The idea of a yana or vehicle comes from the basic notion or image of Buddhism as a raft
 for crossing a river.
 This shore is ordinary everyday consciousness, such as we have mainly the consciousness of
 being an ego or a sensitive mind locked up inside a mortal body, a consciousness of being
 you in particular and nobody else.
 The other shore is release or nirvana, a word which means literally "blow out."
 As one says, "in heaving a sigh of relief."
 Nirvana is never, never, never to be interpreted as a state of extinction or a kind of consciousness
 in which you are absorbed into an infinitely formless, luminous ocean, which could best
 be described as purple jello, but luminous, you know, kind of spiritual horrors.
 It isn't meant to be that at all.
 Nirvana is, has certain, many senses, but the primary meaning of it is that it's this
 everyday life, just as we have it now, but seen and understood and felt in a very, very
 different way.
 Buddhism is called in general a dharma, and this word is often mistranslated as the law.
 It's better translated as the doctrine and still better translated as the method.
 And the dharma is formulated originally by the Buddha, who was the son of a North Indian
 raja living very close to Nepal, who was thriving shortly after 600 BC.
 The word Buddha is a title.
 The proper name of this individual was Gautama Siddhartha, and the word Buddha means the
 awakened one, from the Sanskrit root budh, B-U-D-H, which means to wake or to know.
 So we could say Buddha means the man who woke up.
 And the Buddha was a very, very skillful psychologist.
 He is in a way the first psychotherapist in history, a man of tremendous understanding
 of the wiles and deviousnesses of the human mind.
 Buddhism is made to be easily understood.
 Everything is numbered so that you can remember it.
 And the basis of Buddhism are what are called the Four Noble Truths.
 The first one is the truth about suffering.
 The second, the truth about the cause of suffering.
 The third, the truth about the ceasing of suffering.
 And the fourth, the truth about the way to the ceasing of suffering.
 So let's go back to the beginning.
 Suffering.
 The Sanskrit word is dukkha, D-U-H-K-H-A, dukkha.
 It means suffering in the widest possible sense, but chronic suffering, chronic frustration
 is probably as good a translation as any.
 Chronic frustration.
 And Buddhism says the life of mankind and of animals, indeed also of angels, if you
 believe in angels, is characterized by chronic frustration.
 And so that constitutes a problem.
 If any one of you says, "I have a problem," I don't suppose you would be here if you didn't
 in some way have a problem.
 Well that's dukkha.
 Now the next thing is the cause of it.
 The cause of it is called trishna, T-R-I-S-H-N-A.
 Trishna is a Sanskrit word that is the root of our word thirst.
 Thirst, but more exactly craving, or clutching, or desiring.
 Because of craving or of clutching, in us we create suffering.
 But in turn this second truth includes that behind trishna there lies another thing called
 ignorance, avidya, A-V-I-D-Y-A.
 Non-vision.
 You see vidya, vid in Sanskrit, is the root of the Latin video and of our vision.
 And ah in front of the word is non, as we say atheist is a non-theist.
 So avidya is not seeing, ignorance or better, ignorance.
 Because our mind as it functions consciously is a method of attending to different and
 particular areas of experience, one after another, one at a time.
 When you focus your consciousness on a particular area, you ignore everything else.
 That is why to know is at the same time to ignore.
 And because of that there arises trishna or craving.
 Why?
 Because if you ignore what you really know, you come to imagine that you are separate
 from the rest of the universe, and that you are alone.
 And therefore you begin to crave, to thirst for, you develop an anxiety to survive.
 Because you think if you're separate, if you're not the whole works, you're going to die.
 Actually you're not going to die at all.
 You're simply going to stop doing one thing and start doing something else.
 You know when you die, in the ordinary way, you just stop doing this thing called Alan
 Watts.
 But you do something else, later, later man, you know like that.
 And there's nothing to worry about at all.
 Only if you are entirely locked up in the illusion that you're only this, then you begin
 to be frightened and anxious, and that creates thirst.
 So if you can get rid of ignorance, ignorance, and widen your mind out so as to see the other
 side of the picture, then you can stop craving.
 That doesn't mean to say you won't enjoy your dinner anymore, and that it won't be nice
 to make love to girls or anything like that.
 It doesn't mean that at all.
 It means that enjoying your dinner and making love and generally enjoying the senses and
 all the experience, that only becomes an obstacle to you.
 If you cling to that in order to save yourself.
 But if you don't need to save yourself, you can enjoy life just as much as ever.
 You don't have to be a Puritan.
 So then, that state of letting go, instead of clinging to everything, supposing you know
 you are in business and you have to make money and keep a family supported or something like
 that, you know, the thing is, do that.
 But don't let it get you down.
 Do it, what the Hindus call, "Nishkama Karma."
 Nishkama means "passionless karma activity."
 And that means doing all the things that one would do in life, one's business, one's occupation,
 etc., etc.
