===== Eastern And Western Zen II - 01 - Introduction To Zen =====

I suppose most of you have heard of Zen, but before going on to explain any details about it, I want to make one thing absolutely clear.
I am not a Zen Buddhist. I am not advocating Zen Buddhism. I am not trying to convert anyone to it.
I have nothing to sell. I am an entertainer.
That is to say, in the same sense, that when you go to a concert and you listen to someone play Mozart, he has nothing to sell except the sound of the music.
He doesn't want to convert you to anything. He doesn't want you to join an organization in favor of Mozart's music as opposed to, say, Beethoven's.
And I approach you in the same spirit as a musician with his piano or violinist with his violin.
I just want you to enjoy a point of view which I enjoy.
Now then, when that's been said, and I hope it's put your minds at rest, let me give you, first of all, some simple historical information.
Zen, Zen is a form of Buddhism.
It originated in China about 500 A.D.
And about 1200 A.D. it migrated to Japan, where it exists today.
And it is a form, it's a way of life that has had an immense influence on the arts and on the culture, the poetry and architecture of the Far East.
It has lately become of enormous interest to many people in other parts of the world.
Now, normally, when one talks about Buddhism, and Zen is a form of Buddhism, it is supposed that you're talking about a religion.
And people are apt to classify themselves as Buddhists, as they might say, I am a Catholic, or a Methodist, or a Baptist, or an Episcopalian, or a Jew.
But that is rather misleading.
Buddhism is not a religion in that sense.
If we want to find an equivalent to Buddhism in our society today in the West, probably the nearest thing to it is psychotherapy.
When a person goes to a psychiatrist or psychoanalyst to work out a serious personal problem, not because he's just nutty,
I mean, not necessarily because he has hallucination or excessive singing in the ears with no clear physical origin,
but when a person feels that his whole life is somehow disoriented and wrong,
and he doesn't go to the preacher because the preacher only moralizes to him and says,
my man, you should have more faith in God or something.
So he goes instead to a doctor because in our day, a man with the tag of science on him has more prestige than a man who has the tag of religion.
And so when a psychiatrist goes to work on you, his objective is more or less to change your state of consciousness.
That is to say, if your state of consciousness, your state of mind, is one of being day after day constantly depressed,
the objective of going to a psychiatrist or a psychotherapist is to have your state of consciousness changed to one of happiness.
Now, in a somewhat similar way, the objective of Buddhism in all its forms is to bring about a fundamental change
change in a human being's everyday state of consciousness.
If I make it yet more specific, it's to bring about a change in your sense of personal identity,
that is to say, in your sensation of who and what you are.
And in this way, Buddhism, which I suppose you know, is a method of changing consciousness,
discovered or invented by a man called Gotama, who lived in India shortly after 600 BC,
who was given the title Buddha because the word means the awakened one,
the man who woke up.
And therefore, that very title suggests that ordinary people are asleep.
I remember a very wise man who used to give lectures like this.
And when he came in, he used to be silent and he would look at the audience
and he had gazed at everybody in the audience particularly for a long time
and everybody would begin feeling vaguely embarrassed.
And when he'd gazed at them for a long time, he'd say,
Wake up!
You're all asleep.
And if you don't wake up, I won't give any lecture.
Now, in what sense are we asleep?
The Buddhist would say that almost all human beings have a phony sense of identity,
a delusion, a hallucination as to who they are.
Now, I'm terribly interested in this problem of identity.
And I try and find out what people mean when they say the word I.
I think this is one of the most fascinating questions.
Who do you think you are?
Now, what seems to develop is this.
Most people think that I is a center of sensitivity somewhere inside their skin.
And the majority of people feel that it's in their heads.
Civilizations in different periods of history have differed about this.
Some people feel that they exist in the solar plexus.
Other people feel that they exist about here.
But in American culture today, or in the Western culture in general,
most people feel that they exist in here.
And there is, as it were, a little man sitting inside the center of the skull.
And he has a television screen in front of him,
which gives him all messages from the eyeballs.
He has earphones on, and that gives him all messages from the ears.
And he has in front of him a control panel with various dials and buttons and things
which enable him to influence the arms and legs
and to get all sorts of information from the nerve ends.
And that's you.
So we say in popular speech,
I have a body.
Not I am a body, but I have one,
because I am the owner of the body in the same way as I own an automobile.
And I can take the automobile to the mechanic,
and occasionally in the same way I have to take my body
to the mechanic, the surgeon, the dentist, the doctor,
and have it repaired.
But it belongs to me.
It goes along with me.
I'm in it.
A child, for example, can ask mother,
Mom, who would I have been
if my father had been someone else?
That seems a perfectly simple and logical question for a child to ask.
Because of the presumption that
your parents gave you your body
and you were popped into it,
maybe at the moment of conception
or maybe at the moment of birth,
from a repository of souls in heaven,
and your parents simply provided the physical vehicle.
So that age-long idea that is indigenous,
especially to the Western world,
is that I am something inside a body,
and I am not quite sure whether I am or am not my body.
Some doubt about it.
I say I think.
I walk.
I talk.
But I don't say I beat my heart.
I don't say I shape my bones.
I don't say I grow my hair.
I feel that my heart beating,
my hair growing,
my bone shaping
is something that happens to me.
And I don't know how it's done.
But other things I do.
And next,
I feel quite surely
that everything outside my body
is quite definitely not me.
There are two kinds of things outside my body.
Number one is other people.
And they're the same sort of thing as I am.
But also, they're all little men
locked up inside their skins.
And they're intelligent.
They have feelings and values.
And are capable of love and virtue.
But number two
is the world that's non-human
that we call nature.
And that's stupid.
It has no mind.
It has emotions, maybe, and animals.
But on the whole,
it's a pretty grim business.
Dog eat dog.
And when it gets to the geological level,
it's as dumb as dumb can be.
It's a mechanism.
And there's an awful lot of it.
And that's what we live in the middle of.
And the purpose of being human
is, we feel,
to subjugate nature.
To make it obey our will.
And we arrived here.
We don't feel that we belong in this world.
It's foreign to us.
In the words of the poet
Haussman,
I, a stranger and afraid
in a world I never made.
And so, all around us today,
we see the signs of man's battle with nature.
I'm living at the moment
in a marvelous house
in the Hollywood Hills.
And we are overlooking a lake.
And on the other side of the lake,
the whole hill
has suddenly been interrupted
with a ghastly gash
where they have made level lots
for building tract homes
of the kind you would build
on a flat plain.
This is called
the conquest of nature.
These houses will eventually
fall down the hill
because they are causing soil erosion
and they're being maximally stupid.
The proper way to build a house
on a hillside
is to do it in such a way
as to effect
the minimum interference
with the nature of the hill.
After all,
the whole point of living in the hills
is to live in the hills.
There's no point
in converting the hills
into something flat
and then going and living there.
You can do that already
on the ground.
So people,
the more people live in the hills,
the more they spoil the hills
and they're just the same
as people living on the flat ground.
I mean, how stupid can you get?
Well, anyway,
this is one of the symptoms
of our phony sense of identity,
of our phony feeling
that we are something lonely,
locked up in a bag of skin,
confronted with a world,
an external, alien, foreign world
that is not me.
Now, according to certain
of these great ancient philosophies
like Buddhism,
this sensation of being
a separate, lonely individual
is a hallucination.
It's a hallucination
brought about
by various causes,
the way we are brought up,
being the chief of them,
of course.
I remember as a child,
and you probably have
very similar memories to mine,
that all our parents
were desperately interested
in identifying us.
Don't you remember
that sometimes you went out
and played with other children,
and there was someone
in the group of other children
you admired and look up to,
and you came home
imitating the mannerisms
of that other child.
And your mother said to you,
Johnny, Johnny,
that's not you,
that's Peter.
And you felt a little bit ashamed,
because somehow
you would let her down.
She wanted you to be you,
her child,
and not Mrs. Jones' child,
Peter.
And so, in many ways,
we are all taught this.
For example,
the main thing
that we are all taught
in childhood
is that you must do
that which will only be appreciated
if you do it voluntarily.
Now, darling,
a dutiful child
must love its mother.
But now,
I don't want you to do it
because I say so,
but because you really want to.
Or,
you must be free.
See, this comes into politics.
Everybody must vote.
You see, imagine,
you're members of a democracy.
And you must be members of a democracy.
See, you're ordered to.
Crazy.
Also,
thou shalt love the Lord thy God.
Is that a commandment or a joke?
You know,
if you suggest that the Lord is joking,
most people in our culture are offended
because they have a very moronic conception of God
as a person totally devoid of humor.
But the Lord is highly capable of joking
because joking is one of the most constructive things you can do.
So,
when you are told
who you are
and that you must be free,
furthermore,
that you must survive,
you must go on living,
and that becomes a kind of compulsion,
you get mixed up.
It's very simple.
Of course you get mixed up.
If you think you must do something
which will only be the thing required of you
if you do it freely,
these are the sort of influences, then,
that cause human beings all over the world
to feel isolated,
to feel that they are centers of awareness
locked up in bags of skin.
Now, this sensation of our identity
can be shown and demonstrated to be false.
by some of the disciplines of our own science.
When we describe a human being
or any other living organism
from a scientific point of view,
all that means is that we're describing it carefully.
We are going to describe very carefully
what a human being is
and what a human being does.
All right.
And we find that as we go on with that description,
we can't describe the human being
without describing the environment.
We can't say what a human being is doing
without also saying
what the world around him is doing.
Just imagine for a moment
that you couldn't see anything up here except me.
You couldn't see the curtains behind me.
You couldn't see the stage.
You couldn't see the microphone.
You could only see me.
That was all you could see.
What would you be looking at?
You wouldn't see me at all
because you wouldn't see my edges.
And my edges are rather important
for seeing me.
My edges would be identical
with the edge of your eyesight
with that vague oval curve
which is the field of vision.
And what you would be looking at
would be my necktie,
my nose,
my eyes,
and so on.
But you wouldn't see my edges.
So you'd be confronted
with a very strange monster
and you wouldn't know
it was a human being.
Because to see me
you need to see my background.
And therein lies a clue
of which we are mostly ignorant.
In Buddhist theory,
the cause of our phony sense of identity
is called avidya
and that means ignorance.
Although it's better to pronounce it
ignorance,
the having a deluded sense of identity
is the result of ignoring certain things.
So when you look at me
and I manage by behaving up here
in a kind of a more or less interesting way,
I cause you to ignore my background
because I concentrate attention on me.
Just like a conjurer,
a stage magician,
in order to perform his tricks
misdirects your attention.
He talks to you about something
he's doing here
and he talks to you about his fingers
and how empty they are
and he can pull something out of his pocket
in plain sight
and you don't notice it.
And so a magic happens.
That's ignorance.
Selective attention.
Focusing your consciousness
on one thing
to the exclusion
of many other things.
So in this way,
we concentrate on the things,
the figures,
and we ignore,
we don't concentrate
on the background.
And so we come to think
that the figure
exists independently
of the background.
But actually,
they go together.
And they go together
just as inseparably
as backs go with fronts,
as positives go with negatives,
as ups go with downs,
and as life goes with death.
You can't separate it.
So there's a sort
of secret conspiracy
between the figure
and the background.
They are really one,
but they look different.
They need each other
just as male needs female
and vice versa.
But we are ordinarily
completely unaware of this.
So then,
when the scientist
starts paying attention
to behavior of people
and things carefully,
he discovers
that they go together
that the behavior
of the organism
is inseparable
from the behavior
of its environment.
So, you see,
if I'm to describe
what I am doing,
what am I doing?
Am I just waving my legs
back and forth?
No.
I'm walking.
And in order
to speak about walking,
you have to speak about
the space
in which I am walking,
about the floor.
About the direction,
left or right,
in relation to what kind
of room,
what kind of stage,
what kind of situation.
Because if, obviously,
if there isn't a ground
underneath me,
I can't very well walk.
So the description
of what I am doing
involves the description
of the world.
And so the biologist
comes to say
that what he is describing
is no longer
merely the organism
and its behavior.
He is describing
a field
which he now calls
the organism
hyphen environment.
And that field
is what
the individual
actually is.
Now this is very
clearly recognized
in all sorts
of sciences.
But the average
individual,
and indeed
the average scientist,
does not
feel
in a way
that corresponds
to his theory.
He still feels
as if he were
a center
of sensitivity
locked up
inside a bag
of skin.
The object
of Buddhist
discipline
or
methods
of
psychological
training
is, as it were,
to turn
that feeling
inside out.
To bring about
a state of affairs
in which
the individual
feels himself
to be
everything
that there
is,
the whole
cosmos,
focused,
expressing
itself
here.
And you,
as the whole
cosmos,
expressing
itself
there and
so on.
That what,
in other words,
the reality
of myself
fundamentally
is,
not something
inside my
skin,
but everything,
and I mean
everything,
outside my
skin,
but doing
what is my
skin and
inside it.
I mean,
imagine that
every one of
us,
look,
in the same
way that the
sea,
when the
ocean,
has a wave
on it.
The wave
is not
separate from
the ocean,
is it?
Every wave
on the ocean
is the whole
ocean waving.
The ocean
waves and it
says,
yo-hoo,
I'm here,
see?
But I do,
I can wave
all over the
place.
I can wave
in many different
ways.
I can wave
this way
and wave
that way.
So,
the ocean
of being
waves every
one of us
and we
are its
waves.
But the
wave is
fundamentally
the ocean.
Now,
in that
way,
your sense
of identity
would be
turned inside
out.
You wouldn't
forget who
you were,
you wouldn't
forget your
name and
address,
your telephone
number,
your social
security
number,
and what
sort of
role you're
supposed to
occupy in
society.
But you
would know
that this
particular role
that you play,
this particular
personality that
you are,
is superficial
and the real
you is all
that there is.


