Zen Clues

It has become extremely plausible that this trip between the maternity ward and the crematorium is what there is to life.

And we still have, going into our common sense, the 19th century myth which succeeded the ceramic myth in Western history.

I call it the myth of the fully automatic model.

Man is a little germ that lives on an unimportant rock ball that revolves about an insignificant star on the outer edges of one of the smaller galaxies.

But on the other hand, if you think about that for a few minutes, I am absolutely amazed to discover myself on this rock ball rotating around a spherical fire.

It's a very odd situation.

And the more I look at things, I cannot get rid of the feeling that existence is quite weird.

I know that. See, a philosopher is a sort of intellectual yokel who gawks at things that sensible people take for granted.

And sensible people, existence is nothing at all. I mean, it's just basic and just go on and do something.

See, this is the current movement in philosophy.

Logical analysis says you mustn't think about existence. It's a meaningless concept.

Therefore, philosophy has become the discussion of trivia.

No good philosopher lies awake nights worrying about the destiny of man and the nature of God and all that sort of thing.

Because a philosopher today is a practical fellow who comes to the university with a briefcase at nine and leaves at five.

He does philosophy during the day, which is discussing whether certain sentences have meaning and if so, what.

And then he would, as William Earl said in a very funny essay, he would come to work in a white coat if he thought he could get away with it.

The problem is, he's lost his sense of wonder.

Wonder is like a, in modern philosophy, something you mustn't have.

It's like enthusiasm in 18th century England.

It's a very bad form.

But you see, I don't know what question to ask when I wonder about the universe.

It isn't a question that I'm wondering about, it's a feeling that I have.

Because I cannot formulate the question that is my wonder.

The moment my mouth opens to utter it, I suddenly find I'm talking nonsense.

But that should not prevent wonder from being the foundation of philosophy.

So, there is obviously a place in life for a religious attitude in the sense of awe, astonishment at existence.

And that is also a basis of respect for existence.

We don't have very much of it in this culture, even though we call it materialistic.

In the culture that we call materialistic today, we are of course bent on the total destruction of material and its conversion into junk and poisonous gas as quickly as possible.

This is not a materialistic culture, because it has no respect for material.

And respect is in turn based on wonder, on feeling the marvel of just an ordinary pebble in your fingers.

Here is a tree in the garden, and every summer it produces apples.

And we call it an apple tree, because the tree apples.

That's what it does.

Alright?

Now here is a solar system inside a galaxy.

And one of the peculiarities of this solar system is that at least on the planet Earth the thing peeples.

In just the same way that an apple tree apples.

Now maybe, two million years ago, somebody came from another galaxy in a flying saucer and had a look at this solar system.

And they looked it over and shrugged their shoulders and said, just a bunch of rocks.

And they went away.

Later on, maybe two million years later, they came around and they looked at it again.

And they said, excuse me, we thought it was a bunch of rocks, but it's peopling.

And it's alive, after all, it has done something intelligent.

Because, you see, we grow out of this world in exactly the same way that the apples grow on the apple tree.

If evolution means anything, it means that.

But, you see, we curiously twist it.

We say, well, first of all, in the beginning there was nothing but gas and rock.

And then intelligence happened to arise in it, you know, like a sort of fungus or slime on the top of the whole thing.

But we're thinking in a way, you see, that disconnects the intelligence from the rocks.

Where there are rocks, watch out.

Watch out.

Because the rocks are going eventually to come alive.

Theology has not, as a matter of fact, had a very distinguished record in promoting the study of other than the Christian religion.

Because, you see, if you know in the first place that you have the true religion, there really is no point in studying any other one.

And you can very quickly find reasons for showing them to be inferior, because that was a foregone conclusion.

They had to be.

Because if, for example, you get into discussions as to whether Buddha was a more profound and spiritual character than Jesus Christ,

you arrive at your decision on the basis of a scale of values which is, of course, Christian.

And in this sense, the judge and the advocate are the same.

Now, as you know, I'm not being very fair and very kind to modern theology.

But there is this strange persistence of insisting that our group is the best group.

And I feel that there is in this something peculiarly irreligious.

And furthermore, it exhibits a very strange lack of faith.

Because I believe that there is a strong distinction between faith on the one hand and belief on the other.

That belief is, as a matter of fact, quite contrary to faith.

Because belief is really wishing. It's from the Anglo-Saxon root leaf to wish.

And belief, stated, say, in the creed, is a fervent hope.

