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 When the mouth wants to speak about it, words fail.
 When the mind seeks affinity with it, thought vanishes.
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 Sun and moon cannot illuminate it completely.
 Heaven and Earth cannot cover it entirely.
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 The deer hunter doesn't see the mountains.
 The miser doesn't see man.
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 Last year's poverty was not real poverty.
 But this year's poverty is poverty indeed.
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 The angels find no path on which to strew flowers.
 The heretics, secretly spying, find nothing to see.
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 Last year's plum and this year's willow, their color
 and fragrance are as of old.
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 At the limits of heaven, the sun rises and the moon sets.
 Beyond the balustrade, the mountains deepen.
 And the waters become chill.
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 He sees only the winding of the stream
 and the twisting of the path.
 He does not know that already he is
 in the land of the immortals.
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 A lot of people think that the spontaneous or completely
 natural life as it's understood by these Far Eastern
 philosophers is to act according to whim.
 There was, for example, a great Zen monk
 who lived shortly after 1000 AD who had a very peculiar way
 of painting.
 He had long hair.
 And he would soak-- he'd get very drunk on rice wine.
 Then he'd soak his hair in ink and slosh it all over the paper.
 Then he would do a Rorschach test on it
 and decide what kind of a landscape it actually was
 and then put in the finishing touches.
 And suddenly, out of this apparent mess,
 a great landscape would be evoked.
 But the whole art of the thing lay in putting
 in the finishing touches.
 And also, there's a very curious thing.
 If a person who is untrained in painting
 makes a mess with a brush, it's liable to be just a mess.
 Whereas if a person who has the feeling of painting in them
 for a long time and they make a mess with a brush
 or just do anything, it looks interesting.
 And that's why if you try to copy the best
 people in modern abstract, non-objective painting,
 you'll find it's a very difficult thing to do.
 Because there is more to spontaneity
 than caprice and disorder.
 And I want to try and explain what that is.
 I mean, wouldn't it be great if we could live absolutely
 on the spur of the moment?
 Not make any particular plans, not feel that--
 well, you might make plans, because you can make plans
 spontaneously.
 But not to worry about whether you
 had made the right decision, whether you were being good
 or bad, selfish or unselfish, and not
 to hesitate in anything, you see?
 In one of the great applications of Zen, as I pointed out,
 was to the art of fencing.
 And when you learn fencing, you see
 you have to learn to be spontaneous,
 because here of all places it is true
 that he who hesitates is lost.
 If you're engaged in combat, you see,
 and you stop to think what sort of a defense or attack
 you ought to make, the enemy's got you.
 So the way they teach people spontaneity in fencing
 is very interesting.
 When you start in to fencing school,
 you of course live with the teacher.
 He has a kind of ashram.
 But you're given a janitorial job.
 You clean up, you wash dishes, you put bedding away,
 and things like that.
 While you're going about your daily business,
 the master surprises you with a practice sword, which
 is made of four strips of bamboo,
 rather loosely tied together.
 And he hits you with this, surprisingly and suddenly,
 from nowhere.
 And you are expected to defend yourself
 with anything available, with the bedding, with the broom,
 with the pots and pans, just anything, defend.
 But the poor student never knows when the attack is coming,
 or what direction it's coming from,
 and he begins to get tense.
 And he begins to go around everywhere on sort of alert,
 you see, watching which direction it's coming from.
 And as he goes down a certain passage,
 feeling that the master is probably
 lurking around that corner, and he's
 all set to go for him, and he gets that practice sword,
 he suddenly gets hit from behind.
 So eventually, he gives up.
 There's absolutely no way of preparing for the attack.
 And so he just wanders around, feeling, well, if it hits,
 it's going to hit.
 And then he's ready to begin fencing.
 Because if you prepare for an attack
 from a specific direction, and it
 comes from some other direction, you
 have to withdraw from the direction in which you had
 expected it, and send your energy in another direction,
 and that takes time.
 So what you do is, you go around with a mind of no expectation.
 That is called mu-shin, or mun-en.
 This is a very important Zen expression.
 Mu-shin, it all most means an empty mind.
 You could also call it no heart, because the character shin
 means both heart and mind.
