00:00

Watts

Now this, understand please, is a continuation; the third in a series of four seminars on Mahāyāna Buddhism. And I try, in as far as possible, to make each seminar self-contained so that, if you miss the ones that went before, you don’t find what’s being said completely unintelligible. But what we’re going to take up this time under the title The Net of Jewels is the most (I would say) advanced and mature form of Mahāyāna Buddhism, which is known in Japan as Kegon, and in China as Huáyán, and in Sanskrit as Āvataṃsaka. These words all mean “the doctrine of the garland”—

01:07

Watts

Of the garland; the wreath of flowers. And this was an attempt to make a synthesis of all Mahāyāna Buddhist doctrines—including also the southern school, the Hīnayāna or Theravāda—to show that all these points of view were consistent with each other, although apparently conflicting.

It was perfected by a Chinese gentleman by the name of Fazang, who died in 712 AD—a man of absolutely extraordinary genius. It’s curious that he was a contemporary of Huineng, the sixth patriarch of the Zen sect, who died in 713, a year later.

You might say, in a way, of course, that the doctrine of Kegon is the intellectual content of Zen. Because all Zen people—insofar as they have any intellectual interests in Buddhism—study the Kegon doctrine. And one of the patriarchs of the Kegon school, known as Shūmitsu, was a patriarch of both schools. He lived in the Tang dynasty, rather later than Fazang.

Now, let me remind you of one thing: Mahāyāna Buddhists don’t have the same attitude to historical events that Christians do. For both Jews and Christians, history is enormously important. And the fact that Jesus did, in fact, live at a certain time, and that he taught thus and so, is considered immensely important. And therefore, all Christians tend to want to find out what Jesus really did teach and go back to the original sources. It will forever be impossible to find out what the Buddha really did teach. It is hopelessly overlaid, and nobody could ever figure it out. Besides, the Hindus have absolutely no sense of history whatsoever. It’s impossible to date the great manuscripts of Hindu tradition. And scholars have the wildest, wide variations in their guesses as to the date of the Bhagavad Gita or anything like that. You’ve got a generally attested assumption that the Buddha lived shortly after 600 BC and that, somewhere in the succeeding years—let’s say, well, by about 200 BC—the Pali texts (called the Piṭakas, the three baskets of the doctrine) had been formulated, probably. Probably—but nobody really knows.

But then, you see, we have a whole succession of sutras which represent the various points of view of the Mahāyāna, which may have been written—or we might say forged—anywhere from 100 BC to 500 AD. Many of them don’t exist in the original Sanskrit, we only have them in Chinese or Tibetan translations.

And here is why everything is so vague. The Mahāyāna theory is, you see, that when the Buddha first attained his liberation, he preached the complete, inner, Mahāyāna doctrine. But nobody could understand it, so he had to come down a step and preach something for simple people. Well, this sort of thing went on. He had a deep doctrine and a simple doctrine. But as time passed, those monks who had treasured the original records of the deep doctrine released them.

And so the Āvataṃsaka Sutra, which is a whopper of a thing—very, very subtle—appears to be in circulation roughly about 450 AD, and goodness only knows where it came from. Nobody can possibly tell. It was simply found. It was revealed. And in the same way, of course, let’s take the Book of Deuteronomy. The Book of Deuteronomy purports to be by Moses, although it describes Moses’ own death. It was, as a matter of fact, unearthed in the year 621 BC, when, as a matter of fact, it was written. Because it reflects opinions and attitudes of that time, but naturally, it had to be attributed to Moses. And this was not because the author of Deuteronomy was a fraud intentionally, but because he was modest. If you expound the law, you must not do so in your own name. That would be very, very cocky. You must attribute it to Moses, because Moses is the archetype of all law. So, in exactly the same way, when you have very profound ideas of your own, but nevertheless you feel that you got them from a depth of consciousness which was deeper than your ego. You call that depth of consciousness, that level, the Buddha. And so, naturally, you attribute it to the Buddha.

I must, however, explain that there are many senses in which the word “Buddha” is used among Mahāyāna Buddhists. It is used as the title of the historic Gautama Siddhartha, who we know as the Buddha, Śākyamuni—which means the sage of the Śākya clan. But then, in the Lotus Sutra—which I was discussing last week—the Buddha explains that his appearance as Śākyamuni after 600 BC was a mere sort of illusion. It was an upāya; that is to say, skillful means for helping sentient beings. Because the true, actual Buddha is eternal and manifests itself again and again and again in myriad universes.

And so you can see these glorious Tibetan and Japanese mandala paintings, where you have a central Buddha surrounded with Buddhalets. You find, for example, Kannon at the temple of Sanjūsangen-dō in Kyoto, where there are one thousand and one figures of Kannon, all in gold, and each one of them has eleven heads: the main head that you see from the front, and then one on each side, looking this way, one behind looking back, and then a pile of little heads on top—all the heads being different aspects of Buddha. The center figure has one thousand arms, literally, all in carved wood and lacquered in gold. It’s the most astonishing sight. You wonder what this is. And you’re reminded of Argus with his many eyes, of some sort of cosmic centipede or sea urchin, or something of this kind, with tentacles all over the place.

So this point, then, is that, behind the historic Buddha, it is what [???] the eternal Buddha. But this eternal Buddha is diversified in many different ways. So the evolved doctrine of Mahāyāna, which is connected with this Kegon doctrine, is that there is at the center what is called Mahāvairocana Buddha, which means the Great Sun Buddha—in Japanese Dainichi Nyorai. And this Great Sun Buddha has some interesting historical origins, because one suspects that it comes from Persia and is some form of Ahura Mazda, the Great Sun, the Great Light. Nobody knows. But there it is. Dainichi Nyorai, the Great Sun Buddha, who is always shown wearing a crown, unlike the ordinary Buddhas which wear a sort of round cap of snails. Dainichi Nyorai is crowned and has a great blazing aureole of flames around him, and holds his hand thus.

Well, it’s pretty obvious, isn’t it? You know, that’s what’s going on, but in humans it goes one way, in the cosmos it goes another way, because destruction of a spiral nebula is this helix, [???] hands—you know: let’s play.

Then, around Dainichi Nyorai, there are four other Buddhas. And these are all called Dhyani Buddhas. There is Amitāyus, who is the Buddha of boundless life. There is Amitābha, opposite to him, who is the Buddha of boundless light. Then there is Amoghasiddhi, which is the Buddha of power—siddhi meaning, in Sanskrit, “psychic power,” or “spiritual power.” And there is Ratnasambhava, who is… ratna means a “jewel,” sambhava is “completely developed.” And they all are assigned different colors, different sounds, different meanings. And these five Dhyani Buddhas are supposed to constitute a symbolism of everybody’s Buddha-nature. That is to say, they’re all in you, constituting your fundamental self. But when there appears in the world someone who is highly enlightened, he’s always considered, you see, to be a manifestation of one of these five Dhyani Buddhas—or of all of them.

So this is what the Buddha explains in the Lotus Sutra: that Buddha-nature is the eternal principle, and that, furthermore, everybody has it. Trees and grass also have Buddha-nature. The very grains of dust have it. And so one of the sutras says, “When every phase of our mind is in accord with the Buddha mind, there will not even be one grain of dust that does not become a Buddha.”

So Buddhism does, in fact (contrary to some popular ideas), in this form of Buddhism which I’m talking about this weekend, look forward to a consummation of the world in which everybody and everything becomes enlightened, and where the whole universe operates in total harmony.

Now, it’s difficult to understand in what kind of time this is expected to happen. I don’t mean in what length of time, I mean in what kind of time. It doesn’t seem to be that it will be in what we call the future. But, you see, the kind of time that we are living in is only one of many possibilities of time. You know, we think so—especially, I think some scientists are too apt to assume—that what we call the physical universe, this is really what there is, and that there’s nothing more than that. I find this an inconceivable assumption—that this is all there is. Because we know already, you see, that there are all kinds of levels of existence outside our senses, but within the reach of our instruments. Goodness knows what there is beyond the reach of the instruments—and also in directions that we’ve never thought of. People develop these things in science fiction, and they love to make up the idea of worlds corresponding to Riemannian spaces. Because Riemann invented equations for there being ever so many different kinds of dimensions and spaces, and you can theoretically conceive this.

And so the Hindus and Buddhists feel, you see, that there are infinitely many times and kinds of time, kinds of space, kinds of worlds; that they may, from the point of view of our space, be coincidental with each other—that is to say, all in the same place—but there’s no need for them to be all in the same place at all. You just have to let your imagination run a little bit. And there’s no harm in doing that, provided you know what you’re doing.