That the universe will turn out to be thus and so.

And in this sense, therefore, belief precludes the possibility of faith.

Because faith is openness to truth, to reality, whatever it may turn out to be.

I want to know the truth. That is the attitude of faith.

And therefore, to use ideas about the universe and about God as something to hang onto.

In the spirit of rock of ages cleft for me.

And there is something very rigid about a rock.

And we are finding our rock getting rather worn out in an age where it becomes more and more obvious

that our world is a floating world.

It's a world floating in space where all per space, where all positions are relative

and any point may be regarded as the center.

A world which doesn't float on anything.

And therefore, the religious attitude appropriate to our time is not one of clinging to rocks,

but of learning to swim.

And you know that if you get in the water and you have nothing to hold onto,

and you try to behave as you would on dry land, you will drown.

But if, on the other hand, you trust yourself to the water and let go, you will float.

And this is exactly the situation of faith.

I had a friend who was studying Zen in Japan and he got pretty desperate to produce the answer of who he really is.

And on his way to an interview with the master to give an answer to the problem,

he noticed a very common sight in Japan, a big bullfrog sitting around in the garden.

And he swooped this bullfrog up in his hand and dropped it in the sleeve of his kimono.

And then he went into the master.

And to give the answer of who he was, he suddenly produced the bullfrog.

And the master said, mm-mm, too intellectual.

In other words, this answer is too contrived.

It's too much like Zen.

You've been reading too many books.

It's not the genuine thing.

And so the method of teaching used by these great Eastern teachers is to make fools persist in their folly.

But very rigorously and very consistently and very hard.

Now, if you go to a Zen teacher, he'll say, well, I have nothing to teach.

There is no problem.

Everything's perfectly clear.

And you think that one over.

And you say, he's probably being cagey.

But the teacher says, quite honestly, I haven't anything to tell you.

I don't teach anything.

I have no doctrine.

As I said to you in the beginning of this talk, I have nothing whatsoever to sell you.

So the student thinks, my, this is very deep.

Because this nothing that he's talking about, this nothing that he teaches,

is what they call in Buddhism shunyata.

And it's supposed to be the ultimate reality.

But as you know, if you know anything about these doctrines,

this doesn't mean real nothingness.

Not kind of just nothing there at all, not just blank.

But it means no thingness.

It's the transcendental reality behind all separate and individual things.

And that's something very deep and profound.

So he knows that when the teacher said, I have nothing to teach,

he meant this very esoteric no thing.

Well, he might also say then, if you have nothing to teach,

what are all these students doing around here?

And the teacher says, they are not doing anything.

They are just, they are just a lot of stupid people who live here.

And he knows again, you see, the stupid doesn't mean just straight stupid.

But the higher stupidity of being, people who are humble and don't have intellectual pride.

The Christian proverb is that man's extremity is God's opportunity.

And so people, in other words, have to get desperate.

Imagine the idea that the moment you were born, you were kicked off the edge of a precipice.

And you are falling.

As you fell, a great lump of rock came with you.

And it's traveling alongside you.

And you're clinging to it for dear life.

And thinking, gee, I've got to hold on to this.

You see?

Well, it doesn't do a thing for you.

We're all headed straight for death, as if we had been condemned by a judge.

And yet here we are, all clinging on to things.

And we have all sorts of alibis for doing this.

We say, well, I have responsibilities for my dependents and I've got to cling on.

But all you're doing is you're teaching your dependents to cling the same way as you are.

And making them miserable by learning to go on surviving compulsively.

So the thing is same way if you're caught in a torrent.

And you try to get out of it by swimming against it.

You'll just wear yourself out and you're still carried along with it.

So the sensible thing to do is to turn around and swim with it.

And if you want to get out of it, swim towards the edge.

But go with it.

Same way when you're sailing.

Always keep the wind in your sails.

If you want to go against the wind, tack.

But use the wind.

So it's this way, you know.

We're all in this great stream of change, which we call life.

We are the stream.

If you imagine you're separate from it and you're being carried along by it,

as if you were a cork, that's a delusion.

You're a wave of the stream itself.

So get with it.

So you perform a discipline by experiment, by reductio ad absurdum of his premises.

And so in the same way the guru, whether Hindu or Buddhist, performs a reductio ad absurdum on the premise of the skin encapsulated ego.

Well, what happens then?

You might imagine from garbled accounts of Eastern mysticism that one thereupon disappears forever into an infinite sea of faintly mauved jello.

