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Alan Watts (1915-1973)
Alan Watts
THE PHILOSOPHIES OF ASIA
CONTENTS
I. The Relevance of Oriental Philosophy
II. The Mythology of Hinduism
III. Eco-Zen
IV. Swallowing a Ball of Hot Iron
V. Intellectual Yoga
VI. Introduction to Buddhism
VII. The Taoist Way of Karma
THE RELEVANCE OF ORIENTAL PHILOSOPHY
CHAPTER ONE
When
I was a small boy I used to haunt section of London around the h Museum, and
one day I came across a shop that had a notice over the window which said: "Philosophical
Instruments." Now even as a boy I knew something about philosophy, but
I could not imagine what philosophical instruments might be. So I went up to
the window and there displayed were chronometers, slide rules, scales, and all
kinds of what we would now call scientific instruments, but they were philosophical
instruments because science used to be called natural philosophy. Aristotle
once said that "The beginning of philosophy is wonder." Philosophy
is man's expression of curiosity about everything and his attempt to make sense
of the world primarily through his intellect; that is to say, his faculty for
thinking. Thinking, of course, is a word used in many ways and is a very vague
word for most people. However, I use the word thinking in a very precise way.
By thinking, as distinct from feeling or emoting or sensing, I mean the manipulation
of symbols-whether they be words, numbers, or other signs such as triangles,
squares, circles, astrological signs, or whatever. These are symbols, although
sometimes symbols are a little bit more concrete and less abstract than that,
as in the case of a mythological symbol, like a dragon. However, all these things
are symbols, and the manipulation of symbols to represent events going on in
the real world is what I call thinking.
Philosophy in the Western sense generally means an exercise of the intellect,
and the manipulation of the symbols is very largely an exercise of the intellect,
but it does sometimes go beyond that, as in the specific cases of poetry and
music. Yet what philosophy has become today in the academic world is something
that is extremely restricted. Philosophy in the United States, England, Germany,
and France to some extent has fallen into the realm of two other disciplines:
mathematical logic on the one hand, and linguistics on the other. The departments
of philosophy throughout the academic world have bent over backwards to be as
scientific as possible. As William Earl, who is professor of philosophy at Northwestern
University, said in an essay called "Notes on the Death of a Culture,"
"An academic philosopher today must above all things avoid being edifying.
He must never stoop to lying awake nights considering problems of the nature
of the universe and the destiny of man, because these have largely been dismissed
as metaphysical or meaningless questions. A scientific philosopher arrives at
his office at nine o'clock in the morning dressed in a business suit carrying
a briefcase. He does philosophy until five in the afternoon, at which point
he goes home to cocktails and dinner and dismisses the whole matter from his
head." Professor Earl adds, "He would wear a white coat to work if
he could get away with it."
Of course this critique is a little exaggerated, but by and large this is what
departmental academic philosophy has become, and Oriental philosophy is simply
not philosophy in that sense. These things, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Taoism,
are sometimes also called religions. I question the application of that word
to them because I like to use the word religion rather strictly. Now I am not
going to be so bold as to venture a definition of religion that is supposed
to be true for all time. All I can do is tell you how I use the word, and I
wish to use it in an exact sense from its Latin root which really means "a
bond or rule of life." Therefore, the most correct use of the word religion
is when we say of a man or woman that he or she has "gone into" religion;
that is to say, has joined a religious or monastic order and is living under
a rule of life or is living a life of obedience.
For if Christianity is a religion, if Judaism is a religion, and if Islam is
a religion, they are based on the idea of man's obedient response to a divine
revelation. Thus religion, as we understand it in these three forms of religion,
consists really of three things we will call the three c's: the creed, the code,
and the cult. The creed is the divinely revealed map of the universe or the
nature of things. It is the revelation of the existence of God, of Allah, of
Yahweh, or as we say, God, by His existence, by His will, and in His design
of the universe. That is the creed. To this we add the second c, the code, and
this is the divinely revealed law, or exemplar, which man is supposed to follow.
In the case of Christianity there is a certain variation in this because the
principal revelation of the code in Christianity, as well as the cult, is not
so much a law as a person. In Christianity, God is said to be supremely revealed
in the historic Jesus of Nazareth.. So the code here becomes really the following
of Jesus of Nazareth, but not so much an obedience to a law as through the power
of divine grace. Then, finally, there is the cult, and this is the divinely
revealed method or way of worship by which man relates himself to God through
prayers, rites, and sacraments. In these particular religions these methods
are not supposed to be so much man's way of worshipping God, as God's way of
loving Himself in which man is involved. So, in the Christian religion in the
Mass we would say that we worship God with God's own worship, following the
saying of that great German mystic, Meister Eckhardt: "The love with which
I love God is the same love wherewith God loves me." So, too, when monks
in a monastery recite the divine office, the psalms are supposed to be the songs
of the Holy Spirit, and so in using the psalms the idea is that you worship
God with God's own words, and thereby become a sort of flute through which the
divine breath plays.
Now neither Hinduism, Buddhism, nor Taoism can possibly be called religions
in this sense, because all three of them significantly lack the virtue of obedience.
They do not concede the godhead as related to mankind or to the universe in
a monarchical sense. There are various models of the universe which men have
used from time to time, and the model that lies behind the judeoChristian tradition,
if there really is such a thing, is a political model. It borrows the metaphor
of the relation of an ancient Near Eastern monarch to his subjects, and he imposes
his authority and his will upon his subjects from above by power, whether it
be physical power or spiritual power. It is thus that in the Anglican Church,
when the priest at morning prayer addresses the throne of grace he says, "Almighty
and everlasting God, King of Kings, Lord of Lords, the only ruler of princes,
Who dost from Thy throne behold all the dwellers upon earth, most heartily we
beseech Thee with Thy favor to behold our sovereign majesty, Elizabeth the Queen
and all the royal family."
Now, what are these words? This is the language of court flattery, and the title
"King of Kings," as a title of God, was borrowed from the Persian
emperors. "Lord have mercy upon us," is an image drawn from things
earthly and applied to things heavenly. God is the monarch, and therefore between
the monarch and the subject there is a certain essential difference of kind,
what we might call an ontological difference. God is God, and all those creatures,
whether angels or men or other kinds of existence that God has created, are
not God. There is this vast metaphysical gulf lying between these two domains.
That gives us, as citizens of a democracy, some problems.
As a citizen of the United States you believe that a republic is the best form
of government. Yet how can this be maintained if the government of the universe
is a monarchy? Surely in that case a monarchy will be the best form of government.
Many of the conflicts in our society arise from the fact that although we are
running a republic, many of the members of this republic believe (or believe
that they ought to believe) that the universe is a monarchy. Therefore, they
are, above all, insistent upon obedience to law and order, and if there should
be democracy in the Kingdom of God, that would seem to them the most subversive
idea ever conceived. Now I am exaggerating this standpoint a little bit just
for effect. There are some subtle modifications which one can introduce theologically,
but I will not go into them at the moment.
There are at least two other models of the universe which have been highly influential
in human history. One is dramatic, where God is not the skillful maker of the
world standing above it as its artificer and King, but where God is the actor
of the world as an actor of a stage play-the actor who is playing all the parts
at once. In essence this is the Hindu model of the universe. Everybody is God
in a mask, and of course our own word "person" is from the Latin,
persona: "That through which comes sound." This word was used for
the masks worn by actors in the Greco-Roman theater, which being an open-air
theater required a projection of the voice. The word person has, however, in
the course of time, come to mean "the real you." In Hindu thought,
every individual as a person is a mask; fundamentally this is a mask of the
godhead-a mask of a godhead that is the actor behind all parts and the player
of all games. That is indefinable for the same reason that you cannot bite your
own teeth. You can never get at it for the same reason that you cannot look
straight into your own eyes: It is in the middle of everything, the circle whose
center is everywhere, and whose circumference is nowhere.
A third model of the universe, which is characteristically Chinese, views the
world as an organism, and a world which is an organism has no boss, and even
no actor. This is because in any organism there is not really a boss or "top
organ." In our culture we are accustomed,,of course, to think of our head
as ruling the rest of the body, but there could well be an argument about this.
I am going to put up a case that the stomach is chief because the stomach, the
sort of alimentary tract with a digesting process in it, is surely anterior
to brains. There may be some sort of rudimentary nervous system attached to
a stomach organization, but the more primitive you are, the more you are a little
creature that eats. It is a sort of tube, and in go things at one end and out
the other, and because that wears the tube out the tube finds means of reproducing
itself to make more tubes so that this process of in and out can be kept up.
However, in the course of evolution, at one end of the tube developed a ganglion
that eventually developed eyes and ears with a brain in it. So the stomach's
point of view is that the brain is the servant of the stomach to help it scrounge
around for food. The other argument is this: true, the brain is a later development
than the alimentary tract, but the alimentary tract is to the brain as John
the Baptist to Jesus Christ, the forerunner of the "big event," and
the reason for all the scrounging around is eventually to evolve a brain. Eventually
man shall live primarily for the concerns of the brain, that is, for art and
science and all forms of culture, and the stomach shall be servant.
Now cynical people, like dialectical materialists, say that this is a lot of
hogwash. Really, all history is a matter of economics, and that is a matter
of the stomach. It is a big argument, and you cannot decide it because you cannot
at this stage have a stomach without a brain or a brain without a stomach. They
go together like a back and a front. So, the principle of organism is rather
like this: an organism is a differentiated system, but it has no parts. That
is to say, the heart is not a part of the body in the sense that a distributor
is part of an automobile engine. These are not parts in the sense that they
are screwed in. When the fetus arises in the womb there are not a lot of mechanics
in there lugging in hearts and stomachs and so forth, and fitting them together
and screwing them to each other. An organism develops like a crystal in solution
or a photographic plate in chemicals. It develops all over at once, and there
isn't a boss in it. It all acts together in a strange way and it is a kind of
orderly anarchy.
Fundamentally, this is the Chinese view of the world, the principle of organic
growth they call tao, pronounced "dow." This Chinese word is usually
translated as "the course of nature," or "the way," meaning
the way it does it, or the process of things. That is again really very different
from the Western idea of God the Ruler. Of the tao Lao-tzu says, 'The great
Tao flows everywhere, both to the left and to the right. It loves and nourishes
all things, but does not ford it over them. When merits are accomplished, it
lays no claim to them." And so, the Chinese expression for nature becomes
a word that we will translate as "of itself so." It is what happens
of itself, like when you have hiccoughs. You do not plan to have hiccoughs,
it just happens. When your heart beats, you do not plan it; it happens of itself.
When you breathe, you cannot pretend that you are breathing. Most of the time
you are not thinking about it, and your lungs breathe of themselves. So the
whole idea that nature is something happening of itself without a governor is
the organic theory of the world.
So, these are the two other theories of nature that we are going to consider
in the study of Oriental philosophy: the dramatic theory and the organic theory.
I feel that ways of life that use these models are so unlike Christianity, Judaism,
or Islam, that we cannot really use the word "religion" to describe
these things. Now, what is there in Western culture that resembles the concerns
of Buddhism, Hinduism, and Taoism? The trouble is, on the surface, they look
alike. In other words, if you go into a Hindu temple or a special Japanese Buddhist
temple you will be pretty convinced you are in church (in sort of a Catholic
church, at that, because there is incense, chants, bowings, gongs, candles,
rosaries, and all the things that one associates with a theistic, monarchical
religion). Yet, that is not what is going on. Even though the image of Buddha
may be sitting on a throne, covered with a canopy, and royal honors being done,
there is no factor of obedience. Probably the nearest thing to these ways of
life in the West is, perhaps, psychotherapy in some form, although not all forms
of psychotherapy. The objective of psychotherapy is, as you might say, to change
your state of consciousness. If you, in other words, are horribly depresse an
you are terrified, or if you are having hallucinations, you see a "head
shrinker" and he tries to change your state of consciousness.
Fundamentally, these Oriental disciplines are concerned basically with changing
your state of consciousness. However, here we part company because psychotherapy
is largely focused on the problems of the individual as such, the problems particular
to this individual or that individual. Instead, these Asian ways of life are
focused on certain problems peculiar to man as such, and to every individual
on the understanding that the average human being (and the more civilized he
is the more this is true) is hallucinating. The average human being has a delusive
sense of his own existence, and it is thus that the very word "Buddha,"
in Buddhism, is from a root in Sanskrit, buddb, which means to awaken.
To awaken from the illusion is then to undergo a radical change of consciousness
with regard to one's own existence. It is to cease being under the impression
that you are just "poor little me," and to realize who you really
are, or wbat you really are behind the mask. But there is a difficulty in this.
You can never get to see what the basic self is. It is always and forever elusive.
And so, if I ask you, "Who are you really?" And you say, "Well,
I am John Doe." "Oh? Ha-ha! You think so? John Doe, tell me: How do
you happen to have blue eyes?" "Well," you say, "I do not
know. I did not make my eyes." "Oh, you didn't? Who else?" "Well,
I have no idea how it is done."
"You have to have an idea how it is done to be able to do it? After all,
you can open and close your hand perfectly easily. And you say, 'I know how
to open my hand. I know how to close my hand because I can do it.' But how do
you do it?"
"I do not know. I am not a physiologist."
"A physiologist says he knows how he does it, but he cannot do it any better
than you can. So, you are opening and closing your hand, are you not? Yet you
do not know how you do it. Maybe you are 'blue-ing' your eyes, too! You do not
know how you do it, because when you say 'I do not know how I do it,' all you
are saying is, 'I do know bow to do it, but I cannot put it into words!"'
I cannot, in other words, translate the activity called "opening and closing
my hand" into an exact system of symbols, that is, into thinking. If you
actually could translate the opening and closing of your hand into an exact
system of symbols, it would take forever because trying to understand the world
purely by thinking about it is as clumsy a process as trying to drink the Pacific
Ocean out of a one-pint beer mug. You can only take it one mug at a time, and
in thinking about things you can only think one thought at a time. Like writing,
thinking is a linear process, one thought after another in a series. You can
only think of one thing at a time, but that is too slow for understanding anything
at all and much too slow to understand everything. Our sensory input is much
more than any kind of one thing at a time, and we respond with a certain aspect
of our minds to the total sensory input that is coming in, only we are not consciously
aware of it. Nevertheless, you are doing it, but what kind of "you"
is this? It certainly is not John Doe. It is not that little ego freak.
There is a lot more to you than you think there is, and that is why the Hindu
would say that the real you is the Self, (but with a capital S), the Self of
the universe. At that level of one's existence one is not really separate from
everything else that is going on. We have something here which I will not call
philosophy except in the most ancient sense of basic curiosity. I prefer to
call these disciplines ways of liberation. These are ways of liberation from
maya, and the following of them does not depend on believing in anything, in
obeying anything, or on doing any specific rituals (although rituals are included
for certain purposes because it is a purely experimental approach to life).
This is something like a person who has defective eyesight and is seeing spots
and all sorts of illusions, and goes to an ophthalmologist to correct his vision.
Buddhism is, therefore, a corrective of psychic vision. It is to be disenthralled
by the game of maya. It is not, incidentally, to regard the maya as something
evil, but to regard it as a good thing of which one can have too much, and therefore
one gets psychic and spiritual indigestion-from which we all suffer.
Now then, I am going to go into the very fundamental guts of Hinduism and certain
documents that are known as the Upanishads. These documents constitute what
is called Vedanta, and that is compounded of two words, veda anta. Anta means
"end," or completion or summation, and Veda is, of course, related
to the Latin videre, to see. Veda is the fundamental revelation of the Hindu
way of life contained in its earliest scriptural documents, which are generally
dated in the period between 1500 and 1200 B.c. The Upanishads have been the
summation of the Veda from over a long period of time, beginning perhaps as
early as 800 B.C., although some of the Upanishads are much later than that.
However, there is always a doubt in connection with the dating of any Hindu
text because unlike the Hebrews, the Hindus have absolutely no sense of history.
They view time as circular, as something that just goes round and round again
and again, so that what happens today is on the whole very much like what happened
yesterday, or a hundred years ago, or a thousand years ago. They view life as
a repetitious process of cycles and so there is very little internal evidence
in Hindu manuscripts to give us dates between which we can say it must have
been written because they were not interested in references to contemporary
events. In fact, until relatively recent times, history was little more than
keeping chronicles, and the Hindus were less interested in keeping chronicles
than the Chinese.
In all there is a great deal of vagueness, and this is compounded by the fact
that many of these scriptures were for hundreds of years handed down orally
and memorized before being committed to writing. So there is a great deal of
vagueness as to how old the tradition is with which we are dealing and it may
be earlier or later than the scholars generally suppose. However it seems there
was a migration into the Indian subcontinent by peoples from the north who called
themselves Aryans, which may have occurred somewhere in the neighborhood of
1500 to 1200 B.C., and they brought with them the faded tradition that merged
with whatever aboriginal religions or ways of life that were existing on the
subcontinent at that time, and produced the complex which today we call Hinduism.
I am not going into the Vedas because they comprise a complicated piece of symbolical
interpretation having to do with the rites, the hymns, and the myths of the
various so-called gods of the Hindu pantheon. In the philosophy of the Upanishads
these gods are seen simply as so many different manifestations of one basic
principle, which is called brabman, derived from the root bra, which means to
expand or to grow. Brahman is also called atman, or paramatman, the supreme
self-the "which that which there is no whicher."
