It has been well said that Buddhism is Hinduism stripped for export.
 So one might say simply this to try and sum up what Buddhism is about.
 The word Buddha is derived from the root "bud" in Sanskrit, B-U-D-H, which means to be awake.
 So the Buddha is the awakened man, the man who woke up.
 What does he wake up from? Obviously a dream.
 And what kind of a dream is this?
 Well, I would call it a state of hypnosis.
 And this state of hypnosis, although I'm using hypnosis in a rather archaic sense of the word,
 is a state of being entranced, spellbound, fascinated, and this is called in Sanskrit avidya.
 When we were hypnotized into the notion of attending to life by conscious attention alone,
 by the spotlight to the exclusion of the floodlight,
 and so we began to imagine that we were separate individuals.
 What is called in Buddhism sakkayadrishti, the view of separateness, and a Buddha is one who has overcome that.
 So the method of Buddhism, what's called the Dharma, doesn't mean the law, it means the method.
 The method is to knock the stuffing out of you, to take away everything to which you cling,
 to cleanse you completely of all beliefs, all ideas, all concepts of what life is about,
 so that you are completely let go.
 So Buddhism has no doctrines at all that you have to believe in.
 I don't care what background you come from, whether you're a Roman Catholic or of one extreme,
 or a logical positivist of the other, both are clinging to something, you see?
 And so the method of Buddhism is to knock out the underpinnings, and say, well we just,
 not only do we not believe in anything, we don't even believe in not believing in anything.
 So this is what Buddhism does.
 When it says it's the art of let go, of non-attachment, non-attachment doesn't mean that you lose your appetite for dinner.
 It means simply that you stop grabbing.
 Zen developed in China after Bodhidharma's time, and came to a sort of golden age in the Tang and Sung dynasties.
 In the year 845, there was a brief but vigorous persecution of Buddhism by the Taoist emperor Wu Tsung.
 Temples and monasteries were destroyed, lands confiscated, and the monks compelled to return to lay life.
 Fortunately, his enthusiasm for Taoist alchemy soon involved him in experiments with the elixir of immortality,
 and from partaking of this concoction, he shortly died.
 Zen had survived the persecution better than any other school, and now entered a long era of imperial and popular favor.
 Hundreds of monks thronged its wealthy monastic institutions, and the fortunes of the school so prospered,
 and its numbers so increased, that the preservation of its spirit became a very serious problem.
 The solution was the system of the Kung An, Japanese Koan, or Zen problem.
 Literally, this term means a public document, or case, in the sense of a decision creating a legal precedent.
 Thus, the Koan system involves passing a series of tests based on the mondo, or anecdotes, of the old masters.


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