 But it isn't quite the same as our word heartless,
 as we use it.
 And it isn't the same as the word mindless,
 as we use it, meaning stupid.
 To be in the state of mu-shin is to have a mind like a mirror.
 And of this, the Taoist sage Zhuangzi said,
 "The perfect man employs his mind as a mirror.
 It grasps nothing, it refuses nothing,
 it receives but does not keep."
 And when anything comes in front of a mirror,
 it reflects it instantly.
 The mirror doesn't wait to reflect it.
 They also say, when the moon rises, all bodies of water
 instantly reflect the moon.
 I mean, they don't bother with physics
 about the speed of light or anything like that.
 It's irrelevant.
 Or they say, when you clap your hands,
 the sound issues immediately.
 It doesn't stop to consider whether it will issue.
 And so sparks from the flint, when it's struck,
 they issue instantly.
 But to do this, you can't try to be quick.
 See, if a Zen master corners you with a funny situation,
 and he puts you in a quandary, expecting
 spontaneous action from you, don't try to hurry.
 I know I've watched Suzuki wait a whole minute
 before answering, but he doesn't hesitate.
 He's not at all embarrassed by this wait.
 And he can answer with silence, just as well
 as with a formal response.
 The point is, do something.
 When two young Americans wanted to study Zen,
 they were taken by a Japanese monk
 to interview the master and act as interpreter.
 And one of them had had some practice.
 He knew a bit about it.
 And so after they'd had tea together and just discussed
 formalities, the master said in a very easy way,
 well, what do you gentlemen know about Zen?
 And one of these students threw his fan,
 which he hadn't unfolded.
 The fan was still folded up.
 He threw it straight at the master's face.
 The master slightly moved to one side,
 and the fan went right through the paper wall.
 And the master laughed like a child.
 That's the sort of game they get in.
 Once a master was going around through the forest
 with a group of students, and he picked up a tree branch.
 He noticed that one might pick up a tree branch.
 And suddenly he turned to one of his students and said,
 what is it?
 And he hesitated, so he hit him with the branch.
 And so another student was there,
 and he turned to him quickly.
 He said, what is it?
 He said, give it to me.
 I want to see it.
 I'll tell you.
 So the master tossed the branch to him,
 and he took it and hit the master.
 [LAUGHTER]
 Now, you may think all this is kind of rough stuff.
 But let me give you another story, which
 is on a rather different level.
 A certain Zen priest was having dinner at a big party.
 And the party was being served by a geisha girl who
 was so elegant and so skillful in serving
 that he suspected she might have had some Zen training.
 And so he decided to try her out.
 And he nodded to her, and she immediately came to his place
 and sat down in front of his little low table.
 See, everybody would be seated, probably,
 in front of low tables all around the room,
 and the geisha servants and people
 move up and down in the middle.
 And so she came down and sat down in front of him and bowed.
 And he said, I would like to give you a present.
 And she said, I would be most honored.
 Now, on the table, there are hibachi,
 which are little braziers with hot charcoal in.
 And you move the charcoal around with iron chopsticks.
 He took a piece of charcoal out in iron chopsticks
 and offered it to her.
 She had long, long sleeves on her kimono.
 And what she did was this.
 She wound them all around her hands and took the charcoal.
 Immediately got up and went to the kitchen,
 disposed of the charcoal, changed her robe,
 which had holes all the way through the sleeves,
 and came back.
 And she sat down in front of the master and bowed.
 And she said to him, I would like to give you a present.
 He said, I would be most honored.
 So she picked up the iron chopsticks
 and handed him the charcoal.
 And he pulled out a cigarette and said,
 that's just what I wanted, and lit the cigarette.
 [LAUGHTER]
 Now, here's the lesson.
 The master's spontaneity and being ready for that situation
 was the kind of quick thinking that a good comedian has,
 who, in a completely unprepared way,
 can make all sorts of jokes and turn any situation
 into a jest of some kind.
 There are all sorts of people who do that,
 people who are experts in kind of like Dorothy Parker,
 in that sort of repartee.
 But here it's been developed in a very fundamental way
 and to a very high degree.
 Now, the way in which it's developed, you see,
 requires a protected situation.
