Alan Watts - Buddhism (Following the Middle Way)

===== Buddhism - 01 - As Dialogue I =====

Now, I hope you remember that this morning I was trying in the brief space of 50 minutes

to give you a basic introduction to Mahayana Buddhism,

the kind of Buddhism that is found in China and Japan,

and the kind of Buddhism of which Zen Buddhism in particular is a subsect.

And we are rather particularly concerned with Zen, since it has had such a fundamental influence

in the shaping of Japanese culture and the arts of Japan,

and since we are, in the course of this informal tour,

going to be visiting a good deal of Zen monasteries

and seeing a great deal of Zen-formed works of art, architecture, and so on.

So, I want to lead now tonight from Buddhism in general, or Mahayana Buddhism in general,

to Zen in particular.

Now, Zen plays a little game with you.

Now, whenever anybody like myself or Dr. Suzuki talks about Zen,

all the other people say, because they talk about it, they don't understand it.

Those, in the words of Lao Tzu, who know do not say.

Those who say do not know.

And yet he said that.

He wrote a book of several 80 chapters or so to explain the Tao and the De, its power,

and nobody can help themselves.

They've got to talk.

Human beings are a bunch of chatterboxes.

And when we've got something in our minds that we want to talk about, we talk.

Now, poetry, though, is the great language because poetry is the art of saying what can't be said.

Every poet knows this.

You're trying to describe the indescribable,

and every poet also knows that nothing is describable.

Whether you take some sort of ineffable mystical experience at one extreme,

or whether you take an ordinary rusty nail at the other,

nothing is really describable.

In the words of the famous Count Korzybski,

whatever you say, something is, it isn't.

We used to have a professor at Northwestern

who would produce a match booklet in front of his class

and would say to them, what is it?

And they would say, match booklet.

He'd say, no, no, no, match booklet is a noise.

Is this a noise?

What is it?

And so, to answer this, he'd throw it at them.

That's what it is.

So, in this way, you see, nothing can really be described.

And yet, on the other hand,

we all know perfectly well what we mean when we talk.

If you know, if you've shared an experience with somebody else,

then, of course, you can talk about it.

We can all talk about fire and air and water and wood

because we know what it is.

And there's no mystery.

And so, in the same way,

when it comes to discussing something so esoteric as Zen,

it can be discussed.

Only, Zen people play games with each other.

They play little tricks.

They test each other out by saying to somebody,

I remember when I met Paul Reps for the first time

who wrote that lovely book,

Zen Flesh and Zen Bones.

And he said to me,

Well, he said,

You've written quite a number of books by now.

You must think you're pretty fancy.

I said, I haven't said a word.

No, this is simply a Zen game.

And people sort of feel each other out.

There's a poem which says,

When two Zen masters meet each other on the road,

they need no introduction.

Thieves recognize one another instantaneously.

So now, having got that off my chest,

it's to say, then,

if I were to give you a really proper

and really and truly educative talk about Zen,

I would gather you around here

and sit here in silence for five minutes and leave.

And in a way,

this would be a much more direct exposition of it

than what I'm going to do instead,

which is talk about it.

Only I have a feeling that

you would feel that you were disappointed

and somewhat cheated

by this kind of behavior

if I just left in five minutes' silence.

So then,

this word Zen

is Japanese way

of pronouncing the Chinese word Chan,

which in turn is the Chinese way

of pronouncing the Sanskrit word Jnana.

And Jnana is a very difficult word

to translate into English,

if not impossible.

It's been called meditation.

Meditation in English

generally means sitting quietly

and thinking about something.

And that's not what Zen is.

Contemplation

might come a little nearer

if you use the word

in a very technical sense,

the sense that it was used

or still is used

among Catholic mystics.

Perhaps that's something a bit like Zen.

But again, contemplation,

as we normally use the word,

has a sense of inactivity,

a sense of

not doing anything,

of being completely still and passive.

whereas Zen is something highly active.

So we really don't have

an English word for Jnana,

Chan,

Zen.

But I would say

that we do know what it is

because we do all sorts of things

every day of our lives

in the spirit.

when, for example,

you drive a car.

Most Americans,

at any rate,

drive car since they were teenagers

and are very expert drivers.

And when they drive a car,

they don't think about it.

They're one with the car.

Or when a rider of a horse

is one being with the horse

when you watch a good cowboy

or a cavalry rider.

He's glued to the horse.

He's like a centaur almost.

As the horse moves,

he moves.

Which is in control?

Is the horse riding the man

or the man riding the horse?

You practically don't know.

Same way when you have

an excellent dancing partner.

Who leads?

Who follows?

It seems as if you are one body

and you move together.

That is Zen.

That is Dhyana.

And so,

in a wider sense,

when a person

doesn't react to life

on the one hand

or try to dominate it

on the other,

but when the internal world

of one's own organism

and the external world

of other people

and other things

move together

as if they were

and indeed are

one and the same motion,

that is Zen.

So,

you could say

in a very, very simple way

that the real concern of Zen

is to realize,

not merely to think,

but to know in your bones

that the inside world

inside your skin

and the outside world

outside your skin

going out as far

as anything can go

into galaxies

beyond galaxies

is all one world

and all one being,

oneself,

and you're it.

And once you know that,

then, uh,

you have completely abolished

all the problems

that arise

as a result of feeling

that you are a stranger

in the world,

that you are set down

in the middle

of a hostile

and alien

domain of nature

or people

who are not you.

this whole sense

of estrangement,

foreignness

to the world

is overcome

in Zen.

Now,

let me illustrate

this a little

before we go into Zen

in any kind

of technical way

by a few

rather superficial

but nevertheless

significant facts

out of Japanese culture

and the place of Zen

in Japanese culture.

Japanese culture

is,

as you may have noticed

or was,

as you may have noticed,

extraordinarily ritualistic.

There is a right way

of doing everything,

a good form,

a proper style.

And nowhere

is this more apparent

than in such practices

as the tea ceremony

or arranging flowers

or knowing how to dress

or knowing how to organize

a formal dinner.

The punctiliousness,

the skill

of these people

in doing these things

is quite remarkable.

But in,

uh,

the same measure

as they are very skillful

at doing these things,

they are very worried

about it.

The whole question,

for example,

of bringing presents

to somebody else.

Have they given us

more than we've given them?

Did we remember

this occasion?

Did we remember

that occasion?

These weigh very heavily

on the Japanese soul.

The debt which you owe

to your parents,

the debt which you owe

to your country

and to your emperor,

immeasurable,

infinite debt,

never can be paid.

All these weigh

very heavily.

And therefore,

in Japan,

until the sort of

breakaway of modern youth

with its westernized ideals,

this is a very nervous culture,

concerned about whether

one is playing

the ritual correctly.

A culture like that

needs an outlet,

needs a safety valve,

needs a way

out of this thing.

And Zen provides

just that.

And so,

by contrast,

when you meet a Japanese

who is thoroughly trained

in Zen,

he is a different kind

of personality

altogether

from ordinary Japanese.

He is,

in manners,

not

studdially courteous,

nor is he brusque,

but he is simply

at ease.

He gives you

his whole attention

so long as you give him

your whole attention.

If you start wandering

and frittering,

he's got work to do

and he promptly leaves.

But so long as you

are wanting to talk to him,

he is there for you

and for nobody else.

And he sits down

and he really sits.

You know,

he doesn't worry about

whether he ought

to be somewhere else.

And so,

unable to sit

with complete serenity

in one place.

You know,

if you have half an idea

that you ought

to be worrying

about something

out in the garden

or that you ought

to be cooking dinner

or that you ought

to be down

in your office

or something,

you can't sit

where you are.

You're not really there.

You're a kind

of gas balloon

that keeps wanting

to wander off.

But these people,

when you see,

as you meet

people connected

with Zen,

even the,

sometimes the most

neophyte,

novice of a priest

has this atmosphere

of knowing

how to live

in the present

and not to be

fidgety and giggly

and worrying

about whether

he's done

the right thing.

That's very much

Zen style.

Even though

at the same time

the Zen people

do have

a very

exacting

and demanding

discipline,

the function

of this discipline

is rather curious.

It's to enable

you to be comfortable.

It's to enable

you, for example,

to sleep

on a concrete

sidewalk

on a cold,

wet night

and enjoy it.

To relax

completely

under any

situation

of hardship.

You see,

ordinarily,

when you sit

on a,

you're out

in the cold,

you start

shivering

why?

Because you're

resisting the cold.

You're

tightening your

muscles against

the cold

and you get

the staggers.

But you were

taught,

if you learn

Zen discipline,

not to do that.

Take it easy.

Go with the cold.

Relax.

And all those monks

in those monasteries

here, they're as cold

as hell in winter

and they simply

sit there

most of the time

and we would be

frozen to death

and miserable

and have influenza

and the great

Siberian itch,

but they simply

relax and learn

how to take

the cold.

So there's nothing

about Zen discipline

which is masochistic.

It isn't to

beach your body

because your body's

bad and there's

the creation of the

devil or something.

It has nothing

to do with that.

It is how to be

comfortable under

all circumstances.

But that, again,

is something rather

incidental to the main

question of Zen.

As I said,

the Zen people,

as you meet them

and as you get to

know their style

of personality,

are at ease

in a culture

that is not at ease.

In a culture

that is chronically

concerned with protocol

and is it just right

that is indeed

a terribly self-conscious

culture

where everybody

is always

watching themselves

and having therefore

second thoughts

about everything.

And so the discipline

of Zen

is to enable you

to act

without watching

yourself.

We would say

unselfconsciously.

But Japanese

are as terrified

of this as we are.

They think

and we think.

If I don't watch

myself,

I'll make a mistake.

If I don't hold

a club over myself,

I'll cease

to be civilized

and become a barbarian.

If I don't

discipline myself

with all sorts

of

done on those

passions of yours,

you will become

like the monk

of Siberia

who burst

from his cell

and devoured

the father superior.

So

this basic

mistrust

and so on

in one's

own spontaneity

makes it

makes us wonder

that if the Zen

people are

really spontaneous

and they don't

plan and

premeditate

and hold clubs

over themselves,

won't they

become very,

very dangerous

people socially?

Won't they

go out and

rape their

mothers and

daughters and

murder their

grandmothers

to inherit

their fortunes

and so on

and so forth?

And Zen

people just

don't do that.

And yet

they are

perfectly

spontaneous.

So then

let me

try then

and indicate

how this

discipline

called Zen

actually works.

This will

involve a

little bit

of letting

the cat

out of

the bag

but

can't be

helped.

Let's go

back

to what

I told

you

was

fundamental

to

Buddhism.

Buddhism

is

unlike

other

religions

in that

it does

not

tell you

anything.

It doesn't

require you

to believe

in anything.

Buddhism

is a

dialogue.

And what

are called

the teachings

of Buddhism

are nothing

more than

the opening

phrases or

opening exchanges

in the

dialogue.

Buddhism

is a

dialogue

between

a Buddha

and an

ordinary

man or

rather

someone

who

insists

on

defining

himself

as

an

ordinary

man

and

thereby

creates

a

problem.

I quoted

you this

morning

our

saying

that

anybody

who

goes

to a

psychiatrist

ought to

have

his

head

examined

or

as

the

old

Chinese

master

Tokuzan

put it

if you

ask any

question

you get

thirty blows

with my

stick

if you

don't ask

any

question

you get

thirty

blows

just the

same

in other

words

what the

hell

are you

doing

around

here

defining

yourself

as

a

student

and

defining

me

as

a

teacher

in other

words

you

have

raised

the

problem

and

in

the

way

of

training

of

Zen

this

is

very

clearly

emphasized

if

you

go

to

a

Zen

teacher

and

you

approach

him

in

the

traditional

way

the

first

thing

he

will

do

is

to

say

I

haven't

anything

to

teach

go

away

well

you

say

what

are

these

people

doing

around

here

aren't

they

your

students

they

say

well

they

are

working

with

me

but

unfortunately

we

are

very

poor

these

days

we

don't

have

enough

rice

really

to

go

around

and

make

ends

meet

and

we

can't

take

on

anybody

else

in

other

words

if

you

really

want

this

thing

you've

got

to

work

for

it

that

is

the

real

point

the

point

is

that

you've

got

to

make

such

a

fuss

to

get

in

that

you

cannot

withdraw

gracefully

after

having

made

such

a

fuss

to

get

in

because

you

put

yourself

on

the

spot

and

you

define

yourself

as

somebody

needing

help

or

as

somebody

with

a

problem

who

needs

a

master

in

order

to

be

helped

out

of

the

problem

so

then

when

you've

with

your

head

on

bowed

down

on

the

steps

and

they

let

you

in

at

night

because

they

must

give

hospitality

to

any

wandering

monk

but

you

expect

not

to

go

to

sleep

any

of

those

five

nights

but

to

sit

there

in

meditation

and

they

I

want

to

know

what

the

secret

of

this

master

here

is

and

he's

told

you

from

the

start

that

he

doesn't

have

a

secret

and

he

doesn't

teach

anything

but

you

insist

that

he

does

see

that

is

the

situation

of

everybody

who

feels

that

life

is

a

problem

to

be

solved

whether

you

want

psychoanalysis

whether

you

want

integration

whether

you

want

salvation

whether

you

want

Buddha

whatever

it

is

you

define

yourself

as

wanting

you

created

the

problem

what

is

the

real

problem

that

everybody

brings

to

these

teachers

what

is

it

all

about

it's

basically

this

isn't

it

teacher

I

want

to

get

one

up

on

the

subject

to

disease

and

change

and

death

having

emotions

and

passions

means

that

I

am

tormented

by

feelings

which

I

can't

help

having

and

yet

it's

not

reasonable

to

act

on

those

feelings

without

creating

trouble

I

feel

trapped

by

this

world

and

so

I

want

to

get

the

better

of

it

and

is

there

some

wise

man

around

who

is

a

master

of

so

that's

what

everybody

is

looking

for

in

a

teacher

the

man

who

is

the

savior

and

who

can

show

you

how

to

cope

with

it

the

Zen

teacher

says

I

don't

have

any

answers

nobody

believes

that

because

he

seems

to be

so

competent

when

you

look

at

him

you

can't

believe

that

he

has

no

answers

and

yet

that's

the

consistent

teaching

of

that

it

has

nothing

to

say

and

nothing

to

teach

a

great

Chinese

master

of

the

Tang

dynasty

called

Linji

in

Chinese

or

Rinzai

in

Japanese

said

Zen

is

like

using

a

yellow

leaf

to

stop

a

child

crying

a

child

is

crying

for

gold

and

the

father

takes

an

autumn

leaf

that's

yellow

and

says

gold

or

he

said

it's

like

using

an

empty

fist

to

deceive

a

child

see

you've

got a

closed

fist

and

you say

to

the

child

what have

I

got

here

and

the

child

says

let

me

see

put your

fist

behind

your

back

foot

and

the

child

and

the

child

becomes

excited

to

know

what

the

devil

is

in

that

fist

and

fights

and

fights

and

fights

and finally

is

practically

in

tears

and then

suddenly

you finally

open the fist

and there's

nothing

inside

so in

so in exactly

the same

way

the person

who is under

the impression

that there is

something

that we ought

to get

see all this is

dressed up in a big

way

to be a buddha

to know the answer

to finally solve the problem

to get the message

to get the word

or however you put it

in other words

to be in control

of your fate

and of the world

would you like it

if you could have it

and so

all these powers

are projected

upon the Zen master

he is a buddha

he is a master of life

and if he is

the reason why he is

is that he has discovered

the unreality

of the whole problem

is that it

I've had some

thoughts

and here

are some

serious

words

I've couldn't

learn

least

I've been

working

with

more

possible

===== Buddhism - 02 - As Dialogue II =====

And so all these powers are projected upon the Zen master.