The basic position of the Upanishads is that the self is the one and only reality
without another, and that all this universe is finally brahman. The universe
appears to be a multiplicity of different things and different events only by
reason of maya, which is illusion, magic, art, or creative power. Brahman is
considered under two aspects: one is called nirguna, and the other saguna. The
word una in each case, meaning quality or attribute, and nir, being a negative,
nirguna is brahman considered without attribute, while saguna is brahman being
considered as having attributes. In Christian theology there are exact equivalents
to these terms, which you have probably never heard of. The former is called
the apopbatic way of speaking, a Greek term, and the other is the catopbatic.
When a Christian speaks of God as the father, he is speaking catophatically,
that is to say by analogy. No theologian in his right mind thinks that God is
a cosmic male parent. All a theologian intends to say is God is like a father.
Even when it is said "God is light," that is still catophatic language.
God is like light, but he is not light. The apophatic language states what God
is not, so such terms as "eternal," which means nontemporal, infinite,
or without limitation, are in this sense negative. When the Hindu speaks most
deeply of the ultimate reality of the universe, he applies the phrase neti,
neti, meaning approximately "no, no," or "not this, not this."
In other words, reality-basic reality-eludes all positive conceptualization
whatsoever for the very good reason that it is what you are most basically.
That is why the Hindu describes in the Vedanta doctrine of the Upanishads the
basic energy of the universe as "the unknown." It is never an object
of knowledge, and so it is said in the Kena Upanisbad that if you think that
you understand what brahman is, you do not understand. However if you do not
understand, then you understand. For the way brahman is known is that brahman
is unknown to those who know it, and known to those who know it not. Now that
sounds completely illogical, but translated into familiar terms you would say
that your head is effective only so long as it does not get in the way of your
eyesight. If you see spots in front of your eyes, they interfere with vision.
If you hear singing and humming in your ears, you are hearing your ears, and
that interferes with hearing. An effective ear is inaudible to itself and then
it hears everything else. That is just another way of saying the same thing,
and when we translate it into sensory terms it is not all paradoxical.
It is basic to Vedanta that brahman, this intangible, nonobjective ground of
everything that exists, is identical with the ground of you. This is put in
the formula tat tvam asi. Tat is the same as our word "that." Tvam
is the same as the Latin tuus, "thou;" asi is "at." We should
translate that into a modern American idiom as "You're it." This,
of course, is a doctrine that is very difficult for those brought up in the
Judeo-Christian traditions to accept, because it is fundamental to Christian
and Jewish theology that whatever you are, you are surely not the Lord God.
Therefore, Christians feel that the Hindu doctrine-that we are all fundamentally
masks of God-is pantheism, and that is a dirty word in Christian theological
circles because of the feeling that if everything is God then all moral standards
are blown to hell. It means everything is as good as everything else. Since
everything that happens is really God, this must include the good things and
the bad things, and that seems to them a very dangerous idea. Actually, when
viewed from a social perspective, all religious doctrines contain very, very
dangerous ideas. However, we will not worry about that for the moment because
what the Hindu means by God, when he says Brahman, is not at all the same thing
as what a Jew means by the Lord Adonai, because to the Jew and the Christian
it means the boss, to whom divine honors are due as above all others. The Hindu,
on the other hand, does not mean the boss. He does not mean the King or the
Lord as the political ruler of the universe. He means the inmost energy, which,
as it were, dances this whole universe without the idea of an authority of governing
some intractable element that resists his or its power.
If a Christian or a person in a Christian culture announces that he has discovered
that he is God, we put him in the loony bin because it is unfashionable to burn
people for heresy anymore. However, in India if you announce that you are the
Lord God, they say, "Well, of course! How nice that you found out,"
because everybody is. Why then does a great problem arise? Why does it appear
that we are not? Why do we think? Why do we have the sensory impression that
this whole universe consists of a vast multiplicity of different things, and
we do not see it all as one? Consider though, what do you think it would be
like to see it all as one? I know a lot of people who study Oriental philosophy
and look into attaining these great states of consciousness, which the Hindus
call nirvana, moksba, and what a Zen Buddhist would call liberation or satori
(their word for enlightenment or awakening). Now what would it be like to have
that? How would you feel if you saw everything as really one basic reality?
Well, a lot of people think that it would be as if all the outlines and differentiations
in the field of vision suddenly became vague and melted away and we saw only
a kind of luminous sea of light.
However, rather advisedly, the Vedanta philosophy does not seriously use the
word "one" of the supreme self because the word and idea "one"
has its opposite "many" on one side, and another opposite, "none,"
on the other. It is fundamental to Vedanta that the supreme self is neither
one nor many, but as they say, non-dual, and they express that in this word
advita. A is a negative word like non. Dvita is from dva, same as the Latin
duo, two. So advita is non-dual. At first this is a difficult conception because
naturally, a Western logician would say, "But the non-dual is the opposite
of the dual. Therefore, it has an opposite." This is true, but the Hindu
is using this term in a special sense. On a flat surface I have only two dimensions
in which to operate so that everything drawn in two dimensions has only two
dimensions. How, therefore, on a two-dimensional level, can I draw in three
dimensions? How, in logic, is it humanly rational to think in terms of a unity
of opposites?
All rational discourse is talk about the classification of experiences, of sensations,
of notions, and the nature of a class is that it is a box. If a box has an inside,
it has to have an outside. "Is you is or is you ain't?" is fundamental
to all classifications, and we cannot get out of it. We cannot talk about a
class of all classes and make any sense of it. However, on this two-dimensional
level, we can create, by using a convention of perspective, the understanding
of a third dimension. If I draw a cube, you are trained to see it in three dimensions,
but it is still in two. However, we have the understanding that the slanting
lines are going out through the back to another square, which is behind the
first one, even though we are still on two dimensions. The Hindu understands
this term advita as distinct from the term @4 one' to refer to that dimension.
So when you use the word advita, you are speaking about something beyond duality,
as when you use those slanting lines you are understood to be indicating a third
dimension which cannot really be reproduced on a two-dimensional surface. That
is the trick.
It is almost as if whatever we see to be different is an explicit difference
on the surface covering an implicit unity. Only it is very difficult to talk
about what it is that unifies black and white. (Of course, in a way the eyes
do. Sound and silence are unified by the cars). If you cannot have one without
the other, it is like the north and south poles of a magnet. You cannot have
a one-pole magnet. True, the poles are quite different; one is north and the
other is south, but it is all one magnet. This is what the Hindu is moving into
when he is speaking of the real basis or ground of the universe as being non-dual.
Take, for example, the fundamental opposition that I suppose all of us feel,
between self and other-I and thou-I and it. There is something that is me; there
is an area of my experience that I call myself. And there is another area of
my experience which I call not myself. But you will immediately see that neither
one could be realized without the other. You would not know what you meant by
self unless you experience something other than self. You would not know what
you meant by other unless you understood self. They go together. They arise
at the same time. You do not have first self and then other, or first other
and then self; they come together. And this shows the sneaky conspiracy underneath
the two, like the magnet between the two different poles. So it is more or less
that sort of what-is-not-classifiable (that which lies between all classes).
The class of elephants opposite the class of non-elephants has, as it were,
the walls of the box joining the two together, just, as your skin is an osmotic
membrane that joins you to the external world by virtue of all the tubes in
it, and the nerve ends, and the way in which the external energies flow through
your skin into your insides and vice versa.
But we do see and feel and sense-or at least we think we do-that the world is
divided into a great multiplicity. A lot of people would think of it as a collection
of different things, a kind of cosmic flotsam and jetsam washed together in
this particular area of space, and prefer to take a pluralistic attitude and
not see anything underlying. In fact, in contemporary logical philosophy, the
notion of any basic ground or continuum in which all events occur would be considered
meaningless for obvious reasons. if I say that every body in this universe-every
star, every planet-is moving in a certain direction at a uniform speed, that
will be saying nothing at all, unless I can point out some other object with
respect to which they are so moving. But since I said the universe, that includes
all objects whatsoever. Therefore, 1 cannot make a meaningful statement about
the uniform behavior of everything that is going on. So in the same way that
your eardrum is basic to all that you hear, the lens of the eye and retina are
basic to all that you see. What is the color of the lens of the eye? We say
it has no color; it is transparent in the same way that a mirror has no color
of its own, but the mirror is very definitely there, colorless as it may be.
The eardrum, unheard as it may be, is very definitely basic to hearing. The
eye, transparent as it may be, is very definitely very basic to seeing. So therefore,
if there were some continuum in which everything that is going on and everything
that we experience occurs, we would not notice it. We would not be able, really,
to say very much about it except, perhaps, that it was there. It would not make
any difference to anything, except for the one all-important difference that
if it was not there, there would not be any differences.
But, you see, philosophers these days do not like to think about things like
that. It stretches their heads and they would rather preoccupy themselves with
more pedestrian matters. But still, you cannot help it; if you are a human being
you wonder about things like that. What is it in which everything is happening?
What is the ground? Well, you say, "Obviously it is not a what because
a thing that is a what is a classifiable thing." And so, very often the
Hindu and the Buddhist will refer to the ultimate reality as no thing, not nothing,
but no special thing, unclassifiable. You cannot put your finger on it, but
it is you. It is what you basically are, what everything basically is, just
as the sound of an automobile horn on the radio is in one way an automobile
horn but basically it is the vibration of the speaker diaphragm. So we are all
in the Hindu view "vibrations of the entire cosmic diaphragm." Of
course, that is analogy, and I am using catophatic language from the point of
Christianity.
The best language is to say nothing but to experience it. The nub of all these
Oriental philosophies is not an idea, not a theory, not even a way of behaving,
but it is basically a way of experiencing a transformation of everyday consciousness
so that it becomes quite apparent to us that that is the way things are. When
it happens to you it is very difficult to explain it. So in exactly the same
way, when somebody has the sort of breakthrough that transforms his consciousness
(and it happens all over the world, it is not just a Hindu phenomenon), somebody
suddenly realizes it is all one, or technically non-dual, and really all this
coming and going, all this frantic living and dying-grabbing and struggling,
fighting and suffering-all this is like a fantastic phantasmagoria. He sees
that, but when he tries to explain it he finds his mouth is not big enough because
he cannot get the words out of their dualistic pattern to explain something
non-dualistic.
But why is this so? Why are we under this great, magnificent hallucination?
Well, the Hindus explain this in saguna language as follows. It is a very nice
explanation; a child can understand it. The fact of the matter is the world
is a game of hide-and-seek. Peek-a-boo! Now you see it, now you do not, because
very obviously if you were the supreme self, what would you do? I mean, would
you just sit there and be blissfully one for ever and ever and ever? No, obviously
not. You would play games. You would, because the very nature of a no energy
system is that it has no energy system unless it lets go of itself. So you would
let go of yourself and you would get lost. You would get involved in all sorts
of adventures and you would forget who you were, just as when you play a game.
And although you are only playing for dimes or chips, you get absorbed in the
game.
There is nothing really important to win, nothing really important to lose,
and yet it becomes fantastically interesting, who wins and who loses. And so
in the same way it is said that the supreme self gets absorbed through ever
so many different channels which we call the different beings in the plot, just
like an artist or a writer gets completely absorbed in the artistic creation
that he is doing, or an actor gets absorbed in the part in the drama. At first
we know it is a drama. We go to a play and we say, "It is only a play,'
and the proscenium arch tells us that what happens behind that arch is not for
real, just a show. But the great actor is going to make you forget it is just
a show. He is going to have you sitting on the edge of your chair; he is going
to have you crying; he is going to have you trembling because he almost persuades
you that it is real. What would happen if the very best actor was confronted
by the very best audience? Why, they would be taken in completely, and the one
would confirm the other.
So, this is the idea of the universe as drama, that the fundamental self, the
saguna brahman, plays this game, gets involved in being all of us, and does
it so darn well, so superbly acted, that the thing appears to be real. And we
are not only sitting on the edge of our chair, but we start to get up and throw
things. We join in the drama and it all becomes whatever is going on here, you
see? Then, of course, at the end of the drama, because all things have to have
an end that have a beginning, the curtain goes down and the actors retire to
the greenroom. And there the villain and the hero cease to be villain and hero,
and they are just the actors. And then they come out in front of the curtain
and they stand in a row, and the audience applauds the villain along with the
hero, the villain as having been a good villain and the hero as having been
a great hero. The play is over and everybody heaves a sigh of relief: "Well,
that was a great show, wasn't it?" So the idea of the greenroom is the
same as the nirguna brahman; that behind the whole show there are no differentiations
of I and thou, subject and object, good and evil, light and darkness, life and
death. But within the sphere of the saguna brahman all these differentiations
appear because that is out in front that is on the stage, and no good actor
when on the stage performs his own personality. That is what is wrong with movie
stars. A person is cast to act a role that corresponds to his alleged personality.
But a great actor can assume any personality, male or female, and suddenly convert
himself right in front of the audience into somebody who takes you in entirely.
But in the greenroom he is his usual self. So Hinduism has the idea that as
all the conventions of drama go right along with it, that all this world is
a big act, lila, the play of the supreme self, and is therefore compared to
a dream-to a passing illusion, and you should not, therefore, take it seriously.
You may take it sincerely, perhaps, as an actor may be sincere in his acting,
but not seriously, because that means it throws you for a loop (although that,
of course is involved). We do take it seriously. But, this is one of the great
questions you have to ask yourself when you really get down to the nitty-gritty
about your own inmost core: Are you serious, or do you know deep within you
that you are a put-on?
THE MYTHOLOGY OF HINDUISM
CHAPTER TWO
I
want to start out by explaining quite carefully what I mean by mythology. The
word is very largely used to mean fantasy, or something that is definite6-ly
not fact, and it's used therefore in a pejorative, or put-down, sense. So that
when you call something a mythology or a myth, it means you don't think much
of it. But the word is used by philosophers and scholars in quite another sense,
where to speak in the language of myth is to speak in images rather than to
speak in what you might call plain language, or descriptive language. You can
sometimes say more things with images than you can say with concepts. As a matter
of fact, images are really at the root of thinking. One of the basic waysin
which we think is by analogy. We think that the life of human beings might be
compared to the seasons of the year. Now, there are many important differences
between a human life and the cycle of the seasons, but nevertheless, one talks
about the winter of life and the spring of life, and so the image becomes something
that is powerful in our thinking. Furthermore, when we try to think philosophically
in abstract concepts about the nature of the universe, we often do some very
weird things. It is considered nowadays naive to think of God as an old gentleman
with a long white beard who sits on a golden throne and is surrounded with winged
angels. We say, "Now, no sensible person could possibly believe that God
is just like that." Therefore, if you become more sophisticated and you
follow Saint Thomas Aquinas, you think of God as "necessary being."
If you think with Buddhists you think of God as the undifferentiated void, or
as the infinite essence. But actually, however rarefied those concepts sound,
they are just as anthropomorphic, that is to say, just as human and in the form
of the human mind, as the picture of God as the old gentleman with the white
beard, or as d'Lord in the old television show Green Pastures, wearing a top
hat and smoking a cigar.
All ideas about the world, whether they be religious, philosophical, or scientific,
are translations of the physical world and of worlds beyond the physical into
the terms and shapes of the human mind. There is no such thing as a nonanthropomorphic
idea. The advantage of d'Lord in talking about these things is that nobody takes
it quite seriously, whereas the undifferentiated aesthetic continuum could be
taken seriously. That would be a great mistake, because you would think you
understood what the ultimate reality is. So, I am going to use very largely
naive mythological terms to discuss these matters. If you are a devout Christian,
you must not be offended by this. You will naturally think that you have risen
now to a more superior idea of these things than these very simple terms derived
from the imagery of the Bible and the medieval church. I shall discuss Hinduism
in the same way, and I am going to begin with Hinduism to give you a sort of
fundamental account of what it is all about.
I imagine some of you were present at the lecture I gave in the university on
religion and art, in which I discussed the view of the world as drama. Now I
want to go more thoroughly into this, because the Hindu view of the universe
is fundamentally based on the idea of drama, that is to say, of an actor playing
parts. The basic actor in this drama is called Brahma, and this word comes from
the Sanskrit root bra, which means 44 to swell or expand." The Hindu idea
of Brahma, the Supreme Being, is linked with the idea of the self. In you, deep
down you feel that there is what you call "I," and when you say "I
am," that in Sanskrit is aham. And everybody, when asked what his name
is, replies, "I am 1. I am 1, myself." So, there is the thought that
in all life, the self is the fundamental thing; it means the center. The Brahma
is looked upon as the self and the center of the whole universe, and the fundamental
idea is that there is only one self. Each one of us is that self, only it radiates
like a sun or a star. So, just as the sun has innumerable rays, or just as you
can focus the whole sun through a magnifying glass and concentrate it on one
point, or as an octopus has many tentacles, or as a sow has many tits, so, in
these ways, Brahma is wearing all faces that exist, and they are all the masks
of Brahma. They are not only human faces but also animal faces, insect faces,
vegetable faces, and mineral faces; everything is the supreme self playing at
being that.