 Because if we all started to act on the spur of the moment
 without the slightest consideration or deliberation,
 everybody would think we were crazy.
 And people would avoid us and call the police and things
 like that.
 But what they do is this.
 They start you doing this in the context
 of a disciplined situation, where
 there are very rigid rules for most of the time,
 but there are certain instances at which all those rules go
 hang.
 And you're in a community which understands the game.
 Because the point is this.
 When you start acting spontaneously,
 you're not used to doing it.
 And therefore, your responses are
 unintelligent and inappropriate.
 But when you become used to doing this,
 and when it becomes second nature to you
 to act in the state of motion, of no mind or no deliberation,
 then your behavior has matured.
 And you find that you're accustomed to respond quite
 appropriately, as the Zen master did in lighting his cigarette
 from the charcoal.
 So also in learning the art of swordsmanship,
 when he has given up defending himself and preparing
 his mind for attack, then he's got a mirror mind.
 This is also likened to a vessel of water,
 like a wooden barrel.
 When you make a hole in the barrel,
 the water instantly flows out of the hole,
 because the water is always available to come out.
 It doesn't have to choose.
 And so you could also say that motion is what Krishnamurti
 calls choicelessness.
 And because you see, choice in this sense
 is not quite the same thing as decision.
 Choice means dithering.
 You know, there are some people who, before they start
 to write something down, they wiggle their pens a little.
 The pen dithers over the paper, and then they start to write.
 And so in the same way, a lot of people
 in the constantly in the life situation,
 they dither, because that dithering is anxiety.
 To be or not to be, that is the question.
 Well, there is no question about to be or not to be.
 See, because to be and not to be go together, as we saw.
 They arise mutually.
 So then, in the situation of the Zen community,
 safeguards are set up within which you can learn how
 to act without deliberation, which is, you see, in a sense,
 going back to the state of innocence.
 Now, it doesn't mean that you give up thinking.
 It doesn't mean that you become an anti-intellectual.
 You all can also learn-- and this
 is part of the later phases of Zen training--
 how to think spontaneously, how to deliberate spontaneously.
 The saying is, you see, stand or walk as you will,
 but whatever you do, don't wobble.
 [LAUGHTER]
 So this is our difficulty, because the human mind
 is a feedback system.
 Feedback has a peculiar susceptibility to nervousness.
 There was a young man who said, though,
 it seems that I know that I know, what I would like to see
 is the I that knows me when I know that I know that I know.
 [LAUGHTER]
 You see?
 Now, in this way, we think about thinking.
 We worry about worrying.
 And then when that really gets bad,
 you worry because you worry about worrying.
 Now, that is analogous exactly to the kinds of vibration
 that are set up in certain mechanical systems.
 For example, I did this trick on television once.
 I had the cameraman turn the camera on the monitor.
 The monitor is the television set in the studio
 where you see what you are doing.
 And so on the show, I said, now, I'm
 going to show you a picture of anxiety.
 Don't worry about your sets.
 There's not going to be anything wrong with your sets,
 so don't turn it off.
 Now, I said, Mr. Cameraman, will you please
 turn the camera on the monitor?
 He does that.
 Now, what does he do?
 He's taking a picture of taking a picture,
 all in the same system.
 And as you do that, the system starts going,
 like that, you see, and it makes a sense of a kind of oscillation.
 And you see on the screen all these jagged lines dancing across.
 And because the human being is such a peculiarly, beautifully organized nervous system,
 and has this tremendously subtle cortex,
 which is capable of all kinds of thinking about thinking,
 you can turn yourself on in the most extraordinary ways by, for example,
 getting earphones, which repeat what you say just a fraction of a second after you say it.
 Back to you, they delay it.
 And you can get an oscilloscope tied up with your own heartbeats,
 and get feedback through, in this way, so that you suddenly
 begin to see yourself behaving,
 and it completely balls you up because you wait for yourself to go on.
 But then you realize it's you doing it, but you can't wait on your heartbeat,
 you can't wait on what you say.
 And you get this sensation of going faster and faster and faster and faster
 until you just have to close the whole thing off.
 You'll go crazy.
 So that's what we're doing.
 And our civilization and our social institutions reflect this in hundreds of ways.