He is a Buddha. He is a master of life.

And if he is, the reason why he is,

is that he has discovered the unreality of the whole problem.

There is not life on the one hand and you on the other.

It's all the same.

But you see, you can't tell people that.

And just by telling, get them to see it.

And just in exactly this way,

people who know that the earth is flat can't be reasoned with.

People who believe that the Bible is the literal word of God,

absolutely impossible to reason with them at all,

because they know it is so.

So in the same way,

we tend to know that we are all separate, poor little me,

and that we are in need of salvation or something.

And we know this is so.

And so somebody says, well, you are not really that.

You know that that feeling of separateness is an illusion.

Well, that's all very nice in theory, but I don't feel it.

So what will you do?

What will you do with a person who is convinced that the earth is flat?

There's no way of reasoning with him.

If it's for some reason important that he discover that the earth is round,

you've got to play a game with him.

You've got to play a trick on him.

You tell him, great, the earth is flat.

Let's go and look over the edge.

Wouldn't that be fun?

Of course, if we're going to look over the edge of the earth,

we must be very, very careful that we don't go around in circles,

or we'll never get to the edge.

So we've got to go along consistently,

along a certain line of latitude westwards.

And then we're going to come to the edge of the earth,

just so long as we're consistent.

In other words,

in order to convince a flat earthist

that the world is round,

you've got to make him act consistently

on his own proposition.

And go consistently westwards

to find the edge of the world.

Now, at last,

by going consistently westwards,

he comes back to the place where he started.

He's been convinced that the earth is at least cylindrical.

And he may believe you.

Then take it on faith

that if he goes along a line of longitude,

the same thing will happen.

But you see,

what you did

was to make him persist in his folly.

Now, that's the whole method of Zen.

To make people

become

perfect

egotists.

And so explode the illusion of the separate ego.

So what happens?

In effect, then,

in the discipline of Zen,

when

you finally convince the master

that you're stupid enough

to be accepted as a student

because you've persisted

and because you've defined yourself

as someone having a problem,

he has warned you well in advance

that he has nothing to teach.

But he says,

now I will ask you a question.

There are many ways of asking this question,

but they all boil down to one common theme,

and that is,

who are you?

You say you have a problem.

You say you'd like to get out of the sufferings of life.

You say you'd like to get one up on the universe.

I want to know who's asking this question.

Show me you.

And only they put it in such ways as,

before your father and mother conceived you,

what was your original nature?

Questions like that.

And they'll say,

now, look,

I want to be shown.

I don't want a lot of ideas about who you are.

I don't want to know who you are

in terms of a social role.

You know,

that you have such degrees

or you have such professional qualifications

and such a name and such a family.

All that's the past.

I want to see you genuinely now.

It's like saying to a person,

now, don't be self-conscious.

See?

I want you right this minute

to be completely sincere.

Come on now.

Well, nothing is better calculated.

To make a person incapable of sincerity.

It says,

when relatives come

and aunts and uncles

and there's a little child

and they want to review this child

and see it

and the parents say to the child,

darling, come on now and play for us.

See?

And the poor child is completely nonplussed.

Doesn't know what to do.

Because you cannot play on demand.

Now, what is the Zen teacher doing

in saying to a person,

you must answer this question

by coming before me

in, in fact, a rather formal situation,

the kind of context

in which a Zen master interviews his students.

He's very formal.

And there he sits,

a sort of enthroned tiger.

He's definitely, in this culture,

a sensei,

a, um, authority figure.

And so he's the last kind of person

you can be spontaneous with

because you feel

that he knows you through and through.

And that, uh, do you know,

have you ever read that story

of von Kleist

about a man who has a fight with a bear?

The bear is a mind reader

and always knows what move

he's going to make

so that the man can never

conquer the bear

unless he makes a move

which he doesn't think about first.

How will you do that?

And then you get the same feeling

with, uh, relationship to a Zen master.

You feel

that he is absolutely aware

of everything phony about you.

That he reads you like a book.

But that you can't find a way

of being not phony.

Think about this a little.

You see, it's, uh,

we can arrange a group session.

And this is a little game

that's being played

by lots of people.

It's a kind of psychotherapy.

We can arrange a group session

in which the gimmick is this.

That when anybody says anything

or does anything,

the group or some section

of the group

challenges its sincerity

and says,

why are you coming on so strong?

Are you trying to dominate us?

And you see,

anything that you do

can be interpreted in that way.

Because the moment a group of people

becomes, starts making comments

on its own behavior,

it is setting up a situation

within the group

which is analogous,

say, in a TV studio,

to turning the camera

on the monitor.

So, uh,

when we start

thinking about thinking,

being aware of being aware,

this is what is called

in the Japanese

the observing self.

I watch myself all the time.

See?

You're in a hopeless way.

But this is the price

that human beings pay

for having become

self-conscious.

Anxiety

and guilt.

Anxiety because

am I sure

that I

thought this out

sufficiently carefully?

When I left the house

did I turn off

the gas stove?

And incidentally

I remember turning it off

but can I trust my memory?

I've learned to think

about memory now

and I wonder

if I can trust it.

Maybe I'd better

go back and look.

I went back

and I looked.

But did I really see?

I'm thinking about my sight

and whether

this is quite authentic.

Did I look properly?

Because you know

how the unconscious

can alter your senses.

And so I'd better

go and look again.

See, soon now

I've got into

a sort of

vicious circle

where I'll never

get away from the house.

And all this sort

of getting mixed up

is the penalty

we pay

for the advantageous

gift

of being able

to know

that we know.

There was a young man

who said though

it seems that I know

that I know.

What I would like to see

is the eye

that knows me

when I know

that I know

that I know.

And so this is

the Zen trick.

It's to put you

into this situation

in a very crucial way.

To think about

thinking about

or just the same thing

to make a very

strong effort

not to think.

That's Zazen.

Sit,

let your senses

operate

and be responsive

to whatever

there may be around

but don't think about it.

But now

this is already thinking.

I'm thinking

about not thinking.

How will I stop

thinking about

not thinking?

So there you are.

See, you're all

caught up.

It's like somebody

came to you

and they put

tar in one hand

or molasses

feathers in the other

slapped the two hands

together

and rubbed them around

and said

now pick off the feathers.

So you see

what happens.

The teacher

is well aware

that he's played

this trick on you

and he's going to see

what will happen

if you act

and he's going to

help you to act

consistently

on this foolishness.

Now,

you see,

what he's done

is he simply

made a special case

of what society

does to us all

anyhow.

And this is true

of most cultures.

The high cultures

of the world

whether they're

of the East

or whether they're

of the West

play a game

on every new member.

They don't know

they're playing this game

because their forefathers

played it on them

and they're still

under whose auspices

everybody comes

into this world

is as follows.

You are required

to do something

which will be acceptable

only if you do it

voluntarily.

You must love me.

You must go to sleep.

You must be natural.

You must be free.

Listen to that.

You must be free.

Now what happens,

you see,

society,

the community

into which every child

enters defines

the child.

We know who we are

as other people

reactors.

So the other people

say to us,

you're an independent

agent.

You're responsible.

You are a freely

acting individual

but this is a

commandment

and we obey it

because we can't

help it.

The child has no way

of criticizing this.

or of seeing

there's something

phony about it.

So the child

has to be free

because he is

commanded to be so

by the community.

Now then,

the community

sets itself a problem.

Having defined the child

as an independent agent

and having got the child

to believe that he's

an independent agent

because he isn't.

In other words,

he wouldn't believe this

if he were independent.

It then has trouble

getting him

to behave

as the community

wants him to behave.

So they feel then

there's something

ornery about all children.

They're born in

original sin.

They're refractuous

and so on.

Of course they are

because they've been

defined in a

self-contradictory way.

So when the community

says to a person,

you must be free

or when we are

in a family relationship

in which the members

of the family

are saying to each other,

you must love me.

It's your duty

to love me.

What a bunch of rot.

Supposing you're

one day you get up

and you say to your wife,

darling,

do you really love me?

And she replies,

well,

I'm trying my very best

to do so.

Is that the answer

you wanted?

No.

You wanted her to say,

darling,

I can't help loving you.

I love you so much

I could eat you.

You don't want her

to try to love you.

Yet that is what

you put on people

in almost any

marriage ceremony,

that you shall

love this person.

Thou shalt love

the Lord thy God.

Thou shalt love

thy neighbor as thyself.

This is a double bind.

And anybody who lives

under the dominance

of a double bind

lives in a state

of chronic frustration

because he is devoting

his whole life

to solving

a meaningless,

nonsensical problem.

Let's take the double bind

that is the deepest of all.

You must go on living.

Now, living

is a spontaneous process.

And to say to it

you must happen

is exactly the same thing

as saying

to any kind of creative artist

you must come through

with the goods.

Tonight you must give

the superb performance

and above all

you must be unselfconscious.

Well,

this is being done

to us all the time.

And the object

of the Zen discipline

is that instead

of doing this

to people unconsciously

as parents do it

and as teachers do it

to children

and as the children's peers

do it to their own

peer members

in Zen

the double bind

is put on you

deliberately

knowing how stupid it is.

The teacher

is well aware

of everything he's doing

and what tricks

he's playing on you

because he has

behind it all

the compassionate intent

of getting you

into such a fierce

double bind

that you will see

how stupid it is.

So then

what happens

is this

he gives you

the double bind

be genuine

I want to see

you do something

that is the real you.

I had a friend

who was studying Zen

and he was given

some koan

like this

to work on

and when he was

one day going

for his interview

he walked through

the garden

that connected

the sodo

or the monk's

study quarters

with the master's

place

and there was

a big bullfrog

bullfrog

bullfrogs

in this country

are rather tame

people don't eat them

and so he swept up

the bullfrog

and dropped it

into the sleeve

of his kimono

and when he got

in front of the teacher

to answer the koan

that is to say

to do spontaneously

produce his genuine self

he produced

the bullfrog

the teacher looked at it

and shook his head

and said

mm-mm

too intellectual

or as we might say

too contrived

too studied

that's not yet you

how do you see

the bind in this

it's like being told

that everything

is alright at this moment

so long as you don't

think of a green elephant

so try not to think

of a green elephant

see

now as he works at this

as he tries to produce

the genuine you

the teacher really

strings him out on this

and makes him work

and work

and work over a period

of many months

until he comes

to the point

of seeing

this

there is nothing

you can do

to be genuine

the more you do

the phonier you are

but at the opposite

extreme

there is nothing

you can not do

that is to say

you cannot

give up

trying to be genuine

you can't relax

you know

and be completely

passive

and say

well let's forget

about it

let's think

about practical matters

and forget

all these spiritual

concerns

the moment

you do that

your

abandonment

of trying

is itself

an insidious

form of trying

for example

there is a very

interesting Hindu

teacher

by the name

of Krishnamurti

that many of you

may know about

and he tells people

you know

that all their

religious inquiry

their yoga practices

their reading

religious books

and so on

is nothing

but a form

of perpetuating

one's egocentricity

but on a very refined

and highbrow level

so he gets a kind

of disciple

who studiously

avoids reading

any kind of

philosophical

or edifying book

they are reduced

to reading mystery stories

and they become

devoted

non-disciples

see what a clever

bind that is

it's the same

as the zen

technique

you can't

in other words

let go

of your

we've seen

my point was

at the beginning

we saw

that

the way

of Buddhism

is

to let go

of yourself

to

see

that you live

in a universe

which

in which nothing

can be grasped

therefore

stop grasping

so here's the problem

I come

and say to the teacher

teach me not to grasp

he'll say

why do you want to know

and he

shows you

that the reason why

you want to stop grasping

is that it's a new form

of grasping

you feel that you will

beat the game

by being unattached

see it's horrible

to grieve

when somebody you love

dies

so maybe by being

unattached

to that person

I can avoid grief

pretty cold

isn't it

maybe

you see

by

not having an ego

when life

comes and bangs

on me

if there's nobody

there

it'll be alright

so that's why

I want

non-ego state

that's phony

all this is a new way

of safeguarding

and protecting

the ego

so this is the way

in which Buddhism

is a dialogue

so you see

if you go back

to fundamental

primitive Buddhism

people say

to the Buddha

I want to escape

from suffering

it's a perfectly

honest statement

alright

realize that suffering

is caused by desire

try not to desire

so the student

goes away

and tries to

eliminate desires

by controlling

his mind

and practicing yoga

comes back

to the teacher

and says

it's pretty difficult

but I have

managed at least

to get rid

of some desires

teacher says

to him

but you're still

desiring

to get rid

of desire

what about

that one

and then

the student

sees

that if he

tries to

stop desiring

to get rid

of it

but then

he's got

to stop

desiring

to get rid

of not

desiring

to desire

and suddenly

he finds himself

once more

with molasses

in one hand

and feathers

in the other

absolutely tied up

in a vicious circle

so he realizes

there is nothing

I can do

about it

and there's

nothing I can

not do

about it

and this

predicament

in Zen

is called

a mosquito

trying to bite

an iron bull

a position

of such

psychic extremity

that nothing

can be done

about it

now the point

here is

what does

this situation

mean

when you

find yourself

in that kind

of a trap

what's the meaning

of the trap

why that's

very simple

if there's

nothing you

can do

and also

nothing you

can not do

about a given

situation

it means

that you

are phony

that in other

words what we

call a separate

ego

isn't there

of course it

can't do

anything

because it

is not an

agent

and by virtue

of the fact

that it can't

do anything

equally

it can't

not do

anything

it's completely

phony

so what has

happened is

to expose

the fiction

of there

being a

separate ego

either

to force

its actions

upon the

world

or to have

the actions

of the world

forced upon

it as a

puppet

this thing

just doesn't

exist

except as a

figment of the

imagination

or except

as a

game rule

let's pretend

everybody

is responsible

is independent

is separate

sure that's a

great game

but it's a

game

and so

the whole

object of

this zen

dialogue

between

the teacher

and the

student

is to

carry that

game of

being the

separate ego

to its

logical

conclusion

to its

reductio

ad absurdum

so that

as Blake

said

the fool

who persists

in his

folly

will become

wise

===== Buddhism - 04 - Journey From India I =====

Now then, we have to get on to Buddhism, and in order to introduce Buddhism, it's necessary

to remember the whole background of the world view of India.

