Autobiography

I'd like to start by explaining why I have brought you to Matsue, and this involves some

autobiography which I think will interest you, but I ask your pardon for being so egocentric.

My mother taught physical education at a school in England which was specially designed for

the daughters of missionaries to China.

When the missionaries went on their way to China, and most of them were Baptists, they left their

daughters at the school, and often they gave presents of objects of Chinese art, embroidery,

pottery and so on, to the mistresses of the school.

And my mother therefore inherited a rather large quantity of very beautiful Chinese

objects.

And so from my earliest infancy I was surrounded by these things.

I remember that I didn't like the look of the Chinese people.

They were very strange and disconcerting.

And until I was about 11 years old, I couldn't stand them.

But I always did like the look of the birds, the butterflies, the flowers, the bamboos and

the trees designed by the Chinese artists.

Now it so came about that when I was about 10 to 11 years old, I began to read thriller or

mystery stories, written by such people as Edgar Wallace and Sax Roma, about sinister Chinese

villains.

You remember Dr. Fu Manchu?

All sorts of others like that.

Very, very strange, exotic figures who kept knives in their sleeves or ivory boxes full of the strangest

things.

Who could practice the most exquisitely horrible tortures.

But at the same time who had a kind of urbanity, a kind of culture that was never crude, always

perfect manners.

Whereas other children at that time of life wanted, when they grew up, to become engineers

driving trains or test pilots or sports car champions or whatever it was, I wanted to become a Chinese

villain.

And so just as every child at that time of life decorates their room with the things they're

interested in, I did the same thing.

And I acquired from my mother's collection and from antique shops and all sorts of places,

Chinese and Japanese bric-a-brac to decorate my room.

And so in this way, I became fascinated with the forms and the feeling of Chinese and Japanese

art.

And I still can't quite explain what it is.

My mother, when she looked at certain kinds of flowers that were very beautiful, she said,

it makes you feel jazzy inside.

It hits you right here.

So in the same way, when I looked at landscapes done in painting or in lacquer or on ceramics

from China or Japan, I got a funny feeling inside here.

There was a certain quality, a certain atmosphere of unbelievable beauty.

And I couldn't explain it then and I can't explain it now, but it caught me.

I remember particularly a very, very unimportant little watercolour of bamboos and a few sparrows

perched on the bamboos drawn by some Japanese painter.

And I cherished and loved that little painting as if it were utterly priceless.

And I still can't explain what it was about it that struck me.

But you know how it feels, don't you?

When you go in springtime through a wood and there are saplings, young trees growing densely,

and the whole floor of the wood is carpeted with spring flowers or in the United States a dogwood.

In England there will be crocuses, snowdrops, primroses.

There is a strange quality of freshness, of light, of articulate luminosity of shapes in all these flowers.

There was something like that that captured me in the Chinese and Japanese vision of nature.

And I wanted to find out how and why it was they saw it that way.

So this is what happened.

Don't forget that I was also interested in the sinister side of this.

I loved Chinese villains.

I loved horror stories and ghosts.

And one day when I was 14 years old, I was rummaging around in a bookshop in Canterbury where I went to school.

And I came across two volumes by Lafcadio Hearn called Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan.

And I looked through these two books and I could only afford to buy one of them.

I just didn't have enough cash for both.

So I bought the second volume because it had in it a chapter on ghosts.

And I thought that Japanese ghosts would be the most horrible and dreadfully sinister and weird ghosts that ever were thought about.

So I started with the second volume and I read it from the beginning.

Now the first chapter of this volume is a description of a garden.

And that is the garden we will see tomorrow.

It's a very unpretentious, simple, little, ordinary Japanese garden.

But Lafcadio Hearn described all the kinds of newts and insects and plants that he found in this garden.

Frogs.

Gail.

Wonderful things.

And I was enchanted.

I just couldn't wait to get home from school so that I could create my own Japanese garden.

