Alan Watts - Eastern and Western Zen

===== Eastern And Western Zen - 01 - I Swimming Headless =====

Now, this morning I was giving you a talk on the fundamental basic attitudes expressed

in Lao Tzu's Dao De Jing, and the title of the book, Dao De Jing, introduces now the

second word in the title. I've been dwelling this morning on the first word, which is Dao,

and so comes up this second word, De. And this word, again, faces us with some serious problems

of translation, ordinarily translated virtue, but virtue as we understand it today isn't

at all appropriate. The nearest kind of, when we speak of the healing virtues of a plant,

that's nearer to the meaning of this word, De. The Japanese pronounce it Toku, the Cantonese

Duck, and the Northern Mandarins approximately De. And in the section of the Lao Tzu, where

this is really introduced. The text says something like this, superior virtue, not virtue, thus

it has virtue. Inferior virtue can't let go of virtue, thus not virtue. And we more or less

paraphrase that by translating, superior virtue is not conscious of itself as virtue, and therefore

it is virtue. But inferior virtue is so hooked up with being virtuous, or hooked on being virtuous,

that it's not virtue. Now then, therefore, this word is a connection of virtue and magic. It means

the excellence of the excellence of things, in the sense that a tree excels at being a tree. And nobody

really knows how it does it. There is no way of imitating a tree, except the only thing is to be one. And so in the same

way when a human being shows extraordinary skill at something, it seems that it comes natural to him. It

seems that he doesn't achieve it by any kind of artificiality. If there is some discipline in it,

it's concealed. So excelling in something naturally, and yet it's something that is so difficult to

understand that it seems that it seems that it has been done by magic, is the meaning of this word. So what

de is, is the state of affairs, a way of talking about a, particularly a human being, who has learned to live

in harmony with the Tao. Now, of course, everything is fundamentally in harmony with the Tao.

In the book called the Jung-Yung, or the Unwobbling Pivot, it is said, the Tao is that from which nothing can

depart. That from which things can depart is not the Tao. Fundamentally, you see, you can't get away from

it. It's like a situation in which we are all floating in a tremendous river. And the river carries you along,

anyhow. Now, some of the people in the river are swimming against it, but they're still being carried

along. Others have learned that the art of it, of the thing, is to swim with it. And they're carried along

too. But they know it, you see. They know they're carried along, whereas the people who are swimming

against it think they're going in the opposite direction. But they're not really. So that was a

sort of discussion we were having this morning, when I find invariably, whenever I talk about these

things, Americans raise moral issues, because we are a people incredibly bamboozled by preachers.

And so this always comes up. Bamboozled. Preachers. Yes.

And chronic guilty consciences. And so those questions are always raised.

But this, you see, explains part of the situation, that you have to flow with the river. There is no

other way, but that you can swim against it and pretend not to be flowing with it, but you still

are. So, but a person who is not making that pretense anymore, who knows that you have to go with

the river and swim with it, suddenly he acquires, behind everything that he does,

the power of the river. The person swimming against the river, you see, does not by his action

express the force of the river. The person swimming with it, he goes along and he has that whole river

behind him, but he's subtly directing it, because you can change direction in the course of the river.

You can go to the left or to the right, as a ship can use a rudder and still go along with the current,

or more skillful. Still, as a sailboat can tack, because when a sailboat tacks and goes in a direction

contrary to the wind, it still is using the wind to blow it along. Now that is the most highly skillful

art of all that is Taoism in perfection, the art of sailing. Very intelligent. I remember once I

was looking in the open air and one of the glorious little thistle-down things came, and I picked it up,

like that, and brought it down, and it looked as if it was struggling to get away,

just as if you caught an insect by one leg, like a daddy longlegs or something of that kind. It seemed

to be struggling to get away, and at first I thought, well it's not doing that, that's just the wind blowing.

Then I thought again, really? Only the wind blowing? Surely it is the structure of this thing which,

in cooperation with the existence of wind, enables it to move like an animal,

but using the wind's effort, not its own. It is more intelligent being than an insect, in a way,

because an insect uses effort. Like a person who rows a boat uses effort, but the man who puts up a sail

is using magic. He lets nature do it for him, with the intelligence to use a sail, you see? So in just this

way there's the meaning of, uh, de, is that kind of intelligence which, without your using very much

effort, gets everything to cooperate with you. You, for example, never force other people to agree with

you, but you give them the notion that the idea you wanted them to have was their own. This is a

feminine heart, preeminent. A woman who really wants a lover does not pursue him, because then most men

feel that she's aggressive. And if she's aggressive, she obviously is a woman who has had difficulty in

finding lovers, and therefore there must be some undesirably secret thing about her. But if she, as it were,

makes a void, then, uh, and, and is slightly difficult to get, then people get excited. They know she's a

highly prized object, and, uh, so they pursue. Same way, when you want to teach a baby to swim,

you could, a thing you can do is to put the baby in the water, and then, uh, move backwards in the water,

and create a vacuum, and this pulls the baby along. It helps it to learn the feel of the water and how

to swim. It's the same principle. So, uh, also, clever, difficult to getness is one of the very best means of

acquiring immense publicity. Take the case of T. E. Lawrence, who published The Seven Pillars of Wisdom

in a limited edition. And, uh, this was, it became an extraordinarily celebrated book. It cost hundreds

of dollars a copy to find one, you know, on the market. They waited and waited and built this up

and built this up and built this up and finally they published the general edition. And it was a knockout,

because the first, the first one had been sort of secret and, uh, difficult to find. If you have

patience, you see, you can always do this. Uh, so, the whole art of the ruler, you see, the, the Dao De Jing is a

book written for several purposes. You may take it as a guide to mystical understanding of the universe.

You may take it as a dissertation on the principles of nature, almost a naturalistic, a handbook of natural

law, we would say. Or you may also take it as a political book, a book of wisdom for governors. And

the principle which it advocates, basically, is the virtue of governing by not ruling. Uh,

look at it in this way. Supposing the president of the United States were as unknown to you by name

as the local, uh, sanitary inspector, the man who looks after the drains and the sewage disposal and

all that kind of thing. This is not a glamorous figure, you see. But for that very reason,

he probably does his job more efficiently than the president, because the president wastes an

enormous amount of time in interviewing various groups from, uh, uh, the Elks and the Girl Scouts and,

uh, conferring, uh, honors and all this kind of thing. The poor man's life must be an utter torment

because he's so well known and therefore has absolutely no time to give to the government of

the country. I mean, think of his mail, uh, and all the people who have to be employed sifting that out

and assessing it. So that if he were someone quite anonymous and that we didn't have to think about

he would be a very, very good ruler. In just the same way, for example, you don't have to attend,

unless you're sick, to the government of your own body.

It happens automatically. This is this expression, Ziran, of itself. And, uh, it goes on day after day

after day. And the better it is, the less you have to think about it. When you see well,

you do not see your eyes. If there is something wrong with your eyes, you start seeing spots.

And those spots are spots in your eyes. When you hear well, you'd never hear your ears. But when

they start singing, you know, then you're starting to hear your ears and your ears are getting in the

way of their own hearing. So on the deepest level, a person as a whole can get in the way of his own

existence by becoming too aware of himself. And then he lacks this quality, dearth. Now, the Taoists

then propose that there be something to help people get back to Tao and to be able to be in a state of

so that they wouldn't get in their own way. This is connected with the idea of being empty.

Emptiness, being somehow vacant, the secret of the thing. The highest kind of knowledge is not

know-how, but know-how, N-O hyphen H-O-W. To be able to do it know-how, without any method. To achieve this,

practice something is practiced which is called fasting the heart. The heart, in Chinese,

is a word which doesn't mean heart in the physiological sense.

You see, it's part of the de character, shin, usually located about here. And it means heart-mind. It's equivalently translated as mind. And in all the Zen texts where the word mind is used,

no mind, mooshin, it is this character, the psychic center. Now, the best kind of heart is absence of heart.

In English, the word heartless has a very bad connotation, as does the word mindless. A heartless

person is an inconsiderate, unfeeling person. A mindless person is an idiot.

But a person who has mooshin, or no mind, or no heart, in Chinese, is a very high order of person.

It means that his psychic center doesn't get in its own way. It operates as if it wasn't there.

Zhuangzi says that the highest form of man uses his shin like a mirror.

It grasps nothing. It refuses nothing. It receives, but does not keep.

And the poem says when the geese fly over the water, and they are reflected in the water,

that the geese do not intend to cast their reflection, and the water has no mind to retain their image.

So, the whole thing is, you see, to operate in the world as if you were absent.

Now, this is built into us physiologically, fundamentally. Let me ask you simply,

what is the color of your head from the standpoint of your eyes? Your eyes don't see your head, do they?

You look all around, and you see everything else, but your head you don't see.

Do you feel that your head is black? Hasn't any color at all?

Outside, you see, your field of vision is an oval of two eyes, and this creates sort of two centers of an ellipse.

So there's this whole field of vision.

Now, experiment. What is beyond the field of vision?

What color is it where you can't see?

It isn't black. This is an important point.

It's no color at all beyond there.

And in this way, you can get an idea of what is meant by that character that I discussed this morning,

Schwann, which, although it formally has the meaning of darkness, this one,

although it formally has the meaning of darkness and the deep and the obscure,

it actually refers to this kind of no color, which is the color of your head, so far as your eyes are concerned.

Now, so in this sense, the invisibility of one's head, almost the not having of any head at all,

is the secret of being alive. To be headless, you might say, to have no head,

in just the sense I'm talking about, is our way of talking about the Chinese expression,

Muxin, no mind. Now, as a matter of fact, if you want to see the inside of your head,

all you have to do is keep your eyes open, because everything that you're experiencing in the external

visual field is a state of your brain. All these colors and shapes are the way in which the brain nerves

translate the electrical impulses in the external world, being the world outside the envelope of skin.

So they translate all what is going on outside into impulses which are to us shape and color.

But shape and color are states of the nerves, so what you see when your eyes are open

is how it feels inside your head. You think your head is a blank, but actually it's being a blank.

You don't see your brain as an external, uh, undulating, corrugated structure. You see your brain as everything outside.

So in this way, the emptiness of one's head is the condition of seeing. The transparency of the eye lens

is the condition of seeing colors. It has no color itself. Eckhart said this, because my eye has no color,

it is able to discern color. This is in Germany in the, uh, 13th century. Uh, this is fundamental Taoist idea of

being absent as a condition of being present, being not there. So, uh, Zhuangzi says, when your belt is

comfortable, you don't feel it. When your shoes are comfortable, it is as if you weren't wearing any.

Likewise, your clothes, you see. The more you are aware of these things,

the less properly they are made, or the less properly they fit. But we raise an objection to this,

a very simple objection. If I don't know I'm there, I seem to be missing everything. We want to know that we

know. If we're happy and we don't know we're happy, we might just as well not be happy. To be happy and to

know that you're happy is really the overflowing of the cup of life. Of course, the penalty for that

is to be miserable and to know that you're miserable. Some people are miserable without knowing it.

But, uh, you know my limericks, there was a young man who said so,

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 this is the great human predicament. The development of self-consciousness,

the development of the possibility of reflecting upon one's own knowledge. And this is simultaneously

a blessing and a curse. And Taoism does not escape this problem. I mean it doesn't,

it doesn't avoid this problem, it deals with it. But it doesn't deal with it obviously. So we get back

to this fundamental verse about the nature of death. What is highly virtuous is a virtue that is not

conscious of itself as virtue. The moment it's conscious of itself as such, you see, it, it fails.

So in this way, we love to see a child dancing all by itself, lost in the dance and not performing for

an audience. And we say, oh, if only I could dance like that. If only I could become like a child again,

innocent. But then soon we know when parents notice how beautifully a child dances,

and they all approve of it and say to this child, dance for us. The child begins to lose this power.

And it puts on airs, it knows it's noticed. And we don't like that. You see, that's affectation,

that's showing off, that's phony. What we want you to do is to dance as if you had no audience,

not even yourself. Which of course puts the child in a double bind. Because it says to the child,

we require you to do something that will be acceptable, only if you do it as if it wasn't

required. We do that all the time to our children and to each other. You must love me. After all,

you promised to do so to when we got married, didn't you? And so on. So, this is the difficulty.

But somehow, a very great artist in the maturity of his life, somehow is able at least to give the

impression that he does what he does without playing to the gallery. Without self-consciousness,

it seems perfectly natural. How does he get there? There was a Daoist sage, later than Lao Tzu.

His name was Lietzha. We romanize that as L-I-E-H. Lietzha. And he had a reputation for being able to

ride on the wind. So light. Zhuangzi says in one place, it's easy enough to stand still. The difficulty

is to walk without touching the ground. Because in the state of being in accord with the Dao,

there is a certain feeling of weightlessness. Parallel to the weightlessness that people feel

when they get into outer space, or when they go deep into the ocean. This is of course connected

with the sensation that you're not carrying your body around. I described this morning the sensation

that an expert driver has, when he really is with it in a car. That the hill lifts him up and drops

him down the other side. That he and the road are all one process. And that's equivalent to the sense

of weightlessness. And so this is connected to this is the inner meaning of Lietzha riding on the wind.

When Suzuki was asked, what is it like to have Satori? He said, it's just like ordinary everyday

experience, except about two inches off the ground. And so we say in our own songs, walking on air,

never a care, something is making me sing, tra-la-la-la, tra-la-la-la, like a little bird in

spring. And weightlessness. It means, of course, partly that you're not moving around in constant

opposition to yourself. Most people move in constant opposition to themselves, because they

are afraid that if they don't oppose themselves all the time, something awful will happen.

See, it's so easy to bend your arm. No problem at all. But supposing you make a fight about it,

and you take these antagonistic muscles, as they're called, and fight them against each other so that

you have to bend your arm like that. See? How ridiculous. But if you somehow felt that in bending

your arm you might make a mistake, you know, instead of bending it, you might hit yourself,

uh, then these two muscles get nervous, and they fight each other to be sure that everything happens

all right. That's anxiety, you see? So, uh, when the human being developed the power to be aware of

himself, to know that he knows. In other words, when the cortex was formed over the original brain,

he fell from grace. That was the fall of man. Because when he felt, he had the sensation,

of being in charge, of being in control of himself. And you can only have that sensation when you are

aware of what you're doing. He got anxious. Am I aware enough of myself? Have I taken enough

factors into consideration? Have I done all that should be done? And then he started trembling.

This was the fall of man, of course. This is what is meant. The Lao Tzu says,

when the great Tao lost, there came duty to man and right conduct. In other words, nobody talks about

how you ought to behave unless things have gone radically wrong. There wouldn't be any conception

of faithful ministers of the state unless there were a lot of, uh, lousy politicians around.

No one would talk about filial piety unless there were wayward sons and daughters. So there is

constantly in the tradition of Taoism, the idea that all moral preaching is

is

confusion. There's a marvelous case of this in the Zhuangzi book, where there's an alleged

conversation between Confucius and Laozi, in which Laozi asks Confucius to explain to him

what is charity and duty to one's neighbor. And Confucius gives him a little sermon, you know,

on giving up one's self-interest and working for others. And Laozi says, what stuff? Sir,

regard the universe. He says, the stars come out invariably every night, the sun rises and sets,

the birds flock and migrate without exception, all flowers and trees grow upwards without exception.

You, by your talk of charity and duty to one's neighbor, you're just introducing confusion into

the empire. Your attempt to eliminate self is a positive manifestation of selfishness. You are

like a person beating a drum in search of a fugitive. The modern equivalent of that would be the police

car about to raid a bad nightclub and coming with its siren full on. And everybody in the club gets

out. So, all talk about selfishness, all talk about success in becoming virtuous, or enlightened, or

integrated, or non-neurotic, or self-actualized. Let's use all the terms that are being used. All this

talk attests to the fact that it hasn't happened, and will in fact get in the way of its happening.

Well, to go back to Lietze, who succeeded in riding the wind, what happened? Lietze found

a very great master and went to study with him, and the master lived in a small hut, and Lietze

sat outside the hut, and the master paid absolutely no attention to him. This is sort of the way

with Taoist masters, because why would they want students? They have nothing to teach.

After a year sitting outside, Lietze went away, and he just fed up with waiting so long. Then

he sort of got regretful about this, and thought he really should make a try. So he went back

to the master, who said, why this ceaseless coming and going? So he sat there and tried

to control his mind, in such a way that he would not think of the differences between gain

and loss. In other words, try to live in such a way that nothing is either an advantage or

a disadvantage. Once upon a time, there was a Chinese farmer, whose horse ran away. And

all the neighbors came around to commiserate that evening, so sorry to hear your horses run

away. That's too bad. And he said, maybe. The next day, the horse came back, bringing seven

wild horses with it. And everybody came around in the evening and said, oh, isn't that lucky?

What a great turn of events. You've now got eight horses. And he said, maybe.

The next day, his son tried to break one of these horses and ride it and was thrown and

broke his leg. And they all said, oh dear, that's too bad. And he said, maybe. The following

day, the conscription officers came around to recruit to force people into the army, and

they rejected his son because he had a broken leg. And all the people came around and said,

isn't that great? And he said, maybe. You see, that is the attitude of not thinking of

things in terms of gain or loss, advantage or disadvantage. Because you don't really know

the fact that you might get a letter from a solicitor, I mean from a law office tomorrow,

saying that some distant relative of yours had left you a million dollars. It might be something

you would feel very, very happy about. But the disasters that it could lead to are unbelievable.

Unbelievable. Internal revenue. Internal revenue.

To mention only one possibility. So, you never really know whether something is fortune or misfortune.

We only know the momentary changes as it alters our sense of hope about things.

The Taoist is wise enough, eventually, you see, to understand that there isn't any fixed good

or bad. And so, his point of view is what is called non-choosing. Well, anyway, Lietze attempted

to keep his mind in a state of non-choosing. And this was a very difficult thing to do,

to overcome one's habits of feeling and thinking in this respect. And after he had practiced

this for a year, the master looked at him. And, you know, sort of recognized he was there.

After another year's practice, he invited him to come and sit inside his hut. And then,

however, something changed. And Lietze didn't try any more to control his mind. What he did

was, he put it in this way, I let my ears hear whatever they wanted to hear. I let my eyes

see whatever they wanted to see. I let my feet move wherever they wanted to go. And I let

my mind think of whatever it wanted to think. And then, he said, it was a very strange sensation,

because all my bodily existence seemed to melt and become transparent. And to have no weight.

And I didn't know whether I was walking on the wind or the wind was walking on me. Now,

that's the fasting of the heart. In the ordinary way, you see, you say, well, that made quite

an impression on me. As if you were a slate or a blackboard upon which life makes an impression,

as the chalk does on the slate or the blackboard. And so we say, well, here are these events.

And I'm the observer of all these events. And I remember them and they make an impression on me.

But in the psychology of Taoism, there is no difference between you as observer and whatever it is that you observe.

The only thing that is you is the observation of life from a certain point of view.

I said a little while ago, you think your heads are empty and blank.

But the actual inside of your head is felt in terms of everything you see on the outside.

We make an opposition, you see, between the thinker and the thought,

the experiencer and the experience, the knower and the known.

Because we think about knowledge in terms of certain metaphors.

The metaphor of the stylus on the writing sheet, the reflection on the mirror.

All those sort of images come into our idea of knowledge.

But in the Taoist theory of knowledge, it's quite different.

There isn't a knower facing the known.

It would be more like saying that if there is any knower at all, it contains the known.

Your mind, if you have one, is not in your head.

Your head is in your mind.

Because your mind, understood from the standpoint of vision, is space.

The Chinese use this word, um, sky, space, and sometimes emptiness.

And there is a saying that form, or, you know, shape and color.

There's one word in Chinese that means really both shape and color.

And this, and this are said to be identical.

Space, or emptiness, is precisely shape-color.

And shape-color is precisely emptiness.

This is actually a Buddhist saying.

From the, um, Tridaya Sutra.

So that all that we call space contains the myriads of shapes and colors.

And bodies and weights and so on.

It doesn't reflect them as a mirror.

But it, uh, is the absence which guarantees their presence.

And it's their presence which guarantees its absence.

So there's this mutual relationship, again, the mutual arising expression,

between voidness and form, between existence and non-existence, being and non-being.

These are never felt as alternatives or things, uh, that are in some kind of, uh, contest.

So then, when it is said that there is not any thinker behind thoughts.