In other words, what we're going to study, first of all, to understand Buddhism, is

Indian cosmology, just as you would have to study the cosmology of the Ptolemaic view

of the world in order to understand Dante, and in order to understand lots of things about

medieval Christianity.

So the cosmology of the Hindus, their view of the universe, has come right into Japanese

life through Buddhism, but it anti-dates Buddhism.

Buddhism simply adopted it as a matter of course, just as now if you invented a new religion,

you would probably adopt the cosmology of modern astronomy.

Well now, how does the Hindu see the world?

You know there are really three great views of the world that human beings have had.

And they go, one is the Western view of the world, which looks upon the world as a construct,

an artifact, by analogy with ceramics and carpentry.

Then there is the Hindu view of the world, which is dramatic, looks on it as a play.

And then the Chinese view, which is organic, and looks upon the world as an organism, a body.

But the Hindu view sees it as a drama.

And it's simply this.

There is what there is, and always was and always will be, which is called the Self.

That in Sanskrit is Atman, A-T-M-A-N.

And the Atman is also called Brahman.

Brahman, from the root Bri, to grow, to expand, to swell, is actually related to our word breath.

So, Brahman, the Self, according to the Hindu view, plays hide-and-seek with itself for always

and always and always.

How far out, how lost can you get?

So here, each one of us, according to the Hindu idea, is the Godhead, on purpose, getting

lost for the fun of it.

And how terrible it can get at times, but won't it be nice when you wake up?

That's sort of the basic idea.

And I found it's an idea that any child can understand.

It has great simplicity and great elegance.

Now, in part of this cosmology, we must understand another feature of this conception of the universe.

Not only, uh, you remember now the kalpas, the periods of time, the yugas, the qualities

of the time, through which the universe goes.

But there's the final thing, which are called the Six Worlds, or the Six Paths of Life.

And this is very important for Buddhism, although it comes from Hinduism, is represented in what

is called the Bhava Chakra.

Bhava means becoming, B-H-A-V-A. Chakra, C-H-A-K-R-A, means wheel.

The wheel of becoming, the wheel of birth and death.

And it has six divisions.

It has the top people and the bottom people.

The top people are called Deva, D-E-V-A. The bottom people are called Naraka, N-A-R-A-K-A.

Devas are angels, and they are the people who are the supreme spiritual successors.

The Naraka are tormented in purgatory, and they are the supreme spiritual failures.

They are the Poles, the happiest people and the saddest people.

Then in between there comes the world of the Prettas, next to the Naraka, next to the purgatory.

The Prettas are the frustrated spirits, who have tiny mouths and enormous bellies, huge

appetites but very, very limited means of satisfying it.

Then next, they come between the Narakas and the Devas at the top.

Next up from the Prettas are the human beings.

And they are supposed to hold a middle position in the six worlds.

Then you go up from the human beings to the Devas, and then you start coming down again.

The next world is called the Ashura.

And those are the wrathful spirits, the personifications of storm and all the anger and violence of nature.

Next down is animals, coming between the Ashura and the purgatories again.

Now, all these needn't be taken literally.

They are different modalities of the human mind.

We are in the Naraka world when we are frustrated and in torment.

When we are merely chronically frustrated, we are in the Pretta world.

When we are in a state of equanimity, even-mindedness, we are in the human world.

When we are deliriously happy, we are in the Deva world.

When we are furious, we are in the Ashura world.

And when we are dumb, we are in the animal world.

So these are all modalities.

And it would be said now, this is terribly important to understand Buddhism.

Because the better you get, the more you go up to the Deva world.

The worse you get, the more you go down to the Naraka world.

But everything that goes up has to come down.

So you can't improve yourself indefinitely.

If you improve yourself beyond a certain limit, you simply start to get worse.

Like when you make a knife too sharp, it begins to wear away.

So the Buddhahood, or liberation, enlightenment, is on no place on the wheel, unless it might

be the center.

By ascending, by becoming better, you tie yourself to the wheel by gold chains.

By retrogressing and becoming worse, you tie yourself to the wheel with iron chains.

But the Buddha is one who gets rid of the chains altogether.

And so this will explain why Buddhism, unlike Judaism and unlike Christianity, is not very,

very frantically concerned with being good.

It is concerned with being wise.

It is concerned with being compassionate, which is a little different from being good,

with having tremendous sympathy and understanding and respect for all the ignorant people who

don't know that they're it, but who are playing the very far out game of being you and I.

And so this is why every Hindu greets his brother, not by shaking hands, but by putting his hands

together and bowing.

This is why the Japanese bow to each other, basically.

This is why Buddhist rituals are full of the bowing gesture.

Because you are honoring the self, playing the roles of all the people around you.

And all the more honor is due when the self has forgotten what it's doing and is therefore

in a very far out situation.

Now that is the basic Hindu view of the world.

That's the cosmology which goes along with Buddhism.

According to taste, temperament, tradition, popular belief and so on, there is this additional

idea that when the Lord, the self, pretends that it's each of us, it first of all pretends

that it is something called the jivatman.

The atman, the self, pretends to be an individual soul called a jivatman.

And the jivatman reincarnates through a whole series of bodies.

Life after life after life.

And according to what is called karma, karma literally means doing.

The law of doing, whereby acts occur in a series and they are linked with each other,

in an unbreakable chain.

So everybody's karma is the life course that he will work out through maybe innumerable

lifetimes.

I'm not going into that because a lot of Buddhists don't believe that.

You will find that the Zen people, for example, are quite divided on this.

They will say, no, we don't believe literally in reincarnation.

That after your funeral, you know, you will suddenly become somebody different, living somewhere

else.

They will say reincarnation means this, that if you sitting here now are really convinced

that you're the same person who walked in at the door half an hour ago, you're being

reincarnated.

And if you're liberated, you'll understand that you're not.

The past doesn't exist.

The future doesn't exist.

There is only the present, and that's the only real you that there is.

The Zen master Dogen put it in this way, he said, spring does not become the summer.

First, there is summer, and then there is spring.

Each season stays in its own place.

And so, in the same way, the you of yesterday does not become the you of today.

T.S.

Eliot has the same idea in his poem, The Four Quartets, where he says, when you've settled

down in the train to read your newspaper and so on, you are not the same person who, a little

while ago, left the platform.

If you think you are, you are linking your moments up in a chain.

And this is what binds you to the wheel of birth and death.

But when you know that every moment at which you are is the only moment, this comes into

Zen.

A master will say to somebody, now get up and walk across the room.

And he comes back and he says, where are your footprints?

They've gone.

So where are you?

Who are you?

When we are asked who we are, we usually give a kind of recitation of a history.

Well, I'm so-and-so.

I was given this name by my parents.

I've been to such-and-such a college.

I've done these things in my profession, and I produce a little biography.

Buddha says, forget it.

That's not you.

That's some story.

That's all gone.

That's all past.

I want to see who the real you you are now.

Well, nobody knows who that is, you see, because we don't know ourselves except through

listening to our echoes and consulting our memories.

But then there's a real you, and that again leads us back to this question.

Who are you that is the real you?

We shall see how they play with this in Zen by the koans to get you to come out of your

shell and find out who you really are.

Now, whereas in, uh, India, this worldview is tied up with a whole culture involving every

circumstance of everyday life.

Hinduism is not a religion in the same sense, uh, that, say, being an Episcopalian or even

a Roman Catholic.

Hinduism is not a religion.

It is a culture.

In this respect, it's more like Judaism than Christianity.

Because a person is still recognizable as a Jew even though they don't go to synagogue.

Because there's certain cultural things that Jewish people who come of a line of Jewish parents,

people who have been practicing Jews, they still continue certain ways of doing things,

certain mannerisms, certain attitudes, and so they are cultural Jews instead of religious

Jews.

Now, Hinduism is the same sort of thing.

It is a religion culture.

And so it involves living in India, really, to be a Hindu.

Because of the differences of climate, the differences of arts and crafts, technology, you can't be a

Hindu in the full sense, in Japan or in the United States.

So what is Buddhism?

Buddhism is Hinduism stripped for export.

Now the Buddha was a reformer, you might say, in the highest sense of a reformer, someone

who wants to go to the original form or to reform it for the needs of a certain time.

The word Buddha is a title, not a proper name, same way as Christ means the anointed and it's

not the surname of Jesus.

So Buddha is not the surname of Gotama, it means the one who is awakened from the root in

Sanskrit, buddh, b-u-d-h, to know.

The man who woke up, who discovered who he really was.

Now the thing that wherein, the crucial point, wherein Buddhism differs from Hinduism, is it

doesn't say who you are.

It has no idea, no concept, and I emphasize the word idea and concept, it has no idea and

no concept of God, because Buddhism is not interested in concepts, it's interested in direct experience

and direct experience only.

So from the Buddhist standpoint, all concepts are wrong, just in the same way that nothing

is really what you say it is.

Is this a stool?

It isn't now, it's a wastebasket, it's now a drum.

What is this thing?

See?

Anything you can use it for is what it is.

So if you have a rigid idea that it's a stool and you can only sit on it, you're kind of stuck.

But if it's all these other things as well, then you suddenly see that anything can be everything.

So in the same way, Buddhism does not define and say, what you really are is something,

because it would say that if you believe that, you've got stuck with an idea and you're clinging

onto it for spiritual security.

So a lot of people say, well, I'd like to have a religion because it gives me something to hold

onto.

A Buddhist would say, ah, I'll cut that stuff.

So long as you hold onto something, you don't have religion.

You're only really there when you let go of everything and you don't depend on any fixed

idea, any belief for your sanity or happiness.

So you would think Buddhism is very destructive because it breaks down, it doesn't believe in

God, it doesn't believe in an immortal soul, it doesn't believe in, doesn't seek any solace

in any idea of life after death.

It absolutely faces the fact of the transiency of life.

There's nothing you can hold onto, so man let go.

Because there's no one to hold onto anything anyway.

So Buddhism is the discipline of doing that.

But if you do that, you see, you discover something much better than anybody has who has

a belief.

Because you've got the real thing.

And you can't say what it is.

They say in Zen that if you're enlightened in Buddhism, you are like a dumb man who has

had a wonderful dream.

That is to say, when you've had a wonderful dream, you want to tell everybody what it is.

But you can't, if you're dumb.

See, if you can't speak.

So the real thing in Buddhism, which they call nirvana, which is a sort of equivalent to

moksha, nirvana means blow out.

Phew!

You know, the sigh of relief.

Because if you hold your breath, you lose it.

You hold onto yourself, you hold onto life.

Or breath is the spirit, you hold onto God, rock of ages, cleft of me, let me cling onto

you.

It's all dead.

Becomes just a rock.

Just an idol.

But let go.

Breathe out.

And you get your breath back.

That's nirvana.

So the Buddhist idea is, in doctrine, the highest negativism.

They characterize the ultimate reality as shunya, which means emptiness.

In Japanese, ku, which is the character you use for the sky, or the air, when you get

an airmail envelope, you know, to write home.

It will, the second character is ku, the air, which means emptiness.

They use this to translate shunyata, emptiness.

Fundamental nature of reality, the sky.

But sky, you see, is not negative emptiness.

The sky contains all of us.

It's full of everything going on.

But you can't put a nail in the sky and pin it down.

So in the same way, Buddhism is saying, you don't need any gizmos to be in the know.

You don't need a religion.

You don't need any, even Buddha statues.

You don't need any temples.

You don't need any Buddhist bondioseries, rosaries, and all that jazz.

But when you get to the point that you know you don't need any of those things, that you

don't need a religion at all, then it's fun to have one.

Then as it were, you can be trusted to use rosaries and ring bells and clappers and chant

sutras, you see?

But those things won't help you a bit.

They'll just tie you up in knots if you use them as methods of catching hold of something.

So every teacher of Buddhism is a debunker.

But he does it not to be a smart aleck and to show how clever he is, but out of compassion.

Just as when a surgeon chops off a bad growth or a dentist pulls out a rotten tooth, so the

Buddhist guru or surgeon is getting rid of your crazy ideas for you, which you use to cling

on to life and make it dead.

Now, there are two kinds of Buddhism.

They are called Mahayana.

Mahā is a Sanskrit word for great, m-a-h-a, yāna means a vehicle or conveyance.

And there is hinayana, means the little vehicle, hina in Sanskrit, h-i-n-a means little.

Only that's a term invented by the Mahayanists for the other people.

