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. And so here you encounter a problem. I can see the world as a unity, I can see the world as a multiplicity. But how the devil am I going to put the two visions together? If I am to be a practical success in business, in family life and so on, I have to observe the world of particulars. It's particulars that matter. I have to know chalk from cheese. But if I become a saint, a monk or a hermit, or even perhaps a poet or an artist, I will forget about the practical matters and contemplate the unity, the secret meaning underlying all events. But then all those practical people are going to say to me, "You're falling down on the job. You've escaped from life." Because they feel that the world of particulars is the real world. But the other guy says, "No, your particulars are not real. You make a success of things, yes, but it's completely temporary. You think you're an important person, that you're really contributing to human life. But actually, your success in doing this sort of thing lasts for a few years, and then you fall apart like everybody else does. Where's your success now? When you're dead, what happened to the millions of dollars you made? Where are you? They're all gone. So that isn't real from the standpoint of the person who concentrates on the unity. So then, to perfect our understanding, we have to go to the third of these worlds, which is called "Re, Gi, Mu, Ge." Now, that means between "Re," the unity, and "Gi," the particulars, "Mu," there is no, "Ge," block. That means the world of the universal and the world of particulars are not incompatible. Let's take two very different things and see how they can be united. Take shape and color. Never in a million years can you, with a black pencil that can draw shapes, make red. But if you have red, you can draw a circle. You can draw a red circle, even though the circle shape and the red color will never be the same. Yet red circle, they go beautifully together. So think of circle as "Gi" and red as "Re." The circle is the particular, the color is the universal. They go together. So then we might say, the properly rounded out person is both spiritual and material, both otherworldly and worldly. This is the supreme attainment of a human being, to be both. Don't get one-sided. A person who is what you might call just a materialist ends up by being very boring. It's, you know, you can live the successful life of the world and you can own every kind of material refinement. You can have the most beautiful home, delicious food, marvelous yachts and cars and everything. But if you have no touch of mysticism, it eventually is all perfectly boring. And you get tired of it. Then on the other hand, there are people who are purely spiritual. And they live in a kind of dry world where all luxury has been scrubbed away. And they are very intense people. When you're in their presence, a very spiritual person, an excessively spiritual person, you feel inclined to sit on the edge of your chair. You're not at ease because you know the eye of judgment is looking through you and going down into your very soul and finding that you're just a scallywag after all. And here's this absolutely sincere, this dreadfully honest and unselfish person. This is something which is always puzzling to people brought up in a Western environment because great spiritual people are often very, very censorous. Because they can't be materialists in the ordinary sense. They can't be straight open censorists because for them the world is too wonderful for that. Any human being is too marvelous to be treated as just a kind of sexual object. They may be very much a sexual object but so marvelous you have to stop with it and really go into the whole of that marvelous, wonderful personality. So there is a trouble that keeps coming up for the West. When you go to church and you suddenly go to a church where there's a marvelous clergyman and you think he is the very exemplar of life and you idealize him. And then suddenly there develops a frightful scandal that he has an affair with his secretary. And you think all is lost, that the faith has been sold out, that everything's going to rack and ruin because he was not purely spiritual. And he himself may be terribly confused and worried about this. Because in our world, you see, we make the spiritual and the material mutually exclusive. But "Ri-Ji-Mu-Ge" this third world means that between the spiritual and the material there is no obstruction. So we might say this would sound as if it were the highest level. But there's one more to come which is called "Ji-Ji-Mu-Ge". This means then suddenly "Ri" has disappeared. But between "Ji" and "Ji" there is no obstruction. Between one event and any other event or events there is no mutual exclusiveness. Shall I put it that way? This is the doctrine, the highest doctrine of Mahayana Buddhism, which you could call the doctrine of the mutual interpenetration of all things, or the mutual interdependence of all things. And its symbol is the what is called Indra's net that is used in the Avatamsaka Sutra. Imagine at dawn a multi-dimensional spider's web covered in dew. A vast, vast spider's web that is the whole cosmos and is not only a kind of a flat thing but a solid thing and a solid in four, five, six and N dimensions covered with jewels of dew all of which have rainbow coloring and every drop of dew contains in it the reflection of every other drop of dew and since every drop of dew contains the reflections of all the others each reflected drop of dew contains the reflections you see, of all the others and so ad infinitum. Now this is the Mahayana vision of the world. Which is to say this is relativity that whatever exists in this world and is characterized as something particular as a thing, as an event, as something or other you see as a unit, this does not exist without all other such things and events. So that you might say any one event implies all events and all events, the total universe past, present and future depends on every single member. In other words you may say I can understand that I depend on this whole universe there could not be me unless there was everything else it is harder to see the corollary of that, that the whole universe depends on you you might say well how can that be because I come into being and then I go out of being and when I'm, before I was born I'm sure the universe was here and after I die I'm sure it will go on how can you say then that the whole thing depends on me very simply it depends on your supposing you're dead and we're talking about someone in the past let's say we're talking about Socrates and I'm going to say this whole universe depends on Socrates I may put it more exactly it depends on Socrates having existed you see your parents now some of your parents may be alive but some of your parents may be dead without your parents you would not have come into being so you depend on your parents even when your parents have gone so everything, even when you disappear the universe will still depend on you, on your having been here or if you have not yet arrived it depends on your going to be here so we can say obviously going back to Socrates, the fact that Socrates existed tells us something about the kind of world we're living in, this world once Socrates-ed and that Socrates and his wisdom was a symptom of the kind of universe we're living in in just the same way as I showed you that an apple is a symptom of a tree a certain kind of tree, tells us something about that tree what it functions, how it produces things so a world which produced Socrates or a world which produced John Doe, who was nobody in particular