And become so lost to the world and entranced that you forget your name, address, telephone number and function in life.

And nothing of the kind happens.

The state of mystical illumination, although it may in its sudden onset be accompanied by a sensation of tremendous luminescence and transparency,

as you get used to it, it's just like everyday life.

Here are the things that you formerly thought were separate individuals,

and here is you who you formerly thought was merely confronting these other people.

When the great doctor D.T. Suzuki was asked what is it like to be enlightened,

he said it's just like ordinary everyday experience except about two inches off the ground.

Because what is altered is not the way your senses perceive.

What is altered is what you think about it.

Your definitions of what you see.

Your evaluation of it.

So when you don't cling to it, when you have no longer a hostile attitude to the world because you know the world is you.

It is.

I mean, let's take it from the point of view of biology.

If I describe the behavior of a living organism, I cannot possibly describe that behavior without simultaneously describing the behavior of the environment.

So that I discover that I don't describe organisms in environments.

I describe a unified field of behavior called an organism environment.

It's an awkward word.

But there it is.

The environment doesn't push the organism around.

The organism doesn't push the environment around.

They are two aspects or poles of the same process.

You see, in the history of philosophy and poetry and art, we always find the interchange of two personality types which I call prickles and goo.

The prickly people are advocates of intellectual porcupinism.

They want rigor.

They want precise statistics.

And they have a certain clipped attitude in their voices.

And you know this very well in academic circles.

Where there are people who are always edgy like that.

And they accuse other people of being disgustingly vague and miasmic and mystical.

But the vague, miasmic and mystical people accuse the prickly people of being mere skeletons.

With no flesh on their bones.

And they say to you, you just rattle.

You're not really a human being.

You know the words but you don't know the music.

And so therefore, if you belong to the prickly type, you hope that the ultimate constituent of matter is particles.

If you belong to the gooey type, you hope it's waves.

If you are prickly, you're a classicist.

And if you're gooey, you're a romanticist.

And going back into medieval philosophy, if you're prickly, you're a nominalist.

If you're gooey, you're a realist.

And so it goes.

But we know very well that this natural universe is neither prickles nor goo exclusively.

It's gooey prickles and prickly goo.

And you see, it all depends on your level of magnification.

If you've got your magnification on something so that the focus is clear, you've got a prickly point of view.

You've got structure, shape, clearly outlined, sharply defined.

We look a little out of focus, it's going to go bleh, and you've got goo.

But we're always playing with the two.

Because it's like the question is, is the world basically stuff, like matter, or is it basically structure?

Well, we find out of course today that in science we don't consider the idea of matter, of just there being some sort of stuff.

Because supposing you wanted to describe stuff, in what terms would you describe it?

You always have to describe it in terms of structure.

Something countable, something that can be designated as a pattern.

So we never get to any basic stuff.

There is a sense in which the universe is purely game, but not in the sense of a one-upmanship game, but in the sense of music.

Which is lallying with sound, is dancing delightfully with sound, you see.

And nobody was ever able to give a better account of what it's all about.

I mean, let's take the traditional Christian account of what the angels do in heaven.

Why they sit around the throne of God and sing alleluia, alleluia, alleluia, and they're going, you know.

That's not just alleluia in a sort of formal way, but they're going...

No, they're really swinging.

And by the time you know where they are, the swinging has reached such fantastic proportions.

And they've thought out the most amazing little goo-dee-doo-dee-doo-dee-doo's that you've got the whole physical universe happening.

Yeah, that's the way it starts.

And so, I mean, this game is great.

In music, though, one doesn't make the end of a composition the point of the composition.

If that was so, the best conductors would be those who played fastest.

And there would be composers who wrote only finales.

People go to a concert just to hear one crashing chord, because that's the end.

Same way in dancing.

You don't aim at a particular spot in the room.

That's where you should arrive.

The whole point of the dancing is the dance.

Now, but we don't see that as something brought by our education into our everyday conduct.

We've got a system of schooling which gives a completely different impression.

It's all graded.

And what we do is we put the child into the corridor of this grade system,

with a kind of, come on, kitty, kitty, kitty.

And, yeah, you go to kindergarten, you know.

And that's a great thing, because when you finish that, you'll get into first grade.

And then, come on, first grade leads to second grade, and so on.

And then you get out of grade school, and you go to high school, and it's revving up.

The thing is coming.