And when it came to the chapter on ghosts, I was amazed.

Now I was so enchanted by this book that I had to read other things by Lafcadio Hearn.

And there were quite a number of other things available.

And I bought every book that he had written that I could lay my hands on.

And as you know, a lot of his writing was about Buddhism.

But now I found myself at this time in a very funny situation.

Because here I was, 14 years old, and I had been brought up in the Church of England to be a Christian.

And I was about to be confirmed.

And I must explain this to you because some of you may not understand what this is.

In Christianity, there is an initiation into the Church called baptism.

And this consists in having water poured upon you in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, the Triune God.

But this nowadays is done to most people when they are babies.

And they have no choice in the matter whether they want to become Christians or not.

They are just baptized by their parents.

In the same way as in Japan, many young men are sent to a monastery to study Buddhism just because they were sons of priests.

They have no personal interest in it, but the family tradition demands that they go.

So in exactly the same way, in the country where I was raised,

because your parents were Christians and because the country was Christian,

you automatically had to become a Christian.

So as a baby, you were whiffled off to the Church and they baptized you.

But then there comes a point later in life when you begin to be an adolescent,

you go through the stage of puberty,

when you are supposed to take this on your own initiative, on your own responsibility.

Well, what can you do? You are defenseless.

You have nothing else to choose from.

No other religion has been explained to you.

You only know the one you have.

But I was different because it just so happened that by chance I had become exposed to an alternative.

But I went through the process of confirmation in the Church of England.

And it was a very strange process.

And I must tell you about it in order to give you the whole background of why you are here tonight.

Religion in England is a kind of archaeological piety.

The country is full of glorious monuments from a long, long past.

Beautiful cathedrals.

The country reveres its ancient monuments in just the same way as do the Japanese.

And I went to school at Canterbury, which is the very, very center of the Church of England.

The Archbishop of Canterbury is the head of the Church of England.

And I was elected when the Archbishop was enthroned to carry his train.

And so he gave me a signed photograph of himself afterwards.

Think of that.

And a great shrine of the Church of England.

Here we were.

It was like, if you were in Japan, you were born right in the neighborhood of Higashihonganji, or Ehheiji, or Nanzenji, or some great, great religious center.

So I was at Canterbury.

So there was something very, very romantic about being initiated into this particular mystery.

And most of the instructions that we received had nothing to do with the really fascinating questions about Christianity.

That is to say, the clergymen didn't seem to be interested in what is the nature of the universe, what is oneself, what is the meaning of it all.

They were mostly interested in ecclesiastical history.

And they taught us endlessly about the history of the Church, and the history of the Church in England.

And how we were kind of fitting in with this long line of tradition which went back to the past.

And so naturally we learned about the Pope, Gregory the Great, who sent St. Augustine to Canterbury in 595 A.D.

Just almost the same time as Shoto Gotayashi in this country promulgated Buddhism.

So all this history was learned, and we were told that at the moment of confirmation, when the bishop would lay his hands on our heads,

we would receive a mysterious power which had been handed down from Jesus Christ through his apostles, through his bishops,

in what is called the Apostolic succession.

And by receiving this power, it would be something to make us good, in every sense of good.

But we were yet to find out what it was to be good.

Because at the end of all this long, long instruction, each one of us had to have a private conference with the chaplain of the school.

And, you know, you would think that when you were being initiated into a great mystery,

the private conference with the chaplain would be about some very deep, important secret.

Say, about the nature of God. It would be like Sanzen with the Zen master, you know?

Where you would really face up to truth and reality.

What do you suppose it was all about?

The private talk with the chaplain was a lecture on the evils of masturbation.

One must... there was a kind of vague talk about sex.

And they were against it.

That was the one thing they would not tolerate.

Anything about sex.

I remember I had a very, very dear friend in school,

who later became a brigadier general in the British Army,

and captured a German general staff in Cyprus, single-handed.

