I was discussing last night the Bodhisattva doctrine in Mahayana Buddhism and comparing
 it or relating it to the two great tendencies in Indian spirituality, anti-worldliness or
 other-worldliness and world affirmation and showing how the idea that the highest kind
 of a Buddha is in a certain way a non-Buddha.
 The highest kind of a Buddha is like an ordinary person.
 And this comes out very, very much in various tendencies in Zen where, for example, all
 the painting, peculiarly characteristic of Zen Buddhism in the Chinese and Japanese tradition,
 is as it were secular.
 It has a peculiarly non-religious atmosphere.
 That is to say, the painting of Shingon sect and Tendai sect, as you saw it in the museum
 today, was religious painting.
 You could tell at once that the subject matter of these paintings is religious.
 But with Zen painting, the way of dealing with philosophical and spiritual themes is
 secular.
 So that when an artist like Sengai, living in the 17th century Japan, paints the Buddha,
 there is something slightly humorous about the Buddha.
 He wears his halo over one ear.
 There is an informality, a slight raffishness.
 And so this comes from China, from those great Sung artists like Liang Kai, who painted the
 Sixth Patriarch of Zen, chopping bamboos, looking like the most extraordinarily unkempt
 country oaf.
 So also, the greatest Zen painting has as its subject matter not really religious themes
 at all.
 It uses pine branches, rocks, bamboos, grasses, everything of that kind.
 And you would never know that these things were icons.
 Likewise also, in poetry, which we will go into more extensively in the future, the superb
 expression of Zen poetry is derived from the Chinese poet Hou Koji, who says, "Wondrous
 action, supernatural power, drawing water, carrying fuel."
 Now that poem is a little bit too religious for Zen taste.
 And so preferable to that is Basho's famous poem, "The Old Pond, a Frog Jumps In, Plop."
 Plop is the only possible English translation for the Japanese "mizu no otto," which means
 literally "the water's sound."
 Plop.
 But that poem, you see, is a very high-style Zen poem, because it has nothing in it
 about religion.
 There is a poem on the edge, which also was written by Basho, which says, "When the lightning
 flashes, how admirable he who does not think life is fleeting."
 You see, the flash of a lightning is a Buddhist cliché for the transiency of the world.
 Our life goes by and it disappears as fast as a flash of lightning.
 That becomes a cliché.
 So all religion, all religious comments about life, eventually become clichés.
 Religion always is falling apart and becoming a certain kind of going through the motions,
 a kind of imitation of attitudes, as if one would say, "We've got a book called The Imitation
 of Christ.
 It's a terrible book, because everybody who imitates Christ is a kind of a fake Jesus."
 So in the same way, there's all kinds of imitation Buddhas, not just sitting on altars made of
 wood and gilded, but just sitting around in monasteries.
 So one might say then that the highest kind of religious or spiritual attainment has no
 sign about it that it is religious or that it is spiritual.
 And so as a metaphor for this, there was used in Buddhism from the very beginning the idea
 of the tracks of birds in the sky.
 They don't leave any tracks.
 And so the way of the enlightened man is like the track of a bird in the sky.
 And as one poem, a Chinese poem, says, "Entering the forest he does not disturb a blade of
 grass.
 Entering the water he does not make a ripple."
 In other words, there is no sign about him to indicate that he is self-consciously religious.
 And this goes, too, for the fact that his not having any religious sign is also not
 something contrived.
 It isn't like Protestant simplicity.
 You know, all those Catholics with their rituals and how dreadful and insincere that is.
 With the real reason you know why Protestants think Catholic ritual is insincere?
 You know?
 It's expensive.
 Protestantism started in the burgher cities of Europe, places like Freiburg, Hamburg,
 you know, and Geneva.
 Because the merchant class, who were the foundation of the bourgeoisie, got annoyed because every
 time a Saints' Day came around, all their employees got a day off because it was a Holy
 Day and they had to attend Mass.
 There were so many of these nuisance Holy Days.
 And all these contributions that were assessed by the Church, buying your way out of purgatory
 and saying Mass is for the dead and so on and so forth, they found this not very economical.
 The priests were getting the money instead of the merchants.
 And so they decried as unbiblical and irreligious and wasteful all the finery of the Catholic
 religion and wanted something plain and simple.
 So it became in course of time a sign of being really religious, to avoid rituals and to
 avoid colourful clothing and splendour in churches and to be as ordinary as possible.
 But that is not yet the real religion of me giving no sign of having a religion, because
 this simplicity and absence of ritual itself becomes a sign, a way of advertising how spiritual
 you are.
