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 So in Haiku poetry, we would feel, with Haiku,
 from a Western standpoint, that these poems are unfinished.
 They are simply titles.
 They are simply first lines of something
 that could go on to elaborate and express everything.
 But in this kind of artistry, one doesn't express everything.
 One leaves the best part unsaid.
 Because the work of the poet is not simply
 to impress everybody else with how clever he is
 and leave them speechless, but to evoke in the listener
 something.
 In exactly the same way, the art of the painter
 in the tradition of Sung Chinese painting
 is to leave something to the beholder's imagination.
 Hence, what is called one corner painting.
 Say, a painter like Ma Yuan, or Bayan as he's known in Japanese,
 is a master of one corner painting.
 He indicates a line of hills somewhere near the top.
 And down at the bottom, there is a single drifting boat
 and a fisherman.
 This is all there is.
 The path comes to an end in the parsley.
 Now, you've got to go back to childhood to understand that.
 Don't you remember how, as a child,
 you loved to explore paths and to get right down
 among the stalks of grasses and weeds
 and see where it all goes?
 And how sometimes one of the eternal child stories
 is that you were one day walking along a little lane,
 and you discovered a door in a wall
 that you had never seen before.
 And you opened it, and it led into a magical garden
 where all the bushes were covered in jewels.
 And there were marvelous birds and fantastic songs.
 And you came out, because you had
 to get home in time for dinner.
 And the next day, you looked for that door again,
 but you couldn't find it anywhere.
 And yet, you knew it was there.
 It was just between this fence and that fence.
 But today, it isn't there.
 And yet, somehow, it always is there.
 And so for every child, there is always
 a kind of a funny place that leads on to somewhere else.
 And you don't figure out exactly where it leads,
 because that would spoil it.
 You mustn't know.
 So all this haiku poetry and this kind of painting,
 which the song artists so marvelously mastered,
 is to evoke that sense of what I will just
 call possibility or potentiality without actually filling
 in any details.
 And that's real magic.
 This is the way in which to suggest the abysmally evil.
 And it's likewise the way to suggest
 the ineffably beautiful.
 Don't fill in the details.
 Indicate.
 Don't explain.
 And so let's take some more examples.
 I want you to think of Ryoanji Garden.
 You've all seen that.
 One thing that is most important about Japanese gardens
 is that they are very simple.
 One thing that is most important about Japanese gardens
 is the background in which you find them.
 You can't take Ryoanji, as people have attempted to do,
 and reconstruct it in Brooklyn, unless at the same time
 you take the background.
 And that's going to be pretty difficult to do.
 Now what is that background?
 The back of the garden.
 Rather a low wall, but just high enough
 because it lies on the crest of a slope that beyond it
 goes down.
 And then beyond the wall, all you see is trees.
 So too, in many of the gardens around the temples here,
 you will see over the wall perhaps a roof.
 And then beyond that roof, treetops.
 And those treetops, although we are
 in the middle of a dense city, somehow
 suggest that outside that garden is a forest.
 There's something else.
 You know the quality of sky as you see it
 over the tops of hills that lie between you and the ocean?
 There's something very distant in the blue of that sky,
 suggesting miles and miles and miles,
 and gulls and pelicans drifting away into the distance.
 Openness.
 Something that, in other words, your spirit goes out into
 and has nowhere to land.
 Now all that kind of quality is Yugen.
 And the trick is to evoke the mood of Yugen,
 a certain sort of mysterious suggestiveness,
 by very simple means, which don't actually pin anything
 down.
 So that was the point of haiku poetry,
 to put this possibility within reach of people who
 had within themselves the capability, the sensitivity,
 to appreciate the Yugen feeling, or another feeling that
 is called Sabi.
 Sabi is akin to Yugen, but it's a certain kind
 of solitariness or loneliness, good loneliness.
 Not the loneliness which plucks at the heartstrings
 and makes you long for friends.
 That's not Sabi.
 Sabi is when you love to be alone
 and are at peace in this loneliness.
 And so there is also another mood still akin to this,
 which in Japanese is called Aware.
 It's spelt like our word aware, only pronounced Aware.
 And this, like Yugen and Sabi, is difficult to translate,
 but it's a sense of sadness, but delightful sadness.
 There's a poem which says, "Even in the mind
 of a no-mind man, there is a Ware when the snipe leaves
 the marsh on an autumn evening."
 And you know, late in autumn, when all nature is foggy
 and cold and the leaves have almost gone,
 and the last sign of life, the bird, the snipe, leaves
 and goes somewhere else, perhaps further south.
