I want to start by reemphasizing the point that what are called the religions of the East—the ones we’re discussing: Hinduism, Buddhism, and Chinese Taoism—they don’t involve that you believe in anything specific, and they don’t involve any idea of obedience to commandments from above, and they don’t involve any conformity to a specific ritual—although they do have rituals, but their rituals vary from country to country and from time to time. Their objective is always not ideas, not doctrines, but a method: a method for the transformation of consciousness. That is to say, for a transformation of your sensation of who you are—and I emphasize the word “sensation” because it’s the strongest word we have for feeling directly. When you put your hand on the corner of a table you have a very definite feeling. And when you are aware of existing you also have a definite feeling. But in the view of these methods or disciplines, the ordinary person’s definite feeling of the way he exists and who he is is a hallucination.

To feel yourself as a separate ego, a source of action and awareness that is entirely separate and independent from the rest of the world, somehow locked up inside a bag of skin, is seen as a hallucination. That you are not a stranger in the Earth, that comes into this world either as a result of a natural fluke or being a sort of spirit that comes from somewhere else altogether, but that you, in your fundamental existence, you are the total energy that constitutes this universe playing that it’s you, playing that it’s this particular organism, and even playing that it’s this particular person.

Because the fundamental game of the world is a game of hide and seek. That is to say that the colossal reality—the energy that is everything, that is a unitary energy, that is one—plays at being many, at manifesting itself in all these particulars that we call you and you and you and you and you and you and you and you and this and that all around us. And it’s fundamentally a game. And you can say that this goes really for all the systems that I’m talking about. It’s the basis of Hinduism, of Buddhism, and of Taoism, this intuition.

Now, today we’re going to talk about Buddhism. Buddhism is an offshoot of Hinduism. You could, in a way, call it a reform of Hinduism, or Hinduism stripped for export. It originates in northern India, close to the area that is now Nepal, shortly after 600 B.C. There was a young prince by the name of Gautama Siddhartha, who became the man we call the Buddha. Now, the word “Buddha” is not a proper name, it’s a title, and it’s based on the Sanskrit root budh, which means “to be awake.” And so you could say the Buddha is the man who woke up from the dream of life as we ordinarily take it to be, and found out who he was, who he is.

It’s curious that this title was not something new. There was already in the whole complex of Hinduism the idea of Buddhas—of awakened people—and, curiously, they are ranked higher than gods. Because in the view of Hinduism even the gods, or the angels, the devas, are still bound on the wheel of sort of squirrel cage, of going round and round and round in the pursuit of success. And the idea is that if you pursue something that you can call success, pleasure, good, virtue—which originally of course means “strength,” “magical power”—all these positive things, you are under illusion because the positive cannot exist without the negative. You only know what “to be” is by contrast with “not to be.” So if we say, now, there is a coin in the left hand, there is no coin in the right. And from this you get the idea of to be and not to be. And you can’t have the one without the other. So if you try to pursue, to gain, the positive, and to deny, get rid of, the negative it’s as if you were trying to arrange everything in this room so that it was all up and nothing was down. You can’t do it. You’ve set yourself an absolutely insoluble problem.

Because the basis of life is spectrum. Consider the spectrum of colors. When you think of a spectrum, in what form do you think of it? Most people think of it as a ribbon with red at one end and purple at the other. But the spectrum is actually a circle. Because purple is the mixture of red and blue. It goes right round. And so, in this way, all sensation, all feeling, all experience whatsoever, is moving through spectra. You don’t only have the spectrum of color, you have a spectrum of sound, you have various complex spectra of texture, of smell, of taste, and you are constantly operating through all the possible variations of experience. And it implies that you can’t know one end of the spectrum without also knowing the other. So if you wanted—say your favorite color is red, and you wanted only red, and you had to exclude therefore blue and purple—without blue and purple you can’t have red.

Behind, of course, all the various colors in the spectrum is the white light. And behind everything that we experience, all our various sensations of sound, of color, of shape, of touch, there’s the white light. And I’m using the phrase “the white light” rather symbolically. I don’t mean it literally. But there is common to all sensations what you might call the basic sense. And if you explore back into your sensations and reduce them all to the basic sense, you are on your way to reality, to what underlies everything, to what is the ground of being, the basic energy. And to the extent that you realize this and know that you are it, you transcend, you overcome, you surpass the illusion that you are simply John Doe, Mary Smith, or what have you.