Then you're going to go to college, and by joke, then you get into graduate school.

And when you're through it with graduate school, you go out to join the world.

And then you get into some racket where you're selling insurance.

And they've got that quota to make.

And you're going to make that.

And all the time, the thing is coming.

It's coming.

That great thing, the success you're working for.

Then when you wake up one day about 40 years old, you say,

My God, I've arrived.

I'm there.

And you don't feel very different from what you always felt.

And there's a slight letdown, because you feel there's a hoax.

And there was a hoax.

A dreadful hoax.

They made you miss everything.

We thought of life by analogy with a journey, with a pilgrimage,

which had a serious purpose at the end, and the thing was to get to that end.

Success, or whatever it is, or maybe heaven, after you're dead.

But we missed the point the whole way along.

It was a musical thing, and you were supposed to sing, or to dance,

while the music was being played.

Why do we love nonsense?

Why do we love Lewis Carroll, with his

"'Twas brillig and the slithy toves, did gyre and gimble in the wave,

all mimsy with the borough groves and the mumraths outgrabe?"

Why is it that all those old English songs are full of

Fal de Riddle Ido, and Hey Nonny Nonny, and all those babbling choruses?

Why is it that when we get hip with jazz, we just go boo de boo de boop de boo, and so on,

and enjoy ourselves swinging it?

It is this participation in the essential, glorious nonsense that is at the heart of the world,

that isn't going anywhere, that is a dance.

But it seems that only in moments of unusual insight and illumination that we get the point of this,

and find that thus the true meaning of life is no meaning,

that its purpose is no purpose, and that its sense is nonsense.

Behind the father image, behind the mother image, behind the image of light inaccessible,

and behind the image of profound and abysmal darkness, beyond all conception whatsoever,

there's something else which we can't conceive at all.

Welcome to The Love of Wisdom, with Alan Watts.

As one of the century's most eloquent philosophers, Alan Watts introduced a generation in the West

to the fascinating ideas of the Far East, the wisdoms of the Orient.

In the 1960s and early 70s, he lectured throughout the English-speaking world,

and was recorded in a variety of settings, from seminars aboard his ferry boat, the Vallejo,

in Sausalito, California, to keynote addresses at major universities.

Recorded at the First Unitarian Church in San Francisco in 1971, this program is called Images of God.

Here's Alan Watts.

Now I'm sure that most of you know the old story about the astronaut,

who went far out into space, and was asked on his return whether he had been to heaven and seen God.

And he said, yes.

And so they said to him, well, what about God?

And he said, she is black.

And although this is a very well-known and well-worn story, it is very profound.

Because, I tell you, I knew a monk who started out in life as pretty much of an agnostic or an atheist,

and then he began to read Henri Bergson, the French philosopher who proclaimed the vital force, the élan vital, and so on.

And the more he read into this kind of philosophy, the more he saw that these people were really talking about God.

And I've read a great deal of theological reasoning about the existence of God.

And they all start out on this line.

If you are intelligent and reasonable, you cannot be the product of a mechanical and meaningless universe.

Figs do not grow on thistles.

Grapes do not grow on thorns.

And therefore, you, as an expression of the universe, as an aperture through which the universe is observing itself, cannot be a mere fluke.

Because if this world peoples, as a tree, brings forth fruit, then the universe itself, the energy which underlies it, what it's all about, the ground of being, as Paul Tillich called it, must be intelligent.

Now, when you come to that conclusion, you must be very careful.

Because you may make an unwarranted jump.

Namely, the jump to the conclusion that that intelligence, that marvellous designing power which produces all this, is the biblical God.

Be careful.

Because that God, contrary to his own commandments, is fashioned in the graven image of a paternal, authoritarian, beneficent tyrant of the ancient Near East.

And it's very easy to fall into that trap.

Because it's all prepared, institutionalized, in the Roman Catholic Church, in the synagogue, in the Protestant churches, all there ready for you to accept.

And by the pressure of social consensus, and so on, and so on, it is very natural to assume that when somebody uses the word God,

it is that Father figure which is intended.

Because even Jesus used the analogy, the Father, for his experience of God.

He had to.

There was no other one available to him in his culture.

But nowadays...

We are in rebellion against the image of the authoritarian father.

Especially this should happen in the United States where it happens that we are a republic and not a monarchy.

And if you as a loyal citizen of this country think that a republic is the best form of government,

you can hardly believe that the universe is a monarchy.