Because letting your imagination run—even if you know it’s fantasy—will often turn up with extremely interesting results. All mathematics, for example, is simply playfulness. People who do high mathematics are not in the least bit interested as to whether they are going to attain any practical results. They are just doing things like very, very involved crossword puzzles and seeing how to manipulate them. Well, this is simply really a use of disciplined imagination.

And so, in the same way, many of these Buddhist fantasies are disciplined imagination going to work on the world, so in some state which they would consider the goal of things, but you may also understand the goal not as being in future time, but as being in what you might call basic time—time behind time, time beyond time. There is a sense of total fulfillment.

Now, I want to read to you a description of this state, which is rather curious. It's the work of a very famous Buddhist scholar, John Blofeld, who was adventurous enough to take some mescaline, and suddenly got a real shock because he found out practically everything he'd always known in theory. And this is a very interesting experience, because—I'm not going to read all of it. He says, after some time, that he tried to visualize the Tibetan mandala of the peaceful deities that you find in the Tibetan Book of the Dead, where I was describing to you a mandala—Mahāvairocana in the center, and the Dhyani Buddhas arranged around it, and you see them sitting inside a circle.

Well, there are all sorts of these mandalas that you see in Tibetan art, and we'll go into this a good bit next weekend. But the mandala of the peaceful deities is used as a support for meditation exercise. So he tries to visualize that:

But succeeded only in conjuring up some rather metallic-looking demons—although they were far from frightening and not even very lifelike or realistic, being something of a cross between metal statues and living beings. They did convey to me, as though mockingly, that to expect a profound religious experience as a result of taking mescaline was too presumptuous.

Soon after that, the sensation of a rapidly fragmenting personality returned to me with frightening force. I grew alarmed for my sanity, and should have hastened to take an antidote for the mescaline had one been available. Though my friend persuaded me to eat some lunch, I was in no condition to enjoy it. By then, things seen and heard presented themselves as independent visual and aural experiences, with no seer and hearer to link them into one of those single compositions which at any given moment form the content of normal consciousness. The food went down my throat as usual, but it seemed to be disappearing into a receptacle, connected with me only to the extent that it was too near to be visible.

The mental stress grew agonizing. My fear of permanent madness increased, and I suffered especially from the feeling of having no inner self or center of consciousness into which to retreat from the tension and take rest. An additional discomfort was the sensation of bright lights shining now and then from behind me, as though someone were standing there flicking a flashlight off and on.

The movements of my manservant, who came in several times with dishes of food, sweets, and coffee, occasioned great uneasiness. Whenever he was out of sight, I felt he might be standing behind me for some vaguely sinister purpose. And since he knew nothing of the experiment, I was afraid he would suppose that I was mad. Doubtless anyone else’s uninvited presence would have made me equally distrustful and uneasy, though I was not bothered at all by the company of my friend, because he was in the know, and I felt the need of a nurse or guard.

No words can describe the appalling mental torment that continued for well over an hour. All my organs and sensory experiences seemed to be separate units. There was nothing left of me at all, except a sort of disembodied sufferer, conscious of being mad and wracked by unprecedented tension. There seemed no hope of being able to escape this torture, certainly for many hours, perhaps forever. Hell itself could hardly be more terrifying.

About 1 p. m., I dragged myself to my bedroom, shut myself away from everyone like a sick animal, and fell on my bed. In my extremity, I suddenly made a total surrender and called upon my idam.

Now, in one of the schools of Mahāyāna Buddhism, it is taught that all deities, and therefore a man’s own idam (or indwelling deity), are products of his own consciousness. And that when consciousness is unimpeded by karma, it is clearly seen not to be the property of the individual, but common to all beings; to be the sole reality in all the universe. And he makes various notes on that. But anyway, this is the meaning of the idam. It means your fundamental identity beyond all personal differentiations. So:

Come madness or death, or anything whatever, I would accept it without reservation, if only I could be freed from the tension. For the first time in my life, I ceased to cling. To cling to self, loved ones, sanity, madness, life, or death. My renunciation of myself and its components was so complete as to constitute an act of unalloyed trust in my idam.

Within a flash, my state was utterly transformed. From hellish torment, I was plunged into ecstasy, an ecstasy infinitely exceeding anything describable, or anything I had imagined from what the world’s accomplished mystics have struggled to describe.

Suddenly there dawned full awareness of three great truths which I had long accepted intellectually, but never until that moment experienced as being fully self-evident. Now they had burst upon me, not just as intellectual convictions, but as experiences no less vivid and tangible than are heat and light to a man closely surrounded by a forest fire.

One: there was awareness of undifferentiated unity, embracing the perfect identity of subject and object, of singleness and plurality, of the one and the many. Thus I found myself, if indeed the words “I” and “myself” have any meaning in such a context, at once the audience, the actors, and the play. Logically, the one can give birth to the many, and the many can merge into the one, or be fundamentally but not apparently identical with it. They cannot be, in all respects, one and many simultaneously—not logically. But now logic was transcended.

I beheld, and myself was, a whirling mass of brilliant colors and forms, which, being several colors and several forms, were different from one another, and yet altogether the same at the very moment of being different.

I doubt if the statement can be made to seem meaningful at the ordinary level of consciousness. No wonder the mystics of all faith teach that understanding comes only when logic and intellect are transcended. In any case, this truth, even if at an ordinary level of consciousness it cannot be understood, can in a higher state of consciousness be directly experienced as self-evident. Logic also boggles at trying to explain how I could at once perceive and yet be those colors and those forms, how the seer, the seeing, and the seen, the feeler, the feeling, and the felt could all be one. But to me all this was so clearly self-evident as to suggest the words childishly simple.

Two: simultaneously, there was awareness of unutterable bliss, coupled with the conviction that this was the only real and eternal state of being; all others, including our entire experience in the day-to-day world, being no more than passing dreams. This bliss, I am convinced, awaits all beings when the last vestiges of their selfhood have been destroyed, or, as in this case, temporarily discarded. It was so intense as to make it seem likely that body and mind would be burnt up in a flash. Yet though the state of bliss continued for what I later knew to be three or four hours, I emerged from it unscathed.

Three: at the same time came awareness of all that is implied by the Buddhist doctrine of dharmas, namely, that all things, whether objects of mental or of sensory perception, are alike devoid of own being—

That is the word svabhāva, “existence as independent realities.” They’re devoid of that.

—mere transitory combinations of an infinite number of impulses. This was as fully apparent as are the individual bricks to someone staring at an unplastered wall. I actually experienced the momentary rising of each impulse and the thrill of culmination with which it immediately ceased to be.

I shall now attempt to describe the entire experience in terms of sensory perception, though not without fear that this will cloud rather than illumine what has been said. For the content of my experience, being supra-sensory and supra-intellectual, can hardly be made understandable in terms originally coined to describe the mental and physical content of ordinary perception.

Reality, it seems to me, in retrospect, can be viewed as a plasma of no intrinsic color or form that is nevertheless the substance of all colors and all forms. Highly charged with vivid consciousness, energy, and bliss, it is engaged in eternal play. Or it can be viewed not as a plasma but as an endless succession of myriads of simultaneous impulses, each of which arises like a wave, mounts, and dissolves in bliss within an instant. The whirling colors and shapes which result produce certain effects that recall flashes of rare beauty seen in pictures, dreams, or in the world of normal everyday consciousness. It can be deduced that the latter are in fact faint reflections of this eternal beauty. I remember recognizing a well-loved smile, a well-remembered gesture of uncommon beauty, though I perceived no lips to smile, no arm to move. It was as though I beheld and recognized the everlasting abstract quality to which such transient smiles and gestures had owed their charm.

Again, reality can be viewed as a god dancing with marvelous vigor. Playfully, his every movement producing waves of bliss. From time to time he makes stabbing movements with a curved knife. At every stroke, the bliss becomes intense. I remember that the plunging knife made me cry aloud: “That’s it! That’s right! Yes, yes, yes!” Or else reality can be viewed as a whirling mass of light, brilliant color, movement, and gaiety coupled with unutterable bliss. Those who experience it cannot refrain from laughing cries of “Yes, yes, yes! Ha ha ha, that’s how it is! Of course, of course!”

I felt as though, after many years of anxious search for the answer to some momentous problem, I was suddenly confronted with a solution so wholly satisfying and so entirely simple that I had to burst out laughing. I was conscious of immense joy and of incredulous amazement at my own stupidity in having taken so long to discover the simple truth.

Within this play of the universe there is endless giving and receiving, though giver, gift, and receiver are of course the same. It is as though two deities, who are yet one, are locked in ecstatic embrace, giving and receiving with the abandon of adoration. The Tibetan Yab-Yum representations of deities hint at this. The artists who paint them must be forgiven for their inability to indicate that giver and receiver are not only one, but formless—though indeed some artists managed to suggest the oneness by blending the figures so well that the Yum is not seen unless the picture is given prolonged and careful scrutiny.

