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And you have the feeling they walk rather the same way as a cat. There’s something about it which isn’t hesitant; they’re going along alright, they’re not sort of vagueing around, but they’re walking just to walk. And that’s walking meditation. |
But the point is that one cannot act creatively except on the basis of stillness; of having a mind that is from time to time capable of stopping thinking. And so this practice of sitting may seem very difficult at first. Because if you sit in the Buddhist way, it makes your legs ache, and most Westerners start to fidget. |
They find it very boring to sit for a long time. But the reason they find it boring is that they’re still thinking. If you weren’t thinking, you wouldn’t notice the passage of time. |
And, as a matter of fact, far from being boring, the world—when looked at without chatter—becomes amazingly interesting. The most ordinary sights and sounds and smells, the texture of shadows on the floor in front of you. All these things, without being named and saying, “that’s a shadow,” “that’s red,” “that’s brown,” “that’s somebody’s foot.” When you don’t name things any longer, you start seeing them. |
Because, say ,when a person says, “I see a leaf,” immediately, one thinks of a spearhead-shaped thing outlined in black and filled in with flat green. No leaf looks like that. No leaves—leaves are not green. |
That’s why Lao Tzu said, “The five colors make a man blind, the five tones make a man deaf:” because if you can only see five colors, you’re blind, and if you can only hear five tones in music, you’re deaf. You see, if you force sound into five tones, you force color into five colors, you’re blind and deaf. The world of color is infinite, as is the world of sound. |
And it is only through stopping fixing conceptions on the world of color and sound that you really begin to hear it and see it. So this—shall I be so bold as to use the word “discipline?”—of meditation, or zazen, lies behind the extraordinary capacity of Zen people to develop such great arts as the gardens, the tea ceremony, the calligraphy, and the grand painting of the Song Dynasty, and of the Japanese sumi tradition. And it was because, especially in tea ceremony—which means literally, chanoyu in Japanese, means “hot water of tea,”—they found in the very simplest of things in everyday life magic. |
In the words of the poet Hokoji: “Marvelous power and supernatural activity, drawing water, carrying wood.” And you know how it is sometimes when you say a word and make the word meaningless? You take the word “yes:” yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes—it becomes funny. That’s why they use mu, you know, in Zen training, which means “no.” Mu. |
And you get this going for a long time, and the word ceases to mean anything, and it becomes magical. That sound! Now, what you have to realize in the further continuance of zazen, that as you—well, let me say first in a preliminary way: the easiest way to stop thinking is, first of all, to think about something that doesn’t have any meaning. |
That’s my point in talking about mu, or yes, or counting your breath, or listening to a sound that has no meaning. Because that stops you thinking, because you become fascinated in the sound. Then, as you get on and you just—the sound only—there comes a point when the sound is taken away, and you’re wide open. |
Now, at that point, there will be a kind of preliminary so-called satori, and you will think, “Wowee! That’s it!” You’ll be so happy, you’ll be walking on air. When Suzuki Daisetz was asked what was it like to have satori, he said, “Well, it’s like ordinary, everyday experience, except about two inches off the ground.” But there’s another saying that that student who has obtained satori goes to hell as straight as an arrow. |
No satori around here! Because anybody who has a spiritual experience—whether you get it through zazen, or through LSD, or anything, you know, that gives you that experience—if you hold on to it, say, “Now I’ve got it,” it’s gone out of the window. Because the minute you grab the living thing, it’s like catching a handful of water: the harder you clutch, the faster it squirts through your fingers. |
There’s nothing to get hold of, because you don’t need to get hold of anything. You had it from the beginning. Of course, you can see that by various methods of meditation, but the trouble is that people come out of that and brag about it, say, “I’ve seen it.” Equally intolerable are the people who study Zen and come out and brag to their friends about how much their legs hurt, and how long they sat, and what an awful thing it was. |
They’re sickening. Because the discipline side of this thing is not meant to be something awful. It’s not done in a masochistic spirit, or a sadistic spirit; “suffering builds character, therefore suffering is good for you.” When I went to school in England, the basic premise of education was that suffering builds character. |
