Now then, we have to get on to Buddhism. And in order to introduce Buddhism, it's necessary
 to remember the whole background of the worldview of India. In other words, what we're going
 to study first of all, to understand Buddhism, is Indian cosmology, just as you would have
 to study the cosmology of the Ptolemaic view of the world in order to understand Dante,
 and in order to understand lots of things about medieval Christianity. So the cosmology
 of the Hindus, their view of the universe, has come right into Japanese life through
 Buddhism, but it antedates Buddhism. Buddhism simply adopted it as a matter of course, just
 as now if you invented a new religion, you would probably adopt the cosmology of modern
 astronomy. Well now, how does the Hindu see the world? You know, there are really three
 great views of the world that human beings have had. And they go-- one is the Western
 view of the world, which looks upon the world as a construct, an artifact, by analogy with
 ceramics and carpentry. Then there is the Hindu view of the world, which is dramatic,
 looks on it as a play. And then the Chinese view, which is organic, and looks upon the
 world as an organism, a body. But the Hindu view sees it as a drama. And it's simply this,
 there is what there is, and always was and always will be, which is called the Self.
 That in Sanskrit is Atman, A-T-M-A-N. And the Atman is also called Brahman. Brahman,
 from the root "bhri," to grow, to expand, to swell, is actually related to our word
 "breath." So Brahman, the Self, according to the Hindu view, plays hide and seek with
 itself for always and always and always. How far out, how lost can you get? So here, each
 one of us, according to the Hindu idea, is the Godhead, on purpose, getting lost for
 the fun of it. And how terrible it can get at times. But won't it be nice when you wake
 up? That's sort of the basic idea. And I found it's an idea that any child can understand.
 It has great simplicity and great elegance. Now, in part of this cosmology, we must understand
 another feature of this conception of the universe. Not only, remember now the Kalpas,
 the periods of time, the Yugas, the qualities of the time through which the universe goes,
 but there's the final thing, which are called the six worlds, or the six paths of life.
 And this is very important for Buddhism, although it comes from Hinduism, is represented in
 what is called the Bhava Chakra. Bhava means becoming, B-H-A-V-A. Chakra, C-H-A-K-R-A,
 means wheel, the wheel of becoming, the wheel of birth and death. And it has six divisions.
 It has the top people and the bottom people. The top people are called Deva, D-E-V-A. The
 bottom people are called Naraka, N-A-R-A-K-A. Devas are angels, and they are the people
 who are the supreme spiritual successors. The Naraka are tormented in purgatory, and
 they are the supreme spiritual failures. They are the poles, the happiest people and the
 saddest people. Then in between there comes the world of the Pretas, next to the Naraka,
 next to the purgatory. The Pretas are the frustrated spirits who have tiny mouths and
 enormous bellies, huge appetites, but very, very limited means of satisfying it. Then
 next they come between the Narakas and the Devas at the top. Next up from the Pretas
 are the human beings, and they are supposed to hold a middle position in the six worlds.
 Then you go up from the human beings to the Devas, and then you start coming down again.
 The next world is called the Asura, and those are the wrathful spirits, the personifications
 of storm and all the anger and violence of nature. Next down is animals, coming between
 the Asura and the purgatories again. Now all these needn't be taken literally. They are
 different modalities of the human mind. We are in the Naraka world when we are frustrated
 and in torment. When we are merely chronically frustrated, we are in the Preta world. When
 we are in a state of equanimity, even-mindedness, we are in the human world. When we are deliriously
 happy, we are in the Deva world. When we are furious, we are in the Asura world. And when
 we are dumb, we are in the animal world. So these are all modalities. And it would be
 said now, this is terribly important to understand Buddhism, because the better you get, the
 more you go up to the Deva world. The worse you get, the more you go down to the Naraka
 world. But everything that goes up has to come down. So you can't improve yourself
 indefinitely. If you improve yourself beyond a certain limit, you simply start to get worse.
 Like when you make a knife too sharp, it begins to wear away. So the Buddhahood, or liberation,
 enlightenment is on no place on the wheel, unless it might be the center. By ascending,
 by becoming better, you tie yourself to the wheel by gold chains. By retrogressing and
 becoming worse, you tie yourself to the wheel with iron chains. But the Buddha is one who
 gets rid of the chains altogether. And so this will explain why Buddhism, unlike Judaism
 and unlike Christianity, is not very, very frantically concerned with being good. It
 is concerned with being wise. It is concerned with being compassionate. It is a little different
 from being good. With having tremendous sympathy and understanding and respect for all the
 ignorant people who don't know that they're it, but who are playing the very far-out game
 of being you and I. And so this is why every Hindu greets his brother not by shaking hands,
 but by putting his hands together and bowing. This is why the Japanese bow to each other,
 this is why Buddhist rituals are full of the bowing gesture, because you are honoring the
 self, playing the roles of all the people around you. And all the more honor is due
 when the self has forgotten what it's doing, and is therefore in a very far-out situation.