===== Early Chinese Zen =====

This is Audible. Electronic University presents Early Chinese Zen 1 with Alan Watts.

One of the things that is a really interesting problem is just why Zen has become so fascinating to many people in the West.

Well, it's due very largely to the way in which certain people have presented Zen to the West, notably Suzuki and R. H. Blythe.

They have made a great use of the Zen story or the anecdotes.

There is a book of Zen anecdotes, these conversations between the masters and their students.

They are called Mondo or question/answer.

There is a book which is called the Mumontan and it's just a collection of stories.

And I remember a friend of mine in England when this was first in circulation, getting this book when he was in the hospital.

And he said, "I don't understand it at all, but it's cheered me up immensely."

So the typical sort of Zen story where the student asks the teacher a question, "What is the fundamental meaning of Buddhism?"

And the master says, "Wait around until there is no one here and I'll tell you."

So later the student says to him, "Now there is nobody around, Master, what is it?"

And he takes him out into the garden and he points at the bamboos.

And the student says, "I don't understand."

"Wait around until there is no one here and I'll tell you."

So later the student says to him, "Now there is nobody around, Master, what is it?"

And he takes him out into the garden and he points at the bamboos.

And the student says, "I don't understand."

And the master says, "What a long bamboo that one is, what a short one that one is."

And this is a very, very straight story, you see.

This is saying exactly what it's about in the plainest language.

Only people overlook it.

You know when something is right under your nose and you can't see it,

and you go looking over there, there, there, there, there, and you're carrying it, you see, it's like that.

And so Suzuki has explained that that's the way it is.

That once when Saburo Hasegawa, who was a great Japanese painter,

was at a dinner party here in San Francisco, somebody asked him,

"What about understanding Zen? How long does it take?"

He said, "It might take you 30 years, it might take you 3 minutes. I mean that."

So you see the element of fascination?

That it's right under your nose, you're looking right at it, you see.

It's like you do get sort of strangely puzzled when you've lost something

and somebody's kidding you, they're not pointing it out to you, but they say, "Why don't you see it?"

It's right there.

And you can't for the life of you, I mean it's far more interesting,

that sort of situation than something that's really difficult to find.

In a way you'd have to go digging under the floor, I mean if someone,

if a treasure were concealed in the walls of this ferry boat,

you know, you'd have to go digging through the walls and looking for all sorts of things.

But here is the treasure concealed in full view, and concealed by being in full view,

but in a place that's too obvious to look.

So that's the flavour of Zen, and that's why it becomes so fascinating.