And therefore all senior boys were at liberty to bang about the junior ones with a perfectly clear conscience, because they were doing them a favor. It was good for them, it was building their character. And as a result of this kind of attitude, the word “discipline” has begun to stink. |
It’s been stinking for a long time. But we need a kind of entirely new attitude towards this, because without that quiet and that non-striving, life becomes messy. When you let go, finally (because there’s nothing to hold onto), you have to be awfully careful not to turn into loose yogurt. |
Let me give two opposite illustrations. When you ask most people to lie flat on the floor and relax, you find that they are at full of tension. It’s because they don’t really believe that the floor will hold them up, and therefore they’re holding themselves together; they’re uptight. |
They’re afraid that if they don’t do this, even though the floor is supporting them, they’ll suddenly turn into a gelatinous mass and trickle away in all directions. Then there are other people, when you tell them to relax, they go like a limp rag. Bleeah! |
But, you see, the human organism is a subtle combination of hardness and softness, of flesh and bones. And the side of Zen which has to do with neither doing nor not doing, but knowing that you are It anyway, and you don’t have to seek it, that’s Zen flesh. But the side in which you can come back into the world with this attitude of not seeking, and knowing you’re It, and not fall apart—that requires bones. |
And one of the most difficult things—this belongs to, of course, the generation we all know about that was running about some time ago—where they caught on to Zen, and they started anything-goes painting, they started anything-goes sculpture, they started anything-goes way of life. Now I think we’re recovering from that today. At any rate, our painters are beginning once again to return to glory, to marvelous articulateness and vivid color. |
Nothing like it has been seen since the stained glass at Chartres. That’s a good sign. But it requires that there be in our daily use of freedom—and I’m not just talking about political freedom, I’m talking about the freedom which comes when you know that you’re It for ever and ever and ever. |
And it’ll be so nice when you die, because that’ll be a change—but it’ll come back some other way. When you know that, and you’ve seen through the whole mirage, then watch out! Because there may still be in you some seeds of hostility, some seeds of pride, some seeds of wanting to put down other people, or wanting to just defy the normal arrangements of life. |
So that is why, in the order of a Zen monastery, various duties are assigned. The novices have the light duties, and the more senior you get, the heavy duties. For example, the rōshi very often is the one who cleans out the benjo, the toilet. |
And everything is kept in order. There is a kind of beautiful, almost princely asceticism, because by reason of that order being kept all the time, the vast free energy which is contained in the system doesn’t run amok. The understanding of Zen, the understanding of awakening, the understanding of—well, we’ll call it mystical experience—is one of the most dangerous things in the world. |
And for a person who cannot contain it, it’s like putting a million volts through your electric shaver. You blow your mind and it stays blown. Now, if you go off in that way, that is what would be called in Buddhism a pratyekabuddha—“private buddha.” He’s one who goes off into the transcendental world and is never seen again. |
And he’s made a mistake from the standpoint of Buddhism, because from the standpoint of Buddhism, there is no fundamental difference between the transcendental world and this everyday world. The bodhisattva, you see—who doesn’t go off into a nirvāṇa and stay there for ever and ever, but comes back and lives ordinary everyday life to help other beings to see through it, too—he doesn’t come back because he feels he has some sort of solemn duty to help mankind and all that kind of pious cant. He comes back because he sees the two worlds are the same. |
He sees all other beings as buddhas. He sees them—to use a phrase of G. K. Chesterton’s—“But now a great thing in the street, seems any human nod, where move in strange democracies the million masks of god.” And it’s fantastic to look at people and see that they really, deep down, are enlightened. They’re It. |
They’re faces of the divine. And they look at you and say, “Oh no, but I’m not divine. I’m just ordinary little me.” You look at them in a funny way, and here you see the Buddha nature looking out of their eyes, straight at you, and saying it’s not—and saying it quite sincerely. |
And that’s why, when you get up against a great guru (the Zen master, or whatever), he has a funny look in his eyes. When you say, “I have a problem, guru. I’m really mixed up, and I don’t understand,” he looks at you in this queer way. |