 But doing it without taking it seriously.
 Do it as a game.
 And then everybody who depends on you will like it much better.
 Because if you take it seriously, they'll be feeling guilty, because they'll say, "Oh
 dear, Papa absolutely knocks himself out to work for us," you see.
 And they all get miserable.
 And they go on, they live their lives out of a sense of duty, which is a dreadful thing
 to do.
 So that's Nirvana, you see, to live in a let-go way.
 Then the fourth noble truth describes the way, the method of realizing Nirvana.
 And that's called the Noble Eightfold Path.
 The Eightfold Path is a series of eight human activities, such as understanding or view,
 effort, vocation or occupation, speaking, conduct, etc.
 And they're all prefaced by the Sanskrit word "samyag," which is very difficult to translate.
 Most people translate it right, in the sense of correct.
 But this is an incomplete translation.
 The word "sum," the root "sum" in Sanskrit, is the same as our word "sum," through the
 Latin "summa."
 And "sum," of course, the sum of things, means completion.
 But it also has the sense of balanced, or middle-weighed, not w-e-i-g-h, but w-a-y-e-d,
 middle-weighed, as Buddhism is called the Middle Way.
 And we'll find out a great deal about that later.
 But the thing that you must recognize is this.
 Buddhism—although when you say, "Write speech," in other words, "Don't tell lies"—well,
 let me put it this way.
 Every Buddhist who belongs to the Theravada school in the South expresses the fact that
 he is a Buddhist by reciting a certain formula.
 And it's called "ti-sarana" and "pancha-sila."
 This is—I'm talking Pali now, not Sanskrit.
 Ti-sarana means the three refuges, pancha-sila the five precepts.
 And the "put your hands together like this and say, 'Buddha-hung, saranam gacchami, dung-hung,
 saranam gacchami, sang-hung, saranam gacchami.'"
 That means, "I take refuge in Buddha, I take refuge in the method, the Dhamma, I take refuge
 in the Sangha," which means the fraternity of the followers of Buddha.
 And then he goes on and he takes the five precepts, "Panati-pata, veram-ni, sikha-padam,
 samadhi-yami," and these precepts one after another, "I promise to abstain from taking
 from life, taking life."
 "Adhinadhana, veram-ni, I promise to abstain from taking what is not given."
 "Kamisu-mityahara, I promise to abstain from exploiting my passions."
 "Musavada, veram-ni, I promise to abstain from false speech."
 "Sora-meri-amajjhapamadatana, I promise to abstain from getting intoxicated by a list
 of various boozes."
 Now, this, every Buddhist in the Southern school says, "Mahayanists have a different
 formula."
 Well, this is the method, and the method, the Dhamma, is therefore a moral law, just
 like the Ten Commandments.
 But it isn't.
 It's nothing, it's quite different.
 You see, you don't take the five precepts in obedience to a royal edict.
 You take them upon yourself, and there is a very special reason for doing so.
 How can you fulfil the precept not to take life?
 Every day you eat.
 Even if you're a vegetarian, you must take life.
 And so on.
 Now therefore understand this, and this is absolutely fundamental to an understanding
 of Buddhism.
 Buddhism is a method, it is not a doctrine.
 Buddhism is a dialogue, and what it states at the beginning is not necessarily what it
 would state at the end.
 The method of Buddhism is first of all a relationship between a teacher and a student.
 The student creates the teacher by raising a problem and going to someone about it.
 Now if he chooses wisely, you see, he'll find if there's a Buddha around to use as the teacher.
 And then he says to the Buddha, "My problem is that I suffer, and I want to escape from
 suffering."
 So the Buddha replies, "Suffering is caused by desire, by krishna, by craving.
 If you can stop desiring, then you will solve your problem.
 Go away and try to stop desiring."
 And he gives him some methods how to practice meditation and to make his mind calm and still
 to see if he can stop desiring.
 The student goes away and practices this.
 Then he comes back to the teacher and says, "But I can't stop desiring not to desire.
 What am I to do about that?"
 So the teacher says, "Try then to stop desiring not to desire."
 Now, you can see where this is going to land up.
 Or he might put it in this way, "All right, if you can't completely stop desiring, do
 a middle way."
 That is to say, stop desiring as much as you can stop desiring.
 And don't desire to stop any more desire than you can stop.
 See where that's going to go?
 Because he keeps coming back.
 Because what the teacher has done in saying, "Stop desiring," he has given his student
 what in Zen Buddhism is called a koan.
 This is a Japanese word that means a meditation problem.
 Or more strictly, it means the same thing as "case" means in law.
 Because koans are usually based on anecdotes and incidents of the old masters' cases, precedents.
 But the function of a koan is a challenge for meditation.
 Well, who is it that desires not to desire?
 Who is it that wants to escape from suffering?
 And here we get to a methodological difference between Hinduism and Buddhism on the question
 of who are you.