Also, there are other elements in it that, it has a humour to it, which is peculiarly Chinese.

I don't think the Japanese have quite the humour in their Zen that the Chinese had.

And because, you see, this humour comes from Taoism.

You know, say the writings of Zhuangzi, who was the great Taoist philosopher who lived shortly after 300 BC.

He's the only really great humorous philosopher.

And that flavour has passed on into Zen.

Also, Zen is something experiential. You're not required to believe in anything.

It doesn't have any doctrines.

It entirely consists in a state of consciousness.

Awakened consciousness.

So as if I were to say to you, if you were puzzled about some, you know,

what Tillich calls "concerned" about being,

what is this thing, life?

Why are we here?

Why is it suffering?

Why do all these creatures multiply in different ways and shapes?

Why are there ducks? Why are there trees?

Why are there snails, clams, people, all that?

For heaven's sakes, why?

And why do they come and go, and what happens to them when they go?

We all want to know that.

So that's the kind of concern.

And Zen answers this, not with an idea, but with a changed state of consciousness.

What is it all about?

It's like asking, what's the pit in the middle of an onion?

And you take off all the skins and so on and so on and so on,

and suddenly you find you've got a litter of skins and no pit.

There wasn't anything in it.

And you might say, well, it's a hoax.

It's a...

The light of the deception.

A tale told by an idiot.

And yet,

what you had missed

in looking for the pit

were the beautiful skins.

See, that's the edible part of the onion.

Whereas you may peel a potato,

the onion is all skin.

But, excellent.

Now, what one has done under these circumstances

is you have missed the point by being too eager.

You have therefore overlooked what was obvious.

And so, problems are made about the nature of the universe

by asking the wrong questions.

Is there something important here?

Well, yes, we say there are certain things that are more important than others.

We've agreed among ourselves, because we are people,

that we are more important than seagulls.

And the seagulls have agreed among themselves that they're more important than people.

And they recognize their kind,

and they pick out in life all the things that are significant to their needs

as we pick out the things that are significant to our needs.

We say, "Now that's the thing that really must happen."

But actually, nothing must happen.

It just happens.

And that's called "thusness" or "suchness."

And so, then it's concerned

that the whole nature of Zen

is to get you back to seeing the suchness of things.

It's a process of unhypnotizing you.

Now, when you see you have picked out things in the world

that are the important things, the significant things,

in other words, the things,

a thing is a name for something you think about.

All things are units of thought,

like an inch is a unit of measurement,

or an ounce is a unit of weight.

A thing is a unit of thought.

It's a think.

And so, when you say you can only think of one thing at a time,

you can only think one thing at a time.

That's what it's saying.

Because actually, you say, "Think of a thing, think of a tape recorder."

How many things is a tape recorder?

You know, it's a mass of stuff.

A human body, likewise.

But, when that predicament is foisted on you,

and you have divided life into all these things,

then you are under the delusion that the world

is all separated and disjointed,

and that you are only something in the world.

You forget by doing that,

that you are, that your physical organism,

let me put it this way,

is something that the whole cosmos is doing.

The real you is all that there is.

The whole works.

There's no real separation.

I mean, when I say there's no separation,

don't imagine that I'm saying

that there aren't any skins,

there aren't any outlines,

there aren't any surfaces or lines.

Yes, of course there are.

But, the basic lesson in metaphysics

is that for every inside there is an outside.

That's really all you need to know.

Once you really understand that, you've mastered all philosophy.

That the inside and the outside go together.

People think that I'm in the inside,

and you're on the outside.

But where would my inside be without the outside?

See, imagine a bottle

which has an inside but no outside.

It won't work.

There's no such thing.

Imagine an object

with no external space around it.

It couldn't exist.

So the space and the object go together.

Just in the same way as your front and your back go together.

And that's it.

Only, you see, we're taught by

pointing out what things are important and what are not,

to ignore that.

So, ignoring it is in Sanskrit,

ignorance, avidya.

And the Buddhists say,

avidya is the beginning of the trouble.

You just ignore

how the inside and the outside go together.

So,

the work of Zen

is to get people unhypnotized

by this sort of thing,

back to the point

where they started in babyhood,

but they never cultivated it,

because they were developed along other lines.

It's called to regain one's original pleasure

that you received from your father and mother.

Or what is sometimes called to get the unborn mind.

That's a curious phrase,

the mind that didn't arise.

That is to say,

what you are fundamentally,

as distinct from what you pop up and declare yourself to be.

Imagine, for example,

a big sow with many tips on it.

All these are passages to a central source of milk.

And so, they unite together under the surface.

Well, in the same sort of a way,

you see, we are all united like that.

We are channels

through which it is happening.

Only,

we are sensitive only on the tip of the nipple.

All our concentration is there at that point.

And so we've lost the realization of being the whole thing.

That happened very, very early in our infancy.

Now, when you get it back,

you don't become incapacitated.

In other words, it isn't as if you lost

the sensation

and the comprehension

of what we call the different things and events in the world,

their names, their places,

all that sort of practical knowledge.

The knowledge, in other words, that is

helpful for survival.

You don't lose that.

But you see all these separate things

and people and events

in a new context.

You might say against a new background

in which you see that they're all one.

Or if I'm going to get very, very technical, as the Indian logicians like to,

you would say they are non-dual.

Because the word "one" is still a dual word.

It has an opposite.

"One" is opposed to "many" or to "none."

Whereas this "whatever it is"

that we're all on

doesn't have an opposite,

because it's everything.

So the word "one" isn't quite the right word for it.

So they use the word "non-dual,"

which is a kind of a fancy word.

They use it...

I mean, "non-dual" is, of course, the opposite of "dual."

But they have a convention about it.

Imagine

when you draw on a flat surface

and you want to represent the third dimension of depth.

You do it

still using lines on the flat surface,

but by a convention that we all agree on,

certain slanting lines indicate

this dimension.

And we all know that.

So in the same way in Indian philosophy,

certain words are used

to designate a dimension

not in our ordinary way of thinking.

Our ordinary way of thinking is either this or that.

We think in dualities.

And that may have something to do with the fact that our brain has two sides,

and we have two eyes, two ears, and so on, two nostrils.

This, and the way our ribs are formed,

growing out of a spine, and two legs, and two arms,

probably that structure is connected with the way we think.

Either this or that.

Will you have what's in the left hand, or will you have what's in the right?

And...

So, we can't talk about,

we can't say anything sensible

about everything,

about the universe.

Because we can't find something that's not the universe, you see.

So, then what we do is we take a dualistic word and say,

"It is to be understood that this word refers

to what is beyond all dualistic ideas."

If you look at it this way,

in order to make a word mean something,

I have to be able

to say what is excluded

from the meaning of this word.

It's like a box.

If the box is there,

there must be what's inside the box,

and there must be what's outside the box.

Now, I want to talk to you about a box,

which is the ultimate box.

The class of all classes, as logicians say.

And there isn't anything outside it.

Everything is in this box.

Well, a logician would say, "That's absurd.

There could be no such box. It wouldn't be a box.

Unless you can show me that it has an outside.

I'm sorry."

Well, I'm going to get clever with this fellow.

I'm going to say, "Yeah, I...

My box has an outside.

And the outside and the inside, however, go together.

Actually, the box I have here

is constructed in a peculiar way.

You know what a Möbius strip is, don't you?

You take a strip of paper,

you twist it once, and you join the two ends

to have a continuous strip.

Now, this has a very strange property.

It has only one side and only one edge.

You can hold that strip of paper between your fingers

and say, "Well, look here.

I've got one finger on one side and one on the other.

This basically has two sides."

Say, "Wait a minute.

Take a pencil, a bright red pencil,

and run it along that so-called one side

that you think you have there, and keep going.

And you will find, when you have followed the pencil

back to the place where you started,

that you never took it off the paper

to go around to the other side.

In the same way, you run your finger along one edge of it,

and you keep running, and you'll get back to the point

where you started from.

And you will have covered the whole thing, both sides.

Both edges.

Now, just put that now into three dimensions

instead of two.

And you have what's called a Klein bottle.

I think somewhere around the house, I'll dig it out,

we have the Life magazine book on mathematics,

and it has a beautiful drawing of a Klein bottle in it.

That has the same property in three dimensions.