So then, the Buddha—as the man who woke up—is regarded as one Buddha among a potentiality of myriads of Buddhas. Everybody can be a Buddha. Everybody has in himself the capacity to wake up from the illusion of being simply this separate individual. The Buddha made his doctrine very easy to understand, because in those days there wasn’t very much writing being done, and people committed things to memory. And so he put his doctrine or method in various formulae which are very easy to remember, and I’m going to explain it in those terms so that you can remember it just as well.

He, of course, practiced the various disciplines that were offered in the Hinduism of his time. But he found in a certain way that they had become unsatisfactory, because they had overemphasized asceticism, had overemphasized putting up with as much pain as you can. There was a feeling, you see, that if the problem of life is pain, let us suffer. And this is the root of the ascetics, you see, who lie on beds of nails, who hold a hand up for ever and ever and ever, who eat only one banana a day, who renounce sex, who do all these weird things. Because they feel that if they head right into pain and don’t become afraid of it, but suffer as much pain as possible, they will by this method overcome the problem of pain, and they will set themselves free from anxiety. There’s a certain sense in that, because can obviously see. Supposing, for example, you have absolutely no fear of pain, you have no anxieties, you have no hang-ups—how strong you would be. Nobody could stop you. You would have ultimate courage.

But the Buddha was very subtle. He is really the first historical psychologist—the great psychologist; psychotherapist. He was very subtle. Because he saw that a person who is fighting pain, who is trying to get rid of pain, is still really fundamentally afraid of it. And therefore, the way of asceticism is not right. Equally, the way of hedonism, of seeking pleasure, is not right. So the Buddha’s doctrine is called the Middle Way, which is neither ascetic nor hedonistic.

So it’s summed up in what are called the Four Noble Truths. And the first is called duḥkha. Duḥkha means “suffering” in a very generalized sense. You could call it “chronic frustration.” And it is saying that life, as lived by most people, is duḥkha. It is an attempt, to solve insoluble problems. Try to draw a square circle: you can’t, because the problem itself is meaningless. Try to arrange the things in this room so that they’re all up and none of them down: it is meaningless. Such a problem cannot ever be solved. So try to have light without dark, or dark without light: it can never be solved. So the attempt to solve problems that are basically insoluble, and to work at it through your whole life, that is duḥkha.

Now, he went on to analyze this. That there are what he called three signs of being. The first is duḥkha itself, frustration. The second is anitya, and this means—the letter “a” in Sanskrit at the beginning of a word is often the equivalent of our “non-”. So nitya means “permanent,” anitya means “impermanent.” That every manifestation is impermanent. And therefore, our quest to make things permanent, to straighten everything out, to get it fixed, is an impossible and insoluble problem. And therefore we experience duḥkha, or this sense of fundamental pain and frustration, as a result of trying to make things permanent.

And the third sign of being is called anātman. Now, you know from my talk on Hinduism that the word Ātman means “self.” Anātman therefore means “non-self:” that there is in you no real ego. Now, I’ve explained that already. I’ve explained, in talking about Hinduism, that the idea of the ego is a social institution. It has no physical reality. It is simply: the ego is your symbol of yourself, just as the word “water” is a noise which symbolizes a certain liquid reality. So the idea of the ego, the role you play, who you are, is not the same as your living organism. Your ego has absolutely nothing to do with the way you color your eyes, shape your body, circulate your blood. That’s the real you—but it’s certainly not your ego, because you don’t even know how it’s done from the standpoint of your conscious attention. So the idea of anātman is, firstly, that the ego is unreal; there isn’t one.

Now then, this, then, is the first truth. There is this situation that we have duḥkha, or frustration, because we are fighting the changing-ness of things, and because we don’t realize that the ego, the I, is unreal.