Not any experiencer who has experiences.

This is a way of saying that experiencing, knowing, is not an encounter between strangers.

Western thought concentrates very much on knowledge as an encounter.

And it is thus that we talk about facing facts, facing reality.

Uh, as if somehow or other the knower and the known came from two completely different worlds

and met each other like that.

Whereas, actually, the phenomenon of knowledge is almost the precise opposite of that.

Instead of being a collision between the two wandering bodies in space,

knowledge is much more like the expansion of a flower from the stem and the bud,

where the opposite points of the flower are the knower and the known.

They are the terms of something which, as it were, lies between them.

Let me repeat. We tend, in all our metaphors and common speech, to think of life as an encounter between the knowing human being, the knowing mind, and the world.

They think of it, not as an encounter, but as an expression, not an impression.

An expression of a process that has polarized itself, coming out from a center and expressed itself in terms of opposites.

Well, of course, this is the basis of the whole Yang-Yin principle of, um, you know this jolly old thing.

And, uh, where you've got, what are they, fishes?

Commas?

Fascinating emblem.

They call it a monad, yes, but, um, there it is.

This is a helix, essentially.

This grip.

And this is the formation of spiral nebulae.

And it's the position of sexual intercourse.

I here, this is my I, and you here with your I.

I'm trying to get to the middle of you, you're trying to get to the middle of me.

And neither one of us exists without the other.

This is Yang. Yang, the white, and Yin, the dark.

Yang, the word Yang, originally means, or is associated with, the south side of a mountain, which is sunny.

Yin, the north side, which is dark.

Yang is the north bank of a river, which gets the sun.

Yin is the south bank of a river, which is in the shade.

Now, you see, you don't get a mountain with only one side.

The mountain, if it's a mountain at all, goes up and down.

It's like the wave.

You don't get a wave which has a crest with no trough, or a trough with no crest.

You can't have half a wave.

So, Yang and Yin are quite different from each other, but just because they are different, they're identical.

This is the important idea of the identical difference.

The saying goes, in both Daoism and Buddhism, difference is identity, identity is difference.

The Chinese word for is, is not quite the same as our word.

This word, which is usually used, rather the meaning of that.

That.

So they would say, difference, that identity, identity, that difference.

And so this doesn't mean quite, is exactly the same as.

It means rather, is in relation to, or goes with, necessarily involves.

Difference necessarily involves identity, identity necessarily involves difference.

So Yang and Yin.

There is no Yang without Yin, no Yin without Yang.

When I was first studying these things, I was terribly bothered by how on earth I was going to see this multiple differentiated world as a unity.

What, what was going to happen?

What would it be like to see that all things are one?

The sages keep saying, all things are one.

And they all look to me so different.

Because here was all this, ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch going on around one.

And it was doing it in different ways, and all these people came on in different ways, and they had all their houses, and all their cars, and all their, this and that.

And the whole world looked full of the most bony, prickly differences.

And I thought, well, what's supposed to happen?

Is it supposed to be a kind of, as if your eyesight got blurred?

And all these things suddenly went bleaaah and flowed together?

What is it, what is this experience of Nirvana, of liberation, etc., supposed to be?

Because so many of these, especially Hindu sages, write about it, as if it was just this kind of dissolution of everything.

They said it all become like slug with a salt on it.

Well, I, it took me a long time.

And suddenly one day I realized that the difference that I saw between things was the same thing as their unity.

Because, er, differences, borders, lines, surfaces, boundaries, don't really divide things from each other at all.

They join them together.

Because all boundaries are held in common.

Like, er, let's think of a, of a territory which has all been divided up into property.

It's your property, my property, etc., etc.

They're the fences.

But we hold the, if I live next to you, your fence is my fence.

We hold the boundary in common.

We may make up silly arrangements as to who is responsible for the maintenance of this fence.

But nevertheless, we hold our boundaries in common.

And we wouldn't know what my plot of land was, or where it was, unless we knew the definition of your plot of land and your plot of land that is adjoining.

So, boundaries are held in common.

And I could see then that it, that my sense of being me was exactly the same thing as my sensation of being one with the whole cosmos.

I didn't need to get some other weird, a sort of different, odd kind of experience to feel in total connection with everything.

Once you get the clue, you see, that the sense of unity is inseparable from the sense of difference.

You wouldn't know yourself, or what you meant by self, unless at the same time you had the feeling of something other.

It's, the, the secret is that other eventually turns out to be you.

I mean, that's the element of surprise in life.

When suddenly you, you find the thing most alien, we say, now what is most alien to us?

Go out at night and look at the stars and realize that they are millions and millions and billions of miles away.

Vast conflagrations out in space.

And you can lie back and look at that and say, well, surely I hardly matter.

I'm just a tiny, tiny little peekaboo on this weird spot of dust called Earth.

And all that going on out there.

Billions of years before I was born, billions of years after I will die.

Nothing seems stranger to you than that.

More different from you.

But there comes a point, if you watch long enough, when you'll say, why that's me?

It's the other.

That is the condition of your being yourself.

As the back is the condition of being the front.

And when you know that, you know you'll never die.

Even in permission.

===== Eastern And Western Zen - 02 - I Wisdom Of The Ridiculous =====

During the last two sessions, I've been talking to you principally about the philosophy of the Lao Tzu book, the Tao Te Ching.

And now I want to shift today over to Zhuangzi.

This Zhuangzi, so far as we know, lived about 300 BC, maybe a little earlier than that.

He is a very, very remarkable person because the Zhuangzi book, he's also, more exactly, his name is Zhuang, but his book, sometimes called simply the Zhuangzi book, is quite unique in the whole history of philosophy because he's almost the only philosopher from the whole of antiquity.

And therefore he's an immensely encouraging person to read.

But part of his humor is the art of exaggeration.

And you always have to allow for that.

You always have to realize that he's slightly pulling his own leg.

He is, as in a group of people who are enthusiasts for something, but have humor, who very often find that when they're talking among themselves, they carry their own ideas to ludicrous extremes, and raw with laughter about it.

And Zhuangzi does that.

Now, for example, he has a great deal to say about the value of the useless life.

The whole notion of something, of life, any moment in life or any event in life being useful, that is to say, serving the end of some future event in life, is to a Taoist absurd.

Because nothing is useful at all, the universe is viewed as purposeless and useless through and through, because it's a game.

More than that, game doesn't really convey the sense of this.

When a Taoist sage is wandering through the forest, he isn't going anywhere.

He's just wandering.

When he watches the clouds, he loves them because they have no special destination.

He watches birds moving around.

He watches the waves lapping on the shore.

And just because all this is not busy in the way that human beings are busy,

because it serves no end other than being what it is now,

it is for that reason that he admires it,

and it is for that reason that you get the peculiar styles of Chinese painting in the Tang, Song, and later dynasties,

where nature, in its wayward, wandering nature, is the main subject.

When we say that something is without purpose, that's a put-down phrase.

We say, well, there's no future in it.

What's the use?

No, we say, what's the use?

And we need very much to realize that that question reflects insanity.

What's the future in it?

What's the use?

Joy for the Taoist is that things have no use.

We exaggerate this, and Zhuangzi does in a very humorous way, by describing the ideal useless man.

He's a hunchback.

And he's so deformed that his chin rests on his navel, and so on.

And, but he says now this man is very admirable, he's found the secret of life, because when the social service workers come around, he's the first to get a free handout.

And when the military officers come around to conscript people for the army, he's the first to be rejected.

Therefore, he lives long.

And he also describes the case of some travelers came across an enormous tree.

Fantastic thing.

And they said, never did anyone see such a tree.

So they went up and looked at it, and first they tested the leaves, and found that they were rough and disagreeable and no good to eat.

Then they looked at the branches, and found that they were all twisted, and absolutely no good for using as sticks.

Then they examined the wood, and found it was full of pith, and absolutely useless for a carpenter.

So nobody had disturbed this tree.

It was not used for cutting down, or any purpose whatsoever.

And so it grew to an enormous size, and was of great age.

Now, Zhuangzi is here pulling our legs.

He is not exactly asking us to take all that literally, but this is his way of doing things.

Then also he describes the behavior of the high form of man.

And he says, the man of character, that is, in this case, the word de we were discussing yesterday.

The man of character lives at home without exercising his mind, and performs actions without worry.

The notions of right and wrong, and the praise and blame of others, do not disturb him.

When within the four seas, all people can enjoy themselves, that is happiness for him.

When all people are well provided, that is peace for him.

Sorrowful in countenance, he looks like a baby who has lost its mother.

Appearing stupid, he goes about like one who has lost his way.

He has plenty of money to spend, and does not know where it comes from.

He drinks and eats just enough, and does not know where the food comes from.

This is the demeanor of the man of character.

Then, by contrast, the hypocrites are those people who regard as good whatever the world acclaims as good,

and regard as right whatever the world acclaims as right.

When you tell them that they are men of Tao, then their countenances change with satisfaction.

When you call them hypocrites, then they look displeased.

All their lives they call themselves men of Tao, and all their lives they remain hypocrites.

They know how to give a good speech, and tell appropriate anecdotes in order to attract the crowd.

But from the very beginning to the very end, they do not know what it's all about.

They put on the proper garb, and dress in the proper colors, and put on a decorous appearance in order to make themselves popular,

but refuse to admit that they are hypocrites.

But this explanation of the man in countenance and appearance,

and is wandering about as if he had lost his way, and doesn't know anything.

Of course, it's based on the text in Lao Tzu, where he says,

The people of the world are merry-making, as if partaking of the sacrificial feasts,

as if mounting the terrace in spring.

I alone am mild, like one unemployed,

like a newborn babe that cannot yet smile,

unattached, like one without a home.

The people of the world have enough and to spare,

but I am like one left out.

My heart must be that of a fool,

being muddled, nebulous.

The vulgar unknowing, luminous,

I alone am dull, confused.

The vulgar are clever,

self-assured, seemingly aimless.

The people of the world all have a purpose,

and value drawing sustenance from the mother.

Capital M, that's Mother Nature.

There is about, you see,

the character of the Taoist sage,

as depicted by Zhuangzi,

because

the fool is the person

who doesn't know enough

to come in out of the rain,

who doesn't compete.

Everybody else gets before him

to the prizes,

the material prizes of life,

and even to the spiritual prizes.

The fool is, you see,

the person who isn't going anywhere.

He sits by the road and goes,

The fool is like a Mongolian idiot child

who isn't interested in survival,

will take a plate of food

and run his finger around in it

and make a wonderful slosh with the stew

and then watch it drip

from the tip of his finger.

He won't eat for quite a while

and then he'll play with it

in all sorts of ways.

Then his attention will be distracted

by something else

and he'll chase after that, you see.

But he, if so long as you don't cross him,

this is the case of the Mongolian idiot,

he remains the most wonderfully friendly,

swinging kind of a cat.

And, but he has no ambition.

He doesn't fight for himself.

And nobody can ever get him to.

So the fool has always been used

as a kind of analog of the sage.

There's a Hindu verse

which says sometimes naked,

sometimes mad.

Now as a scholar,

now as a fool,

thus they appear on earth,

the free men.

And if you read the biographies

of the early life of Sri Ramakrishna

or Sri Ramana Maharshi,

absolutely wild.

Now, not all of this you see again,

just as in reading Zhuangsa,

you mustn't take it too literally.

These things are said

by way of a kind of overstress,

another kind of overstress

in the opposite direction.

When a Japanese scholar

many years ago

explained the teaching of,

he said something

I had never heard anybody else say,

that the Buddha taught,

for example,

that life is suffering

in order to correct

the wrong view

that it ought to be pleasure.

He said that

everything is impermanent

in order to correct

the wrong view

that reality lasts

forever in time.

So the idea of the middle way

is set up in this fashion

by going to one extreme

in order to correct another.

This is a very common Asian technique

and it is found especially in Zen

where teachers,

when they are asked

about something sacred,

will always answer

in terms of something secular.

What is the Buddha?

The tree in the garden.

Then when you ask

about something secular,

they answer in terms

of something sacred.

You see?

As there is a master

and his student

working in the field

and they are using

a knife to prune

and the student

suddenly says to the master,

give me the knife

and he gives it to him

point first.

And so he says,

but please let me

have the other end.

The teacher says,

what would you do

with the other end?

You see,

the question immediately

turns into a kind

of a metaphysical thing.

So this play back and forth

between the extremes

has as its interior design

the awakening of the mind

to polarity.

about yesterday,

this thing of mutual arising.

Zhuangzi tells a story

about this.

He says,

a certain keeper of monkeys

said with regard

to their ration of nuts

that each monkey

should have three in the morning

and four at night.

But at this,

the monkeys were very angry.

So the keeper said

they might have four

in the morning

and three at night,

with which arrangement

they were all well pleased.

Now the number of nuts

was the same,

he goes on to say,

but there was an adaptation

to the likes and dislikes

of those concerned.

This, then, he says,

is the way of conduct

of the sage.

Basically,

Zhuangzi's philosophy

is a philosophy

of relativity.

He makes

a great deal

of the point

that

there is no absolute standard

of great or small

of important.

There is a story,

for example,

of

a sort of

enfant terrible

at a banquet

and the speeches

are being made

after dinner

and

somebody gets up

and says

that the human being

is the highest

of all creatures,

that the whole world

serves humanity

and

there is a lot

of pompous nonsense.

The small boy

gets up and says

that since

tigers feed

on human beings,

it is quite obvious,

therefore,

that human beings

exist for the service

of tigers.

For Zhuangzi,

you must get

the point of view

that

small things

are as big

as big things

can be

and big things

are as small

as small things

can be.

Everything

can be looked at

as great

or small,

important

and unimportant

and all

the steps

between

because his

conception

of the world

is essentially

cyclic

in his idea

of the circle

and

Taoist and

Zen teachers

have a whole

method

of teaching

by circles

and drawing

circles.

The center

of a circle

is any point

on the circumference.

You can begin

anywhere.

There is a koan

in Zen Buddhism

which asks

the question

Indra built

the seamless

tower.

Where did he

start?

Now a seamless

tower is like

a sleeve

with no seam

on it.

It's a continuous

cylinder of cloth

so the continuous

cylindrical tower

is the seamless

tower.

Where do you

start?

In the same way

where does the

circle start?

The circle of life,

the cycle of life,

the interdependence

of the bees

and the flowers,

the interdependence

of long and short

you see,

it's all circular.

And so

there is nowhere

and there is

everywhere

that it can begin.

In the same way

when he discusses

the organs

of the body

he makes a catalogue

of all these organs

and says

now which do you

prefer?

He says

which one

comes first

and which one

follows?

Which one rules

and which ones

are servants?

He said

it seems

that there

may be

a governor

in all this

but nobody

could ever

find it.

This is a very

strange passage

in Zhuangzi

which I've seen

translated in

many different ways.

There is an

absolutely absurd

translation of Zhuangzi

on the market now

published in

mentor books

by a professor

of Chinese

at Harvard

and it is

absolutely

ridiculous.

The whole thing

is made by a man

who is I'm sure

an ex-missionary

and

keeps talking

about God.

Well there is

no expression

in Zhuangzi

for God.

There is this

which has

almost the same

meaning

as

spontaneity

of itself

so.

This means

something is

so

through the

power of

heaven.

Now heaven

means simply

the universe.

as you look

out from

earth

which is

as it

were

the

center

or the

base

everything

else

the whole

expanse

of the

cosmos

is

Chen

and there

is no

connection

in the

idea

of

heaven

with

some

sort

of

personal

ruler

of the

universe.

So the

notion

of God

you see

as we

understand

it

is

really

very

foreign

indeed

to

Taoist

thought

and when

you see

somebody

translating

this

as God

it is

it gives

a very

wrong

impression

of this

teaching.

For example

there is

a passage

in which

Zhang

saying

can one

get the

Tao so

as to

have it

for one's

own

and the

sage

answers

your body

is not

your own

it is the

delegated

image

of

God

because

they've

read in

the Bible

man is

made in

the image

of God

your

life

is not

your own

it is

the

delegated

adaptability

of

your

offspring

are not

your own

they are

the

delegated

seeds

you move

you know

not how

you are

at rest

you know

not why

these are

the operations

of the

ways

of Tao

so how

could you

get Tao

so

if a drunk

man falls

out of

a cart

though he

may suffer

he does

not die

because his

spirit is in

a condition

of security

he does

not suffer

from contact

with objective

existences

if sub security

may be got

from wine

how much

more

from

from being

in accord

with

the spontaneous

rhythm of

the universe

that's really

what it means

but in

the anxiety

of

missionaries

and missionaries

have been

you see

the great

western

they've been

the foundation

of chinese

scholarship

in the west

to translate

the scriptures

into chinese

they studied

chinese

they were the

first people

to study

chinese

and they

have

constantly

therefore

had an

interest

in slipping

chinese

christian ideas

into chinese

classics

just in the

same way

as when you

read monia

williams's

sanskrit

dictionary

which is

the base

dictionary

for sanskrit

study

for centuries

it's all

made up

with a

missionary

bias

this

notion

you see

of god

in the

sense

of the

personal

ruler

of the

world

is

totally

foreign

to chinese

thought

there isn't

even an

idea

in chinese

thought

of

the law

of nature

as we

have it

see

the

motions

of the

body

the

harmony

of the

organism

is not

what it

is in

obedience

to a

law

the

the chinese

do have

an idea

of law

this is the

word

this is an

interesting

character

nowadays

written this

way

but originally

written like

this

of a

sacrificial

iron

cauldron

with a

knife

beside it

and it

comes from

a time

when

the laws

were

inscribed

on the

sacrificial

cauldrons

so

so that

when

people

came

to

offer

their

sacrifices

a

certain

sages

objected

to

this

and

said

that

if the

people

know

what

the

laws

are

in the

fixed

terms

of

writing

they

will

develop

a

litigious

spirit

that is

to say

they'll

start

haggling

about

what

it

really

says

and

as

you

know

that

is

the

principal

occupation

of

lawyers

and

they

said

that

the

thing

is

that

you

mustn't

write

it

down

law

positive

law

I

think

is

the

correct

legal

term

so

there

is

no

notion

in

the

Taoist

philosophy

or

one

might

almost

say

in

Chinese

philosophy

as a

whole

for this

certainly

includes

Confucianism

no

notion

whatsoever

of

the

world

as

responding

to

a

boss

so

the

body

in

other

words

does

not

have

in

it

a

ruling

organ

its

order

is

the

consequence

of

or

the

operation

of

every

part

of

it

existing

together

simultaneously

arising

mutually

there's

no

governor

now

the

difficulty

you see

in

Zhuangzi's

philosophy

the

difficulty

with

human

beings

is

they

begin

to

think

in

terms

of

governing

and

ruling

and

they

set

out

to

dominate

themselves

and

their

surroundings

and

invariably

this

leads

to

a

mess

he

tells

the

story

of

an

ancient

man

by the

name

of

polo

was a

great

horse

trainer

this

is

where

we

get

the

word

polo

from

but

he

said

polo

absolutely

ruined

the

nature

of

horses

were

nice

charming

creatures

like

Dean

Swift's

Huinims

before

polo

interfered

and ruined

their

nature

then

he

says

in

other

places

a

good

carpenter

doesn't

need

a

square

works

without

it

and

this

is

fantastically

true

of

Japanese

carpenters

you

should

see

one of

the

fascinating

things

in

going

to

Japan

is

these

old

style

carpenters

working

from

the

roughest

architectural

plan

and

with

the

strangest

instruments

but they

have

an

uncanny

knack

of

fitting

things

by feel

and by

eye

a

great

story

is

told

of

ceremonial

raising

of

the

ridge

pole

of

a

new

temple

and

it

was

being

done

by

a

certain

guild

of

carpenters

and

there

was

a

rival

guild

in

town

which

had

not

got

the

contract

and

they

were

very

sore

about

it

so

during

the

night

one

of

the

members

of

the

rival

guild

came

and

he

chopped

off

six

feet

or

so

of

the

ridge

pole

has

interfered

with

this

it

must

be

our

enemy

guild

they

cut

off

six

feet

of

the

roof

beam

anyway

he

said

never

mind

I

will

put

it

no

square

you

see

because

his

sense

of

that

is

in

his

organism

in

his

nerves

in

his

senses

is

much

more

subtle

than

anything

that

could

be

made

with

instruments

all

kinds

of

stories

about

the

artists

of

the

far

east

excelling

in

this

kind

tea

room

and

he

is

with

his

student

and

the

student

wants

to

know

where

to

put

a

hook

for

hanging

a

bamboo

vase

for

flowers

on

the

wall

and

the

master

says

there

and

the

student

makes

a

little

mark

somewhat

later

the

student

rubs

out

the

mark

gets

rid

says

it

was

there

and

he

puts

his

finger

exactly

on

the

same

spot

you

see

that's

the

sort

of

thing

that

is

admired

without

the

slightest

calculation

you

see

now

he

goes

on

and

says

the

joint

so

explains

at

length

that

music

has

been

ruined

by

the

five

notes

says

the

five

notes

will

make

a

man

deaf

and

the

five

colors

will

make

a

blind

now

what

does

this

mean

it

the

thing

is

that

if

you

think

there

are

only

five

notes

you

can't

hear

the

moment

you

say

this

is

a

problem

we

have

in

music

that

we've

got

a

notation

which

is

our

scale

the

way

we

can

write

music

is

limited

to

that

possibility

but

there

half

note

quarter

note

eighth

note

sixteenth

note

and so

on

and we

can

increase

the

value

of

each

by

one

half

by

dotting

it

but

that's

the

limit

of

our

rhythmic

expression

as

in

all

oriental

music

you

have

an

infinite

continuum

both

of

tone

they

make

the

most

extraordinarily

complicated

rhythms

and

the

way

you

learn

music

is

not

from

notation

not

from

measures

but

from

the

living

body

of

your

teacher

demonstrating

the

ways

of

playing

instruments

so

you

follow

the

teacher

the

man

instead

of

what

it

says

in

a

book

So, the whole principle, then, is one of success in life through not pushing it around, through not trying to govern it.