Now, imagine a world which has the same property

in four dimensions.

And you've got something like what our universe is.

It's outside, it's the same as it's inside.

Crazy.

And you see, it's difficult to talk about that

in the kind of language that we have.

Just in the same way, mathematicians,

especially in mathematics applied in physics,

have ideas which they can express in their formulae,

but which they can't talk,

they can't tell the layman about it.

Because in order to instruct the layman

as to the meaning of these concepts,

they have to put them into our ordinary

three-dimensional sensory images,

and they always distorted.

So you see, the view,

that's why it said that Zen cannot be explained in words.

Although it is, in a way, explained very clearly in words,

in all these little stories.

Nevertheless, these stories are not intelligible

until you have what I can only call

a new dimension of consciousness.

You see, a lot of people don't really have depth perceptions.

They would look at the moon and see it as a disk.

They don't see a ball.

In the same way, a lot of people are tone deaf.

They hear noises but never hear tunes.

It's something like that.

Suddenly one day you say, "Good heavens, the moon's a ball."

Or you suddenly become alive to what it is that people dig in music.

So in just that sort of way,

you can become suddenly alive to,

I'll just call it, the oneness of everything that's going on.

And you see that that's all you,

and you are eternal.

You're what there is.

And there's nothing to be afraid of.

Because we're coming and going,

we go through a whole spectrum of feelings,

from the most rapturous pleasures to the most ghastly agonies.

And it's all as insubstantial as weaving smoke.

And just go!

You know, just get with it and go!

And then you have the basic understanding of Zen.

Now, all that I've said thus far

is simple introduction to what Zen is about.

This way of understanding things

arose independently in both India and China.

In India, in what we call the tradition of the Upanishads,

in Vedanta and Yoga and so on.

Then in Buddhism.

In China, in the form of Taoism.

And they reached each other eventually.

And the confluence of the Buddhist and the Taoist traditions

came to be Zen.

And this, the formation of Zen, really began in about 415 AD in China.

With the students of a great Hindu monk, Kumarajiva.

And in the following 200 years, 300 years,

it slowly took form and took form

until a very remarkable man by the name of Huineng,

H-U-I-N-E-N-G,

who died in 713 AD,

the man who put it on the map.

Who, as it were, brought all the threads together

and could be called the real founder of Chinese Zen.

Now, we're going to, in the course of this seminar,

we're going to look at the work of Huineng.

But I want first, before we look at him,

at some of the earlier people, especially Sun Tzung.

Sun Tzung was a couple of generations before Huineng,

spiritual generations, that is, master pupils of him.

Who wrote the most succinct summary of Zen that exists,

which is called the Xin Xin Ming.

That is to say, the treatise on trust in the mind.

Mind with a capital M, which means many things.

Mind is used in Zen.

They use the word Xin.

And when a Chinese says Xin, he points here.

Kokoro in Japanese means the heart mind.

The psychic center of gravity.

But it means mind in a much wider sense than that.

It means mind in the sense of, do you mind?

Mind out.

And it also means mind in the sense of space.

Everything that we see is on the mind.

Like the sound of the radio is on the diaphragm of a loudspeaker.

It's a very wide sense of the word.

This morning I simply tried to give you a general survey

of what Zen is about by way of being an introduction.

And I was discussing the peculiar reasons for the interest in Zen in the West.

Stressing the extraordinary way in which

the sort of now you see it, now you don't

implication of Zen literature has fired people's imagination and curiosity.

The feeling there is a new vision of the world

in the aspect of its unity as distinct from our ordinary vision of the world

in the aspect of its multiplicity and broken upness, fallen apartness.

And that this is something that you might somehow suddenly catch at any minute.

It isn't that Zen is an easy thing or that it's a difficult thing.

It might be either.

And it exercises this peculiar fascination by saying

that the vision of the world in its unity is terribly obvious.

It's right under your nose.

Only you are looking too hard in the wrong place so you don't see it.

And so this is always the same puzzle as if I said to you

if you came here, you know, and said well we want some philosophical enlightenment or whatever

and I looked at you in a funny way and said

but you've forgotten something.

You know, as if you hadn't got your pants on or something.

What have you forgotten?

You know?

Who do you think you are anyhow?

Oh, you say, I'm just me.

Oh, now come on. Don't give me that line.

Well, what do you mean? I'm just poor little me.

Oh, nuts.

Don't put on that act.

And essentially, you see, it's that kind of upaya which a Zen teacher uses.

Upaya is a Sanskrit word meaning

pedagogical techniques in spiritual disciplines.

In politics it means cunning.

But in the vocabulary of Buddhism or Hinduism

it means the expert cunning

used by a teacher to surprise and trick his students out of their ego-centricity.

And then, therefore, in all these koans, dialogues, rough Zazen practices and so on

it's all upaya.

It's a colossal hoax, but a very beneficent one.

Well,

true Zen came to birth in China

as a result of a sort of interplay

between Buddhism and Taoism.

Now, both the Confucians and the Taoists

on, although there's a certain puritanism in Confucian ethics

they all believe in the physical world as a good thing.

The Taoist loves nature, the Confucian is particular about parents and family and all that jazz.

The Buddhists of India, on the other hand, tended, very often, to be anti-physical.

I mean, in other words, to be celibate, to be interested in getting out of this state of consciousness

in which the world appears to us in its multiplicity.

The Chinese never could get on with that.

They didn't see any sense in that Indian attitude.

So when Buddhism came to China, the Chinese did a flip of it.

And they wanted a kind of Buddhism which, although it was sort of monastic in the Indian tradition,

was not monastic in the way that it is in India, or in Burma, Sulaiman.

Buddhism for the Chinese is, to some extent, a thing which you go into for a time

and you retain enlightenment.

Then you can come back, as it were, and do anything you want.

You can have family, you can be a tramp, you can just play it any way.

But they feel, with the whole tone of the Mahayana type of Buddhism, even in India,

is that once enlightened you ought to come back.

So the situation of a Buddhist monk in the Far East is, generally speaking,

that he's not quite like a monk as we understand monks in the West.

Monks in the West take life vows.

They vow poverty, chastity and obedience until they die.

But in the Far East, a Buddhist monk may go into the discipline for a number of years

and then return to lay life with no bad feelings.

In fact, he may be considered a considerable success in having done so.

So, that kind of trend in the Confucian and the Taoist attitudes,

when it coalesces with Indian Buddhism,

produces something very different from anything you find in India.

And then, uniquely and outstandingly, represents this sort of attitude.

I have to explain this by telling a sort of a modern anecdote.

Joseph Campbell, who is, as you know, the editor of all the works of Heinrich Zimmer,

and actually wrote them himself, out of Zimmer's notes, went to India.

And he went to the greatest living guru in India today, who is an expoliceman,

and said to him,

"The sutras say that all things are Brahman.

Isn't this also true of the illusion of the Maya?

Isn't that the way we feel every day, and just ordinary kind of human beings?

Isn't that the Brahman too?"

And this man said, "You know, it's interesting.

That was the first question I asked my teacher."

And he said, "Of course, they are."

"Well," Joseph said, "nobody in India teaches that anymore."

So, the guru took Joseph downstairs to all his students,

and said, "I want you to meet a great Rishi sage from America.

He really has found it, and you should...

He will now give you a lecture or something. I don't know what happened."

In other words, the Hindu tends to say,

"Yes, in fact, all this world that you see now before your eyes

is the divine, ultimate, non-dual reality.

But of course, you have to find out what it is.

And when you do, it will disappear.

You will go into what they call Nirvikalpa Samadhi.

That means, technically, it means being in a state of Samadhi without having concepts.

But they mean something else by it.

They mean as if all the shapes that you saw before you were suddenly to dim out.

And instead, there is nothing but light.

Maybe this light is slightly violet, but I don't know.

Anyway, every kind of sensual experience disappears.

Now then, the way in which you have to argue this with a Hindu Swami who takes this line,

is to say that your position is still dualistic.

Because you've moved from the vision of form to the formless vision.

This is just changing places. This is not liberation.

It's somewhere else on the wheel.

And you know they have to admit it.

And I once had an argument with a Swami,

in which I brought up a point we were discussing this morning.

He was referring to the Brahman, the ultimate reality, as the One.