And you think, “Oh dear me, he’s reading my most secret thoughts. He’s seeing all the awful things I am, all my cowardice, all my shortcomings.” He’s not doing anything of the kind; he isn’t even interested in such things. He’s looking at—if I may use Hindu terminology—he’s looking at Shiva in you, saying, “My god, Shiva, won’t you come off it?” So then, you see, the bodhisattva, who is—I’m assuming quite a knowledge of Buddhism in this assembly—but the bodhisattva as distinct from the pratyekabuddha, bodhisattva doesn’t go off into nirvāṇa, he doesn’t go off into permanent withdrawn ecstasy, he doesn’t go into a kind of catatonic samadhi. |
That’s alright. There are people who can do that; that’s their vocation. That’s their specialty, just as a long thing is the long body of Buddha, and a short thing is the short body of Buddha. |
But if you really understand that Zen, that Buddhist idea of enlightenment, is not comprehended in the idea of the transcendental, neither is it comprehended in the idea of the ordinary. Not in terms with the infinite, not in terms with the finite. Not in terms of the eternal, not in terms of the temporal—because they’re all concepts. |
So, let me say again: I am not talking about the ordering of ordinary everyday life in a reasonable and methodical way as being schoolteacher-ish, and saying if you were nice people, that’s what you would do. For heaven’s sake, don’t be nice people! But the thing is that, unless you do have that basic framework of a certain kind of order, and a certain kind of discipline, the force of liberation will blow the world to pieces. |
It’s too strong a current for the wire. So then, it’s terribly important to see beyond ecstasy. Ecstasy here is the soft and lovely flesh, huggable and kissable, and that’s very good. |
But beyond ecstasy are bones—what we call hard facts. Hard facts of everyday life. Incidentally, we shouldn’t forget to mention the soft facts; there are many of them. |
But in the hard fact—what we mean: the world as seen in an ordinary, everyday state of consciousness. To find out that that is really no different from the world of supreme ecstasy… well, it’s rather like this: let’s suppose, as so often happens, you think of ecstasy as insight, as seeing light. There’s a Zen poem which says : See? |
There’s a sudden vision. Satori! Breaking! |
Wowee! And the doors of the mind are blown apart, and there sits the ordinary old man. It’s just little you, you know? |
Lightning flashes, sparks shower. In one blink of your eyes, you’ve missed seeing. Why? |
Because here is the light. The light, the light, the light—every mystic in the world has seen the light. That brilliant, blazing energy, brighter than a thousand suns: it is locked up in everything. |
Now imagine this. Imagine you’re seeing it, like you see aureoles around Buddhas, like you see the beatific vision at the end of Dante’s Paradiso. Vivid, vivid light, so bright that it is like the clear light of the void in the Tibetan Book of the Dead. |
It’s beyond light, it’s so bright. And you watch it receding from you. And on the edges, like a great star, it becomes a rim of red. |
And beyond that, a rim of orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet. You see this great mandala appearing, this great sun. And beyond the violet there’s black. |
Black like obsidian: not flat black, but transparent black, like lacquer. And again, blazing out of the black, as the yang comes from the yin, more light. Going, going, going. |
And along with this light, there comes sound. There is a sound so tremendous with the white light that you can’t hear it, so piercing that it seems to annihilate the ears. But then, along with the colors, the sound goes down the scale in harmonic intervals, down, down, down, down, until it gets to a deep thundering bass which is so vibrant that, in turn, it turns into something solid, and you begin to get the similar spectrum of textures. |
Now, all this time, you’ve been watching a kind of thing radiating out. But it says: you know, this isn’t all I can do. And the rays start going yoo-ee, yoo-ee, yoo-ee, yoo-ee, yoo-ee, yoo-ee, yoo-ee, yoo-ee, dancing like this. |
And naturally, the sound starts waving, too, as it comes out. And then the textures start varying themselves. And they say: well, you’ve been looking at this thing as I’ve been describing it so far in a flat dimension. |
Let’s add a third dimension; it’s going to come right at you now. See? This way. |
And meanwhile, it says: it’s not just that we’re not going to go yoo-ee, yoo-ee, yoo-ee, like this, we’re going to do little curlicues. We’re going to go lick-achoo, ka-tick-achoo, ka-tick-achoo, ka-tick-achoo, like this. And it says: well, that’s just the beginning! |
We can go tam, tam, tam, tam, tam, tam, pa-tch, tam, tam, bum, making squares and turns. And then suddenly you see in all the little details that become so intense, that all kinds of little subfigures are contained within what you thought were originally the main figures. And the sound starts going all different. |