During the experience I was identical with the giver, the receiver, and the incredible bliss given and received. There is nothing sexual about this union; it is formless, the bliss is all-pervading—

He should use the word “genital,” not “sexual.”

—and giver and receiver, giving and receiving, are not two but one. It is only in attempting to convey the experience that the imagery of sexual joy suggests itself as perhaps coming a little closer than other imagery to the idea of an ecstatic union in which two are one.

Some of the conclusions I drew from the whole experience are as follows. A: Fear and anxiety as to our ultimate destiny are needless self-inflicted torments. By energetically breaking down the karmic propensities which give rise to the illusion of an ego and of individual separateness, we shall hasten the time when reality is revealed and all hindrances to ecstatic bliss removed. Unless, like the Bodhisattvas, we compassionately prolong our wanderings in saṃsāra so as to lead other beings to that goal.

B: The world around us, so often gray, is the product of our own distorted vision, of our ego consciousness and ego clinging. By casting away ourselves together with all longings, desires, qualities, and properties that pertain to them, we can utterly destroy the illusory egos which alone bar us from the ecstatic bliss of universal consciousness. The key is total renunciation. But this, alas, cannot often be achieved by a single effort of will because each of us is hemmed in by a hard shell of karmic propensities, the fruit of many, many misspent lives.

The three fires of desire, passion, and ignorance are hard to quench. Yet they would be quenched in an instant could we but make and sustain an act of total renunciation. Such an act cannot result from effort or longing, because these would involve our egos and thus actually strengthen them. Thus, in the ultimate stage, even effort and longing for nirvāṇa must be abandoned together with everything else. This truth is hard to understand.

C: The Buddha’s experience indicates that when enlightenment—that is: full awareness of that blissful reality whose attributes include inconceivable wisdom, compassion, light, beauty, energy, and gaiety—is obtained in this life, it is possible to continue carrying out human responsibilities, behaving as required, responding to circumstances as they arise, and yet be free from them all. So it is for the talented actor who, in the part of Romeo, weeps real tears. When his grief for Juliet threatens to overwhelm him, he can withdraw inwardly from his role long enough to recollect the unreality of Juliet and of her death, and yet continue to give the same performance as before.

D: A single glimpse of what I saw should be enough to call forth unbounded affection for all living beings. For however ugly, smelly, or tiresome they may seem, all that is real about them is that gloriously blissful shining consciousness which forms the center of my experience. Hatred, dislike, disdain, aversion for any being sharing that consciousness, i. e. any being at all, must amount to blasphemy in one who has seen being itself.

Well now, I think anybody influenced by the Weltanschauung, the Zeitgeist of the twentieth century would find great difficulty in taking such a statement seriously. Because we pride ourselves on being realistic—that is to say, on being people who do not indulge in wishful thinking. And while at the beginning of our century there was a great deal of what is now referred to as “shallow optimism” about human progress, when the two world wars came and went, we decided that human nature was pretty much of a mess. And you will remember, no doubt, that during the second world war there was a theological movement generally called back to sin. That is to say, back to a belief in the very, very fundamental reality of evil. That was the time when C. S. Lewis wrote The Screwtape Letters. That was the time when Reinhold Niebuhr wrote The Nature and Destiny of Man. And this was saying: “You Westerners have got too civilized and too sentimental. You don’t really admit and face the fact of how ghastly things can be.”

Well now, therefore, for that reason, a description like this, which says the way things really are is a ball without any exception whatsoever, and it is real and you were just on vacation from it for a moment—which, when you get out of it, will seem like nothing, see?—this is not a statement or an attitude that is coming out of anything like a sentimental culture. Nothing could be more different than the climate of Indian and Tibetan and Chinese Buddhism, and the climate of New Thought at the end of the nineteenth century.

After all, New Thought, Christian Science, Unity, all those movements were conceived in the great American prosperity of New England among very nice, successful people. And as you see today when you go around the circles in which these very, very optimistic religions flourish, they’re all composed mainly of rather well-to-do, comfortable bourgeoisie. No aristocrats ever went for them and no proletarians.

And there is a reason for this, which is that aristocrats always live on the past, because they have arrived long ago, and therefore they have no reason to strive. A real aristocrat is a very unassuming person who doesn’t lord it about, but knows that he is someone and there’s no way of questioning it. It’s why they’re so courteous to servants. On the other hand, a proletarian has no past and no future, and so he lives for the present. The bourgeoisie has no past, but he won’t live in the present; he always lives for the future. Therefore, he’s the one constantly deluded. So he is always, you see, the sucker. As my uncle used to say: “The rich can afford it, the poor get it given to them, and the middle classes do without”—which was a sort of a bitter comment. But the thing is that prosperous bourgeoisie did invent and go for the philosophy that everything really behind the scenes is all right.

Now, this point of view comes from a world that is so different from that; a world of extreme insecurity: of war, of disease, of all kinds of spooks and horrors. And you see this reflected in Buddhist art. It has a class of beings in it which are, we would say, devils. The most appalling creatures with many heads, many arms full of claws, necklaces of skulls, writhing serpents around them, and are described in the text to be making the most appalling noise. And there they are; that’s life. But these are not demons. They’re not in the Christian sense of the word devils at all. They are aspects—or shall we say wrathful aspects—of the underlying reality.

And the whole point is this, and this is described in the Tibetan Book of the Dead: that you have to face these things in the conviction that they are simply illusions of your own mind. But you don’t try to push them away by thinking of something else. This is not to say, “Well, don’t think thoughts like that. They’re negative.” When you get negative thinking (this is the different principle), you don’t substitute something positive. What you do is: you go slam bang into the middle of the negative—as this man did, you see, in describing his vision when he got this awful state. He just plunged, you see? Let go and plunged right into it. And, yes, he was helped by mescaline, but anybody in an awful state—say they’re in pain, or they’re dying, or something dreadful is happening—will be able to achieve the same consequence by going with it completely.

I remember this wonderful German who wrote the book called Hara—you know, on Zen meditation. It’s about belly. Hara means “belly.” Von Durkheim. Karlfried von Dürckheim. And he said to me, “You know, I’m having a very interesting time, because working in Germany after the awful ravages of the war has brought me some very interesting contacts.” He said, “I’ve come across a lot of people who had this tremendous spiritual illumination, and, sort of, when it passed off, believed that they had had some kind of lapse of mind or hallucination under extreme stress. And when they tried to tell anybody else about it, they were laughed off.” And he said, “There were three kinds.”

There was the experience of the dud bomb. You heard it coming, and there was this frightful whistle, and then there was a thud and nothing happened. But in the meantime, you knew this was it, and you gave up and surrendered completely. You just let go. And suddenly it became apparent, exactly as he says, that everything is completely gorgeous.

Then he said there was a second instance. A person in a concentration camp with no sentence, no law, no nothing, absolutely convinced that he would never, never get out. Never! And he accepted it, and this same thing happened.

He said there was a third class of catastrophe, very common to people, and that was to be completely uprooted: to be a displaced person with all your possessions, all your money, all your career totally destroyed. And when some people just accepted this, the same thing happened to them.

And the funny thing about it is, you see, that it’s so queer because it’s so difficult to pin any kind of morality on this. You see at that moment that the other people who are suffering and are resisting it and are having an awful time are not really having an awful time at all. They are actually—you catch yourself doing this occasionally when you nurse a grievance and you enjoy hating somebody. You know this sort of mood? When you just revel in disliking something. So, in this way, from the vision, one can see life reveling in agony. It’s a very weird way of looking at things. And, of course, you can’t carry that over into practical life and say, “Now, I should torture you because you’re going to enjoy such exquisite agony.” You don’t do that. But this is how it is seen from this particular point of view, this particular shift in consciousness.

The funny thing is, as he indicates: it’s so simple. There’s no question about it. It’s absolutely clear, now. In other words, what we’re talking about is what is the Buddhist vision of the consummation of mankind, of being, what it is all about. Hard to say when, where, from what point of view, but somewhere rather fundamental. So you can say, “Well, is this a hallucination that people slip into every now and then, like getting drunk or crazy or having mumps or measles or something that just distorts your point of view and gives you what would be called euphoria?” You know, when you want to use a put-down word for happiness, you call a person euphoric.

So, you could argue that way, and it would be quite legitimate to argue that way within the Zeitgeist of our times. Because we are reassured by what I would call a “rusty beer can view” of reality. You know? It all comes down to a rusty beer can, you know. That’s real, you see? That’s the sort of thing you see lying on the street, and that’s every day, it’s folksy and terribly reassuring.

