[Music]
 As I showed you yesterday on that other tea bowl, this is a water jar.
 And they like to leave the bottom unglazed.
 But look, you see, how the glaze has been allowed to run.
 It's what we would call not neat at all.
 And you watch somebody make one of these.
 And I have watched a man just pick up the plate,
 and as he applies the design of the glaze,
 he just goes whoosh with a brush,
 and lets it drop on, and it's done.
 There's another man who glazes by wood smoke,
 and in his kiln he may put about 1,100 pieces.
 And he wraps them in straw.
 And wherever the straw touches, it leaves a splash of orange color against a purple background.
 Now, you see, the straw arranges itself according to the nature of straw.
 It doesn't follow strict human direction.
 And the fascination is when they open up that kiln and bring the things out,
 they look eagerly to see what has the straw done.
 So this principle of letting glaze run to see what will happen
 is wu-wei, this is non-interference.
 This is mu-shin also.
 No purpose, or it can also be translated,
 no specific intent.
 And now, of course, you see, sometimes this doesn't work.
 And the master picks it up and says,
 "That's not very interesting," and rejects it.
 What are the canons of taste which decide
 whether he will accept one of these accidents or reject it?
 Because here an additional principle of control enters.
 See, say in the practice of calligraphy,
 a man may sit down with a huge pile of paper in front of him
 and do piece after piece after piece, and if it isn't just right, he throws it away.
 So he eventually makes a selection that comes out.
 There's a famous story of a Zen master who was doing calligraphy,
 and he had a very smart monk standing beside him who was his assistant.
 And the monk said, "Uh-uh," to each one as he did it,
 "You can do better than that."
 "Oh, no, no, come now, you know much better than that."
 This master got more and more furious,
 but the monk had to go out to the benjo, to the toilet of the monk.
 And he thought, "Quick, while he's away, he did it."
 And the monk came back and looked at him and he said, "A masterpiece."
 So there's this element of selection, you see.
 Now, what determines this?
 How do you know?
 Or another example of this, there was a tea caddy,
 porcelain tea caddy, not porcelain, but clay.
 And when Senor Rikyu was having tea ceremony,
 he saw this tea caddy and made no comment on it.
 And the owner was so disappointed that he smashed it.
 But one of his friends picked the broken pieces out of the trash can
 and took them to a mender.
 He said, "Look, mend this with gold."
 And he put therefore gold cement and put this caddy back together.
 And so it had all over its surface spidery lines of gold.
 And when Rikyu saw that, he was just enchanted.
 And it became one of the most valuable tea caddies in the Japanese collections.
 Spidery lines of gold following just the apparently chance marks of a smash.
 There was a competition at the Art Institute in the University of Chicago
 in which it was a sculpture class,
 and the competition was that each student was given a cubic foot of plaster of Paris.
 And they said, "Now do something with it."
 Well, the prize was won by a woman who looked at this cube and said,
 "It has no character. It doesn't want to be anything."
 So she flung it on the floor and smashed it all up.
 I mean, she made dents in it and banged off the corners and put cracks in it and things.
 Then she looked at it again.
 She said, "Ah, now I know what it wants to be."
 And so she followed the grain in it, as it were, made by all these cracks,
 and produced this marvelous piece of sculpture.
 You have in this area a very ingenious sculptor by the name of Donald Horde
 who is a master at following the grain in wood and actually making the grain.
 The grain seems to suggest to him the muscles and the flow of the kind of body that he's making.
 Well, that's the thing.
 So when a master decides whether the accident came off, what he wants is this.
 He wants the thing to be the perfect harmony of man and nature, of order and randomness.
 Now, this is a curious thing in the human mind.
 When we play games, we get most fascination out of those games which satisfactorily combine skill and chance.
 Games like bridge, poker, have a sort of admirable combination of these two elements.
 And we can go on playing those games again and again and again,
 because you don't feel completely at the mercy of chance, as you do with dice, unless you cheat,
 and you don't feel completely at the mercy of skill, as you do with chess,
 or especially with a game like three-dimensional chess.
 So there's a sort of optimum middle where order and randomness go together.
 Well, that's what this man is looking for.
 He's looking for the optimal combination, you see.
 Things that are artwork like Persian miniatures or the jewelry of Cellini and Chinese porcelain,
 is too much skill, too much order.
 It's like those houses you go into where you don't put an ash in the tray
 because everything is so clean and everything is so tidy, you don't touch it.
 One prefers a house, you see, that looks a little lived in,
 that is more genial, more comfortable, somehow invites you to sit down
 and even put your feet on the table.
 Whereas on the other extreme, some kind of pad where everything is covered in dirt
 and filthy clothes are thrown in the corner and, you know, people are all...
 paint all over them and so on.