and nobody ever remembered him or thought to write his biography nevertheless for all his obscurity the whole universe depends on him and it depends equally on every fruit fly, every gnat, every vibration of every gnat's wing and it depends on every last electron, however brief its manifestation may be, so that what this is saying is that everything that there is implies everything else and all those other things collectively in their totality which we call the universe in turn imply each individual object, event and so on that's the meaning of Imbres Net, so that this is called in Zen to take up a blade of grass and use it as a golden Buddha 16 feet high, when you have a chain and you pick up a link all the other links come up with it, you see because it implies if this is a link it is a link in a chain, if it isn't it's just an oval piece of metal, but if it's a link up come all other links, so if you are an event, every event there's no such thing as a single event, the only possible single event is all events whatsoever that could be regarded as the only possible atom, the only possible single thing is everything, but the things that we call things all imply each other we know what we are only in relation to what we aren't we know of the sensation of oneself only in relation to a sensation of something other so the other goes with the self as the back goes with the front and your life however short, everything depends on it if that did not happen nothing would happen, so in this sense the whole world bears your signature, it would not be the same world if it weren't for you, you've heard haven't you what is called the pathetic fallacy this was an idea of the 19th century which said that it was false and wrong to project human feelings on the world the wind in the pine trees is not sighing it's you who are sighing the sun is not happy, it's you who are happy when the sun shines so don't mix up your happiness with the sun the sun has no feeling, the sun is not human the wind has no feeling and is not human the poet says the moon doth with delight look round her when the heavens are bare and the logician says no, the poet looks round with delight at the moon in the bare heavens how awful I mean if that's the point you see, better not say any poetry, just have prose but actually the moon does look round with delight when the poet looks round with delight, because the world of which one symptom is the moon, is the same world of which another symptom is the poet they go together a world where there is a moon implies a world where there is a poet a world where there is a poet implies a world where there is a moon, so in this sense the moon can be said to look round with delight through the agency of the poet because you can't separate poet and moon just as you can't separate head and feet without destroying the unity of the body so in that sense then, this whole world is a human world and we should not take the silly attitude or philosophy called the philosophy of the pathetic fallacy which says outside our skins it's all inhuman and dumb and blind force and only inside the skin is there the human world all this world is human because it depends not only on the existence of humanity in general but on the existence of Mary Smith in particular so the whole world is covered as it were with your personal signature but at that moment when you suddenly seem to be everything and to be Mr. A, you know you suddenly see the obverse of this, that your particular personality is nothing at all without everything else without everybody else I need, in order to be Alan Watts I need every single other human being and the uncontrollable otherness of all those other human beings that I can't do anything about they're going to be themselves whatever I do and yet at the same time I depend on all their difference from me and yet they all depend likewise on me so that I'm in a very funny position the moment I would be egoless and say I'm nothing without you then suddenly I find I'm the kingpin they all depend on me then suddenly when I get swell-headed about being the kingpin I find I'm nothing at all without them so everything keeps going blip, blip, blip, blip in other words the moment you think you've got it in one state it transforms itself into the other that's the Jiji Muge now in Jiji Muge you see you've got a vision of the world in which everybody is boss and nobody is boss there is no one boss who governs the whole thing it takes care of itself it's a colossal democracy but yet every man and every Uguisu and every snail is king in this world and at the same time is commoner and that's how it works and there is no great king although in Hinduism they have an idea a very strange one to us called Ishvara Ishvara means the supreme personal God the top being in the Deva world and many Buddhists believe that there is such a God there is a ruler of the universe but he is lower than a Buddha because in the course of the endless cycles Ishvara will dissolve into nothing all Gods, all angels are within the round of being it's a very curious idea to our minds and therefore although Buddhists believe in God in that sense they don't take it importantly there are no shrines in Buddhism to Ishvara so then it is through Jiji Muge this idea of the mutual interpenetration and interdependence of all things that we have the philosophical basis for Zen as a practical non-intellectual way of life because of the realization that the most ordinary event the charcoal brazier, the mat, soup for dinner sneezing, washing your hands, going to the bathroom, everything all these so-called events separate events imply the universe so this is why Zen people will use the ordinary event to demonstrate the cosmic and the metaphysical only they don't rationalize it that way to see infinity in a grain of sand and eternity in an hour is still Riji Muge and not Jiji Muge Jiji Muge is when you offer somebody the grain of sand for God's sake stop thinking about eternity that's just the grain of sand there is no difference between the grain of sand and eternity so you don't have to think about eternity as something implied by the grain of sand the grain of sand is eternity so in the same way exactly our sitting here at this moment is not something different from nirvana we are nirvana as sitting here exactly like this, you see so you don't have to say any philosophical comment on the grain of sand or on our sitting here that's called legs on a snake or a beard on a eunuch you put legs on a snake, you see and you embarrass the snake in its motion and a eunuch doesn't need a beard we would say in our idiom don't gild the lily or Zen would say don't put frost on top of snow so all what you might call specifically religious activity is legs on a snake eventually this is going to be eliminated just as eventually we hope that government will be eliminated and will become unnecessary because every individual will be self-governing and therefore relate properly to his brother and the state will vanish so too at the same time the church will vanish and that's why in the book of Revelation in the New Testament it is said that in heaven there is no temple because the whole place is the temple so in... when we achieve the fulfillment of Buddhism there is no Buddha, no temple, no gong, no bell because the whole world is the sound of the bell and the image of Buddha is everything you can look at so a Zen master was asked mountains and hills are they not all forms of the body of Buddha? the master replied yes they are but it's a pity to say so [BLANK_AUDIO] {END} Wait Time : 0.00 sec Model Load: 0.64 sec Decoding : 1.55 sec Transcribe: 2105.97 sec Total Time: 2108.16 sec