But, on the other hand, I keep coming back to the funny feeling that if existence itself is not basically gorgeous in this way, that it wouldn’t be able to exist. That, in other words, the game wouldn’t be worth the candle. That you would have a reality system which would have cancelled itself out long ago through some simple method of suicide.

Now, of course, here again we can say, “Well, that’s what it’s doing—only, it’s taking an unconscionable long time to do it from our point of view.” You know, this is part of the “God is dead” bit. That you could read into that that God just couldn’t stand it. This whole thing was a terrible mistake, and died, and left the world hanging. And there are theologians who seriously think that God did once exist and has actually disappeared and died. This is unbelievable, but it is so. It’s more or less, as I understand it, the position of Altizer.

But I suppose this is one of those things that is like nerve. A lot of people, by having nerve, get away with all sorts of things that they shouldn’t get away with, but succeed in doing so. And we call them successful. They shouldn’t have succeeded because they really didn’t have the proper qualifications or educational background or whatever it was, but they did have nerve. Well, in the same way, you know, when you hit a golf ball, you have to have this follow through. You really go zhhinga, like this. You don’t just hit at the ball. Well, so, in a similar way, when a person has the feeling, you see, that this is the way the universe is, it gives him a certain quality of existence. And you may say: well, he’s not really a very realistic person, but damnit, he gets on well.

Now, what I was talking to you about this morning, namely the conception of the universe as a totally harmonious energy system, which may be realized as such at some time or some kind of time—not necessarily future time as we ordinarily understand it—but let’s just say there is a point of view from which the whole gamut of being may be considered as completely harmonious. This is called—in the philosophy we are discussing, that is to say the philosophy of the Āvataṃsaka—the dharmadhātu. Dharma-dhātu: literally the “realm” or “domain of the dharma;” the dharma being this complicated, difficult, indeed impossible Sanskrit word, that is usually translated “law” in English, but which can also mean “method,” “function,” rather like our word “principle,” as in the phrase “to get the principle of the thing.” It can also have some affinity with our word “reason,” and it can also have some affinity with our word what is “right.” So if you’ve got conduct that is described as dharma or adharma, which is “right” and “wrong,” roughly. Dharmadhātu therefore really means “the order of the universe;” “what it is fundamentally.” And I was pointing out that, fundamentally, this order is a harmony, and there is a point of view from which this can be seen.

Now, this philosophy of the Āvataṃsaka sutra makes a further analysis of the dharmadhātu into what are called the four dharma worlds. And this is one of these mnemonic tricks that Buddhists always use to help you keep things in mind. They group things into four, into five, into six, seven, eight, nine, ten, twelve, and so on—they always miss out eleven for some reason—so that you can memorize it easily. And the four dharma worlds—or what you might call the four ways of looking at existence; let’s call it that—are called in Japanese (I’ll use this language because it’s easier to remember than Chinese, and easier to pronounce), first of all, the world that is called ji. Second, the world that is called ri. Third, the one that is called riji muge. And then fourth, the world that is called jiji muge. Well, I will go through these things in order.

First of all, the way of looking at the world as ji. The character ji [事] in Chinese has a very complex set of meanings. It can mean ordinarily a “thing” or an “event.” It can mean “business;” that is to say, something that matters, that’s important. It can mean a “fuss” or “affectation.” So that a person who might be described as buji in Japanese, “no ji”—Suzuki once wrote me an autograph, and he wrote the three characters, bu ji nin, which means a “no-fuss man.” And a buji nin is a man of whom the poem says that I quoted to you last week:

Entering the forest, he does not disturb a blade of grass.

Entering the water, he does not cause a ripple.

You know, like those wonderful South Sea island pearl fishers who can dive, cutting the water like a knife and hardly making any splash at all. This kind of harmonious relationship with circumstances in which one doesn’t stand out like a sore thumb, that is buji; “no ji.” So ji, the fundamental meaning, is whatever it is that stands out—that is to say the distinct, the particular, the individual, the sharp.

So in contrast with ji—which is one point of view toward the world—is ri Ri is a Chinese character; pronounced by the Chinese li—which almost all of you will by now be familiar with, because I’ve explained in previous seminars that this character means, fundamentally, “the markings in jade,” or “the grain in wood,” or “the fiber in muscle.”

Now, at the stage of Chinese history that we’re talking about—which is 712 AD, when this particular philosophy was really matured by Fazang—the word ri (or li) meant what I’ve been referring to all along as the undefinable substratum of things. Like the mirror underneath all the various reflections in the mirror, or the diaphragm of the radio underlying all the sounds which the loudspeaker produces, or the eye as fundamental to sight, the ear as fundamental to sound. So you could put it this way, then: that what ji stands for is the individual reflections in the mirror, and what ri stands for is the mirror.

Fazang himself explained it to one of the Chinese emperors by the image of a golden lion, and he wrote a long treatise on the golden lion—which, if you want the whole thing and want to study it carefully, you will find in volume two of Feng Youlan’s History of Chinese Philosophy. Incidentally, anyone seriously interested in these things should possess these two volumes published by Princeton. And in the second volume he has a long, long exposition of Fazang. And the nice thing about Feng Youlan is he’s a very conscientious historian, because most of his book is quotations. He simply weaves in the original sources with explanatory help-outs and just lets you have it. And I think he’s extraordinarily good—but he’s not easy reading. But he has the whole of the golden lion exposition here, which Fazang used to make the Huáyán (or the Garland doctrine) comprehensible to a slightly stupid emperor. I say slightly.

So he used the idea of the golden lion, because he used the form of the lion to represent ji (that is the individualizing principle) and the gold to represent ri (which is the underlying). And you remember we discussed this last week because, in another way and from another point of view, we were talking about the Western distinction between form and substance, and how we have grown up with our common sense geared to the idea that every shape is a shape of some stuff. But we consider the shape principle, the form principle, to be spiritual, and the stuff principle to be material. In other words, form is a higher order of being than matter, because we think of matter as stuff; the form of the part is a higher principle than the clay out of which it is made. That’s the way we think.

But in this Buddhistic and Hindu way of thinking, it’s exactly the other way around. The gold is used to represent the higher principle, and the form of the lion is used to represent the material. Because, you see, there isn’t a word in Sanskrit that corresponds to our word “material.” They use rūpa, and rūpa means “form.” When, in other words, a Sanskrit-thinking person wants to indicate what we call the material world, he doesn’t really say “material,” he says “formal.” The world of form. Then, when he wants to indicate higher worlds that are spiritual, he calls them arūpa, which are formless.

So, in his way of thinking, the gold underlying the form of the lion represents a deeper, more basic order of reality than the form of the lion. You have to get used, you see, to these funny flips in metaphor as used between Chinese-speaking peoples, or Sanskrit-speaking peoples, and English- or German-speaking or Greek-speaking peoples.

So the point, now, that he’s making: he’s established these two ways of looking at the world. You can look at it from the point of view of all the jazz that everything is doing. You see? All the forms, all the dances, all the patterns—and those are ji. Then you can look at it from the point of view of what is it doing it all, or what is it all happening in? What is, in other words, the medium, or the basis, which is all this universe? And that is called ri. Although, by a funny flip, at a time later than Fazang’s—that is to say, we’ll have to go on in Chinese history to the Neo-Confucian philosophy, which will take us to the fourteenth century, where the word ri comes to have the meaning of the organic pattern of the world; where the full meaning of the idea of markings in jade, which it originally had, is brought out again.

For a period, here, under the auspices of Buddhism, ri roughly corresponds to what we mean in Western philosophy by the word “noumenon” as distinct from “phenomenon”—roughly. You see, noumenon is based on nous, which is “mind.” Phenomenon is based on phaínō, which means “to show,” “to manifest.” “Manifestation of mind,” or “in formation of the formless.”

Because, you see, fundamental to the whole Hindu-Buddhist complex is the notion of the world as being something like what happens when you develop a photographic film. You look at the film, and first of all, in the solution, it is formless. There’s nothing on it. And then, suddenly, all over the area that you’re watching, a picture develops. It doesn’t develop across in that order, or down in that order, but all over at once it comes out. And they feel that nature works in rather the same way. There is the whatever it is, you see—the vast unnameable continuum—and this manifests itself like the film developing. So every ji is a thing or event, ri is the continuum in which things and events occur. But, as a matter of fact, the two are not really different from each other.

Now, this gets us to the next principle and the next step. The third so-called dharmadhātu, or dharma world, is called riji muge. And that means that “between ri and ji there is no inconsistency.” The word ge literally means a “blockage,” but probably “inconsistency” or “separation.” You could use that. “No separation”—riji muge. “No separation between ri and ji.

