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 Zen developed out of the work of Kumarajiva.
 Came into China, as I said, 400 or a little before.
 He had two disciples who began to work on Buddhism
 from a Taoist point of view.
 And they were actually the originators of Zen.
 Then apparently, about shortly before 500,
 as the dates now check out, another Indian
 came to China whose name was Bodhidharma.
 And Bodhidharma was the person who touched off
 Zen as a specific movement.
 Bodhidharma had a pupil by the name of Eka.
 Hui Ge in Chinese.
 Eka is Japanese pronunciation, like Zen
 is the Japanese pronunciation of the Chinese chun.
 And the story is that when Eka came to Bodhidharma,
 Bodhidharma refused to accept him as a student.
 All Zen masters do this.
 They reject you.
 And this stimulates you, you see, to come back stronger.
 I mean, if you're going to learn at all.
 And Eka came back stronger and stronger and stronger.
 And Bodhidharma resisted him stronger and stronger.
 And finally, he cut off his left arm
 and presented it to Bodhidharma.
 He said, look, here's my left arm, given to you as a token,
 that nothing in the world matters to me except to find
 out what you're all about.
 All right, he said, what do you want to know?
 Eka said, I have no peace of mind.
 Please pacify my mind.
 In Chinese, mind is-- this word pronounced shin.
 And shin is here.
 Shin is the heart mind.
 It's the psychic center.
 And so Bodhidharma said, bring out your shin here before me,
 and I will pacify it.
 Eka said, when I look for it, I can't find it.
 Bodhidharma said, then it's pacified.
 And Eka immediately understood what all the thing was about.
 That's the experience called satori in Japanese,
 wu in Chinese, Mandarin, and then the Cantonese dialect,
 [CLEARS THROAT]
 It's just what we call in our modern psychological jargon
 the aha phenomenon.
 The aha phenomenon.
 Aha.
 Now I see.
 Well, now, what was all this?
 This zen, which in Chinese is this character,
 is a translation of the Sanskrit word jhana.
 And so this is being pronounced chan in Chinese and zen
 in Japanese.
 It's unfortunately untranslatable in English.
 It designates a certain state of consciousness
 that is sometimes called meditation,
 but that won't do it all.
 Contemplation isn't really the point.
 The Chinese have a different word for contemplation.
 And sometimes one-pointedness of mind.
 I would prefer to translate this word
 with the notion of total presence of mind.
 When we say a person is crazy, we often
 say they're not all there.
 Now go to the opposite of that and visualize
 the person who is completely there or who is completely here.
 Person who lives totally and absolutely now.
 That doesn't mean he's incapable of thinking
 about the past or the future, because thoughts
 about the past and about the future
 are included in the present.
 You have them now.
 But imagine the kind of person who is not distracted,
 who when he talks to you, he really
 gives you his whole being.
 Who doesn't, as it were, look over your shoulder
 and wander off to something else.
 Somebody who, first of all, he's completely here,
 and he's so much here that you can't phase him.
 Now this idea of phasing is crucial in zen.
 You see, I referred a moment ago to attachment,
 that Buddhism is living free from attachments.
 And I have made the point that this is not
 abandoning a sense of a good appetite for dinner,
 but it's stopping sticking.
 In psychological jargon, you don't block.
 A mind of no hesitation, it's sometimes called.
 In Chinese, the phrase mo zhi qi is
 used of going straight ahead.
 So supposing somebody walks up to you on the street and says,
 are you saved?
 Now most of us who are intelligent people
 feel embarrassed by such a question.
 You know, what's this wretched Salvation Army person
 or Jehovah's Witness doing asking me
 whether I'm saved or not?
 And we're all a little bit, you know,
 what do you do with a nut like that?
 So but in zen, this is a perfect moment to respond, see?
 To the most embarrassing question, are you saved?
 But zen comes back in a very funny way.
 In zen, one doesn't give philosophical answers
 to a question like that.
 You give practical answers.
 I had a boiled egg this morning.
 [LAUGHTER]
 Because whenever you are asked about matters sacred,
 theoretical, and philosophical, you
 answer in terms of things earthy and practical.
 But then on the other hand, when you're
 asked about things earthy and practical,
 you answer in terms of things religious and philosophical.
 Is dinner ready?
 You know?
 Who's asking this question?
 [LAUGHTER]
 Who are you?
 [LAUGHTER]
 So this is then the flavor of zen, is--
 you know, a bodhidharma is supposed
 to have meditated so long that his legs fell off.