The second of the Four Noble Truths is then called tṛishṇā. Tṛishṇā is a Sanskrit word again, and is the root of our word “thirst.” And it’s usually translated “desire,” but it is better translated “clinging,” “grabbing,” or there’s an excellent modern American slangy word: “hangup.” That is exactly what tṛishṇā is: a hangup. Tṛishṇā is clutching. As, for example, what we call smother love: when a mother is so afraid that her children may get into trouble that she protects them excessively and, as a result of this, prevents them from growing. Or when lovers cling to each other excessively and have to sign documents that they will curse and swear to love each other always: they are in a state of tṛishṇā. And this is the same thing as holding on to yourself so tightly that you strangle yourself.

Now, so, the second truth, then, about tṛishṇā is that the cause of duḥkha is tṛishṇā: clinging is what makes suffering. If you don’t recognize that this whole world is a phantasmagoria, an amazing illusion, a weaving of smoke, and you try to hold on to it, you see, then you start suffering—seriously suffering.

Tṛishṇā is in turn based upon avidyā. The same negative a. Vidyā, from the root vidh, means “knowledge,” as in the latin video and the English “vision.” Avidyā, therefore, is “ignorance.” Gnosis, gn, means, of course, “to know.” “Knowledge” is the same thing as gnosis in Greek. “To know.” So this is “not to know,” “to ignore,” “to overlook.” And I explained in the first talk in this series how we ignore all kinds of things, because we notice only what we think noteworthy, and therefore our vision of everything is highly selective. We pick out certain things and say that’s what’s there, just as we select and notice the figure rather than the background. Sometimes I draw this on the blackboard and ask the question: what have I drawn? What would you say? What have I drawn? A circle. Any other suggestions? Yeah, you’re getting the point. I’ve drawn a wall with a hole in it, you see? But ordinarily—you’ve been reading my books!—but ordinarily, people see the ball, the circle, the ring, or whatever, and never think of the background. Because they ignore the background. Just as one thinks that you can have pleasure without pain: you want pleasure, the figure, and don’t realize that pain is the background.

So avidyā is this state of restricted consciousness, restricted attention, that moves through life unaware of the fact that to be implies not to be, and vice versa.

So now, the Third Noble Truth is called nirvāṇa. This word means “blow out.” Nir is a negative word again, like a, vāṇa is “blowing.” So it’s a kind of “out-blowing.” Now, in breathing you know that breath is life. The Greek word—you may pronounce it pneuma or pnefna—is the same as “spirit.” And “spirit” means “breath.” In the Book of Genesis, when God had made the clay figurine that was later to be Adam, he breathed the breath of life into its nostrils and it became alive, because life is breath. But now, if you hold your breath, you lose it. “He that will save his life will lose it.” So breathe in, breathe in, breathe in, get as much air as you can, and tṛishṇā, cling, and you lose it. So nirvāṇa means “breathe out:” psssshhhhhhhwwwwwwwhhh… whew! What a relief that was! The sigh of relief. Let it go. Because it’ll come back to you if you let it go. But if you don’t let it go you will just suffocate.

So a person in this state of nirvāṇa is what we might call a blown-out person. Like: blow your mind. Let go! Don’t cling. And then you’re in the state of nirvāṇa.

And I reemphasize the point: this is not—I’m not preaching, see? Not saying this is what you ought to do. I’m simply pointing out a state of affairs that is so. There’s no moralism in this whatsoever. It’s simply pointing out, like: if you put your hand into the fire, you’ll get burned. You can get burned if you want to. It’s okay. But if it so happens that you don’t want to get burned, then you don’t put your hand in the fire. So, in the same way, if you don’t want to be in a state of anxiety all the time—and again, I emphasize: if you like to be anxious, it’s perfectly alright! See, Buddhism never hurries anyone on. They say you’ve got all eternity through which to live in various forms, and therefore you don’t have just one life in which you’ve got to avoid eternal damnation. You can go running around the wheel in the rat race and play that game just as long as you want to, so long as you think it’s fun. But if there comes a time when you don’t think it’s fun, you don’t have to do it. So I wouldn’t say to anyone who disagrees with me, and who says, “Well, I think we ought to engage the forces of evil in battle and put this world to right,” and so on and so forth, and arrange everything in this world so that it’s all up—try it, please. It’s perfectly okay. Go on doing that. But if you see that it’s futile, then you can let go. Don’t try to cling. Relax.