And the other people don't like it.

They like to call themselves Theravada, t-h-e-r-a, v-a-d-a, which means vada, the way, thera,

of the elders.

Now, Theravada Buddhism you will find in Ceylon, Burma, Thailand, Cambodia, and generally

South Asia.

Mahayana you find in, it originated in Nepal, northern India, and you find it in Tibet, China,

Mongolia, Japan, and to some extent in Indonesia.

The Mahayana is what we are finding here.

All the sects of Japanese Buddhism are Mahayana.

Now what's the great difference between these two schools?

The Theravada is very strict.

It's a way for monks, essentially, rather than laymen.

And it is, you see there are many ways of living Buddhism, it'll take me some time to

show you this.

The Theravada Buddhists are trying to live without desires, to have no need for wives or girls

or husbands or boyfriends, not to kill anything at all, to live the strictest vegetarian way,

and to strain your water so that you even don't eat any insects, little insects with it.

And to this very strict way, and meditate all the time, and eventually attain nirvana,

which will involve your total disappearance from the manifested world.

The Mahayana feeling is that that is a dualistic point of view.

You don't need to get away from this world to experience nirvana, because nirvana is what

there is.

It's here.

It's now.

So the ideal person of Mahayana is called a Bodhisattva.

This originally meant somebody on the way to becoming a Buddha.

But in Mahayana it has a different meaning.

It means somebody who has become a Buddha, but has gone back into the world, in the spirit

of compassion, to help all other beings to become awakened.

Well now that's an endless task.

It's like filling a well with snow, you know.

Put snow into a well and never fills up.

So when at the Zen monastery they've said their homage to the Buddha, the Dharma, let's say

the Buddha's doctrine or method, and the Sangha, the order of followers of the Buddha.

Then they take five vows.

And one of them is, however innumerable sentient beings are, I vow to liberate them all.

Well so you see there's no end to that.

Never comes a time when all sentient beings are liberated.

But actually from the standpoint of one who is a Buddha, he sees everybody as liberated.

In other words, if I were to be a Buddha, I wouldn't say, now look everybody, I'm a

Buddha, and I'm more experienced than you and I know more than you and you owe me respect

on that account.

On the other hand, I would see you all as being exactly right where you are.

All of you Buddhas, and even those of you who don't know it, it would be right for you not

to know it at this moment.

===== Buddhism - 05 - Journey From India II =====

In talking about Buddhism in past seminars,

I explain that it's absolutely fundamental to an understanding of Buddhism

to recognize that its whole method of teaching is dialectic.

That is to say, it consists of a dialogue between a teacher and a student.

And the method of this dialogue is called upaya,

that is to say, skillful means used by the teacher

to bring about the enlightenment of the student.

The word upaya meaning expert pedagogy in teaching,

but meaning deceit when used in a political context.

And since Buddhism is a dialogue,

what you ordinarily understand as the teachings of Buddhism

are not the teachings of Buddhism,

they are simply the opening gambit or the opening process of this dialogue.

And the point being that Buddhism is not a teaching,

its essence consists in a certain kind of experience,

in a transformation of consciousness,

which is called awakening or enlightenment,

which involves our seeing through or transcending the hoax of being a separate ego.

And so a Buddhist does not have the same tendency that a Christian has

to want to find out what his faith is

by going back to the most original sources.

There has always been a tendency in Christianity to ask,

what did Jesus really teach?

What is the pure New Testament?

Uncorrupted by theologians and by scribes

who inserted things into the mouth of the master.

It does not occur to Buddhists to have this attitude

because of this dialectic pattern.

You see, when you have an acorn,

if it's a lively acorn, it grows into an oak.

And that's the way it should be.

In other words, it should develop into something.

And so Buddhism, as it has developed since the days of the Buddha,

has gone a long way.

It has become sometimes more complex, sometimes more simple.

But it has changed radically because the seed which the Buddha planted was alive.

Now, for example, when we ask what are the Buddhist scriptures,

you can get two answers to that question.

In the Southern School, there is a set of scriptures

which are written in the Pali language,

divided into three sections, called the Tipitaka,

which means the three baskets.

Because these palm leaf manuscripts,

on which the sutras were eventually written down,

were, of course, carried around in baskets.

And three baskets of these palm leaf manuscript volumes

comprised the Buddhist scriptures.

But you must remember that in the evolution of these scriptures,

that the Buddha wrote nothing,

nor did his immediate disciples.

That's a very important thing to remember,

that all Indian scriptures were, for many centuries, handed down orally.

And so we have no clear guide as to their dates.

Because when you hand down an oral tradition,

you are not always likely to preserve certain historical landmarks.

Supposing we are talking about a certain king,

and the name of this king will mark a historical point.

But in an oral tradition,

the name of the king is likely to be changed

every time the story is told,

to correspond to the king then reigning.

So, in other words, things that do change,

that have a historical rhythm,

like a succession of kings,

they will be changed in handing down the oral tradition.

But things that do not change,

that is to say the essential principle of the doctrine,

they won't be altered at all.

So you must remember that the Buddhist scriptures

were for some hundreds of years handed down orally

before they were ever committed to writing.

And that accounts for their monotonous form.

That is why everything is numbered,

why there are four noble truths,

eight steps of the eightfold path,

ten fetters, five skandhas,

four brahmaviharas or meditation states,

and so on and so on.

Everything is put in numerical lists,

so as to be memorized easily.

And so there are formulae which are constantly repeated.

And this is supposed to aid the memory.

Now then, it is obvious that those scriptures

of the Pali Canon,

when you really sit down and read them,

you know that what has happened here

is that partly they have a certain monotony

due to mnemonic aids,

but also that in the course of time

before they were written down,

many monks spent wet afternoons adding to them,

and adding things in such a style

that no inspired person could ever have said them.

And they made commentaries upon commentaries upon commentaries,

and lots of them had no sense of humor.

I always love the passage where

the Buddha is giving instructions on the art of meditation,

and he's describing a number of things

on which one could concentrate.

And there's a commentator making little notes on this,

and so when he's made his list of things on which you could concentrate,

like a square drawn on the ground,

or the tip of your nose,

or a leaf,

or a stone,

or anything.

And then he says,

or on anything.

And the commentator puts footnote,

but not any wicked thing.

I mean, that's professional clergy for you,

the world over.

So this sort of thing has obviously happened.

But you must remember that this is not,

this accumulation,

this attribution of one's own writings to the Buddha,

is not done in a dishonest way.

It would be dishonest today,

with our standards of literary historicity and correctness.

It would be very wrong of me

to forge a document and pretend

that it was written by some very venerable person,

say, by Dr. Suzuki,

or by Goethe.

But, centuries ago, both in the West and in the East,

it was considered quite immoral

to publish any book of wisdom under your own name.

Because you, personally,

were not entitled to the possession of this knowledge.

And that is why you always put on any book of wisdom,

the name of the real author,

that is to say, the person who inspired you.

So, in this way, it is highly doubtful

if the book of the wisdom of Solomon,

at least it's not only doubtful,

but it's perfectly certain,

that Solomon never wrote it.

But that it was attributed to Solomon,

because Solomon was an archetype of the wise man.

So, in the same way, when, for centuries,

various Buddhist monks and scholars

wrote all kinds of sutras, scriptures,

and ascribed them to the Buddha,

they were being properly modest.

They were saying,

these doctrines are not my doctrines.

They are the doctrines of,

that proceed from,

the Buddha in me,

and therefore they should be ascribed to Buddha.

And so, over and above the Pali Canon,

there is an enormous corpus of scriptures

written originally in Sanskrit,

and subsequently translated

into Chinese and Tibetan.

We have very inadequate manuscripts

of the original Sanskrit,

but we have very complete

Chinese and Tibetan translations.

And so it is primarily

from Chinese and Tibetan sources

that we have the Mahayana canon

of the scriptures,

over and above the Theravada Canon,

which is written in the Pali language.

Pali is a softened form of Sanskrit,

whereas in Sanskrit one says Nirvana,

in Pali one says Nibbana.

Sanskrit says Karma,

Pali says Kamma.

Sanskrit says Dharma,

Pali says Dhamma.

It's very similar language,

but it's softer in its speech,

articulation.

Now it's a general feeling among scholars

of the West,

that the Pali scriptures are closer

to the authentic teachings of the Buddha

than the Sanskrit ones.

And so, with our Christian background

and approach to scriptures in general,

the West has built up a very strong,

you might say prejudice,

in favour of the authenticity

of the Theravada tradition

as against the Mahayana tradition.

Whereas the Mahayanists put it this way,

they say that their most,

they have a hierarchy of scriptures.

One for very simple-minded people,

the next they have about four grades,

going progressively to the scriptures

for the most intelligent people.

And they say that the Buddha

preached that to his intimate disciples first.

And then slowly, as he reached out

from the most intimate group to others,

he came down to what is now the Pali Canon,

as the scriptures for the biggest dunderheads.

But that the ones that he preached first

were not revealed until long, long after his death.

So they have no difficulty in making a consistent story

about the fact that the scriptures in Sanskrit

represent a level of the historical evolution

of Buddhist ideas,

that from our point of view

could not possibly have been attained

in the Buddha's lifetime.

But you see, they say,

though the latest revealed

was actually the first taught to the in-group.

Well, you've got to make allowances

for these differences in points of view

and not entirely project Western standards

of historical and documentary criticism

onto Buddhist scriptures.

Because, as I said,

it is in the essence of Buddhism

to be a developing process.

Because it is a dialogue.

So then, you can see the initial steps of the dialogue

in our earliest, or presumed earliest,

records of Buddhism.

In the Four Noble Truths,

where you have it put out

that the problem which Buddhism faces

is suffering.

suffering.

This word dukkha,

which we translate suffering,

is the opposite of sukha.

Sukha means what is sweet and delightful.

Dukha means the opposite,

what is bitter and frustrating.

And, Mahayanists will explain

that the Buddha always taught

by a dialectical method.

That is to say,

when people were trying

to make the goal of life

the pursuit of sukha.

That is to say,

the pursuit of happiness.

He counteracted this wrong view

by teaching that life is essentially miserable.

When people thought, for example,

that there is a permanent and eternal self

in each one of us,

and clung to that self,

the Buddha,

in order to counteract this one-sided view,

taught the other extreme doctrine

that there is no fixed self in us.

No ego.

But a Mahayanist would always say,

the truth is the middle way.

Neither sukha nor dukkha.

Neither atman nor anatman.

Self nor non-self.

The whole point is like this.

Once when R.H. Blythe was asked

by some students,

do you believe in God?

He answered,

if you do, I don't.

If you don't, I do.

And so, in much the same way,

all Buddhist pedagogics teaching,

is specifically addressed,

not to people in general,

but to the individual who brings a problem.

And wherever he seems to be

overemphasizing things in one way,

the teacher overemphasizes in the opposite way.

So as to arrive at the middle way.

So then, with this emphasis on life is suffering,

it's simply saying,

this is the problem we're dealing with.

We hurt.

We, human beings,

feel pretty unfairly treated.

Because we are born into a world

so arranged

that the price that we pay

for enjoying it,

that is to say,

for having sensitive bodies,

is that these bodies are at the same time,

because they are sensitive,

capable of the most excruciating agonies.

Isn't that a nasty trick to play on us?

What are we going to do about it?

This is the problem.

So then when the Buddha says,

the cause of suffering is desire,

desire.

Trishna is our word thirst,

and may perhaps be translated desire

in a very general sense,

or perhaps better craving,

clinging, grasping,

something like that.

He is saying,

now I'm going to make this suggestion.

You suffer because you desire.

Now supposing then you try not to desire,

and see if by not desiring,

you can cease from suffering.

Or you can put the same thing in another way.

You can say to a person,

it's all in your mind.

There is nothing either good or ill,

but thinking makes it so.

And therefore,

if you can control your mind,

you've nothing else that you need control.

For example,

you don't need to control the rain

if you can control your mind.

If you get wet,

it's only your mind that makes you think

it's uncomfortable to be wet.

A person who's got good mental discipline

can be perfectly happy

wandering around in the rain.

You don't need a fire

if you've got good mind control,

because if you've got

ordinary bad mind control,

when it gets cold,

you start shivering.

That's because you're putting up

a resistance to the cold.

You're fighting it.

But don't fight it.

Relax to the cold.

And, in other words,

this is a matter of mental attitude,

and then you'll be fine.

Always control your mind.

This is another way of approaching it,

do you see?

Now then,

as soon as the student begins to experiment

with these things,

he finds out

that it's not so easy as it sounds.

Not only is it very difficult

not to desire,

not only is it very difficult

to control your mind,

but there's something phony

about the whole business.

And this is what you're intended

to discover.

That, namely,

when you try to eliminate desire

in order to escape from suffering,

you desire to escape from suffering.

You are desiring not to desire.

In other words,

I'm not merely playing with logic.

I'm saying that

a person who is escaping

from reality

will always feel the terror of it.

It'll be like the hound of heaven

that pursues him.

And he's escaping

in a way

even when he's trying not to escape.

And it was this point,

you see,

that this method of teaching

was supposed

to educate from you,

to draw out from you.

Not by saying

to anybody

all this in the first place,

but by making the experiment

not to desire

or the experiment

to control your mind thoroughly.

This is the first step.

To understand this,

you must go through that.

Or some equivalent of it.

So as to come to the point

where you see

you are involved

in a vicious circle.

That, in trying to control your mind,

the motivation,

the reason for which

you are doing it,

is still clinging and grasping.

It is still self-protection.

It is still lack of trust

and love.

So,

when this is understood,

the student returns to the teacher

and says,

look, this is my difficulty.

I cannot

eliminate desire

because that itself,

my effort to do so,

is itself desire.

I cannot eliminate selfishness

because my reasons

for wanting to be unselfish

are selfish.

As one of the Chinese

Buddhist classics puts it,

when the wrong man

uses the right means,

the right means work

in the wrong way.

Now, the right means

are all the traditional disciplines.

And you are going to use them.

You see,

you are going to practice zazen

or whatever

and make yourself into a Buddha.

But, you see,

if you are not a Buddha

in the first place,

you can't become one

because you will be the wrong man.