 Now that is the basic Hindu view of the world. That's the cosmology which goes along with
 Buddhism. According to taste, temperament, tradition, popular belief, and so on, there
 is this additional idea that when the Lord, the self, pretends that it's each of us, it
 first of all pretends that it is something called the jivatman. The atman, the self,
 pretends to be an individual soul called a jivatman. And the jivatman reincarnates through
 a whole series of bodies, life after life after life. And according to what is called
 karma, karma literally means doing. The law of doing, whereby acts occur in a series,
 and they are linked with each other in an unbreakable chain. So everybody's karma is
 the life course that he will work out through maybe innumerable lifetimes. I'm not going
 into that because a lot of Buddhists don't believe that. You will find that the Zen people,
 for example, are quite divided on this. They will say, "No, we don't believe literally
 in reincarnation, that after your funeral, you know, you will suddenly become somebody
 different living somewhere else." They will say reincarnation means this, that if you
 sitting here now are really convinced that you're the same person who walked in at the
 door half an hour ago, you're being reincarnated. If you're liberated, you'll understand that
 you're not. The past doesn't exist. The future doesn't exist. There is only the present,
 and that's the only real you that there is. The Zen master Dogen put it in this way. He
 said, "Spring does not become the summer. First there is summer, and then there is spring.
 Each season stays in its own place. And so in the same way, the you of yesterday does
 not become the you of today." T.S. Eliot has the same idea in his poem, "The Four Quartets,"
 where he says, "When you've settled down in the train to read your newspaper and so on,
 you are not the same person who a little while ago left the platform." If you think you are,
 you are linking your moments up in a chain, and this is what binds you to the wheel of
 birth and death. But when you know that every moment at which you are is the only moment,
 this comes into Zen. A master will say to somebody, "Now get up and walk across the
 room." And he comes back and he says, "Where are your footprints?" They've gone. So where
 are you? Who are you? When we are asked who we are, we usually give a kind of recitation
 of a history. "Well, I'm so and so. I was given this name by my parents. I've been to
 such and such a college. I've done these things in my profession, and I produce a little biography."
 Buddha says, "Forget it. That's not you. That's some story. That's all gone. That's all past.
 I want to see the real you you are now." Well, nobody knows who that is, you see, because
 we don't know ourselves except through listening to our echoes and consulting our memories.
 But then there's a real you, and that again leads us back to this question. Who are you
 that is the real you? We shall see how they play with this in Zen by the koans to get
 you to come out of your shell and find out who you really are.
 Well now, whereas in India this worldview is tied up with a whole culture involving
 every circumstance of everyday life-- Hinduism is not a religion in the same sense that,
 say, being an Episcopalian or even a Roman Catholic. Hinduism is not a religion. It is
 a culture. In this respect, it's more like Judaism than Christianity, because a person
 is still recognizable as a Jew even though they don't go to synagogue. Because there's
 certain cultural things that Jewish people who come of a line of Jewish parents, people
 who have been practicing Jews, they still continue certain ways of doing things, certain
 mannerisms, certain attitudes, and so they are cultural Jews instead of religious Jews.
 Now Hinduism is the same sort of thing. It is a religion culture, and so it involves
 living in India, really, to be a Hindu. Because of the differences of climate, the differences
 of arts and crafts, technology, you can't be a Hindu in the full sense in Japan or in
 the United States. So what is Buddhism? Buddhism is Hinduism stripped for export.
 Now the Buddha was a reformer, you might say, in the highest sense of a reformer, someone
 who wants to go to the original form, or to reform it for the needs of a certain time.
 The word Buddha is a title, not a proper name, same way as Christ means the anointed, and
 it's not the surname of Jesus. So Buddha is not the surname of Gautama. It means the
 one who is awakened from the root in Sanskrit, BUDH, B-U-D-H, to know. The man who woke up,
 who discovered who he really was. Now the thing that wherein, the crucial point, wherein
 Buddhism differs from Hinduism, is it doesn't say who you are. It has no idea, no concept,
 and I emphasize the word idea and concept. It has no idea and no concept of God. Because
 Buddhism is not interested in concepts, it's interested in direct experience, and direct
 experience only. So from the Buddhist standpoint, all concepts are wrong, just in the same way
 that nothing is really what you say it is. This, is this a stool? It isn't now, it's
 a wastebasket. It's now a drum. What is this thing? See? It is what it does. It's this,
 see? Anything you can use it for is what it is. So if you have a rigid idea that it's
 a stool and you can only sit on it, you're kind of stuck. But if it's all these other
 things as well, then you suddenly see that anything can be everything. So in the same
 way Buddhism does not define and say what you really are is something, because it would
 say that if you believe that, you've got stuck with an idea, and you're clinging onto it
 for spiritual security. So a lot of people say, "Well, I like to have a religion because
 it gives me something to hold on to." A Buddhist would say, "Oh, cut that stuff." So long as
 you hold on to something, you don't have religion. You're only really there when you let go of
 everything. And you don't depend on any fixed idea, any belief, for your sanity or happiness.
 So you would think Buddhism is very destructive, because it breaks down. It doesn't believe
 in God. It doesn't believe in an immortal soul. It doesn't seek any solace in any idea
 of life after death. It absolutely faces the fact of the transiency of life. There's nothing
 you can hold on to. So man, let go. Because there's no one to hold on to anything anyway.
