This man whose name was Aka, he came to where Bodhidharma was meditating and said,
 "Master, I have no peace of mind. Please pacify my mind."
 Of course, he didn't even get in for a long time to ask the question,
 because Bodhidharma refused to see anybody.
 Finally, when he cut off his left arm, for the token of his sincerity, and presented it to the master,
 Bodhidharma said, "You know, all right, what do you want?"
 Well, he said, "I have no peace of mind."
 So Bodhidharma said, "Bring out your mind here before me. I'll pacify it."
 And Aka said, "When I look for my mind, I can't find it."
 Bodhidharma said, "There, it's pacified."
 Now, somehow this answered Aka's question.
 And all Zen is stories like that.
 Now, one thing I must tell you about these stories.
 They are of the same nature as jokes.
 And that is to say, a joke is told with the object of making you laugh.
 Laughter is not an intellectual thing.
 It is an emotional reaction.
 And the point is the emotional reaction.
 If, therefore, a joke is explained to you, you may laugh out of politeness, a throaty laugh,
 but you will not laugh spontaneously, a belly laugh.
 Now, the object of Zen stories is not to produce laughter, but to produce awakening,
 clarification, enlightenment, or what is called in Japanese, "Satori."
 Satori is like laughter, something that happens suddenly.
 You don't use a rule, slowly begin to laugh, and then laugh louder and louder,
 because you see a joke instantly.
 A joke is always a matter of an "Aha!"
 So in the same way, these stories are intended to produce an "Aha!" reaction in you.
 Of "Oh, but I see, now it's clear."
 And really, they don't contain any information.
 Their design is not to tell you something, that is to say, to impart information or knowledge.
 Their design is to get rid of something.
 To get rid of a false problem with which you are wrestling,
 so that the problem will disappear as a result of understanding the story.
 And you'll see from the story that I told you, that what happened was the disappearance of the problem.
 Because Eikar, when he looked for his mind that was giving him so much trouble, couldn't find it.
 The Satori which so frequently follows these interchanges is by no means a mere comprehension of the answer to a riddle.
 For whatever the Zen master says or does is a direct and spontaneous utterance of suchness, of his Buddha nature.
 And what he gives is no symbol, but the very thing.
 Zen communication is always direct pointing, in line with the traditional four-phase summary of Zen.
 Outside teaching, apart from tradition, not founded on words and letters,
 pointing directly to the human mind, seeing into one's nature and attaining Buddhahood.
 The center of Zen training is to live spontaneously.
 And this is why it's so fascinating to many Western people, especially Western intellectuals,
 who are overburdened with self-consciousness.
 Because what fascinated people about Zen when they first heard of it through Dr. Suzuki's writings, was Zen stories.
 I lent a book of Zen stories once to a friend of mine, years and years ago, and he was in hospital.
 And when he gave it back to me, he said, "Gee," he said, "I didn't understand a word of it, but it cheered me up enormously."
 Almost all the literature of the period in early Buddhist Chinese is anecdotes about the encounters of Zen masters with their students.
 They are called in Japanese, "Mondo," which means question-answer.
 Now then, these stories go on in the most amazing ways.
 And I might retell a few, although some of them may be familiar to you.
 I'll try and choose ones that are probably less familiar.
 There was a famous master called Suibi, and he was asked, "What is the secret teaching of Buddhism?"
 And he was asked this in the lecture hall, you know, where other monks were studying.
 And he said, "Wait till there's no one around, and I'll tell you."
 So later in the day, the monk accosted him and said, "There's nobody around now. What is the secret teaching of Buddhism?"
 So he went into the garden with this monk, and he pointed at the bamboos.
 And the monk said, "I don't understand."
 He said, "What a tall one that is. What a short one that is."
 And this awakened the monk.


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