 That's the other extreme. We don't want that.
 But that's that curious thing in the middle.
 Now, the most difficult thing is to hold to the middle.
 It's like walking a tightrope.
 And that's why the path of Buddhism is called the razor's edge.
 Because you see what happened when all this kind of work,
 in the course of history, became fashionable.
 People began to affect these styles.
 For example, when Sesshu, the great master, ink painter, worked,
 he would sometimes take a handful of straw and paint with that instead of a brush
 in order to get the sort of rough effect that he wanted.
 But later on there came people who could take an ordinary paintbrush
 and so exactly ink that brush
 that it would give precisely the messy effect that they had in mind.
 They would also be able to ink a brush in such a way, and this is terribly decadent,
 they could dab grapes on a vine
 and have dark ink where the shadow was supposed to be
 and no ink at all where the highlight was supposed to be.
 That's when they started getting mixed up with Western ideas about shadows and perspective.
 They didn't have that earlier.
 But they were so skilled in the handling of ink that they would do this sort of thing
 and they would imitate, you see, all the so-called rough natural effects of the great Zen artists.
 And so today in Japan, a younger generation of artists has decided it's time to break all that up.
 If we imagine, for example, haiku parties, the writing of haiku poetry.
 Basho, who was the great 17th century master of haiku, said, "Get a three-foot child to write haiku,"
 because they are the sort of direct, guileless things that children would say.
 But now there are magazines devoted to haiku poetry, where in every issue there will be 10,000 haikus
 written by people all over the country, and they get so stilted and so affected that one wished one had never heard of haiku.
 The same thing is starting over here.
 And you should see the entries we get in these haiku competitions that Japan Airlines and other people sponsor.
 But it all after a while becomes dated, stilted, and so somewhere again the new thing has to break out,
 which is always coming up, but there's no formula, you see, for fixing it so that you can do it again and again and again,
 because the moment you start doing it again and again and again, it isn't it anymore.
 The real thing has escaped.
 Do you remember some time ago there was a fashion for having wrought iron fish, just the outline of a fish?
 Some artist originally, you know, put this fish together and it looked great.
 But then you suddenly found them in every gift shop and dime store, and they looked perfectly terrible.
 So this is the mysterious thing.
 Well, not only in the arts, but in lifestyles, in everything, when you start saying, "What is the technique for getting this thing?"
 And people say, "Well, this is it."
 It's gone.
 Same in education.
 Same in music.
 The moment you start teaching something, what question are you asking?
 How could we, is there some method whereby in our schools we could produce from the music department,
 every graduation ceremony, three musicians of the statue of Bach or Mozart?
 Now, if we knew how to do that, that knowledge would prevent us from being surprised by the work of these people.
 Because we would know how it's done.
 And when you know how something is done, it doesn't surprise you.
 That's why there's a Zen poem which says, "If you ask where the flowers come from, even the God of spring doesn't know."
 Certainly the God of spring would be supposed to know where the flowers come from, but the truth of the matter is he doesn't.
 And so in the same way, if you ask the Lord God, "How do you create the universe?"
 He said, "I have no special method."
 And this is known in Zen as a very difficult, this is the most difficult virtue to attain.
 So many of these things begin with Mu.
 Buji.
 Buji.
 It means nothing special.
 It means no business, no artificiality, in American current real cool.
 So, Buji is where something doesn't stand out like a sore thumb.
 But it is absolutely different from being modest.
 A Buji person may be immodest in the sense that if he knows he can do something well, he just says he can.
 He doesn't go on all sorts of blushing violet techniques.
 Buji you see is this mysterious quality of nothing special, no special method.
 Because if there is, let me repeat, if we do know the method and we know it infallibly, it ceases to be interesting.
 There are no surprises left.
 And the moment the element of surprise is gone, the zest of life is gone.
 That you see is why it's very difficult to teach Zen to yourself.
 Because you can't easily surprise yourself.
 The essence you see of this kind of spontaneity is response to a surprise.
 So the master, you don't know what he's going to do, and he surprises you.
 It's like trying to cure hiccups.
 Very difficult to cure yourself because when you pat yourself on the back you know when you're going to do it.
 So you're all ready for it.
 When somebody else comes up and slams you on the back, then that's a surprise, and what you needed was a surprise.
 Or it's like jokes.
 What makes you laugh about a joke is the element of surprise in it.
 That's why jokes aren't funny after they've been explained.
 So in the same way, all these Zen stories, if explained, have no effect.
 They're intended to produce what I would call metaphysical laughter.
 But this has to be a surprise.
 And so as to be surprised,
 well, there's no way of premeditating it.
 So you see, if you read, for example, there's a book out here called Zen by Oyegon Herigel,
 who studied archery. Many of you have probably read this book.