As Oneness has distinct multiplicity.

I said, "Ah, ah, ah, ah, Oneness has an opposite, and the Brahman has no opposite."

And what do you think he said? He said, "You argue just like a Hindu."

Well, he knew very well. I mean, he was using loose language, as we all do.

So, this was the thing, you see, historically, in the development of Indian philosophy

that took place between about 100 and 400 AD.

That they faced the fact that looking for a state of consciousness

that's radically different from this state now, is just an escape.

It hasn't really come to terms with the problem.

The problem is, you see, that the state of consciousness you're in now,

however loused up it may be, is in Hindu language the play of Vishnu.

You are all Vishnu playing that you're in this mess, which is the part of the cosmic dance.

So, if that's the case, dig it, you see. I mean, get with it. Be that.

So, the Chinese caught on to this.

And when, you could say, this very moment, this very world, this very body, is the point.

Now. But if you see you're seeking something beyond all the time, you never get with it.

You're never here. So, they saw that very clearly.

So, this man, Sun Tzung, who I was talking about at the end of this morning's session,

who is one of the first, I would say, really articulate people about Zen,

who wrote the "Chin Chin Ming",

he starts out by saying,

"The great Tao, or the perfect Tao, is without difficulty,

except that it avoids picking and choosing.

Only when you neither love nor hate does it appear in all clarity.

A hair's breadth of deviation from it, and a deep gulf is set between heaven and earth.

If you want to get hold of what it looks like, do not be anti or pro anything.

The conflict of longing and loathing, this is the disease of the mind."

Okay, now, if you take that quite literally,

if you try to avoid picking and choosing, that's another kind of choice, isn't it?

If you say, "I ought not to love anything, I ought not to hate anything,

I ought not to take any extreme attitudes," you're still choosing.

If I say, in psychological jargon, for psychiatric health, "You ought to accept yourself."

You know? Accept everything that happens.

Well, among the things that happen is the very concrete fact that there are things you don't accept,

and that you can't accept. So you have to accept that.

Now, do you see what this does?

It's a very interesting technique.

It's saying that you are, each one, a Buddha, enlightened, even before you've accepted yourself.

You see, you don't have to do anything about it.

But it's terribly difficult for human beings to resist the temptation to do something about it.

So it says, "Okay, do that."

If you want to practice yoga and meditation, go ahead.

If you feel that would make you better, do it.

But the point is that there's really nothing to do, and there's nothing not to do either.

You won't get this by sort of acting spontaneous in a phony way, but you can do that if you want to do.

But you're it right where you stand, without making a single move.

And that's what's meant, you see, profoundly, by avoiding picking and choosing.

Actually, there's nothing you can do about it.

You may get the illusion that your picking and choosing makes a real difference,

that your choices really do change the nature of things, but they don't.

And so, so long as you want to hang on to that illusion and play it, there you are.

But actually, you are, as you live and all sit around this room at the moment,

in the various stages of what you may consider subjectively to be goodness and badness, sickness and health,

sanity and insanity.

Every one of you is as much a splendid accomplishment as the shape of the clouds.

And that's natural.

You know, with all the funny hairdos and artificiality and everything.

We're all like the birds.

Only we have a complicated way of pretending that we aren't, so that we figure out we're something special.

And that's it too, you see.

But, it is a tough job getting anybody to see that.

So, what do they do?

They have all these techniques, and they put you through the mill,

because people won't accept this vision until they feel they've paid for it.

Until they feel, they finally discover, after an enormous effort,

like the student I told you about this morning, there isn't anything to realize.

It really is fantastic.

See, so all this is very direct and simple.

So, not picking and choosing doesn't mean that you have to cultivate being detached.

You can try that, sure.

But then you find you're terribly attached to your non-attachment.

Like you're proud of your humility, or something like that.

And it just goes round and round and round.

So, you know, come unstuck!

Well, you always were unstuck, because you're in the flow.

And nothing is stuck.

It all is changing, changing, changing.

One is nothing but a flow of change.

There isn't anything to hang on to.

Nobody to hang on to it.

You know, here is a decaying hand grasping at smoke.

It's all falling apart.

And there's nothing anybody can do about it,

because what anybody is who perhaps could do something about it,

that is falling apart too.

It's what's meant by the doctrine of Anantama.

There is no, the Buddhist idea that there is no permanent self,

because it's all falling apart.

So, cheer up, you know, it's great!

So, not knowing the profound meaning of things,

we disturb our original peace of mind to no purpose.

Original peace of mind is what I was referring to as the child's,

the infant's, the baby's fundamental knowledge of the unity of the world.

The oceanic feeling, as Freud calls it.

Perfect like great space, the Tao lacks nothing and has nothing in excess.

Truly, because of our accepting and rejecting,

we don't get the suchness of things.

You see, I explained suchness this morning.

How it's the way everything is just like that.

But we pick out some things as significant and other things as not significant.

And this prevents us from seeing that all the insignificant things are in a way significant,

and all the significant things are in a way insignificant.

See, that I go on living is for me significant,

until I don't anymore.

But that means I'm going to run around, busy, busy, busy, talk a lot, and work, and eat,

and entertain, and do this, that, and the other, and it's a great dance.

Actually, it has no more ultimate meaning than somebody sitting and going,

One Zen master said, "From the bathtub to the bathtub I have uttered stuff and nonsense."

That was his death verse.

The bathtub in which the baby is washed at birth, the bathtub in which the corpse is washed before burial.

All the time he's been talking nonsense.

And so all these birds are going around, (gibberish)

and all these human beings are making this great hullabaloo and building houses and all that kind of thing.

And it's all, well, it's just suchness, that's the point.

So, neither follow after, nor dwell with the doctrine of the void.

I mean, don't get hooked on the idea that things are empty, and therefore that this is a way of saying

that the world is a ghastly sham, and something you ought to avoid.

That's what this means.

So, don't try to catch hold of this doctrine as if it would do you some good.

And on the other hand, don't dwell with it.

Don't get attached to it.

For if the mind is at peace, these wrong views disappear of themselves.

The mind at peace is not quite what we ordinarily mean by peace of mind.

Oh, he quotes a thing here on the comment, "Neither follow after, nor dwell with the doctrine of the void."

This verse, from another early Chinese Zen master.

"Getting rid of things and clinging to emptiness is an illness of the same kind.

It is just like throwing oneself into a fire to avoid being drowned.

When activity is stopped, there is passivity.

Now, when activity is stopped, and there is passivity, this passivity, again, is a state of activity.

You see?

If you practice detachment, and being calm in mind, and free from all worldly passions,

this in its own turn is a worldly passion, since you're attached to this new state.

You see, that's the Chinese criticism of the Hindu viewpoint.

Stay where you are.

If you try to be spiritual, this is putting legs on a snake.

And the snake doesn't need any legs, and is only confused by them when it gets them.

But, you may have to try to be spiritual, or whatever the equivalent of this is,

psychoanalyzed, integrated, clear, all the words that are used.

You may have to try to do that, to find this out.

But that everything you add in this way, by clinging to some idea of detachment, spiritual freedom, nirvana, whatever,

all that in the end is an artificiality that will be sloughed off.

So, you might say, to use Spiegelberg's phrase, "Zen is the religion of no religion."

That the highest perfection of religion is just not to have any noticeable religion.

See, the Daos don't have a religion.

They don't preach, they don't pray, they don't recite sutras.

But the human beings have to do this thing, and have Buddhas and all that.

And when you really get the point, none of that is necessary.

But then you can have it just for kicks.

Audible hopes you have enjoyed this program.