He was expelled from school because he went for a walk with the daughter of the local greengrocer.

He didn't do anything else. He just took her out for a walk.

And they expelled him.

Out with him.

Because he had associated with a girl.

I didn't react very well to this.

Because the general impression of Christianity that I had received as a child

was of God as an, on the whole, beneficent, but grandfatherly character who lived in heaven.

Who always took the attitude of this is going to hurt me a lot more than it's going to hurt you.

But he was, you know, a definite, um, authoritarian character who was watching you all the time.

He was an all-seeing eye that peered at you from everywhere.

And examined everything that you did and judged you.

Well, at the same time then, as all this instruction was going on, I was reading Rav Kadio Hearn.

And I found out about Buddhism, where instead of this repulsive Father God,

there was something called Shinyo.

There was something called True Suchness, or Universal Consciousness, Alaya Vijnana.

Well, that was a tremendous relief.

To feel, in other words, that instead of this authoritarian construction of the universe,

where there was the big, big boss at the top, and then a hierarchy of kings and archbishops,

bishops, prelates, and so on, all representing government by force from above.

There was instead a completely different system, whereby there wasn't a governed universe,

on an authoritarian basis, but an organic universe, wherein every single being,

like a flower on a plant or a leaf on a tree, from the center, like rays from a sun,

manifestations of the original primal consciousness, Alaya Vijnana.

Well, you can't imagine what a relief that was, to get out of this ghastly system of government by force.

And so I suddenly announced, in the middle of this whole scene, that I was a Buddhist.

And the British are very, very secure, and they're not threatened by this kind of thing, as Americans are.

You know how the British allow a Hyde Park corner to exist, where you can utter all kinds of blasphemies against the king and the queen,

and anything you want to say, and the policemen just lean around there and laugh.

So, in the same way, I was in Canterbury at the same time as Dr. Hewlett Johnson, who was the famous Red Dean.

And he invited us senior boys to dinner one night, and I remember a long conversation with him.

It was a pretty far out scene.

So, when I announced that I was a Buddhist, they said,

Jolly what, the man's a Buddhist.

And they were terribly entertained.

Thought this was awfully jolly.

And the school had to send two representatives to a conference of schoolboys on religion,

presided over by the Archbishop of York, who was then the great William Temple.

And they sent me as one representative to be the unorthodox point of view.

And as the other representative, they sent a young man who was going to be a clergyman, as his father had been.

And he was so, so much wedded to the clergy scene, that the kind of tobacco he smoked was called Parsons Pleasure.

Didn't he?

He already cultivated a clerical voice and a clerical style long before even entering upon his theological training.

And in due course, I remember, he did become a clergyman.

But he was simply playing a role.

And it fitted in, it had been in his family for centuries probably, and he just went on with the same thing.

Because I was a rebel, and I, I was, this, you see, this different conception of the world as something which was not constructed on a political basis, but on an organic basis.

Now this, this is quite central to one's understanding of Chinese philosophy and Japanese attitude to nature.

But with the Japanese and with the Chinese, there is a very strange situation going on, because the politics of China, and to an even greater extent, the politics of Japan, have been very strongly authoritarian.

The figure of the father, the emperor, the master, the authority, is in the Far East greatly venerated.

Just as much as it was in my culture.

For Americans, you see, this is a little less.

There is not a real great authority figure in the United States.

The president of the United States can be called Ike or LBJ, but you can't slap the Pope on the back and call him Harry.

And you can't talk about the King and the Queen of England as Liz or George, just like that, you know.

In America, one thing that astounds me is how people who are members of a republic can believe in an authoritarian religion.

If you are members of democracy and believe deeply in democratic principles of government, how on earth can you square this in your conscience with a universe designed on monarchical lines?

But many Americans do just that.

They go to church as Catholics, as Episcopalians, or as Baptists, or whatever, and they bow and scrape before the Lord God Almighty.