 And this would be true of any civilization,
 because all civilization is based on the development of consciousness and feedback.
 That is to say, the property of self-control,
 of being self-conscious, looking at what you've done,
 and then being able to criticize it and correct it.
 But who criticizes?
 Is the critic reliable?
 When you criticize yourself, who will criticize the critic?
 You see?
 Or to put it in the other way, "quis custodiae, ipsos custodiaes."
 Who will guard the guards themselves?
 Who will take care of the policemen?
 Who will govern the president?
 And that is the big problem.
 And when we get tied up in that problem,
 the Chinese got tied up in it because they were simply a very high order of civilization.
 So did the Japanese.
 There has to be a break.
 Somebody has to start throwing things.
 Otherwise everybody will go insane.
 So Zen functions in that culture as a way of liberation
 from the tangle of being too civilized.
 Now you see, in Japanese culture,
 people are tremendously concerned with propriety,
 with good manners, and with keeping up with the Joneses.
 One of the funniest things in the world is to watch Japanese people having a bowing contest.
 It's a very frequent thing when friends meet or take leave, they go, "Ahh!"
 And they bow and they bow and they respond,
 and it goes back and forth and see who gets the last one in
 because I'm more polite than you.
 And the worries about when somebody comes, you know,
 you visit a family, you always bring a gift.
 And they start worrying, "Is this gift suitable?
 Is it anything as good as the gift they last gave us?
 And is it right for the occasion?
 Have we thought about it enough?
 Is there some symbolism in this gift that connects with this person's name
 or their birthday or something like that?"
 And they think about these things interminably.
 And thus they cultivate it in the ordinary culture,
 has a great deal of social nervousness in it.
 People giggle.
 You often see girls who giggle and cover their mouths
 to say, "I'm not really giggling."
 All sorts of funny things happen
 because of this immense social awareness and nervousness.
 Now, Zen breaks that up.
 Only it does it in a way that has high artistry to it.
 So you see, let's just take the aesthetic domain for the moment.
 And you remember I was discussing yesterday one tea bowl.
 And you remember too that in the whole history of ceramics,
 the Chinese developed some of the most elegant work imaginable.
 You are probably aware, I don't see a specimen,
 of the great work of the Sung and Korean potters.
 Very often done in a jade-like green, the most gorgeous texture.
 It looked practically as if it was carved out of jade.
 Well, that led on, you see, to the high techniques of the Ming Dynasty
 with translucent porcelain, white clay, the most subtle designs of all.
 And that style went also to Japan.
 And the very, very rich people you read about in say, books like The Tale of Genji,
 and you see in a film, if you must see it, Chushengura,
 the story of the 47 Ronin.
 The lovely things they had around their houses were unbelievable.
 The lacquer, the boxes in pure gold, and oh, you know, it was delicious stuff.
 But then, it was just like having too much éclairs, and ice cream,
 and filet mignon, and cooked à la carême, you know,
 that French cook who made everything look like an oriental palace.
 And now what happened?
 The people who practiced Zen suddenly got an eye for the beauty of the ordinary.
 There were two reasons for this.
 One was that they became fascinated with what happened spontaneously,
 what pattern a brush would make when handled roughly and the hairlines were shown.
 They also, because they practiced Zazen, which is sitting quietly,
 not thinking of anything special, but having a completely open mind,
 that puts you into a state where you get much better eyes and ears than you ordinarily have.
 And you start really seeing things.
 So, you know that famous haiku poem, "The old pond, a frog jumps in, plop."
 In Japanese, that plop is "mizo no otto," "sound of the water."
 And there's another poem just like it, "In the dark forest, a berry drops, the sound of the water."
 Somebody suddenly realized, you see, just the sound of the water is marvelous.
 That's all.
 Or they found that they kept getting in very, very cheap Korean rice bowls,
 the poorest, cheapest kind for peasants to eat out of.
 And suddenly it struck one of these Zen masters that that was an incomparably beautiful object.
 Nobody had seen this before.
 They also had the simplest wooden ladles, bamboo and then a stick in it, for use in the kitchen.
 And one day somebody noticed that this ordinary, everyday kitchen utensil was just lovely.