 It's all gone.
 When the last geese migrate and winter sets in,
 it would say, "Even in the mind of a no-mind man,"
 that is to say a Buddha who has no, you might say,
 egocentric feelings, "even in such a person,
 there comes a clutch of sadness."
 Aware is a sort of nostalgia.
 And we feel it very strongly in all the poetry of transience.
 You know, this is one of the greatest themes of poetry.
 How the world is floating away.
 Nothing can be possessed.
 And we are all dissolving smoke.
 And poets keep on at this.
 So do preachers.
 But in what different ways?
 The preacher will say, "Vanity of vanities, all is vanity."
 But in the next moment, he will burst into poetry.
 You know that chapter in Ecclesiastes
 where everything is described as passing away.
 How exquisite it is.
 And in Shakespeare, the same magic is evoked.
 Our revels now are ended.
 These are actors, as I foretold you, are all spirits,
 and are melted into air, into thin, thin air.
 And like the baseless fabric of this vision,
 the cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces,
 the solemn temples, the great globe itself,
 I, all which it inherits, shall dissolve.
 And like this insubstantial pageant faded,
 leave not a rack behind.
 We are such stuff as dreams are made on.
 And our little life is rounded with a sleep.
 What's going on?
 From one point of view, you see, the poet
 seems to be putting everything down.
 And to say, it's all an illusion, it's all a vision,
 and there's nothing.
 And yet, at the same time, he borrows from this vision.
 He borrows the beautiful imagery of cloud-capped towers,
 and gorgeous palaces, and solemn temples.
 And from the illusion itself, he weaves his spell.
 Omar Khayyam, which is today Fitzgerald's Omar Khayyam,
 is a bit corny to ears trained to modern poetry.
 But to the Victorian ear, it had the same magic.
 The earthly hope men set their hearts upon turns ashes,
 or it prospers.
 And a non-like snow upon the desert's dusty face,
 lighting a little hour or two, is gone.
 Now, Oriental poetry is full of this theme.
 Haiku, every kind of Buddhist sutra, and so on,
 is full of the theme of the disappearing world, ukiyo-e,
 the floating world that vanishes.
 And there's one kind of person who says, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh,
 don't you look at those beautiful girls,
 because in a few years, they're going to be ugly old ladies.
 Don't you take delight in this delicious food,
 because in a few years, you're going
 to have chronic stomach ulcers and bad digestion.
 Don't you dissipate with singing and dancing,
 because not long from now, you'll
 have rheumatism or arthritis and a sore throat,
 and you won't be able to enjoy it anymore.
 But another kind of person is saying, yep, it all dissolves.
 It all goes away.
 And the beautiful girls will be old ladies,
 and the handsome young men will be crones and eventually skulls.
 And isn't that great?
 What's wrong with skeletons?
 When you pick up on the beach a shell of some fish,
 and you say, no fish are to home anymore.
 All the flesh in this bone has dissolved,
 and you've got just the bone.
 And you say, wow, look at that.
 Isn't that great?
 A skull is just as beautiful as a seashell, a bone which
 a brain once lived in, a bone which jeweled eyes once shone
 from, but still look at that white skull.
 It's really a marvelous thing.
 Only we've been taught wrong associations with it,
 taught that the going away of life is against life,
 whereas as a matter of fact, life is entirely something
 that always goes away.
 Going away, dissolving, is the same thing as living.
 Only if our associations get crossed up,
 and we are taught that dying is against life,
 then we can't live.
 Dying is the same thing as living.
 And if you see that, that everything becoming bones,
 everything turning back into the soil, becoming manure,
 you see, that is life.
 The loved one must be allowed to dissolve and not be clung to.
 So this is why the theme of transience and dissolution
 is really one of the mainstays of poetic beauty.
 And the poet is a genius and a compassionate bodhisattva
 to us all.
 When he takes the thing that we dread, that is to dissolve,
 and shows us that dissolution is the heart of beauty
 and the heart of life.
 And this is what the mood of aware in haiku
 and in painting and in poetry evokes.
 Now, I've got, I'm afraid, a rather long way
 from the rest of the gentlemen I started to talk about.
 But in taking next, say, Sengai--
 Sengai was a Zen master who made the greatest thing
 of marvelous bad paintings.
 In a way, you might say of Sengai that he couldn't paint,
 nor could he write.
 His writing is like a child's writing,
 and his paintings are caricatures.
 And yet they're not.
 There's something about him that is extremely humorous.