Now, he goes with the idea of the gold lion, he puts it this way. You can’t ever find gold that is not in some form. If it’s not in the form of a lion, it will be in some form. But you can’t find a lion without the gold. In other words, the lion, even if it’s a living lion, has to have some ri underneath it, as it were. This is the oriental meaning of the word “substance,” as distinct from our meaning, which is “stuff.”

So the gold and the lion are in a way inseparable. You can think of them separate. You can form the abstractions of gold on the one hand and the lion on the other. But actually, the form, the ji and the ri, will always go together. So then, riji muge: “no separation of the rūpa world”—that is, the world of form—“and the formless world” is when you see there is no incompatibility between what we could call the spiritual and the material.

Now, this is an idea very, very simpático to the Chinese. It hasn’t been a very popular idea in India. It did originate in India, but the Indian mind is (to a large extent, in popular sense) very, very disillusioned with the formal world, which is always falling apart and which is painful and which is a struggle and a mess, and everything like that, and they long for the formless world. And so, when you listen to most Hindu teachers, they will encourage you to become as spiritual as possible and to renounce the material life of family, delight in the senses, sex—all that sort of thing is kind of out. But the Chinese could never conceive that that was a sensible point of view. The Chinese social order is essentially family-oriented, and celibacy makes no sense to them at all. Although there have been Chinese ascetics; by and large, they don’t dig that. So it appealed to them very much that there could be this philosophy of a view of the world in which ri and ji were perfectly compatible.

So then, what is being said here is that—to go back to my image: the mirror and the images in the mirror. You will never see the mirror unless it’s reflecting something. There is no way of there being a mirror which is not reflecting. So, in other words, don’t look for the principle called ri as something different from the ji. In other words, when you wake up and understand that there is something behind existence, you are not to expect to find a big, vast blank. A lot of people think that when they attain nirvāṇa, all individual forms which they see before their eyes will slowly melt and become gooey like the dissolution of the negative, the forms in the negative, back into the formlessness behind—as if that would happen. See? So it’s not going to be that way.

What you’re going to find out is this: that all things as you see them, being quite distinct from each other, and all the shapes and the differences of people and everything here, that those—which differences you see, which you are noticing in the world, those things, those events—are not really separate from each other at all. They are the same thing as the ri underlying it. It’s important, then, to see that in nature, in the real physical world, there aren’t any separate things. The idea of separate things is no more than an idea. It is a way of talking about life.

And to get to this we have to go, of course, to the fourth step in the series; what’s called jiji muge. And this is the image of the net of jewels, and this is the central image of the whole Āvataṃsaka philosophy. There is a net, like a spider’s web, covered with dewdrops in the dawn. Only, this web is multi-dimensional. In other words, it’s not even a three-dimensional web. It’s more and more and more—as many dimensions as you could possibly ever imagine. And on this web every dewdrop contains a reflection of all the other dewdrops. This is a way, an image, of saying that everything implies everything else. Take any detail, any possible feature of the universe which you can in any way identify as a thing, and if you really go into it, you will have to see it as capable of existing only in the context of everything else.

So each thing implies everything, because it could not possibly have—let’s just take it this way: where is anything? You can only define a “where” of one thing in relation to the “where” of all the others. You can only define the size of a thing in relation to other sizes. You can only define the length in time of a thing in relation to other lengths of time. You see? So that there is, for example, a point of view from which a very small thing like this little clamshell here could seem to be enormous. And you can very easily get this point of view. All you have to do is to hold this in your hand and transfer your consciousness into a tiny creature wandering around inside this huge shell: why, it’s colossal! Or else you can go the other way and you can think of all the galaxies as molecules in somebody’s hair in another world, you see? Then it’s really very little. It all depends on your scale.

But the point is this: that everything (insofar as anything that you could possibly identify as a thing or as an event) goeswith—let’s coin this word, the word “goeswith”—all other things whatsoever. And I think in this seminar we mentioned this technique of making holograms whereby, with laser beams, you can take any photographic negative, and from any part of the negative reconstruct the whole. Well, it works the same way: that any ji is what it is only in relationship to, in context with, all other ji whatsoever. And this is often also called the doctrine of mutual interpenetration, and this is the key to understanding what I was trying to describe this morning as the experience of the universal harmony.

I remember once a woman I met had an accident and she was trapped in an elevator. But it caught her leg, and her leg was broken, and she was trapped there for half an hour before anybody could rescue her. But she said, “I came in that time to realize that, in all this universe, there was not one single speck of dust that was out of place.” Well, this again was somebody accepting a situation about which nothing could be done, and that would of course include accepting the fact that you can’t accept it. That: there it is, and then suddenly this extraordinary way of feeling comes to you that everything goeswith everything else. It’s curiously different from what we would call the fatalistic sense. The fatalistic sense means I submit to a higher power. Something arranges everything, and I don’t have anything to do with it, I have no responsibility, and I just go because I’m an automaton, you see. That is a rather different attitude than what I’m trying to describe. It’s rather passive.

This one is like this: my talking to you now is inseparable from the gulls flying out there. You may say that’s rather a far shot to call, you see, but as a matter of fact, let’s start putting it all together. We are living in a nice little town here by the water and, by a combination of events, I make this place attractive so you come. And if there weren’t gulls around here, it wouldn’t be the ocean, you know. Gulls and ocean go together. And so this whole complex of things—it isn’t just that I’m in a vacuum, you see—but it all goes together. It all goeswith every single one of these houseboats, and it goeswith every kind of cruddy piece of falling off paint and rotting wood, and the whole bit all interdepends.

And if you get to see this one day, and you realize—you know, you felt terrible because you did this, that, and the other, which you shouldn’t have done—and suddenly you realize, go back over your own life. Supposing your friends, parents, and relations had never done anything wrong, or what they thought was wrong. Think of the opportunities you would have missed. It fits. And there is this sense, then, that you get that the whole pattern that you can feel out of your existence and one thing with another is completely logical. It all goes together.

Now, you see what this is, is a kind of fulfillment of what all scientists are trying to do. When we ask of any behavior whatsoever in the world: can we explain it? We are asking: is there a reason for it? And what we are looking for is to be able to fit it into a consistent pattern.

Now let’s suppose, for example, that we somebody has done something quite unreasonable. Well then, some psychologist comes along and says, “Yes, I agree from a certain point of view what he did was unreasonable. But you haven’t looked fully into this thing. You don’t realize all the complex of causes that were operating in this situation. And if you did understand that, you would see and understand exactly why the person behaved in this unreasonable way.” The whole faith of science is that the universe is explainable this way—that we can, in other words, make out a super-pattern in terms of which all sub-patterns make sense.

If we are going to say there are some things that will never make sense, that there are some things which simply have no explanation whatsoever, this is also a way of saying—or it amounts to saying—that they don’t exist because they are not connected. There is no rational explanation of their being there at all, and so such things must be flukes. Not only flukes, but complete cosmic madnesses. Now, when you call something a cosmic madness, something that is a total fluke for which you haven’t got any explanation, all you’re saying is: my mind isn’t big enough to get the point. And we have to admit there are many things going on which puzzle us profoundly, and our minds have not yet acquired a way of explaining them.

There are reasons for this. There are reasons that the patterns in terms of which we explain things—let’s take for example the pattern of causality: mechanical, Newtonian causality is a rather limited pattern, and not everything will fit it. But, as we think more and delve deeper, we get concepts which are more generous, concepts which accommodate the behavior of the world more subtly. The patterns we are using are more ingenious.

Now, there comes a point, of course, at which I see it all fits together, but I can’t tell you quite why. Because the pattern in terms of which it all fits together is simultaneously too complex and too simple to talk about. You see, we are getting back to this thing which is the medium in which it all happens and which can’t be defined. I glimpsed that, you see, and get that feeling: “Oh yes, of course. It really does all go together.” But at that moment, the philosopher would challenge me and say, “Yes, but look here. We thought out things in terms of science. We’ve thought out orders, we’ve thought out equations, we’ve thought out patterns in terms of which events are predictable, and therefore we know they’re fairly sure. But you are telling us something which doesn’t help us to predict anything. Because you are saying that even the unpredictable is included in this. And so you are not telling us anything at all.” And that is quite true. But the most important of all things to tell is the nothing. Because that’s the basis. That’s why you don’t pronounce the name of God; why it’s unspeakable.

So there was a Zen monk who said: I had the most marvelous teacher; I was very lucky, because he never taught me anything. In other words, he never told me a word. All he did was sit around in a gruff kind of silence while this poor student knocked himself out against him. And he got the point. See, this is the problem: if there were a point you could get and say, “Now I have really got this. I understand what universe is, what life is all about. And now I know.” See, it’s like that. Well, you would have only got part of it. You would say, “Well, now, wait a minute. What’s outside of this?” See? You’d be looking around the corners. “No, wait a minute. Well, where does this fit in?” See, this thing I’ve got. For the sake of the tape recorder, I have to say that I’m, as it were, holding a ball in my hands. And I’ve got it, see, but there’s something outside the ball.