 And so in the same way, they found that it was quite as satisfactory
 to listen to the kettle boiling as to listen to an elaborate concert.
 So what did they do?
 They started through, particularly a man called Sen-no-rikyu,
 to give parties for very small, few guests in shacks, little huts in the garden,
 made of very primitive materials, such as mud walls.
 And where they would go and sit, and out of the simplest utensils,
 carefully chosen by a superb artist,
 they would simply sit and enjoy the uncomplicated life.
 And so was born the tea ceremony.
 Now look at that, you see, in the historical context, that's terribly important.
 It was a going back to the primitive, after people were sick of too much civilization.
 And yet, it was going on to the primitive, rather than back.
 Because the people who selected all those things,
 they knew the whole tradition of their civilization, their culture.
 They weren't barbarians.
 What's happened today is this.
 Tea ceremony is essentially something to enjoy.
 And there are a few men left who know how to serve tea ceremony.
 And it's an extremely congenial, quiet get-together,
 with easy conversation, simple and unostentatious manners,
 and really lovely things to look at.
 I was present at a tea ceremony celebrated by a Zen monk,
 who happens to be an American.
 And he is a man who has done a lot of mountaineering.
 And he has, therefore, with him at all times,
 the sort of equipment that you take on camping in the mountains,
 because he does a lot of climbing in Japan.
 And I said to him, "Won't you...
 This afternoon would be very nice to have a tea ceremony.
 You did it once before here, and it was so pleasant.
 Would you serve it again?"
 He said, "Yes, by all means."
 Before he had served tea ceremony in the style that Zen monks do it,
 which is rather simple and direct, and much more comfortable
 than all these well-educated ladies who are on...
 tittering about it, and are on tiptoe, and nervous,
 and hoping they won't make a mistake, and all that kind of thing.
 It's just dreadful.
 So he suddenly came in with a small primer stove,
 set that down.
 Then he had an old paint pot, which had inside it an aluminum mug.
 He set that down.
 He then proceeded to take the aluminum mug out,
 pour water into the paint pot, and set that on the primer stove.
 But he ritually pumped up the primer stove.
 He did everything in the style of tea ceremony,
 but this was a dirty old primer stove.
 And suddenly the thing began to flame like the god Fudo.
 And he mixed the tea in the traditional way with the whisk,
 had all the perfect, lovely manners, handing us the aluminum cup.
 And we got into a long...
 It's a custom after the tea ceremony, after you've drunk,
 to pass all the utensils around for inspection.
 This is exactly what happened.
 And we found that the aluminum cup had the year 1945
 stamped on it for some reason.
 We got into a discussion about styles of aluminum cups made in 1945.
 And it was the funniest thing, but it was a complete makeover
 of the tea ceremony into the modern idiom.
 Of course, the tea drunk in tea ceremony is that powdered green tea,
 which you don't steep like you make ordinary tea.
 You whisk it, and mix it with a small amount of hot water into a froth.
 And it's called liquid jade.
 And it's a bit of an acquired taste for most Westerners.
 It tastes a little bit like a mixture of mate tea and Guinness.
 But when you get to know it, it's very invigorating and very awakening.
 And if you make up a strong mixture of it, it's a good thing to use
 if you want to stay awake all night and do work.
 And so you see, the legend was that Zen monks started this interest in tea
 because they needed it to stay awake during their practice of meditation.
 And it's said that Bodhidharma, whom I drew for you yesterday,
 and he's always drawn with eyes that are wide open.
 Why?
 Because he hasn't got any eyelids.
 Once when he was meditating, he fell asleep, and he was furious
 and cut his eyelids off.
 And as they dropped on the ground, up came the first tea plants.
 That's why they have leaves shaped like eyelids,
 and are to be drunk ever thereafter for staying awake.
 So the plant of Buddhism, the tea is the Buddhist drink,
 just like wine is the Christian drink, coffee is the Islamic drink,
 and milk the Hindu drink.
 Every religion has its drink.
 So then around this kind of appreciation, born of stillness,
 and the delight in seeing how nature takes its course,
 came the entire cult of Zen art, with its special kind of creativity,
 its special ceramics, its special calligraphic styles,
 and its special gardens, which are the controlled accident.
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