He tells a story, as a matter of fact, Chuanza has a very funny trick.

A lot of his wisdom he puts into the mouth of Confucius.

He said that Confucius was one day doing this, and he ran into Lao Tzu, and they had an argument, and Lao Tzu won.

But then the next time he talks about Confucius teaching Lao Tzu's doctrines.

And this is the immense confusion of everybody.

But it's said one day Confucius was standing by a river where there was a tremendous cataract plunging down.

And he suddenly saw an old man coming out of the forest who fell into the river and suddenly disappeared into the cataract.

And he said, oh dear, too bad, probably some old fellow tired of life who wanted to put an end to it all.

The next moment, way downstream, the old man gets out of the water and starts bouncing along.

And Confucius is amazed, and he sends one of his disciples to catch this fellow before he disappears.

He said, sir, I was thinking that you were going to commit suicide, and I suddenly find that you came out of that cataract alive.

Do you have some special method by which you do this?

No, I have no special method, said the old man.

I just go in with the whirl and come out with the swell.

Because I don't resist the water, I entirely identify myself with water.

So you see, here he is, utterly relaxed, just rolling around in the torrent, and not resisting in any way.

And so he is preserved.

He goes with the stream, rolls with the punch, or whatever you want to call it.

Again, of course, there is exaggeration, a story of this kind.

Just as there is an exaggeration in the story of the hunchback and the tree and so on.

Because letting go, non-interference, doesn't mean, for example, flabbiness.

A lot of people, when they think they are relaxing, merely become flabby.

And if that is so, you know, you would, the perfectly relaxed person, would slowly become jello.

And would spread out on the floor and finally drip through into the basement.

Relaxation, you see, is simply something that happens when there is too much yang in you,

too much of the positive, you need to balance off with the yin.

And the trouble is that human beings, in their anxiety to control things,

exhibit too much yang, too much aggressiveness, too much of the male principle.

They need the balance of the female.

And so all these exaggerations in the direction of let things go, let things happen, don't interfere,

are stressing the yin point of view to compensate for the excessive yang.

And furthermore, the difficulty always comes.

I remember reading a book called You Must Relax.

The difficulty always arises when one feels I must relax, I've got to let go, and let things happen.

But how on earth do I do it?

I, even in trying to relax, I'm all tense, because I'm anxious that it must happen.

And maybe it won't.

And how do you do it?

You see?

You can't achieve Wu Wei like that.

What you have to understand is that you don't have to do anything.

There is no method, as the old man said.

The meaning of Wu Zi, when you call the Tao is Wu Zi, or lawless,

it means there is no method in it that you can master and do it.

What you have, it's all based on understanding, or what our psychologists call insight,

that you have to find out that there is nothing that you do as a source and cause of action separate from everything else.

When you know that, that there is no separate acting you, then there is no need to try to relax.

The thing you have to see is that the flow of the Tao, as I said yesterday with the illustration of the people swimming in a strong stream,

that the flow of the Tao goes on anyway, just like the flow of time.

For example, you can't get out of the present moment.

You can think about the past, and you can think about the future.

But since you do that thinking now, the present is inescapable.

All right, now, the present moment, it does, doesn't it?

It has a sense of flow.

Time is going along.

Life is going along.

Time, actually, the clock time, is simply a measure of flow.

A way of going tick, tick, tick, tick, and counting the ticks.

And say, well, we've lived through so many ticks.

But nevertheless, this thing, real time, as distinct from this ticking thing, is a flowing.

And yet it's still.

Isn't that fascinating?

It moves, but you're always there.

It's always now.

You never get out of now.

All right, now, if you can feel that, see, that you can't get out of now, and you never will.

So, now, realize that what we call now is the same thing as Tao.

The Tao, the course of things, the eternal now, the presence of God, anything you want to call it, see?

That's now, and you can't get out of it.

So, there's no need to get with it, because you can't get out.

See?

That's beautiful.

You just relax, and you're there.

So, that's the principle of flowing.

You can make all kinds of very clever ways of postponing finding this out.

It's terribly simple.

But you can say, well, this is a very spiritual matter, and I'm an unevolved person,

and it'll take me a great deal of time to realize this in a more than an intellectual way.

That's an excuse for playing your own game and not finding this out.

There are all sorts of elaborate ways of doing that, and you can put it off by indulging in the most complicated systems of spiritual culture and yoga and so on and so forth.

And that's all right.

I have no objection to your putting it off if that's what you want to do.

But actually, it's always here and now.

Just as you can't get away from now, you can't get out of the Tao.

But that's the humor of the whole thing.

And that's why Zhuangzi has his beautiful light touch.

He says,

The crow is white without a daily bath.

The crow is black without being painted in ink.

And this is the same saying, you know, as in Zen.

In the spring landscape, there is nothing superior, nothing inferior.

Flowering branches grow naturally.

Some short, some long.

Or they say,

A long thing is the long body of Buddha.

A short thing is the short body of Buddha.

There are, therefore, you see, blondes and brunettes.

Fat people and skinny people.

Tall people and short people.

Cultured people and vulgar people.

Even the Christian hymn says,

The rich man in his castle, the poor man at his gate.

God made them high and lowly and ordered their estate.

You know?

We don't sing that now because we've got too much social conscience.

In, I think I probably read this passage yesterday.

Maybe I didn't.

But he, see, Drangso, has this to say about it.

White without its correlate wrong.

Or good government without its correlate misrule.

Do not apprehend the great principles of the universe,

nor the nature of all creation.

One might as well talk of the existence of heaven without that of earth,

or of the negative principle, yin,

without the positive, yang,

which is clearly impossible.

Yet people keep on discussing it without stop.

Such people must be either fools or knaves.

Of course, one could always reply to Zhuangzi,

that there have to be fools and knaves,

so that we can recognize the existence of sages.

Speech is not mere blowing of breath.

It is intended to say something.

Only what it is intended to say cannot yet be determined.

Is there speech indeed or is there not?

Can we or can we not distinguish it from the chirping of young birds?

How can Tao be so obscured that there should be a distinction of true and false?

How can speech be so obscured that there should be a distinction of right and wrong?

Where can you go and find Tao not to exist?

Where can you go and find that words cannot be proved?

The Tao is obscured by our inadequate understanding,

and words are obscured by flowery expressions.

Hence the affirmations and denials of the Confucian and the Motzian schools,

each denying what the other affirms and affirming what the other denies.

Each denying what the other affirms and affirming what the other denies brings us only confusion.

There is nothing which is not this.

There is nothing which is not that.

What cannot be seen by that, the other person, can be known by myself.

Hence I say, this emanates from that, that also derives from this.

This is the theory of the interdependence of this and that.

Nevertheless, life arises from death and vice versa.

Possibility arises from impossibility and vice versa.

Affirmation is based upon denial and vice versa.

Which being the case, the true sage rejects all distinctions

and takes his refuge in heaven.

That's in the universe.

For one may base it on this.

Yet this is also that, and that is also this.

This also has its right and wrong, and that has its right and wrong.

Does then the distinction between this and that really exist or not?

When this, the subjective, and that, the objective,

are both without their correlates,

that is the very axis of Tao.

And when that axis passes through the center

at which all infinities converge,

affirmations and denials alike blend into the infinite one.

Hence it is said that there is nothing like using the light.

See, the axis of the opposites

is the perception of their polarity.

The difference between them is explicit.

But the unity of them is implicit.

The difference, the explicit difference between two ends of a stick.

But the implicit unity that they are ends of the same stick.

You see?

So that's the axis.

The axis of Tao is the, you might call it,

the secret conspiracy

that it lies between all poles and all opposites,

which is implicit, esoteric,

or whatever you want to call it,

that they're fundamentally one.

So that unity,

it's between you and the universe,

or whatever polarity you want to take,

is not something that has to be brought into being.

If one brings it into being,

one assumes that it doesn't exist.

That's called in Zen,

putting legs on a snake,

or a beard on a eunuch.

There's something unnecessary, you see.

So it exists, it is always there,

and you can see it so vividly.

And actually,

put your, almost,

almost put your finger on it and sense it,

if you understand that the movement of the Tao

is exactly the same thing as the present moment.

Now, of course,

if you try to grab the present moment,

and get ready, get ready,

with your clapper,

and say,

Now!

It's gone!

The finer and finer you draw the hairline on the watch,

you don't know exactly when now is,

you eventually get to the point

where you can't see it at all.

See?

But if you leave it alone,

and you don't try to grab the moment as it flies,

well, it's always there.

See?

You don't have to mark it.

You don't have to put your finger on it.

Because it's everything that there is.

And so the present moment suddenly expands.

And it contains the whole of time,

all past, all future, everything.

You never have to hold on to it.

===== Eastern And Western Zen - 03 - I Unbleached Silk =====

Now, what I want to talk to you about this afternoon are some of the aesthetic principles

underlying both Chinese and Japanese arts, and they're deriving from these Taoistic

and Buddhistic philosophies that have inspired them, and to speak about them fairly technically.

In the language of Taoism, there are certain words used which are the foundations of their

aesthetic ideas.

One of these words is the uncarved block, and another is unbleached silk.

And as I already intimated in talking to you about the Taoist view of the relationship of

man and nature, the Taoists make a distinction between the natural and the artificial, and

seem to be all on the side of the natural, and rather against the artificial, although

you must be cautioned against taking this too seriously, too literally.

You might say, of course, that the distinction between the artificial and the natural is

an artificial distinction, because really and truly a human building is no more nor

less artificial than a bird's nest.

But the Taoists use a kind of art and a kind of poetry which you could call indicative.

That is to say, while understanding that everything that man does is natural, some things that he

does are more natural than others.

That is to say, they look more natural.

They go that way.

And so, the idea of unbleached silk means silk in the raw, raw silk, natural silk.

And so, in the same way, the uncarved block is the sort of stone that would be selected

for a Chinese or Japanese garden.

Chinese stones tend, as I see it, to be rather more elaborate, rather more fussy than Japanese

stones.

And I think that in the art of Bonseki, which means growing rocks, the Japanese are a bit

more sophisticated than the Chinese, although this doesn't often happen.

But the Japanese are masters at growing rocks.

So, this rock that you would find in a Japanese garden is the uncarved block.

Even though it may have been...

What has happened, really, it's what we call in the West an objet trouvé, where the artist,

instead of making something, selects it.

He finds a glorious thing and shares his finding with other people, and that finding is a work

of art.

And you see, that is connected with the whole thought in this tradition of aesthetics in

the Far East, that superb art is a work of nature.

It is not something imposed upon nature, even though, as you've seen in many Japanese gardens,

that there is very complex espalier work on trees, and that an enormous amount of pruning

and trimming is done.

And, in fact, the discipline of the garden is amazingly complicated and requires a great

deal of care.

But the object always is, through the discipline of the art, to make the garden seem more natural

than it would look if you left it to itself.

You understand that?

It is to work upon nature with skill and craft, but to move in the direction in which nature

is already going, so that the uncarved block may be extended into a sculpture.

But what the carver, to make the block uncarved, even when the sculpture is finished, what the

sculptor is going to ask the block in the first place is, what do you want to become?

In other words, along what lines have you already started in the direction of a sculpture?

And I will cooperate with you and bring it to completion.

So that's the principle, really, you see, that underlies judo.

Judo means the gentle way, the gentle dao, and it is the art of going along with nature.

It is also called wu-wei, or mu-yi in Japanese.

And not doing nothing, literally, not being, because after all it's man's nature to act.

You can't do nothing, literally.

But to act mu-yi without, really it is to act without feeling that your actions are separate

from nature.

When you feel that everything you do is simply part of the course of things,

then the way in which you do things is changed.

You wouldn't think so.

It isn't logical that it should be.

But nevertheless, if you really feel that you can't deviate from the dao and that it lies

behind everything that you do, your type of action and your style of behavior will in

fact be changed.

It will tend to be in the direction of your seeming to other people, in some ways, to be more passive

than you might ordinarily be.

And the difficulty here is that Westerners, when they hear about Buddhism and Taoism and this

sort of thing, they interpret it one-sidedly as passivity and don't see that what sometimes

looks like passivity is cleverness.

You, as businessmen often know, if you leave letters unanswered for a month, when you return

to them, many of them have already answered themselves.

And sometimes when you sit and do nothing, you avoid making very serious mistakes, which

would have arisen if you had acted prematurely, if you had done something about it.

I've practiced this inactivity of this kind for many years and have always been accused

of being lucky.

Because when I should have done something and been up and at it, I just went and sat and

did nothing.

And then when it turned out all right, this is terrible.

No, I know, you haven't said that.

But anyway, this is so, isn't it?

So, this tendency to look inactive and to go in the direction, in the arts, of a kind

of primitivity, which we know in the word shibui, the quality called shibui in Japan, is a certain

kind of sophisticated primitivity.

Listen to these contradictions, these paradoxes.

sophisticated primitivity, controlled accident, where you see man and nature are really collaborating.

Man as the controller, the reasoner, the logical being, and yet at the same time, not ruining

life by making it all logic and all control.

To have logic and to have control, that is to say, in short, to have order, you have to

have randomness.

Because where there is no randomness, order cannot manifest itself.

Well now, in the vocabulary of Japanese aesthetics, there are a number of terms which you should

understand thoroughly, which are basic.

The first is sabi, and that goes along with something that rhymes with it, wabi.

So often, Japanese people speak of wabi-sabi, or sabi-wabi, as a kind of mood of the art,

of certain art feeling, or of zen taste.

And then there is aware, which I've mentioned in passing, as another kind of mood.

There is yugen, there is furiu, such words which designate the basic moods of painting and poetry,

and so on.

Now, to begin with sabi, the basic feeling of sabi is loneliness.

One of the great paintings that illustrate sabi is the lonely crow on a tree branch.

It is the feeling of the hermit.

It is the feeling which the garden artist tries to create when, in a crowded country,

he wants to give you the sensation of being way off in a mountain landscape.

So this sense, you see, of solitariness, of being able to wander off on your own, is sabi,

and is a thing, of course, that any sane person has to have.

One has to have privacy.

You have to have space in which to be alone, so as not to become a rubber stamp.

You see, it's often thought that Eastern philosophy is against individuality.

And this is not true.

The unity of man and the universe is not a loss or a merging of personality in something

impersonal.

It's more like the fact that when individuality, when personality, is known and experienced

as an expression of the whole cosmos, then the person becomes more individual, not less

individual.

But he becomes individual in a non-strident way.

In a way that has in it the spirit of the uncarved block and the unbeached silk.

And so, one of the qualities of this is solitariness.

The great Chinese poem, which has sabi in it preeminently, is asking for the master.

I asked the boy beneath the pines.

He says, the master's gone alone, herb gathering, somewhere on the mount, cloud hidden, whereabouts

it's unknown.

It's unknown.

So, all the whole idea, you see, of Zen, that wherever you stand, if you realize Zen, you

create a mountain.

Everywhere is the mountain solitude, even in the middle of an uproar.

This is sabi.

And for this reason, then, an enormous amount of the subject matter of a Far Eastern painting

and poetry is solitude and the love of solitude.

Now there is, next, wabi.

This is a more difficult idea.

Let's imagine that you are feeling very bad about something, you're depressed, the world

is too much with you, just you're sick of life.

And then, quite surprisingly, you notice a small weed growing underneath a hedge.

And this weed is really, after all, not just to be dismissed as a weed, but some rather lovely

design there is in the nature of this plant.

Now supposing you are bothered by financial uproar, wars, politics and everything like that,

and you are sitting on a beach and you become aware of the water endlessly crossing pebbles.

And you get a sense that this goes on forever and ever and ever.

It is long before you were thought of, long before all human history, empires, schemes and

so on and will endure long after.

But it's something that strikes you that is very simple, very ordinary, like the water

on the pebbles, or like the little weed under the hedge, that suggests a kind of amazing

eternal reliability of nature.

That in the very humble form, goes on and on and on, and whatever human beings may do,

this everlasting sanity persists.

Now that strange flip from the mood of depression to the mood of a certain consolation in this weed

is wabi.

Now don't let me be too dictatorial.

I'm trying to explain these things through examples rather than through trying to give

you philosophical definitions.

It's better to give examples than to pin it down with abstract terminologies.

Now wabi comes out in the haiku very much, a brushwood gate, and for a lock, this snail.

This is wabi.

This is all there is.

The path comes to an end among the parsley.

Which has a touch of yugen, but also wabi, because the parsley is just, well everybody has parsley

in the garden.

Now, next, this word aware, A-W-A-R-E, is very much connected with the Buddhist feeling for

the transience of life.

Everything is change and nothing at all can be held onto or possessed.

This feeling of transience is at the root of the philosophy of poverty that exists in

Buddhism and has a curious difference in it from the Christian philosophy of poverty as,

say, explained by St. Francis of Assisi.

It's cognate to it, it's like it, but a little subtle difference.

Somehow one feels, in the Christian emphasis on poverty, that poverty contrasts with richness

as good to evil.

In other words, poverty is unpleasant, but it's something you ought to share with the poor who

live unpleasant lives.

So if you are to expiate your sins, well you ought to be poor and to live roughly.

And so, for this reason, in Buddhism one would not say so much poverty as one would say simplicity.

Not going without, not clinging to things because it's good for you, but because it is actually

the happiest way to live.

Because nothing is more terrifying than the state of chronic anxiety which one has if you

are subject to the illusion that something or other in life could be held onto and safeguarded.

And nothing can.

So the acceptance of everything flowing away is absolutely basic to freedom, to being an unsui,

a cloud water person who drifts like cloud and flows like water.

But in this, we mustn't take ourselves too ridiculously.

I mean, naturally, all human beings have in them a certain clinging.

See you can't let go totally.

You wouldn't be human if you did.

You can't be just a leaf on the wind.

Or just a ball in a mountain stream, to use a Zen poetic phrase.

Because if you were that, you wouldn't be human.

Just as I pointed out that the person with no emotions, who has completely controlled his

emotions as a stone Buddha, so a person who would be completely let go would also be some

kind of an inanimate object.

So Zen very definitely emphasizes being human, being perfectly human as its ideal.

And so to be perfectly human, one must have not a state of absolute detachment, but a state

of detachment which contains a little bit of resistance, a certain clinging still.

They say in India of Jivan Mukta, a man who is liberated in this world, that he has to cultivate

a few mild bad habits in order to stay in the body.

Because if he were absolutely perfect, he would disappear from manifestation.

And so the yogi, the great yogi, maybe he smokes a cigarette or has a bad temper occasionally.

It's something that keeps him human.

And that little thing is very important.

It's like the salt in a stew.

It grounds him.

Well this is another way of saying that even a very great sage, a great Buddha, will have

in him a touch of regret that life is fleeting.