Amazing complexities of sound all over the place. And this thing’s going, going, going, and you think you’re going to go out of your mind, and suddenly it turns into—why, us, sitting around here. Thank you very much! |
When I last talked about Zen I was discussing it as a dialogue between master and student, and I was discussing it to a great extent in relation to Far Eastern culture: how it is, in effect, a method of liberation from the culture. All of us need to be liberated from our culture to a certain extent, because education is a kind of necessary evil. And when the process of education—or acculturation—has been completed, we need a cure for it. |
Education is like salting meat in order to preserve it for eating. But when you’re ready to cook it and eat it, you need to soak some of the salt out. So in the process of being brought up by one’s parents and one’s teachers you are in one way spoiled—although, in another way, made tolerable to live with. |
And so in our culture it’s increasingly fashionable to have psychoanalysis when you’re finished with education, so as to work out and resolve all the damage and traumatic shocks that were done to you in the process. And it’s becoming something that—in sophisticated circles—one goes through, not because you’re a mentally sick person, but because it’s considered beneficial to general mental health. And this is our fumbling attempt, you see, to find a cure for our own culture. |
We need a cure, of course, because the thing that we lose in the course of being brought up is spontaneity. That’s what’s so delightful about a child, as well as so objectionable—that children are just plain spontaneous. And when they do it in a way that pleases us we think they’re delightful, and when they do it in a way that doesn’t please us we think they’re horrid. |
And so we pretty much kill the spontaneity in them in order to get—certainly, that they won’t be horrid, and that they will be nice, but in a rather phony way. And this is such a disaster, isn’t it? Because when we watch a child—say, dancing—and it’s never learned; never had a single dancing lesson, and is really just dancing for fun, we say, “That’s delightful.” Then, eventually, the child notices that this is a way of getting attention and becomes self-conscious about dancing, and then we send it to dancing school, and it becomes stiff and wretched. |
And only after many, many years of practice does the child—as a dancer, now a young man or woman—recapture the spontaneity of childhood. Got to go all that long way around to get back to the thing that it once had. And that’s terribly difficult. |
So in the same way, we might say the general attitude to life, that a child is taught to live as the child is taught to dance. It has to observe the rules. And in so doing this thing arises that bugs us human beings beyond belief. |
That is: self-consciousness. Self-consciousness is, in one sense, our pride as human beings. It’s the great thing we have. |
We cannot only be happy, but we can know we’re happy. We cannot only think, but we can think about thinking. And therein lies the whole possibility in reasoning: to think about thinking, to know about knowing, to be aware of what one does. |
Herein is the whole birth of a rational control of behavior, which you might say is the glory of civilization and the glory of man. But at the same time it’s a perfect pest, because how do you know when to stop thinking about thinking? For instance, you think over a problem; you’ve got to make a decision. |
How long should you think about it? How much evidence should you collect before you take a step? You never know. |
Actually, what most of us do is we think about a given decision until it’s a nuisance, or the time is too late to think about it anymore, and then we do something. We never are sure that we decided the right thing, and one of the troubles about thinking decisions is there are ever so many unpredictable variables that come into everything. And you may work out the most perfect business contract, and everything is fine, but you didn’t bargain for the banana skin that you were going to slip on on your way to your partner’s office, or whatever it was. |
Such things couldn’t be predicted in any amount of decision-making, and the more we try to elaborate perfectly foolproof methods of arranging our lives, the more we find ourselves encumbered with impossible details. That’s the fallacy of too much law. When we provide for everything in the law, [we] suddenly find you can’t move without filling out 300 forms, and without consulting all sorts of bureaucrats, without hiring a staff of lawyers and accountants, and all kinds of things; to be sure you don’t make the wrong move. |
After a while, the game ceases to be worth the candle. And life becomes so safe that it’s not worth living at all. So this is one of the problems of being self-conscious. |
And all education, you see, is an instruction in self-consciousness. What do you learn in education? You learn, fundamentally, words. |