But they would be absolutely infuriated if the president of the United States were to take dictatorial powers into his hands and to rule the country as if he were God.

But with the British, with the Japanese, it's very different because both my background and the Japanese background is we belong to monarchies.

And as children, we felt that the hierarchy went all the way up from our own superiors in school, from our superiors in the church.

It went right the way up to the Archbishop of Canterbury, and above him the King, and above the King, who is defined as the defender of the faith, the Lord God.

There was this stairway, this hierarchy, right the way down.

But in these cultures here, while they have this authoritarian picture politically, there is always a counter-tradition going on.

You see, in China, the authoritarian picture is supported by Confucianism.

Always contrary to Confucianism, there is Taoism.

And Taoism is a way, as it were, of slipping out from the authoritarian pattern, from the feudal pattern.

So in this country, Shinto is very much involved with the authoritarian pattern, the line of hierarchy by which we are all ruled.

Whereas on the other hand, Buddhism represents something of another kind.

Because, you see, if everybody has in him the Buddha nature, this is a point of view that is non-royalistic, that is deeply democratic.

Various schools of Buddhism have, of course, from time to time, gone along with the hierarchical and royalistic conception of the world and of social order.

But other schools of Buddhism have never really gone along with it.

They have, instead, been a secret teaching that there really, fundamentally, isn't any hierarchy in nature.

There isn't a political order.

But there is another kind of order altogether.

The order, which I described to you in the first talk I gave you, called in Chinese, Li, in Japanese, Re.

You know, this character sometimes translated reason, principle, but which basically is best translated as organic pattern.

Because its original meaning is the markings in jade, the grain in wood, or the fiber in muscle.

It is that quality that one sees in flowing water, or in the shapes of clouds, or in the grain of wood, in which one recognizes order and intelligence.

But you can't put your finger on it and say why it is orderly, why it differs from just a mess.

So then, you might say this, in the Christian world, and in the Confucian world, see the universe, we see nature as something that is obeying laws.

There is a boss behind the whole scene, who tells everything what to do.

You have to toe the line, obey that.

But in the Chinese Taoist conception, there is no boss.

Everything follows its own nature.

Everything letting itself do what comes naturally.

But inferior virtue is so studied, so contrived, so trying to be virtuous, that it is not virtuous.

And so, in this way, the idea of the Tao is that it is the regulative principle of the universe, just for the very reason that it does not exercise force and does not dominate things.

You know this now, look.

Supposing you have been very much in love with a man or a woman, and you want them to love you.

But you know always, don't you, that you can't force them to love you.

And if you say, you must love me, love dries up.

But on the other hand, if you say, look, please have it your way.

You don't have to meet me tomorrow.

Please, you choose.

You know, let's let it go.

And if you want to go and date somebody else than me, please help yourself.

Always come back if you do it that way.

Let it go and it returns to you.

But dominate it and say, you must be mine.

You will lose it.

See?

So, in the same way, the Chinese have the conception that the basic principle of the universe governs the universe, not by ruling, but by allowing it.

everything in the universe to follow its own nature and to be itself and you see

this is a colossal act of trust of faith in everybody and everything else and

this is finally the only sane attitude because if you don't everybody and

everything else the only other thing you can do is to live in an armed camp where everybody and

everything is watched government regulated with jobs guns with locked doors with all kinds of big

brother watching you on television what does poor big brother do on the other end of the TV set here

he is sitting watching what everybody else is doing he hasn't even got time to take a walk in

the park with his girlfriend what a mess he is see that would be the situation of God if you take the

idea of God literally as the authoritative watcher of everybody who's writing in his little black book

everything that everybody does wouldn't you be sorry for God there he is wretchedly watching and

writing his little black book seeing what everybody does there's no time to twiddle his thumbs no time

to look at the stars no time to just plain enjoy being God it's it is gonna watch all this so you

can see then for a young man aged 15 16 what a blessed relief it was to discover a conception of the universe