But to reject the paternalistic image of God as an idol is not necessarily to be an atheist.

Although I have advocated something called atheism in the name of God.

That is to say, an experience, a contact, a relationship with God,

that is to say, with the ground of your being that does not have to be embodied or expressed in any specific image.

Now, theologians on the whole don't like that idea.

Because I find in my discourse with them that they want to be a little bit hard-nosed about the nature of God.

They want to say that God has indeed a very specific nature.

Ethical monotheism means that the governing power of this universe has some extremely definite opinions and rules

to which our minds and acts must be conformed.

And if you don't watch out, you'll go against the fundamental grain of the universe and be punished.

In some way, old-fashionedly, you will burn in the fires of hell forever.

More modern-fashionedly, you will fail to be an authentic person.

It's another way of talking about it.

But there is this feeling, you see, that there is authority behind the world and it's not you.

It's something else.

Like we say, that's something else that's far out.

And therefore, this Jewish, Christian and indeed Muslim approach makes a lot of people feel rather strange, estranged from the root and ground of being.

There are a lot of people who never grow up and are always in awe of an image of grandfather.

Now, I'm a grandfather.

I have five grandchildren.

And so I'm no longer in awe of grandfathers.

I know I'm just as stupid as my own grandfathers were.

And therefore, I'm not about to bow down to an image of God with a long white beard.

Now, naturally, of course, we intelligent people don't believe in that kind of a God, not really.

I mean, we think that God is spirit, that God is very undefinable and infinite and all that kind of thing.

But nevertheless, the images of God have a far more powerful effect upon our emotions than our ideas.

And when people read the Bible and sing hymns,

Ancient of days, who sittest, throned in glory,

Immortal, invisible, God only wise, Enlightened, accessible, hid from our eyes.

They still got that fellow up there with that beard on.

It's way in the back of the emotions.

And so we should think, first of all, in contrary imagery.

And the contrary imagery is, she's black.

Imagine instead of God the Father, God the Mother.

And imagine that this is not a luminous being, blazing with light, but an unfathomable darkness.

Such as is portrayed in Hindu mythology by Kali.

K-A-L-I, the Great Mother.

The images of God are far more, have a far more powerful effect upon our emotions than our ideas.

And when people read the Bible and sing hymns,

Ancient of days, who sittest, throned in glory,

Immortal, invisible, God only wise, Enlightened, accessible, hid from our eyes.

They still got that fellow up there with a beard on.

It's way in the back of the emotions.

And so we should think, first of all, in contrary imagery.

And the contrary imagery is, she's black.

Imagine instead of God the Father, God the Mother.

And imagine that this is not a luminous being, blazing with light, but an unfathomable darkness.

Such as is portrayed in Hindu mythology by Kali.

K-A-L-I, the Great Mother.

Who is represented in the most terrible imagery.

Kali has a tongue hanging out long, drooling with blood.

She has fanged teeth.

She has a scimitar in one hand and a severed head in the other.

And she is trampling on the body of her husband, who is Shiva.

Shiva represents also, furthermore, the destructive aspect of the deity.

Wherein all things are dissolved, so that they be reborn again.

And here is this blood-sucking, terrible mother,

as the image of the supreme reality behind this universe.

Imagine, it's the representative of the octopus, the spider, the awful orphans,

the creepy crawlies at the end of the line, which we are all terrified of.

Now that's a very important image.

Because, let us suppose, just for the sake of argument,

that all of you sitting here right now are feeling, well, fairly alright.

I mean, you're not in hospital.

You're not, you don't have the screaming memes.

You have a sense, you've probably had dinner and are feeling pretty good.

But you know that you feel that you're fairly good.

Because in the background of your minds, very far off in the background of your minds,

you've got the sensation of something absolutely ghastly that simply mustn't happen.

And so against that, which is not happening,

which doesn't necessarily have to happen.

But by comparison with that, you feel pretty alright.

And that absolutely ghastly thing that mustn't happen at all is Kali.

And therefore, at once, we begin to wonder whether

the presence of this Kali is not in a way very beneficent.

I mean, how would you know that things were good

unless there was something that wasn't good at all?

Now this is, I'm not putting this forward as a final position.

I'm only putting it forward as a variation,

as a way of beginning to look at a problem

and getting our minds out of their normal ruts.

She's black.

Well, she, first of all feminine, represents what is called philosophically the negative principle.