The fundamental process of reality is, according to the Hindu myth, hide-and-seek,
or lost and found. That is the basis of all games. When you start to play with
a baby, you take out a book and you hide your face behind it. Then you peek
out at the baby, and then you peek out the other way, and the baby begins to
giggle, because a baby, being near to the origins of things, knows intuitively
that hide-and-seek is the basis of it all. Children like to sit in a high chair,
to have something on the tray, and "make it gone.' Then somebody picks
it up and puts it back, and they make it gone again.
Now then, that is a very sensible arrangement. It is called in Sanskrit lila,
and that means "sport" or "play 5 " but the play is hide-and-seek.
Now, let's go a little bit into the nature of hide-and-seek. I don't want to
insult your intelligence by telling you some of the most elementary things that
exist, but, really, everything is a question of appearing and disappearing.
For example, if I sit next to the object of my desire and I put my hand on the
person's knee and leave it there, after a while they will cease to notice it.
But if I gently pat them on the knee because now I'm there and now I'm not,
it will be more noticeable. So, all reality is a matter of coming and going.
It is vibration, like a wave of positive and negative electricity. It is up
and down, and things like wood appear to be solid, much in the same way that
the blades of a fastmoving electric fan appear to be solid. So, the vast agitation
that is going on in the electrical structure of solid things is a terrific agitation
that will not allow the agitation called my hand to go through it.
Other kinds of agitation, like X rays, are so constructed that they can get
through. So, everything is basically coming and going. Take, for example, sound.
If you listen to sound and slow the sound down, just as when you look with a
magnifying glass you find that solid things are full of holes, when you magnify
sound you find it is full of silences. Sound is sound-silence. There is no such
thing as pure sound, just as there is no such thing as pure something-something
always goes together with nothing. Solids are always found in spaces, and no
spaces are found except where there are solids. You might imagine there being
a space without any solid in it, but you will never, never encounter one, because
you will be there in the form of a solid to find out about it. They go together,
these things, solid and space. The positive and the negative and the "here
we are and here we aren't" all go together in the same way, like the back
and front of a coin. You can't have a coin that has a back and no front. The
only thing that gets anywhere near that is a Mobius strip, which is a mathematical
construct in which the back and the front are the same, but that only shows
in a more vivid way how backs and fronts go together. So, the whole thing is
based on that.
Now, once we have this game there are two different things, but they are really
the same. The Brahma is what is basic, but the Brahma manifests itself in what
are called the dvanva, and that makes the pairs of opposites (duality). Dva
is the Sanskrit word for "two," which becomes duo in Latin and dual
in English. Two is the basis, and you cannot go behind two, because one has
an opposite: the opposite of one is none. Now, what is in common between one
and none? No one can sayyou can't mention it. It is called Brahma, and it is
sometimes called om. Yet you can't really think of what is in common between
black and white, because there is obviously a conspiracy between black and white;
they are always found together. Tweedledee and Tweedledum agreed to have a battle,
and there is always an agreement underlying this difference; that is what we
call implicit, but the difference is explicit. So, the first step in what
you might call the hide phase of the game of hide-andseek is to lose sight of
the implicit unity between black and white, yes and no, and existence and nonexistence.
Losing sight of the fundamental unity is called Maya, a word that means many
things, but primarily it means "creative power," or "magic,"
and also "illusion"-the illusion that the opposites are really separate
from each other. Once you think that they are really separate from each other
you can have a very thrilling game. The game is, "Oh dear, black might
win," or "We must be quite sure that white wins." Now, which
one ought to win? When you look at this page, you would say the reality here
is the writing; that is what is significant. Yet there are many other patterns
that you can find in which you are undecided in your mind as to which is the
figure and which is the background. It could be a black design on a white sheet,
or it could be a white design on a black sheet, and the universe is very much
like that. Space, or the background of things, is not nothing, but people tend
to be deceived about this. If I draw a circle, most people, when asked what
I have drawn, will say that I have drawn a circle, or a disk, or a ball. Very
few people will ever suggest that I have drawn a hole in a wall, because people
think of the inside first, rather than thinking of the outside. But actually
these two sides go together-you cannot have what is "in here" unless
you have what is "out there."
All artists, architects, and people concerned with the organization of space
think quite as much about the background behind things and containing things
as they do about the things so contained. It is all significant and it is all
important, but the game is "Let's pretend that this doesn't exist."
So, this is the pretending: "Oh, black might win,' or "Oh, white might
win." This is the foundation of all the great games that human beings play-ofcheckers,
of chess, and of the simple children's games of hide-and-seek.
It is, of course, the tradition of chess that white gets the first move, because
black is the side of the devil. All complications and all possibilities of life
lie in this game of black and white. In the beginning of the game, the two pairs
are divided, that is to say, dismemberedcut, to separate. In the end of the
game, when everything comes together, they are re-membered. To dismember is
to hide, or to lose. To remember is to seek and to find. In Hindu mythology,
Brahma plays this game through periods of time called kalpas, and every kalpa
is 4,320,000 years long. For one kalpa he forgets who he is and manifests himself
as the great actor of all of us. Then, for another kalpa, he wakes up; he remembers
who he is and is at peace. So, the period in which he manifests the worlds is
called a manavantara, and the period in which he withdraws from the game is
called a pralaya. These go on and on forever and ever, and it never becomes
boring, because the forgetting period makes you forget everything that has happened
before. For example, although it inherits genes from the most distant past,
each time a baby is born it confronts the world anew and is astonished and surprised
at everything. As you get old, you become heavy with memories, like a book that
people have written on, as if you were to go on writing on a page and eventually
the whole thing were to become black. Then, you would have to take out white
chalk and start writing that way. Well, that would be like the change between
life and death.
In popular Hinduism, it is believed that each of us contains not only the supreme
self-the one ultimate reality, the Brahma, who looks out from all eyes and hears
through all ears-but also an individualized self. This self reincarnates from
life to life in a sort of progressive or a regressive way, according to your
karinathe Sanskrit word that means "your doing," from the root kre,
"to do." There is a time, then, in which we become involved and get
more and more tied up in the toils of the world, and are more subject to desire
and to passions and to getting ourselves hopelessly out on the limb. Then, there
follows a later time when the individual is supposed to withdraw and gradually
evolve until he becomes a completely enlightened man, a mukti. A mukti is a
liberated person who has attained the state called moksha, or liberation, where
he has found himself. He knows who he is. He knows that he, deep down in himself
(and that you, deep down in yourself) are all the one central self, and that
this whole apparent differentiation of the one from the other is an immense
and glorious illusion.
Now, this is a dramatic idea. In drama, we have a convention of the proscenium
arch on the stage and we have a convention of onstage and offstage. There is
the curtain, or backdrop, in front of which the actors appear, and behind that
there is a dressing room, called the greenroom. In the greenroom, they put on
and take off their masks. in Latin the word for the masks worn by the players
in classical drama is persona. The Latin word per means "through,"
and sona means "sound"-that through which the sound comes, because
the mask had a megaphone-shaped mouth that would "throw" the sound
in an open-air theater. So, dramatis personae, the list of the players in a
play, is the list of masks that are going to be worn. Insofar as we now speak
about the real self in any human being as the person by inquiring, "Are
you a real person?" we have inverted the meaning of the word. We have made
the "mask" word mean "the real player underneath," and that
shows how deeply involved we are in the illusion. The whole point of aplay is
for the actor to use his skill to persuade the audience, despite the fact that
the audience knows it's at the play, and to have them sitting on the edge of
their chairs, weeping or in terror because they think it is real. Of course,
the Hindu idea is that the greatest of all players, the master player behind
the whole scene, who is putting on the big act called existence, is so good
an actor that he takes himself in. He is at once the actor and the audience,
and he is enchanted by his playing. So, the word maya, or illusion, also means
"to be enchanted." Do you know what to be enchanted is? It is to be
listening to a chant and to be completely involved in it-or perhaps amazed.
What is it to be amazed? It is to be caught in a maze, or spellbound. And how
do you get spellbound and what do you spell? You spell words. So, by the ideas
we have about the world and through our belief in the reality of different things
and events, we are completely carried away and forget altogether who we are.
There is a story about a great sage, Narada, who came to Vishnu. Vishnu is one
of the aspects of the godhead, Brahma. Brahma is usually the word given to the
creator aspect, Vishnu to the preserving aspect, and Shiva to the destructive
aspect. When Narada came to Vishnu and said, "What is the secret of your
maya?" Vishnu took him and threw him into a pool. The moment he fell under
the water he was born as a princess in a very great family, and went through
all the experiences of childhood as a little girl. She finally married a prince
from another kingdom and went to live with him in his kingdom. They lived there
in tremendous prosperity, with palaces and peacocks, but suddenly there was
a war and their kingdom was attacked and utterly destroyed. The prince himself
was killed in battle, and he was cremated. As a dutiful wife, the princess was
about to throw herself weeping on o the funeral pyre and burn herself in an
act of suttee or self-sacrifice. But suddenly Narada woke to find himself being
pulled out of the pool by his hair by Vishnu, who said, "For whom were
you weeping?" So, that is the idea of the whole world being a magical illusion,
but done so skillfullyby whom? By you, basically. Not "you" the empirical
ego, not "you" who is just a kind of focus of conscious attention
with memories that are strung together into what you call "my everyday
self." Rather, it is the "you" that is responsible for growing
your hair, coloring your eyes, arranging the shape of your bones. The deeply
responsible "you" is what is responsible for all this.
So this, then, is in sum the Hindu dramatic idea of the cosmos as an endless
hide-and-seek game: now you see it, now you don't. It is saying to everybody,
"Of course you worry and are afraid of disease, death, pain, and all that
sort of thing. But really, it is all an illusion, so there is nothing to be
afraid of." And you think, "Well, but my goodness, supposing when
I die there just won't be anything? It will be like going to sleep and never
waking up." Isn't that awful, just terrible-nothing, forever? But that
doesn't matter. When you go into that period called death, or forgetting, that's
just so that you won't remember, because if you did always remember it, it would
be a bore. But you are wiser than you know, because you arrange to forget and
to die, and keep going in and out of the light. But underneath, at the basis
of all this, between black and white, between life and death, is something unmentionable.
That's the real you, that's the secret-only you don't give away the show. All
of you are now privy to a secret; you are initiates. You know this neat little
thing, but you may not have experienced it. You know about it, but you must
not give the show away. Don't run out in the streets suddenly and say to everybody,
"I'm God," because they won't understand you.
So then, there are people whom we will call farout. They are far out into the
illusion, and they are really lost; they are deeply committed to the human situation.
Opposite them are the far-in people, who are in touch with the center.
Now, the very far-out people are to be commended, because they are doing the
most adventurous thing. They are lost-they are the explorers and are way out
in the jungles. In all societies, in some way or other, the far-out people keep
in touch with the far-in people. The far-in people are there-they may be monks,
yogis, priests, or philosophers, but they remind the far-out people, "After
all, you're not really lost, but it's a great thrill and very brave of you to
think that you are." So then, some of the far-in people act as what is
called a guru, and the function of a guru is to help you wake up from the dream
when your time comes.
In the ordinary life of the primitive Hindu community, there are four castes:
the caste of priests, of warriors, of merchants, and of laborers. Every man
who belongs to the Hindu community belongs to one of the four castes, which
he is born into. That seems to us rather restrictive, because if you were born
the son of a university professor you might much prefer to be a waterskiing
instructor, and that would mean a shift in caste from what is called the Brahmana
because the professor in Hindu life would come under the priestly caste. But
in a time when there were no schools and everybody received his education from
his father, the father considered it a duty to educate the boys, the mother
considered it her duty to educate the girls, and there was no choice of a boy
being something other than his father. He was apprenticed to him while very
young, and the child, as you know, naturally takes an interest in what the parents
are doing and tends to want to do it, too.
So, it was based on that, and although it seemsprimitive to our way of thinking,
that is the way it was. When a man attained the age of maturity in the middle
of his life, and had raised a son old enough to take over the family business,
he abandoned caste. He became an upper outcast, called a sannyasi and he went
outside the village, back to the forest. So there are two stages of life: grihasta,
or "householder," and vanaprastha, or "forest dweller."
We came out of the forest and we formed civilized villages. The hunters settled
down and started agriculture. Then they formed into castes, and every man, as
it were, had a function: tinker, tailor, soldier, sailor, rich man, poor man,
beggar man, thief-but those are all parts, those are big acts. Who are you really,
behind your mask?
So, in the middle of life it is considered up to you to find out who you are.
You are going to die in a few years. Before you die, wake up from the illusion
so that you won't be afraid of death. When you become vanaprastha you go to
a guru, and the guru teaches you yoga, which is the art of waking up. In other
words, to remember, as distinct from dismember, is to find out again that our
separateness is maya, or in "seeming" only-it is not the fundamental
reality. We are all one. Now, how does the guru teach you that? He does it mostly
by kidding you. He has a funny look in his eye, as if to say, "Brahma,
old boy, you can't fool me." The basic question that all gurus ask their
students is, "Who are you?" The great guru of modern times was Sri
Ramana Maharshi. Wealthy philosophical ladies from the United States used to
go to ask him, "Who was I in my former incarnation?" because they
wanted to find out they were Cleopatra, or something like that. He would say,
"Who asked the question? Who is it that wants to know? Find out who you
are." Well, if you want to find out who you are, you get into a very funny
mix-up because it is like trying to bite your teeth. "Who is it that wants
to know who I am? If only I could catch that thing.' And the guru really says,
"But now, let's get going on this, let's concentrate, you see and get that
thing." So, he has people meditating on their own essence, and all the
time he is looking at them with a funny look in his eye. They think, "Oh
dear, that guru, he knows me through and through. He reads all my secret and
impure thoughts. He realizes my desires and how badly I concentrate." But
really, the guru is laughing himself silly inside, because he sees that this
is the Brahma being quite unwilling to wake up, or not really ready. Suddenly
there comes a shock-the moment when you realize the truth about that thumb you
were catching. You say, "Oh dear, it's, after all, the same hand,"
and there is a shock of recognition. Suddenly you wake up and exclaim, "Of
course!" Now, that moment is moksha, or liberation. We have many names
for it, but no very clear names. In the West we call it mystical experience,
cosmic consciousness, or something of that kind. We find it very difficult to
express it in our religious language because we would have to say at that moment,
"I have at last discovered that I am the Lord God." We put people
in asylums who discover this, if this is the way they express it, because it
really is for us the one sure sign of being completely out of your head. Whereas
in India when somebody says "I am the Lord God," they say, "Well,
naturally. Congratulations, at last you found out."
Our idea of the Lord God, as we shall see, is different from the Hindu idea.
You notice that Hindu images of the divinities usually have many arms, and that
is because they are conceived of as sort of cosmic centipedes. The centipede
does not think how to use each leg, just as you don't think how to use every
nerve cell in your nervous system. They just seem to use themselves; they work
automatically. Well, many things working automatically together is the Hindu
idea of omnipotence, whereas our idea is more technical. The person in supreme
control would have to know how he does every single thing. You would ask, "God,
how do you create rabbits?" as if he doesn't just pull them out of hats
like a stage magician but actually knows in every detail down to the last molecule
or subdivision thereof how it is done and could explain it.
Hindus would say that if you ask God, "How do you make a rabbit?"
he would say, "That is no problem at all-I just become it." "Well,
how do you become it?" "Well, you just do it, like you open your hand
or close it. You just do it. You don't have to know how in words." What
we mean by understanding and explaining things is being able to put them into
words. We do that first by analyzing them into many bits. In the same way, when
you want to measure the properties of a curve, which is complicated, in order
to say how that curve is shaped, you have to reduce it to tiny points and measure
them. So you put a grid of graph paper across, and by telling the position on
the graph of where the curve is at every point, you get an accurate description
of what that curve is, or how it is, in scientific terms. That is what we mean
when we talk about understanding things, but obviously there is another sense
of "to understand." You understand how to walk even if you can't explain
it, because you can do it. Can you drive a car? Yes. How do you drive a car?
If you could put it into words, it might be easier to teach people how to do
it in the first place, but one understands and learns many things about driving
a car that are never explained in words. You just watch somebody else do it,
and you do the same thing.
In this way, then, the Hindu and the Western ideas of God are somewhat different.
So, when the Hindu realizes that he is God, and that you are too, he sees the
dance of God in everybody all around him in every direction. He does not assume
certain things that a Western person might assume if they had the same experience.
For example, you know the difference between what you do voluntarily and what
happens to you involuntarily. When I see someone else move at the far end of
the room, it comes to me with a signal attached to it; that experience is involuntary.
When I move, it comes to me with a voluntary signal attached to it. Nevertheless,
both experiences are states and changes in my nervous system, but we do not
ordinarily realize that. When we see somebody else doing something, we think
that it is outside our nervous system. It isn't at all; it is happening in our
own brain. Now, if you should discover that it is happening inside you, it might
just as well come to you with a voluntary signal attached to it. You could say,
"I've got the feeling that I'm doing everything that everybody else is
doing. Everything that I see and that I am aware of is my action."