The really important thing that you need to get is what would never possibly be grasped. That is to say, the situation you’re in, that is you: no way of getting that as an object, focusing on it, defining it, pinning it down. None whatever. And, in that sense, the whole situation is no thing: nothing. You can’t particularize it. So, so much for that.

But actually, this thing that we call—I don’t want you, you see, to think of the no thing, as something like homogenized jello. You see? That’s not the point. It isn’t like that. It’s like everything, with all the details, and with all—you see, this is why I must say, in the matter of art, people who try to communicate mystical visions; there are two schools of artists who communicate mystical visions. The precise school and the vague school. In the vague school, which I don’t really go for, I saw, my son-in-law brought me over the other day, a book of pictures of angels. But the trouble with them was, they all looked wispy. They were all cloudish forms, vague reflections in water, wooshy things. Now, when I think of an angel, I don’t think of anything wooshy. I think of something in which the detail is so vivid that you say, “Oh, look at that!” In the same way as when you look at some marvelous flower or peacock feather, for example. Look at a peacock feather, and every kind of tiny little unit in it is all there. See?

Now, this is the point. That this world, to be seen in its unity, must at the same time be seen in maximum detail. It isn’t a question of fuzzing the details. This is what meant by jiji muge: between thing and thing, event and event, any detail, any line you can draw, there is no separation. Because, you see, what we call lines, and draw them as clear and clean as you will, every line joins its two sides together. It is a boundary in common between two areas. See? Exactly. The white yang and the black yin are as different as can be, but they go together. And the boundary line, the S curve between them in the thing, joins them.

So this is why a great deal of high visionary art which attempts to express deep mystical insight is fantastically detailed, and has tremendous precision in it, and is not wishy-washy stuff at all. And so this will explain why—I will show you some examples today or tomorrow of the type of Buddhist painting that comes out of this school of thought. And you will see what a miraculous world of wonder is in it of extraordinary detail. Because this is the vision that you get when you start exploring. You take a flower, and you take a big magnifying glass, and you go down into that flower, and you find out that the petals are composed of veins. And out of the veins come funny capillaries. And suspended between the capillaries are these filminesses of petal. And these filminesses of petal are made of tiny little dots that sort of ripple, you see? Everything like that, you see. Then you’re looking into the lotus image. You’re seeing the detail.

But the point that you have to get is that these details are not separate details. They all go together. So that every wiggle in the vein of the petal is part of the same thing that you are, being there, looking at it. Just, in other words, as the flower may be considered as a unity with all those veins and things moving out from the center, so, in exactly the same way, we, sitting here, are doing something just like that—only, we’re doing it with such a tremendous free-floating jazz to it. You see? We come from all over the place, wee-jiggidy-jiggidy-jiggidy-diggy-diggy-diggy-diggy-dee, like this. But just because we do it with that immense amount of free-floating jazz, we make the most extraordinary unity when we sit around and talk, or whatever you do.

Well, let’s have an intermission.

Yesterday afternoon I gave you the four views of the world which are characteristic of the Kegon philosophy, and supplied a sort of convenient summary of its general outlook: the world seen as simply things and events—that is, from the point of view of multiplicity. That’s the first view. And that’s called ji in Japanese. I’m giving you the Japanese words because they’re easier to remember. And the second view of the world is things seen from the standpoint of unity—that is to say, just as the mirror provides a unity (a base, that is to say) for all the separate images in it, so you might say that the mind, or space (and there is a way in which the two are the same), provides the unity for all the manifold things and events that exist in it.

Now, there seems, of course, to be a conflict between these two points of view: the one and the many. And the most ancient philosophical problems revolve around this whole dichotomy. How do you get the one out of the many? How do you get the many out of the one? It seems that one and many are mutually exclusive. In other words: in practical affairs we are many, and we all have conflicting interests. What formula are we going to find so that we can agree and act together? See, this is always the most difficult task. And it requires great brains, or great insight, or great something or other, to find the point on which we can all agree, and so work together. So there is always an apparent fight going on between the principle of unity and the principle of diversity. Because, after all, the diverse people don’t want to be too united. You know, if we all had to wear exactly the same clothes, and all had to do exactly the same sort of job, there would be a revolution. You’d say, “Blegh! Stop interfering with my personality! Individual freedom is important, and it certainly is.” And what we’ve got to do, you see, then, is to find the formula where there is the maximum of individual liberty, but all of it going on together harmoniously. And that’s what we, as a political, historical community, have as our theoretical foundation. Isn’t that fascinating? You see, we’ve been trying to work out this impossible problem.

And, incidentally, the theories of American politics, the basic ideas, are founded on esoteric Christian mysticism. The whole idea of democracy as we understand it in the modern world goes back to German mysticism in the fourteenth century. That is to say, it goes back to people like Meister Eckhart and Tauler, Angelus Silesius, the Brothers of the Free Spirit, the Anabaptists—the Anabaptists were people who said that all living beings are naturally children of God, and therefore baptism is not necessary to bring a person into salvation. Then there were people called the Levellers, and the Levellers, this movement migrated from Germany through the Dutch countries to England. And during the great Puritan uprisings against Charles I, all these groups began to flourish in England. And the British aristocracy simply couldn’t stand them, because they overthrew the whole order of hierarchy by saying everybody is equal. And so they had to get out of England and come here.

Now, you will see, of course, there is always the danger of a parody. That is to say, when everybody is equally a manifestation of the Godhead—which is the Quaker doctrine of the inner light; that’s what it really comes to. And that’s why the Quakers don’t recognize any sacraments, because everything is a sacrament. Why the Quakers don’t have any ritual, because sitting together in silence is a ritual. Anything is a ritual. The Quakers want to make a complete fusion of everyday life and religion so that you don’t notice any religion around. You just have the good life. And so the Quakers won’t remove their hats in court. They won’t take an oath, because they say you’ve got to trust me, because everything I say will be true. So, you see, the Quaker idea is the direct continuation of the tradition of Christian mysticism as it flowered in Germany, particularly, in the late Middle Ages.

The unfortunate parody of all that is that everybody is equally inferior. That’s what you always have to watch out for. Everybody can be treated rudely by the police, because you’re all equal. And the police aren’t going to say Sir to somebody because he happens to be the mayor, or—well, they may to the mayor, because you’re an important figure in business or something—you’re all just Joe, you see. Pffgght! And then that becomes: everybody’s equally inferior.

But if you could imagine where everybody is considered equally superior, this is the foundation of what we call courtesy, good manners: where you salute people, and you reverence their right to a certain privacy, a certain separateness, you see. And you have to learn this art in a state of affairs where people start crowding in on each other. Now, you see, in a country like Japan, space is the most expensive thing there is. And it’s becoming so here. Space used not to be expensive at all here. There was just oodles of it, and everybody could afford to be equally rude. And now we can’t. We’re getting crowded in on each other. And to create space, you have to create it by manners. That is, then, respect to everybody.

Because, for example, in a Japanese house, there is no privacy such as we understand it. You can hear every belly rumble because the walls are just paper, and all the rooms are tiny and very close in on each other. And then, for example, they all take baths together. And they all always see each other naked, but they don’t look. To begin with, there’s so much steam that you can’t really see much. But they have a way of being courteous. Nobody takes liberties in the bathtub unless somebody wants liberties to be taken. But in the ordinary way, complete strangers will meet together in the public bath of a hotel,—male or female, there are two bathrooms. One says men, and the other says women. Men means “men and women,” Women means “women only.” But the family bath is always the one labeled men. and everybody goes in there, and nobody is embarrassed, because manners are preserved. You sort of keep psychological hands off another person with the notion that they’re to be respected, you see. In Japanese culture, everybody bows to everybody else. And they have bowing contests. They outbow each other. When you leave it goes on interminably and, as it were, you are more polite if you bow more often than the other person.

Well, this is all sort of funny from our point of view, but it’s still this point: that there is a possibility, in other words, of a cultural form that will stress and get away with the proposition that everybody is equally divine as distinct from the proposition that everybody is equally inferior. And that feeling, and the manners that go with it, is essential in any community where we start to crowd, when we get a population explosion. So this is one thing we have to do to solve this huge question of the swarming population—especially in the United States, which is not used to the idea of courtesy; not really. That we’ve got to make a propaganda for great respect to everybody. Otherwise, we won’t be able to accommodate the crush at all.