Now, of course, people who are women in our culture today and believe in women's lib

don't like to be associated with the negative

because the negative has acquired very bad connotations.

We say accentuate the positive.

Well, that's a purely male chauvinistic attitude.

How would you know that you were outstanding

unless, by contrast, there was something in standing?

You cannot appreciate the convex without the concave.

You cannot appreciate the firm without the yielding.

And therefore, the so-called negativity of the feminine principle

is obviously life-giving and very important.

But we live in a culture which doesn't notice it.

You see a painting, a drawing of a bird,

and you don't notice the white paper underneath it.

You see a printed book,

and you think that what is important is the printing.

And the page doesn't matter.

And yet, if you reconsider the whole thing,

how could there be visible printing without the page underlying it?

What is called substance,

that which stands underneath, sub, underneath, stands, stands.

To be substantial is to be underlying,

to be the support,

to be the foundation of the world.

And, of course, this is the great function of the feminine,

to be the substance.

And therefore, the feminine is represented by space,

which is, of course, black at night.

But were it not for black and empty space,

there would be no possibility whatsoever of seeing the stars.

Stars shine out of space.

And astronomers, very high-powered astronomers,

are beginning to realize

that stars are a function of space.

Now that's difficult for our common sense.

Because we think that space is simply inert nothingness.

Then we don't realize

that space is completely basic to everything.

It's like your consciousness.

Nobody can imagine what consciousness is.

It's the most elusive whatever it is that there is at all.

Because it's the background of everything else that we know.

Therefore, we don't really pay much attention to it.

We pay attention to the things within the field of consciousness,

to the outlines, to the objects,

to the so-called things that are in the field of vision,

the sounds that are in the field of hearing, and so forth.

But whatever it is that embraces all that,

we don't pay much attention to it.

We can't even think about it.

It's like trying to look at your head.

You know, you try to look at your head and what do you find?

You don't even find a black blob in the middle of things.

You just don't find anything.

And yet that is that out of which you see,

just as space is that out of which the stars shine.

So there's something very queer about all this.

That which you can't put your finger on,

that which always escapes you,

that which is completely elusive,

the blank,

seems to be absolutely necessary

for there to be anything whatsoever.

Now let's take this further.

Kali also is the principle of death

because she carries a scimitar in one hand

and a severed head in the other.

Death.

This is tremendously important to think about.

We put it off.

Death is swept under the carpet in our culture.

In the hospital,

they try to keep you alive as long as possible

in utter desperation.

They won't tell you that you're going to die.

When their relatives have to be informed

that it's a hopeless case,

they say,

don't tell this to the patient.

And all the relatives come around with hollow grins

and say,

well, you'll be all right in about a month

and then we'll go and have a holiday somewhere

and sit by the sea

and listen to the birds and whatnot.

And the dying person knows that this is mockery.

Well, of course,

we've made death howl with all kinds of ghouls.

We've invented dreadful afterlives.

I mean, the Christian version of heaven

is as abominable as the Christian version of hell.

I mean, nobody wants

to be in church forever.

Children are absolutely horrified

when they hear these hymns

which say,

prostrate before thy throne to lie

and gaze and gaze on thee.

They can't imagine what this imagery means.

I mean, in a very subtle theological way

I could wangle that statement around

to make it extremely profound.

I mean, to be prostrate at once

and to gaze on the other hand,

see,

is a coincidentia oppositorum.

A coincidence of opposites

which is very, very, very deep.

But to a child,

it is a crick in the neck.

And

that's the sort of imagery we're brought up with.

So the idea of what might happen after death.

Well, you're going to be faced with your judge.

The one who knows all about you.

This is Big Papa

who knows you were a naughty boy

and a very naughty girl,

especially girl,

from the beginning of things.

He's going to look right through

to the core of your inauthentic existence

and what kind of heebie-jeebies may come up.

Or you may believe in reincarnation

and you think that your next life

will be the rewards

and the punishments

for what you've done in this life.

And you know you've got away

with murder in this life.

And the most awful things

are going to happen next time around.

So you look upon death as a catastrophe.

Then there are other people who say,

Well, when you're dead, you're dead.

Just nothing's going to happen at all.

So what you ought to worry about?

Well, we don't quite like that idea.

Because it spooks us.

You know, what's it be like to die?

To go to sleep and never, never, never wake up?

Well, a lot of things it's not going to be like.

It's not going to be like being buried alive.

It's not going to be like being in the darkness forever.