Because if he doesn't have that touch of regret, he's not human, and he is incapable of compassion

towards people who regret very much that life is fleeting.

So the mood aware is that touch of regret, of nostalgia, of, you know that poem which speaks

of the feeling of a banquet hall deserted.

Here it is, there's been a great banquet, you know, and all the guests have gone home.

And there are empty glasses and dirty plates and crushed napkins and all sorts of things

all over.

And somehow the echo of voices and merriment is still there.

And so this mood aware comes up.

So even a very great person should feel that because the price otherwise is not to be human.

So for this reason, Buddhist and Taoist poetry is not unemotional.

It's not dehumanized and so somehow speaks very much to us as people and does not have

in it the feeling that we ought instead to turn into saints or supermen.

That's the humane thing about this philosophy of life.

The next word, the special term, is FURIU.

FURIU means, literally, wind flow.

FU is the character for wind, RYU means flowing.

The dictionaries translate it elegance, and this won't do.

FURIU, first of all, you must remember that the word wind is used in Chinese and Japanese

alike to indicate atmosphere, the atmosphere of a place.

So when a person has, say, a certain school of poetry or philosophy, it's called the family

wind, that means the atmosphere, the slant, the attitude of this particular school.

So that meaning of wind, atmosphere, comes into the expression FURIU.

And FURIU is like this.

Here is a man fishing, and he's sitting in the evening in the twilight on the edge of a river,

and with his fishing rod in a lonely little boat tied up by the bank.

Now if this man is fishing with his mind intent simply on catching fish, this is not FURIU.

But if he's also digging the atmosphere, it's FURIU.

To flow with the wind, you see, to dig the atmosphere.

American offers the most beautiful possibilities of translation for, in our incomparable slang,

for some oriental ideas.

FURIU is there, you know, to get with it, to flow with it.

And not again, you see, in the sense of the merely passive leaf flowing on the wind.

But FURIU has in it, you see, a touch of self-consciousness, like that man fishing.

Now you would think if you studied Taoist philosophy that this would be very bad.

Uh, Zhuangzi somewhere says that, uh, a comfortable belt is one that you don't feel.

And you're unaware of it.

That's not the most comfortable belt.

Like comfortable shoes, would you be completely unconscious of comfortable shoes?

No.

Something better than comfortable shoes are shoes that you know are comfortable.

So in the same way, uh, the, uh, self-consciousness adds something to life.

It's one thing to be happy and not know it.

It's another thing to be happy and to know it.

It's like, uh, one's voice in a shower room or bath tub has more resonance than one's voice

in the open air.

And that's why temples and cathedrals and resonating boxes for guitars and drums and things are created.

To give this little quality of echo.

For all echo is a certain kind of feedback which enables you to reflect upon what you are

doing and to know that you know.

So uh, one might say that ordinary people are Buddhas, but they don't know it.

And the Buddha is one who knows he's a Buddha only.

They uh, don't let you settle for this comfortably and easily.

Because really to know is also defined as not to know.

In the Upanishads, it is said that uh, if you think you, if you know what Brahman is,

you have yet some study to be done.

For those who know Brahman, do not know Brahman, and those who do not know Brahman really know.

Uh, now all this paradoxical language, uh, is intended to keep you confused.

So that you can't say, I've got it.

So, but this position you see is not one sided.

There is something about being human, about being self conscious, you see, that is not

a mistake of nature.

Not a uh, completely evil fall into self-awareness.

But self-awareness, although it creates all kinds of problems.

Because through self-awareness, we um, the human being is in some sense a self-frustrating

mechanism.

He knows that he's going to die.

And the price of being able to control the future is to know that in the long run you

won't be able to.

And worry about that.

But also, with self-consciousness goes the possibility of resonance, of realization, of becoming enlightened,

liberated, and knowing it.

And therefore, able to enjoy it.

Adds, uh, to this, to the dimension of going with it.

Something more than the mere passivity of going with.

But knowing that you're going.

Now, uh, but it does at the same time.

It isn't entirely wrong that the dictionaries have translated it elegance.

If you could say for you is style, uh, when we say somebody really has style.

Now but this designates a particular kind of style.

It is the style of what one might call the elegant poor man, the aristocratic bum, the rich

pauper, you see.

Now you find that a good deal in, uh, the things that we've been seeing.

We've gone to many temples where nobody really owns anything.

And yet, in a way, they're luxurious.

This is for you.

The next word, uh, you again.

F-U-R-Y-U.

I have spoken about Yugen, but I haven't told you.

The basic symbol of Yugen is the flower which grows from a rock.

And so there is something about that which is improbable,

mysterious, contradictory,

that a flower could come out of a rock.

Yugen, more than any other of these terms, defies translation.

The two characters, which I shall draw for you shortly,

are rather interesting.

One, the first character, Yuu,

shows the basic form of a mountain.

And then the mountain is combined

with characters indicating dark, darkness.

You see, in the character of a mountain,

which is simply like this,

there are these things here that are the valleys,

and the dark is put in the valley, you see, in each case.

Now, you get so the idea of the deep valley.

There's a poem which says,

The wind drops, but the petals keep falling.

The bird calls,

and the mountain becomes more mysterious.

Little sounds emphasizing silence.

Little motions emphasizing stillness.

Quality, you see, is in this word, Yuu.

Again, is in Chinese,

which means the original deep, deep, mysterious darkness

out of which everything arises.

The depth.

Jakob Burma would say,

Ungrund, in the book of Genesis,

and darkness covered the face of the deep,

or the spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.

Those waters of chaos, the primeval blackness,

which is the same blackness as your head.

You know, how your head appears invisible to your eyes.

That is, again,

it is darker than darkness,

because it is blacker than black, you see.

It is practically nothingness.

It's so mysterious.

So, when you put these two characters together,

you get Yugen.

And so, Yugen is, first of all,

suggestiveness.

I was looking around one of the temples a few days ago,

where I noticed that

you couldn't figure out

how big it was,

or

it didn't seem to have any limits.

Because, always,

every wall, say, of a room,

seemed to be a screen,

which led to something else beyond.

And at the back of every garden,

there seemed to be a little gate

that led to some other courtyard.

And everything

led into something else,

and I said to the priest,

I don't know whether I'm going to go exploring,

or not,

or just leave it alone,

and think that, well,

here I left Kyoto,

and I never did find out

what was through that little gate.

And so what?

Oh, forever there will be magic behind there,

which I didn't define,

I didn't draw in.

And so,

this whole temple was done that way.

All sorts of suggestions

of little avenues disappearing,

like a mountain path,

winding up among the trees.

Where does it go?

True,

if you follow it,

you'll eventually go up out of Kyoto here,

and get down to Otsu.

And you'll notice,

you'll find yourself back in the suburbs.

But there is the sense

with that disappearing mountain path,

like we've got going up here,

that it goes to the place.

And everybody has,

in the back of their minds,

an image of the place

that you want to go to.

Or some,

not really an image,

though,

it's always slightly indefinite.

There's the certain feeling of,

there ought to be somewhere,

the thing I've always wanted.

We get disappointed,

of course,

because as we get older,

we feel that,

perhaps that doesn't exist at all.

That one just has to put up

with the second best,

or with something.

Half a loaf is better than no bread.

But still,

I find that,

far eastern art

is very,

very full

of hints

about what is sometimes called

Horai-san.

Horai-san is the magical island

somewhere out in the Pacific,

which is the Paradise Island.

And all these Chinese paintings

of wonderful floating pagodas

and terraces

with scholars sitting around

drinking wine

and so on,

are hints of the Paradise world.

And that somewhere then,

these little steps

lead up to that thing.

And you've seen these steps.

Japan is full of them.

As you just go along in the train,

you look up the hills,

and there are arches,

tori,

steps disappearing into the hills,

all of which suggest the feeling,

somewhere else is that thing.

So Yugen, as it were,

comes around full circle

to Sabi,

the wonderful lonely place

at the end of the road,

where

there won't be any mother-in-law

to bother you,

any of that sort of

dreadful social difficulty.

But

solitude,

which befits

a bearded old gentleman.

Now, of course,

you see,

they're very human,

and they reflect our,

perhaps,

childish and immature desires

to be really alone,

to have that Paradise thing.

And realistic people say,

well,

you ought not to

bother yourself

or fool yourself

with such fantasies.

And nowadays,

I find that we feel very guilty

about

thinking of Paradise,

of Horizon,

or whatever it is,

the Enchanted Garden.

They think,

uh-uh,

uh-uh.

Reality is what you read about

in the newspapers,

and you've got to face it.

And everything is unpleasant,

basically.

I know

there's the hard-boiled school

of

zoologists,

for example,

who insist that birds

hate flying.

You know,

everybody has always

envied a bird

and wanted to be able

to glide along

with wings,

you know.

And so there comes up

somebody,

who's usually some

wretched academician,

who says,

no,

we've discovered

by measurements

that birds loathe flying.

I must feel

very satisfactory

when you found that out,

because you've

smashed

an ideal.

Oh,

for the wings

of a dove,

far away

would I roam,

in the wilderness,

build me a nest

and remain there

forever at rest.

I'm quoting the Psalms.

But,

apparently,

doves just hate

this chore of flying.

Now,

it is just in the same way

as

it's ridiculous

to try to be so inhuman

as never to feel

any regrets

about the passing

of time

and of life

and so on.

It's likewise inhuman

not to have

the paradise fantasy

of the mysterious

place

round the corner,

just over the crest

of the hill,

just behind the island

in the distance,

because that place

is really

the big joke.

That's you.

That's why

you have found

that at the end

of the line,

when you get through

the last story

and up the last stairway,

you are liable

to be confronted

with a mirror.

And so,

everybody is seeking,

seeking,

seeking

for that thing

that you've got to have,

you see.

Well,

you've got it,

but nobody's going

to believe this.

But there it is,

the real thing

that you are

is the paradise land

that you're looking for

at the end of the line.

And it's far,

far more reliable

than any kind

of an external scene

which you could love

and cling to

and hold on to.

Of course,

the whole fascination

of life

is that that seems

perfectly incredible.

I think these terms

are the crucial ones.

Let me repeat them

briefly.

You've got,

firstly,

the uncarved block

and the unbleached silk.

These are the prototypes.

Then you have

Sabi,

the mood of solitariness.

Wabi,

the flip

from

disillusion

with everything

to the sudden

recognition

of how faithful

the weeds are.

How

the sparrows

chirping in the eaves

suddenly take your mind

away from

important

and dreadful

business.

Aware,

the regret

of the passing

of life

which somehow

makes that very

passing

beautiful.

Furyu,

getting with it

and living

with style.

That is to say

with rich poverty,

elegant simplicity.

Yugen,

aesthetic equivalent,

of,

well,

let me put it

this way.

There was a philosopher

by the name of

Vanderloo

who once said

that the mystery

of life

is not a problem

to be solved

but a reality

to be experienced.

That's you again.

And that mystery,

that deep,

deep,

ever so deep

thing which is

before all worlds

is you,

the unrecognized

itself.

So let's have a brief

intermission.

===== Eastern And Western Zen - 04 - I Zen Bones =====

Once upon a time, there was a Zen student who quoted an old Buddhist poem to his teacher, which says,

The voices of Torrance are from one great tongue. The lines of the hills are the pure body of Buddha.

Isn't that right? he said to the teacher.

It is, said the teacher, but it's a pity to say so. It would be, of course, much better.

If this occasion were celebrated with no talk at all.

And if I addressed you in the manner of the ancient teachers of Zen, I should hit the microphone with my fan and leave.

But I somehow have the feeling that since you have contributed to the support of the Zen Center,

in expectation of learning something, a few words should be said, even though I warn you,

that by explaining these things to you, I shall subject you to a very serious hoax.

Because if I allow you to leave here this evening, under the impression that you understand something about Zen,

you will have missed the point entirely.

Because Zen is a way of life, a state of being, that is not possible to embrace in any concept whatsoever.

So that any concepts, any ideas, any words that I shall put across to you this evening,

will have as their object, showing you the limitations of words and of thinking.

Now then, if one must try to say something about what Zen is, and I want to do this by way of introduction,

I must make it emphatic that Zen, in its essence, is not a doctrine.

There's nothing you're supposed to believe in.

And it's not a philosophy in our sense, that is to say, a set of ideas,

an intellectual net, in which one tries to catch the fish of reality.

Actually, the fish of reality is more like water.

It always slips through the net, and in water, you know, when you get into it, there's nothing to hang on to.

All this universe is like water.

It is fluid, it is transient, it is changing.

And when you're thrown into the water, after being accustomed to living on the dry land,

and you're not used to the idea of swimming, you try to stand on the water,

you try to catch hold of it, and as a result, you drown.

The only way to survive in the water, and this refers particularly to the waters of modern

philosophical confusion, where God is dead, metaphysical propositions are meaningless,

and there's really nothing to hang on to, because we're all just falling apart.

And the only thing to do under those circumstances is to learn how to swim.

And to swim, you relax, you let go, you give yourself to the water,

and you have to know how to breathe in the right way.

And then you find that the water holds you up.

Indeed, in a certain way, you become the water.

And so in the same way one might say, if one attempted to, again I say misleadingly,

to put Zen into any sort of concept, it simply comes down to this.

That in this universe, there is one great energy, and we have no name for it.

People have tried various names for it, like God, like Brahman, like Tao.

But in the West, the word God has got so many funny associations attached to it,

that most of us are bored with it.

When people say, God the Father Almighty, most people feel funny inside.

And so we like to hear new words.

We like to hear about Tao, about Brahman, about Xinyo, and Tathata,

and such strange names from the Far East, because they don't carry the same associations

of mawkish sanctimony and funny meanings from the past.

And actually, some of these words that the Buddhists use for the basic energy of the world,

really don't mean anything at all.

The word Tathata, which is translated from the Sanskrit into suchness,

or Dhasness, or something like that, really means something more like Dha Dha Dha.

Based on the word Tath, which in Sanskrit means that.

And so in Sanskrit it is said, Tath Vam Asi, that thou art, or in modern American, you're it.

But Dha, Dha, that's the first sound a baby makes when it comes into the world.

Because the baby looks around and says, Dha, Dha, Dha, Dha, Dha, that.

And fathers flatter themselves and think it's saying Dada, which means daddy.

But according to Buddhist philosophy, all this universe is one Tathata.

That means 10,000 functions or 10,000 things, one suchness.

And we're all one suchness.

And that means that suchness comes and goes like everything else.

Because this whole world is an on and off system.

As the Chinese say, it's the yang and the yin.

And therefore it consists of now you see it, now you don't.

Here you are, here you are, here you aren't.

Because that's the very nature of energy, to be like waves.

And waves have crests and troughs.

Only we, being under a certain kind of sleepiness or illusion,

imagine that the trough is going to overcome the wave or the crest.

The yin, the dark principle, is going to overcome the yang or the light principle.

And that off is finally going to triumph over on.

And we, shall I say, bug ourselves by indulging in that illusion.

Gee, supposing darkness did win out, wouldn't that be terrible?

And so we're constantly trembling and thinking that it may.

Because after all, isn't it odd that anything exists?

It's most peculiar, it requires effort, it requires energy.

And it would be so much easier for there to have been nothing at all.

Therefore we think, well, since being, since the is side of things is so much effort,

you always give up after a while and you sink back into death.

But death is just the other face of energy.

And it's the rest, the not being anything around,

that produces something around, just in the same way that you can't have

solid without space or space without solid.

When you wake up to this and realize that

the more it changes, the more it's the same thing, as the French say,

that you are really a playing of this one energy

and there is nothing else but that, that it is you,

that for you to be always you would be an insufferable bore.

And therefore it is arranged that you stop being you after a while

and then come back as someone else altogether.

And so when you find that out, you become full of energy and delight.

As Blake said, energy is eternal delight.

And you suddenly see through the whole sham of things.

You realize you're that, we won't put a name on it, you're that.

And you can't be anything else.

So you are relieved of fundamental terror.

That doesn't mean that you're always going to be a great hero,

that you won't jump when you hear it bang,

that you won't worry occasionally, that you won't lose your temper.

It means though that fundamentally deep, deep down within you,

you will be able to be human, not a stone Buddha.

You know in Zen, there is a difference made between a living Buddha and a stone Buddha.

If you go up to a stone Buddha and you hit him hard on the head, nothing happens.

You break the, break your fist or your stick.

But if you hit a living Buddha, he may say ouch.

And he may feel pain.

Because if he didn't feel something, he wouldn't be a human being.

Buddhas are human.

They are not devas, they are not gods.

They are enlightened men and women.

But the point is,

that they are not afraid to be human.

They are not afraid to let themselves participate in the pains,

difficulties and struggles that naturally go with human existence.

The only difference is,

and it's almost an undetectable difference,

it takes one to know one.

As a Zen poem says,

when two Zen masters meet each other on the street,

they need no introduction.

When thieves meet, they recognize one another instantly.

So, a person who is a real cool Zen understander,

does not go around saying,

Oh, I understand Zen.

I have Satori.

I have this attainment, I have that attainment, I have the other attainment.

Because if he said that, he wouldn't understand the first thing about it.

So, it is then that, if I may put it metaphorically,

Zhuangzi said,

the perfect man employs his mind as a mirror.

It grasps nothing, it refuses nothing.

It receives but does not keep.

And another poem says,

of wild geese flying over a lake,

the wild geese do not intend to cast their reflection,

and the water has no mind to retain their image.

In other words, this is to be,

to put it very strictly into our modern idiom,

this is to live without hang-ups.

The word hang-up being an almost exact translation

of the Japanese Bonno and the Sanskrit Klesha.

Ordinarily translated worldly attachment,

but all that sounds a little bit, you know what I mean,

it sounds pious.

And in Zen, things that sound pious are said to stink of Zen.

But to have no hang-up,

that is to say, to be able

to drift like a cloud and flow like water,

seeing that all life

is a magnificent illusion,

a playing of energy.

And there is absolutely nothing fundamentally to be afraid of.

Fundamentally.

You will be afraid on the surface.

You will be afraid of putting your hand in the fire.

You will be afraid of getting sick, etc.

But you will not be afraid of fear.

Fear will pass over your mind like a black cloud will be reflected in the mirror.

But of course, the mirror isn't quite the right illustration.

Space would be better, like a black cloud or flies through flows through space without leaving any track.

Like the stars don't leave trails behind them.

And so that fundamental that is called the void in Buddhism,

the thing that it doesn't mean void in the sense that it's void in the ordinary sense of emptiness.

It means void in that it is the most real thing there is,

but nobody can conceive it.

It's rather the same situation that you get between the speaker in a radio

and all the various sounds which it produces.

On the speaker you hear human voices,

you hear every kind of musical instrument,

honkings of horns, the sound of traffic,

the explosion of guns.

And yet all that tremendous variety of sounds are the vibrations of one diaphragm.

But it never says so.

The announcer doesn't come on first thing in the morning and say,

ladies and gentlemen,

all the sounds that you will hear subsequently during the day will be the vibrations of this diaphragm.

But don't take them for real.

And the radio never mentions its own construction, you see.

And in exactly the same way, you are never able really to examine, to make an object of your own mind,

just as you can't look directly into your own eyes or bite your own teeth.

Because you are that.

And if you try to find it and make it something to possess, why that's a great lack of confidence.

That shows you don't really know you're it.

And if you're it, you don't need to make anything of it.

There's nothing to look for.

But the test is, are you still looking?

Do you know that?

I mean, not as kind of knowledge that you possess, not something you've learned in school,

like you've got a degree.

And you know, I've mastered the contents of these books and remembered it.

In this knowledge, there's nothing to be remembered, nothing to be formulated.

You know it best when you say, well, I don't know it.

Because that means, I'm not holding on to it.

I'm not trying to cling to it in the form of a concept,

because there's absolutely no necessity to do so.

That would be, in Zen language, putting legs on a snake or a beard on a eunuch.

Or as we would say, gilding the lily.

Now you say, well, that sounds pretty easy.

You mean to say, all we have to do is just relax.

We don't go around chasing anything anymore.

We abandon religion.

We abandon meditations.

We abandon this, that and the other.

And just live it up anyhow.

Just go on.

You know, like a father says to a child who keeps asking,

why, why, why, why, why?

Why did God make the universe?

Who made God?

Why are the trees green?

And so on and so forth.

The father says finally, oh, shut up and eat your bun.

It isn't quite like that.