And if you do that, you’re in the state of nirvāṇa and you become a Buddha. And of course it means that you become a rather astonishing person. You may, of course, be subtle about it and make like you’re a very ordinary person, so that you don’t get people mixed up. And so, in Buddhism, the Buddha explained that his doctrine, his method, was a raft. It’s sometimes called a yāna. The word means a “vehicle,” a “conveyance.” And when you cross a river on a raft, and you get to the other shore, you don’t pick up the raft and carry it on your back. You leave it behind. But people who are what I would call hooked on religion are always on the raft. They’re going back and forth, back and forth, back and forth on the raft, so that clergyman tends to turn into a ferryman who is always on the raft and never gets over to the other shore himself.

Now, there’s something to be said for that, because how are we going to get the raft back to the first shore to bring over the other people, see? Somebody has to volunteer to take the back journey. But he must be awfully careful to realize that the real objective is to get the people across and set them free. If you dedicate yourself to ferrying people across, don’t ask them to come back on the raft with you. Because you’ll get over-crowded, and people will think that the raft is the goal rather than the other shore. So when—I find this in actual practice—that when clergymen do not ever ask for money—it’s alright, you know, like a doctor, who simply charges a fee. Says, “You come to me, you pay me so much.” But the clergyman doesn’t say, “Pay me so much,” he says, “We would like your pledge, your voluntary contribution.” See? And then nobody knows what to give. That’s the idea of the raft.

Now then, the Fourth Noble Truth is called mārga. This word means “path.” And the way of Buddhism is often called the Noble Eightfold Path. Because there are eight phases—I won’t say steps, because they’re not sequential. Samyak is a very curious phrase. It doesn’t mean “right” in our sense of “correct.” Sam is the same, really, as our word “some:” “total,” “complete,” “all-inclusive.” We might use the word “integrated,” as when we say a person has integrity. A person who has integrity, we mean he’s all of a piece, he’s not divided against himself.

So in this sense of samyak, dṛṣṭi—this is related to the word darshan, which means a point of view, or viewing: when you go to visit a great guru or teacher, you have darshan, you look at it, and you offer your reverence to it. This is darshan. Many senses of it. But it means simply “to view.” Look at the view. So the samyak darshan is the “complete view.” For example, let’s take the constellation called the Big Dipper. We look at it from a fairly restricted zone in space, and it always seems—whatever the season of the year—because we’re so far away from it, that those stars in the Big Dipper are in the same position. But imagine looking at it from somewhere else in space altogether, and those stars would not look like a dipper. They’d be in another position. Now then, what is the true position of those stars? Don’t you see there isn’t one? Because wherever you look, the position alters. You could say that the true situation of those stars is how they are looked at from all possible points of view: inside the constellation looking outwards, outside the constellation looking inwards, from everywhere and everywhere.

But, you see, there is no such thing as the truth. The world, in other words, is not existing independently of those who witness it. Because the world is precisely the relationship between the world and its witnesses. And so if there are no eyes in this world, the sun doesn’t make any light—nor do the stars. So what is is a relationship. You can, for example, prop up two sticks by leaning them against each other, and they will stand—but only by depending on each other. Take one away, and the other falls.

So in Buddhism it is taught that everything in this universe depends on everything else, that we have a kind of a huge network. And this is called the doctrine of mutual interdependence. All of it hangs on you, and you hang on all of it, just as the two sticks support each other. And this is conveyed in a symbol which is called Indra’s net. Imagine a multidimensional spider’s web in the early morning covered in dewdrops, and every dewdrop contains the reflection of all the other dewdrops, and in each reflected dewdrop the reflections of all the other dewdrops in that reflection, and so ad infinitum. That is the Buddhist conception of the universe in an image. The Japanese call that jiji muge. Ji means a “thing-event,” a “happening.” So “between happening and happening,” mu, “there is no,” ge, “separation.” Jiji muge.