where there wasn't a boss a new cosmology utterly different from the cosmologies we knew in the west

at that time we had two cosmologies in the west you see one was the authoritarian one with the God with

the bus and God but if you didn't want that you did have another choice and that was the cosmology of

of the mechanism Newton whose billiard game under debacle to Newton invented this between the game of cosmic

billions where everything is mechanical there isn't a God it says simply a mechanistic system which goes

typically crop crop crop over both of the part now bolsa balls balls that all the balls and so on and they

don't have a ball at all because it simply mechanical you could have that shoulder is the loop to do the

you know what it is this both of the systems are mythological the system of the universe controlled

by the divine master has at least the virtue of being alive there is somebody who cares upstairs

the other system uh where everything is just mechanical um is is really a state of mind

uh it's invented by people who want to insist that they are very hard-boiled

they would say to the people who believe in god you are just a lot of wishy-washy people who have

indulged in wishful thinking you want to think that there is somebody up there who cares now

as a matter of fact there isn't the universe in which we live is one which is totally stupid

and that we happen to be intelligent and feeling human beings is a mere accident

we are a fluke we are a mere chance in the middle of this mindless mass of rock and fire

and because we know this we are the tough guys we are real hard-boiled and we don't indulge in wishful

thinking well you see this is just a way of setting yourself up it's a it's a kind of one-upmanship

that you play this game of being us now you see with the thing i came across in in buddhism was

neither of these two conceptions now it wasn't on the one hand the authoritarian god nor was it on the

other hand the mechanistic nonsense the universe is just a machine it was quite different it was

it it involved uh it didn't sacrifice the feeling that the world is intelligent and yet at the same

time it didn't combine the idea of an intelligent universe along with the notion that this intelligence

was a tyrant instead it would say that the universe is a fundamental mind or consciousness and every

individual is an expression of it not something ruled by it not something governed by it but some

thing which expresses it so that uh we are all shall i say a game which that universal consciousness is

playing and you see how much more humane this idea was than the authoritative idea on the one hand

or the dowry mechanistic idea on the other see the extraordinary thing about the mechanistic idea which

has to an amazing degree penetrated our common sense which for many people living in the western world

today the idea that nature is a mechanism and that we are

uh mechanical objects functioning within the mechanical system of nature this has become amazingly plausible

to millions and millions of people what is avant-garde thinking 50 years ago becomes the common sense of

today and so uh this notion of the mechanical universe has become to most people now plausible they uh are really rather

convinced by it and think well i'm just a chemical my consciousness is just a matter of a funny uh chemical event

that has occurred and uh while it lasts it lasts but when it's over that'll be that so people who feel that way

feel curiously estranged from nature and the rest of the world because they feel to be conscious who have

values to have a sense of beauty the sense of companionship with other human beings

is a freak a freak a freak in nature the nature as such has no respect for this point of view at all

same time you see this goes along with astronomy with the conceptions of modern astronomy whereas

under ancient astronomy human beings have thought that the world was the center of the cosmos

and that all the generations of the stars were centered upon influencing what went on in this planet at the

end of the 19th century modern astronomy had given us instead the idea that man is an utterly insignificant

being a tiny tiny little fungus growing on a speck of dust called the earth which moves

somewhere on the outside of the galaxy and is absolutely unimportant do you see what a masochistic point

of view this is what a put down of ourselves it neglects the other side of the picture equally scientific

the other side of the picture being the human organism is the one the most complicated thing in nature that

we know you may look out to galaxies but they are very simple in structure compared with the human organism

and so the human organism with its nervous system calls into being this whole cosmos because without

eyes the sun is not light without ears vibrations in the air make no noise

eyes without muscles nothing is heavy or light without the soft texture of the skin nothing is hard or soft

it is our organism that calls all these properties into being and so we live in a universe that is a human

universe it is not anti-human it is something that grows humans just as apple trees grow apples