 [LAUGHTER]
 And he's usually drawn this way, something like this, anyway.
 [CHIMES]
 It looks like a shmoo.
 But in Japan, you buy these toys that are darumas.
 And they are so weighted in here that you can never
 knock them over.
 You can bat it on the floor, bat it this way, bat it that way,
 but it always comes up again.
 And so the poem says, "Seven times down, eight times up,
 such is life."
 So this is the principle of not being phased,
 not being attached.
 So to play the game, you can't phase me.
 Now, this is very important in the art of lifemanship,
 fundamental gamesmanship.
 Because you see, when the zen monks moved into Kyoto,
 they took over the best part of town.
 Simply fantastic how this happened.
 The beautiful hills that I was talking about this morning
 were occupied by the brigands, who later became
 the Japanese nobility.
 The great daimyos, these were the toughest characters.
 And the zen monks played a game with them, which was that,
 you know, you possess all these lands, and you are powerful,
 and so on, but so what?
 It's all falling apart.
 Then what will you do?
 Well, they said, that's too bad.
 We don't know.
 And the zen monks said, oh, you haven't got the hang of the
 thing, you see.
 So they found that they couldn't terrify zen monks.
 They played all sorts of tricks, but the zen monks were
 better masters at it.
 See, supposing you say to somebody, look, I'm not afraid
 of you.
 You can do anything you like.
 You can kill me, or anything at all.
 Well, if I go and kill the fellow who says this, I'll
 never find out whether he was afraid or not.
 So they out-faced these people and said, we have a secret,
 you see, that you don't have.
 And we'll teach your servitors to be great warriors, because
 they'll learn the secret, too, and they won't be afraid of
 anything.
 And this is what they did.
 And so the daimyos, the noblemen, built great monasteries
 for these zen masters and monks on their best land.
 The finest artists of Japan made gold leaf screens for
 almost every room in the place.
 And although nobody owns anything individually, the
 community owns it collectively with the protection of the
 daimyos.
 And they had a tremendous scene going.
 Now, to us, that sounds extremely weird.
 Even immoral.
 You don't expect religious people to do things like that.
 No, I know you don't, if the religious people are
 self-righteous and have no humor.
 But these people didn't go around pretending that they were
 specially good.
 They didn't dupe themselves.
 They were people who understood what human nature is, that in
 every one of us there is an element of irreducible
 rascality.
 In Jewish theology, this is called the "yetzah hara,"
 Y-E-Z-E-R-H-A-R-A, the "yetzah hara," the element of
 irreducible rascality, which was created by God, because
 God has one, too.
 And that's why, when you are really affectionate with
 somebody else, when, for example, men--I don't know what
 women do in their private lives between each other--but
 men, as we all know, say to someone they're very fond of,
 "Why, you old bastard!"
 You know?
 Just like that, you know, there's a certain way of saying
 to a person, there's a certain glint of recognition.
 And so there's a Zen poem which says, "When two Zen masters
 meet each other on the road, they need no introduction.
 When a thief meets a thief, they recognize each other
 instantly."
 And this goes back, you see, again into the heart of
 Chinese philosophy, that human nature is considered to be
 basically good.
 And even the rascally elements of it are good.
 They have a sort of salt in the human stew.
 There has to be this little thing that human passions, and
 that the natural contentiousness and greed or whatever that we
 have, is an essential element in our makeup.
 And that when people lose sight of that, they go mad.
 Nothing, for example, is more dangerous than a saint.
 That is to say, an unconscious saint who thinks that he is
 right, and who endeavors to live an absolutely pure life, and
 to eliminate all selfish thoughts.
 Somebody who undertakes that task is going to be a menace to
 all around, because he loses his humor.
 He loses his real humility, which is knowing that after all,
 since we are humans, we have certain needs.
 We need to eat, we need sex, we need this, that, and the other.
 And this sort of has a quality of humor to it.
 And so this is why in Zen art, the sages are always drawn to
 look a little bit like bums.
 You know that putai, or hotei as he's called, what's called the
 laughing Buddha, the fat Buddha with an immense belly, and
 carrying around an enormous bag of rubbish, into which he
 indiscriminately puts anything he finds around, and then gives
 it away to children.
 This is the sort of type of which the Chinese call the old rogue.
 And the old rogue, as a type of this poet, sage, monk, and
 scholar, you see, is greatly admired.