Because you see, the thing is this, all those people who try to realize Zen

by doing nothing about it, are still trying desperately to find it.

And are on the wrong track.

There is another Zen poem which says,

you cannot attain it by not thinking.

Or you could say, you cannot catch hold of the meaning of Zen by doing something about it.

But equally, you cannot see into its meaning by doing nothing about it.

Because both are in their different ways, attempts, to move from where you are now, here, to somewhere else.

And the point is that we come to an understanding of this, what I call suchness,

only through being completely here.

And no means are necessary to be completely here.

Either active means on the one hand, nor passive means on the other.

Because in both ways, you are trying to move away from the immediate now.

But you see, it's difficult to understand language like that.

And to understand what all that is about.

There is really one absolutely necessary, uh, prerequisite.

And this, uh, is to stop thinking.

Now, I am not saying this in the spirit of being an anti-intellectual.

Because I think a lot, talk a lot, write a lot of books,

and am a sort of half-baked scholar.

But you know, if you talk all the time, you'll never hear what anybody else has to say.

And therefore, all you'll have to talk about is your own conversation.

The same is true for people who think all the time.

That means, when I use the word think, talking to yourself.

Sub-vocal conversation.

The constant, uh, chit-chat of symbols and images and talk and words inside your skull.

Now, if you do that all the time, you'll find that you've nothing to think about except thinking.

And just as you have to stop talking to hear what others have to say,

you have to stop thinking to find out what life is about.

And the moment you stop thinking, you become into immediate contact with what Kozybski called,

so delightfully, the unspeakable world.

That is to say, the non-verbal world.

Some people would call it the physical world.

But these words, physical, non-verbal, material, are all conceptual.

And, is not a concept.

It's not a noise either.

It's, get that?

So, when you are awake to that world,

you suddenly find that all the so-called differences

between self and other, life and death,

pleasure and pain, are all conceptual.

And they're not there.

They don't exist at all.

In that world, which is, in other words, if I hit you hard enough,

ouch doesn't hurt.

If you're in a state of what is called no thought.

It just, there is a certain experience, you see, but you don't call it hurt.

It's like when you were small children, they banged you about.

And you cried.

And they said, don't cry.

Because they wanted to make you hurt and not cry at the same time.

People are rather curious about the things they do like that.

And, but you see, they really wanted you to cry.

In the same way if you threw up one day.

It's very good to throw up when you've eaten something that isn't good for you.

But your mother said,

and made you repress it and feel that throwing up wasn't a good thing to do.

Because then, when you saw people die,

and everybody around you started weeping and making a fuss.

And then you learned from that, that dying was terrible.

When somebody got sick, everybody else got anxious.

And you learned that getting sick was something awful.

You learned it from the concept.

So, the reason why there is in the practice of Zen,

what we did before this lecture began, to practice Zazen, sitting Zen.

Incidentally, there are three other kinds of Zen besides Zazen.

Standing Zen, walking Zen, and lying Zen.

In Buddhism they speak of the three dignities of man.

Walking, standing, sitting, and lying.

And when they say, when you sit, just sit.

When you walk, just walk.

But whatever you do, don't wobble.

In fact, of course, you can wobble.

If you really wobble well.

When the old master Hyakujo was asked, what is Zen?

He said, when hungry, eat.

When tired, sleep.

But they said, well, isn't that what everybody does?

Aren't you just like ordinary people?

Oh, he said, no, they don't do anything of the kind.

When they're hungry, they don't just eat.

They think of all sorts of things.

When they're tired, they don't just sleep,

but dream all sorts of dreams.

I know the Jungians won't like that.

But there comes a time when you just dream yourself out.

And no more dreams.

You sleep deeply and breathe from your heels.

Now, therefore, Zazen, or sitting Zen,

is a very, very good thing in the Western world.

We have been running around far too much.

It's all right, we've been active,

and our action has achieved a lot of good things.

But as Aristotle pointed out long ago,

and this is one of the good things about Aristotle,

and he said, the goal of action is contemplation.

In other words, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy,

but what's it all about?

Especially when people are busy

because they think they're going somewhere,

and they're going to get something and attain something.

There's quite a good deal of point to action

if you know you're not going anywhere.

If you act like you dance, or like you sing, or play music,

then you're really not going anywhere.

You're just doing pure action.

But if you act with the thought in mind

that as a result of action,

you are eventually going to arrive at some place

where everything will be all right,

then you are on a squirrel cage,

hopelessly condemned to what the Buddhists call samsara,

the round or rat race of birth and death.

Because you think you're going to get somewhere.

You're already there.

And it's only a person who has discovered that he's already there

who is capable of action.

Because he doesn't act frantically

with the thought that he's going to get somewhere.

He acts like he can go into walking meditation at that point,

you see.

Where we walk,

not because we are in a great hurry to get to a destination,

but because the walking itself is great.

The walking itself is the meditation.

And when you watch Zen monks walk,

it's very fascinating.

They have a different kind of walk from everybody else in Japan.

Most Japanese shuffle along,

or if they wear Western clothes,

they race and hurry like we do.

Zen monks have a peculiar swing when they walk.

And you have the feeling they walk rather the same way as a cat.

There's something about it which isn't hesitant.

They're going along all right.

They're not sort of vaguing around,

but they're walking just to walk.

And that's walking meditation.

But the point is that one cannot act creatively,

except on the basis of stillness,

of having a mind that is from time to time capable of stopping thinking.

And so this practice of sitting

and may seem very difficult at first.

Because if you sit in the Buddhist way,

it makes your legs ache.

And most Westerners start to fidget.

They find it very boring to sit for a long time.

But the reason they find it boring is that they're still thinking.

If you weren't thinking,

you wouldn't notice the passage of time.

And as a matter of fact, far from being boring,

the world, when looked at without chatter,

becomes amazingly interesting.

You've been listening to part one of Zen Bones

with Alan Watts from the Alan Watts radio series number three,

Eastern and Western Zen.

For information how to obtain the radio series on cassette tape,

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Or you can write to The Electronic University,

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from the Alan Watts radio series number three,

Eastern and Western Zen.

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Our theme music is by Zakir Hussain, courtesy of Moment Records.

I'm Neil Harvey.

Thank you for listening.

Welcome to another talk from the Alan Watts radio series number three,

Eastern and Western Zen.

This is part two of a program called Zen Bones,

which was originally a talk given at a benefit for the Zen Mountain Center,

recorded in the summer of 1967 at the Avalon Ballroom in San Francisco.

The program concludes with a recording of Zen Rin poems,

in which Alan Watts accompanies himself on the koto in the early morning hours

at his mountain retreat above Muir Woods in 1973.

It's Zen Bones, part two.

Here's Alan Watts.

The most ordinary sights and sounds and smells,

the texture of shadows on the floor in front of you,

all these things without being named and saying,

that's a shadow, that's red, that's brown, that's somebody's foot.

When you don't name things any longer, you start seeing them.

Because, say, when a person says, I see a leaf,

immediately one thinks of a spearhead-shaped thing,

outlined in black and filled in with flat green.

No leaf looks like that.

No leaves, leaves are not green.

That's why Lao Tzu said,

the five colors make a man blind,

the five tones make a man deaf.

Because if you can only see five colors, you're blind.

And if you can only hear five tones in music, you're deaf.

You see, if you, if you force,

sound into five tones. You force color into five colors, you're blind and deaf.

The world of color is infinite, as is the world of sound.

And it is only through stopping, fixing conceptions on the world of color and sound, that you really begin to hear it and see it.

So this, shall I be so bold as to use the word discipline,

of meditation or zazen, lies behind the extraordinary capacity

of Zen people, to develop such great arts as the gardens, the tea ceremony, the calligraphy,

and the grand painting of the Sung dynasty, and of the Japanese Sumi tradition.

And it was because, especially in tea ceremony, which means literally Chano-yu in Japanese means hot water of tea.

They found in the very simplest things of everyday life, magic.

In the words of the Toito Koji, marvelous power and supernatural activity.

Drawing water, carrying wood.

And you know, sometimes when you say a word and make the word meaningless, you take the word yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.

It becomes funny.

That's why they use Mu, you know, in Zen training, which means no.

Mu.

And you get this going for a long time, the word ceases to mean anything.

And it becomes magical.

That sound.

Now, what you have to realize in the further continuance of Zazen, that as you, well, let me say first in a preliminary way.

The easiest way to stop thinking is first of all to think about something that doesn't have any meaning.

That's my point in talking about Mu or Yes or counting your breath or listening to a sound that has no meaning.

Because that stops you thinking because you become fascinated in the sound.

Then as you get on and you just, the sound only, comes the point when the sound is taken away.

And you're wide open.

Now at that point, there will be a kind of preliminary so-called Satori.

And you will think, wowee, that's it.

You'll be so happy you'll be walking on air.

When Suzuki Daisets was asked, what is it like to have Satori?

He said, well, it's like ordinary everyday experience, except about two inches off the ground.

But there's another saying that that student who has attained Satori goes to hell as straight as an arrow.

No Satori around here.

Because anybody who has a spiritual experience, whether you get it through Zazen or through LSD or anything, you know, that gives you that experience.

If you hold onto it, say, now I've got it, it's gone out of the window.

Because the minute you grab a living thing, it's like catching a handful of water.

The harder you clutch, the faster it squirts through your fingers.

There's nothing to get hold of.

Because you don't need to get hold of anything.

You had it from the beginning.

Of course you can see that by various methods of meditation.

But the trouble is the people who come out of that and brag about it.

Say, I've seen it.

Equally intolerable are the people who study Zen and come out and brag to their friends about how much their legs hurt.

And how long they sat.

And what an awful thing it was.

They're sickening.

Because the discipline side of this thing is not meant to be something awful.

It's not done in a masochistic spirit or a sadistic spirit.

Suffering builds character.

Therefore suffering is good for you.

When I went to school in England, the basic premise of education was that suffering builds character.

And therefore all senior boys were at liberty to bang about the junior ones with a perfectly clear conscience.

Because they were doing them a favor.

It was good for them.

It was building their character.

And as a result of this kind of attitude, the word discipline has begun to stink.

It's been stinking for a long time.

But we need a kind of entirely new attitude towards this.

Because without that quiet and that non-striving, life becomes messy.

When you let go, finally, because there's nothing to hold on to, you have to be awfully careful not to turn into loose yogurt.

And let me give two opposite illustrations.

When you ask most people to lie flat on the floor and relax, you find that they are full of tensions because they don't really believe that the floor will hold them up.

And therefore they're holding themselves together.

They're uptight.

They're afraid that if they don't do this, even though the floor is supporting them, they'll suddenly turn into a gelatinous mass and trickle away in all directions.

Then there are other people when you tell them to relax.

They go like a limp rag.

But you see, the human organism is a subtle combination of hardness and softness.

Of flesh and bones.

And the side of Zen, which has to do with neither doing nor not doing, but knowing that you're it anyway and you don't have to seek it, that's Zen flesh.

But the side in which you can come back into the world with this attitude of not seeking and knowing you're it and not fall apart, that requires bones.

And one of the most difficult things, this belongs to, of course, a generation we all know about that was running around some time ago, where they caught on to Zen and they started anything goes painting.

They started anything goes sculpture.

They started anything goes way of life.

Now I think we're recovering from that today.

At any rate, our painters are beginning once again to return to glory, to marvelous articulateness and vivid color.

Nothing like it has been seen since the stained glass of shaft.

That's a good sign.

But it requires that there be in our daily use of freedom.

And I'm not just talking about political freedom.

I'm talking about the freedom which comes when you know that you're it forever and ever and ever.

And it'll be so nice when you die because that'll be a change.

But it'll come back some other way.

And when you know that and you've seen through the whole mirage, then watch out because there may still be in you some seeds of hostility, some seeds of pride, some seeds of wanting to put down other people or wanting just to defy the normal arrangements of life.

So that is why in the order of a Zen monastery, various duties are assigned.

The novices have the light duties and the more senior you get the heavy duties.

For example, the Roshi very often is the one who cleans out the banjo, the toilet.

And everything is kept in order.

There is a kind of beautiful, almost princely asceticism.

Because by reason of that order being kept all the time, the vast free energy which is contained in the system doesn't run amok.

The understanding of Zen, the understanding of awakening, the understanding of, well, we'll call it mystical experiences, one of the most dangerous things in the world.

And for a person who cannot contain it, it's like putting a million volts through your electric shaver.

You blow your mind and it stays blown.

Now, if you go off in that way, that is what would be called in Buddhism a Pratyeka Buddha, private Buddha.

He's one who goes off into the transcendental world and is never seen again.

And he's made a mistake from the standpoint of Buddhism, because from the standpoint of Buddhism there is no fundamental difference between the transcendental world and this everyday world.

The Bodhisattva, you see, who doesn't go off into a Nirvana and stay there forever and ever, but comes back and lives ordinary everyday life to help other beings to see through it too.

He doesn't come back because he feels he has some sort of solemn duty to help mankind and all that kind of pious cant.

He comes back because he sees the two worlds are the same.

He sees all other beings as Buddhas.

He sees them, to use a phrase of G.K. Chesterton's,

But now a great thing in the street seems any human nod, where move in strange democracy the million masks of God.

And it's fantastic to look at people and see that they really, deep down, are enlightened.

They're it. They're faces of the divine.

And they look at you and say, Oh no, but I'm not divine. I'm just ordinary little me.

And you look at them in a funny way and here you see the Buddha nature looking out of their eyes straight at you and saying it's not.

And saying it quite sincerely.

And that's why when you get up against a great guru, be Zen master or whatever, he has a funny look in his eyes.

When you say I have a problem, guru, I really, I'm mixed up and I don't understand.

He looks at you in this queer way.

And you think, Oh dear me, he's reading my most secret thoughts.

He's seeing all the awful things I am, all my cowardice, all my shortcomings.

He's not doing anything of the kind. He isn't even interested in such things.

He's looking at, if I may use Hindu terminology, he's looking at Shiva in you, saying, My God Shiva, won't you come off it?

So then you see the Bodhisattva, who is, if I, I'm assuming quite a knowledge of Buddhism in this assembly.

But the Bodhisattva as distinct from the Pratyeka Buddha, Bodhisattva doesn't go off into Nirvana.

He doesn't go off into permanent, withdrawn ecstasy.

He doesn't go into a kind of catatonic samadhi.

That's all right, there are people who can do that.

That's their vocation.

That's their specialty.

Just as a long thing is the long body of Buddha, and a short thing is the short body of Buddha.

But if you really understand that Zen, that Buddhist idea of enlightenment, is not comprehended in the idea of the transcendental,

neither is it comprehended in the idea of the ordinary.

Not in terms of the infinite, not in terms of the finite.

Not in terms of the eternal, not in terms of the temporal, because they're all concepts.

So, let me say again, I'm not talking about the ordering of ordinary everyday life in a reasonable and methodical way,

as being schoolteacherish, and saying, nice, if you were nice people, that's what you would do.

For heaven's sake, don't be nice people.

But the thing is, that unless you do have that basic framework of a certain kind of order, and a certain kind of discipline,

the force of liberation will blow the world to pieces.

It's too strong a current for the wire.

So then, it's terribly important to see beyond ecstasy.

Ecstasy, yeah, is the soft and lovely flesh, huggable and kissable, and that's very good.

But beyond ecstasy are bones, what we call hard facts, hard facts of everyday life.

Incidentally, we shouldn't forget to mention the soft facts.

There are many of them.

But then the hard fact, if you say, what we mean, the world as seen in an ordinary everyday state of consciousness.

To find out that that is really no different from the world of supreme ecstasy.

Well, it's rather like this.

Let's suppose, as so often happens, you think of ecstasy as insight, as seeing light.

There's a Zen poem which says,

A sudden crash of thunder.

The mind doors burst open.

And there sits the ordinary old man.

See, there's this sudden vision.

Satori breaking.

Wowee!

And the doors of the mind are blown apart.

And there sits the ordinary old man.

That's just little, little you, you know.

Lightning flashes, sparks shower.

In one blink of your eyes you've missed seeing.

Why?

Because here is the light.

The light, the light, the light.

Every mystic in the world has seen the light.

That brilliant, blazing energy.

Brighter than a thousand suns which is locked up in everything.

Now imagine this.

Imagine you're seeing it.

Like you see aureoles round Buddhas.

Like you see the beatific vision at the end of Dante's Paradiso.

Vivid, vivid light so bright that it's like the clear light of the void in the Tibetan Book of the Dead.

It's beyond light, it's so bright.

And you watch it receding from you.

And on the edges like a great star that becomes a rim of red.

And beyond that a rim of orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet.

And you see this great mandala appearing, this great sun.

And beyond the violet there's black.

Black like obsidian.

Not flat black but transparent black like lacquer.

And again blazing out of the black as the yang comes from the yin.

More right.

Going, going, going.

And along with this light there comes sound.

There's a sound so tremendous with the white light that you can't hear it.

So piercing that it seems to annihilate the ears.

But then along with the colors the sound goes down the scale.

In harmonic intervals down, down, down, down, down.

Until it gets to a deep thundering base.

Which is so vibrant that in turn it turns into something solid.

And you begin to get the similar spectrum of textures.

Now all this time you've been watching a kind of a thing radiating out.

But it says, you know, this isn't all I can do.

And the rays start going...

dancing like this.

And naturally the sound starts going, waving too, as it comes out.

And then the textures start varying themselves.

And they say, well you've been looking at this thing as I've been describing it so far

in a flat dimension.

Let's add a third dimension.

It's going to come right at you now.

See, this way.

And meanwhile it says, it's not just that we're going to go

like this.

We're going to do little curly cues.

We're going to go like this.

And it says, well that's just the beginning.

We can go...

making squares and turns.

And then suddenly you see in all the little details

that become so intense.

All kinds of little sub figures are contained within

what you thought were originally the main figures.

And the sound starts going all different.

Amazing.

Complexities of sound all over the place.

And this thing's going, going, going.

And you think you're going to go out of your mind.

And suddenly it turns into...

Why? Us sitting around here.

Thank you very much.

The cold kills you with cold.

The heat kills you with heat.

Above, there isn't a piece of tile to cover his head.

Below, there isn't an inch of earth for him to stand on.

When the mouth wants to speak about it, words fail.

When the mind seeks affinity with it, thought vanishes.

Sun and moon cannot illuminate it completely.

Heaven and earth cannot cover it entirely.

The deer hunter doesn't see the mountains.

The miser doesn't see men.

Last year's poverty was not real poverty.

But this year's poverty is poverty indeed.

The angels find no path on which to strew flowers.

The heretics, secretly spying, find nothing to see.

Last year's plum and this year's willow.

Their color and fragrance are as of old.

At the limits of heaven, the sun rises and the moon sets.

Beyond the balustrade, the mountains deepen and the waters become chill.

He sees only the winding of the stream and the twisting of the path.

He does not know that already he is in the land of the immortals.

He who would understand the meaning of Buddha nature must watch for the season and the causal relations.

Every voice is the voice of Buddha.

Every form is the Buddha form.

===== Eastern And Western Zen - 05 - I Biting An Iron Bull =====

Welcome to another talk from the Alan Watts Radio Series No. 3, Eastern and Western Zen.

This talk is taken from a seminar called Inevitable Ecstasy on Zen Buddhism,

in which Alan Watts compares man's effort toward attaining enlightenment to a mosquito biting an iron bull.

It's part one of Biting an Iron Bull. Here's Alan Watts.

This seminar called Inevitable Ecstasy is about a very sticky problem,

which is to say the problem to which the Buddha primarily addressed himself,

which is that of agony, suffering.

But before we get into that, we have to be clear about certain basics.

And these basics have to do not so much with concepts and ideas as they do with the state of mind.

You could call it also a state of feeling, a state of sensation, a state of consciousness.

And we need to understand that, even be in that, before we can really go very far.

And this is an extraordinarily difficult state of mind to talk about,

even though in its nature it's extremely simple.

Because it is, in a way, like we were when we were babies,

when we hadn't been told anything and didn't know anything other than what we felt,

and we had no names for it.

Now, of course, as we grow older,

we learn to differentiate one thing from another, one event from another,

and above all, ourselves from everything else.

Well and good, provided you don't lose the foundations.

Just as mountains are differentiated, but they're all based on the earth,

so the multiple things of this world are differentiated.

But they have, as it were, a basis.

There is no word for that basis, not really.