Now, if you misunderstood that, you might think that you were able to control
everything that everybody else does, and that you really were God in that kind
of technical sense of God. You have to be careful what sort of interpretations
you put on these experiences. It is one thing to have an authentic experience
of the stars. It is quite another thing to be able to describe accurately their
relative positions. It is one thing to have an experience of cosmic consciousness,
or liberation, but quite another thing to give a philosophically or scientifically
accurate account of it. Yet this experience is the basis of the whole Hindu
philosophy. It is as if one comes into the world in the beginning having what
Freud called the "oceanic consciousness" of a baby, but the baby does
not distinguish, apparently, between experiences of itself and experiences of
the external world. Therefore, to the baby, it is all one. Furthermore, a baby
has for a long time been part of its mother and has floated in the ocean of
the womb. So it has the sense from the beginning of what is really to an enlightened
person totally obviousthat the universe is one single organism.
Our social way of bringing up children is to make them concentrate on the bits
and to ignore the totality. We point at things, give them names, and say, "Look
at that." But children very often ask you what things are, and you realize
you do not have names for them. They point out backgrounds, and the shape of
spaces between things, and say, "What's that?" You may brush it aside
and say, "Well, that's not important. That doesn't have a name." You
keep pointing out the significant things to them, and above all what everybody
around the child does is to tell the child who he is, and what sort of part
he is expected to play-what sort of mask he must wear. I remember very well
as a child that I knew I had several different identities, but I knew that I
would probably have to settle for one of them; the adult world was pushing me
toward a choice. I was one person with my parents at home, another person altogether
at my uncle's home, and still quite another person with my own peer group. But
society was trying to say, "Now make up your mind as to who you really
are." So I would imitate some other child whom I had admired. I would come
home and my mother would say, "Alan, that's not you, that's Peter. Be yourself
now." Otherwise, you are somehow phony, and the point is not to be phony
but to be real.
However, this whole big act is phony, but it is a marvelous act. A genuine person
is one who knows he is a big act and does it with complete zip. He is what we
would call committed, and yet he is freed by becoming completely committed and
knowing that the world is an act. There isn't anybody doing it. We like to think
things stand behind processes, and that things "do" the processes,
but that is just a convention of grammar. We have verbs and nouns, and every
noun can obviously be described by a verb. We say "the mat." We can
also say 14 the matting." Likewise, we can say "cating" for "cat."
When we want to say, "The cating is sitting," however, we say, "The
cat sits," using a noun and a verb-whereas it is all verb; it is all a
big act. But remember, you mustn't give the show away.
I remember a very wise man who used to give lectures like this, and when he
came in he used to be silent. He would look at the audience, gaze at Leveryone
there for a particularly long time, and everybody would begin feeling vaguely
embarrassed. When he had gazed at them for a long time he would 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, or a hallucination as to who
they are. I am terribly interested in this problem of identity. I try to find
out what people mean when they say the word 1. 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 is 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 in the stomach. But in American culture today, and in the Western culture
in general, most people feel that they exist in their heads. There is, as it
were, a little man sitting inside the center of the skull who has a television
screen in front of him that gives him all messages from the eyeballs. He has
earphones on that give him all messages from the ears, and he has in front of
him a control panel with various dials and buttons, which enable him to influence
the arms and legs and to get all sorts of information from the nerve ends. And
that is you. So, we say in popular speech, "I have a body," not "I
am a body." I have one because I am the owner of the body in the same way
as I own an automobile. I take the automobile to a mechanic and, occasionally,
in the same way, I take my body to the mechanic-the surgeon, the dentist, and
the doctor-and have it repaired. It belongs to me, it goes along with me, and
I am in it.
For example, a child can ask its mother, "Mom, who would I have been if
my father had been someone else?" That seems to be 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-old 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; there is some
doubt about it. I say, "I think, I walk, I talk," but I don't say,
"I beat my heart," "I shape my bones," and "I grow
my hair." I feel that my heart beating, my hair growing, and my bones shaping
is something that happens to me, and I don't know how it is done. But other
things I do, and 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 are the same sort of thing that I am, but also they are all little men
locked up inside their skins. They are intelligent, have feelings and values,
and are capable of love and virtue. Number two is the world that is nonhuman-we
call it nature, and that is stupid. It has no mind, it has emotions maybe, like
animals, but on the whole it's a pretty grim dog-eat-dog business. When it gets
to the geological level, it is as dumb as dumb can be. It is a mechanism, and
there is an awful lot of it. That is what we live in the middle of, and the
purpose of being human is, we feel, to subjugate nature, and to make it obey
our will. We arrived here, and we don't feel that we belong in this world-it
is foreign to us: in the words of the poet A.E. Housman, "I, a stranger
and afraid, in a world I never made." All around us today we see the signs
of man's battle with nature. I am living at the moment in a marvelous house
overlooking a lake, and on the other side of the lake the whole hill has suddenly
been interrupted with a ghastly gash. 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, and these houses will eventually fall down the hill because
the builders are causing soil erosion and they are 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 is no point in converting
the hills into something flat and then going and living there. You can do that
already on the level ground. So, as more people live in the hills, the more
they spoil the hills, and they are just the same as people living on the flat
ground. How stupid can you get? Well, 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 and confronted with a world, an external, alien, foreign
world that is not us.
Now, according to certain of these great ancient philosophies, like Buddhism,
this sensation of being a separate, lonely individual is a hallucination. It
is a hallucination brought about by various causes, the way we are brought up
being the chief of them, of course. For example, the main thing that we're all
taught in childhood is that we must do that which will only be appreciated if
we 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." This also is seen in politics"Everybody
must vote." Imagine, you are members of a democracy, and you must be members
of the democracy-you are ordered to. You see, this is crazy. Also "Thou
shalt love the Lord thy God." Is that a commandment or a joke? However,
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, and furthermore that you must survive, that becomes
a kind of compulsion, and you get mixed up. Of course, it is very simple to
get mixed up if you think you must do something that will only be 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 are describing it carefully. We are going to describe
very carefully what a human being is and what a human being does. We find that
as we go on with that description, we can't describe the human being without
describing the environment. We cannot 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 except me. You couldn't
see the curtain behind me, or the microphone. You could only see me, and that
is 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. What you would be looking at would
be my necktie, my nose, my eyes, and so on, but you wouldn't see my edges. You
would be confronted with a very strange monster, and you wouldn't know it was
a human being. 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, meaning "ignorance," although
it is better to pronounce it "ignorance." Having a deluded sense of
identity is the result of ignoring certain things. So, when you look at me,
I cause you to ignore my background, because I concentrate attention on me,
just like a conjurer or stage magician misdirects your attention in order to
perform his tricks. 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 magic happens. That's ignorance-selective attention-focusing your
consciousness on one thing to the exclusion of many other things. In this way
we concentrate on the thingsthe figures-and we ignore the background. So, we
come to think that the figure exists independently of the background, but actually
they go together. 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 cannot separate it. So there is 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 a scientist starts carefully paying attention to the behavior
of people and things, he discovers that they go together, and that the behavior
of the organism is inseparable from the behavior of its environment. So, if
I am to describe what I am doing, am I just waving my legs back and forth? No,
I am walking. 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, stage, and situation. Obviously, if there isn't
a ground underneath me, I cannot 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/environment 5 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 is focused, expressing itself here, and you are the whole cosmos expressing
itself there, and there, and there, and there, and so on. In other words, the
reality of my self fundamentally is not something inside my skin but everything,
and I mean everything, outside my skin, but doing what is my skin and what is
inside it. In the same way, when the ocean has a wave on it, the wave is not
separate from the ocean. Every wave on the ocean is the whole ocean waving.
The ocean waves, and it says, "Yoo-hoo, I'm here. I can wave in many different
ways-I can wave this way and 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-your name and address, your telephone number, your social
security number, and what sort of role you are supposed to occupy in society.
But you would know that this particular role that you play and this particular
personality that you are is superficial, and the real you is all that there
is.
SWALLOWING A BALL OF HOT IRON
CHAPTER
FOUR
The inversion, or turning upside down, of the sense of identity, of the state
of consciousness that the average person has, is the objective of Buddhistic
disciplines. Now, perhaps I can make this clearer to you by going into a little
detail as to how these disciplines work. The method of teaching something in
Buddhism is rather different from methods of teaching that we use in the Western
world. In the Western world, a good teacher is regarded as someone who makes
the subject matter easy for the student, a person who explains things cleverly
and clearly so you can take a course in mathematics without tears. In the Oriental
world, they have an almost exactly opposite conception, and that is that a good
teacher is a person who makes you find out something for yourself. In other
words, learn to swim by throwing the baby into the water. There is a story used
in Zen about how a burglar taught his child how to burgle. He took him one night
on a burgling expedition, locked him up in a chest in the house that he was
burgling, and left him. The poor little boy was all alone locked up in the chest,
and he began to think, "How on earth am I going to get out?" So he
suddenly called out, "Fire, fire," and everybody began running all
over the place. They heard this shriek coming from inside the chest and they
unlocked it, and he rushed out and shot out into the garden. Everybody was in
hot pursuit, calling out, "Thief, thief," and as he went by a well
he picked up a rock and dropped it into the well. Everybody thought the poor
fellow had jumped into the well and committed suicide, and so he got away. He
returned home and his father said, "Congratulations, you have learned the
art."
William Blake once said, "A fool who persists in his folly will become
wise." The method of teaching used by these great Eastern teachers is to
make fools persist in their folly, but very rigorously, very consistently, and
very hard. Now, having given you the analogy and image, let's go to the specific
situation. Supposing you want to study Buddhism under a Zen master-what will
happen to you? Well, first of all, let's ask why you would want to do this anyway.
I can make the situation fairly universal. It might not be a Zen master that
you go to-it might be a Methodist minister, a Catholic priest, or a psychoanalyst.
But what's the matter with you? Why do you go? Surely the reason that we all
would be seekers is that we feel some disquiet about ourselves. Many of us want
to get rid of ourselves. We cannot stand ourselves and so we watch television,
go to the movies, read mystery stories, and join churches in order to forget
ourselves and to merge with something greater than ourselves. We want to get
away from this ridiculous thing locked up in a bag of skin. You may say, "I
have a problem. I hurt, I suffer, and I'm neurotic," or whatever it is.
You go to the teacher and say, "My problem's me. Change me."
Now, if you go to a Zen teacher, he will say, "Well, I have nothing to
teach. There is no problemeverything's perfectly clear." You think that
one over, and you say, "He's probably being cagey. He's testing me out
to see if I really want to be his student. I know, according to everybody else
who's been through this, that in order to get this man to take me on I must
persist." Do you know the saying, "Anybody who goes to a psychiatrist
ought to have his head examined?" There is a double take in that saying.
So, in the same way, anybody who goes with a spiritual problem to a Zen master
defines himself as a nut, and the teacher does everything possible to make him
as nutty as possible. The teacher says, "Quite honestly, I haven't anything
to tell you. I don't teach anything-I have no doctrine. I have nothing whatsoever
to sell you." So the student thinks, "My, this is very deep,"
because this nothing that he is talking about, this nothing that he teaches,
is what they call in Buddhism sunyata. Sunyata is Sanskrit for "nothingness,"
and it is supposed to be the ultimate reality. But if you know anything about
these doctrines, this does not mean just ccnothing there at all" or just
"blank," but it means "nothing-ness." It is the transcendental
reality behind all separate and individual things, and that is something very
deep and profound. So, he knows that when the teacher said, "I have nothing
to teach," he meant this very esoteric no-thing. Well, he might also say
then, "If you have nothing to teach, what are all these students doing
around here?" And the teacher says, "They are not doing anything.
They are just a lot of stupid people who live here."
He knows again this "stupid" does not mean just straight stupid, but
the higher stupidity of people who are humble and do not have intellectual pride.
Finally, the student, having gone out of his way to define himself as a damn
fool in need of help, has absolutely worked himself into this situation. He
has defined himself as a nut, and then the teacher accepts him. The teacher
says, "Now, I am going to ask you a question. I want to know who you are
before your mother and father conceived you. That is to say, you have come to
me with a problem, and you have said, 'I have a problem. I want to get one up
on this universe.' Now, who is it that wants to get one up? Who are you? Who
is this thing called your ego, your soul, your 1, your identity, for whom your
parents provided a body? Show me that. Furthermore, I'm from Missouri and I
don't want any words and I want to be shown."
The student opens his mouth to answer, but the teacher says, "Uh-uh, not
yet; you're not ready." Then he takes him back and introduces him to the
chief student of all the so-called Zen monks who live there together, and the
chief student says, "Now, what we do here is we have a discipline, but
the main part of the discipline is meditation. We all sit cross-legged in a
row and learn how to breathe and be still: in other words, to do nothing. Now,
you mustn't go to sleep and you mustn't fall into a trance. You have to stay
wide awake, not think anything, but perfectly do nothing." During meditation,
there is a monk walking up and down all the time with a long flat stick, and
if you go to sleep or fall into a trance, he hits you on the back. So instead
of becoming dreamy, you stay quite clear, and wide awake, but still doing nothing.
The idea is that out of the state of profoundly doing nothing, you will be able
to tell the teacher who you really are.
In other words, the question "Who are you before your father and mother
conceived you?" is a request for an act of perfect sincerity and spontaneity.
It is as if I were to ask, "Look now, will you be absolutely genuine with
me? No deception please. I want you to do something that expresses you without
the slightest deception. No more role-acting, no more playing games with me;
I want to see you!" Now, imagine, could you really be that honest with
somebody else, especially a spiritual teacher, because you know he looks right
through you and sees all your secret thoughts. He knows the very second you
have been a little bit phony, and that bugs you. The same is true of a psychiatrist.
You might be sitting in there discussing your problems with him and absentmindedly
you start to pick your nose. The psychiatrist suddenly says to you, "Is
your finger comfortable there? Do you like that?" And you know your Freudian
slip is showing. What do fingers symbolize, and what do nostrils symbolize?
Uh-oh. You quickly put your hand down and say, "Oh no, it is nothing, I
was just picking my nose." But the analyst says, "Oh really? Then
why are you justifying it? Why are you trying to explain it away?" He has
you every way you turn. Well, that is the art of psychoanalysis, and in Zen
it is the same thing.
When you are challenged to be perfectly genuine, it is like saying to a child,
"Now darling, come out here and play, and don't be self-conscious."
In other wor s I could say to you, "If any of you come here tonight at
exactly midnight, and put your hands on this stage, you can have granted any
wish you want to, provided you don't think of a green elephant." Of course,
everybody will come, and they will put their hands here, and they will be very
careful not to think about a green elephant. The point is that if we transfer
this concept to the dimension of spirituality, where the highest ideal is to
be unselfish and to let go of one's self, it is again trying to be unselfish
for selfish reasons. You cannot be unselfish by a decision of the will any more
than you can decide not to think of a green elephant. There is a story about
Confucius, who one day met Lao-tzu, a great Chinese philosopher. Lao-tzu said,
"Sir, what is your system?" And Confucius said, "It is charity,
love of one's neighbor, and elimination of self-interest." Lao-tzu replied,
"Stuff and nonsense. Your elimination of self is a positive manifestation
of self. Look at the universe. The stars keep their order, the trees and plants
grow upward without exception, and the waters flow. Be like this."
These are all examples of the tricks the master might be playing on you. You
came to him with the idea in your mind that you are a separate, independent,
isolated individual, and he is simply saying, "Show me this individual."
I had a friend who was studying Zen in Japan, and he became pretty desperate
to produce the answer of who he really is. On his way to an interview with the
master to give an answer to the problem, he noticed a very common sight in Japan,
a big bullfrog sitting around in the garden. He swooped this bullfrog up in
his hand and dropped it in the sleeve of his kimono. Then he went to the master
to give the answer of who he was. He suddenly produced the bullfrog, and the
master said, "Mmmmm, too intellectual." In other words, this answer
is too contrived. It is too much like Zen. "You have been reading too many
books. It is not the genuine thing," the master said. So, after a while,
what happens is the student finds that there is absolutely no way of being his
true self. Not only is there no way of doing it, there is also no way of doing
it by not doing it.
To make this clearer, allow me to put it into Christian terms: "Thou shalt
love the Lord, thy God." What are you going to do about that? If you try
very hard to love God you may ask yourself, "Why am I doing this?"
You will find out you are doing it because you want to be right. After all,
the Lord is the master of the universe, and if you don't love him, you're going
to be in a pretty sad state. So, you realize you are loving him just because
you are afraid of what will happen to you if you don't. And then you think,
"That is pretty lousy love, isn't it? That's a bad motivation. I wish I
could change that. I wish I could love the Lord out of a genuine heart."
But, why do you want to change? You realize that the reason you want to have
a different kind of motive is that you have the same motive. So, you say "Oh
for heaven's sake, God, I'm a mess. Will you please help me out?" Then
he reminds you, "Why are you doing that? Now, you are just giving up, aren't
you? You are asking someone else to take over your problem. " Suddenly
you find you are stuck.
What is called the Zen problem, or koan, is likened to a person who has swallowed
a ball of red-hot iron. He cannot gulp it down and he cannot spit it out. Or
it is like a mosquito biting an iron bull. It is the nature of a mosquito to
bite and it is the nature of an iron bull to be unbiteable. Both go on doing
what is their nature, and so, nothing can happen. Soon you realize you are absolutely
up against it. There is absolutely no answer to this problem, and no way out.
Now, what does that mean? If I cannot do the right thing by doing, and I cannot
do the right thing by not doing, what does it mean? It means, of course, that
I who essayed to do all this is a hallucination. There is no independent self
to be produced. There is no way at all of showing it, because it is not there.