You are using the right means,

but because you are using them

for a selfish intent

or a fearful intent.

You are afraid of suffering

and you don't like it

and you want to get out of it,

you want to escape.

All these, you see,

are the motivations

which frustrate

the right means.

So one is meant

to find that out.

And so then,

in course of time

when all this was thoroughly explored

by the Buddha's disciples,

there developed

a very evolved form

of this whole technique

of dialectic

which was called Madhyamika.

M-A-D-H-Y-A-M-I-K-A.

It means the middle way.

But it was a form

of Buddhist practice

and instruction

developed by Nagarjuna.

N-A-G-A-R-J-U-N-A.

Who lived approximately in 200 A.D.

Nargajuna's method

is simply an extension

and drawing to logical conclusions

of the method of dialogue

that already existed.

Except that Nagarjuna

took it to an extreme.

And his method is simply this.

To undermine,

to cast doubts on,

any proposition

to which his student will cling.

To destroy

all intellectual formulations

and all concepts

of the nature of reality

or the nature of the self

whatsoever.

Now you might think

that that was simply

a parlor game,

a little intellectual exercise.

But if you engaged in it,

you would find

it was absolutely terrifying.

And you would feel yourself

brought very close

to the verge of madness.

because a skillful teacher

in this method

reduces you to a shuddering state

of total insecurity.

I have watched this being done

among people you would consider

perfectly ordinary, normal Westerners

who thought they were getting involved

in just a nice abstract intellectual discussion.

But then finally the teacher,

as the process goes on,

discovers in the course of the discussion

what are the fundamental premises

to which every one of his students

is clinging.

What is the foundation of sanity?

What do you base your life on?

And when he has found out

what that is for each student,

he destroys it.

He shows you that you can't

found a way of life on that.

That it leads you into all sorts

of inconsistencies and foolishness.

And the student turns back to the teacher

and says, well it's all very well

for you to pull out all the carpets

from under my feet.

What would you propose instead?

And the teacher says,

I don't propose anything.

He's no fool.

He doesn't put up something to be knocked down.

But you see, here are you.

If you don't put up something to be knocked down

then you can't play ball with the teacher.

And you may say, well, I don't need to.

Then on the other hand

there's something nagging you inside

telling you you do.

And so you go and play ball with him

and he keeps knocking it down.

Whatever you propose.

Whatever you cling to.

And this exercise produces in the individual

a real traumatic state.

People get acute anxiety.

And you wouldn't think so

because it's just seen as if it were

nothing more than a discussion

on a very intellectual and abstract level.

But when it really gets down to it

and you find that you don't have

a single concept you can really trust,

it's the heebie-jeebies.

But you are preserved from insanity

by the discipline,

by the atmosphere set up by the teacher

and by the fact that he seems perfectly happy

without anything in the way of a concept

to cling on to.

The student looks at him and says,

he seems to be all right.

Maybe, maybe I can be all right too.

You know, this gives a certain confidence,

a certain feeling that all is not mad

because the teacher in his own way

is perfectly normal.

You know, he's all right.

You know, there are things that are

===== Buddhism - 06 - Middle Way I =====

I want to start by re-emphasizing the point that what are called the religions of the East and the ones we're discussing, Hinduism, Buddhism and Chinese Taoism, they don't involve that you believe in anything specific.

And they don't involve any idea of obedience to commandments from above, and they don't involve any conformity to a specific ritual, although they do have rituals, but their rituals vary from country to country and from time to time.

Their objective is always not ideas, not doctrines, but a method, a method for the transformation of consciousness.

That is to say, for a transformation of your sensation of who you are.

And I emphasize the word sensation because it's the strongest word we have for feeling directly.

When you put your hand on the corner of a table, you have a very definite feeling.

And when you are aware of existing, you also have a definite feeling.

But in the view of these methods or disciplines, the ordinary person's definite feeling of the way he exists and who he is, is a hallucination.

To feel yourself as a separate ego, a source of action and awareness that is entirely separate and independent from the rest of the world, somehow locked up inside a bag of skin, is seen as a hallucination.

That you are not a stranger in the earth that comes into this world either as a result of a natural fluke or being a sort of spirit that comes from somewhere else altogether.

But that you, in your fundamental existence, you are the total energy that constitutes this universe, playing that it's you, playing that it's this particular organism, and even playing that it's this particular person.

Because the fundamental game of the world is a game of hide and seek.

That is to say, that the colossal reality, the energy that is everything, that is a unitary energy, that is one, plays at being many.

At manifesting itself in all these particulars that we call you, and you, and you, and you, and you, and you, and you, and you, and this, and that, and all around us.

And it's fundamentally a game.

And you can say that this goes, really, for all the systems that I'm talking about.

It's the basis of Hinduism, of Buddhism, and of Taoism.

This intuition.

Now, today we're going to talk about Buddhism.

Buddhism is an offshoot of Hinduism.

You could, in a way, call it a reform of Hinduism, or Hinduism stripped for export.

It originates in northern India, close to the area that is now Nepal, shortly after 600 B.C.

There was a young prince, by the name of Gotama Siddhartha, who became the man we call the Buddha.

Now, the word Buddha is not a proper name.

It's a title.

And it's based on the Sanskrit root buddh, B-U-D-H, which means to be awake.

And so you could say the Buddha is the man who woke up from the dream of life as we ordinarily take it to be,

and found out who he was, who he is.

It's curious that this title was not something new.

There was already, in the whole complex of Hinduism, the idea of Buddhas, of awakened people.

And, curiously, they are ranked higher than gods.

Because, in the view of Hinduism, even the gods, or the angels, the devas, are still bound on the wheel of the sort of squirrel cage,

of going round and round and round in the pursuit of success.

And the idea is that if you pursue something that you can call success, pleasure, good, virtue,

which originally, of course, means strength, magical power, all these positive things,

you are under illusion because the positive cannot exist without the negative.

To be, you only know what to be is by contrast with not to be.

So, if we say, now, there is a coin in the left hand, there is no coin in the right.

And from this you get the idea of to be and not to be.

And you can't have the one without the other.

So, if you try to pursue, to gain the positive, and to deny, get rid of the negative,

it's as if you were trying to arrange everything in this room so that it was all up and nothing was down.

You can't do it.

You set yourself an absolutely insoluble problem.

Because the basis of life is spectrum.

And consider the spectrum of colors.

When you think of a spectrum, in what form do you think of it?

Most people think of it as a ribbon, with red at one end and purple at the other.

But the spectrum is actually a circle.

Because purple is the mixture of red and blue.

It goes right round.

And so, in this way, all sensation, all feeling, all experience whatsoever, is moving through spectra.

You don't only have the spectrum of color, you have a spectrum of sound.

You have various complex spectra of texture, of smell, of taste.

And you're constantly operating through all the possible variations of experience.

And it implies that you can't know one end of the spectrum without also knowing the other.

So, if you wanted, say your favorite color is red, and you wanted only red,

and you had to exclude, therefore, blue and purple.

Without blue and purple, you can't have red.

Behind, of course, all the various colors in the spectrum is the white light.

And behind everything that we experience, all our various sensations of sound, of color, of shape, of touch,

there's the white light.

And I'm using the phrase, the white light, rather symbolically.

I don't mean it literally.

But there is common to all sensations what you might call the basic sense.

And if you explore back into your sensations and reduce them all to the basic sense,

you're on your way to reality, to what underlies everything, to what is the ground of being, the basic energy.

And to the extent that you realize this, and know that you are it, you transcend, you overcome, you surpass the illusion that you are simply John Doe, Mary Smith, or what have you.

So then, the Buddha, as the man who woke up, is regarded as one Buddha among a potentiality of myriads of Buddhas.

Everybody can be a Buddha.

Everybody has in himself the capacity to wake up from the illusion of being simply this separate individual.

The Buddha made his doctrine very easy to understand, because in those days there wasn't very much writing being done,

and people committed things to memory.

And so he put his doctrine, or method, in various formulae, which are very easy to remember.

And I'm going to explain it in those terms, so that you can remember it just as well.

He, of course, practiced the various disciplines that were offered in the Hinduism of his time.

But he found in a certain way that they had become unsatisfactory, because they had overemphasized asceticism,

had overemphasized putting up with as much pain as you can.

There was a feeling, you see, that if the problem of life is pain, let us suffer.

And this is the root of the ascetics, you see, who lie on beds of nails,

who hold a hand up forever and ever and ever, who eat only one banana a day,

who renounce sex, who do all these weird things,

because they feel that if they head right into pain, and don't become afraid of it,

but suffer as much pain as possible, they will, by this method, overcome the problem of pain.

And they will set themselves free from anxiety.

There's a certain sense in that, as you can obviously see.

Supposing, for example, you have absolutely no fear of pain.

You have no anxieties.

You have no hang-ups.

How strong you would be.

Nobody could stop you.

You would have ultimate courage.

But the Buddha was very subtle.

He is really the first historical psychologist.

The great psychologist.

Psychotherapist.

He is very subtle.

Because he saw that a person who is fighting pain,

who is trying to get rid of pain,

is still really fundamentally afraid of it.

And therefore, the way of asceticism is not right.

Equally, the way of hedonism, of seeking pleasure, is not right.

So the Buddha's doctrine is called the middle way,

which is neither ascetic nor hedonistic.

So it's summed up in what are called the Four Noble Truths.

And the first is called Dukkha.

Dukkha means suffering in a very generalized sense.

You could call it chronic frustration.

And it is saying that life as lived by most people is Dukkha.

It is an attempt, in other words, to solve insoluble problems.

Try to draw a square circle.

You can't.

Because the problem itself is meaningless.

Try to arrange the things in this room so that they are all up and none of them down.

It is meaningless.

Such a problem cannot ever be solved.

So try to have light without dark, or dark without light.

It can never be solved.

So the attempt to solve problems that are basically insoluble,

and to work at it through your whole life, that is Dukkha.

Now, he went on to analyze this, that there are what he called three signs of being.

The first is Dukkha itself, frustration.

The second is Anitya.

And this means, the letter A in Sanskrit at the beginning of a word,

is often the equivalent of our non.

So Nitya means permanent.

Anitya means impermanent.

That every manifestation of life is impermanent.

And therefore, our quest to make things permanent,

to straighten everything out, to get it fixed,

is an impossible and insoluble problem.

And therefore, we experience Dukkha,

or this sense of fundamental pain and frustration,

as a result of trying to make things permanent.

And the third sign of being is called Anatman.

Now, you know from my talk on Hinduism,

that the word Atman means self.

Anatman means therefore non-self.

That there is in you no real ego.

Now, I've explained that already.

I've explained, in talking about Hinduism,

that the idea of the ego is a social institution.

It has no physical reality.

It is simply, the ego is your symbol of yourself.

Just as the word water is a noise,

which symbolizes a certain liquid reality,

so the idea of the ego, the role you play,

who you are, is not the same as your living organism.

Your ego has absolutely nothing to do

with the way you color your eyes,

shape your body, circulate your blood.

That's the real you.

But it's certainly not your ego,

because you don't even know how it's done,

from the standpoint of your conscious attention.

So, the idea of Anatman is firstly,

that the ego is unreal.

There isn't one.

Now then, this then is the first truth.

There is this situation,

that we have dukkha, or frustration,

because we are fighting the changing-ness of things,

and because we don't realize that the ego, the I, is unreal.

The second of the Four Noble Truths is then called Trishna.

Trishna is a Sanskrit word again,

and is the root of our word thirst.

And it's usually translated desire.

But it is better translated clinging, grabbing.

Or, there's an excellent modern American slangy word, hang up.

That is exactly what Trishna is, a hang up.

Trishna is clutching.

As for example, what we call smother love.

When a mother is so afraid that her children may get into trouble,

that she protects them excessively.

And as a result of this, prevents them from growing.

Or when lovers cling to each other excessively,

and have to sign documents,

that they will curse and swear to love each other always,

they are in a state of Trishna.

And this is the same thing as holding onto yourself so tightly

that you strangle yourself.

Now, so, the second truth then about Trishna

is that the cause of Dukkha is Trishna.

Clinging is what makes suffering.

If you don't recognize that this whole world

is a phantasmagoria,

an amazing illusion,

a weaving of smoke,

and you try to hold onto it, you see,

then you start suffering,

seriously suffering.

Trishna is in turn based upon avidya.

The same negative, a.

Vidya, from the root vid, means knowledge,

as in the Latin video,

and the English vision.

Avidya, therefore, is ignorance.

Gnosis, gna, means, of course, to know.

Knowledge is the same thing as gnosis in Greek.

To know.

So this is not to know.

To ignore.

To overlook.

And I explained in the first talk in this series

how we ignore all kinds of things

because we notice only what we think noteworthy.

And therefore our vision of everything is highly selective.

We pick out certain things

and say that's what's there,

just as we select and notice the figure

rather than the background.

Sometimes I draw this on the blackboard

and ask the question, what have I drawn?

What would you say?

What have I drawn?

The circle.

Any other suggestions?

A hole in the black.

Yeah, you're getting the point.

I've drawn a wall with a hole in it, you see.

But ordinarily, you've been reading my books.

So, but ordinarily people see the ball, the circle,

the ring or whatever,

and never think of the background

because they ignore the background.

Just as one thinks that you can have pleasure without pain.

You want pleasure the figure

and don't realize that pain is the background.

So, avidya is this state of restricted consciousness,

restricted attention,

that moves through life unaware of the fact

that to be implies not to be and vice versa.

So, now the third noble truth is called nirvana.

This word means blow out.

Nira is a negative word again, like ah.

Vana is blowing.

So, it's a kind of out blowing.

Now, in breathing, you know that breath is life.

The Greek word, you may pronounce it pneuma or pneuma,

is the same as spirit.

And spirit means breath.

In the book of Genesis,

when God had made the clay figurine

that was later to be Adam,

he breathed the breath of life into its nostrils.

And it became alive.

Because life is breath.

But now, if you hold your breath, you lose it.

He that would save his life will lose it.

So, breathe in, breathe in, breathe in,

get as much air as you can

and trishna, cling.

And you lose it.

So, nirvana means breathe out.