 So Buddhism is the discipline of doing that. But if you do that, you see, you discover
 something much better than anybody has who has a belief. Because you've got the real
 thing. You can't say what it is. They say in Zen that if you're enlightened in Buddhism,
 you are like a dumb man who has had a wonderful dream. That is to say, when you've had a wonderful
 dream, you want to tell everybody what it is. But you can't, if you're dumb. See, if
 you can't speak. So the real thing in Buddhism, which they call nirvana, which is a sort of
 equivalent to moksha, nirvana means blow out. You know, the sigh of relief. Because if you
 hold your breath, you lose it. You hold on to yourself, you hold on to life, or breath
 is the spirit. You hold on to God. Rock of ages cleft for me, let me cling on to you.
 It's all dead. Becomes just a rock, just an idol. But let go, breathe out, and you get
 your breath back. That's nirvana. So Buddhist idea is in doctrine, the highest negativism.
 They characterize the ultimate reality as shunya, which means emptiness. In Japanese,
 ku, which is the character you use for the sky or the air. When you get an airmail envelope,
 you know, to write home, it will, the second character is ku, the air, which means emptiness.
 They use this to translate shunyata, emptiness, fundamental nature of reality, the sky. But
 sky, you see, is not negative emptiness. The sky contains all of us. It's full of everything
 going on. But you can't put a nail in the sky and pin it down. So in the same way, Buddhism
 is saying, you don't need any gizmos to be in the know. You don't need a religion. You
 don't need any, even Buddha statues, you don't need any temples. You don't need any Buddhist
 bondeusery, rosaries, and all that jazz. But when you get to the point that you know you
 don't need any of those things, that you don't need a religion at all, then it's fun to have
 one. Then, as it were, you can be trusted to use rosaries and ring bells and clappers
 and chant sutras, you see. But those things won't help you a bit. They'll just tie you
 up in knots if you use them as methods of catching hold of something. So every teacher
 of Buddhism is a debunker. But he does it not to be a smart aleck and to show how clever
 he is, but out of compassion. Just as when a surgeon chops off a bad growth or a dentist
 pulls out a rotten tooth, so the Buddhist guru or surgeon is getting rid of your crazy
 ideas for you, which you use to cling on to life and make it dead.
 Now there are two kinds of Buddhism. They are called Mahāyāna. Mahā is Sanskrit word
 for great, M-A-H-A. Yāna means a vehicle or conveyance. And there is Hinayāna, means
 the little vehicle, Hīnā in Sanskrit. H-I-N-A means little. Only that's a term invented
 by the Mahāyānas for the other people. And the other people don't like it. They like
 to call themselves Theravāda, T-H-E-R-A-V-A-D-A, which means Vāda, the way, Thera, of the
 elders. Now Theravāda Buddhism you will find in Ceylon, Burma, Thailand, Cambodia, and
 generally South Asia. Mahāyāna you find in, it originated in Nepal and Northern India,
 and you find it in Tibet, China, Mongolia, Japan, and to some extent in Indonesia. The
 Mahāyāna is what we are finding here. All the sects of Japanese Buddhism are Mahāyāna.
 Now what's the great difference between these two schools? The Theravāda is very strict.
 It's a way for monks, essentially, rather than laymen. And it is, you see, there are
 many ways of living Buddhism. It'll take me some time to show you this. The Theravāda
 Buddhists are trying to live without desires, to have no need for wives or girls or husbands
 or boyfriends, not to kill anything at all, to live the strictest vegetarian way, and
 to strain your water so that you even don't eat any insects, little insects with it, and
 to this very strict way and meditate all the time, and eventually attain Nirvana, which
 will involve your total disappearance from the manifested world. Mahāyāna feeling is
 that that is a dualistic point of view. You don't need to get away from this world to
 experience Nirvana, because Nirvana is what there is. It's here, it's now. So the ideal
 person of Mahāyāna is called a Bodhisattva. This originally meant somebody on the way
 to becoming a Buddha, but in Mahāyāna it has a different meaning. It means somebody
 who has become a Buddha, but has gone back into the world, in the spirit of compassion,
 to help all other beings to become awakened. Well now that's an endless task. It's like
 filling a well with snow, you know, put snow into a well and never fills up. So when at
 the Zen monastery they've said their homage to the Buddha, the Dharma, that's the Buddha's
 doctrine or method, and the Sangha, the order of followers of the Buddha, then they take
 five vows. And one of them is, "However innumerable sentient beings are, I vow to liberate them
 all." Well so you see there's no end to that. Never comes a time when all sentient
 beings are liberated. But actually from the standpoint of one who is a Buddha, he sees
 everybody as liberated. In other words, if I were to be a Buddha, I wouldn't say, "Now
 look everybody, I'm a Buddha, and I'm more experienced than you, and I know more than
 you, and you owe me respect on that account." On the other hand, I would see you all as
 being exactly right where you are. All of you Buddhas, and even those of you who don't
 know it, it would be right for you not to know it at this moment.
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