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eastern wisdom and modern life with alan w watts produced by kqed san francisco

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for the educational television and radio center helen watts is a scholar lecturer and the author

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of many widely read books on comparative philosophy and religion this is not the figure

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of a strange pagan god it is the figure of a man an awakened man a buddha and i expect you may have

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wondered why almost all figures of buddha or of many other eastern sages that you see

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are seated like this this figure of buddha is in the posture of meditation

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and the way in which he is seated and the whole cast of his features and of his expression

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symbolize a certain attitude to life a certain way of looking things

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which in indian and chinese philosophy is considered essential to sanity

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perhaps i can give you some idea of the meaning of this attitude

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by demonstrating it with a chinese character a word which represents this whole attitude to life

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most of you probably know that chinese characters are originally picture writing

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and in this particular character this half of the character

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is said originally to have represented some water bird perhaps a stalk or a heron

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and this other part of the character is first of all a sign meaning the human eye

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and then you put legs on it the activity of the eye and that means seeing and the whole character

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is pronounced guan and it means a certain kind of observation a certain way of looking at things

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which might be typified by the image of a heron standing at the edge of the water as in this painting

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which is by the great japanese artist kano motonobu there is the heron standing quietly and serenely

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watching the water and so

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the whole meaning of this attitude to life is what is summed up in the entire eastern idea of meditation

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typified in these buddha figures and i want to try today to explain to you something of the meaning

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of this attitude to life for fundamentally meditation is not so much an exercise

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as it is a certain way of using one's mind or one's consciousness

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because normally most human beings when they use their eyes or their ears

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are constantly and chronically straining to see and to hear and when you come to think of it that's

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very odd because our eyes don't work by effort they don't have to go out and get the light

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the light comes to them and in the same way sound comes to our ears and even the sensor of touch

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comes to our fingertips we don't for example have to press a thing hard if i want in the dark

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i'm trying to fumble and feel what this is i don't have to press very hard to feel it

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because the sensation simply of the hard object comes to the nerve ends in my skin

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and so it's strange isn't it that we have acquired the habit of a constant and chronic effort

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to see clearly and to hear clearly i think part of it comes from school you know when children are

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listening to a teacher in class they're always fidgeting or doing something like this you know and

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looking around and twisting and jiggling and the teacher says pay attention and the children

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immediately to ingratiate the teacher are able to sort of ham or act what paying attention is like

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and paying attention of course is staring at the teacher yes they're very interested in what you

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say and sometimes to get their concentration uh clear they curl up their legs around the

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legs of the chair and go into all these strained attitudes so that the teacher knows they really

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are trying very hard to attend and it is through such conditioning as that through being taught

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that we must try to see and try to hear in order to have clear sight and clear hearing that we learn

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constantly to strain our senses in their use but as a matter of fact this impedes the clarity of our

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senses because if you will try staring hard at a book in front of you or staring very hard at the tv

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screen you're looking at right now you'll find that it becomes fuzzy also in the same way if you're

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trying to listen say to a telephone conversation while the children are running all over the house

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and screaming if you try to listen to the telephone you'll get very angry and you'll have to stop to

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yell at the children to make them be quiet but on the other hand if you just let the sound come to

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your ears you'll have no difficulty at all in hearing it so you remember then that heron i showed you

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when that heron was watching the fish it wasn't sort of going like this looking all over the place

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for what fish here fish here no heron was just quiet and as it were the whole area of vision is simply

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coming to the heron's eyes and the moment it sees a ripple in the water it darts down and gets the fish

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now i don't think it's only that we have been taught by teachers and parents and so on

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to try to see and try to hear clearly there are other factors in the problem

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and one of them is that while we are seeing hearing we are trying to make sense of our world

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by thinking about it and the act of thinking also introduces an element of strain into the use of

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our minds and i think the reason for this is perhaps you will remember how i showed you on a previous

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program that thought is linear you know it goes one word after another it's strung out in a line we think

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thought thought thought thought thought thought in a line like this one after another whereas when we

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see we see to what is going on entirely we take in a volume when we see we take in a great area nature is

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a volume rather than something strung out in a line but when we think we get one thought after another

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and so the process of thought is much slower than the process of seeing and using our consciousness or

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our mind as a whole and this then requires a certain effort to make thought keep up with what we are

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seeing or what we are hearing also you see thought works by abstraction what do i mean by abstraction

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well a lot of chinese characters are abstractions if we take for example the chinese character for man

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it is written this way now that was originally the head and legs of a human figure something you know

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like this when we draw an abstract figure of a man everybody knows that's a man but as a matter of

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fact it cuts out a great deal of man this figure cuts out all the details and gives us a simple image

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which we can grasp all at once and we have to do that in order to think so that we can use a series