What a relief that was.

The sigh of relief.

Let it go.

Because it'll come back to you,

if you let it go.

But if you don't let it go,

you'll just suffocate.

So, a person in the state of nirvana

is what we might call a blown out person.

Like, blow your mind.

Let go.

Don't cling.

And then you're in the state of nirvana.

And I re-emphasize the point.

This is not, I'm not preaching.

See?

Not saying this is what you ought to do.

I'm simply pointing out a state of affairs that is so.

There's no moralism in this whatsoever.

It's simply pointing out, like,

if you put your hand into the fire, you'll get burned.

You can get burned if you want to.

That's okay.

But if it so happens that you don't want to get burned,

then you don't put your hand in the fire.

So, in the same way,

if you don't want to be in a state of anxiety all the time,

and again, I emphasize,

if you'd like to be anxious, it's perfectly all right.

If that's...

See, Buddhism never hurries anyone on.

They say, you've got all eternity through which to live in various forms.

And therefore, you don't have just one life in which you've got to avoid eternal damnation.

You can go running around the wheel and the rat race and play that game just as long as you want to,

so long as you think it's fun.

But if there comes a time when you don't think it's fun,

you don't have to do it.

So, I wouldn't say to anyone who disagrees with me,

and who says,

well, I think we ought to engage the forces of evil in battle,

and put this world to right,

and so on and so forth,

and arrange everything in this world so that it's all up.

Try it, please.

It's perfectly okay.

Go on doing that.

That's it.

What's something...

It's extremely sick.

The whole time when I walk back,

Like I was so rich,

I mean, if you can take this word.

Type figure...

There is no intention,

you can take the gift that exists,

that it's easy.

I mean, how expensive you're not gonna lie through,

or let's make it cool.

I'm pretty sure,

야,

I'm so happy about that,

but this is the reason where you say was so long

in time now.

===== Buddhism - 07 - Middle Way II =====

But if you see that it's futile, then you can let go.

Don't try to cling, relax.

And if you do that, you're in the state of Nirvana, and you become a Buddha.

And of course it means that you become a rather astonishing person.

You may of course be subtle about it, and make like you're a very ordinary person, so

that you don't get people mixed up.

And so in Buddhism, the Buddha explained that his doctrine, his method, was a raft.

It's sometimes called a yana, the word Y-A-N-A, yana, means a vehicle, a conveyance.

And when you cross a river on a raft, and you get to the other shore, you don't pick up the

raft and carry it on your back.

You leave it behind.

But people who are, what I would call, hooked on religion, are always on the raft.

They're going back and forth, back and forth, back and forth on the raft.

So the clergyman tends to turn into a ferryman, who's always on the raft and never gets over

to the other shore himself.

Now there's something to be said for that, because how are we going to get the raft back

to the first shore to bring over the other people?

See?

Somebody has to volunteer to take the back journey.

But he must be awfully careful to realize that the real objective is to get the people across

and set them free.

If you dedicate yourself to ferrying people across, don't ask them to come back on the raft with

you.

Because you get overcrowded, and people will think that the raft is the goal rather than the other shore.

So when, I find this in actual practice, that when clergymen do not ever ask for money, and it's all right, you know, like a doctor who simply charges a fee.

He says, you come to me, you pay me so much.

But the clergyman says, he doesn't say pay me so much, he says, we would like your pledge,

your voluntary contribution.

See?

And then nobody knows what to give.

That's the idea of the raft.

Now then, the fourth noble truth is called Marga.

This word means path.

And the way of Buddhism is often called the Noble Eightfold Path, because there are eight phases.

I won't say steps, because they're not sequential.

Samyak is a very curious phrase.

It doesn't mean right in our sense of correct.

Some is the same, really, as our word some, total, complete, all inclusive.

We might say, we might use the word integrated, as when we say a person has integrity.

A person who has integrity, we mean he's all over peace.

He's not divided against himself.

So, in this sense of Samyak Drishti, this is related to the word Darshan, which means a

point of view, or viewing.

When you go to visit a great guru or teacher, you have Darshan, you look at him, and you

offer your reverence to him.

This is Darshan.

Many senses of it.

But it means simply to view.

Look at the view.

So, the Samyak Darshan is the complete view.

For example, let's take the constellation called the Big Dipper.

We look at it from a fairly restricted zone in space, and it always seems, whatever the

season of the year, because we're so far away from it, that those stars in the Big Dipper

are in the same position.

But imagine looking at it from somewhere else in space altogether, and those stars would

not look like a Dipper.

They'd be in another position.

Now then, what is the true position of those stars?

Don't you see there isn't one?

Because wherever you look, the position alters.

You could say that the true situation of those stars is how they are looked at from all points

of view, all possible points of view.

Inside the constellation, looking outwards.

Outside the constellation, looking inwards.

From everywhere and everywhere.

But you see, there is no such thing as the truth.

The world, in other words, is not existing independently of those who witness it.

Because the world is precisely the relationship between the world and its witnesses.

And so if there are no eyes in this world, the sun doesn't make any light.

Nor do the stars.

So what is, is a relationship.

You can, for example, prop up two sticks by leaning them against each other and they will

stand.

But only by depending on each other.

Take one away and the other falls.

So in Buddhism it is taught that everything in this universe depends on everything else.

That we have a kind of a huge network.

And this is called the doctrine of mutual interdependence.

All of it hangs on you.

And you hang on all of it.

Just as the two sticks support each other.

And this is conveyed in a symbol which is called Indra's net.

Imagine a multidimensional spider's web in the early morning covered with dewdrops.

And every dewdrop contains the reflection of all the other dewdrops.

And in each reflected dewdrop the reflections of all the other dewdrops in that reflection.

And so ad infinitum.

That is the Buddhist conception of the universe.

In an image.

The Japanese call that Jiji Muge.

A G means a thing event.

A happening.

So between happening and happening.

Mu, there is no, ge, separation.

Jiji Muge.

Now, so the first phase of the Eightfold Path has to do with one's view.

Understanding of the world.

The second phase has to do with action.

How you act.

The Buddhist idea of ethics is based on expediency.

If you are engaged in the way of liberation.

And you want to clarify your consciousness.

Doing that is inconsistent with certain kinds of action.

So every Buddhist makes five vows.

Five precepts.

And you may perhaps have heard the Buddhist formula of taking what is called Panchasila.

The five precepts.

And they take what are called Thisarana.

The three refuges.

And the five precepts.

The refuges are the Buddha.

The Dharma.

The doctrine.

And the Sangha.

The fellowship of all those who are on the way.

So, the priest, the bhikkhu, the Buddhist monk, and the lay people will chant the formula.

Buddha-hanga saranaṅga-chāmi.

Dang-hanga saranaṅga-chāmi.

Sang-hanga saranaṅga-chāmi.

Those are the three refuges.

The Buddha, the Dharma, and the Sangha.

Then they take the five precepts.

Pāṇā-ti-pātha.

Vēramani-sikāpadaṅga-samādhyāmi.

Ādi-nadāna.

Vēramani-sikāpadaṅga-samādhyāmi.

Kāmesu-michachara.

Vēramani-sikāpadaṅga-samādhyāmi.

So they take these five precepts.

Pāṇā-ti-pātha.

I undertake the precept to abstain from taking life.

Ādi-nadāna.

I undertake the precept to abstain from taking what is not given.

Kāmesu-michachara.

I undertake the precept to abstain from exploiting the passions.

Nusāvāda.

I undertake the precept to abstain from falsifying speech.

Sūra-mērīya-mājapa-mādatāṅga.

I undertake the precept to abstain from being intoxicated by Sūra-mērīya-mājapa-mādatāṅga.

Whatever they were.

I presume Tadi, which is alcohol,

I don't know what else it was.

Nobody does, no.

Because, you see, if you start killing people,

uh, or, uh, taking life, you're in trouble.

You set up an opposition, and you've got to become involved in taking care of it.

If you start stealing, you worry people.

You upset people's orientation in life,

because if you suddenly come back home for dinner and find somebody's stolen your table,

where you're going to serve dinner.

Uh, if you exploit your passions,

um, it means that, uh,

when you're, when you feel bored,

uh, somehow that life is a little bit empty,

you say, well, now, what are we going to do this evening?

Let's go and get stuffed.

A lot of people who suffer from obesity are trying to simply fill their empty psyche,

by stuffing themselves with food.

Well, it's the wrong cure.

So, uh, likewise, Musavada,

if you start telling lies to everybody,

you know what happens when you start telling lies,

you have to tell extra lies to cover up the first one,

and you get into the most hopeless misunderstanding.

Speech collapses.

And, of course, the intoxication is the same problem as the exploitation of the passions.

So there's a purely kind of practical, expedient, utilitarian approach to morals.

There's another side to this which doesn't enter into the precepts,

which I will explain later.

So, that's the third phase of the Eightfold Path.

Then, the, no, the second phase.

Then the third phase has to do with your mind,

with your state of consciousness.

And this has to do with what we would ordinarily call meditation.

There are the two final,

the seventh and eighth, uh, aspects of the path,

are called Samyak Shmriti and Samyak Samadhi.

Shmriti means recollection.

That's the best English word for it.

Now, do you understand?

The word recollect is to gather together what has been scattered.

What is the opposite of remember?

Obviously dismember.

What has been chopped up and scattered

into the bread.

It becomes remembered.

So, in the Christian scheme,

do this in remembrance of me.

You see, the Christ has been sacrificed.

Chopped up.

But the mass is celebrated in remembrance.

One of the old liturgies says,

the wheat which has been scattered all over the hills,

and grows up,

is gathered again into the bread.

Remembered.

Go back to your Hindu basis.

The world is regarded as the dismemberment of the self,

the Brahman, the Godhead.

The one is dismembered into the many.

So, remembrance is realizing again that each single member of the many is really the one.

So, that's recollection.

You can think of it, too, in another way.

And it's really the same way if you think it through.

I'm going to leave you with a few puzzles,

so that you can think them through,

and I won't explain them.

But another way is to be recollected,

is to be completely here and now.

Are you here and now?

Are you really here?

There was a wise old boy who used to give lectures on these things,

and he would get up and not say a word.

He would just look at the audience.

And he'd examine every person individually.

And they'd all start feeling uncomfortable.

He wouldn't say anything, he'd look at them all.

And then he'd suddenly say,

Wake up!

You're all asleep!

And if you don't wake up, I won't give you any lecture.

Are you here, recollected?

See, most people aren't.

They're bothering about yesterday and wondering what they're going to do tomorrow.

And aren't all here.

That's a definition of sanity, to be all there.

So to be recollected,

is to be completely alert,

available for the present.

Because that's the only place that you are ever going to be in.

Yesterday doesn't exist,

tomorrow never comes.

There is only today.

A great Sanskrit sort of invocation says,

Look to this day, for it is life.

In its brief course lie all the realities of our existence.

Yesterday is but a memory.

Tomorrow is only a vision.

Look well then, to this day.

Such is the salutation of the dawn.

So shmiti means then, recollectedness in the sense of being all here.

In the sense that this is the only way there is.

Then beyond that comes samadhi.

Again, notice the presence of this word S-A-M.

Sam.

Samadhi is integrated consciousness,

in which there is no further separation between the knower and the known,

the subject and the object.

You are what you know.

Now we think, in the ordinary way,

that we are the witnesses of a constantly changing panorama of experience,

from which we as the knowers of this, in a way, stand aside and watch it.

We think of our minds as a kind of tablet,

upon which experience writes a record.

And the tablet is always there,

although the experience goes by.

And eventually the experience, by writing so much on the tablet, wears it out.

It's all scratched away.

And you die. See?

But actually, if you will investigate this,

and you have to experiment on this,

because I cannot explain it to you in words.

You can only find it out for yourself.

There is no difference between the knower and the known.

When you say, I see a sight, I feel a feeling,

you are using redundant language.

I see implies the sight.

I feel implies the feeling.

Do you hear sounds?

No.

You just hear.

Or you can say, there are sounds.

Either one will do.

So you will find, if you thoroughly investigate the process of experiencing,

that the experiencing is the same as the experiencer.

And this is the state of Samadhi.

I put it originally in this form,

that the organism and the environment are a single behavioral process.

So likewise is the knower and the known.

So you as someone who is aware,

and all that you are aware of is one process.

That is the state of Samadhi.

And you get to that state by the practice of meditation.

Every Buddha figure practically is seen in the sitting posture of meditation,

which is sitting down quietly and being aware of all that goes on without comment,

without thinking about it.

And when you stop categorizing, verbalizing, talking to yourself inside your head,

naturally the separations between, for example, knower and known, self and other, simply vanish.

Can you point to the difference between my five fingers?

Where will you put your finger if you want to point to the difference?

You see, the idea of difference is an abstraction.

It just isn't there in the physical world.

Of course, that's not saying that the fingers are joined like a duck's claws with a web,

but that, it's just that.

They're not the same.

That's an idea.

They're not different.

That's an idea.

And these ideas just aren't here.

See?

You can't point to it.

You can't put your finger on it.

Get then to the state of affairs where you see the world free from concepts.

That's what Buddhists mean by void.

When they say the world is basically, they use the phrase shunya, that has a meaning of like empty, void.

Everything is shunya.

This has certainly also the meaning of anitya, of transience, but basically it means.

You can't catch the world in a conceptual net.

Just if you try to catch water in a net, it all slips through.

If you try to tie up water in a paper package, or grab it in your hands, it all flows through.

So shunya, it doesn't really mean that the world itself, that the energy of the world is nothing at all.

It means that no concept of it is valid.

You cannot make any one idea, or belief, or doctrine, or system, or theory, tie the thing up.

So, if you go through this, and you get completely blown out, and released, and are in the state of nirvana,

for no reason that anybody can explain, just as for example, as I pointed out, when you see that you can't change yourself,

you can't lift yourself up by your own bootstraps, you then get a new access of psychic energy.

So in exactly the same way, when you get to this state of nirvana, there wells up from within you,

what the Buddhists call karuna, or compassion.

The sense that you aren't different from everybody else.

Everybody else's suffering is your suffering.

And so this tremendous sense of solidarity with all other beings arises.