In other words, symbols about reality. And through words we’re able to talk about living, and so think about living, and so have knowledge about it. You see, no knowledge is academically respectable knowledge unless it’s knowledge in terms of words or in terms of numbers. |
That is to say, in terms of symbolic language about life. But you see, once you’re in that position, once you know that you know, and you know you’re alive, and you know you’re gonna die—because you can predict—you feel you’ve lost your innocence. Something’s gone wrong. |
This, in the Christian tradition, was the knowledge of good and evil. What it says in Hebrew is not exactly moral good and evil that was known as a result of eating the fruit of the tree, but what was advantageous and disadvantageous. It gave you the gift of being like God, that is to say, the gift of being able to control the course of events. |
And anybody who controls the course of events, you see, probably puts themself in the situation of the sorcerer’s apprentice. The Lord, looking at you down there and says, “Okay, you wanted to be God. Man, you go ahead and try!” And you get in more and more of a mess. |
You know, you succeed amazingly. Just like the sorcerer’s apprentice actually made that broom go and fetch water for it. But he couldn’t stop it. |
And as we say today: you can’t stop progress. So then, the whole problem of self-consciousness is that you’re always in a dither and a doubt. We call this anxiety. |
And a nostalgia develops among us for the age of innocence. Wouldn’t it be nice not to have to make any decisions? To act entirely on whim? |
And if you got into trouble—well, that would be alright, because you wouldn’t’ve been worrying about it. See, when a moth mistakes a candle for its sex call—which is what happens; that’s why moths fly into candles—the moth makes a mistake and powie, it goes out. That’s that. |
[The] moth doesn’t worry on the way to the candle whether it’s going to get burned. And of course, the moths are sufficiently prolific so that one moth more or less lost in a candle doesn’t matter. Hundreds of moths lost in candles don’t matter. |
They just go on. So you might imagine a human civilization where people make mistakes—and yes, they go off with a glorious bang instead of a whimper. And that’s that. |
They wouldn’t worry. They’d live magnificently. But we can’t possibly go back and do that. |
You can’t on purpose give up self-consciousness, you can’t give up worrying, you can’t give up thinking about yourself, and above all you’re terrified to live spontaneously because you might do something wrong. However, the center of Zen training is to live spontaneously. And this is why it’s so fascinating to many Western people, especially Western intellectuals, who are overburdened with self-consciousness. |
Because what fascinated people about Zen, when they first heard of it through Dr. Suzuki’s writings, were Zen stories. I lent a book of Zen stories once to a friend of mine, years and years ago, and he was in hospital. And when he gave it back to me he said, “Geez, I didn’t understand a word of it, but it cheered me up enormously!” So the literature of Zen, especially the literature of Zen in its early days in the Tang Dynasty in China, was a literature that runs from approximately 700 A.D. to 1,000 A.D. |
This span of years is the golden age of Zen, and almost all the literature of the period—in early Buddhist Chinese—is anecdotes about the encounters of Zen masters with their students. They are called in Japanese mondō, which means “question-answer.” And it appears that the way of studying Zen in those days was rather unlike the way of studying it now. Now, Zen is settled and is studied in communities—such as we’ve been looking at and will be staying in tomorrow night. |
But in those days, Zen was a wandering thing. In other words, if you became a Zen monk, you did a great deal of traveling. And instead of sitting on your fanny most of the day, you trudged. |
You were walking along through prairies, mountain paths, rugged country; you were visiting master after master after master, to find one who would answer your question. Now, in a very natural way—supposing a person is questing; you are a seeker. You’re not a phony seeker, but a real seeker—that is to say, you have within you a burning desire to find out what it’s all about. |
Who you are, what life is, what reality is, or what’s the way out of the mess. You want to become—instead of a mixed-up human being—you want to become something as simple and genuine as a tiger, or a cat, or a bird, or a Buddha. So those monks used to wander, and wander, and wander in search of a man who would answer the question. |
So one of the first stories is that, when Bodhidharma—or Daruma, who you see all over Japan as the man with big eyes, a bushy beard, usually dressed in red, with no legs—he [Alan mistakenly says Bodhidharma visited himself. The person asking Bodhidharma for advice referred to here is Taiso Eka] came to where Bodhidharma was meditating and said, “Master, I have no peace of mind. Please pacify my mind.” Of course, he didn’t even get in for a long time to ask the question, because Bodhidharma refused to see anybody. |