The funny thing about the Japanese, incidentally, is that they’ve learned the manners of mutual respect under certain circumstances. But new circumstances arise in which they haven’t learned it. One of these is the subway, which is total pandemonium. They pack everybody into the subway like sardines, and they have special officials whose duty it is to push people in and to see that they’re all jammed in. They just shove the crowd. Then, when each official at the separate door has got it, he signals and the doors close. Although, in this situation, the Japanese—although they are shoving and pushing and so on—when you’re absolutely tight up against a Japanese man or woman, they’re all right. You know, they’re not going to pick your pocket or something like that. They endure it. But they do. They fight and struggle and shove to get a place. After that, they relax. But they are not used to this situation, and therefore haven’t found out the proper manners for dealing with it.

So this is, then, an example of solving a problem by seeing the one in the many: namely, that treat every many as the one—that is to say, accord respect. Then the many will be able to get along together. And that, in other words, underlies our simplest ideas that every individual has equal rights in the eyes of the law. And we don’t invert it, meaning that every individual is equally nobody. This comes about, of course, when we are in a hurry. When you’re in a hurry, you can’t be bothered to look at the details and you simply, beeeck!, wipe it out. So naturally, when you don’t provide for sufficient school teachers, every school teacher is dealing with a mass of children, and is in a hurry, and can’t be bothered with the details. When you don’t provide for enough judges, the courts are in a hurry and can’t be bothered with the details. So always be sure to keep your eyes open. That is to say: to have lots of teachers and pay them properly, lots of judges and pay them properly so that they won’t accept bribes. And invest in those aspects of the community which are vital—we are not doing that. In other words, the salary of a teacher in any school is probably lower than that of the janitor, which simply says what it says. It just shows you what you value.

Well, now, these four views of the world ended up, of course, with the fourth one, which was called jiji muge: the complete harmony of every thing-event with every other thing-event. And I wanted to show you that this harmony exists anyhow. That however wrong things may appear to go, there is a point of view from which you can see a connection which is a harmonious and rational connection. Just as, in your everyday life, you realize that if you hadn’t lost a certain job, you would never have been in the situation where you met someone you love dearly. You see? In retrospect, you can see all this kind of connectedness going along. And one of the fascinating things in human relations is to figure out the network.

You know, there’s a saying that there are only five hundred people. This is a certain kind of joke. But it has to do with the fact that you have a network of friends who are the sort of people you think really are people. And they’re all interlocked with each other in funny ways. It has been estimated that this should be a little larger figure; about 14,000. That’s a different joke, and it has to do with the fact that communication has become easier than it used to be, with cheap telephone rates, and all that, and jet aircraft. But there is this wonderful feeling of a network of people who know people, and you’ll get wonderful surprises because you meet someone and find that they’re the dearest friends of your old friend, and so on and so forth.

Now, from one point of view, then, there is already existing between every single event and thing that happens a harmony. But this harmony is not manifest in terms of human conduct. It is there, even in the worst human conduct. But it’s not manifest—that is to say, we do not have, by any stretch of the imagination, a really civilized society. And the Buddhists would say that you cannot have the really civilized society until you first realize that the harmony already exists. In other words, if you think you have to create the harmony socially by some sort of moral violence, and impose it upon the world as it exists now, you will only succeed in stirring up more trouble. That’s why reformers tend to be extremely destructive people; people with a fanatical mission. It is necessary first to see that absolutely nothing needs to be done to improve the world. Then it can indeed be improved.

And this is another way of talking about what Blofeld referred to in his little essay as renunciation, or complete giving up of self. Now, you cannot give up yourself, let go of your own self-interests, and suddenly say, “Well, from today I’m no longer going to press my own advantage against everybody else.” You can’t do that by a voluntary decision, because you will merely be using a new gimmick to boost yourself: “Look at me! I’m the most unselfish person! How saintly I am!” You see? Only, you may not say that to others; that would be a little uncool. You would say it to yourself, though. See? “Look at me! I’m really going to make this thing.”

There’s no way, therefore, you see, of being unselfish (or of renouncing clinging) on purpose. It can be done only in the realization—when you actually come down to it, you see—that you cannot cling to anything at all. There is nothing to cling to, and there is no one to cling. And this is the realization of what the Buddhists call voidness. The simplest manifestation of voidness is the fact that everything is in a state of flux: everything is falling apart. I mean, it’s very vivid to me on this ferryboat because we are literally falling apart: the hull is rusting underneath, there’s dry rot in the wood. And it’ll last a certain time, and while it lasts, we’ll stay. See? But really, it would be a fantastic project to preserve the whole thing. And the money, if such money were available, had better be spent some other way. But there is this sense, when you live in the moving tides and watch all this junk out here, growing and rotting and everything, that this is the floating world, and nothing is permanent at all. People create around themselves illusions of permanence by building houses out of concrete, and steel, and granite, and so on, and then, when they get inside there, they feel now that’s put in order.

But actually, it’s only a focus of your attention, because the moment you solve and permanentize a problem on one level—say, you make a lot of money, and you build yourself a very solid house, and you start worrying about your health. Because that’s something you really can’t control. It’s very fluid, very volatile, because it has to do with all your veins, and intestines, and nerves, and all these gooey things that don’t stay put. So you worry about that. This is where you focus your attention.

So if you become aware of what’s happening, really, in this world, you see as a basic proposition that everything is completely falling apart. And you think: well, then the obvious thing for a sensible person to do is to make an effort to secure it for as long as possible. And this is what we call the Philistine, square, practical attitude. This is the bourgeois position, you see. Make the best of the job.

Do the work that’s nearest,

Though it’s dull at wiles.

Helping when you meet them,

Lame dogs over styles.

That’s the sort of thing you see on a plate as a souvenir in some place for tourists. Yeah, hold it together as long as you can. And there’s something about that that we all laugh at. I don’t know why, but we do. But it’s not a very heroic attitude. It’s not a very interesting attitude.

Or there’s something else, and that is the synthesis of despair and courage. In other words, total courage arises out of seeing that there is really nothing that can be done. Holding things together for as long as you can hold them together is a sort of illusion, because you know time’s going to run out, and within a hundred years nothing will matter. You’ll be dead anyway. One reaction to that is, of course: why bother? But the other reaction is: good Lord, if that’s the truth, what fun we can have now! You see? If the thing really is an illusion and it’s simply falling to pieces, and in every way there is nothing to grab, you see—in any direction. Now, get this now, you see. No, don’t say: “Oh well, I’ll wait till tomorrow to face that.” There is absolutely no possibility of anybody in this room being able to stop dissolution. You can start all kinds of new evolution with dissolution by, say, having children or promoting a society which is going to go on beyond your death and whatever. But if you really get with the thing that there’s nothing you can grab, that this is total disintegration—and don’t even try to hold on to something like God.

Change and decay in all around I see.

Oh, thou who changest not, abide with me.

Get rid of that, you see. Because that doesn’t allow the process to happen that I’m talking about. When you don’t hold even on to God—there is nothing; nothing whatsoever—it is just at that moment that you acquire the curious vitality that we call Buddha-nature. And that is essential energy, essential courage, and essential compassion.

And remember, this can’t fully be explained. You can say that I see no logical connection between the act of renunciation. In other words, I’ve stopped clinging altogether—not because I ought to, but because I find out there’s nothing else to do. All right, now what’s the logical connection between that and the courage and compassion? It’s not very easy to point that out, because in order to find out, you have to go through the experience.

It’s like—there’s a parallel problem, historically, about the Calvinists. The Calvinists believed in predestination: that there was absolutely nothing that the individual could do to control whether he would be damned or saved forever and ever, because God had decided in the beginning of all time which individuals he would damn and which he would save. So you would naturally suppose that Calvinists who believed that would be rather dissolute and lazy people, because they would say, “Well, it doesn’t make any difference. There’s nothing we can do about it.” But, on the contrary, Calvinists were not. Calvinists were very earnest people—rather too earnest, one might say. Pillars of conventional probity and prudence and morality and so on, because they had to prove that they were predestined to be saved. See?

So there is a difference between a theory and what you would think would be the application of that theory, the same theory in terms of experience and what will be the consequences of that experience. So here we’re discussing—because we’re using words—a theory of the total ungraspability of the world. And that sounds as if it would lead to despair, especially if there is no God to hang on to. Nothing at all to hang on to, you see? Then you would say, “Oh well, it’s all nothing,” you see?

But actually, if you get with that nothing, you discover what is fundamentally worthwhile, what it’s all about. And that’s why they say Buddhists are atheists: because when you really become one with God, obviously you don’t go around worshiping God or asking God for things and making prayers. There’s no point in that anymore. Should God pray to himself?