When you recover from the illusion and you suddenly wake up, you think, "Whew,
what a relief." That is called satori. When this kind of experience happens,
you discover that what you are is no longer this sort of isolated center of
action and experience locked up in your skin. The teacher has asked you to produce
that thing, to show it to him genuine and naked, and you couldn't find it. So,
it isn't there, and when you see clearly that it isn't there, you have a new
sense of identity. You realize that what you are is the whole world of nature,
doing this. Now, that is difficult for many Western people, because it suggests
a kind of fatalism. It suggests that the individual is nothing more than the
puppet of cosmic forces. However, when your own inner sense of identity changes
from being the separate individual to being what the entire cosmos is doing
at this place, you become not a puppet but more truly and more expressively
an individual than ever. This is the same paradox that the Christian knows in
the form, "Whosoever would save his soul shall lose it."
Now, I think that this is something of very great importance to the Western
world today. We have developed an immensely powerful technology. We have stronger
means of changing the physical universe than have ever existed before. How are
we going to use it? A Chinese proverb says that if the wrong man uses the right
means, the right means work in the wrong way. Let us assume that our technological
knowledge is the right means. What kind of people are going to use this knowledge?
Are they going to be people who hate nature and feel alienated from it, or people
who love the physical world and feet that the physical world is their own personal
body? The whole physical universe, right out to the galaxies, is simply one's
extended body. Now, at the moment, the general attitude of our technologists
who are exploring space is represented in the phrase "the conquest of space."
They are building enormous, shelllike, phallic objects that blast into the sky.
This is downright ridiculous, because no one is going to get anywhere in a rocket.
It takes a terribly long time to even get to the moon, and it is going to take
longer than anybody can live to get outside the solar system, just to begin
with. The proper way to study space is not with rockets but with radio astronomy.
Instead of exploding with a tough fist at the sky, become more sensitive and
develop subtler senses, and everything will come to you. Be more open and be
more receptive, and eventually you will develop an instrument that will examine
a piece of rock on Mars with greater care than you could if you were holding
it in your own hand. Let it come to you.
The whole attitude of using technology as a method of fighting the world will
succeed only in destroying the world, as we are doing. We use absurd and uninformed
and shortsighted methods of getting rid of insect pests, forcing our fruit and
tomatoes to grow, stripping our hills of trees and so on, thinking that this
is some kind of progress. Actually, it is turning everything into a junk heap.
It is said that Americans, who are in the forefront of technological progress,
are materialists. Nothing is further from the truth. American culture is dedicated
to the hatred of material and to its transformation into junk. Look at our cities.
Do they look as though they were made by people who love material? Everything
is made out of ticky-tacky, which is a combination of plaster of paris, papier-mich6
and plastic glue, and it comes in any flavor. The important lesson is that technology
and its powers must be handled by true materialists. True materialists are people
who love material-who cherish wood and stone and wheat and eggs and animals
and, above all, the earth-and treat it with a reverence that is due one's own
body.
INTELLECTUAL YOGA
CHAPTER
FIVE
The
word yoga, as most of you doubtless know, is the same as our word yoke and the
Latin word jungere, meaning "to join. " join, junction, yoke, and
union-all these words are basically from the same root. So, likewise, when Jesus
said, "My yoke is easy," he was really saying, "My yoga is easy."
The word, therefore, basically denotes the state that would be the opposite
of what our psychologists call alienation, or what Buddhists call sakyadrishti,
the view of separateness or the feeling of separatenessthe feeling of being
cut off from being. Most civilized people do in fact feel that way, because
they have a kind of myopic attention focused on their own boundaries and what
is inside those boundaries. They identify themselves with the inside and do
not realize that you cannot have an inside without an outside. That would seem
to be extremely elementary logic, wouldn't it? We could have no sense of being
ourselves and of having a personal identity without the contrast of something
that is not ourselves-that is to say, other.
However, the fact that we do not realize that self and other go together is
the root of an enormous and terrifying anxiety, because what will happen when
the inside disappears? What will happen when the so-called I comes to an end,
as it seems to? Of course, if it didn't, and if things did not keep moving and
changing, appearing and dissolving, the universe would be a colossal bore. Therefore,
you are only aware that things are all right for the moment. I hope most of
the people in this gathering have a sort of genial sense inside of them that
for the time being things are going on more or less okay. Some of you may be
very miserable, and then your problem may be just a little different, but it
is essentially the same one. But you must realize that the sense of life being
fairly all right is inconceivable and unfeelable unless there is way, way, way
in the back of your mind the glimmer of a possibility that something absolutely,
unspeakably awful might happen. It does not have to happen. Of course, you will
die one day, but there always has to be the vague apprehension, the hintegedanka,
that the awful awfuls are possible. It gives spice to life. Now, these observations
are in line with what I am going to discuss: the intellectual approach to yoga.
There are certain basic principal forms of yoga Most people are familiar with
batba yoga, which is a psychophysical exercise system, and this is the one you
see demonstrated most on television, because it has visual value. You can see
all these exercises of lotus positions and people curling their legs around
their necks and doing all sorts of marvelous exercises. The most honest yoga
teacher I know is a woman who teaches hatha yoga and does not pretend to be
any other kind of guru. She does it very well.
Then there is bhakti yoga. Bbakti means "devotion," and I suppose
in general you might say that Christianity is a form of bhakti yoga, because
it is yoga practiced through extreme reverence and love for some being felt
more or less external to oneself who is the representative of the divine.
Then there is karma yoga. Karma means "action," and incidentally,
that is all it means. It does not mean the law of cause and effect. When we
say that something that happens to you is your karma, all we are saying is that
it is your own doing. Nobody is in charge of karma except you. Karma yoga is
the way of action, of using one's everyday life, one's trade, or an athletic
discipline (like sailing or surfing or track running) as your way of yoga, and
as your way of discovering who you are.
Then there is raja yoga. That is the royal yoga, and that is sometimes also
called kundalini yoga. It involves very complicated psychic exercises having
to do with awakening the serpent power that is supposed to lie at the base of
one's spiritual spine and raise it up through certain chakras or centers until
it enters into the brain. There is a very profound symbolism involved in that,
but I am not going into that.
Mantra yoga is the practice of chanting or humming, either out loud or silently,
certain sounds that become supports for contemplation, for what is in Sanskrit
called jnana. jnana is the state in which one is clearly awake and aware of
the world as it is, as distinct from the world as it is described. In other
words, in the state of jnana, you stop thinking. You stop talking to yourself
and figuring to yourself and symbolizing to yourself what is going on. You simply
are aware of what is and nobody can say what it is, because as Korzybski well
said, "The real world is unspeakable." There's a lovely double take
in that. But that's inana, that's zazen, where one practices to sit absolutely
wide awake with eyes open, without thinking.
That is a very curious state, incidentally. I knew a professor of mathematics
at Northwestern University who one day said, "You know, it's amazing how
many things there are that aren't so." He was talking about old wives'
tales and scientific superstitions, but when you practice jnana, you are amazed
how many things there are that aren't so.
When you stop talking to yourself and you are simply aware of what is-that is
to say, of what you feel and what you sense-even that is saying too much. You
suddenly find that the past and the future have completely disappeared. So also
has disappeared the socalled differentiation between the knower and the known,
the subject and the object, the feeler and the feeling, the thinker and the
thought. They just aren't there because you have to talk to yourself to maintain
those things. They are purely conceptual. They are ideas, phantoms, and ghosts.
So, when you allow thinking to stop, all that goes away, and you find you're
in an eternal here and now. There is no way you are supposed to be, and there
is nothing you are supposed to do. There is no where you are supposed to go,
because in order to think that you're supposed to do something you have to think.
It is incredibly important to un-think at least once a day for the very preservation
of the intellectual life, because if you do nothing but think, as you're advised
by IBM and by most of the academic teachers and gurus, you have nothing to think
about except thoughts. You become like a university library that grows by itself
through a process that in biology is called mitosis. Mitosis is the progressive
division of cells into sub-cells, into sub-cells; so a great university library
is very often a place where people bury themselves and write books about the
books that are in there. They write books about books about books and the library
swells, and it is like an enormous mass of yeast rising and rising, and that
is all that is going on. It is a very amusing game. I love to bury my nose in
ancient Oriental texts-it is fun, like playing poker or chess or doing pure
mathematics. The trouble is that it gets increasingly unrelated to life, because
the thinking is all words about words.
If we stop that temporarily and get our mind clear of thoughts, we become, as
Jesus said, "again as children" and get a direct view of the world,
which is very useful once you are an adult. There is not much you can do with
it when you are a baby, because everybody pushes you around; they pick you up
and sit you there. You can't do much except practice contemplation, and you
can't tell anyone what it is like. But when, as an adult, you can recapture
the baby's point of view, you will know what all child psychologists have always
wanted to know-how it is that a baby feels. The baby, according to Freud at
least, has the oceanic experience, that is to say, a feeling of complete inseparability
from what's going on. The baby is unable to distinguish between the universe
and his or her action upon the universe. Most of us, if we got into that state
of consciousness, might be inclined to feel extremely frightened and begin to
ask, "Who's in charge? I mean, who controls what happens next?" We
would ask that, because we are used to the idea that the process of nature consists
of controllers and controllees, things that do and things that are done to.
This is purely mythological, as you find out when you observe the world without
thinking, with a purely silent mind.
Now then, jnana yoga is the approach that is designed for intellectuals. There
is an intellectual way to get to this kind of understanding. A lot of people
say to me, "You know, I understand what you are talking about intellectually,
but I don't really feel it. I don't realize it." I am apt to reply, "I
wonder whether you do understand it intellectually, because if you did you would
also feel it."
The intellect, or what I prefer to call the intelligence, is not a sort of watertight
compartment of the mind that goes clickety, clickety all by itself and has no
influence on what happens in all other spheres of one's being. We all know that
you can be hypnotized by words. Certain words arouse immediately certain feelings,
and by using certain words one can change people's emotions very easily and
very rapidly. They are incantations, and the intellect is not something off
over there. However, the word intellect has become a kind of catchword that
represents the intellectual porcupinism of the academic world.
A certain professor at Harvard at the time Tim Leary was making experiments
there said, "No knowledge is academically respectable which cannot be put
into words." Alas for the department of physical education. Alas for the
department of music and fine arts. That is very important, because one of the
greatest intellects of modern times was Ludwig Wittgenstein. And as you read
the end of his Tractatus, which was his great book, he shows you that what you
always thought were the major problems of life and philosophy were meaningless
questions. Those problems are solved not by, as it were, giving an answer to
them but by getting rid of the problem through seeing intellectually that it
is meaningless. Then you are relieved of the problem. You need no longer lie
awake nights wondering what is the meaning of life, and what it is all about,
simply because it isn't about anything. It's about itself, and so he ends up
saying, "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent."
A new successor to Wittgenstein, an Englishman named Spencer-Brown, has written
a book called Laws of Form, and if any of you are mathematically minded I would
firmly recommend it. He makes this comment about Wittgenstein: "True, there
are certain things of which one cannot speak. For example, you cannot describe
music." That is why most of the reports of music critics in the newspapers
seem completely absurd. They are trying to convey in words how a certain artist
performed, and they borrow words from all other kinds of art and try to make
some show of being clever about it.
But there is no way in which the music critic, in words, can make you hear the
sound of the concert. By writing certain instructions on paper telling you certain
things to do, those sounds can be reproduced though, so musical notation is
essentially a set of instructions telling you certain things to do, and if you
do them, you will gain an experience that is ineffable and beyond words. Spencer-Brown
points out that all mathematics is basically a set of instructions, like "describe
a circle, drop a perpendicular." So, if you follow certain instructions,
then yod will understand certain things that cannot be described, and that,
of course, is what yoga is all about.
All mystical writing, really, is instructions. It is not an attempt to describe
the universe, to describe God, to describe ultimate reality. Every mystic knows
that cannot possibly be done. The very word mysticism is from the Greek root
muin, which means "silence." Mum's the word; shut up. I should talk,
but that's it. Be quiet. Then you will understand because the instructions are
to listen. Listen, or even look. Stop, look, and listen-that is yoga-and see
what is going on. Only don't say, because that will spoil it. Somebody came
to a Zen master and said, "The mountains and hills and the skyare not all
these the body of Buddha?" And the master said, "Yes, but it's a pity
to say so."
For those of you who are mathematically hip, by reading Spencer-Brown's book
Laws of Form, you can go through an intellectual process that is very close
indeed to jnana yoga. As a matter of fact, I was so impressed with it that I
went over to England especially to see this fellow. He is quite remarkable,
a youngish man adept at all sorts of things.
In the book, he starts out with the instruction to draw a distinction, any distinction
you want, between something and nothing, between the inside and the outside,
or what have you. Then he takes you through a process of reasoning in which
he shows you that once you have made that step, all the laws of mathematics,
physics, biology, and electronics follow inevitably. He draws them out and he
gets you into the most complicated electronic circuitry systems that necessarily
follow from your having drawn a distinction. Once you have done that, the universe
as we know it is inevitable.
After that he says, "I haven't told you anything you didn't already know.
At every step when you saw that one of my theorems was correct, you said, 'Oh,
of course.' Why? Because you knew it already." And then at the end of it,
where he has shown you, as it were, the nature of your own mind, he raises the
question, "Was this trip really necessary?"
So now he takes us in the reentry and says, "You see, what has happened
through all this mathematical process, and also in the course of your own complicated
lives where you have been trying to find out something that you already knew,
is the universe has taken one turn." That is the meaning of universe; it
has taken a turn on itself to look at itself. Well, when anything looks at itself
it escapes itself, as the snake swallowing its tail, as the dog chasing its
tail, as we try to grab this hand with that. It gets some of it, but it doesn't
get it, and so he makes the amazing remark, "Naturally, as our telescopes
become more powerful, the universe must expand in order to escape them."
Now, you will say this is subjective idealism in a new disguise. This is Bishop
Berkeley all over again saying that we create the universe out of our own minds.
Well, unfortunately it is true, if you take mind to mean "physical brain"
and "physical nervous system." If you listen to Karl Pribram's lectures
at Stanford, you will find him saying the same thing in neurological terms.
It is the structure of your nervous system that causes you to see the world
that you see. Or read J. Z. Young's book Doubt and Certainty in Science, where
all this is very clearly explained. It is the same old problem in new language,
only it is a more complicated language, a more sophisticated, up-to-date, scientifically
respectable language. It is the same old thing, but that is yoga. Yoga, or union,
means that you do it. In a sense, you are God, tat tvam asi, as the Upanishads
say, "You are making it."
So many spiritual teachers and gurus will look at their disciples and say, "I
am God. I have realized." But the important thing is that you are realized.
Whether I am or not is of no consequence to you whatsoever. I could get up and
say "I am realized," and put on a turban and yellow robe and say "Come
and have darsban, I'm guru, and you need the grace of guru in order to realize,"
and it would be a wonderful hoax. It would be like picking your pockets and
selling you your own watch. But the point is, you are realized. Now, what are
we saying when we say that? We are obviously saying something very important,
but alas and alack, there is no way of defining it, nor going any further into
words about it. When a philosopher hears such a statement as tat tvam asi, "You
are it," or "There is only the eternal now," the philosopher
says, "Yes, but I don't see why you are so excited about it. What do you
mean by that?"
Yet he asks that question because he wants to continue in a word game; he doesn't
want to go on into an experiential dimension. He wants to go on arguing, because
that is his trip, and all these great mystical statements mean nothing whatsoever.
They are ultimate statements, just as the trees, clouds, mountains, and stars
have no meaning, because they are not words. Words have meaning because they're
symbols, because they point to something other than themselves.
But the stars, like music, have no meaning. Only bad music has any meaning.
Classical music never has a meaning, and to understand it you must simply listen
to it and observe its beautiful patterns and go into its complexity.
When your mind, that is to say, your verbal systems, gets to the end of its
tether and it arrives at the meaningless state, this is the critical point.
The method of jnana yoga is to exercise one's intellect to its limits so that
you get to the point where you have no further questions to ask. You can do
this in philosophical study if you have the right kind of teacher who shows
you that all philosophical opinions whatsoever are false, or at least, if not
false, extremely partial. You can see how the nominalists cancel out the realists,
how the determinists cancel out the free willists, how the behaviorists cancel
out the vitalists, and then how the logical positivists cancel out almost everybody.
Then someone comes in and says, "Yes, but the logical positivists have
concealed metaphysics," which indeed they do, and then you get in an awful
tangle and there is nothing for you to believe.
If you get seriously involved in the study of theology and comparative religion,
exactly the same thing can happen to you. You cannot even be an atheist anymore;
that is also shown to be a purely mythological position. So you feel a kind
of intellectual vertigo that is as in a Zen Buddhist poem, "Above, not
a tile to cover the head. Below, not an inch of ground to stand on." Where
are you then?