Because words are only for distinction.

And so there can't really be a word, not even an idea, of the non-distinction.

We can feel it, but we can't think it.

But we don't feel it like an object.

You feel you're alive.

You feel you're conscious.

But you don't know what consciousness is,

because consciousness is present in every conceivable kind of experience.

It's like the space in which we live,

which is everywhere.

It's like a fish being in water,

and presumably a fish doesn't know it's in the water,

because it never goes out.

A bird, presumably, knows nothing of the air,

and we really know nothing of consciousness,

and we pretend space isn't there.

So, however,

when you grow up

and become fascinated,

which is really the right word,

spellbound, enchanted,

by all the things that adults wave at you,

you forget the background,

and you come to think

that all the distinctions which you've been learning

are the supremely important things to be concerned with.

You become hypnotized,

just in the same way

as when the beak of a chicken is put to a chalk line.

It gets stuck on that line.

And so when we are told to pay attention to what matters,

we get stuck with it,

and that's what in Buddhism is called attachment.

Attachment doesn't mean

that you enjoy your dinner,

or that you enjoy sleeping,

or beauty.

Those are responses

of our organism in its environment

as natural as feeling hot near a fire

or cold near ice.

So are certain responses of fear

or of sorrow.

They are not attachment.

Attachment is exactly translated

by the modern slang term,

hang-up.

It's a kind of stickiness,

or what in psychology would be called blocking,

when you are in a state of wobbly hesitation,

not knowing how to flow on.

That's attachment,

what is meant by the Sanskrit word klesha.

So when the chicken has its beak put to the chalk line,

it's got a hang-up.

It's stuck on that line.

And so in the same way,

we get a hang-up

on all the various things

that we are told

as we grow up

by our parents,

our aunts and uncles,

our teachers,

and above all

by our peer group.

And the first thing

that everybody wants to tell us

is the difference between ourselves

and the rest of the world.

And between those actions

which are voluntary

and those which are involuntary

what we do

on the one hand

and what happens to us

on the other.

And this is, of course,

immensely confusing

to a small child

because it's told to do

all sorts of things

that are really supposed to happen,

like going to sleep,

like having bowel movements,

like loving people,

like not blushing,

stopping being anxious,

and all sorts of things

like that.

The child is told in some

that we, your parents,

elders and betters,

command you

to do what will please us

only if you do it spontaneously.

And no wonder

everybody's completely confused.

We go through life

with that burden on us.

We therefore develop

this curious thing.

We develop a thing

which is called an ego.

Now, I've got to be

very clear to you

what I mean by an ego.

An ego is not the same thing

as a particular living organism.

For my philosophy,

the particular living organism,

which is inseparable

from a particular environment,

that is to say,

from the universe

as centered here and now,

there's something real.

It isn't a thing.

I call it a feature

of the universe.

But what we call our ego

is something abstract,

which is to say

it has the same order

and kind of reality

as an hour

or an inch

or a pound

or a line of longitude.

It is for purposes of discussion.

It is for convenience.

In other words,

it is a social convention

that we have

what is called an ego.

But the fallacy

that all of us make

is that we treat it

as if it were

a physical organ,

as if it were real

in that sense,

when in fact

it is composed

on the one hand

of our image

of ourselves,

that is,

our idea

of ourselves,

as when we say

to somebody,

you must improve

your image.

Now,

this image of ourselves

is obviously

not ourselves.

Any more

than an idea

of a tree

is a tree.

Any more

than you can get wet

in the word water.

And,

to go on with,

our image of ourselves

is extremely inaccurate

and incomplete.

Would that some

got the gifted gears

to see ourselves

as others see us.

We don't.

So,

my image of me

is not at all

your image of me.

And my image of me

is extremely incomplete

in that

it does not include

any information

to speak of

about the functioning

of my nervous system,

my circulation,

my metabolism,

my subtle relationships

with the entire

surrounding human

and non-human universe.

So,

the image I have

of myself

is a caricature.

It is

arrived at

through,

mainly,

my interaction

with other people

who tell me

who I am

in various ways,

either directly

or indirectly.

And I

play about

with

what their picture

is of me

and they play

something back to me

so that we set up

this conception.

And this started

very, very early

in life.

And

I was told,

you see,

and you were told

that we must

have a consistent

image.

You must be you.

You have to find

your identity

in terms of image.

And this is

an awful red herring.

A lot of the

current quest

for identity

among younger people

is

a search

for an

acceptable image.

What role

can I play?

who am I

in the sense

of what am I

going to do

in life

and so on.

Now,

while that has

a certain

importance,

if it's not

backed up

by deeper

matters,

it's extraordinarily

misleading.

So,

therefore,

on the one hand,

there is this image

which is

intellectual,

emotional,

imaginative,

and so forth.

Now,

we would say

I don't feel

that I

am

only an image.

I feel

there's something

more real than that

because

I feel,

I mean,

I have a sense

of there being

a particular

sort of,

how do we say,

a center

of something,

some sort

of sensitive

core

inside the skin

and that

corresponds

to the word

I.

Let's take a

look at this

because

the thing

that we feel

as being

myself

is certainly

not the whole

body

because

a lot of

the body

can be seen

as an object.

In other words,

if you stand,

stretch yourself

out,

lie on the floor

and turn your head

and look at yourself,

you know,

you can see your feet

and your legs

and all this

up to here

and finally

it all vanishes

and there's a sort

of a vague nose

in front

and you assume

you have a head

because everybody

else does

and you've looked

in a mirror

and that told you

you had a head

but you can never

see it

just like you

can't see your back.

So you tend

to put your ego

on the side

of the unseen

part of the body,

the part

you can't get at

because that

seems to be

where it all

comes from

and you feel it

but what is it

that we feel

because if I see

clearly

and my eyes

are in functioning

order

the eyes

certainly

are not

conscious of

themselves.

There are no

spots in front

of them,

no defects

in other words

in the lens

or in the retina

or in the optic nerves

that give

hallucinations.

So also therefore

if my ego,

my consciousness

is working properly

I ought not

to be aware

of it

as something

sort of

there

being a nuisance

in a way

in the middle

of things

because your ego

is awfully hard

to take care of.

Well what is it

then that we feel?

Well I think

I've discovered

what it is.

It's a chronic

habitual sense

of muscular strain

which we were taught

in the whole process

of doing

spontaneous things

to order.

When you're taking

off in a jet plane

and the thing

has gone rather

further down the runway

than you think

it should have

without getting up

in the air

you start pulling

at your seat belt

get this thing

off the ground

perfectly useless.

So in the same way

when our

community

tells us

look carefully

now listen

pay attention

we start

using muscular

strains

around our

eyes

ears

jaws

hands

to try

to use

our muscles

to make

our nerves

work

which is

of course

futile

and in fact

it gets in the way

of the functioning

of the nerves

try to concentrate

and then

when we

try to control

our emotions

we hold

our breath

pull our stomachs

in

or tighten

our rectal muscles

to hold

ourselves together

now pull yourself

together

immediately

what are you to do

what does a child

understand by that

he does it

muscularly

pulls himself

together

but it's useless

so everybody

chronically

pulls himself

together

so that

it's so funny

if you get a person

that just lie

on the floor

and relax

but there's the floor

under you

as firm as can be

holding you up

nevertheless

you will detect

that the person

is making

all sorts of

tensions

lest he should

suddenly

turn into

a nasty

jello

on the floor

so that

chronic tension

which in sanskrit

is called

sankocha

which means

contraction

is the root

of what we call

the feeling

of the ego

so that in other words

this feeling

of tightness

is the

physical

referent

for

the psychological

image

of ourselves

so that we get

the ego

as the marriage

of an illusion

to a futility

even though

the idea

of an I

with a name

with a being

is naturally

useful

for social

communication

provided we

know what

we're doing

and take it

for what it is

but we are

so hung up

on this concept

that it

confuses us

even

in the proposition

that it might

be possible

for us to feel

otherwise

because we

ask the question

if we hear

about people

who

have

transcended

the ego

well we ask

how do you

do that

well I say

what do you

mean

you

how do you

do that

because the

you you're

talking about

doesn't exist

so you can't

do anything

about it

any more

than you can

cut a cheese

with a line

of longitude

now that

sounds very

discouraging

doesn't it

but let's

suppose now

you are babies

again

and you don't

know anything

now don't be

frightened

because anything

you know

you can get

back later

but for the

time being

here is

our awareness

and let's

suppose you

have no

information about

this at all

and no words

for it

and that my

talking to you

is just a

noise

now don't try

to do anything

about this

don't make any

effort

because naturally

by force of

habit

certain tensions

remain inside you

and certain

ideas and

words drift

all the time

through your

mind

just like

the wind blows

or clouds

move across

the sky

don't bother

with them

at all

don't try

to get rid

of them

just

be aware

of what's

going on

in your

head

like it

was clouds

in the sky

or the

crackling

of the fire

there's no

problem to

this

all you have

to do

really

is look

and listen

without

naming

and if you

are naming

never mind

just listen

to that

now that

you can't

force anything

here

that you

can't

willfully

stop

thinking

and stop

naming

is only

telling you

that the

separate you

doesn't exist

it isn't

a mark

of defeat

it isn't

a sign

of your lack

of practice

in meditation

that it

runs on

all by itself

simply means

that the

individual

separate you

is a figment

of your

imagination

so you

are aware

at this

point

of a

happening

remember

you don't

know anything

about

the difference

between you

and it

you haven't

been told

that

you've no

words

for the

difference

between

inside

and outside

between

here and

there

and nobody

has taught

you

that what

you see

out in

front

of you

is either

near

or far

from

your eyes

watch a

baby put

out a

finger to

touch the

moon

you don't

know about

that

therefore

here it

is

we'll just

call it

this

and if

you will

feel it

the going

on

which

includes

absolutely

everything

you feel

well whatever

that is

it's what

the chinese

call

Tao

what buddhists

call

suchness

or

and it's

a happening

it doesn't

happen to

you

because where

is that

you

what you

call you

is part

of the

happening

or an

aspect of

it

has no

parts

it's not

like a

machine

and it's

a little

scary

because

we'll say

well who's

in control

around here

why should

there be

anyone

that's a

very weird

notion we

have that

processes

require

something

outside them

to control

them

it never

occurred to

us that

processes

could be

self-controlling

even though

we say to

someone

control

yourself

we can

always

in order

to think

about

self-control

we split

a person

in two

so that

there's a

you

separate from

the self

that's supposed

to be

controlled

well how

can that

achieve

anything

how can

a noun

start a

verb

yet it's a

fundamental

superstition

that that

can be

done

so you

have this

process

which is

quite

spontaneous

going on

we call it

life

it's

controlling

itself

it's

aware of

itself

it's

aware of

itself

through

you

you are

an aperture

through which

the universe

looks at

itself

and because

of it

so the universe

looking at

itself

through you

there's always

an aspect

of itself

that it

can't

see

so it

is like

that snake

you see

that is

pursuing

its tail

because the

snake

can't

see

its

head

like

you

can't

we

always

find

as we

investigate

the

universe

make

the

microscope

bigger

and bigger

and we

will find

ever more

minute

things

make the

telescope

bigger

and bigger

and the

universe

expands

because it's

running away

from itself

it won't

do that

if you

don't

chase

it

so

the

universe

is chasing

its own

tail

see

it's the

thing

we're

talking

about

this

Tao

and

it's a

game of

hide and

seek

really

when you

ask the

question

who is

doing

the

chasing

you

are

still

working

on to

the

assumption

that

every

verb

has to

have

a

subject

that

when

there

is

an

action

there

has

to

be

a

doer

well

that's

what

I

will

call

a

grammatical

convention

leading

to

what

Whitehead

called

the

fallacy

of

misplaced

concreteness

like

the

famous

it

in

it

is

raining

so

when

you

say

there

cannot

be

knowing

without

a

knower

this

is

merely

saying

no

more

than

nature

anything

you

can

think

of

as

a

thing

as

a

noun

can

be

described

by

a

verb

and

there

are

languages

which

do

that

it

sounds

awkward

in

there

never

was

any

stuff

it

is

a

ghost

what

we

call

stuff

is

simply

patterns

seen

out

of

focus

and

it

is

fuzzy

so

we

call

it

stuff

you

know

it's

a

k-pop

so

we

know

we

have

these

words

energy

matter

being

reality

even

Tao

and

we

can

never

find

them

they

always

elude

us

entirely

although

we

do

have

the

very

strong

intuition

that

all

this

that

we

see

is

connected

or

related

so

we

speak

of

a

universe

although

that

word

really

means

one

turn

it's

your

turn

now

or

like

you

make

one

turn

to

look

at

yourself

but

you

can't

make

two

turns

and

see

what's

looking

you've

been

listening

to

Biting

an

Iron

Bull

part

one

with

Alan

Watts

from the

Alan Watts

radio

series

number

three

eastern

and western

zen

for

information

how to

obtain the

radio series

on cassette

tape

call

1-800-969-2887

or you can

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biting an

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Alan Watts

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san

an

selmo

california

the love

of wisdom

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i'm

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thank you

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welcome to

another talk

from the

Alan Watts

radio series

number

three

eastern

and western

zen

this is

part two

of a talk

from the

seminar

inevitable

ecstasy

in which

Alan Watts

explores

the doctrine

of the

void

one of the

central themes

in zen

buddhism

it was

recorded on

the ferry

boat

vallejo

in the

late

60s

it's

very

simple

therefore

you

only

have

to

understand

that

you

can't do anything about it. And as they say in Zen, you cannot take hold of it, but you

can't get rid of it. And in not being able to get it, you get it. But there it is, that

you can struggle and struggle and struggle, and indeed will do so as long as you have

the feeling inside you that you're missing something. People, your friends, all sorts

of people will do their utmost to persuade you that you're missing something. Because

they're missing something, and they think they're getting it through a certain way, and therefore

to assure themselves they'd like you to do it too. So does this thing. And you see,

a clever guru beguiles his students by letting them have the feeling of success and accomplishment

in certain directions. A guru gives people exercises, A, that are difficult but can be

accomplished, and B, that are impossible. You will always be hung up on the impossible ones,

but the possible ones you will get a feeling of making progress, so that you will double

your efforts to solve the impossible exercises. And then they range things in many, many ranks

and levels through which you can advance. This stage of consciousness, that state of consciousness,

or think of the degrees of masonry, or so on. Ranks in learning things, the different belts

you get in judo and all that kind of jazz. You can do that. And it gives people the search

of competing with themselves or even with others. Because of the feeling inside that there is just

something I'm missing. And of course, if you are learning any sort of skill, and you haven't

perfected the skill, there is indeed something you're missing. But in this thing that we're

talking about, that isn't true. Because you, as the Buddhists say, are Buddhas from the very

beginning. And all that searching is like looking for your own head, which you can't see and therefore

might conceivably imagine that you're lost. So, that indeed is the point. That we don't

see what looks. And therefore we think we've lost it. And so we're in search of the self,

the Atman. Well, that's the one thing we can't find. Because we have it. We are it. But we

confuse it with all these images. So therefore, if you understand perfectly clearly that you

can't do anything to find that very, very important thing. God, enlightenment, nirvana,

whatever. Then what? I find, you know, it's so stupid. Because even if I tell myself, well,

there's nothing I can do about it. Why did I say that? You see? Why did I say that? Why did I go out of my way to tell myself there's nothing I can do about it?

Because in the back of my mind there was a funny little feeling that if I did tell myself that, something different would happen. See? All right. So even that doesn't work. Nothing works. Now, when absolutely nothing works, where are you? Well, here we are. I mean, there's this feeling of something going on. The world doesn't stop dead when there's nothing you can do. There's something happening. Now, just there, that's what I'm talking about. There's the happening.

When you are not doing anything about it, you're not not doing anything about it, you just can't help it. It goes on despite anything you think or worry about or whatever. Now, there is the point. Right there. And remember, although you will think at

at first that this is a kind of determinism, there are two reasons why it isn't.

One, there is nobody being determined. Now, there is nobody being determined. Now, other people think of determinism as the direction of what has happened.

What happens by the past, the causation of what happens by the past. Now, if you will use your senses, the direction of what happens by the past, the causation of what happens by the past.

There are two reasons why it isn't.

One, there is no body being determined.

Now, other people think of determinism as the direction of what happens by the past,

the causation of what happens by the past.

Now, if you will use your senses, you will see that that is a hallucination.

The present does not come from the past.

If you listen, and only listen, close your eyes,

do the sounds come from according to your ears.

You hear them coming out of silence.

The sounds come, and then they fade off.

They go like echoes,

or echoes in the labyrinths of your brain, which we call memories.

The sounds don't come from the past.

They come out of now, and trail off.

You can do that later with your eyes.

You can see, like when you're watching television,

there's a vibration coming out from the screen to your eyes.

And it starts from there somehow.

Because we see the hands, and then they move,

we think that the movement is caused by the hands,

and that the hands were there before, and so can move later.

We don't see that our memory of the hands is an echo of their always being now.

They never were.

They never will be.

They're always now.

So is the motion.

And that is recollected as the trailing off echo, like the wake of a ship.

And so, just as the wake doesn't move the ship, the past does not move the present,

unless you insist that it does.

And if you say, well, naturally, I'm always moved by the past,

that's an alibi.

And it completely fails to explain how you ever learn anything new.

That's why all the psychologists, who are mostly behaviorists, are completely bogged down

in trying to find the theory of learning.

Because according to the theory of learning that we have, everything new that you assimilate

is really only learned when translated into terms of what you already know.

So, in that sense, learning becomes like a library,

which increases only by the addition of books about books already in it.

A lot of libraries are indeed like that.

So, that's what we call scholasticism.

So then, you become aware that this happening isn't happening to you,

because you are the happening.

The only you there is, is what's going on.

Feel it.

And disregard these stupid distinctions that you've been taught.

I mean, stupid relatively speaking.

And feel it genuinely.

When you feel it genuinely, you get down to rock bottom, all that isn't there.

That's a game that's been erected on it.

And it isn't determined.

In other words, you get this odd feeling

of a synthesis between doing and happening, in which doing is as much happening as happening,

and happening is as much doing as doing.

And if you're not very careful at that point, you'll proclaim yourself God Almighty, in the Hebrew

Christian sense.

And in a way they are.

I am omnipotent in so far as I'm the universe.

But I'm not omnipotent in the role of Alan Watts.

I'm not only cunning.

So now then, this sensation of the happening is basic to all we want to explore.

It's there as you see you can't do anything.

And that as you see you can't do anything, you don't go and distract yourself with something

else, like committing suicide, or getting drunk, any sort of distraction.

Because if you do that, you will miss what follows from the feeling of what is going on

when you're not doing anything, when you're not able even to not do anything.

See, this is a sticky place.

You can't get in and you can't get out.

That's why it's called in Zen, the mosquito biting the iron bull.

Or the man who swallowed the ball of red hot iron, which he can't gulp down and can't spit out.

See, it's that difficult.

What are you to do or not do?

And that tells you, you see, that dilemma.

That what you thought was you just isn't there at all.

Now don't make it difficult, because that's a form of evading it.

Don't make it easy.

That's the form of evading it.

It's neither difficult nor easy, because if it were difficult, it would have to be difficult

for someone.

If it were easy, it would have to be easy for someone.

And the someone we're talking about is just the one that isn't there.

And if you think it is there, okay, it's a free country.

You can have that thought, but it's a thought.

In other words, your ego is a thought among thoughts.

It is not, in fact, the controlling thinker, or the feeler, or the censor.

It's one of them.

And so, therefore, this thing is going along.

And as I say, we get anxious because we feel nobody's in control, but nobody ever was.

You know, and you've lived thus far a reasonably orderly life.

I mean, there have been some catastrophes and messes, but it's amazing how we have got this far.

I mean, the thing looks after itself.

And you will well remember that a lot of times that when you thought you were in charge and

doing something sensible, you did something extremely foolish.

And when you thought you did something extremely foolish, it turned out to be a blessing.

That's the way things go.

That's what it's going to all come to, with these physicists who think of the energy of the universe

running down, dissipating in radiation, gradually, gradually, gradually, gradually,

until there's nothing at all left.

And for some reason or other, we're supposed to find this depressing.

But if somebody is going to argue that the basic reality is nothingness,

where does all this come from?

Obviously from nothingness.

And once again, you get how it looks behind your eyes, see?

So cheer up, you see.