 So the completely bodhisattva type of person doesn't leave any track, either by being religious
 overtly or by being non-religious overtly.
 How will you be neither religious nor non-religious?
 See that's the great test.
 How will you avoid that trap of being one or the other?
 It's like, are you a theist or are you an atheist?
 See the theist is caught by God and the idea of God, the belief in God, but the atheist
 is equally caught.
 Because an atheist is very often an atheist, because he cannot stand the idea that God
 is watching him all the time, that there is this constant all-seeing eye prying on your
 most private life, and that there's this... you know how when you're a child in school
 and you're writing something or doing arithmetic and the teacher walks round the class and
 looks over your shoulder?
 Nobody wants to be watched like that.
 Even someone who's good at writing or at arithmetic doesn't want somebody looking over their shoulder
 while they're doing it.
 It puts you off, it bugs you.
 So the idea of the Lord God who is watching us all the time, who is judging everything
 that we do, puts people off and they can't stand it.
 So better be an atheist to get rid of teacher.
 But the atheist, you see, the man who advertises his disbelief in God is a very pious person.
 Nobody believes in God like an atheist.
 There is no God and I am his prophet.
 So then, the true bodhisattva state is very difficult to pin down as being either... neither
 supremely religious nor blatantly secular.
 And people who think that the height of Buddhism or the height of Zen
 is to be perfectly ordinary have still missed the point, like the atheist has missed the
 point.
 But for this reason then, there is an element in the art, the painting, the poetry, etc.,
 which has been inspired by this kind of Buddhism.
 This kind of art where the subject matter is non-religious.
 Nevertheless, there is something about the way in which this non-religious subject matter
 is handled that stops you.
 And you know there's something strange about it.
 This is how I first became interested in Oriental philosophy and all that kind of thing.
 I had an absolute fascination for Chinese and Japanese painting, the secular painting,
 the landscapes, the treatment of flowers and grasses and bamboos.
 There was something about it that struck me as astonishing, even though the subject matter
 was extremely ordinary.
 And I just, as a child practically, I had to find out what was the strange element in
 those bamboos and those grasses.
 I was being, of course, taught by those painters to see grass.
 But there was something in there that one could never pin down, never put your finger
 on.
 And that was this thing that I will call the religion of no religion.
 The supreme attainment of being a Buddha who can't be detected, who, in this sense, then
 leaves no trace.
 You remember, some of you have seen those ten paintings called "The Ten Stages of Spiritual
 Ox-Herding".
 There are two sets of these paintings.
 There's a heterodox one and an orthodox one.
 The heterodox one, as the man catches the ox, it gets progressively whiter, until in
 the end it disappears altogether and the last picture is an empty circle.
 But the orthodox set of paintings doesn't end with the empty circle.
 That empty circle arises two from the end, three from the end.
 It is followed by two others.
 After the man has attained the state of emptiness, the state, in other words, of complete iconoclasm,
 the state of no attachment to any spiritual or psychological or moral crutch, there are
 two more steps.
 One is called "Returning to the Origin", which is represented by a tree beside a stream.
 And the final one, called "Entering the City with Hands Hanging Down".
 That means hands giving a hand out, as it were, giving bounty.
 And it shows a picture of the fat Buddha, Putai, or in Japanese known as Hotei, who
 has an enormous belly, big ears, who carries round a colossal bag.
 And what do you think this bag has in it?
 Trash!
 Wonderful trash.
 Everything that children love.
 Things that everybody else has thrown away and thought of as valueless.
 This bum collects and gives it away to children.
 And so it says here that he goes on his way without following the steps of the ancient
 sages.
 His door is closed, that's the door of his house, and no glimpses of his interior life
 are to be seen.
 So in other words, it's like when you erect a building, while you're building it, you
 have all kinds of scaffolding up.
 That shows you that building is going on.
 But when the building is complete, the scaffolding is taken down.
 To open a door, as they say in Zen, you may need to pick up a brick to knock at the door.
 But when the door is open, you don't carry the brick inside.
 To cross a river, you need a boat, but when you've reached the other side, you don't pick
 up the boat and carry it.
 So the brick, the boat, the scaffolding, all these things represent some sort of religious
 technology or method.
 And in the end, these are all to disappear, so that the saint will not be found in church.
 Don't take what I say literally.
 The saint can perfectly readily go to church without being sullied by church.
 But ordinary people, when they go to church, they come out stinking of religion.