 The Hindu says, "You yourself," he calls ātman, A-T-M-A-N, "the self."
 And he says, "Now strive to know the self.
 Realize I am not my body because I can be aware of my body.
 I am not my thoughts because I can be aware of my thoughts.
 I am not my feelings for the same reason.
 I am not my mind, etc., because I can be aware of it.
 For I really am other than, above, transcending all these finite aspects of me."
 Now the Buddhist has a critique of that.
 He says, "Why do you try to escape from yourself as a body?
 The reason is your body falls apart and you want to escape from it.
 Why do you want to disidentify yourself from your emotions?
 The reason is that your emotions are uncomfortable and you want to escape from them.
 You don't want to have to be afraid.
 You don't want to have to be in grief or anger.
 And love even is too much, you see.
 It involves you in suffering because if you love someone you have a hostage to fortune."
 So the Buddhist says, "The reason why you believe you are the Atman, the eternal self,
 which in turn is the Brahman, the self of the whole universe, is that you don't want
 to lose your damn ego.
 And if you can fix your ego, and put it in the safe deposit box of the Lord, you think
 you've still got yourself.
 You haven't really let go."
 So the Buddhist, the Buddha said, "There isn't any Atman."
 He taught the doctrine of An-Atman, non-self.
 Your ego is unreal and as a matter of fact there's nothing you can cling to.
 No refuge, really.
 Just let go, man.
 There's no salvation, no safety, nothing anywhere, you see.
 How clever that was, you see.
 Because what he was really saying is, any Atman that you could cling to, or think about,
 or believe in, wouldn't be the real one.
 This is the accurate sense of the original documents of the Buddha's teaching.
 If you carefully go through it, that's what he's saying.
 He's not saying that there isn't the Atman, or the Brahman.
 Anyone you could conceive wouldn't be it.
 Anyone you believed in would be the wrong one.
 Because believing is clinging, still.
 There's no salvation through believing.
 There's only salvation through knowledge.
 And even then, the highest knowledge is non-knowledge.
 And here he agrees with the Hindus who say, in the Upanishads, in the Kena Upanishad,
 if you think that you know Brahman, you do not know him.
 But if you know that you do not know the Brahman, you truly know.
 Why?
 Well, that's very simple.
 If you really are it, you don't need to believe in it.
 And you don't need to know it, just as your eyes don't need to look at themselves.
 So that's the difference of method in Buddhism.
 Now understand method here.
 The method is a dialogue.
 And the so-called teachings of Buddhism are the first opening gambits in the dialogue.
 And when they say you cannot understand Buddhism out of books, the reason is that the books
 only give you the opening gambits.
 Then having read the book, you have to go on with the method.
 Now you can go on with the method without a formal teacher.
 That is to say, you can conduct the dialogue with yourself, or with life.
 You have to explore and experiment on such things as, could one possibly not desire?
 Could one possibly concentrate the mind perfectly?
 Could one possibly do this, that, and the other?
 And you have to work with it, you see, so that you understand the later things that
 come after trying these experiments.
 These later things are the heart of Buddhism.
 So then, shortly after the Buddha's time, the practice of Buddhism continued as a tremendous
 ongoing dialogue among the various followers.
 And eventually they established great universities, such as there was at a place called Nalanda
 in northern India.
 This discourse was going on, and if you looked at it superficially, you might think it was
 nothing but an extremely intellectual bull-session, where philosophers were outwitting each other.
 Actually, the process that was going on was this, that the teacher, or guru in every case,
 was examining students as to their beliefs and theories, and destroying their beliefs,
 showing that any belief that you would propose, any idea about yourself or about the universe
 that you want to cling to and make something of, used for a crutch, a prop, a security,
 the teacher demolishes it.
 This is how the dialogue works, until you are left with not a thing to hang on to.
 Any religion you might propose, even atheism, they'll tear up.
 Agnosticism they'll destroy.
 Any kind of belief, they're experts in demolition, so that they finally get you to the point
 where you've got nothing left to hang on to.
 Well then you're free, because you're it, you see?
 Once you're hanging on to things, you put it somewhere else, you see?
 Something I can grab.
 And even when you think as an idea, then I'm it, you're still hanging on to that, they're
 going to knock that one down.
 So when you are left without anything at all, you've seen the point.
 Now that's the method of the dialogue, essentially.
 That is the dharma.
 And all Buddhists make jokes about that.
 Buddha says in the Diamond Sutra, you see, "When I attained complete, perfect, unsurpassed
 awakening, I didn't attain anything."
 Because it's like, to use a metaphor that is used in the scriptures, it's like using
 an empty fist to deceive a child.
 So you know, you say to a child, "What have I got here?"
 The child gets interested immediately, and wants to find out.
 You hide it, and the child climbs all over you, can't get at your fist.
 And finally, you do let him get it, and there's nothing in it.


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