This is what is meant in Buddhist philosophy by saying we are all basically nothing.

And when the sixth patriarch says the essence of your mind,

that's how it is behind your eyes, is intrinsically pure.

The pure doesn't mean a non-dirty story state of mind,

as it is apt to mean in the word puritan.

Pure means clear, void.

So you know the story, when the sixth patriarch was given his office as successor,

because he was truly enlightened, there was a poetry contest.

And the losing one wrote the idea that the mind, the consciousness, was like a mirror,

which had to be polished.

And constantly, one, I have to polish my mirror.

I have to purify my mind, see?

So that I'm detached and calm and clear-headed and, you know, buddhared.

But the one who won the contest said, there is no mirror,

and the nature of the mind is intrinsically void.

So where is there anywhere for dust to collect?

See?

So in this way, by seeing that nothingness is the fundamental reality,

and you see it's your reality, then how can anything contaminate you?

Well, the idea of your being scared and put out and worried and so on is just nothing.

It's a dream.

Because you're really nothing.

But this is the most incredible nothing.

And the sixth patriarch, likewise, went on to contrast

emptiness of indifference, which is sort of blank emptiness, see?

When you, if you think of this nothingness as mere blankness,

and you hold on to the idea of blankness, and kind of grisly about it,

you haven't understood it.

He said, nothingness is really like the nothingness of space,

which contains the whole universe.

All the sun, moon, and stars, and the mountains, and rivers,

and the good men, and the bad men, and the animals, and the insects,

the whole bit, all are contained in void.

So out of this void comes everything, and you are it.

What else could you be?

See, so what I'm showing you is that all this hocus-pocus

about the fear of nothingness is that, truly speaking,

nothingness is what we want to talk about when we talk about the spiritual.

It's all been ignored.

It's all been put down.

And say, oh, nothingness.

Heaven preserve us from that.

But that's the very, that's where the secret lies.

And obviously, the secret always lies in the place you never think of looking for it.

In mythology, this comes again and again.

Okay, this is Christmas.

Where is the Christ born?

In a palace?

No, where nobody would think of looking.

Then pigs die.

I thought that was rather funny.

Well, we don't know who the prince is without the carpenter, do we?

Now, it's in that sense, really, that I could suggest to you that you meditate on nothingness.

I know you can't think about it.

But yet, when it becomes perfectly clear to you that that's what you are,

and what you were before you were born, where can anybody stick a knife into you, fundamentally?

If you see that, now, we want to go on and be able to answer all the people who will come bug us about it.

Because whether you say anything about it to other people or not, people are going to bug you about this.

And they say, oh, no, no, no, no, no, you really are something, you know, you'll know it.

Oh, wowee, you know, life isn't the way you think.

Oh, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.

It can be awful, see.

It can be real.

Oh!

And they'll say, oh, you can't.

Where in such a philosophy as this is there any basis for the love of one's fellow men?

For joy in children, for cultivating gardens, for doing this and that and the other, see?

Well, they say, there is no basis in it.

That's the same way there is no basis in emptiness for form, or so it seems.

But only precisely to the degree that you have discovered the nothingness that you are,

you find you're suddenly full of energy.

That is energy.

It's the source and origin of energy.

So that when, you know, there's a sort of nothing in your way, then you can do exactly

what I was describing as having this glee for going into doing this, that and the other thing,

and being thoroughly creative.

But you can't be creative out of just plain somethingness.

You need nothingness to be creative.

And that's what we are.

And this too is real nothingness.

And I think it's not darkness.

It's not like being buried alive forever.

It's not like rest.

Even when the Catholics sing,

Rest eternal, grant unto them, O Lord, and let light perpetual shine upon them.

This isn't rest.

Because it isn't motion.

Neither motion nor rest.

What is it?

Nobody can imagine.

And it's at that point, you see, where the imagination completely runs out and stops.

There we've hit the thing.

See, there you are, right at the fundamental mystical reality.

Now, what this is we're talking about is what mystics have quite often discussed.

There will be, this isn't read very much.

It's a state called agnosia, which means unknowing.

There's a book called The Cloud of Unknowing, written by an English monk in the 14th century.

But it's based on another book called Theologia Mystica, which was written in the 6th century by an unknown Syrian monk who used the name of Dionysius the Areopagite.

But this book ends up with a description of God, which is all in negatives, not any kind of anything you can imagine at all.

Not light, not power, not spirit, not fatherhood, not sonship, not this, that, and the other, all the way down the line.

Everything that anybody's ever said or thought about God is denied.

Because God is infinite and therefore beyond the reach of any conception at all.

So he says that anybody who, having a vision, thought he saw God, would not have seen God but some creature that God has made that is less than God.

So again, you approach, in a Christian context, said in such a way that even St. Thomas Aquinas bought it.

That you can't impute heresy to it.

Because everybody's got to agree that God is the witch than which there is no witcher.

And this guy spells it out.

So in the same way, you get Nagarjuna saying that the ultimate reality is sunyata, voidness.

So Shankara gets at it, where he says that which is the knower or the knowing in everything

can never itself be an object of its own knowledge, for fire doesn't burn itself, although it burns other things.

So we never know what the Brahman is, just like the eyes don't ever see the head.

If you put something there, you are stopping short of nothing.

And you don't get the whole benefit of it, that's all.

If you insist that there is something there, that there is the loving father at the end of the line, the paradise garden,

you are really cheating yourself.

Because it's only when you have thorough emptiness and real downright nothingness at the end of the line that you get the full impact.

No holds.

Look, Mama, no hands.

See?

Now, I really think that's the simplest thing I can possibly tell you.

I really don't know what else there is to be said about this whole Zen project, or mysticism, Vedanta, what have you.

It comes down to that, and there are infinitely many ways of evading.

But what I'm trying to point out to you, you see, is the way in which you see the point by taking the line of least resistance,

by facing the facts, by not super-adding to truth something you contribute to it,

your own business that you put up.

But saying, if I follow what I conceive or can see with my senses to be reality,

as far as we can look,

it seems that this is sort of the inevitable conclusion,

which everybody has spent endless effort in arguing about and resisting,

not realizing that if they went the whole way, how splendid it would be.

And that's all you have to do.

We'll be right back.

Thank you.

We'll be right back.

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.

Then you heard the program, Biting an Iron Bull, Part 2,

from the Alan Watts Radio Series, P.O. Box 2309, San Anselmo, California, 94979.

The Love of Wisdom with Alan Watts is produced by The Electronic University.

Our theme music is by Zakir Hussain, courtesy of Moment Records.

I'm Neil Harvey.

Thank you for listening.

===== Zen Tales =====

Welcome to another talk from the Alan Watts Radio Series #3, Eastern and Western Zen.

Philosopher, author, lecturer, and entertainer, Alan Watts has earned a reputation as one

of the most unrutted philosophers of the 20th century.

This program is part one of a two-part series.

Recorded while on tour in Japan, Alan Watts explores the idea of Zen thought as a method

of liberation from one's culture.

He compares this liberation to learning to dance, and describes the long journey to recapture

the original spontaneity of childhood.

Given in Kyoto in 1965, it's Zen Tales, Part One.

Here's Alan Watts.

When I last talked about Zen, I was discussing it as a dialogue between master and student,

and I was discussing it to a great extent in relation to Far Eastern culture, how it

is in effect a method of liberation from the culture.

All of us need to be liberated from our culture to a certain extent, because education

is a kind of necessary evil.

And when the process of education or acculturation has been completed, we need a cure for it.

Education is like salting meat in order to preserve it for eating.

But when you're ready to cook it and eat it, you need to soak some of the salt out.

So in the process of being brought up by one's parents and one's teachers, you are in one

way spoiled, although in another way made tolerable to live with.

And so in our culture, it's increasingly fashionable to have psychoanalysis when you've finished

with education, so as to work out and resolve all the damage and traumatic shocks that were

done to you in the process.

And it's becoming something that in sophisticated circles, one goes through, not because you're

a mentally sick person, but because it's considered beneficial to general mental health.

And this is our fumbling attempt, you see, to find a cure for our own culture.

We need a cure, of course, because the thing that we lose in the course of being brought

up is spontaneity.

That's what's so delightful about a child as well as so objectionable, that children

are just plain spontaneous, and when they do it in a way that pleases us, we think they're

delightful.

And when they do it in a way that doesn't please us, we think they're horrid.

And so we pretty much kill the spontaneity in them in order to get certainly that they

won't be horrid, and that they will be nice, but in a rather phony way.

And this is such a disaster, isn't it?

Because when we watch a child, say, dancing, and it's never learned, never had a single

dancing lesson, and it's really just dancing for fun, we say, "That's delightful."

Then eventually the child notices that this is a way of getting attention, and becomes

self-conscious about dancing, and then we send it to dancing school, and it becomes

stiff and wretched.

And only after many, many years of practice does the child as a dancer, now a young man

or woman, recapture the spontaneity of childhood.

It's got to go all that long way around to get back to the thing that it once had.

And it's terribly difficult.

So in the same way with the, we might say, the general attitude to life, that a child

is taught to live as a child is taught to dance.

It has to observe the rules.

And in so doing, this thing arises that bugs us human beings beyond belief.

That is self-consciousness.

Self-consciousness is, in one sense, our pride as human beings.

It's the great thing we have.

We can not only be happy, but we can know we're happy.

We can not only think, but we can think about thinking.

And therein lies the whole possibility of reasoning, to think about thinking, to know

about knowing, to be aware of what one does.

Herein is the whole birth of irrational control of behavior, which you might say is the glory

of civilization and the glory of man.

At the same time, it's a perfect pest, because how do you know when to stop thinking about

thinking?

For instance, you think over a problem, you've got to make a decision.

How long should you think about it?

How much evidence should you collect before you take a step?

You never know.

Actually what most of us do is we think about a given decision until it's a nuisance, and

then we, or the time is too late to think about it anymore, then we do something.

We never are sure that we decided the right thing, and one of the troubles about thinking

about decisions is there are all so many, ever so many, unpredictable variables that

come into everything.

And you may work out the most perfect business contract and everything is fine, but you didn't

bargain for the banana skin that you were going to slip on on your way to your partner's

office or whatever it was.

Such things couldn't be predicted in any amount of decision making.

And the more we try to elaborate perfectly foolproof methods of arranging our lives,

the more we find ourselves encumbered with impossible details.

That's the fallacy of too much law.

When we provide for everything in the law, suddenly find you can't move without filling

out 300 forms, and without consulting all sorts of bureaucrats, without hiring a staff

of lawyers and accountants and all kinds of things to be sure you don't make the wrong

move.

After a while the game ceases to be worth the candle.

I mean, life becomes so safe that it's not worth living at all.

So this is one of the problems of being self-conscious.

And all education, you see, is instruction in self-consciousness.

What do you learn in education?

You learn fundamentally words.

In other words, symbols about reality.

And through words we're able to talk about living.

And so think about living.

And so have knowledge about it.

You see, no knowledge is academically respectable knowledge unless it's knowledge in terms of

words or in terms of numbers.

That is to say, in terms of a symbolic language about life.

But you see, once you're in that position, once you know that you know, and you know

you're alive, and you know you're going to die because you can predict, you feel you've

lost your innocence.

Something's gone wrong.

This in the Christian tradition is the knowledge of good and evil.

What it says in Hebrew is not exactly moral good and evil that was known as a result of

eating the fruit of the tree, but what was advantageous and disadvantageous.

It gave you the gift of being like God.

That is to say, the gift of being able to control the course of events.

And anybody who controls the course of events, you see, probably puts himself in the situation

of a sorcerer's apprentice.

The Lord looking down there and says, "Okay, you wanted to be God, man.

You go ahead and try."

And you get in more and more of a mess.

You know, you succeed amazingly.

Just like the sorcerer's apprentice actually made that broom go and fetch water for him.

But he couldn't stop it.

And as we say today, you can't stop progress.

So then the whole problem of self-consciousness is that you're always in a dither and a doubt,

we call this anxiety.

And a nostalgia develops among us for the age of innocence.

Would it be nice not to have to make any decisions, to act entirely on whim?

And if you got into trouble, well, that would be all right, because you wouldn't have been

worrying about it.

See when a moth mistakes a candle for its sex call, which is what happens, that's why

moths fly into candles, the moth makes a mistake and powee, it goes out.

That's that.

Moth doesn't worry on the way to the candle whether it's going to get burned.

And of course, the moths are sufficiently prolific so that one moth more or less lost

in a candle doesn't matter.

Hundreds of moths lost in candles don't matter.

They just go on.

So you might imagine a human civilization where people make mistakes.

And yes, they go off with a glorious bang instead of a whimper.

And that's that.

They wouldn't worry.

They'd live magnificently.

But we can't possibly go back and do that.

You can't on purpose give up self-consciousness.

You can't give up worrying.

You can't give up thinking about yourself.

And above all, you're terrified to live spontaneously, because you might do something wrong.

However, the center of Zen training is to live spontaneously.

And this is why it's so fascinating to many Western people, especially Western intellectuals,

who are overburdened with self-consciousness.

Because what fascinated people about Zen when they first heard of it through Dr. Suzuki's

writings was Zen stories.

I lent a book of Zen stories once to a friend of mine, years and years ago.

And he was in hospital.

And when he gave it back to me, he said, "Gee," he said, "I didn't understand a word of it,

but it cheered me up enormously."

So Zen, the literature of Zen, especially the literature of Zen in its early days in

the Tang Dynasty in China, we'll say a literature that runs from approximately 700 AD to 1000

AD.

This marks, this span of years is the golden age of Zen.

And almost all the literature of the period in early Buddhist Chinese is anecdotes about

the encounters of Zen masters with their students.

They are called in Japanese "mondo," which means "question-answer."

And it appears that the way of studying Zen in those days was rather unlike the way of

studying it now.

Now Zen is settled and is studied in communities, such as we've been looking at, and will be

staying in tomorrow night.

But in those days, Zen was a wandering thing.

In other words, if you became a Zen monk, you did a great deal of traveling.

And instead of sitting on your fanny most of the day, you trudged.

You were walking along through prairies, mountain paths, rugged country.

You were visiting master after master after master to find one who would answer your question.

Now in a very natural way, supposing a person is questing, you are a seeker.

You're not a phony seeker, but a real seeker.

That is to say, you have within you a burning desire to find out what it's all about, who

you are, what life is, what reality is, or what's the way out of a mess.

You want to become, instead of a mixed-up human being, you want to become something

as simple and genuine as a tiger or a cat or a bird or a Buddha.

So those monks used to wander and wander and wander in search of a man who would answer

the question.

So one of the first stories is that when Bodhidharma, or Dharma, who you see all over Japan as the

man with big eyes, a bushy beard, usually dressed in red, with no legs, he came to where

Bodhidharma was meditating and said, "Master, I have no peace of mind.

Please pacify my mind."

Of course, he didn't even get in for a long time to ask the question, because Bodhidharma

refused to see anybody.

Finally, when he cut off his left arm as a token of his sincerity and presented it to

the Master, Bodhidharma said, "All right, what do you want?"

Well, he said, "I have no peace of mind."

The mind in Chinese is shin, and it isn't quite what we mean by mind.

They locate it here, Japanese kokoro.

We locate our mind here.

But this mind here, the heart mind, is the psychic center.

When you say, "I have no peace of mind," it doesn't mean you've just got a headache.

You may have a heartache, too.

It's a more inclusive word.

You might call it the center of psychic activity.

So Bodhidharma said to this man, whose name was Eka, "Bring out your mind here before

me.

I'll pacify it."

And Eka said, "When I look for my mind, I can't find it."

Bodhidharma said, "There, it's pacified."

Now somehow this answered Eka's question.

And all Zen is stories like that.

Now one thing I must tell you about these stories.

They are of the same nature as jokes.

That is to say, a joke is told with the object of making you laugh.

Laughter is not an intellectual thing.

It is an emotional reaction.

And the point is the emotional reaction.

If therefore a joke is explained to you, you may laugh out of politeness, a throaty laugh,

but you will not laugh spontaneously, a belly laugh.

Now the object of Zen stories is not to produce laughter, but to produce awakening, clarification,

enlightenment, or what is called in Japanese, "Satori."

Satori is like laughter, something that happens suddenly.

You don't, as a rule, slowly begin to laugh and then laugh louder and louder, because

you see a joke instantly.

A joke is always a matter of an "Aha!"

So in the same way, these stories are intended to produce an "Aha!" reaction in you of,

"Oh, but I see, now it's clear."

And really they don't contain any information.

Their design is not to tell you something, that is to say, to impart information or knowledge.

Their design is to get rid of something, to get rid of a false problem with which you

are wrestling, so that the problem will disappear as a result of understanding the story.

And you'll see from the story that I told you that what happened was the disappearance

of a problem.

Because Eikar, when he looked for his mind that was giving him so much trouble, couldn't

find it.

Now then, these stories go on in the most amazing ways, and I might retell a few, although

some of them may be familiar to you.

I'll try and choose ones that are probably less familiar.

There was a master walking in the forest with a group of his disciples, and suddenly he

picked up a tree branch and said to one of the monks, "What is it?"

And the monk hesitated, didn't answer immediately, so the teacher hit him with it.

So he turned to another monk and said, "What is it?"

And the monk said, "Give it to me so that I can see."

And the master tossed him the branch.

He caught it and he hit the master with it.

And so the master said, "Well, you got out of that dilemma."

There was another occasion when an officer of the army came to a Zen master and said,

"Sir, I've heard a very strange story and I want to know your answer to it.

Once upon a time there was a man who kept a goose in a bottle, and it grew so large

that he couldn't get it out.

Now he didn't want to break the bottle and he didn't want to hurt the goose, so how does

he get it out?"

And the master changed the subject and said something like, "You know, it's a nice day

today, isn't it?

There's a waterfall making a lovely sound outside."

So they went on, a pleasant conversation.

And then the officer got up to leave and as he walked away to the door, the master said,

"Oh, officer!"

And he turned around and said, "Yes?"

And the master said, "There, it's out."

Another time there was a famous master called Suibi, and he was asked, "What is the secret

teaching of Buddhism?"

And he was asked this in the lecture hall, you know, where other monks were studying.

And he said, "Wait till there's no one around and I'll tell you."

So later in the day the monk accosted him and said, "There's nobody around now.

What is the secret teaching of Buddhism?"

So he went into the garden with this monk and he pointed at the bamboos.

And the monk said, "I don't understand."

He said, "What a tall one that is.

What a short one that is."

And this awakened the monk.

Then there was another monk whose name was Gutei.

And whenever people came to ask him questions about Buddhism, he'd hold up a finger.

That was the only answer he'd give.

Well he had an attendant.

And one day somebody came to the temple to inquire about the teaching being given there,

and the master was apparently out and his attendant was there.

So the investigator said, "What is your teaching here?"

And the attendant held up a finger.

But actually the master had been there.

He was peeking from behind a screen.

And so he came out to this boy and said, "What's the fundamental teaching of Buddhism?"

And the boy held up a finger.

Instantly the master drew a knife and cut it off.

And the boy was very dismayed and went rushed away yelling.

So the master said, "Hey, come back!"

So he came back.

He said, "What's the fundamental principle of Buddhism?"

And he went to hold up the finger and it wasn't there.

And he was enlightened.

There is a Chinese god whose name is Pingding.

And this is the god of fire.

And there was a monk who was traveling and he came to a new master.

He had been to someone else and he said, "Well, who did you study with before you came to

me?"

"Oh," he said, "I studied with so-and-so."

He said, "What did he teach you?"

"Well," he said, "when I asked about the fundamental meaning of Buddhism, he answered me, 'Pingding

comes for fire.'"

"Well," the master said, "that was an excellent answer, but I bet you didn't understand it."

"Oh, yes," he said, "I understood it.

Because Pingding is the god of fire.

And when, if Pingding should ask for fire, that would be like me asking about Buddhism

because I'm really a Buddha already."

The master shook his head.

I said, "I knew it."

He said, "You missed the point completely."

"Well," he said, "how would you deal with it?"

The master said, "You ask me."

So the monk said, "What is the fundamental principle of Buddhism?"

And the master said, "Pingding comes for fire."

And the monk got the point.

Well, you know, you can go on with these stories indefinitely.

And but you'll notice certain dynamics in them.

They require, as a rule, a solution to a dilemma.

Or they do something that creates what we would call a state of blockage.