 He had to learn to pull the bowstring in the manner of the Japanese archer,
 and let it go, but not on purpose.
 He had to let it go without thinking first, "I'll let it go," and then let go.
 He had to let it go, not on purpose.
 Now, that really bugged Herigel.
 How do you do something not on purpose, especially if you're aiming at a target?
 Well, the whole point is, if you think before you shoot, it's too late.
 The target's moved.
 That's why we have a thing like beginner's luck.
 You see, if you simply point at something like that,
 if your finger was a gun, I would probably have hit the light switch.
 And so you get a person who's naive about a gun, will pick a gun up and bang,
 and the thing will drop dead.
 I'll never forget the first time I ever used a slingshot.
 A friend of mine was with me, and he was aiming away and not missing,
 and I just picked it up, ping, and it hit. But I couldn't do it again.
 You get a certain naturalness there.
 So there was a master by the name of Icku, who was a great leg puller,
 and he had in front of his house a very gnarled pine tree,
 one of those things that's contorted, and they loved this kind of thing.
 He put a notice up by it, said, "I, Icku, will pay 100 yen,"
 which was a fair amount of money in those days,
 "to anyone who can see this tree straight."
 Well, soon there was a whole crowd of people around that tree,
 lying on the ground and twisting their necks and looking at it from all sorts of angles,
 and there was absolutely no way of seeing the tree with a straight trunk.
 But Icku had a friend who was a priest of another sect,
 and the smart boy went over to see this friend and said,
 "What about this, Mr. Icku's tree?"
 "Oh," said the other priest, "it's perfectly simple."
 He said, "You go and tell him the answer to seeing the tree straight is to look straight at it."
 So this man went over to Icku and said, "I claim the reward."
 He said, "You look straight at it."
 And Icku looked him in a funny way and said,
 he forked out the 100 yen and gave it to him and said,
 "I think you've been talking to Rosen down the street."
 Now in that way, you see, just look straight at it.
 In other words, here's the bowstring, let go of it.
 All this fimble-fambling, minble-mambling, jumble-humble about the right technique of letting go of it,
 let go of it, dammit!
 But that's very difficult.
 It's as if I would say to you now, everybody, let's be unselfconscious.
 And so finally, in desperation, you at last learn to let go of the thing,
 which was what you were supposed to do all the time.
 And then, one is again as a child.
 This is original innocence.
 So, this is the meaning of the person who was asked,
 "What do you do here in this Zen institution?"
 He said, "We eat when hungry and we sleep when tired."
 Well, he said, "That's being just like everybody else. They all do that."
 He said, "They do not."
 When they eat, they don't eat.
 But they think of all sorts of extraneous matters.
 When they're tired, they don't sleep, they dream all kinds of dreams.
 Nobody ever transforms himself into an enlightened pattern of life
 by dividing himself in two pieces, good I and bad me,
 wherein good I preaches to bad me and tries to make me over,
 as if a human being were divided, were like a rider on a horse.
 And the rider is the soul and the horse is the body,
 or the rider is reason and the horse is passion.
 The rider is control and the horse is the uncontrolled.
 In other words, we've got the opposition of the ego
 allied with the super-ego, trying to ride the ego aligned with the id.
 And Freud's metaphors and Freud's construction of the sort of psychic anatomy of mankind
 is really derived from Plato,
 with the image of the soul riding the animal horse.
 Now, all this is a total failure,
 because there is a secret connection, as it were, a sort of back stairs,
 between good I and bad me.
 Good I can look down at bad me and say,
 "Uh-uh-uh-uh-uh, you oughtn't to be like that."
 But all the time bad me is sending its energy up the back stairs to good I,
 and motivating good I to go, "Uh-uh-uh," at bad me,
 but for the reasons of bad me.
 I ought to be better, because then I could be more proud of myself.
 So, in this way, there is something about spirituality, self-conscious spirituality,
 all kinds of religion involving preaching and moralizing
 and talking to oneself in a split and divided way,
 good I against bad me, that is profoundly phony.
 One of the main streams of Buddhist way of life
 to be what one might call the religion of non-religion,
 to find, to demonstrate, to convey what is the most highly spiritual
 through what is the most everyday and ordinary,
 and to make no division between the two.
 So, you might say the more everyday it is, the more truly spiritual it is.
 But the more it appears to be spiritual, that is to say,
 something different from, aside from, apart from everyday life,
 the more false that kind of spirituality will be.
 And this reaches a peak in the history of Japanese culture in the 17th century,
 when in this country there were three, no, I'll say four, superbly important men.
 Basho, the haiku poet;
 Wankei, a Zen teacher;
 Hakuin, another Zen teacher;
 and Sengai, a Zen painter.