Of course, you are where you always were. You have discovered that you are it,
and that is very uncomfortable because you can't grab it. I have discovered
that whatever it is that I am is not something inside my head-it is just as
much out there as it is in here. But whatever it is, I cannot get hold of it,
and that gives you the heebie-jeebies. You get butterflies in the stomach, anxiety
traumas, and all kinds of things. This was all explained by Shankara, the great
Hindu commentator on the Upanishads and a great master of the non-dualistic
doctrine of the universe, when he said, "That which knows, which is in
all beings the knower, is never an object of its own knowledge." Therefore,
to everyone who is in quest of the supreme kick, the great experience, the vision
of God, whatever you want to call itliberation-when yt)u think that you are
not it, any old guru can sell you on a method to find it. That may not be a
bad thing for him to do, because a clever guru is a person who leads you on.
"Here kitty, kitty, kitty, kitty. I've got something very good to show
you. Yes. You just wait. Oh, but you've got to go through a lot of stages yet."
You say "Ah, ah, ah, ah. Can I get that? Oh, I want to get that."
And all the time it's you.
I was talking to a Zen master the other day, and he said, "Mmmmm. You should
be my disciple." I looked at him and said, "Who was Buddha's teacher?"
He looked at me in a very odd way, and he burst into laughter and gave me a
piece of clover. So long as you can be persuaded that there is something more
that you ought to be than you are, you have divided yourself from reality, from
the universe, from God, or whatever you want to call that, the tat in tat tvam
asi. You will find constantly, if you are interested in anything like this-in
psychoanalysis, in Gestalt therapy, in sensitivity training, in any kind of
yoga or what have you-that there will be that funny sensation of what I will
call "spiritual greed" that can be aroused by somebody indicating
to you, "Mmmm, there are still higher stages for you to attain. You should
meet my guru." So, you might say, "Now, to be truly realized you have
to get to the point where you're not seeking anymore." Then you begin to
think, "We will now be non-seekers," like disciples of Krishnamurti,
who because he says he doesn't read any spiritual books can't read anything
but mystery stories, and become spiritually unspiritual. Well, you find that,
too, is what is called in Zen "legs on a snake." It is irrelevant.
You don't need not to seek, because you don't need anything. It is like crawling
into a hole and pulling the hole in after you.
The great master of this technique was a Buddhist scholar who lived about 200
A.D. called Nagarjuna. He invented a whole dialectic, and he created madhyamaka,
where the leader of the students would simply destroy all their ideas, absolutely
abolish their philosophical notions, and they'd get the heebie-jeebies. He didn't
have the heebie-jeebies. He seemed perfectly relaxed in not having any particular
point of view. They said, "Teacher, how can you stand it? We have to have
something to hang on to." "Who does? Who are you?" And eventually
you discover, of course, that it is not necessary to hang on to or rely on anything.
There is nothing to rely on, because you're it. It is like asking the question,
"Where is the universe?" By that I mean the whole universe-whereabouts
is it in space? Everything in it is falling around everything else, but there's
no concrete floor underneath for the thing to crash on. You can think of infinite
space if you like-you don't have to think of curved space, the space that goes
out and out and out forever and ever and has no end: What is that? Of course,
it is you. What else could it be? The universe is delightfully arranged so that
as it looks at itself, in order not to be one-sided and prejudiced, it looks
at itself from an uncountable number of points of view. We thus avoid solipsism,
as if I were to have the notion that it is only me that is really here, and
you are all in my dream. Of course, that point of view cannot really be disputed
except by imagining a conference of solipsists arguing as to which one of them
was the one that was really there.
Now, if you understand what I am saying by using your intelligence, and then
take the next step and say, "I understood it now, but I didn't feet it,"
then next I raise the question, "Why do you want to feel it?" You
say, "I want something more," but that is again spiritual greed, and
you can only say that because you didn't understand it. There is nothing to
pursue, because you are it. You always were it, and to put it in Christian terms
or Jewish terms, if you don't know that you are God from the beginning, what
happens is that you try to become God by force. Therefore you become violent
and obstreperous and this, that, and the other. All our violence, all our competitiveness,
all our terrific anxiety to survive is because we didn't know from the beginning
that we were it.
Well, then you would say, "If only we did know from the beginning,"
as in fact you did when you were a baby. But then everybody says, "Well,
nothing will ever happen." But it did happen, didn't it? And some of it
is pretty messy. Some people say, "Well, take the Hindus.
It is basic to Hindu religion that we are all God in disguise, and that the
world is an illusion." All that is a sort of half-truth, but if that is
the case-if really awakened Hindus by the knowledge of their union with the
godhead would simply become inert, why then Hindu music, the most incredibly
complex, marvelous technique? When they sit and play, they laugh at each other.
They are enjoying themselves enormously with very complicated musical games.
But when you go to the symphony everybody is dressed in evening dress and with
the most serious expressions. When the orchestra gets up, the audience sits
down, and it is like a kind of church. There is none of that terrific zest,
where the drummer, the tabla player, laughs at the sarod player as they compete
with each other in all kinds of marvelous improvisations. So, if you do find
out, by any chance, who you really are, instead of becoming merely lazy, you
start laughing. And laughing leads to dancing, and dancing needs music, and
we can play with each other for a change.
INTRODUCTION TO BUDDHISM
CHAPTER
SIX
The
idea of a yana, or vehicle, comes from the basic notion or image of Buddhism
as a raft for crossing a river. This shore is ordinary everyday consciousness
such as we have, mainly the consciousness of being an ego or a sensitive mind
locked up inside a mortal body-the consciousness of being you in particular
and nobody else. The other shore is release, or nirvana, a word that means literally
"blow out," as one says, whew, in heaving a sigh of relief. Nirvana
is never, never to be interpreted as a state of extinction or a kind of consciousness
in which you are absorbed into an infinitely formless, luminous ocean that could
best be described as purple Jell-O, but kind of spiritual. Horrors! It is not
meant to be that at all. Nirvana has many senses, but the primary meaning of
it is that it is this everyday life, just as we have it now, but seen and felt
in a completely different way. Buddhism is called in general a dharma, and this
word is often mistranslated as "the law." It is better translated
as "the doctrine," and still better translated as "the method."
The dharma was formulated originally by the Buddha, who was the son of a north
Indian raja living very close to Nepal who was thriving shortly after 600 B.C.
The word buddha is a title. The proper name of this individual was Gautama Siddhartha,
and the word buddha means "the awakened one," from the Sanskrit root
buddh, which means "to wake" or "to know." So, we could
say buddha means "the man who woke up." The Buddha was a very skillful
psychologist, and he is in a way the first psychotherapist in history, a man
of tremendous understanding of the wiles and the deviousness of the human mind.
Buddhism is made to be easily understood. Everything is numbered so that you
can remember it, and the bases of Buddhism are what are called the four noble
truths. The first one is the truth about suffering, the second is the truth
about the cause of suffering, the third is the truth about the ceasing of suffering,
and the fourth is the truth about the way to the ceasing of suffering. So let's
go back to the beginning-suffering. The Sanskrit word is duhkha. It means suffering
in the widest possible sense, but "chronic suffering" or "chronic
frustration" is probably as good a translation as any. Buddhism says the
life of mankind and of animalsindeed also of angels, if you believe in angels-is
characterized by chronic frustration. And so, that constitutes a problem. If
any one of you says, "I have a problem"well, I don't suppose you would
be here if you didn't in some way have a problem-that is duhkha. Now, the next
thing is the cause of it. The cause of it is called trishna. Trishna is a Sanskrit
word that is the root of our word thirst, but means more exactly "craving,"
"clutching," or "desiring." Because of craving or clutching
we create suffering, but in turn, this second truth is that behind trishna there
lies another thing called ignorance-avidya, or "nonvisioned." Vid
in Sanskrit is the root of the Latin videre and of our vision. And a in front
of the word means "non." So, avidya is not-seeing, ignorance, or better,
ignorance, because our mind as it functions consciously is a method of attending
to different and particular areas of experience, one after another, one at a
time.
When you focus your consciousness on a particular area, you ignore everything
else. That is why to know is at the same time to ignore, and because of that,
there arises trishna, or craving. Why? Because if you ignore what you really
know, you come to imagine that you are separate from the rest of the universe,
and that you are alone, and therefore you begin to crave or to thirst. You develop
an anxiety to survive, because you think if you are separate, if you are not
the whole works, you're going to die. Actually, you're not going to die at all.
You are simply going to stop doing one thing and start doing something else.
When you die in the ordinary way, you just stop doing this thing, in this case
called Alan Watts, but you do something else later. And there is nothing to
worry about at all. Only when you are entirely locked up in the illusion that
you are only this do you begin to be frightened and anxious, and that creates
thirst. So, if you can get rid of ignorance (ignorance) and widen your mind
out so as to see the other side of the picture, then you can stop craving. That
does not mean to say you won't enjoy your dinner anymore, and that it won't
be nice to make love, or anything like that. It doesn't mean that at all. It
means that enjoying your dinner and making love, and generally enjoying the
senses and all of experience, only become an obstacle to you if you cling to
them 'tn order to save yourself. However, if you do not need to save yourself,
you can enjoy life just as much as ever: you don't have to be a puritan.
So, then, that is the state of letting go, instead of clinging to everything.
Supposing you are in business and you have to make money to keep a family supported-that
is the thing to do, but don't let it get you down. Do it, in what the Hindus
call nishkama karma. Nishkama means "passionless" and karma means
"activity." That means doing all the things that one would do in life,
one's business, one's occupation, but doing it without taking it seriously.
Do it as a game, and then everybody who depends on you will like it much better.
If you take it seriously, they will be feeling guilty, because they will say,
"Oh dear, Papa absolutely knocks himself out to work for us," and
they become miserable. They go on, and they live their lives out of a sense
of duty, which is a dreadful thing to do. So, that is nirvana, to live in a
let-go way.
The fourth noble truth describes the way or the method of realizing nirvana,
called the noble eightfold path. The eightfold path is a series of eight human
activities, such as understanding or view, effort, vocation or occupation, speaking,
conduct, and so forth, and they are all prefaced by the Sanskrit word samyak,
which is very difficult to translate. Most people translate it as "right"
in the sense of correct, but this is an incomplete translation. The root sam
in Sanskrit is the same as our word sum through the Latin summa. The sum of
things means completion, but it also conveys the sense of balanced or "middle-wayed."
Buddhism is called the Middle Way, and we'll find out a great deal about that
later.
Every Buddhist who belongs to the Theravada for Hinayana] school in the south
expresses the fact that he is a Buddhist by reciting a certain formula called
tisarana and pancha-sila. I am talking Pali now, not Sanskrit. Tisarana means
the three refuges, and pancha-sila means "the five precepts."
Buddharn
saddanam gacchame
Dbarmam saddanam gacchame
Sangam saddanam gacchame
That
means "I take refuge in Buddha; I take refuge in the method, the dharma;
I take refuge in the sangha" (which means the fraternity of the followers
of Buddha). He then goes on to take the five precepts: "I promise to abstain
from taking life," "I promise to abstain from taking what is not given,"
"I promise to abstain from exploiting my passions," "I promise
to abstain from false speech," and "I promise to abstain from getting
intoxicated" by a list of various boozes.
Now, every Buddhist in the Southern school says, "Mahayanists have a different
formula." This is the method, and the method, the dharma, is therefore
a moral law, but it isn't just like the Ten Commandments-it is quite different.
You do not take the five precepts in obedience to a royal edict. You take them
upon yourself, and there is a very special reason for doing so. How can you
fulfill the precept not to take life? Every day you eat. Even if you're a vegetarian,
you must take life. This is absolutely fundamental to an understanding of Buddhism.
Buddhism is a method-it is not a doctrine. Buddhism is a dialogue, and what
it states at the beginning is not necessarily what it would state at the end.
The method of Buddhism is, first of all, a relationship between a teacher and
a student. The student creates the teacher by raising a problem and going to
someone about it.
Now, if he chooses wisely, he will find out if there is a buddha around to use
as the teacher, and then he says to the buddha, "My problem is that I suffer,
and I want to escape from suffering." So, the buddha replies, "Suffering
is caused by desire, by trishna, by craving. If you can stop desiring then you
will solve your problem. Go away and try to stop desiring." He then gives
him some methods of how to practice meditation and to make his mind calm in
order to see if he can stop desiring. The student goes away and practices this.
Then he comes back to the teacher and says, "But I can't stop desiring
not to desire. What am I to do about that?" So the teacher says, "Try,
then, to stop desiring not to desire."
Now, you can see where this is going to end up. He might put it in this way:
"All right, if you can't completely stop desiring, do a middle way. That
is to say, stop desiring as much as you can stop desiring, and don't desire
to stop any more desire than you can stop." Do you see where that's going
to go? He keeps coming back because what the teacher has done in saying "Stop
desiring" is he has given his student what in Zen Buddhism is called a
koan. This is a Japanese word that means "a meditation problem," or
more strictly, the same thing that case means in law, because koans are usually
based on anecdotes and incidents of the old masters- cases and precedents. But
the function of a koan is a challenge for meditation. Who is it that desires
not to desire? Who is it that wants to escape from suffering?
Here we get into a methodological difference between Hinduism and Buddhism on
the question of "Who are you?" The Hindu says, "Your self is
called the atman, the self. Now, strive to know the self. Realize I am not my
body, because I can be aware of my body. I am not my thoughts, because I can
be aware of my thoughts. I am not my feelings for the same reason. I am not
my mind, because I can be aware of it. Therefore, I really am other than and
above, transcending all these finite aspects of me."
Now, the Buddhist has a critique of that. He says, "Why do you try to escape
from yourself as a body?" The reason is your body falls apart and you want
to escape from it. "Why do you want to disidentify yourself from your emotions?"
The reason is that your emotions are uncomfortable and you want to escape from
them. You don't want to have to be afraid. You don't want to have to be in grief
or anger, and even love is too muchit involves you in suffering, because if
you love someone you are a hostage to fortune. So, the Buddha says the reason
why you believe you are the atman, the eternal self, which in turn is the brahman,
the self of the whole universe, is that you don't want to lose your damn ego.
If you can fix your ego and put it in the safe-deposit box of the Lord, you
think you've still got yourself, but you haven't really let go. So, the Buddha
said there isn't any atman: he taught the doctrine of anatman, or nonself. Your
ego is unreal, and as a matter of fact, there is nothing you can cling to-no
refuge, really. just let go. There is no salvation, no safety, nothing anywhere,
and you see how clever that was. What he was really saying is that any atman
you could cling to or think about or believe in wouldn't be the real one.
This is the accurate sense of the original documents of the Buddha's teaching.
If you carefully go through it, that is what he is saying. He is not saying
that there isn't the atman or the brahman, he's saying anyone you could conceive
wouldn't be it. Anyone you believed in would be the wrong one, because believing
is still clinging. There is no salvation through believing, there is only salvation
through knowledge, and even then the highest knowledge is nonknowledge.
Here he agrees with the Hindus, who say in the Kena Upanishad, "If you
think that you know Brahman, you do not know him. But if you know that you do
not know the Brahman, you truly know." Why? It is very simple. If you really
are it, you don't need to believe in it, and you don't need to know it, just
as your eyes don't need to look at themselves. That is the difference of method
in Buddhism. Now, understand "method" here. The method is a dialogue,
and the so-called teachings of Buddhism are the first opening gambits in the
dialogue. When they say you cannot understand Buddhism out of books, the reason
is that the books only give you the opening gambits. Then, having read the book,
you have to go on with the method. Now, you can go on with the method without
a formal teacher. That is to say, you can conduct the dialogue with yourself
or with life. You have to explore and experiment on such things as "Could
one possibly not desire?" "Could one possibly concentrate the mind
perfectly?" "Could one possibly do this, that, and the other?"
And you have to work with it so that you understand the later things that come
after trying these experiments. These later things are the heart of Buddhism.
So then, shortly after the Buddha's time, the practice of Buddhism continued
as a tremendous ongoing dialogue among the various followers, and eventually
they established great universities, such as there was at Nalanda in northern
India. A discourse was going on there, and if you looked at it superficially,
you might think it was nothing but an extremely intellectual bull session where
philosophers were outwitting each other. Actually, the process that was going
on was this: the teacher or guru in every case was examining students as to
their beliefs and theories and was destroying their beliefs by showing that
any belief that you would propose, any idea about yourself or about the universe
that you want to cling to and make something of-use for a crutch, a prop, or
a security-could be demolished by the teacher. This is how the dialogue works,
until you are left without a thing to hang on to. Any religion you might propose,
even atheism, would be torn up. They would destroy agnosticism and any kind
of belief. They were experts in demolition, so they finally got you to the point
where you had nothing left to hang on to. Well, at that point you are free,
because you're it. Once you are hanging on to things, you put "it"
somewhere else, something "I" can grab. Even when you think, as an
idea, "Then I'm it," you are still hanging on to that, and so they
are going to knock that one down.
So, when you are left without anything at all, you've seen the point. That's
the method of the dialogue, essentially. That is the dharma, and all Buddhists
make jokes about this. Buddha says in The Diamond Sutra, "When I attained
complete, perfect, unsurpassed awakening, I didn't attain anything." Because
to use a metaphor that is used in the scriptures, it's like using an empty fist
to deceive a child. You say to a child, "What have I got here?" The
child gets interested immediately and wants to find out, and you hide it. The
child climbs all over you and can't get at your fist. Finally, you do let him
get it, and there's nothing in it. Now, that is the method again. "Teacher,
you have the great secret, and I know you have it. There must be such a secret
somewhere somebody knows." And that secret is, "How do I get one up
on the universe?" I don't know that I'm it, so I'm trying to conquer it.