When you're posed with something completely unusual and you don't know how to react to

it in a normal, automatic way.

You see, if somebody says to you in the street, "Good morning," you say, "Good morning," and

you don't, you're not being spontaneous, you're being merely automatic.

But when somebody comes up to you and says, "Are you saved?"

Or "Do you accept Jesus Christ as your personal savior?"

It's a very unusual question and it stalls most people.

They say, "Well, what do you mean?"

Or something funny like that, you know, or they feel embarrassed by religious questions.

And or somebody might say to you, "Why have you got such long toenails?"

When you're wearing a shoe and nobody can see it, you see.

Anything that absolutely disrupts the normal flow of interchange.

But then you're nonplussed.

And the object of Zen is never to be nonplussed.

That's, you see, to be nonplussed is the real meaning of the Buddhist doctrine of what's

called "bonno" in Japanese, which means entanglements or defilements, or attachments, we might call

them.

Worldly attachments.

It is not a worldly attachment in Buddhist philosophy to enjoy dinner.

That is natural, you see.

It is not a worldly attachment to need to sleep.

That is perfectly natural.

But it is worldly attachment to be sticky.

That's to say, to be like a wheel that sticks on the axle and squeaks.

So we are sticky when we are in a certain way self-conscious.

We are, as we would say, all balled up or all clutched up.

And we've lost our original spontaneity.

And we are not, as it were, flowing with the stream of the Tao, the course of nature, or

whatever you want to call it.

So then all these questions put you in a dilemma.

And the point is to see if you can get out of the dilemma without a moment's hesitation.

That doesn't mean doing it quickly, necessarily, because if you're in a hurry to give a quick

answer, that itself is a form of blockage.

You should all read in this connection a translation in Suzuki's book, Zen and Japanese Culture,

of a letter written by Takuan, who invented pickled radishes I told you about, you know.

Those yellow daikons are called Takuan after this man.

And he wrote a letter on the art of swordsmanship, where he explains the necessity of spontaneity

in fencing is that if you have to stop to think about how you're going to respond to

a certain kind of attack, it's too late.

You'll be dead.

You must respond in the same way as when you clap your hands, the sound comes out without

a moment's hesitation.

Or when you strike steel on flint, there is no waiting before the spark comes out.

But he adds, if you try to be quick, this will itself be a block.

So when, you may notice, that when people are trained in the use of the sword, they

get what Anne Clark bought the other day, which is a bamboo sword to start with.

And you can give a person a healthy clobber with a bamboo sword without actually ruining

him.

So the teacher may well have you work around the house doing various chores as a sort of

janitor when you begin in sword school, and will take every possible occasion to surprise

you and hitting you with a bamboo sword.

And you're expected to defend yourself with anything available, with the cushion, with

the broom, with a saucepan, anything you happen to be handling, defend yourself immediately.

Well after a while, you know, if you're going around your everyday work expecting to be

jumped on any minute, it becomes rather nerve-wracking.

Especially if you're thinking all the time about where's it going to come from next.

And you discover that the more you make plans and try to calculate on where it's going to

hit you next, you will always be outwitted.

Because the teacher is infinitely clever and will always come from an unexpected direction.

So at last there arrives a point where you just give up.

You stop planning, and you just go around relaxed and if it hits, it hits.

And then you're ready to start fencing.

You've been listening to Zen Tales Part One with Alan Watts from the Alan Watts Radio

Series #3, Eastern and Western Zen.

For information 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.

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Zen.

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Box 2309, San Anselmo, California, 94979.

The Love of Wisdom with Alan Watts is produced by The Electronic University.

Our theme music is by Zakir Hussain, courtesy of Moment Records.

I'm Neil Harvey.

Thank you for listening.

Welcome to another talk from the Alan Watts Radio Series #3, Eastern and Western Zen.

Philosopher, author, lecturer, and entertainer, Alan Watts has earned a reputation as one

of the most unrutted philosophers of the 20th century.

This is part two of a two-part program.

In part one, Alan Watts presented the idea of Zen thought as a method of liberation from

one's culture.

In this program, he describes and demonstrates the mind-bending, humorous, and profound Zen

Koan method of teaching.

He says, "A Zen poem is like a sword that cuts, but does not cut itself, like an eye

that sees, but does not see itself."

Recorded in Kyoto while on tour in Japan in 1965, it's Zen Tales, Part Two.

Here's Alan Watts.

Another story told about this is the story of the woodcutter and the animal, whose name

was Satori.

There was once a woodcutter working in a clearing in a forest, when he saw a strange animal

peeking at him from behind a bush.

And thinking to have this animal for dinner, he rushed at it with his axe.

And the animal laughed from the opposite side of the clearing, because this animal had the

power to read thoughts.

And therefore, wherever the woodsman intended to go, the animal read his thought first.

And so the animal began to talk and mocked him and said, "You think you're going to do,

I'm going to be this place next, because the woodsman naturally thought, when I see him

next, instead of going to where he is, I'll go to the opposite side of the clearing."

And so this went on until the woodsman got absolutely furious, and he returned to chopping

the wood.

And the animal laughed and said, "So you've given up."

And just at that moment, as he wanged the axe against the tree, the head flew off and

struck the animal dead.

That's the way you have to attain Zen.

So you see what happened here.

The boy who studies swordsmanship is put in this impossible situation, where he can't

do anything right.

Everything he does is wrong.

And therefore, after finding this out, that nothing will do, because it's all self-conscious,

he gives up.

Then he can be spontaneous.

But you see what is provided is the training, why the training of Zen people is disciplined,

is that we're going, first of all, to be spontaneous within limits.

See, out in society, you can't do that, because people will be disbugged by you, if you say

exactly what you feel and always act the truth.

You won't be liked.

And you may indeed do very dangerous things.

But the Sodo, or the Zen training school, is set up so that there is a walled-in situation,

where one is allowed to be spontaneous within certain limits.

And the crucial moment is what is called the San Zen interview, which is a restricted interview.

It's very formal, but in the climax of that interview, no holes are barred.

It is a personal interchange where fundamental honesty is the crux of the whole thing.

Now you see, as I explained last time, that is a very buggy situation, because the more

you wonder whether you're going to be fundamentally honest, the more you get cold feet.

Listen, supposing you were allowed an interview with God, and allowed to ask one question,

what would you ask?

And really think it over, you know.

If you go into this and think, "What would I ask?"

You know, it's got to be really important.

It's got to be the fundamental question for you.

What is it that you basically want to know?

You start thinking about that, and thinking about that, and the more you think about it,

the more you don't know what you would ask.

You think, "Well, that's a silly question, isn't it?

I know what he would say to that."

You think about another one, and think, "That's a curious, interesting question.

I don't suppose anybody knows the answer to it.

But after all, it's only just idle curiosity.

I don't think I'll ask that one."

Then you think of another question, and think about that for a while, and then you realize

it's a question that doesn't mean anything.

That would be a waste of breath, and of a great opportunity.

And you go through it, and through it, and through it, until you think about all the

questions you might ask.

It's the same, very much so, if you visit a great master.

You know, you might get an interview with a Zen master while you're here, and with the

advantage of an interpreter present.

What do you want to ask him?

You've got just this one chance.

What do you want to know?

I remember a friend of mine who went to Yamazaki Roshi, who used to be at Shokubuchi.

He said when he got in there, he said, "You know, I feel so silly," he said, "I haven't

got any questions to ask you.

I just feel like laughing."

And Yamazaki said, "Good, let's laugh."

He broke into a great bellow.

And you know, there it is.

So it's a protected...

And this is what I want to emphasize about this, because there are a whole... ever so

many facets of Zen that are so easily misunderstood just through reading about it.

There's one school of people that will emphasize the spontaneity of it, and think, "Gee, this

Zen is real groovy stuff," you know.

It means you just do anything you like.

It's true, you see, that certain of the great Zen masters have said, "Zen is...

Rinzai made this point very strongly," he said, "In Zen there is no place for discipline,

or for Buddhism, or for making efforts.

You just eat when you're hungry, sleep when you're tired, move your bowels when nature

calls.

Fools will laugh at me, but the wise will understand."

See, you read that.

Next thing you know, somebody comes here to Japan to study Zen, and suddenly they write

back with letters about hours and hours of sitting in one position, and being banged

about with warning sticks, and having to get up at the ghastly four in the morning, and

wash in cold water, and having a very spare diet, and having to do things, behave, and

move just exactly so, and all that side of it is emphasized.

Well, people think, "What's going on?

Is it this, or is it that?

Is it one thing, or is it the other?"

The answer is, it's both.

It does have discipline, especially in view of the fact, and do bear this in mind, most

Zen monks today are not really in the monastery of their own volition, and have not been for

hundreds of years.

They've been there because it was a family tradition.

If you see you have a son, you're a priest, and you have a son, well, in all traditional

cultures in India, in China, and so on, there's a tendency for the son to carry on his father's

business.

So if you're the son of a priest, it's sort of expected that you'll be one too.

So after the monastery, we do.

It was the same in England in the 18th century, where the oldest son of the family went into

the army, the second son into the law, I forget which order it was, and the third son anyway

went into the ministry.

Well, that means a whole lot of people who are in theological school haven't got the

slightest interest in religion, not real interest.

And so they have to be taught to think.

So Saint Ignatius, for example, made out methods of meditation.

ABCD, Proximate Consideration, Remote Consideration, the meditation itself, the resolution at the

end, and so on.

It's simply designs to teach people how to think who had never thought and weren't interested

in thinking.

So in much the same way, these things occur, have occurred in the Far East.

And a great deal of it is therefore designed to discipline people who have no real motivation

for the discipline in question, the study in question.

So now, one of the great features of Zen training is to develop within yourself what is called

a great doubt.

And the Koan system is used to develop a great doubt.

Here you are, you know, you're asked to hear the sound of one hand.

And you know, if you're an American and you've come over to Japan to study Zen, you've gone

to a lot of trouble.

You obviously have some sincere motivation.

And you just can't get the answer to that one-hand thing.

And it becomes more and more a matter of life and death, because it seems terribly important

to find this out.

So you have a great doubt.

That is to say, you have an urgent spirit of inquiry.

And with your, you can't get it, and you can't get it, and you can't get it, the teacher

keeps saying, "Now, come on, come on, let's go.

Let's be ready to give your life for this thing."

But you see, if you go into a Zen monastery and you don't have that spirit of inquiry

that led you across the ocean at a great deal of expense, you're just someone who was brought

up, one of the boys in the neighborhood, and you went into the monastery.

Well, as the teacher says, the trouble with you is you don't have a great doubt.

Of course, he doesn't have a great doubt.

He's not interested.

So he learns to cultivate a great doubt.

See, it's like trying to, in a, if I may put it in Western or Christian terminology, you

don't love God.

You've never seen him.

You don't know anything about God.

Why the devil would you love God?

Somebody comes along and says, "You've got to love God, you know.

It's terribly important.

It's the first commandment.

Oh, gee, I've got to love God."

So what do we do?

We sit down and say, "Dear God, I love you.

Dear God, I love you.

Dear God, I love you.

Dear God, I love you.

Come on, come on.

You've got to get this feeling going.

Get that going."

And then the preacher can tell all sorts of stories, you see, and move you, and terrify

you with the fear of hell if you don't love God.

Or you could say, "How beautiful Jesus was.

That was the revelation of God."

Now you ought to love that.

You know, you ought to love your mother.

Probably hate her guts.

So you see, you get this thing.

Work on that great doubt.

Well, you see, the trouble is you can't get a great doubt to order.

You can't tell anybody anything to order.

If you could, do you know what would happen?

Suppose you were at a music school.

What are they trying to do in music school?

They're trying to find methods for teaching creative musicianship.

Whether you're a player or whether you're a composer or whatever.

They want to find out how they can make every student a genius.

Actually, all schools are run for the advantage of the staff.

And you know, it's a job.

You've got to put people through there.

It's a way of keeping them off the labor market.

But if you're a very sincere teacher, you want to find out how to impart that subtle

thing to the students.

So there are books galore on methods, special methods, for getting that creative ability

across.

Professor so-and-so's method, Dr. so-and-so's method, etc., playing the piano and so on.

Make it easy, but make him a genius.

Now if such a method existed, do you know what would happen?

These geniuses would all be boring, because we would know how they do it.

And the whole fascination of an art and of a great performance is you don't know how

it's done.

There must be something about it that is fundamentally astonishing.

You could say, again, putting it into Western terms, if God could explain how he created

the universe, he wouldn't be God.

And you know how in the book of Genesis, it's told so straightforwardly that when the Lord

first of all creates the things, and then looks at them afterwards and sees that they're

good.

And you know, I love the passage where suddenly he creates great whales.

You know, suddenly great whales, whoops!

Like that.

And he looks at these things and says, my, that's great, do it again.

And so in this way, there's a Zen poem which says, "You may want to ask where the flowers

come from, but even the God of spring doesn't know."

And another says, "Planting flowers to which the butterflies come," Bodhidharma says, "I

don't know."

So there is this curious thing in all what I would call vital knowledge, living knowledge,

that it's always a mystery to itself.

Life is a mystery to itself.

For the same reason, you see, there's a Zen poem which says, "It is like a sword that

cuts but does not cut itself, like an eye that sees but does not see itself."

So in this way, what there is fundamentally, basic reality, knows itself and doesn't know

itself.

If it did know itself thoroughly, it would stop.

Like playing games.

If you know the outcome of a game for sure, there's no point playing it.

So you know, when master chess players sit down and it becomes apparent, although there

are still many pieces on the board, that one of them is going to mate in three moves, they

abandon the game, because they know the outcome.

If you knew the future perfectly, if you knew everything you're going to do, right up to

the day of your death, you'd say, "Let's check out on this game.

Let's commit suicide and start another life."

Because there's no point living through what is known completely.

Of course, you can't very well live through what is unknown completely.

There must be some light.

But total light annihilates itself.

So then, you see, there is no prescription, and no infallible technique for teaching anybody

music, although there are music schools.

And there is no, likewise, no infallible technique for teaching anybody Zen, although indeed

there are Zen schools.

And sometimes the teacher who is many years' experience begins to get disillusioned.

"What's the point of all these schools?

What's the point of teaching music?"

You can't teach music.

You could only pass it on from one person to another by osmosis.

Sure there's a technique you can learn how to read, you can learn how to put your fingers

on the banjo or something, but the real thing, what to do with that technique, what to say

with it, you can't teach that.

So one assumes then that a person who is sufficiently motivated, who is fond of music, will learn

the technique because he wants to get so where he can handle the instruments.

And you suppose likewise that a person who is really interested in self-knowledge, after

all Zen is only a certain way of self-knowledge, will master certain techniques because he's

interested.

But you see, all schools and all systems begin to make techniques an end in themselves because

technique is the only thing you can teach.

You can't teach the thing.

Now you see, we get scared when we think of that.

You say, "Do you mean to say I might be that person who gets hung up in this and all I'm

going to get out of this school is technique?

Somehow I might be that dumb bunny who just doesn't get the thing?"

That's an awful thought, isn't it?

Because that's drilled into us from childhood.

For example, it comes out in toilet training.

I remember we, all the medical and nursing authorities when I was a small boy, had tremendous

constipation phobia.

And they believed that you could suffer from poisoning, you know, from retaining things

too long.

And so they were always, always agitating, questioning every day as to whether you had

been.

So you built up, conversely, a terror that you might not be able to.

And this, in its turn, built up tensions that were actually constipating.

So everybody was constantly being filled with cascara sagrada, California syrup of figs,

castor oil, bombshells of every description which upset the natural function.

So in the same way, you might think, "I'm going to practice meditations or something

and study Zen, but will I be the poor fool who never gets the point?"

You could put it in Christian terms and say, "Well, I will be as good as I can be, but

perhaps I will be the one who God will never give any real grace to, because I haven't

been picked out.

And will I get this grace?

There's no way, you see, that you can wangle grace.

You can't compel the Lord to give it.

In the same way, you can't compel satori to happen.

So you think, "Maybe it won't happen to me."

So that's possible, you see.

So what do you do about that?

Well, the teachers have all sorts of things to say about what to do about it.

They say, "Well, now look, just forget about it.

It doesn't matter if you don't get it.

Not getting it is getting it, you see."

They use this paradox all the time.

Not to have it, really to accept that you don't have it, that's getting it.

That's the real point, see.

But that's a gimmick.

See, I'm going to try as hard as I can not to try to get it, see.

But you're really playing a game, see.

You know that this is the, I've at last got the infallible method.

There must be an infallible method, because if there isn't a method, we're lost.

We are up the creek.

Why?

Because we're out of control.

But you see, when you find out there isn't a method, there isn't a positive method, and

there isn't a negative method, what are you going to do?

You can't do something and you can't do nothing.

You can't let go of the thing, because after all you got curious about it.

And this is what's called having swallowed a ball of hot iron.

You can't gulp it down and you can't spit it out.

And then there's a trap to get you into that state.

You'd be very careful how you get mixed up with the thing.

Because, you know, you may end up in a padded cell blathering.

That is the quandary it is, and that's why ever so many opposite things can be said about

Zen.

That's why on the one hand it can be said rightly that it's a strong discipline.

Why on the other hand it can be said rightly that it's not a discipline at all.

It isn't that it's just a mixture of things.

Zen isn't sort of partly a discipline and partly spontaneity.

Whatever is said about it can be said of all of it, and therefore it seems to be paradoxical.

And one always can get into difficulty by neglecting some side of it and saying, "Well,

that doesn't matter."

Sometimes it's true that it doesn't matter.

Sometimes it's not true.

It may be just the thing that you need, the side you say that doesn't matter.

So there's no way, what I'm trying to say is, there's no way of putting your finger

on this thing.

There's no way of nailing it down, and that's the whole point.

Because you see, fundamentally, Zen makes you do what you were doing all the time, only

it makes you do it consistently.

Let's suppose you're sitting in your padded cell, and you suddenly found out this little

game.

See, you've got your one hand clasped by the other and your thumb sticking out here at

the top.

And you look at that thumb and say, "Ooh, look at that.

Whoops!"

And then try to catch it.

No.

No.

No.

Here we go.

No.

No.

No.

Come on, let's get it.

Come on.

Let's get it.

Come on.

Let's get it.

Get that thing.

Get that.

See?

Ooh, that's what we're doing.

See, here's me, and here's knowing about me.

I want to control myself, you see, I want to get a hold of that thing that's me.

Because when I get a hold of it, I can control it, and then I'm going to be all right.

Got to get a hold of it.

And so we're doing that.

And as a result, we have astounding illusions.

Now we have the illusion, because it's drilled into us through acculturation, that each one

of us is a separate ego, separate centre of awareness, little living pulp of some kind,

that lives in a strange world.

Scares the hell out of us.

What makes you think this, you see?

How did you ever come to imagine that you are somehow disconnected, out there, surrounded

by this world, in which you're a stranger?

See, it's really obvious that that isn't so, only it's not obvious to most people.

It's really obvious that you, the real you, deep in, is this thing that is reality.

And that you are having a profoundly interesting game, pretending you're not.

And you're going through all kinds of amazing mazes to play this game.

And it's mostly running in terror from your own shadow, jumping at the sound of your own

heart beating, having goose pimples rise on your back at the sound of your own footsteps.

Wow.

And you are always exploring into this world, and finding it gets stranger and stranger,

as you look out into the infinitudes of space, where you thought everything was pretty rational,

you know, there were these other galaxies that were millions of light years away, and

you thought, well, there's just a lot of galaxies out there.

Suddenly something called a quasar turns up.

Nobody understands what a quasar is.

They defy all the things that we thought we knew.

And so it gets stranger and stranger.

And the more you probe inwardly, you know, you lift the skin off your own stomach and

take a look inside.

What a weird world that is.

And you say, ooh, cover that up, it makes me keen.

I feel like I feel when I see spiders or ants or something.

Get the shivers and the creeps from it.

But you see, what you're getting the creeps at is yourself in an unfamiliar aspect, the

unknown side.

Because at last comes recognition.

When you, the most far-out thing, the thing that seems the most totally other, you say,

well, that's me.

And what a relief.

But at the same time, what fun to begin all over again.

You know, I'm just so excited.

You know, I'm just so excited.

The Love of Wisdom with Alan Watts is produced by The Electronic University.

Our theme music is by Zakir Hussain, courtesy of Moment Records.

I'm Neil Harvey.

Thank you for listening.