So the first phase of the Eightfold Path has to do with one’s view, understanding of the world. The second phase has to do with action: how you act. Buddhist idea of ethics is based on expediency. If you are engaged in the way of liberation, and you want to clarify your consciousness, doing that is inconsistent with certain kinds of action. So every Buddhist makes five vows, five precepts. And you may perhaps have heard the Buddhist formula of taking what is called pañcaśīla, the five precepts, and they take what are called tisaraṇena, the three refugees and the five precepts. The refugees are the Buddha, the dharma (the doctrine), and the sangha (the fellowship of all those who are on the Way). So the priest (the biddkhu, the Buddhist monk) and the laypeople will chant the formula:

Buddham saranam gacchami.

Dhammam saranam gacchami.

Sangham saranam gacchami.

Those are the three refugees: the Buddha, the dharma, and the sangha. Then they take the five precepts:

Pāṇātipātā veramaṇī sikkhāpadaṃ samādiyāmi.

Adinnādānā veramaṇī sikkhāpadaṃ samādiyāmi.

Kāmesumicchācāra veramaṇī sikkhāpadaṃ samādiyāmi.

Musāvādā veramaṇī sikkhāpadaṃ samādiyāmi.

Surāmerayamajjapamādaṭṭhānā veramaṇī sikkhāpadaṃ samādiyāmi.

So they take these five precepts. Pāṇātipātā: “I undertake the precept to abstain from taking life.” Adinnādānā: “I undertake the precept to abstain from taking what is not given.” Kāmesumicchācāra: “I undertake the precept to abstain from exploiting the passions.” Musāvādā: “I undertake the precept to abstain from falsifying speech.” Surāmerayamajjapamādaṭṭhānā: “I undertake the precept to abstain from being intoxicated” by Surā, meraya, majjapamādaṭṭhānā, whatever they were. I presume toddy, which is alcohol. I don’t know what else it was. Nobody does know.

Because, you see, if you start killing people or taking life, you’re in trouble. You set up an opposition, and you’ve got to become involved in taking care of it. If you start stealing, you worry people, you upset people’s orientation in life. Because if you suddenly come back home for dinner and find somebody’s stolen your table, where are you going to serve dinner? If you exploit your passions, it means that when you feel bored and somehow that life is a little bit empty, you say, “Well, now, what are we going to do this evening? Let’s go and get stuffed.” See, a lot of people who suffer from obesity are trying to simply fill their empty psyche by stuffing themselves with food. Well, it’s the wrong cure. So likewise, musāvādā: if you start telling lies to everybody, you know what happens when you start telling lies. You have to tell extra lies to cover up the first one, and you get into the most hopeless misunderstanding. Speech collapses. And, of course, the intoxication is the same problem as the exploitation of the passions. So there’s a purely kind of practical, expedient, utilitarian approach to morals. There’s another side to this, which doesn’t enter into the precepts, which I will explain later.

So that’s the second phase of the Eightfold Path. Then the third phase has to do with your mind, with your state of consciousness. And this has to do with what we would ordinarily call meditation. There are the two final—the seventh and eighth aspects of the path are called samyak smṛti and samyak samādhi. Smṛti means “recollection.” That’s the best English word for it. Now, do you understand—the word “recollect” is to gather together what has been scattered. What is the opposite of “remember?” Obviously, “dismember.” What has been chopped up and scattered becomes re-membered. So in the Christian scheme, “Do this in remembrance of me.” You see? Christ has been sacrificed, chopped up. But the mass is celebrated in re-membrance. One of the old liturgies says “the wheat which has been scattered all over the hills and grows up is gathered again into the bread.” Remembered. Go back to your Hindu basis. The world is regarded as the dismemberment of the self, the Brahman, the godhead. The one is dismembered into the many. So remembrance is realizing again that each single member of the many is really the one. So that’s recollection.

You can think of it, too, in another way. And it’s really the same way if you think it through. I’m going to leave you with a few puzzles so that you can think them through, and I won’t explain them. But another way to be recollected is to be completely here and now. Are you here and now? Are you really here? There was a wise old boy who used to give lectures on these things, and he would get up and not say a word. He would just look at the audience. And he’d examine every person individually, and they’d all start feeling uncomfortable. He wouldn’t say anything. He’d look at them all. And then he’d suddenly say, “Wake up! You’re all asleep. And if you don’t wake up I won’t give you any lecture.”