===== Eastern And Western Zen II - 03 - World As Just So =====

A lecture on Zen is always something in the nature of a hoax
because it really does deal with a domain of experience
that can't be talked about.
But one must remember at the same time
that there's really nothing at all that can be talked about adequately.
And the whole art of poetry is to say what can't be said.
So every poet, every artist, feels when he gets to the end of his work
that there's something absolutely essential that was left out.
So Zen has always described itself as a finger pointing at the moon.
And you must be very careful not to mistake the finger for the moon
and especially careful if the finger looks religious
not to suck it for comfort instead of following where it points.
In the Sanskrit saying that we were discussing in the first of these seminars
Tatva Masi, that art thou.
Zen is concerned with that.
That, of course, is the word which is used for Brahman,
the absolute reality in Hindu philosophy.
And you're it, only in disguise,
and disguised so well that you've forgotten it.
But, unfortunately, ideas like the ultimate ground of being,
the self, Brahman, ultimate reality, the great void,
all that is very, very abstract talk.
And Zen is concerned with a much more direct way
of coming to an understanding of that,
or thatness, as it's called,
Tatata, in Sanskrit.
So Zen has been summed up in four statements.
A direct transmission outside scriptures and apart from tradition.
No dependence on words and letters.
Direct pointing to the human mind
and seeing into one's own nature
and becoming Buddha.
That is, becoming enlightened, awakened
from the normal hypnosis
under which almost all of us
go round
like somnambules.
It's extraordinary how much interest
has existed in Zen in the United States,
especially in the years since the war with Japan.
And, naturally, I've often meditated
on the reasons for this interest.
I think, first of all,
the appeal of Zen lies
in
its unusual quality
of humor.
Religions aren't, as a rule,
humorous in any way.
Religions are serious.
And when one looks at Zen art
and reads Zen stories,
it is quite apparent
that something is going on here
which isn't serious in the ordinary sense,
however sincere it may be.
The next thing, I think,
that has appealed to Westerners
is that Zen
has no doctrines.
There is nothing you have to believe
and
it doesn't
moralize at you very much.
It's not particularly concerned
with morals at all.
It's a field of inquiry
rather like physics.
And you don't expect a physicist
to discuss authoritatively
about morals
even though, as a human being,
he has moral interests and problems.
But as a physicist,
he is not a moral authority.
Or if you go to an oculist
or ophthalmologist
to have your eyes adjusted,
that is so you can see clearly.
And Zen is spiritual ophthalmology.
Another thing
that appeals very much
to Western students about Zen
is that they've read their Zen
from Suzuki
and from some of my writings
and from R.H. Blythe.
And these people present
a rather different kind of Zen
from that which you will find today
in Japan.
They present what is essentially
early Chinese Zen
from the old writings
ranging from about
shortly before 700 A.D.
to 1,000 A.D.
and that Zen
has a very different flavor
from modern Japanese Zen
and so, of course,
many of the people
who go to study Zen in Japan
disapprove of Dr. Suzuki thoroughly
and also naturally
of my exposition of Zen
because we don't make
a great fetish
of studying Zen by sitting.
In Japan today,
they sit and they sit
and they sit.
R.H. Blythe
asked the Zen master
what would you do
if you had only
one half hour left to live?
And he said
I would do Zazen
which means he would sit
like the Buddha here
and practice meditation.
And Blythe had given him
several choices.
Would you like to listen
to your favorite music?
Would you have a dinner?
Would you get drunk?
Would you like the company
of a beautiful woman?
Would you take a walk?
What would you do?
Or would you just go on
with your daily business
as if nothing
was going to happen?
In other words
would you wind up your watch?
So he was very disappointed
in this answer.
And he said
you know
sitting is only one way
of doing Zen.
Buddhism speaks
of the four dignities of man.
Walking
standing
sitting
and lying.
And so
Zazen
is simply the Japanese word
for sitting Zen.
There must also be
walking Zen
standing Zen
and lying Zen.
You should know
for example
how to sleep
in a Zen way.
That means
to sleep thoroughly.
Zen has been described
as when hungry eat
when tired sleep.
And
when the student
got that description
he said
well doesn't everybody
do that?
And the master
said they don't.
When hungry
they don't just eat
but think of
ten thousand things.
When tired
they don't just sleep
but dream
innumerable dreams.
So in a sense
this sounds like
the old
western
uh
truism
whatever you
your hand
finds to do
do it with all
your might.
But
that's not the same
thing as Zen.
a lot of people
like to see
if they could
sum up Zen
in that way
in the
Latin motto
of the school
I used to go to
in England
Agedum Agis
act when you act
or while you act.
There's a famous
story
which beautifully
illustrates the
current relationships
between east and west.
Paul Reps
who wrote
or rather drew
a lovely book
called Zen Telegrams
once asked
a Zen master
to sum up
Buddhism
in one phrase
and he said
don't act
but act.
So
Reps was simply
delighted
because he
thought the master
had said
don't act
but act
and that of course
would be the
Taoist principle
of Wu Wei
of
action
in the spirit
of not being
separate from the world
realizing so fully
that you are
the universe
too
that your action
on it is not
an interference
but a
an expression
of the totality.
But the master's
English was very bad
indeed
and Paul Reps
had misunderstood
him.
He had said
don't act
bad act
and you know
that is the sort
of attitude
that all clergy
develop
over the centuries.
You know how it is
when you go to church
if you do
so often
the sermon
boils down to
my dear people
you ought to be good
and everybody
knows that
but hardly anybody
knows how
or even what good
is.
No the fascination
of Zen
to the west
is that it promises
a sudden insight
into something
that is always
supposed to take
years and years
and years.
The psychoanalysts
if you're mixed up
they tell you
the troubles
you've got yourself
into over all
these years
can't be undone
in a day
and therefore
it will take
many many sessions
maybe twice a week
for several years
for you to get
straightened out.
The Christians say
that if you embark
on a path
of spiritual discipline
you get yourself
a spiritual director
and submit yourself
to the will of God
but you may not
get into the high states
of contemplative prayer
for very many years.
The Hindus
the Vedanta society people
the Buddhists
also say
will require
many long years
of meditation
very hard concentration
very difficult practice
and stern discipline
and then maybe
you will make
enough progress
in this life
to become a monk
in your next life
and then you'll make
enough progress
to enter some of the
preliminary stages
leading to Buddhahood
but it's all likely
to take you
many many incarnations.
But when this artist
Hasegawa
was asked
how does one
see into Zen
he said
it may take you
three seconds
it may take you
thirty years
I mean that
and so you see
there is always
the possibility
that it may take
only three seconds.
Zen literature
abounds with stories
you see
in which
there's a dialogue
or what is called
in Japanese
mondo
which means
question answer
between
a Zen teacher
and his student
and these dialogues
are fascinatingly
incomprehensible
but it always
seems to be
that the end
of this swift
interchange
the student
gets the point
sometimes he doesn't.
I gave a book
of these dialogues
once to a friend
of mine
who was deeply
interested in
Eastern philosophy
he said
I haven't understood
a word of it
but it's cheered
me up enormously
so this book
called the
Mumonkan
which means
the barrier
with no gate
or the
gateless gate
contains such
stories as
the student
I say student
rather than monk
because
Zen students
are not monks
in our sense
of the word monk
our monks
take life vows
of poverty
chastity
and obedience
and to make
the grade
you're expected
to spend
your whole life
in the monastic
state
but I call
the Zen monk
a student
because he's
more like a student
in a theological
seminary
he may stay
much longer
than the usual
three years
he may stay
thirty years
or so
but it's always
possible for him
to leave
with dignity
and to graduate
and to go
into lay life
or become
a regular
priest
who keeps
charge of a temple
can get married
and have a family
and only
very few
graduates
of a Zen
monastery
become
Roshi
that Roshi
means simply
old teacher
that is the
man in charge
of the
spiritual development
of the students
so one of these
students in the book
says to
the master
Joshu
I have been here
in this monastery
for some time
and I've had no
instruction from you
master said
have you had
breakfast
yes
then go wash
your bowl
and the monk
was awakened
now you may think
that the moral
of this story
is
do the work
that's nearest
though it's dull
at wiles
helping when you
meet them
lame dogs
over styles
or that
the bowl
might be a symbol
of the great void
the all containing
universe
and probably
the monk
had washed it
already
because they
immediately
after eating
in Japan
and China
in a monastery
they would
take tea
and pour it
into the bowl
and swill it around
wash it
and wipe it out
so maybe
he had already
washed the bowl
and in that case
you might think
that
the master
was saying
don't
gild the lily
don't
to use a real
nice zen phrase
don't put legs
on a snake
or a beard
on a eunuch
no
the point
of that story
is so clear
that that's
what's difficult
about it
and all these
stories resemble
jokes
in this sense
a joke is told
to make you laugh
when you get
the point of a joke