 There was a great Zen master once, and one of his disciples asked him, "How am I making
 progress?"
 He said, "You're all right, but you have a trivial fault."
 "Well, what is that?"
 He said, "You have too much Zen."
 "Well," he said, "when you're studying Zen, don't you think it's very natural to be talking
 about it?"
 The master said, "When it's like an ordinary conversation, it is much better."
 And so another monk who was standing by listening to this exchange said to the master, "Why
 do you so specially dislike talking about Zen?"
 And he replied, "Because it turns one's stomach."
 So what did he mean when he said, "When it's like an ordinary, everyday conversation, it
 is somewhat better"?
 Then the old master, Joshu, was asked, "At the end of the Kaopa, when everything is destroyed
 in fire, there will be one thing remaining.
 What is that?"
 And Joshu replied, "It's windy again this morning."
 So in Zen, when you're asked a question about religion, you reply in terms of the secular.
 When you're asked about something secular, you reply in terms of religion.
 So what is the eternal nature of the self?
 It's windy again this morning.
 "Please pass me a knife."
 The master hands him the knife with the blade first.
 He says, "Please give me the other end."
 What would you do with the other end?
 See, here the disciple starts out with the ordinary.
 "Please pass me the knife."
 And suddenly he finds himself involved in a metaphysical problem.
 But if he starts out with the metaphysical, he's going to get involved with the knife.
 So now, to go deeply into the religion of non-religion, we have to understand the, what
 you might call, the final, ultimate attainment of Mahayana Buddhist philosophy.
 And this is contained in a school of thought which is called in Chinese, Hua-Yin, and in
 Japanese, Kegon.
 Kegon is the intellectual foundation for Zen.
 And there was a great Chinese master by the name of Shumitsu, who was simultaneously a
 Zen master and the fifth patriarch of the Hua-Yin sect.
 Hua means flower, Yin, garland, the garland of flowers.
 And it's all based on a Sanskrit sutra called Avatamsaka.
 This is called simply, in Japanese, Kegon-kyo, a very big sutra.
 And the subject matter of this sutra are what are called the four Dharma worlds.
 And I must explain what these four worlds are, so that you get the point.
 First of all, there is a level of being which we will call Ji.
 The word Ji, which is Japanese way of pronouncing the Chinese Ch'er, is the world of things
 and events.
 What you might call the common sense world, the everyday world that our senses normally
 record.
 The word Ji, the character in Chinese, has a multiplicity of meanings, because it can
 mean a thing or an event.
 It can also mean business, an affair, not in a love affair, but something in the way
 the French say "les affaires" for business, something important.
 It can also mean affectation, putting something on or showing off.
 And so a person who is a master in Zen is called Buji, which means no business, no affectation,
 nothing special.
 The poem says, "On Mount Lu there is misty rain, and the river Jiang is at high tide.
 When you have not been there, your heart is filled with longing.
 But when you have been there and come back, it was nothing special.
 Misty rain on Mount Lu, river Jiang at high tide."
 But this "nothing special" is not a way of putting something down.
 Do you see that?
 I could say, "Well, it was nothing special, it didn't really amount to anything."
 That's one way of saying it was very ordinary.
 But Buji, just as it doesn't mean it was very ordinary, in the same way that the person
 who has no religion is really the most religious, do you see?
 He's not just a common ignorant moron.
 He looks like one, but he isn't.
 And you have to know what he knows in order to see that he isn't and to recognize him
 for what he is.
 So "nothing special," Buji, it doesn't stand out, it doesn't, as we would say, it doesn't
 stick out like a sore thumb.
 So the world of Ji then means generally the world of particulars, the world of multiplicity,
 the world we ordinarily feel we're involved in.
 So that's the first world.
 The second world is called the world of Ri.
 Now Ri, in Chinese, "li," is, as I explained to you when we were discussing the idea of
 the law of nature, the character means the markings in jade, or the grain in wood, or
 the fibre in muscle.
 But in the Huayen philosophy, the word "ri" means the universal, underlying all particulars,
 the one underlying all multiplicity.
 The unitive principle, as distinct from Ji, which is the differentiation principle.
 So as it were, it's like this.
 When you see into the nature of this world, you start from Ji.
 You start from noticing all the particular things and being baffled by their multiplicity,
 and dealing with the multiplicity of things.
 But as you go into this, you discover, as you understand things, what do you mean when
 you understand things?
 It means you become aware of their relationships to each other, and eventually you see the
 unity behind them.
 And it is as if the multiplicity of the world dissolved into unity.
 .


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