Are you here; recollected? See, most people aren’t. They’re bothering about yesterday and wondering what they’re going to do tomorrow, and aren’t all here. That’s a definition of sanity: to be all there. So to be recollected is to be completely alert, available for the present. Because that’s the only place that you are ever going to be in. Yesterday doesn’t exist, tomorrow never comes. There is only today. A great Sanskrit invocation says:

Look to this day, for it is life.

In its brief course lie all the realities of our existence.

Yesterday is but a memory.

Tomorrow is only a vision.

Look well, then, to this day.

Such is the salutation of the dawn.

So smṛti means, then, recollectedness in the sense of being all here, in the sense that this is the only where there is.

Then beyond that comes samādhi. Again, notice the presence of this word sam. Samādhi is integrated consciousness in which there is no further separation between the knower and the known, the subject and the object. You are what you know. Now, we think in the ordinary way that we are the witnesses of a constantly changing panorama of experience from which we, as the knowers of this, in a way, stand aside and watch it. We think of our minds as a kind of tablet upon which experience writes a record. And the tablet is always there, although the experience goes by. And eventually the experience, by writing so much on the tablet, wears it out. It’s all scratched away, and you die. See?

But actually, if you will investigate this—and you have to experiment on this because I cannot explain it to you in words, you can only find it out for yourself—there is no difference between the knower and the known. When you say, “I see a sight,” “I feel a feeling,” you are using redundant language. “I see” implies the sight. “I feel” implies the feeling. Do you hear sounds? No. You just hear. Or you can say there are sounds. Either one will do.

So you will find if you thoroughly investigate the process of experiencing that the experiencing is the same as the experiencer. And this is the state of samādhi. I put it originally in this form: that the organism and the environment are a single behavioral process. So, likewise, is the knower and the known. So you (as someone who is aware) and all that you are aware of is one process. That is the state of samādhi. And you get to that state by the practice of meditation. Every Buddha figure practically is seen in the sitting posture of meditation, which is sitting down quietly and being aware of all that goes on without comment, without thinking about it. And when you stop categorizing, verbalizing, talking to yourself inside your head, naturally the separations—between, for example, knower and known, self and other—simply vanish. Can you point to the difference between my five fingers? Where will you put your finger if you want to point to the difference? You see, the idea of difference is an abstraction. It just isn’t there in the physical world. Of course, that’s not saying that the fingers are joined (like ducks’ claws) with a web, but that it’s just that. They’re not the same—that’s an idea. They’re not different—that’s an idea. And these ideas just aren’t here, see? You can’t point to it, can’t put your finger on it.

Get, then, to the state of affairs where you see the world free from concepts. That’s what Buddhists mean by void. When they say the world is basically—they use the phrase śūnya. That has a meaning of “empty,” “void.” Everything is śūnya. This has certainly also the meaning of anitya, of transience. But basically it means you can’t catch the world in a conceptual net. Just as if you try to catch water in a net, it all slips through. If you try to tie up water in a paper package or grab it in your hands, it all flows through. So śūnya doesn’t really mean that the world itself, that the energy of the world, is nothing at all. It means that no concept of it is valid. You cannot make any one idea or belief or doctrine or system or theory tie the thing up.

So if you go through this and you get completely blown out and released and are in the state of nirvāṇa, for no reason that anybody can explain there—just as, for example, as I pointed out: when you see that you can’t change yourself, you can’t lift yourself up by your own bootstraps, you then get a new access of psychic energy. So, in exactly the same way, when you get to this state of nirvāṇa there wells up from within you what the Buddhists call karuṇā, or compassion. The sense that you aren’t different from everybody else. Everybody else’s suffering is your suffering. And so this tremendous sense of solidarity with all other beings arises. So that he who reaches nirvāṇa doesn’t, as it were, withdraw into a sort of isolated peace, but is always coming back into the world, into the difficulties, into the problems of life in compassion for everyone else. You can’t be saved alone, because you’re not alone, you are the whole cosmos.