 He's the non-violent brigand.
 The rolling stone, the free man.
 Or in our words, the joker.
 The joker, you see, is the card that can play any role in the pack.
 So then, Zen developed in China after Bodhidharma's time, and
 came to a sort of golden age in the Tang and Song dynasties.
 The golden age of Zen lies between 713 A.D. and
 approximately 1100, 1200.
 11 to 1200.
 That's the great creative period in which all the marvelous
 masters emerged, and during which Zen exercised a profound
 influence on the development of Chinese poetry, painting,
 calligraphy, and scholarship.
 Then, between 11 and 1200, it shifted to Japan, and underwent
 a new development, rather different in quality and in tone.
 And after it had done that, for some curious reason, which is
 a very complicated historical question, it slowly faded away
 in China, so that as we find it today, it is principally a
 Japanese phenomenon, and it is slowly fading in Japan, and
 slowly growing in the West.
 It's a very funny thing.
 Now then, let me indicate what Zen training, what its method is.
 How does it work?
 I said before, what is involved is a dialogue, an interchange
 between two people.
 One who has defined himself as a student, and has therefore
 defined the other as the teacher.
 There is no teacher until a student arrives, no problem
 until a question is raised.
 So students create teachers.
 It's very funny.
 We have a saying, "Anybody who goes to a psychiatrist ought
 to have his head examined."
 You can interpret that as, "You're an idiot to go to a
 psychiatrist because they're a bunch of charlatans."
 The subtler meaning of it is, yes, if you define yourself as
 being in need of help, psychiatrically, you need a
 psychiatrist.
 They say exactly the same thing in Zen.
 If you ask a question, you get 30 blows with a stick.
 If you don't ask a question, you get 30 blows with a stick.
 Because you simply put yourself in statu populare, you've
 defined yourself as having a problem.
 Now, nobody really has a problem, but the Maya, the game
 of life, is to pretend that you do.
 Going back to fundamental Hinduism, the Godhead, or the
 self, pretends it's all of us, and so gets lost, and so has a
 ball, and dreams all this going on.
 So, when you're on your way out from the dream, it suddenly
 occurs to you that you have a problem.
 Life is suffering.
 You would like to get out of this.
 So, one such student went to a Zen master, and he said, "We
 have to dress and eat every day, and how do we get out of all
 that?"
 In other words, you might ask the question in this way, "We
 have to work, get up Monday morning, go to the office, do
 all this routine, sell something, and so on.
 How do we get out of the rat race?"
 So, we have to dress and eat every day, and how do we get rid
 of all that?
 And the master said, "We dress, we eat."
 The student said, "I don't understand."
 He replied, "If you don't understand, put on your clothes
 and eat your food."
 This is the kind of dialogue so characteristic of Zen.
 So, the position is this.
 The master, on being approached by a student about the problem
 of life, says, "I have nothing to teach you.
 I'm a Zen master.
 I have nothing to say.
 Zen is not words.
 And furthermore, everything is perfectly clear."
 There was a Confucian scholar who went to a Zen master and
 said, "What is your secret teaching?"
 And he replied, "There is a saying in your own teacher
 Confucius which explains it all.
 Don't you remember when Confucius said to his disciples,
 'Do you suppose that I'm concealing something from you?
 I've held nothing back.'"
 And the scholar didn't get this.
 So, a few days later, they were walking together in the
 mountains, and they passed the wild laurel bush.
 And the Zen master said to the Confucian scholar, "Do you
 smell it?"
 He said, "Yes."
 He said, "You see, I'm holding nothing back."
 So, the position of the Zen master is, "There is nothing
 to tell you.
 There is no...
 We're not offering you any panacea, any solution, any
 doctrine, any big, big goody to the problem of life, because
 the problem is an illusion."
 Well, then the student under these circumstances thinks,
 "Well, this is some sort of a come-on.
 He's testing my sincerity."
 And, of course, the nothing which he has to teach is the
 mystery of the great void.
 He doesn't take it as meaning just plain old ordinary
 nothing, but the great void.
 And so, he persists.
 And the teacher makes him persist until he gets way out
 on a limb.
 He has to persist so much that he practically dedicates his
 life, saying, just as Huika symbolically cut off his arm.
 The student is put in the position of dedicating his life
 to solving this thing and getting what that teacher has.
 And, of course, there wasn't anything all along.
 But he's been put in that position.
 So, then, once he's in statu pupillare, once he's


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