I'll tell you what.

It's going to be like

as if you never had existed at all.

Not only you, but everything else as well.

That just there was never anything

and there's no one to regret it.

And there's no problem.

Well, think about that for a while.

It's kind of a weird feeling you get

when you really think about that.

You really imagine it.

Just a stop altogether.

And you can't even call it stop.

Because you can't have stop without start.

And there wasn't any start.

There's just no thing.

Well, then when you come to think of it

that's the way it was before you were born.

I mean, if you go back in memory

as far as you can go

you'll get to the same place

as you go forward

in your anticipation of the future

as to what it's going to be like to be dead.

Then you get these funny ideas

that this blankness

is the necessary counterpart

of what we call being.

Now, we all think we're alive, don't we?

I mean, we're really here?

That there is something called existence?

You know, the existentialists,

Dasein, Throneless.

You know?

Here we are.

But how could you be experiencing that

as a reality

unless you had once been dead?

How what gives us any ghost of a notion

that we are here?

Except by contrast

with the fact that we once weren't.

And later on, won't we?

But this thing is a cycle

like positive and negative poles in electricity.

So this then is the value of the symbolism

of she is black.

Chi, the womb principle,

the receptive,

the instanding,

the void,

and the dark.

And so that is to come into the presence

of the God who has no image.

Behind the father image,

behind the mother image,

behind the image

of light inaccessible,

and behind the image

of profound and abysmal darkness.

There's something else

which we can't conceive at all.

Dionysus, the Areopagite,

called it the luminous darkness.

Nagarjuna called it Shunyata,

the void.

Shankara called it Brahman,

that which can only,

of which nothing at all can be said.

Neti neti.

Beyond all conception whatsoever.

And you see,

that is not atheism

in the formal sense of the word.

This is a profoundly religious attitude.

Because what it corresponds to,

practically,

is an attitude to life

of total trust.

Of letting go.

When we form images of God,

they are all really exhibitions

of our lack of faith.

Something to hold onto.

Something to grasp.

How firm a foundation.

What lies underneath us.

The Rock of Ages,

or whatever.

Ein Festerburg.

But when we don't grasp,

we have the attitude of faith.

If you let go of all the idols,

you will of course discover

that what this unknown is,

which is the foundation of the universe,

is precisely you.

It's not the you you think you are.

No, it's not your opinion of yourself.

It's not your idea or image of yourself.

It's not the chronic sense of muscular strain,

which we usually call I.

You can't grasp it.

Of course not.

Why would you need to?

Supposedly you could.

What would you do with it?

And who would do what with it?

You can never get at it.

So there is that profound,

central mystery.

And the attitude of faith

is to stop chasing it.

Stop grabbing it.

Because if that happens,

the most amazing things follow.

But all these ideas of

the spiritual,

the godly,

as this attitude of

ah, must,

and we have been laid down the laws

which we are bound to follow.

All this jazz

is not the only way

of being religious

and of relating

to the ineffable mystery

that underlies ourselves

and the world.

For this selection,

we join a small group of students

traveling with Alan Watts

through Japan.

Along the way,

they stop to visit the temples

and the gardens of Kyoto

and listen to Alan Watts

bring ancient koans to life

as he tells his favorite Zen stories.

Enjoy with us Zen tales

from the Japan seminars.

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.

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 finish with education

so as to work out

and resolve all the damage

and traumatic shocks

that were done for 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 learnt

and 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.

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 are 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 test

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 it

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

meaning with you.

It's a feeling of being self-consciousness.

We've created many of the things

that you do

to make theцию

and the answer

inirauntary

that's a way

that you can increase

in the future.

It's in the future.

Because when you're

doing the things

you can't renew

and enjoy

the way

the game

you're trying to

tell a place

and start

to go

the truth

and

when you get

the truth

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, was 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 the sorcerer's apprentice.

The Lord looking down there and says,

OK, 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 it.

But he couldn't stop it.

And as we say today, you can't stop progress.

Then the whole problem of self-consciousness is that you're always in a dither and a doubt.

It's all 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 when?

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 powy, 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.

And 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,

would say a literature that runs from approximately 700 A.D. to 1000 A.D.

This marks this span of years as 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, mon-do, 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,

a 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 the 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.

Because 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, you know,

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 Eikar,

Bring out your mind here before me. I'll pacify it.

And Eikar said, When I look from my mind, I can't find it.

Bodhidharma said, There, it's pacified.