 He enjoys always a joke on himself of how badly he writes
 and how badly he paints, and he gets away with it.
 In fact, he became so famous in the 17th century
 that people started to copy Sengai,
 thinking that it was a cinch, you know?
 Anybody could paint like Sengai.
 Like some people look at a modern abstract painting
 and say, well, my child could do better than that.
 And there was one painter in Kyoto
 who was making quite a lot of money
 by forging Sengai paintings and selling them.
 And one day, Sengai came to visit him.
 And he brought with him a furoshiki
 with a package inside.
 And he said to this man, I have brought you my seals.
 Because if you would put-- your forgeries of my paintings
 are so good that if you would actually put my own seals
 on them, they would be perfect.
 But he said, excuse me if occasionally I
 may borrow them, because I might need them myself.
 Now, what is Sengai doing?
 He's a man who has been greatly collected,
 but who painted for the joy of painting and not to be shown.
 That is to say, he had no ambitions
 to be hung in a gallery or a museum.
 He just liked to draw.
 And so he's trying to say, in order to be a painter,
 you don't have to be shown in a gallery.
 And if that's why you paint, that you
 paint to be shown in a gallery, you
 are not going to be a genuine painter.
 Has it ever occurred to you that today, people
 who want to be shown in museums--
 and that's their supreme ambition in painting--
 are doing a very odd thing?
 See, a museum is kind of a morgue.
 That's why I haven't, on this tour,
 done very much museum viewing.
 I'd rather tried to show you works of art
 in their natural and convenient setting.
 Because only professional professionals
 paint for museums.
 Real artists paint to have their paintings to live with,
 to put in a house, to paint a screen that is actually
 going to be used for part of the furniture of a room.
 Painting, in other words, is something
 as useful in its own way as plumbing.
 It makes a gorgeous house.
 It isn't made just to be shown, to be a fad,
 to be a sort of thing to be talked about,
 and to have books written about it,
 and to have art historians going cluck, cluck, cluck, and so on.
 The moment it becomes that, it becomes the same kind
 of thing as poetry, which can't be understood,
 unless you know the illusions.
 It becomes academic painting.
 So Sengai restores to 17th century Japanese art,
 painting that you can do not to be a little fake gallery
 artist, but to thoroughly enjoy yourself with a brush.
 And so likewise with Zen.
 Zen, too, could become too clerical.
 And it does so become, you know, with professional Zen.
 I was discussing this with a good Western Zen student
 a few days ago.
 And she was saying, you know, if you stay around a teacher
 too long, he starts to get worried about you.
 That is to say, if you are not going to be a professional,
 if you're not going to be a teacher yourself,
 you're not going to be a priest, you're just a lay student
 of Zen.
 And if you go year after year after year back to this guy,
 he starts to get troubled and says,
 you are addicted to medicine.
 It's becoming a bad habit.
 And somehow you have to get rid of Zen.
 So wherever these things become professional,
 people lose their spirit.
 And so there were these two other men
 in the 17th century who, in quite different ways,
 helped, made it possible for Zen understanding
 to spread beyond a sort of clerical circle.
 Hakuin did it by one method, a bankai by another.
 And very interesting results arise from this.
 Hakuin was an extraordinarily clever teacher.
 And he systematized the Koan system in such a way
 that it could be very conveniently handled.
 And he had 80 students who became accomplished Zen
 masters.
 That was considered absolutely extraordinary,
 because before it had been felt that one Zen master would have
 only one or two really good students who would
 be his spiritual descendants.
 That in this age of the Kali Yuga,
 when everything is falling apart,
 you couldn't possibly expect more than that.
 So Hakuin, by his very ingenious but rigorous discipline--
 he was a martinet.
 He really was.
 But he encouraged many young Japanese
 to go through this mill that he put them through.
 And by somehow pepping them up and challenging them
 with a very vigorous discipline, he
 got 80 people to succeed him.
 Now, Bankai did exactly the opposite.
 Bankai taught Zen mainly to farmers.
 He was the roshi at Myoshinji in Kyoto for many years.
 And he taught to the simplest people
 and said to understand Zen, you don't really
 have to do anything.
 If you try to attain satori, it's
 like a person trying to wash off blood with blood.
 What you have to understand is your--
 difficult to put in English-- but your unborn mind.
 This expression in Japanese, husho.
 Husho means not manifest.
 That which hasn't arisen into the world of appearances.
 And he said, because of your unborn mind,
 when you hear a crow squawk and when you hear a bell ring,
 you know instantly, without any premeditation
 or without having to stop to think what has happened.
