the simple priests of the sect in the country villages today still insist that that's
 what you should believe.
 But the sophisticated priests don't believe that at all.
 They know that Amitabha is in you only.
 It is that side of you which you don't define as you.
 When you say, "I have a body," instead of saying, "I am a body," that's because you
 feel that your body happens to you.
 That it's something you got mixed up with, that was given to you by your parents.
 You don't say, "I beat my heart on purpose."
 You feel that your heart is something that happens to you.
 So all that side of things that you experience as a passive recipient of it is Tariki.
 But in all this, who are you?
 Who is the recipient of these gifts?
 Don't you see that self and other go together?
 That you don't need to cling to yourself because you have everything you called other and that's
 you too.
 But you only realize this if you explore it, if you go to an extreme.
 So you can go to the extreme by pursuing the idea of total courage, of letting go of everything,
 of being a true Zen monk and abandoning all your property and living in a barn and sitting
 in the middle of the night in the cold and eating rice and pickles and so on.
 And you can explore liberation that way.
 That's going to an extreme.
 But eventually you'll come round to the same point as the person who goes to the other
 extreme which is no effort whatsoever.
 It comes of itself only.
 He gets in a kind of bind too.
 Because when am I making no effort?
 Even if I say "Namo Amida Butsu" I'm doing something about it.
 You know, I've got to stop doing, saying this "Namo Amida Butsu".
 You know, saying "Namo Amida Butsu" is so easy.
 But it's still a little bit work.
 And I mustn't do any work at all.
 How can you get to the point where you don't do any work at all?
 You just mustn't do anything.
 And you find yourself that that is as difficult as the other situation was.
 You see, to do nothing, really do nothing, with perfection is as difficult as to do everything.
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