 And I want to say something about the work of these four men
 and their genius and the movement in Japanese history which they represented,
 which you might call the democratization of the esoteric.
 And there's something about this of extraordinary interest to Americans,
 because for good, for better or for worse,
 we as Americans live in a culture in which there is nothing esoteric.
 There are no secrets, except those things which cannot be understood.
 In a way, they are always esoteric.
 Only a few people can understand them, and they don't need to be guarded,
 because even if you, for example, you publish a textbook on nuclear physics,
 and only very few people can understand it.
 But in the sense that it is published, it is no longer esoteric.
 In our world, for example, a teacher tries his utmost to make himself understood.
 He knocks himself out to make his message assimilable without tears.
 But as I've explained to you, in Oriental cultures,
 teachers expect the student to make the effort to attain the understanding.
 So a teacher is difficult, and you must put yourself out to understand what he says.
 He's not going to make it easy for you,
 because of the feeling that what comes to you too easily doesn't really come to you.
 Now, however, there was in 17th century Japan a movement among the people you might call esoteric,
 to make their understanding available to the masses.
 In a sense, arising out of Buddhist compassion, the idea that the aim in life of a bodhisattva
 is to bring enlightenment to as many other sentient beings as possible.
 And always the problem is, you see, when you've popularized something,
 how to do it without making it vulgar, cheap, watered down, insipid.
 And these four men were in their own quite different ways geniuses at doing it.
 Let's start with Basho.
 Basho didn't invent haiku poetry, but he brought it to a certain degree of development,
 whereby it was possible for ordinary people who were not very literate to become poets.
 Now, to understand the situation in which Basho arose,
 you must realize that Japanese poetry grows on the tree of Chinese tradition,
 and that by the 17th century, Chinese poetry was as difficult to follow as, say, T.S. Eliot is today.
 Now, to understand T.S. Eliot's poems, "The Four Quartets,"
 you have to know an enormous amount of world literature and some very, very obscure books,
 because T.S. Eliot's "Four Quartets" is a complex texture of allusions to other works,
 and you have to know what these other works are in order to get the point.
 So this is poetry written strictly for literati,
 and the Chinese brought this to a high degree of perfection,
 so that, you see, poets were writing only for other poets.
 They weren't getting anything across to people who just, as it were, spoke everyday language.
 And so the development... This happened also in Japan.
 If you read, say, a novel like "The Tale of Genji,"
 and read all about the light-footed amours of those very, very cultivated people,
 and with their little poems and things, the subtle kinds of illusion they had.
 And also, when tea ceremony became over-refined,
 you know, there were suggestions in the shade of a cup,
 which was intended to remind you of something.
 You know, a complicated set of associations, which the master planned,
 and you were supposed to get the point.
 And so people indulged in all kinds of fantastic one-upmanship
 in seeing who did or didn't recognize the subtle chains of association,
 recognition of which depended upon a great deal of learning.
 And you see what that is? That's a very elaborate game.
 And the intent and the object of the game is not really delight,
 but seeing who can out-associate whom.
 So these 17th century masters rebelled against all that kind of thing.
 And they wanted tea and poetry and painting and zen
 to be appreciated for itself,
 and to be appreciated by anybody with human equipment.
 So Basho said, "In order to write haiku,
 you should be taught by a child three feet high,
 because a statement which such a child would make
 would be a poem, and a profound poem,
 to the degree, and especially to the degree,
 that what the child said was a simple image,
 and had in it no kind of philosophizing,
 but was just that vivid statement, which children do.
 You light the fire, and then I'll show you something wonderful,
 a great ball of snow.
 That's a haiku poem.
 And all these poems, each one simply takes an image,
 and says no more.
 A brushwood gate, and for a lock, this snail.
 Leaf fallen, flying back to the branch, butterfly.
 You see, there's something a little bit clever about those ones,
 and for that very reason, they are not the best kind of haiku.
 Better still is something like this.
 In the dense fog, what is being shouted between hill and boat?
 You see the image of a river estuary,
 and you can't see anything, but you know there's someone down there in the boat,
 talking to someone up on the hill, and you can't hear the conversation.
 You can't quite put your finger on.
 The quality, which in Japanese aesthetics is called "yugen."
 "Yugen" made up of two Chinese characters,
 both of which mean "the dark, the deep, and the mysterious."
 But "yugen" is not like a great abyss
 full of black clouds and lightning, in which there might be a dragon.
 That's not "yugen."
 "Yugen" is the subtly mysterious,
 and is described by the poet Sayami
 as to wander on and on in a great forest without thought of return,
 to watch flying geese appear and be hidden in the clouds,
 to watch distant fishing boats on the ocean disappear behind islands.
 And what in all these images is the connecting link?
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