Finally, when he cut off his left arm as a token of his sincerity and presented it to the master, Bodhidharma said, you know, “All right, what do you want?” Well, he said, “I have no peace of mind.” The mind, in Chinese, is xīn, and it isn’t quite what we mean by “mind.” They locate it here [the heart]; Japanese kokoro. We locate our mind here [the head]. But this mind here, the heart-mind, is the psychic center. |
When you say, “I’ve no peace of mind,” it doesn’t mean you’ve just got a headache. You may have a heartache, too. It’s a more inclusive word; you might call it the center of psychic activity. |
So Bodhidharma said to this man, whose name was Eka: “Bring out your mind here before me. I’ll pacify it.” And Eka said, “When I look for my mind I can’t find it.” Bodhidharma said, “There, it’s pacified.” Now somehow, this answered Eka’s question. And all Zen is stories like that. |
Now, one thing I must tell you about these stories: they are of the same nature as jokes. That is to say, a joke is told with the object of making you laugh. Laughter is not an intellectual thing, it is an emotional reaction. |
And the point is the emotional reaction. If, therefore, a joke is explained to you, you may laugh out of politeness; a throaty laugh—but you will not laugh spontaneously; a belly laugh. Now, the object of Zen stories is not to produce laughter, but to produce awakening, clarification, enlightenment, or what is called in Japanese satori. |
Satori is, like laughter, something that happens suddenly. You don’t—as a rule—slowly begin to laugh and then laugh louder and louder. Because you see a joke instantly. |
A joke is always a matter of an a-ha! So, in the same way, these stories are intended to produce an a-ha reaction in you of, “Oh, but I see! Now it’s clear!” And really, they don’t contain any information. |
Their design is not to tell you something—that is to say, to impart information or knowledge. Their design is to get rid of something. To get rid of a false problem with which you are wrestling, so that the problem will disappear as a result of understanding the story. |
And you’ll see, from the story that I told you, that what happened was the disappearance of a problem. Because Eka, when he looked for his mind that was giving him so much trouble, couldn’t find it. Now then, these stories go on in the most amazing ways, and I might retell a few—although some of them may be familiar to you. |
I’ll try and choose ones that are probably less familiar. There was a master walking in the forest with a group of his disciples, and suddenly he picked up a tree branch and said to one of the monks, “What is it?” And the monk hesitated; didn’t answer immediately, so the teacher hit him with it. So he turned to another monk and said, “What is it?” And the monk said, “Give it to me, so that I can see.” And the master tossed him the branch. |
He caught it and he hit the master with it. And so the master said, “Well, you got out of that dilemma!” There was another occasion where an officer of the army came to a Zen master and said, “Sir, I have heard a very strange story and I want to know your answer to it. Once upon a time there was a man who kept a goose in a bottle. |
And it grew so large that he couldn’t get it out. Now, he didn’t want to break the bottle and he didn’t want to hurt the goose, so how does he get it out?” And the master changed the subject and said something like, you know, “It’s a nice day today, isn’t it? The waterfall’s making a lovely sound outside.” And so they went on, in pleasant conversation. |
And then the officer got up to leave, and as he walked away to the door the master said, “Oh, officer?” And he turned around and said, “Yes?” And the master said, “There! It’s out!” Another time there was a famous master called Suibi, and he was asked, “What is the secret teaching of Buddhism?” And he was asked this in the lecture hall, you know, where other monks were studying. And he said, “Wait until there’s no one around and I’ll tell you.” So, later in the day, the monk accosted him and said, “There’s nobody around now. |
What is the secret teaching of Buddhism?” So he went into the garden with this monk, and he pointed at the bamboos. And the monk said, “I don’t understand.” He said, “What a tall one that is. What a short one that is.” And this awakened the monk. |
Then there was another monk, whose name was Gutei, and whenever people came to ask him [a] question about Buddhism, he’d hold up a finger. That was the only answer he’d give. Well, he had an attendant. |
And one day somebody came to the temple to inquire about the teaching being given there, and the master was apparently out, and his attendant was there. So the investigator said, “What is your teaching here?” And the attendant held up a finger. Well, actually, the master had been there; he was peeking from behind a screen. |
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