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of very simple images or grasps of the world and these are abstractions and it is fundamentally

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in terms of abstractions that we think now thought as i said is slower because it goes in a line thought

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after thought and also thought is abstract that is to say it lacks the full living quality of real life

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just as this figure here is just a sort of skeleton ball on top of sticks and therefore it lacks the vitality

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the aliveness of a real man now the more we tend to live in a world of thought the more we tend to

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live in an abstract world that is removed from and has a gap between it and the real world of nature

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and as a result of this we tend to live in a world that is in some ways unsatisfying lacking in vitality and

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life and also people tend to think all the time this becomes for every civilized community every

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civilized person a sort of habit which is like constantly talking to yourself now of course when

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you meet me here on the tv screen i'm always talking or almost always but i assure you i'm not always

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talking i'm often silent because after all we have to be silent some of the time don't we in order to

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hear what other people have to say and therefore to have something to talk about

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in just the same way our minds have to be silent some of the time if we are really to have anything

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to think about except thoughts you know there is a popular proverb which says that talking to yourself

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is the first sign of madness and there's some truth in this because constant thinking as distinct from

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simply experiencing through our senses constant thinking about our experiences coding our experiences

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into words into signs into the symbols of thought is a buzz that goes on day in and day out inside our

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heads except when we are sleeping and as a result of that we begin to live in a world increasingly

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divorced from reality and that is why in those oriental cultures in india and china and japan it has

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always been considered important for everybody to spend some of his time by no means all of his time

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but some of it not thinking but simply in the attitude which was represented by that chinese

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character which i drew at the beginning pronounced one or quiet observation remember this point it's

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important this is not saying that thinking is a disturbance is a thing that human beings shouldn't do

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on the contrary it's a highly important acquisition of man but thinking is of no real value to us unless

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we also can practice non-thinking unless we can have our mind silent and make immediate contact with the

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real world as distinct from the world of pure abstraction and so this leads to a very common practice

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in asia among hindus among buddhists among daoists called meditation and i want to try and show you something

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about it by sitting in the posture of meditation which is commonly used and is done approximately like

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this one sits upon a firm cushion usually a big city telephone directory is about the right thickness

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and ordinarily among oriental peoples they sit in what is called lotus posture or half lotus posture as

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i'm sitting now which means that the right foot is lifted up onto the left thigh you will find of course

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that that's an extraordinarily uncomfortable position if you're not used to it but one of the reasons for

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sitting that way is that it locks your legs together so that you don't easily fall over if you should go to sleep

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and also that this position gives you a sense of being very very firmly rooted to the ground

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and then the hands are laid like this and one then turns attention to letting oneself breathe you don't do a

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breathing exercises taking deep inhalations and exhalations you simply let your breath come as it wants to

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but you if anything let the out breath you know the breath that goes with a sigh of relief you let that

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be the emphasized breath rather than the in breath you don't close your eyes you usually drop them a little

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on the floor in front of you because the object is not to cut out all the things that you might be

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experiencing through your eyes and through your ears through your nose and your nerve ends on the skin

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the object is simply to let one's mind alone to experience but not to try to catch hold of one's

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experience in thoughts simply to think to no i wouldn't say think that's a word we use

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very ambiguously when i use the word think i mean talk to yourself or bring a lot of images before

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your mind which have nothing to do with what's right in front of you

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so the function of this exercise this posture is to let the whole world come to you

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without interfering with it in any way just sitting like that you may say oh that's a great waste of

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time there are all sorts of interesting things in life to do why just spend some hours sitting

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and the reason though as i tried to explain is that it is through this that one comes to have

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a contact no longer with a world of abstractions no longer with a world of thought but with the world

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that actually is now as you do this you begin to notice a rather curious change in your general feeling

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of life you notice that there ceases to be what i would call an interruption or an interval between

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your experience and yourself

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you see in our ordinary way of using our minds the chronic sense of strain

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the chronic attempt to think about and make sense of what we are feeling is what we call our ego

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if you say i experience my own existence i am aware constantly of a knower

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behind and receiving all that is known

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then you get this chronic sensation of there being an i a self who has all these experiences and that i or

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self is what we call the ego and this chronic sense of strain is our we might call it our psychological

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blocking against our experience the thing that seems to divide us from an external world

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from the whole universe but when in this way the interval begins to diminish we begin to experience

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our world as ourselves there is no interval there is no interruption between the knower and the known

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just as when we are completely absorbed listening to music or dancing to music

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we are not aware of our separation from it we go right with it

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and so in the same way when the mind responds instantly to what the senses bring

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it seems almost as if the mind and what it experiences were one and the same

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now in a way of course this is actually true we can understand this theoretically but we don't

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ordinarily really feel it for example you know the old saying if a tree falls in a forest with nobody