So that he who reaches nirvana doesn't, as it were, withdraw into a sort of isolated peace,

but is always coming back into the world, into the difficulties, into the problems of life,

in compassion for everyone else.

You can't be saved alone, because you're not alone. You are the whole cosmos.

You've been listening to Following the Middle Way with Alan Watts,

from the Alan Watts Radio Series Number 6 on Buddhism.

For information on how to obtain the radio series on cassette tape, call 1-800-969-2887.

Or you can write to The Electronic University, P.O. Box 2309, San Anselmo, California, 94979.

When you call or write, please indicate the name of your local station.

That you heard the program, Following the Middle Way, from the Alan Watts Radio Series Number 6.

===== Buddhism - 08 - No Religion I =====

I was discussing last night the Bodhisattva doctrine in Mahayana Buddhism

and comparing it or relating it to the two great tendencies in Indian spirituality,

anti-worldliness or otherworldliness and world affirmation

and showing how the idea that the highest kind of a Buddha is in a certain way a non-Buddha.

The highest kind of a Buddha is like an ordinary person.

And this comes out very, very much in various tendencies in Zen

where, for example, all the painting, peculiarly characteristic of Zen Buddhism,

in the Chinese and Japanese tradition, is, as it were, secular.

It has a peculiarly non-religious atmosphere.

That is to say, the painting of Shingon sect and Tendai sect,

as you saw it in the museum today, was religious painting.

You could tell at once that the subject matter of these paintings is religious.

But with Zen painting, the way of dealing with philosophical and spiritual themes is secular.

So that when an artist like Sengai, living in the 17th century, Japan, paints the Buddha,

there is something slightly humorous about the Buddha.

He wears his halo over one ear.

There is an informality, a slight raffishness.

And so this comes from China, from those great Song artists like Liang Kai,

who painted the sixth patriarch of Zen, chopping bamboos,

looking like the most extraordinarily unkempt country oaf.

So, also, the greatest Zen painting has as its subject matter not really religious themes at all.

It uses pine branches, rocks, bamboos, grasses, everything of that kind.

And you would never know that these things were icons.

Likewise, also, in poetry, which we will go into more extensively in the future,

the superb expression of Zen poetry is derived from the Chinese poet,

who says, wondrous action, supernatural power, drawing water, carrying fuel.

Now, that poem is a little bit too religious for Zen taste.

And so, preferable to that is Basho's famous poem,

The Old Pond, A Frog Jumps In, Plop.

Plop is the only possible English translation for the Japanese,

Mizu no Otto, which means literally, the water's sound.

Plop.

But that poem, you see, is a very high-style Zen poem,

because it has nothing in it about religion.

There is a poem on the edge, which also was written by Basho,

which says,

When the lightning flashes,

how admirable he who does not think life is fleeting.

You see, the flash of a lightning is a Buddhist cliché

for the transiency of the world.

Your life goes by and disappears as fast as a flash of lightning.

That becomes a cliché.

So, all religion,

all religious comments about life,

eventually become clichés.

Religion always is falling apart,

and becoming a certain kind of going through the motions,

a kind of imitation of attitudes,

as if one would say,

we've got a book called The Imitation of Christ.

It's a terrible book,

because everybody who imitates Christ

is a kind of a fake Jesus.

So, in the same way,

there's all kinds of imitation Buddhas,

not just sitting on altars made of wood,

gilded,

but just sitting around in monasteries.

So,

one might say, then,

that the highest kind of

religious

or spiritual attainment

has no sign about it

that it is religious

or that it is spiritual.

And so,

as a metaphor for this,

there was used in Buddhism

from the very beginning

the idea of

the tracks of birds in the sky.

They don't leave any tracks.

And so,

the way of the enlightened man

is like the track of a bird in the sky.

And as one poem,

a Chinese poem says,

entering the forest,

he does not disturb a blade of grass.

Entering the water,

he does not make a ripple.

In other words,

there is no sign about him

to indicate

that he is self-consciously religious.

And this goes, too,

for the fact that

his not having any religious sign

is also

not something contrived.

It isn't like Protestant simplicity.

You know,

all those Catholics

with their rituals

and how dreadful

and the insincere,

that is,

the real reason you know

why Protestants think

Catholic ritual is insincere.

You know?

It's expensive.

Protestantism started

in the burger cities

of Europe.

places like

Freiburg,

Hamburg,

you know,

and Geneva.

Because

the merchant class,

who were the foundation

of the bourgeoisie,

got annoyed

because every time

a saint's day came around,

all their employees

got a day off

because it was a holy day

and they had to attend mass.

There were so many

of these nuisance holy days

and all these contributions

that were assessed

by the church,

buying your way

out of purgatory

and saying masses

for the dead

and so on and so forth,

they found this

not very economical.

The priests were getting

the money

instead of the merchants.

And so they decried

as unbiblical

and irreligious

and wasteful

all the finery

of the Catholic religion

and wanted something

plain and simple.

So it became

in course of time

a sign of being

really religious

to avoid rituals

and to avoid

colorful clothing

and splendor

in churches

and to be

as ordinary

as possible.

But that is not yet

the real religion

of me giving

no sign

of having a religion

because this

simplicity

and absence

of ritual

itself becomes

a sign.

a way of advertising

how spiritual

you are.

So the completely

bodhisattva type

of person

doesn't leave

any track

either

by

being religious

overtly

or by being

non-religious

overtly.

How will you be

neither religious

nor non-religious?

See,

that's the great test.

How will you

avoid that trap

of being

one or the other?

It's like

are you a theist

or are you

an atheist?

See,

the theist

is caught

by God

and the

idea of God,

the belief in God

but the atheist

is equally caught

because an atheist

is very often

an atheist

because

he cannot stand

the idea

that God

is watching him

all the time.

That there is

this constant

all-seeing eye

prying on your

most private life

and that

there is

you know how

when you are

a child in school

and you are

writing something

or doing

arithmetic

and the teacher

walks round the

class and looks

over your shoulder.

Nobody wants

to be watched

like that.

Even someone

who is good

at writing

or at arithmetic

doesn't want

somebody looking

over their shoulder

while they are

doing it.

It puts you

off.

It bugs you.

So the idea

of the Lord God

who is watching

us all the time

who is judging

everything that we

do puts people

off and they

can't stand it.

So better be an

atheist to get

rid of teacher.

So, but the

atheist you see

the man who

advertises his

disbelief in God

is a very pious

person.

Nobody believes

in God like an

atheist.

There is no

God and I am

his prophet.

So then, the

true bodhisattva

state is very

difficult to pin

down as being

either, neither

supremely

religious nor

blatantly

secular.

And people

who think

that the

height of

Buddhism or

the height

of Zen

is to be

perfectly

ordinary

have still

missed the

point.

Like the

atheist has

missed the

point.

But for this

reason then,

there is an

element in

art, the

painting, the

poetry, etc.,

which has been

inspired by this

kind of

Buddhism, this

kind of art

where the

subject matter

is non-religious.

Nevertheless,

there is

something about

the way in

which this

non-religious

subject matter

is handled

world that

stops you

and you

know there

is something

strange about

it.

This is how

I first

became interested

in Oriental

philosophy and

all that kind

of thing.

I had an

absolute

fascination

for Chinese

and Japanese

painting,

the secular

painting, the

landscapes, the

treatment of

flowers and

grasses and

bamboos.

there was

something about

it that

struck me as

astonishing, even

though the

subject matter

was extremely

ordinary.

And I, just

as a child

practically, I

had to find

out what was

the strange

element in

those bamboos

and those

grasses.

I was being

of course

taught by

those painters

to see

grass, but

there was

something in

there that

one could

never pin

down, never

put your

finger on.

And that

was this

thing that

I will

call the

religion of

no religion.

The supreme

attainment of

being a

Buddha who

can't be

detected.

Who, in

this sense

then, leaves

no trace.

You remember,

some of you

have seen

those ten

paintings called

The Ten

Stages of

Spiritual

Oxherding.

And the

author, there

are two sets

of these

paintings.

There's a

heterodox one

and an

orthodox one.

The heterodox

one, as the

man catches

the ox, it

gets progressively

whiter, until

in the end it

disappears

altogether, and

the last picture

is an empty

circle.

But the

orthodox set of

paintings doesn't

end with the

empty circle.

The empty circle

arises, two

from the

end, three

from the

end.

It is

followed by

two others.

After the

man has

attained the

state of

emptiness, the

state, in

other words, of

complete

iconoclasm, the

state of no

attachment to

any spiritual

or psychological

or moral

crutch, there

are two more

steps.

One is called

returning to

the origin, which

is represented

by a tree

beside a

stream, and

the final one

called entering

the city with

hands hanging

down.

That means

hands giving

a hand out, as

it were, giving

bounty.

And it shows

the picture of

the fat Buddha

Putai, or in

Japanese, known

as Hotei, who

has an enormous

belly, big

ears, who

carries round a

colossal bag.

And what do

you think this

bag has in

it?

Trash.

Wonderful

trash.

Everything that

children love,

things that

everybody else

has thrown

away and

thought of as

valueless, this

bum collects

and gives it

away to

that he

goes on

his way

without

following the

steps of the

ancient sages.

His door is

closed.

That's the

door of his

house.

And no

glimpses of

his interior

life are to

be seen.

So, in other

words, it's

like when you

erect a

building, while

you're building

it, you

have all

kinds of

scaffolding

up.

That shows

you that

building is

going on.

But when the

building is

complete, the

scaffolding is

taken down.

To open a

door, as

they say in

Zen, you

may need to

pick up a

brick to

knock at

the door.

But when

the door is

open, you

don't carry the

brick inside.

To cross a

river, you

need a

boat.

But when

you've reached

the other

side, you

don't pick

up the

boat and

carry it.

So, the

brick, the

boat, the

scaffolding, all

these things

represent some

sort of

religious

technology or

method.

And in the

end, these

are all to

disappear.

So that the

saint will not

be found in

church.

I don't take

what I say

literally.

The saint can

perfectly readily

go to church

without being

sullied by

church.

But ordinary

people, when

they go to

church, they

come out

stinking of

religion.

There was a

great Zen

master once,

and one

of his

disciples asked

him, how

am I making

progress?

He said, you're

all right, but

you have a

trivial fault.

Well, what is

that?

He said, you

have too much

Zen.

Well, he

said, when

you're studying

Zen, don't

you think it's

very natural to

be talking

about it?

The master

said, when

it's like an

ordinary

conversation, it

is much

better.

And so,

another monk

who was

standing by

listening to

this exchange

said to

the master,

why do you

so specially

dislike talking

about Zen?

And he

replied, because

it turns one's

stomach.

So, what did

he mean when

he said, when

it's like an

ordinary everyday

conversation, it

is somewhat

better?

When the old

master, Joshu,

was asked, at

the end of the

kalpa, when

everything is

destroyed in

fire, there will

be one thing

remaining, what

is that?

And Joshu

replied, it's

windy again this

morning.

So, in

Zen, when

you're asked a

question about

religion, you

reply in terms of

the secular.

When you're

asked about

something secular,

you reply in

terms of

religion.

So, what is

the eternal

nature of the

self?

It's windy

again this

morning.

Please pass

me a knife.

The master

hands him the

knife with the

blade first.

He says, please

give me the

other end.

What would

you do with

the other end?

example, starts

out with the

ordinary.

Please pass

me the

knife.

And suddenly

he finds

himself involved

in a

metaphysical

problem.

But if he

starts out

with the

metaphysical,

he's going

to get

involved with

a knife.

So, now

to go

deeply into

the

religion of

non-religion,

we have to

understand

the, what

you might call

the final

ultimate

attainment

of Mahayana

Buddhist

philosophy.

And this

is

contained in

a school

of thought

which is

called in

Chinese

Hua Yan

and in

Japanese

Kegon.

Kegon

is the

intellectual

foundation

for Zen.

And there

was a

great Chinese

master by

the name

of Shumitsu

who was

simultaneously

a Zen

master

and the

fifth

patriarch

of the

Hua Yan

sect.

Hua

means

flower.

Yan

garland.

The

garland

of flowers.

And it's

all based

on a

Sanskrit

sutra

called

Avatangsaka.

This is

called

simply

in Japanese

Kegon

Kyo.

A very

big

sutra.

And

the subject

matter of

this sutra

are what

are called

the four

Dharma

worlds.

And I

must explain

what these

four worlds

are so

that you

get the

point.

First of

all,

there is

a level

of being

which we

will call

Ji.

The word

Ji,

which is

Japanese

way of

pronouncing

the Chinese

chur,

is the

world of

things and

events.

What you

might call

the common

sense

world,

the

everyday

world

that our

senses

normally

record.

The word

Ji,

the character

in Chinese,

has a

multiplicity

of meanings

because it

can mean

a thing

or an

event.

It can

also mean

business,

an affair,

not in a

love affair,

but something

in the way

the French

say,

les affaires

for business,

something

important.

It can

also mean

affectation,

putting

something on

or showing

off.

And so

a person

who is a

master in

Zen is

called

Buji,

which means

no business,

no

affectation,

nothing

special.

The poem

says,

On Mount

Lu there is

misty rain,

and the

river

Jiang is

at high

tide.

When you

have not

been there,

your heart

is filled

with longing,

but when you

have been

there and

come back,

it was

nothing

special.

Misty

rain on

Mount

Lu,

river

Jiang

at high

tide.

But

this

nothing

special

is not

a way

of putting

something

down.

Do you

see that?

I could

say,

well,

it was

nothing

special,

it didn't

really

amount

to

anything.

That's

one way

of

saying

it was

very

ordinary.

But

Buji,

just as

it doesn't

mean

it was

very

one.

He

looks

like

one,

but

he

isn't.

And

you

have

to

know

what

he

knows

in

order

to

see

that

he

isn't

and

to

recognize

him

for

what

he

is.

So

nothing

special,

Buji,

it

doesn't

stand

out,

it

doesn't,

as we

would say,

it doesn't

stick out

like a

sore

thumb.

So

the

world

of

multiplicity,

the world

we

ordinarily

feel

we're

involved

in.

So

that's

the

first

world.

The

second

world

is

called

the

world

of

Ri.