you laugh spontaneously
but if the point
has to be explained
to you
you don't laugh
so well
you force a laugh
there is some kind
of sudden impact
between
the punchline
and the laugh
and so in exactly
the same way
with these stories
there is
expected to be
something else
than laughter
which is sudden
insight
into the nature
of being
nature of being
that sounds
again very abstract
but it was
go wash your bowl
so
another story
in this book
concerns a master
who said
when a cow
walks out
of the enclosure
the corral
the horns
and head
the four legs
and the body
all get through
but not the tail
how is it
that the tail
can't get through
and nobody
could answer this
another story
tells of a certain
master
called
Bai Zhang
who was so
good
that he had
hundreds of students
and they couldn't
all be housed
in one
monastery
so he had to
find one of the
students
who could also
be a master
and so he
arranged a test
he put down
a picture
in front of them
all
and said
without making
an assertion
or without making
a denial
tell me
what is this
and the senior monk
said it couldn't
be called
a piece of wood
and the teacher
didn't accept
this answer
but the monastery
cook came forward
and kicked the pitcher
over and walked
away
and he got the job
and the commentator
remarks
maybe he wasn't
so smart
after all
for he gave up
an easy job
for a difficult one
when
a
an inquirer
about zen
came to a master
they often
you know
they approach
a zen master
with a kind
of key question
what is the
fundamental principle
of buddhism
or why did
the bearded barbarian
come from the west
because zen
is supposed
to have been
brought into china
by a hindu
named bodhidharma
bodhidharma
is always
represented
as having
a huge
bushy beard
and very fierce
eyes
now bodhidharma
always insisted
that he had
nothing to teach
and so
why did he come
that's
one of the fundamental
questions
you might say
to me
i've often said
when i'm giving
a lecture
i'm not trying
to improve you
i'm not trying
to persuade you
to a certain
point of view
that is to say
like a preacher
would convert
somebody
in fact
i have nothing
to tell you
at all
because
were i to
presume
that i had
something to tell
you
i would be
like a person
who picked
your pocket
and sold you
your own watch
so you might
say then
why do i talk
you might ask
the sky
why are you
blue
the clouds
why do you
float around
birds
why do you
sing
and we've been
busy trying to
invent explanations
for all this
and so
there's this
great zen
saying
one of the
old masters
said
when i was
a young man
and knew
nothing of
buddhism
mountains were
mountains
and waters
were waters
but when i
began to
understand a
little buddhism
mountains were
no longer
mountains
and waters
no longer
waters
in other words
when one starts
scientific and
philosophical
inquiries
everything gets
explained away
in terms of
its causes
things or other
things that go
with it
or one sees
that all
the things
in the world
what we think
are separate
things
are as
things
illusions
there is
nothing separate
so but he
said at the end
but when i had
thoroughly understood
mountains were
mountains and
waters are
waters
so this is
what's called
direct pointing
if you ask
me
what is this
is one answer
if you had a
cigarette in
your hand
that might be
another answer
a zen master
was once
talking with
me
and he
said
when water
goes out
of the wash
basin
down the
drain
does it go
clockwise
or anti-clockwise
and this was
all phrased
in the middle
of a very
ordinary
conversation
and
i you know
it just seemed
like a speculative
question
and i said
oh it might
go either
he said no
like this
now he said
which came
the first
ego hen
i said
now he said
that's the
point
now it is
saying too
much
i warn you
to say
that zen
is trying
to point
to
the physical
universe
so that you
could look
at it
without forming
ideas about
it
that is saying
too much
but it is
the general
idea
it's in the
direction of
being the
right idea
zen
people speak
of the
virtue of
what they
call
mushin
which means
no mind
or munen
no thought
that red
lantern
says munen
on it
no thought
and
this is
not
an
anti-intellectual
attitude
the ordinary
simple person
is just
is just as
bamboozled
by thinking
as a
university
professor
you can
think
intellectually
in a
no think
way
that's the
art
it doesn't
mean not to
have any
thoughts at
all
it means
not to be
fooled by
thoughts
not to be
hypnotized by
the forms of
speech
and uh
images that we
have for the
world
not to be
hypnotized by
them into
thinking that
that is the
way the
world really
is
so if i say
this is a
fan
it isn't
to begin
with fan
as a noise
and this
doesn't make
the noise
fan
but just
whoosh
but it
can be many
other things
than a fan
it could be
a backscratcher
very well
all sorts
of things
don't let
words
limit the
possibilities
of life
actually
this fan
was
has an
inscription
on it
written by
a zen
master
who is
a hundred
years old
and it
says
i don't
understand
i don't
know
anything
about it
so
that goes
back to
the story
of bodhidharma
that when
he first
came to
china
sometime
a little
before
a.d
he was
interviewed
by the
emperor
wu
of liang
and he
the emperor
was a
great patron
of buddhism
and said
we have
caused
many
monasteries
to be
built
monks
and nuns
to be
ordained
and the
scriptures
to be
translated
into chinese
what is
the
merit
of this
and bodhidharma
said
no merit
whatever
well that
really set
the emperor
back
because
the popular
understanding
of buddhism
is that
you do
good things
like that
religious
things
and you
acquire
merit
and this
leads you
to better
and better
lives
in the
future
so that
you will
eventually
become
liberated
and so
he was
completely
set back
so he
said
well what
is the
first
principle
of
the holy
doctrine
and
bodhidharma
said
vast
emptiness
and nothing
holy
or in
vast
emptiness
there is
nothing
holy
so the
emperor
said
who is
it then
that stands
before us
the implication
being aren't
you supposed
to be a
holy man
and bodhidharma
said i don't
know
so the
poem
says
plucking
flowers to
which the
butterflies
come
bodhidharma
says
i don't
and another
poem
like it
if you
want to
know where
the flowers
come from
even the
god of
spring
doesn't
know
so
anybody who
says that
he knows
what zen
is
is a
fraud
nobody
knows
just like
you
you don't
know who
you are
all this
business about
your name
and your
accomplishments
your
certificates
your
what your
friends say
about you
you know
very well
that's not
you
but the
problem to
know who
you are
is the
problem
of smelling
your own
nose
when
the great
japanese
master
dogen
came back
from china
in about
the year
to bring
his school
of zen
into japan
they asked
him what
did you
learn
in china
he said
the eyes
are horizontal
the nose
is perpendicular
this man
went on
to write
a tremendous
book about
zen
they are so
contradictory
these people
don't expect
consistency
out of a
zen master
big big
book called
the shobo
genzo
and uh
i talked
with the
zen master
about this
book in
japan
and he said
oh he said
that's a
terrible book
it explains
everything so
clearly
it gives
the show
away
he said
you don't
need any
book for
zen
the sound
of the
rain needs
no translation
so you
see
it is this
kind
of way
of going
about things
this method
of zen
that has so
fascinated the
west
and everybody
who reads
about zen
wonders if
somehow
you see
this understanding
is right under
your nose
you know how
it is sometimes
you get a crowd
of people to
come into a
room and you
put something
in the room
that's absurd
like suppose
there was a
balloon floating
on the ceiling
people could
come in
and not notice
it at all
or you
know somebody
puts on
something weird
some kind
of a funny
necktie or
something
and you say
to a person
well
haven't you
noticed
a woman
in a new
dress
you know
haven't you
noticed
you said
well
what is it
you know
it's right
under your
nose
they're staring
in the face
but you
don't see
it
and zen
is exactly
like that
so
I might
say to
you all
what did
you forget
when you
came in
here
maybe you
forgot it
long before
something
you've
forgotten
and you
think
is it
this
is it
that
oh no
no
it's much
simpler
than that
so
it's
very
obvious
and
this
makes
it
all
the
more
difficult
it
is
very
obvious
the
master
bokaju
was
asked
we
have
to
dress
and eat
every
day
and
how
do
we
escape
from
all
that
in
another
Zen
master
in
quite
recent
times
was
interviewed
a student you see all these stories i'm telling you are connected and what i want you to do is
to grasp intuitively the connection i was uh interviewing a student western student
and he said um get up and walk across the room he got up and walked and came back
said where are your footprints another monk asked joshu what is the way
tao chinese the tao he said your everyday mind is the way how do you get into accord with it
he said when you try to accord you deviate so here is this extraordinary phenomenon now let me say
having presented you with all these fireworks let me say a few sober things about zen as a historical
phenomenon which we can put it in context with other things in the seminar we've been studying
about the history of oriental philosophy zen is a subdivision of mahayana buddhism and as you know
that is the school of buddhism which is concerned with realizing buddha nature in this world
not necessarily by going off to the mountains or by renouncing family life everyday life etc
etc as if that were an entanglement but realizing in the midst of life uh the the possibility of
becoming a buddha and uh so the great ideal personality of mahayana buddhism is the bodhisattva
a word now applied to somebody who has attained nirvana but instead of disappearing uh comes back
black in many many guises there's a famous painting of one of the bodhisattvas in the form of a prostitute
and uh bodhisattvas in zen art are often represented as bums there's the beautiful one over there uh by the
furnace painted by sengai of the bum hotei or putai in chinese who's always immensely fat and he's saying