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listening to it will there be any noise perhaps you know the limericks in which this problem is

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posed there was a young man who said god i find it exceedingly odd that a tree as a tree

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simply ceases to be when there's no one around in the quad and the answer was young man your

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astonishment's odd i'm always around in the quad so the tree as a tree never ceases to be since

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observed by yours faithfully god but this is a great philosophical puzzle for the western world

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does what we know depend on their being a knower now in a way obviously it does because when a tree

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falls in the forest it certainly makes vibrations in the air but those vibrations in the air do not

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become noise unless they vibrate an eardrum so in the same way the light from the sun does not become

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light unless it falls on an eye an eyeball and two uh we could say the the external world is full of hard

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things but nothing is hard except in relation to the soft surface of the human skin nothing is heavy

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except in relation to human muscles so if there is not a human organism

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the world does not appear to us at all as having any of the characteristics which we attach to an

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external world in other words we could say the sun is light but only because of eyes rocks are hard but

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only because of soft fingers falling rocks are noisy but only because of sensitive human ears

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we cannot form any idea at all of what the world would be like without an observing mind even such

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things as duration the span of time depend upon the human mind to appreciate space depends on a human

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mind to observe the world from a particular position and so know that there are things which are distant from

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without this mind there could not be any world that we could think about or conceive or imagine in any way

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whatsoever and so this shows in a very clear way that our mind and the external world go together

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they are inseparable differences you remember in a recent program how i tried to illustrate the idea of

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inseparable differences by taking a coin or an object here like a cigar which has two distinct ends but

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you cannot separate those ends this is very important it's worth repeating because it's quite fundamental

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if i would want to take one of these ends off and break the thing and throw it away it would still

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have another end there would still be two ends there i could never get rid of the situation of it having

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two ends so you see that although the two ends are different there is just one object and so in the same

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way although there is a difference in a way between the knower and the known between man and the world

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nevertheless these two go together and they are fundamentally inseparable and therefore when our

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consciousness is responding instantly without any interval or interruption without any shall we say

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stopping to think about it then we have a situation in which

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we are actually realizing we are actually feeling the true physical relationship which exists between man

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and this we could call the experience of oneness or unity with the universe which is the function of meditation

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now i think it's not difficult to see some very obvious values because well if we live entirely

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in a world of thought all the things that we pursue in life tend in a way to become arid and unsatisfactory

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because we are living in an abstract world in other words nobody in his senses is going to eat a menu instead of dinner

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nobody nobody in his senses is going to try and get a satisfactory diet of dollar bills

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and yet you see dollar bills and menus stand in the same relation on the one hand to wealth on the other

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hand to dinner the same relation in which thought stands to reality they re-present it they symbolize

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reality but they are in no sense substitutions for it yes you can do a great deal of things if you

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have a lot of dollar bills but unless you exchange those dollar bills into real concrete worth they

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are of no value to you and so in the same way if we try to live in the world of pure thought

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we begin to feel a strange unsatisfactory quality to the world and this living in pure thought is not

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something that is only done by you know professors and intellectuals and thinking people perfectly

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ordinary people often live in the world of pure thought as for example when we pursue certain goals

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in life when we say i want to be successful i want to be happy these are really abstractions

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because supposing you become enormously wealthy and you're able to afford three cars and six houses

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you can't drive in three cars at once you can't live in six houses at once you have a symbol which we

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call prestige of your status but that is an abstract symbol you can't really you can't eat prestige you

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can't eat success and so to overcome that kind of beguilement by the fantasies of thought

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not thinking is an important adjunct to thought to be able every so often to cease the hubbub going

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on inside one's head and to let talking to oneself stop and come to stillness you needn't of course

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sit in the meditation posture like this to do it this is simply the way it's done by buddhists hindus

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you can walk you can sit in the ordinary way you can lie in the bathtub and do it you can lie on your

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back in bed before you get up in the morning and do it just let your mind alone and stop trying to make

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sense of the world so then there is really something to think about other than thought itself

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like if we wrote books about nothing but books this is i'm afraid what a great deal of scholarship is

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books about books about books so in this way through meditation we come to that kind of profound peace

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which is exhibited in the faces of the buddhists i remember particularly some words by lafcadio hearn

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in which he gives a marvelous description of the whole attitude which these faces represent

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each eidolon shaped by human faith remains the shell of a truth eternally divine

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and even the shell itself may hold a ghostly power the soft serenity the passionless tenderness of these

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buddha faces might yet give peace of soul to a west weary of creeds transformed into conventions

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eager for the coming of another teacher to proclaim i have the same feeling for the high as for the low

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for the moral as for the immoral for the depraved as for the virtuous for those holding sectarian views

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and false opinions as for those whose beliefs are good and true