just as persimmon trees grow persimmons and so uh this tree of the world which grows us human beings on it

is a people tree you know it's under a people tree that the buddha was enlightened

that's a funny coincidence i could say in retrospect that what absolutely charmed me in coming across

lafcadio hern and in coming across chinese and japanese art and the whole world of feeling that that

represented was here was a view of the world in which man and nature go together now you see

as a christian i couldn't find nature in church that this great cathedral canterbury and i i love this

cathedral because it was a jewel box it had marvelous almost filigree stone arches

and stained glass that glowed like jewelry and yet the style of this architecture had nothing to do with

the world outside i would look at trees and flowers and human bodies and at fish and elephants and say

if you were the work of an artist you are the work of a totally different artist from the one who designed

the cathedrals they're both very good artists but they are sure not the same artists just as you know

immediately the difference between hokusai and sessu or between um leonardo da vinci and uh you know you

know it like that it could just the the painters couldn't be done by the same person so in the same

way the world in the cathedral and in the bible which was found in black and had gold edges all that well

and the clergy who were dressed in black casters stuffed with clothes there wasn't an inch of them

except their faces and their hands available otherwise they were completely covered in upholstery and had

very weird voices everything about it was unnatural and so then i found out about zen buddhist painting

architecture gardens where the temple you see did not exclude the outside

world you know you have a tokenoma here which is in zen style calligraphy pines and chrysanthemums

this wall aside you know and the whole thing flows into a garden uh you take ryoanji for example you've

all seen that uh the temple part opens up screens and here is the garden and the two mix in like this

yes and that was for me plus everything else the background of the garden as uh kobori-san was

explaining to us is terribly important uh you can't just take a japanese garden go blunt like that just put

it down anywhere it has to go against a certain background and so this way of living where the human

being is not cut off from the surroundings say in those great chinese paintings where

you're the subject of the painting it says is a poet watching the moon and drinking wine

suddenly a great landscape occurs before you you have to use a magnifying glass to find the poet watching

the moon drinking wine and there he is in his little place see whereas in western art uh the landscape

originated only as a kind of detail in the background of enormous human figures and human subjects with a

little landscape off in the background somewhere behind dominated by the human figure later western

artists under the influence of chinese artists in the 18th century began to become fascinated with

landscape as such and they learned watercolor techniques from the chinese and began to see that

landscape for itself was fascinating nevertheless we kept in all our drawings of landscape a point of view

view that is to say specifically a perspective which drew every painting from the standpoint of an observer

facing it so that everything goes to the vanishing point of a single observer

chinese landscape is drawn with several points of observation

that's the difference in perspective uh we were watching yesterday a daitokichi uh a marvelous old gentleman who

was drawing a total panorama of the kyoto hills with all the temples he just unrolled it like you do the torah

uh he had a a makimono which was enormously long and he was drawing the whole of kyoto

uh seen from a point of view which nobody was not in a helicopter can have

he was looking down on the hills but also he was looking at everything from many different angles

and he was going around to each individual temple and painting in all the architectural details and he

had a kind of gluing pieces of paper together wherever he wanted to fill in the detail

or he hadn't approved of the painting he had already done he had to cut out a square and put a new one in

and repaint it so that he had a way of looking at kyoto from every point of view and it was all synthesized

so you see this is not the angle of somebody standing in a fixed position

and looking at the world as something out there

looked at from one center which is called ego eye this is the point of view of somebody watching it

from many points of view and above all feeling himself a symptom the world he is painting so that

even his art this i'm going to talk about in the next seminar his art is a work of nature the very way

in which he uses his brush he does it in the same way that the trees grow this is i can't go into this

tonight because it raises a whole lot of other questions but in the in the far eastern philosophy

of of artistry the art the artist is an extension of nature he is not a copier of nature he is not

someone who practices something called art which is different from nature art is nature

or chinese what is so of itself that is art art and nature of the same