So the teacher says, "Keep trying,' and he gets you going and going and
going and goin@which shows you that in the end there is nothing to get, there
never was any need to get anything and never was any need to realize anything,
because you're it. And the fact that you think you're not is part of the game.
So don't worry.
Many of the problems that are now being discussed by modern logicians are, unbeknownst
to them, already in the ancient Indian books: problems of semantics, of meaning,
and of the nature of time and memory. All these were discussed with very, very
meticulous scholarly sophistication, so it is my opinion that this was a very
fertile period of human history, and that the philosophy in which it eventually
emerged-the philosophy of Mahayana Buddhism-is as yet the most mature and really
intelligent theory of human life and of the cosmos that man has ever devised.
It is characteristic of this point of view that it adheres to the Middle Way,
but the Middle Way does not mean moderation. It means the bringing together
of opposites, of what we might call in our world spirit and matter, mind and
body, mysticism and sensuality, unity and multiplicity, conformity and individualism.
All these things are marvelously wedded together in the world view of Mahayana.
Fundamental to Mahayana Buddhism is the idea of what is called the bodhisattva.
A bodhisattva is a person who has as his essence (sattva), bodhi (awakening).
It is usually used to mean a potential buddha, someone who is, as it were, just
about to become a buddha. That was the original sense, and part of the Pali
canon is a book called the Jatakamala, the tales of the Buddha's previous lives-how
he behaved when he was an animal and as a man long before he became Buddha.
In all these stories, he is represented as sacrificing himself for the
benefit of other beings, but since he had not yet become a fully fledged buddha,
he is called in these stories a bodhisattva. That really means "a potential
buddha," but the point is that as a potential buddha, as a bodhisattva,
he is always involved in situations where he is feeding himself to the hungry
tigers and so on.
Now, in the course of time, the term bodhisattva underwent a transformation.
A bodhisattva matures and becomes a buddha, and what does that mean popularly?
It means that whoever is fully awakened to the way things are is delivered from
any necessity to be involved in the world anymore. In other words, you can go
on to a transcendent level of being where time is abolished, where all times
are now, where there are no problems, where there is perpetual eternal peace-nirvana
in the sense of the word parinirvana, meaning beyond nirvana, super nirvana.
So, if you are fed up with this thing and you don't want to play the game of
hide-and-seek anymore, you can go into the parinirvana state and be in total
serenity.
However, and again I am talking in the language of popular Buddhism, a person
who stands on the threshold of that peace can turn back and say, "I won't
be a buddha, I'll be a bodhisattva. I won't make the final attainment, because
I would like to go back into the world of manifestation (called samsara) and
work for their liberation." So, then, when a Mahayana Buddhist does his
formula for puia, he says, "Sentient beings are numberless, I take a vow
to save them. Deluding passions are inexhaustible, I take a vow to destroy them.
The gates of the method, the dharma, are manifold, I take a vow to enter them.
The Buddha way is supreme, I take a vow to complete it." Of course all
this is impossible. Numberless sentient beings, because they are numberless,
can never be delivered. Deluding passions which are inexhaustible can never
be eradicated. So, this then is their formula.
The bodhisattva who returns into the world and becomes involved again is in
fact regarded as a superior kind of being to the one who gets out of it. The
person who gets out of the rat race and enters into eternal peace is called
pratyeka-buddba, which means "private buddha," a buddha who does not
teach or help others, and in Mahayana Buddhism that is almost a term of abuse.
Pratyeka-buddha is a class with unbelievers, heretics' infidels, and fools,
but the great thing is the bodhisattva.
All beings are thought of in popular Buddhism as constantly reincarnating again
and again into the round of existence, helplessly, because they still desire.
They are, therefore, drawn back into the cycle. The bodhisattva goes back into
the cycle with his eyes wide open, voluntarily, and allows himself to be sucked
in. This Is normally interpreted as an act of supreme compassion, and bodhisattvas
can assume any guise. They can get furiously angry if necessary in order to
discourage evil beings, and could even assume the role of a prostitute and live
that way so as to deliver beings at that level of life. They could become an
animal, an insect, a maggot, or anything else, and all deliberately and in full
consciousness to carry on the work of the deliverance of all beings. Now, that
is the way the popular mind understands it.
Therefore, the bodhisattvas are all revered, respected, worshiped, and looked
upon as we look upon God in the West-as saviors, as the Christian looks upon
Jesus. Underneath this myth there is a profound philosophical idea going back
to the Hindu philosophy of advaita and non-duality-namely, that the apparent
dualism of "I" and "thou," of the knower and the known,
the subject and the object, is unreal. So, also, the apparent duality between
maya, the world illusion, and reality is unreal. The apparent duality or difference
between the enlightened and the ignorant person is unreal. So, the apparent
duality of bondage and deliverance, or liberation, is unreal. The perfectly
wise man is the one who realizes vividly that the ideal place is the place where
you are. This is an impossible thing to put in words. The nearest I could get
to it would be to say that if you could see this moment that you need nothing
beyond this momentnow, sitting here, irrespective of anything I might be saying
to you, of any ideas you might have rattling around in your brains-here and
now is the absolute "whicb in which there is no whicher." Only, we
prevent ourselves from seeing this because we are always saying, "Well,
there ought to be something more. Aren't I missing something somehow?"
But nobody sees it.
Now then, the most far-out form of Mahayana Buddhism is called the Pure Land
school, jodo-shin-sbu. jodo means "pure land" and sbin-shu means "true
sect." This is based on the idea that there was in immeasurably past ages
a great bodhisattva called Amitabha, and he made a vow that he would never become
a buddha unless any being who repeated his name would automatically at death
be born into the Pure Land over which he presides-that is, a kind of paradise.
He did become a buddha, and so the vow works. All you have to do is repeat the
name of Amitabha, and this will assure that without any further effort on your
part you will be reborn into his western paradise when you die, and in that
paradise, becoming a buddha is a cinch. There are no problems there. The western
paradise is a level of consciousness, but it is represented in fact as a glorious
place. You can see the pictures of it in Koya-san, wonderful pictures where
the Buddha Amitabha is actually a Persian figure related to Ahura Mazda, which
means "boundless light." The Daibutsu of Kamakura, that enormous bronze
buddha in the open air, is Amitabba.
So, there he sits surrounded with his court, and this court is full of upasaras,
beautiful girls playing lutes. And as you were born into the paradise, what
happens when you die is you discover yourself inside a lotus, and the lotus
goes pop, and there you find yourself sitting, coming out of the water, and
here on the clouds in front of you are the upasaras sitting, strumming their
lutes, with the most sensuous, beautiful faces.
Now, to get this, all you have to do is say the name of Amitabha. The formula
is Namu Amida butsu, and you can say this very fast, "Namu Amida butsu,
Namu Amida butsu, Numanda, Numanda, Numanda." When said many, many times,
you are quite sure it is going to happen.
Actually, you only have to say it once, and you mustn't make any effort to gain
this reward, because that would be spiritual pride. Your karma, your bad deeds,
your awful past, is so bad that anything good you try to do is done with a selfish
motive, and therefore doesn't effect your deliverance. Therefore, the only way
to get deliverance is to put faith in the power of this Amitabha Buddha and
to accept it as a free gift, and to take it by doing the most absurd things-by
saying "Namu Amida butsu." Don't even worry whether you have to have
faith in this, because trying to have faith is also spiritual pride. It doesn't
matter whether you have faith or whether you don't, the thing works anyway,
so just say "Namu Amida butsu." Now, that is the most popular form
of Buddhism in Asia.
The two most vast temples in Kyoto, the initiant Higashi Honganii temples, represent
this sect, and everybody loves Amitabha. Amida, as they call him in Japan-boundless
light, infinite Buddha of Compassion, is sitting there with this angelic expression
on his face: "It's all right, boys, just say my name, it's all you have
to do." So when we add together prayer wheels, Namu Amida butsu (the Japanese
call it Nembutsu) as the means of remembering Buddha, and all these things where
you just have to say an abbreviated prayer and the work is done for you, wouldn't
we Westerners, especially if we are Protestants, say, "Oh, what a scoundrelly
thing that is, what an awful degradation of religion, what an avoidance of the
moral challenge and the effort and everything that is required. Is this what
the bodhisattva doctrine of infinite compassion deteriorates into?"
Now, there is a profound aspect to all that. just as there is desperation and
despair, nirvana desperation and despair of the horrors, so there are two ways
of looking at this "nothing to do, no effort to make" idea, depending
completely on the savior. For, who is Amitabha? Popularly, Amitabha is somebody
else. He is some great compassionate being who looks after you. Esoterically,
Amitabha is your own nature; Amitabha is your real self, the inmost boundless
light that is the root and ground of your own consciousness. You don't need
to do anything to be that. You are that, and saying Nembutsu is simply a symbolical
way of pointing out that you don't have to become this, because you are it.
And Nembutsu, therefore, in its deeper side builds up a special kind of sage,
which they called myoko-nin. Myoko-nin in Japanese means "a marvelous fine
man," but the myoko-nin is a special type of personality who corresponds
in the West to the holy fool in Russian spirituality, or to something like the
Franciscan in Catholic spirituality.
I will tell you some myoko-nin stories because that is the best way to indicate
their character. One day a myoko-nin was traveling and he stopped in a Buddhist
temple overnight. He went up to the sanctuary where they have big cushions for
the priests to sit on, and he arranged the cushions in a pile on the floor and
went to sleep on them. In the morning the priest came in and saw the tramp sleeping
and said, "What are you doing here desecrating the sanctuary by sleeping
on the cushions and so on, right in front of the altar?" And the myoko-nin
looked at him in astonishment and said, "Why, you must be a stranger here,
you can't belong to the family."
In Japanese when you want to say that a thing is just the way it is, you call
it sonomama. There is a haiku poem that says, "Weeds in the rice field,
cut them down, sonomama, fertilizer." Cut the weeds, leave them exactly
where they are, and they become fertilizer, or sonomama. And sonomama means
"reality," "just the way it is," "just like that."
Now, there is a parallel expression, konomama. Konomama means "I, just
as I am." just little me, like that, with no frills, no pretense, except
that I naturally have some pretense. That is part of konomama. The myoko-nin
is the man who realizes that "I, konomama-just as I am-am Buddha, delivered
by Amitabha because Amitabha is my real nature." If you really know that,
that makes you a myoko-nin, but be aware of the fact that you could entirely
miss the point and become a monkey instead by saying, "I'm all right just
as I am, and therefore I'm going to rub it in-I'm going to be going around parading
my unregenerate nature, because this is Buddha, too." The fellow who does
that doesn't really know that it's okay. He's doing too much, and he is coming
on too strong. The other people, who are always beating themselves, are making
the opposite error. The Middle Way, right down the center, is where you don't
have to do a thing to justify yourself, and you don't have to justify not justifying
yourself. So, there is something quite fascinating and tricky in this doctrine
of the great bodhisattva Amitabha, who saves you just as you are, who delivers
you from bondage just as you are. You only have to say "Namu Amida butsu."
It is fascinating, but that is the principle of Mahayana, and your acceptance
of yourself as you are is the same thing as coming to live now, as you are.
Now is as you are, in the moment, but you can't come to now, and you can't accept
yourself on purpose, because the moment you do that you're doing something unnecessary.
You are doing a little bit more. That is what they call in Zen putting legs
on a snake or a beard on a eunuch. You've overdone it. How can you neither do
something about it nor do nothing about it as if that was something you had
to do? This is the same problem as originally posed in Buddhism: How do you
cease from desiring? When I try to cease from desiring, I am desiring not to
desire. Do you see this? All of this is what is called upaya, or skillful device,
to slow you down so that you can really be here. By seeing that there is nowhere
else you can be, you don't have to come to now. Where else can you be? It isn't
a task or a contest-what the Greeks called agone. There is nowhere else to be,
so they say, "Nirvana is no other than samsara." This shore is really
the same as the other shore. As the Lankavatarasutra says, "If you look
to try to get nirvana in order to escape suffering and being reborn, that's
not nirvana at all."
THE TAOIST WAY OF KARMA
CHAPTER
SEVEN
The philosophy of the Tao is one of the two great principle components of Chinese
thought. There are, of course, quite a number of forms of Chinese philosophy,
but there are two great currents that have thoroughly molded the culture of
China-Taoism and Confucianismand they play a curious game with each other. Let
me start by saying something about Confucianism originating with K'ung Fu-tzu
or Confucius, who lived a little after 630 B.c. He is often supposed to have
been a contemporary of Lao-tzu, who is the supposed founder of the Taoist way.
It seems more likely, however, that Laotzu lived later than 400 B.c., according
to most modern scholars.
Confucianism is not a religion, it is a social ritual and a way of ordering
society-so much so that the first great Catholic missionary to China, Matteo
Ricci, who was a Jesuit, found it perfectly consistent with his Catholicism
to participate in Confucian rituals. He saw them as something of a kind of national
character, as one might pay respect to the flag or something like that in our
own times. He found that Confucianism involved no conflict with Catholicism
and no commitment to any belief or dogma that would be at variance with the
Catholic faith. So, Confucianism is an order of society and involves ideas of
human relations, including the government and the family. This order is based
on the principle of what is called in Chinese ren, which is an extraordinarily
interesting word. The word ren is often translated as "benevolence,"
but that is not a good translation at all. This word means "human-heartedness"
(that's the nearest we can get to it in English), and it was regarded by Confucius
as the highest of all virtues, but one that he always refused to define. It
is above righteousness, justice, propriety, and other great Confucian virtues,
and it involves the principle that human nature is a fundamentally good arrangement,
including not only our virtuous side but also our passionate side-our appetites
and our waywardness. The Hebrews have a term that they call the yetzer ha-ra,
which means "the wayward inclination," or what I like to call the
element of irreducible rascality that God put into all human beings because
it was a good thing. It was good for humans to have these two elements in them.
So, a truly human-hearted person is a gentleman with a slight touch of rascality,
just as one has to have salt in a stew.
Confucius said the goody-goodies are the thieves of virtue, meaning that to
try to be wholly righteous is to go beyond humanity and to be something that
isn't human. So, this gives the Confucian approach to life, justice, and all
those sorts of things a kind of queer humor, a sort of "boys will be boys"
attitude,,which is nevertheless a very mature way of handling human problems.
It was, of course, for this reason that the Japanese Buddhist priests (especially
Zen priests) who visited China to study Buddhism introduced Confucianism into
Japan. Despite certain limitations that Confucianism has-and it always needs
the Taoist philosophy as a counterbalance-it has been one of the most successful
philosophies in all history for regulation of governmental and family relationships.
Confucianism prescribes all kinds of formal relationships-linguistic, ceremonial,
musical, in etiquette, and in all the spheres of moralsand for this reason has
always been twitted by the Taoists for being unnatural. But you need these two
components, and they play against each other beautifully in Chinese society.
Roughly speaking, the Confucian way of life is for people involved in the world.
The Taoist way of life is for people who get disentangled. Now, as we know in
our own modern times, there are various ways of getting disentangled from the
regular lifestyle of the United States. If you want to go through the regular
lifestyle of the United States, you go to high school and college, and then
you go into a profession or a business. You own a standard house, raise a family,
have a car or two, and do all that jazz. But a lot of people don't want to live
that
way, and there are lots of other ways of living besides that. So, you could
say that those of us who go along with
the pattern correspond to the Confucians. Those who are bohemians, bums, beatniks,
or whatever, and don't
correspond with the pattern, are more like the Taoists. Actually, in Chinese
history, Taoism is a way of life for
older people. Lao-tzu, the name given to the founder of Taoism, means "the
old boy," and the legend is that
when he was born he already had a white beard.
So, it is sort of like this: When you have contributed to society, contributed
children and brought them up, and have assumed a certain role in social life,
you then say, "Now it's time for me to find out what it's all about. Who
am I ultimately, behind my outward personality? What is the secret source of
things?" The later half of life is the preeminently excellent time to find
this out. It is something to do when you have finished with the family business.
I am not saying that is a sort of unavoidable strict rule. Of course, one can
study the Tao when very young, because it contains all kinds of secrets as to
the performance of every kind of art, craft, business, or any occupation whatsoever.
In China, in a way, it plays the role of a kind of safety valve for the more
restrictive way of life that Confucianism prescribes. There is a sort of type
in China who is known as "the Old Robe." He is a sort of intellectual
bum, often found among scholars, who is admired very much and is a type of character
that had an enormous influence on the development of the ideals of Zen Buddhist
life. He is one who goes with nature rather than against nature.
First of all, I am going to address ideas that come strictly out of Lao-tzu's
book, the Tao Te Ching. Of course, the basis of the whole philosophy is the
conception of Tao. This word has many meanings, and the book of Lao-tzu starts
out by saying that the Tao that can be spoken is not the eternal Tao. You cannot
give all the meanings, because the word tao means both "the way or course
of nature or of everything" and "to speak." So, the actual opening
phrase of the book, following this word tao, is a character that means "can
be," or "can," or something like "able." So, according
to its second meaning it is "the way that can be spoken, described, or
uttered." But it also means the way that can be "wayed," although
you would have to invent that word. The way that can be traveled, perhaps, is
not the eternal way. In other words, there is no way of following the Tao; there
is no recipe for it. I cannot give you any do-it-yourself instructions as to
how it is done. It is like when Louis Armstrong was asked, "What is jazz?"