Now

Ri,

in

Chinese

Li,

is

as I

explained

to

you

when

we

were

discussing

the

idea

of

the

law

of

nature.

The

character

means

the

markings

in

jade

or

the

grain

in

wood

or

the

muscle.

But

in

the

Huayen

philosophy

the

word

Ri

means

the

universal

underlying

all

particulars

the

one

underlying

all

multiplicity.

The

unitive

principle

as

distinct

from

Ji

which

is

the

differentiation

principle.

So

as

it

were

like

it's

like

this

when

you

see

into

the

nature

of

this

world

you

start

from

Ji.

You

start

from

noticing

all

the

particular

things

and

being

baffled

by

their

multiplicity

and

dealing

with

the

multiplicity

of

things.

But

as

you

go

into

this

you

discover

as

you

understand

things

what

do

you

mean

when

you

understand

things

it

means

you

become

aware

of

their

relationships

to

each

other

and

eventually

you

see

the

unity

behind

them

and

it

is

as

if

the

multiplicity

of

the

world

dissolved

into

unity

===== Buddhism - 09 - No Religion II =====

You start from noticing all the particular things, and being baffled by their multiplicity,

and dealing with the multiplicity of things.

But as you go into this, you discover, as you understand things,

what do you mean when you understand things?

It means you become aware of their relationships to each other,

and eventually you see the unity behind them.

And it is as if the multiplicity of the world dissolved into unity.

And so here you encounter a problem.

I can see the world as a unity.

I can see the world as a multiplicity.

But how the devil am I going to put the two visions together?

If I am to be a practical success in business, in family life, and so on,

I have to observe the world of particulars.

It's particulars that matter.

I have to know chalk from cheese.

But if I become a saint, a monk, or a hermit, or even perhaps a poet or an artist,

I will forget about the practical matters, and contemplate the unity,

the secret meaning underlying all events.

But then all those practical people are going to say to me,

you're falling down on the job.

You've escaped from life.

Because they feel that the world of particulars is the real world.

But the other guy says,

no, your particulars are not real.

You make a success of things, yes, but it's completely temporary.

You think you're an important person,

that you're really contributing to human life.

But actually, your success in doing this sort of thing lasts for a few years,

and then you fall apart like everybody else does.

Where's your success now?

When you're dead, what happened to the millions of dollars you made?

Where are you?

You're all gone.

So that isn't real, from the standpoint of the person who concentrates on the unity.

So then, to perfect our understanding, we have to go to the third of these worlds,

which is called, Ri, Ji, Mu, Ge.

Now, that means between Ri, the unity, and Ji, the particulars,

Mu, there is no, Ge, block.

That means the world of the universal and the world of particulars are not incompatible.

Let's take two very different things,

and see how they can be united.

Take shape and colour.

Never in a million years can you, with a black pencil that can draw shapes, make red.

But, if you have red, you can draw a circle.

You can draw a red circle.

Even though the circle shape and the red colour will never be the same.

Yet, red circle, they go beautifully together.

So, think of circle as Ji, and red as Ri.

The circle is the particular, the colour is the universal.

They go together.

So then, we might say, the properly rounded out person is both spiritual and material.

Both otherworldly and worldly.

This is the supreme attainment of a human being, to be both.

Don't get one-sided.

A person who is, what you might call, just a materialist, ends up by being very boring.

It's, you know, you can live the successful life of the world, and you can own every kind of material refinement.

You can have the most beautiful home, delicious food, marvellous yachts, and cars, and everything.

But if you have no touch of mysticism, it eventually is all perfectly boring, and you will get tired of it.

Then, on the other hand, there are people who are purely spiritual.

And they live in a kind of dry world, where all luxury has been scrubbed away.

And they are very intense people.

When you are in their presence of a very spiritual person, an excessively spiritual person,

you feel inclined to sit on the edge of your chair.

You are not at ease.

Because you know the eye of judgment is looking through you, and going down into your very soul,

and finding that you are just a scallywag after all.

And here is this absolutely sincere, this dreadfully honest and unselfish person.

This is something which is always puzzling to people brought up in a western environment.

Because great spiritual people are often very, very sensuous.

Because they can't be materialists, in the ordinary sense.

They can't be straight, open sensualists.

Because for them, the world is too wonderful for that.

Any human being is too marvellous to be treated as just a kind of sexual object.

They may be very much a sexual object, but so marvellous.

You have to stop with it, and really go into the whole of that marvellous, wonderful personality.

So there is a trouble that keeps coming up for the West.

When you go to church, and you suddenly go to a church where there is a marvellous clergyman.

And you think he is the very exemplar of life, and you idealize him.

And then suddenly there develops a frightful scandal.

That he has an affair with his secretary.

And you think all is lost.

That the faith has been sold out.

That everything is going to rack and ruin.

Because he was not purely spiritual.

And he himself may be terribly confused and worried about this.

Because in our world, you see, we make the spiritual and the material mutually exclusive.

But ri ji muge, this third world means that between the spiritual and the material there is no obstruction.

So we might say this would sound as if it were the highest level.

But there is one more to come.

Which is called ji ji muge.

This means then suddenly ri has disappeared.

But between ji ji and ji there is no obstruction.

Between one event and any other event or events there is no mutual exclusiveness.

Shall I put it that way?

This is the doctrine, the highest doctrine of Mahayana Buddhism.

Which you could call the doctrine of the mutual interpenetration of all things.

Or the mutual interdependence of all things.

And its symbol is the, what is called Indra's net.

That is used in the avatang saka sutra.

Imagine, at dawn, a multidimensional spider's web, covered in dew.

A vast, vast spider's web that is the whole cosmos.

And is not only a kind of a flat thing, but a solid thing.

And is solid in four, five, six and n dimensions.

Covered with jewels of dew.

All of which have rainbow colouring.

And every drop of dew contains in it the reflection of every other drop of dew.

And since every drop of dew contains the reflections of all the others.

Each reflected drop of dew contains the reflections, you see, of all the others.

And so ad infinitum.

Now this is the Mahayana vision of the world.

Which is to say, this is relativity.

That whatever exists in this world and is characterised as something particular.

As a thing, as an event, as something or other, you see, as a unit.

This does not exist without all other such things and events.

So that you might say, any one event implies all events.

And all events, the total universe, past, present and future, depends on every single member.

In other words, you may say, I can understand that I depend on this whole universe.

There could not be me unless there was everything else.

It is harder to see the corollary of that.

That the whole universe depends on you.

You might say, well, how can that be?

Because I come into being and then I go out of being.

And when I'm, before I was born, I'm sure the universe was here.

And after I die, I'm sure it will go on.

How can you say then that the whole thing depends on me?

Very simply.

It depends on your, supposing you're dead.

And we're talking about someone in the past.

Let's say, we're talking about Socrates.

And I'm going to say, this whole universe depends on Socrates.

I may put it more exactly.

It depends on Socrates having existed.

You see your parents now.

Some of your parents may be alive, but some of your parents may be dead.

Without your parents, he would not have come into being.

So you depend on your parents, even when your parents have gone.

So everything, even when you disappear, the universe will still depend on you.

On your having been here.

Or if you have not yet arrived, it depends on your going to be here.

So we can say, obviously, going back to Socrates,

the fact that Socrates existed tells us something about the kind of world we're living in.

This world, once Socratized.

And that Socrates and his wisdom was a symptom of the kind of universe we're living in,

in just the same way as I showed you that an apple is a symptom of a tree,

a certain kind of tree.

It tells us something about that tree, what it functions, how it produces things.

So a world which produced Socrates, or a world which produced John Doe,

who was nobody in particular, and nobody ever remembered him or thought to,

write his biography.

Nevertheless, for all his obscurity, the whole universe depends on him,

and it depends equally on every fruit fly, every gnat,

every vibration of every gnat's wing, and it depends on every last electron.

However brief its manifestation may be.

So that what this is saying is that everything that there is implies everything else.

And all those other things collectively, in their totality, which we call the universe,

in turn imply each individual object, event, and so on.

That's the meaning of Indra's net.

So that, this is called in Zen, to take up a blade of grass,

and use it as a golden Buddha, sixteen feet high.

When you have a chain, and you pick up a link, all the other links come up with it.

You see?

Because it implies, if this is a link, it is a link in a chain.

If it isn't, it's just an oval piece of metal.

But if it's a link, up come all other links.

So if you are an event, every event, there is no such thing as a single event.

The only possible single event is all events whatsoever.

That could be regarded as the only possible atom.

The only possible single thing is everything.

But the things that we call things all imply each other.

We know what we are only in relation to what we aren't.

We know of the sensation of oneself only in relation to a sensation of something other.

So the other goes with the self as the back goes with the front.

And your life, however short, everything depends on it.

If that did not happen, nothing would happen.

So in this sense, the whole world bears your signature.

It would not be the same world if it weren't for you.

You've heard, haven't you, what is called the pathetic fallacy?

This was an idea of the 19th century.

Which said that it was false and wrong to project human feelings on the world.

The wind in the pine trees is not sighing.

It's you who are sighing.

The sun is not happy.

It's you who are happy when the sun shines.

So don't mix up your happiness with the sun.

The sun has no feeling.

The sun is not human.

The wind has no feeling and is not human.

The poet says, the moon doth with delight look round her when the heavens are bare.

And the logician says, no, the poet looks round with delight at the moon in the bare heavens.

How awful.

I mean, if that's the point, you see, better not say any poetry.

Just have prose.

But actually the moon does look round with delight when the poet looks round with delight.

Because the world of which one symptom is the moon is the same world of which another symptom is the poet.

They go together.

A world where there is a moon implies a world where there is a poet.

A world where there is a poet implies a world where there is a moon.

So, in this sense, the moon can be said to look round with delight through the agency of the poet.

Because you can't separate poet and moon.

Just as you can't separate head and feet without destroying the unity of the body.

So, in that sense then, this whole world is a human world.

And we should not take the silly attitude or philosophy called the philosophy of the pathetic fallacy.

Which says, outside our skins it's all inhuman and dumb and blind force.

And only inside the skin is there the human world.

All this world is human.

Because it depends not only on the existence of humanity in general,

but on the existence of Mary Smith in particular.

So, the whole world is covered, as it were, with your personal signature.

But at that moment when you suddenly seem to be everything,

and to be Mr. A, you know,

you suddenly see the obverse of this.

That your particular personality is nothing at all without everything else.

Without everybody else.

I need, in order to be Alan Watts,

I need every single other human being,

and the uncontrollable otherness of all those other human beings,

that I can't do anything about.

They are going to be themselves whatever I do.

And yet, at the same time,

I depend on all their difference from me.

And yet, they all depend, likewise, on me.

So that I'm in a very funny position.

The moment I would be egoless and say,

I'm nothing without you.

Then suddenly I find I'm the kingpin.

They all depend on me.

Then suddenly, when I get swell-headed about being the kingpin,

I find I'm nothing at all without them.

So everything keeps going blip, blip, blip, blip, blip.

In other words, the moment you think you've got it in one state,

it transforms itself into the other.

That's the Gigi Muge.

Now in Gigi Muge, you see,

you've got a vision of the world

in which everybody is boss and nobody is boss.

There is no one boss who governs the whole thing.

It takes care of itself.

It's a colossal democracy.

But yet, every man and every Uguisu and every snail is king in this world.

And at the same time is commoner.

And that's how it works.

And there is no great king,

although in Hinduism they have an idea,

a very strange one to us, called Ishvara.

Ishvara means the Supreme Personal God.

The top being in the Deva world.

And many Buddhists believe that there is such a God.

There is a ruler of the universe.

But he is lower than a Buddha.

Because in the course of the endless cycles,

Ishvara will dissolve into nothing.

All gods, all angels are within the round of being.

It's a very curious idea to our minds.

And therefore, although Buddhists believe in God in that sense,

they don't take it importantly.

There are no shrines in Buddhism to Ishvara.

So then, it is through Jiji Muge,

this idea of the mutual interpenetration and interdependence of all things,

that we have the philosophical basis for Zen as a practical, non-intellectual way of life.

Because of the realization that the most ordinary event,

the charcoal brazier, the mat, soup for dinner, sneezing, washing your hands, going to the bathroom, everything.

All these so-called events, separate events, imply the universe.

So, this is why Zen people will use the ordinary event to demonstrate the cosmic and the metaphysical.

Only, they don't rationalize it that way.

To see infinity in a grain of sand and eternity in an hour is still Riji Muge and not Jiji Muge.

Jiji Muge is when you offer somebody the grain of sand,

for God's sake, stop thinking about eternity.

Here's just the grain of sand.

There is no difference between the grain of sand and eternity.

So, you don't have to think about eternity as something implied by the grain of sand.

The grain of sand is eternity.

So, in the same way exactly, our sitting here at this moment is not something different from Nirvana.

We are Nirvana as sitting here, exactly like this, you see.

So, you don't have to say any philosophical comment on the grain of sand or on our sitting here.

That's called legs on a snake or a beard on a eunuch.

You put legs on a snake, you see, and you embarrass the snake in its motion.

And a eunuch doesn't need a beard.

We would say in our idiom, don't gild the lily.

Or Zen would say, don't put frost on top of snow.

So, all what you might call specifically religious activity, is legs on a snake.

Eventually, this is going to be eliminated, just as eventually, we hope that government will be eliminated.

And will become unnecessary.

Because every individual will be self-governing.

And therefore, relate properly to his brother.

And the state will vanish.

So too, at the same time, the church will vanish.

And that's why in the book of Revelation, in the New Testament, it is said that in heaven there is no temple.

Because the whole place is the temple.

So, when we achieve the fulfillment of Buddhism, there is no Buddha.

No temple.

No gong.

No bell.

Because the whole world is the sound of the bell.

And the image of Buddha is everything you can look at.

So, a Zen master was asked, Mountains and hills, are they not all forms of the body of Buddha?

And the master replied, Yes, they are.

But it's a pity to say so.

So, I hope that they are there.

Let's segue what essa said.

Baby to accrue himself.

One 하는ider from

themselves.

Are we vibe?

No.

Keeping it bulky.

One.

Would you like to add a Initiative?

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