 So one day there was a Nichiren priest.
 Nichiren shu is a very belligerent form of Buddhism.
 It's like Jehovah's Witnesses in Buddhism.
 And there was a Nichiren priest heckling
 Bankai when he was talking and saying out
 on the back of the audience, I don't understand
 what you're talking about.
 So Bankai said, I'd be happy to explain.
 Please come closer.
 A Nichiren priest came in and he said, come closer still.
 And he got up here and said, please still come closer.
 And the Nichiren priest kept on coming.
 When he was right up there, Bankai said,
 how well you understand me.
 So Bankai would say, Zen consists
 in faith, in your innate quality of intelligence,
 in your organic pattern.
 Trust it.
 After all, your eyes are beautifully blue or brown.
 Your hair is wonderfully brunette or blonde.
 Your breathing is fantastic.
 Your heart is working beautifully.
 That is your Zen.
 Go ahead.
 And all those farmers and people who came around
 understood Bankai.
 But Bankai didn't leave any disciples.
 He had no spiritual successors.
 And for this reason, he is considered in a certain way
 an enormous success.
 Because he was like a bird going through the sky
 without leaving any traces.
 He was like that, as that poem says, entering the water,
 he does not make a ripple.
 Entering the forest, he does not disturb a blade of grass.
 Bankai is largely forgotten today because of this.
 And those are remembered, you see,
 who left spiritual descendants who could chalk up
 a certificate and say, I was trained by such and such master,
 who was trained by such a master, who
 was trained by such a master.
 And in all such genealogies, there
 is a temptation to formalism and a certain kind of pride.
 So in the sense, this happened.
 In leaving no specific descendants,
 he at the same time left many nameless descendants, people
 who were totally unimportant historically,
 who were farmers and peasants, and who really
 got the point of what he said.
 But then and there, decided that just because they did
 understand that there was no need to become professional Zen
 Buddhists, to label themselves as Bankai followers,
 or Zen followers, or Buddhists.
 Because you see, whoever really gets this thing
 and understands it, knows that he hasn't attained anything.
 Buddha said in the Diamond Sutra,
 when I attained complete, perfect, and unexcelled
 awakening, I attained nothing at all.
 And you see, that nothing at all is the same nothing
 into which all trees, and plants, and bodies,
 and butterflies, and birds are disappearing
 in the course of endless transformations.
 Everything disappears into nothing at all.
 But out of the same nothing at all
 come all the new things, forever and ever.
 [MUSIC PLAYING]
 He who would understand the meaning of Buddha nature
 must watch for the season and the causal relations.
 Every voice is the voice of Buddha.
 Every form is the Buddha form.
 [MUSIC PLAYING]
 The wild goose has no intention of leaving traces.
 The water has no thought of engulfing reflections.
 [MUSIC PLAYING]
 [BELLS RINGING]
 The instant you speak about a thing, you miss the mark.
 The badger and the white bull emit a glorious radiance.
 With no bird singing, the mountain is yet more still.
 In the spring beyond time, the withered tree flowers.
 When the snowy heron stands in the snow,
 the colors are not the same.
 [MUSIC PLAYING]
 A pair of monkeys are reaching for the moon in the water.
 [MUSIC PLAYING]
 When pure gold enters the fire, its color becomes still brighter.
 [MUSIC PLAYING]
 The sound of the bell in the silent night.
 I wake from my dream in this dream world of ours.
 Gazing at the reflection of the moon in a clear pool,
 I see beyond my form, my real form.
 [MUSIC PLAYING]
 The song of birds, the voices of insects
 are all means of conveying truth to the mind.
 In flowers and grasses, we see messages of the dhow,
 of the whale, of the sea, of the sea of the sea.
 The sound of the bell in the silent night.
 I wake from my dream in this dream world of ours.
 The way of nature.
 The scholar, pure and clear of mind, serene and open of heart,
 should find in everything what nourishes him.
 [MUSIC PLAYING]
 Men know how to read printed books.
 They do not know how to read the unprinted ones.
 They can play on a stringed harp,
 but not on a stringless one.
 Applying themselves to the superficial instead
 of the profound, how should they understand music or poetry?
 [MUSIC PLAYING]
 [BELLS RINGING]
 If you know the inner significance of things,
 the misty moon of the five lakes is all within you.
 If you understand the activity of human phenomena,
 the heroism and nobility of the great men of all ages
 is in your grasp.
 [BELLS RINGING]
 [MUSIC PLAYING]
 [BELLS RINGING]
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