buddha is dead maitreya who is supposed to be the next buddha hasn't come yet i had a wonderful sleep
and didn't even dream about confucius and he's just stretching and yawning as he wakes up so zen is
mahayana indian mahayana buddhism translated into chinese and therefore deeply influenced by taoism and
confucianism zen monks brought confucian ideas to japan and the origins of zen lie actually
around the year 414 at which time a great hindu scholar by the name of kumarajiva
was translating with a group of assistants the buddhist sutras into chinese
one of his students taught that all beings whatsoever have the capacity to become buddha
to become enlightened even rocks and stones and that even heretics and evil doers have the buddha
nature or buddha potentiality in them and everybody said he was a dreadful heretic
but then a text called the nirvana sutra came from india which said precisely that so everybody had to
admit that this man was right he also began to teach that awakening must be instantaneous
it's a kind of all or nothing state i don't mean that there aren't degrees of its intensity
but once you see the principle you see the whole thing
as they say when the bottom falls out of the bucket all the water goes together
those men then promulgated the way of sudden awakening bodhidharma came later and he is supposed in
legend to have been followed by a line of six patriarchs of which he was the first
the second was named eka i'm using the japanese pronunciation
uh who was formerly a general of the army then the third was so son who wrote the shinjin mei
which is the most marvelous little summary of buddhism in verse
and so on till they came to eno the sixth patriarch you know perhaps more familiarly his chinese name
quenang uh the problem you know with what you read in books is that the spelling is terribly confusing
you see this guy quenang most people say hui neng and they've also read a text called the sutra
of w e and they say why lang but this is simply the cantonese way of pronouncing the same characters
when this is the mandarin way in mandarin hui neng becomes way long in cantonese almost say hui
way when i'm way long and in japanese a no totally confusing but it's all the same man
and he died in 715 a.d he's the real founder of chinese zen the man who synthesized the whole thing
and was the uh at least his collected discourses are contained in what is called the platform sutra
and any student of zen should read the platform sutra it's fortunately there's a new translation
from the earliest form of the text done by wingtzer chan published by st john's university in new york
it's catholic university but you know really fused zen with the chinese way of doing things and he
emphasized very thoroughly do not think you are going to attain buddhahood by sitting down all day and
keeping your mind blank because a lot of those students who practiced dhyana which is the sanskrit
for chan which is the chinese for zen which is in turn japanese means meditation or contemplation
perhaps would be better translation in english and everybody thought that the proper way to contemplate
was to be as still as possible but according to zen that is to be a stone buddha instead of a living buddha
now i can knock a stone buddha on the head clunk and it has no feelings and so it's a stone buddha
there was a famous zen master called tankar who went to a little lonely temple on a freezing cold night
and he took the buddha image one of the buddha images off the altar split it up and made a fire
and when the attendant of the temple came in in the morning he was horrified
broke at the image and tankar took his stick started raking in the ashes
and the temple priest said what are you looking for he said i'm looking for the sali that is to say
the jewels that are supposed to be found in the body of a genuine buddha when he's cremated
so the priest said you couldn't expect to find sali from a wooden buddha
in that case said tankar let me have that other buddha for my fire
that's you see the difference between living buddha and stone buddha
but a person who thinks that in order to be awakened you have to be heartless to have no emotions
no feelings that you couldn't possibly lose your temper or get angry or feel annoyed or depressed
those people haven't got the right idea at all if that's your ideal said a no you might just as
well be a block of wood or a piece of stone what he wanted you to understand is that your real mind
while all those emotions are going on is imperturbable just like the sky uh when you move your hand
through the sky you don't leave a track the birds don't stain the blue when they pass by and when the
water reflects the image of the geese it doesn't uh the the reflection doesn't stick there so to be
pure-minded in the zen way or clear-minded is a better way of translating it is not to have no thoughts
is not a question of uh not thinking about dirty things
one uh great master of the tang dynasty when asked what is buddha
believe it or not answered a dried turd
so it's not that kind of purity it is purity clarity in the sense that your mind isn't sticky
you don't harbor grievances you don't be attached to the past you go with it with life life is flowing
all the time that is the tao the flow of life and you are going along with it whether you want to or not
you're like people in a stream you can swim against the stream but you'll still be moved along by it
and all you'll do is wear yourself out in futility
but if you swim with the stream the whole strength of the stream is yours
of course the difficulty that so many of us have is finding out which way the stream is going
but certainly as it goes all the past banishes the future has not yet arrived and there is only one place
to be which is here and now and there is no way of being anywhere else none whatever if you understand
that thoroughly your task is finished you then become instantaneous and also momentous
so this was a nose principle as i said he died in 715 and he left five very great disciples who taught
substantially the same sort of thing but as things go then they became uh these disciples had disciples
and those disciples had disciples and there's a genealogy and zen broke into what are called five houses
and these uh some of them didn't go on zen went on in two main forms one is called by the japanese
rinzai zen after the great master rinzai who lived uh towards the end of the ninth century
and the soto school comes from another line and they have a slightly different emphasis
soto is more serene in its approach rinzai more gutsy
uh rinzai people use the koan method in zen studies soto people don't at least not in the
same way but this period between the death of the sixth patriarch eno and about the year 1000
is the golden age of zen this were these were the really formative years
and after that zen began to decline in china it became mixed up with other forms of buddhism
and it suffered the fate of many many forms of
meditation type or yoga type discipline it got a little bit sidetracked into occult and psychic matters
what are called in buddhism siddhi or the development of supernormal powers
for zen this is completely beside the point but they did it got involved with chinese alchemy
with taoistic alchemy and uh all sorts of foolishness in that direction but a very strong strain of zen went
to japan the first being in about 1130 the monk esai and then about 1200 the monk i told you about dogen
who founded the great beautiful gorgeous galluptious monastery at a heiji which exists to this
day now in this golden age of chinese zen the main method of study was walking zen
rather than sitting zen all monks were great travelers and they walked for miles and miles through fields and
mountains visiting temples to see if they could find a master who would cause their spark to flash
to get what is called in mandarin woo or in japanese satori or in cantonese um this uh
always rather fascinates me the way this character is written the word i in in chinese is sometimes
represented by this right hand side of the character alone five mouths five senses
this one means your mind or heart the heart mind shin now when we say was something very surprising
happened my heart came into my mouth here it comes into all five so this character means awakening it's
the same in a way as the sanskrit bodhi which i explained to you in the talk on buddhism awakening from
the illusion of being a separate ego locked up in a bag of skin discovering that you are the whole
universe and of course if you do discover that and you do see into it all of a sudden it's a shock
because your whole common sense is turned directly inside out everything is the same as you've always
seen it but completely different because you know who you are you know that what the devil were you
worrying about what was all that fuss what was all that to do well you see it was part of the game
everything from one point of view is fuss and to do to do to do what is there to do
i must read you in the second session a poem by james browton called the birds of america which is all about that
but when you wake up you see and discover that all this to do wasn't you what you thought was you
but was the entire works which we could just call it that you're it and it is
it and everything is it and it does all things that are done and then that is a great surprise
but it sounds tasteless it sounds empty it sounds void because if i say well you're all it that is a
statement without the slightest logical sense because we don't know what is it unless there's something that
isn't it but if it's both is all is is and all isn'ts then we can't think about it nevertheless
it is highly possible to see that that's so in a way that's so vivid it brings your heart into all your
five mouths