He said, "If you have to ask, you don't know." Now that's awkward,
isn't it? But we can gather what it is by absorbing certain atmospheres and
attitudes connected with those who follow it. We can also gather what it is
from the art, poetry, expressions, anecdotes, and stories that illustrate the
philosophy of the way.
So, this word then, tao, the "way or the course of things," is not,
as some Christian missionaries translated it, the Logos, taking as their point
of departure the opening passage of Saint john's Gospel, "In the beginning
was the word." If you look this up in a Chinese translation of the Bible,
it usually says, "In the beginning was the Tao. And the Tao was with God,
and the Tao was God. The same was in the beginning with God. All things were
made by it and without it was not anything made that was made." So, they
have substituted "Tao," and that would have a very funny effect on
a Chinese philosopher, because the idea of things being made by the Tao is absurd.
The Tao is not a manufacturer, and it is not a governor. It does not rule, as
it were, in the position of a king. Although the book Tao Te Ching is written
for many purposes, one of its important purposes is as a manual of guidance
for a ruler. What it tells him is, essentially, "Rule by not ruling. Don't
lord it over the people." And so, Lao-tzu says, "The great Tao flows
everywhere, both to the left and to the right. It loves and nourishes all things,
but does not lord it over them, and when good things are accomplished, it lays
no claim to them." In other words, the Tao doesn't stand up and say, "I
have made all of you. I have filled this earth with its beauty and glory. Fall
down before me and worship." The Tao, having done everything, always escapes
and is not around to receive any thanks or acknowledgment, because it loves
obscurity. As Lao-tzu said, "The Tao is like water. It always seeks the
lowest level, which human beings abhor." So, it is a very mysterious idea.
Tao, then, is not really equivalent with any Western or Hindu idea of God, because
God is always associated with being the Lord. Even in India, the Brahman is
often called the Supreme Lord, although that is a term more strictly applicable
to Ishvara, the manifestation of Brahman in the form of a personal God. But
the Lord Krishna's song is the Bbagavad Gita, the "Song of the Lord,"
and there is always the idea of the king and the ruler attached. This is not
so in the Chinese Tao philosophy. The Tao is not something different from nature,
ourselves, and our surrounding trees, waters, and air. The Tao is the way all
that behaves. So, the basic Chinese idea of the universe is really that it is
an organism. As we shall see when we get on to the Cbuang-tzu (which was written
by Chuang-tzu), who is the sort of elaborator of Lao-tzu, he sees everything
operating together so that you cannot find the controlling center anywhere,
because there isn't any. The world is a system of interrelated components, none
of which can survive without the other, just as in the case of bees and flowers.
You will never find bees in a place where there are not flowers, and you will
never find flowers in a place where there are not bees or other insects that
do the equivalent job. What that tells us, secretly, is that although bees and
flowers look different from each other, they are inseparable. To use a very
important Taoist expression, they arise mutually. "To be" and "not
to be" mutually arise. This character is based on the picture of a plant,
something that grows out of the ground. So, you could say, positive and negative,
to be and not to be, yes and no, and light and dark arise mutually and come
into being. There is no cause and effect; that is not the relationship at all.
It is like the egg and the hen. The bees and the flowers coexist in the same
way as high and low, back and front, long and short, loud and soft-all those
experiences are experienceable only in terms of their polar opposite.
The Chinese idea of nature is that all the various species arise mutually because
they interdepend, and this total system of interdependence is the Tao. It involves
certain other things that go along with Tao, but this Mutual arising is the
key idea to the whole thing. If you want to understand Chinese and Oriental
thought in general, it is the most important thing to grasp, because we think
so much in terms of cause and effect. We think of the universe today in Aristotelian
and Newtonian ways. According to that philosophy the world is separated. It
is like a huge amalgamation of billiard balls, and they don't move until struck
by another or by a cue. So, everything is going tock, tock, tock, all over the
place; one thing starts off another in a mechanical way. Of course, from the
standpoint of twentieth-century science, we know perfectly well now that this
is not the way it works. We know enough about relationships to see that the
mechanical model that Newton devised was all right for certain purposes, but
it breaks down now, because we understand relativity and we see how things go
together in a kind of connected net, rather than in a chain of billiard balls
banging each other around.
So, then, we move to a second term that is extremely important. The expression
tzu-jan is the term that we translate as "nature" in Chinese, but
this term expresses a whole point of view. It does not say nature, natura, which
means, in a way, "a class of things." It means, literally, "self
so" or "what is so of itself." It is what happens of itself,
and thus, spontaneity. Early on in the Tao Te Ching, Lao-tzu says, "The
Tao's method is to be so of itself." Now, we might translate that as 14
automatic" were it not that the word automatic has a mechanical flavor.
Tzu-jan, or sbizen in Japanese, means "spontaneous": it happens as
your heart beats. You don't do anything about it, don't force your heart to
beat, and you don't make it beat-it does it by itself. Now, figure a world in
which everything happens by itself-it doesn't have to be controlled, it is allowed.
Whereas you might say the idea of God involves the control of everything going
on, the idea of the Tao is of the ruler who abdicates and trusts all the people
to conduct their own affairs, to let it all "happen." This doesn't
mean that there is not a unified organism and that everything is in chaos. It
means that the more liberty and the more love you give, and the more you allow
things in yourself and in your surroundings to take place, the more order you
will have.
It is generally believed in India that when a person sets out on the way of
liberation, his first problem is to become free from his past karma. The word
karma literally means "action" or "doing" in Sanskrit, so
that when we say something that happens to you is your karma, it is like saying
in English, "it is your own doing." In popular Indian belief, karma
is a sort of builtin moral law or a law of retribution, such that all the bad
things and all the good things you do have consequences that you have to inherit.
So long as karmic energy remains stored up, you have to work it out, and what
the sage endeavors to do is a kind of action, which in Sanskrit is called nishkama
karma. Nishkama means "without passion" or "without attachment,"
and karma means "action." So, whatever action he does, he renounces
the fruits of the action, so that he acts in a way that does not generate future
karma. Future karma continues you in the wheel of becoming, samsara, the "round,"
and keeps you being reincarnated.
Now, when you start to get out of the chain of karma, all the creditors that
you have start presenting themselves for Payment. In other words, a person who
begins to study yoga may feel that he will suddenly get sick or that his children
will die, or that he will lose his money, or that all sorts of catastrophes
will occur because the karmic debt is being cleared up. There is no hurry to
be "cleared up" if you're just living along like anybody, but if you
embark on the spiritual life, a certain hurry occurs. Therefore, since this
is known, it is rather discouraging to start these things. The Christian way
of saying the same thing is that if you plan to change your life (shall we say
to turn over a new leaf?) you mustn't let the devil know, because he will oppose
you with all his might if he suddenly discovers that you're going to escape
from his power. So, for example, if you have a bad habit, such as drinking too
much, and you make a New Year's resolution that during this coming year you
will stop drinking, that is a very dangerous thing to do. The devil will immediately
know about it, and he will confront you with the prospect of 365 drinkless days.
That will be awful, just overwhelming, and you won't be able to make much more
than three days on the wagon. So, in that case, you compromise with the devil
and say, "Just today I'm not going to drink, you see, but tomorrow maybe
we'll go back." Then, when tomorrow comes, you say, "Oh, just another
day, let's try, that's all." And the next day, you say, "Oh, one more
day won't make much difference." So, you only do it for the moment, and
you don't let the devil know that you have a secret intention of going on day
after day after day after day. Of course, there's something still better than
that, and that is not to let the devil know anything. That means, of course,
not to let yourself know. One of the many meanings of that saying "Let
not your left hand know what your right hand doeth" is just this. That
is why, in Zen discipline, a great deal of it centers around acting without
premeditation. As those of you know who read Eugen Herrigel's book Zen in the
Art of Archery, it was necessary to release the bowstring without first saying
"Now." There's a wonderful story you may have also read by a German
writer, Van Kleist, about a boxing match with a bear. The man can never defeat
this bear because the bear always knows his plans in advance and is ready to
deal with any situation. The only way to get through to the bear would be to
hit the bear without having first intended to do so. That would catch him. So,
this is one of the great problems in the spiritual life, or whatever you want
to call it: to be able to have intention and to act simultaneously- this means
you escape karma and the devil.
So, you might say that the Taoist is exemplary in this respect: that this is
getting free from karma without making any previous announcement. Supposing
we have a train and we want to unload the train of its freight cars. You can
go to the back end and unload them one by one and shunt them into the siding,
but the simplest of all ways is to uncouple between the engine and the first
car, and that gets rid of the whole bunch at once. It is in that sort of way
that the Taoist gets rid of karma without challenging it, and so it has the
reputation ofbeing the easy way. There are all kinds of yogas and ways for people
who want to be difficult. One of the great gambits of a man like Gurdjieff was
to make it all seem as difficult as possible, because that challenged the vanity
of his students.
If some teacher or some guru says, "Really, this isn't difficult at all-it's
perfectly easy," some people will say, "Oh, he's not really the real
thing. We want something tough and difficult." When we see somebody who
starts out by giving you a discipline that's very weird and rigid, people think,
"Now there is the thing. That man means business." So they flatter
themselves by thinking that by going to such a guy they are serious students,
whereas the other people are only dabblers, and so on. All right, if you have
to do it that way, that's the way you have to do it. But the Taoist is the kind
of person who shows you the shortcut, and shows you how to do it by intelligence
rather than effort, because that's what it is. Taoism is, in that sense, what
everybody is looking for, the easy way in, the shortcut, using cleverness instead
of muscle.
So, the question naturally arises, "Isn't it cheating?" When, in any
game, somebody really starts using his intelligence, he will very likely be
accused of cheating; and to draw the line between skill and cheating is a very
difficult thing to do. The inferior intelligence will always accuse a superior
intelligence of cheating; that is its way of saving face. "You beat me
by means that weren't fair. We were originally having a contest to find out
who had the strongest muscles. And you know we were pushing against it like
this, and this would prove who had the strongest muscles. But then you introduced
some gimmick into it, some judo trick or something like that, and you're not
playing fair." So, in the whole domain of ways of liberation, there are
routes for the stupid people and routes for the intelligent people, and the
latter are faster. This was perfectly clearly explained by Hui-neng, the sixth
patriarch of Zen in China, in his Platform Sutra, where he said, "The difference
between the gradual school and the sudden school is that although they both
arrive at the same point, the gradual is for slow-witted people and the sudden
is for fast-witred people." In other words, can you find a way that sees
into your own nature-that sees into the Tao immediately.
Earlier, I pointed out to you the immediate way, the way through now. When you
know that this moment is the Tao, and this moment is considered by itself without
past and without future-eternal, neither coming into being nor going out of
being-there is nirvana. And there is a whole Chinese philosophy of time based
on this. It has not, to my knowledge, been very much discussed by Taoist writers;
it's been more discussed by Buddhist writers. But it's all based on the same
thing. Zenji Dogen, the great thirteenth-century Japanese Zen Buddhist, studied
in China and wrote a book called Sbobogenzo. A rosbi recently said to me in
Japan, "That's a terrible book, because it tells you everything. It gives
the whole secret away." But in the course of this book, he says, "There
is no such thing as a progression in time. The spring does not become the summer.
There is first spring, and then there is summer." So, in the same way,
"you" now do not become "you" later.
In T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets, he says that the person who is settled down
on the train to read the newspaper is not the same person who stepped onto the
train from the platform. Therefore, you who sit here are not the same people
who came in at the door: these states are separate, each in its own place. There
was the "coming in at the door person," but there is actually only
the "here-and-now sitting person." The person sitting here and now
is not the person who will die, because we are all a constant flux. The continuity
of the person from past through present to future is as illusory in its own
way as the upward movement of the red lines on a revolving barber pole. You
know it goes round and round, and the whole thing seems to be going up or going
down, whichever the case may be, but actually nothing is going up or down. When
you throw a pebble into the pond and you make concentric rings of waves, there
is an illusion that the water is flowing outward, but no water is flowing outward
at all. The water is only going up and down. What appears to move outward is
the wave, not the water. So this kind of philosophical argument says that our
seeming to go along in a course of time does not really happen.
The Buddhists say that suffering exists, but no one who suffers. Deeds exist,
but no doers are found. A path there is, but no one follows it. And nirvana
is, but no one attains it. In this way, they look upon the continuity of life
as the same sort of illusion that is produced when you take a cigarette and
whirl it in the dark and create the illusion of the circle, whereas there is
only the one point of fire. The argument, then, is that so long as you are in
the present there aren't any problems. The problems exist only when you allow
presents to amalgamate. There is a way of putting this in Chinese that is rather
interesting. They have a very interesting sign-it's pronounced nin (nen in Japanese).
The top part of the character means "now" and the bottom part means
"the mind heart," the shin. And so, this is, as it were, an instant
of thought. In Chinese they use this character as the equivalent for the Sanskrit
word inana. Then, if you double this character and put it twice or three times,
nin, nin, nin-it means "thought after thought after thought." The
Zen master joshu was once asked, "What is the mind of the child?"
He said, "A ball in a mountain stream." He was asked, "What do
you mean by a ball in a mountain stream?" Joshua said, "Thought after
thought after thought with no block." He was using, of course, the mind
of the child as the innocent mind, the mind of a person who is enlightened.
One thought follows another without hesitation. The thought arises; it does
not wait to arise. When you clap your hands, the sound issues without hesitation.
When you strike flint, the spark comes out; it does not wait to come out. That
means that there's no block.
So, "thought, thought, thought"-nin, nin, nindescribes what we call
in our world the stream of consciousness. Blocking consists in letting the stream
become connected, or chained together in such a way that when the present thought
arises, it seems to be dragging its past, or resisting its future by saying,
"I don't want to go." When the connection, or the dragging of these
thoughts, stops, you have broken the chain of karma. If you think of this in
comparison with certain problems in music it is very interesting, because when
we listen to music, we hear melody only because we remember the sequence. We
hear the intervals between the tones, but more than that, we remember the tones
that led up to the one we are now hearing. We are trained musically to anticipate
certain consequences, and to the extent that we get the consequences, we anticipate
it, we feel that we understand the music. But to the extent that the composer
does not adhere to the rules-and gives us unexpected consequences-we feel that
we don't understand the music. If he gives us harmonic relationships that we
are trained not to accept, or expect, we say, "Well this man is just writing
garbage." Of course, it becomes apparent that the perception of music and
the ability to hear melody will depend upon a relationship between past, present,
and future sounds. You might Say, "Well, you're talking about a way of
living that would be equivalent to listening to music with a tonedeaf mind so
that you would eliminate the melody and have only noise. In your Taoist way
of life, you would eliminate all meaning and have only senseless present Moments."
Up to a point that is true; that is, in a way, what Buddhists also mean by seeing
things in their suchness.
What is so bad about dying, for example? It's really no problem. When you die,
you just drop dead, and that's all there is to it. But what makes it a problem
is that you are dragging a past. And all those things you have done, all those
achievements you've made and all these relationships and people that you've
accumulated as your friends have to go. It isn't here now. A few friends might
be around you, but all the past that identifies you as who you are (which is
simply memory) has to go, and we feel just terrible about that. If we didn't,
if we were just dying and that's all, death would not be a problem. Likewise,
the chores of everyday life become intolerable when everything-all the past
and futureties together and you feel it dragging at you every way. Supposing
you wake up in the morning and it's a lovely morning. Let's take today, right
here and now-here we are in this paradise of a place and some of us have to
go to work on Monday. Is that a problem? For many people it is because it spoils
the taste of what is going on now. When we wake up in bed on Monday morning
and think of the various hurdles we have to jump that day, immediately we feel
sad, bored, and bothered. Whereas, actually, we're just lying in bed.
So, the Taoist trick is simply, "Live now and there will be no problems."
That is the meaning of the Zen saying, "When you are hungry, eat. When
you are tired, sleep. When you walk, walk. When you sit, sit." Rinzai,
the great Tung dynasty master, said, "In the practice of Buddhism, there
is no place for using effort. Sleep when you're tired, move your bowels, eat
when you're hungry-that's all. The ignorant will laugh at me, but the wise will
understand." The meaning of the wonderful Zen saying "Every day is
a good day" is that they come one after another, and yet there is only
this one. You don't link them. This, as I intimated just a moment ago, seems
to be an atomization of life. Things just do what they do. The flower goes puff,
and people go this way and that way, and so on, and that is what is happening.
It has no meaning, no destination, no value. It is just like that. When you
see that, you see it's a great relief. That is all it is. Then, when you are
firmly established in suchness, and it is just this moment, you can begin again
to play with the connections, only you have seen through them. Now they don't
haunt you, because you know that there isn't any continuous you running on from
moment to moment who originated sometime in the past and will die sometime in
the future. All that has disappeared. So, you can have enormous fun anticipating
the future, remembering the past, and playing all kinds of continuities. This
is the meaning of that famous Zen saying about mountains: "To the naive
man, mountains are mountains, waters are waters. To the intermediate student,
mountains are no longer mountains, waters are no longer waters." In other
words, they have dissolved into the point instant, the tsbana. "But for
the fully perfected student, mountains are again mountains and waters are again
waters."