Now, somehow, this answered Eikar'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.

And 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 Eckhart, when he looked for his mind

that was giving him so much trouble, couldn't find it.

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 in the branch.

He caught it and he hit the master with it.

And so the master said, well, you got out of that, Dylan.

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, in a waterfall,

making a lovely sound outside.

And 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 Gute.

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 the 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 rushed away yelling.

So the master said, hey, come back.

And 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 Pingting.

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, Pingting 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 Pingting is the god of fire.

And if Pingting 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, well, how would you deal with it?

The master said, you asked me.

So the monk said, what is the fundamental principle of Buddhism?

And the master said, Pingting 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 nearly 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.

Or somebody might say to you, why have you got such long toenails?

When you're wearing your shoe and nobody can see it, you see.

Anything that absolutely disrupts the normal flow of interchange.

Well, 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 are 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 are 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 Clarke bought the other day, which is a bamboo sword to start with.

And you can give a person a healthy club with a bamboo sword without actually ruining him.

And 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 the 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'll 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.

Then you begin regular lessons.

Because you have given up protecting yourself.

And therefore you've learnt real defence.

Because you can't protect yourself by calculation, by one-pointed thinking,

thinking of one thing at a time,

against an enemy who may attack from an infinite number of directions.

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 I'm going to be displaced 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 of society you can't do that.

Because people will be just bugged 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 it's 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.

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?

And 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.

I don't 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 an interpreter present.

What are you going 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 Shokokuchi.

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 spoke into a great bell.

And, you know, there it is.

So it's a protected, this is what I want to emphasize about this,

because there are 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 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 at four in the morning and wash in cold water

and having a very spare diet

and having to do things to 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 and 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 the priest, it's sort of expected that you'll be one too.

So off to the monastery with you.

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 St. Ignatius, for example, made out methods of meditation.

A, B, C, D, proximate consideration, remote consideration,

the meditation itself, the resolution at the end, and so on.

This is 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 through 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.

out that is to say you have an urgent spirit of inquiry and was your you can't get it 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 he went into the monastery

although 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 um in a comparison i may put it in western or christian terminology

uh you don't love god you've never seen him you don't know anything about god how why the devil

would you love god somebody comes along say you've got to love god you know it's terribly important

it's the first commandment oh gee you'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

i'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 uh terrify you with a fear of hell if you don't love god or you should say our

beautiful jesus was that was uh the the revelation of god now you ought to love that

you know if you ought to love your mother probably hey that does now 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 literally do you know what happens supposing you

go to 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 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 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 in the book of Genesis uh it's told so

straightforwardly that uh when the Lord uh 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 uh so in this way uh 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 so there's no prescription in 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 for

the 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 and 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 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 so that's drilled into us

from childhood is that for example it comes out in toilet training I remember we all of medical and

nursing authorities when I was a small boy and tremendous constipation phobia and they believe

that you could suffer from poisoning you know from retaining things too long and so they were 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 bombshell 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 then 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 the same

way you can't compel satori to happen do you think maybe it won't happen to me so that's 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 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 are lost we are up the creek why because we're out of control

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 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 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 that is the is the the quandary it is and that's why

ever so many opposite things can be said about them 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 and it isn't that it's just a mixture of things then 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 well 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 then makes you do what you were

doing all the time only it makes you do it consistently let's supposing you're sitting

in your padded cell and you suddenly found out this little game see you got your one hand clasped by

the other and your thumb sticking out here at the top you look at that farm and say oh look at that whoops

and try to catch it here we go no no come on let's get it come on let's get it come on let's get that

thing get that see who that's what we're doing see here's me and here's knowing about me nope I want to

try and control myself you see I want to get hold of that thing with me because that when I get hold

of it I can control it then I then I'm going to be all right but you get hold of it and so

we're doing that and as a result we have astounding illusions that I was describing right at the

beginning of these seminars the illusion of separateness you see I didn't realize when I

did this that the thumb isn't separate from the hand it's all one now we have the illusion because

it's drilled into us through acculturation that each one of us is a separate ego separate center of

awareness little living pulp of some kind that lives in a strange world scared the hell out of us

what makes you think this you see how did you ended 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 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 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

could lift the skin off your own stomach and take a look inside what a weird world that is you

cover that up isn't it i feel like i feel when i see spiders or ants or something you 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 and she said why that's me and what a relief but at the same

time what fun to begin all over again and have a new surprise something different