So this, then, is a possibility here, when people see that and are living let-go lives, that they could come into harmony with each other—in a social sense, political sense. And the question here now in practical politics is this: is there any way of advocating a certain style of practical politics in everyday life which persuades without preaching? See, one thing that is quite evident from the whole history of religion is that preaching doesn’t work. I mean, this is the great lesson of religion. When somebody says, “You should do so-and-so, because if you don’t, look what awful things are going to happen,” nobody pays any attention. Because they never really make the awful things that are going to happen convincing. There’s always hell somewhere when you’re dead, or the consequences of not really amounting to being a nice person, you know. “What will everybody else think of you?” Well, who cares? You can always find a society, a community, where someone will think well of you. So, you know, if you’re an outcast in one group, in a civilization like ours, you simply join another, because we are so diversified and we make friends very quickly. And nobody knows who you are, what your background is, but they just take you in, you know? In the old world, that’s rather difficult.

But we have to find a way, in other words, of dealing with our great conflicts based on a kind of cold logic of seeing, of thinking, a whole process through. Like, let’s take the Chinese. The Chinese are being stupid because they’ve got the wrong propaganda line. They are squeaking. They are calling out foul and saying: “You wretched Western barbarians have exploited us long enough. Your capitalists, your imperialists, your this, that, and the other have had it, and we are going to overthrow you, and we are going to overthrow our own landlords,” and so on. And they’re taking this line. Now, that line is not going to work. It’s just going to stir up hostility. In exactly the same way, in our own backyard, here, the Negroes are taking the wrong line. Black nationalism means we are just the kind of people the whites always said we were: aggressive, uncooperative, alienated. And if they take that line—let’s look at this, you see, as a matter of simply practical politics—if they take that line of black nationalism, they are going to be wiped out mercilessly. Because who has the napalm? It’s as bad as that. And looking at it from the other side, our white notion that Negroes are somehow inferior people doesn’t pay off, because it just creates exactly that trouble. It creates that sort of saw in the body politic. It doesn’t make any sense.

Well, you could then say it likewise to the Chinese: look, what you ought to do is, instead of saying, “We’re the poor Chinese,” you get up, stand on your feet, and say, “As it so happens, we are the most ancient existing civilization on Earth. And we have cultivated reasonableness for centuries. And you think Sweden is a reasonable country with a wonderful social democracy? You just wait and see what we’re going to do. We are going to be the most reasonable people you ever saw.” And everybody will be astonished and will want to go to China. And they’ll walk over the whole of Asia.

And the reason about all this is that I’m trying to say—I always try to emphasize the position that any doctrine of this kind is not preaching. It is not moralistic. It is simply pointing out the nature of the facts. Not that you ought to be unselfish, and you ought not to cling to possessions, to identity, to role, to status. The point is: you can’t. And as you realize you can’t, you don’t. Well, so with other matters of practical politics: when you realize what can’t be done, you won’t do it—or try to do it. It’s only so long as you’re under illusions and think that certain things can be done which can’t be done, that then these conflicts arise. So it seems to me that along these lines—which I will call the lines of cosmologic—that there is perhaps some sort of possibility of bringing about a practical realization of what the Buddhists call the dharmadhātu, or the state of affairs in which all individual things and events are in a harmonious relationship.

Now let me, though, underline this point which is absolutely essential to grasp: that realization in social and ethical terms cannot possibly happen unless those involved in the project have understood that there is no necessity for it to happen. That, in other words, there is a point of view from which it has happened already, because so long as it must happen, it won’t. In other words, when you say, “Oh gee, we’ve got to get this done. This is urgent. Come on, now, everybody. Get in and pitch,” and so on, and, “We’re going to make this happen,” it won’t. Bet your life it won’t. Because people acting under the sense of necessity and constraint are not free.

So this is why the Buddhists lay so much emphasis on the importance of what you might call the let-go personality. A person who doesn’t care—doesn’t give a damn, to use our own sort of colloquialisms: “If I live, okay. If I don’t, so what? It doesn’t matter.” And that (which looks from our standpoint so negative), what they’ve discovered, you see, is that it’s the brightest, most positive, glowing, gorgeous point of view.

Now, in the kind of culture and cosmology and view of the world out of which this philosophy arose historically, the general prevailing view is that, within a few thousand years, the world’s going to blow up. You know, Hindu cosmology works on the presupposition that in the course of time everything gets worse, and that only after it has got so bad that it dissolves is time renewed. And when the cycle starts again, everything is as good as possible. It’s brand new, you know. It’s like a new house, a new car, a new baby. And everything’s great. And then, as it gets older, it deteriorates and finally falls apart. So there is, you see, about Asian politics a certain fundamental pessimism in that respect: that, in the course of time, everything is going to get worse and there will come the destruction.

Now then, what is the logic, what is the possible sense, in talking about this Kegon philosophy where they really seriously think that there might be the possibility of creating a harmonious world? The answer is this: that to get it, you’ve got to get into a different kind of time. In the kind of time we are now living in, everything is going to get worse. That’s the nature of the time structure. But you don’t have to live in this kind of time. You can live in another time structure altogether. You realize this? You can. You can get out of this time—but only when you’re disillusioned with it: when you see that it’s not going anywhere.

For example, you’re all educated to believe that the future holds something for you. And you have a graded system of education where you go up step by step by step—always with a come-on saying: now, when you get this thing, it’s going to be great. And then, when you get there, and you’re director of the company, chairman of the department, senior surgeon in the hospital, or whatever it is (or you’ve married the guy), you suddenly realize that you don’t have a future—because you’ve arrived. But then an insurance salesman comes around, and he tells you that if you buy this retirement policy, there’s going to be a great thing ahead of you called retirement. And when you get that, then you’ve really got there, you know. But then, what they’re going to do then is put you in a morgue as a senior citizen. Because you’ve got prostate trouble, bad teeth, lousy digestion, your hair’s falling out, and you haven’t got the energy left to enjoy yourself as you thought you would have. Of course, if you don’t resist growing old and you understand how to grow old, this is no problem. But the point is the constant illusion that time will achieve what you are really after. Everybody brought up in this way is therefore living in false time. Now, get out of that kind of time, you see, by seeing that it doesn’t lead anywhere.

Now, I’m saying in another way the same thing as I was saying a moment ago: that you can’t stop things changing, so there’s nothing to hang on to, and there’s no one to hang on to it, either. It’s like an illusory hand trying to hold firmly to a parcel of smoke. So in these two ways, seeing (in other words) that we’re living in a false time, and in this kind of time everything is going to get worse. So forget it! It isn’t profitable time. And you will be able to see that you can look at what you now call the everyday world—see, this actual existence—you can look at it in an entirely different perspective and live in a different kind of time.

This other kind of time is vertical to ordinary clock time. It is a switch of emphasis, in other words, where the eternal now becomes what is supremely important. As we have time at the moment, you see, there is no now. There’s the past and there’s the future, and there’s a hairline at which one becomes the other. And on our watches—you see, I have a little funny watch where the hairlines are so fine that I have to put on my glasses to see them at all. And even then, they’ve really got them down to the most analytical little tiny lines. But you see what that means? This is a symbol of having no present, because the present has been abolished and made into the abstract hairline; the split second.

So there is no present in our kind of time. We are therefore presentless people. We have a past, we have a future, but that’s all. No present. So then, that’s why Aldous Huxley wrote a book called Time Must Have a Stop. You have to get rid of that time where the present is totally unimportant. What did you do? It’s important. What will you do? That’s terribly important. But where are you? Who are you? What are you now? Where are we? It’s not there.

So then, it is only as people renounce the future and the past that they get a present. Now, the future hasn’t come—not here—and the past is altogether gone, you can’t get that. When you have no future and you have no past, there is nothing else for you to have but a present!

And with this fundamental adjustment of human consciousness you see the everyday world in an entirely different state. You are living in a new kind of time. And you see other people living in their kind of time—which is, of course, going along this way—and you’re sorry for them because they are in an illusion. But it’s a free country, and you can dig that illusion if you want to.

Now, I want to finish up this seminar by trying to explain the way in which the Kegon philosophy underlies the practice of Zen. Earlier in the seminar I explained that, insofar as Zen Buddhism has an intellectual background, that is the Kegon philosophy. And in the first three sessions, then, I’ve tried to give you at least a partial view of what this fantastic metaphysical construct is. And if you want to, incidentally, explore it further, alas, the literature is not too well available, but there is an excellent account of it in the second volume of Feng Youlan’s History of Chinese Philosophy. And I think that’s the best place to go. There is a little book that Suzuki wrote called The Essence of Buddhism, published in London by the Buddhist Society, and that also is an account of it, but it’s harder to find.

So now, how do we get from where we were to Zen? Well, it goes like this. In the Sutra of the Sixth Patriarch, the Tánjīng, which was the collected teachings of the Sixth Patriarch of the Zen school—who, as I said, was a contemporary of Fazang. And Fazang died in 712 AD, and Huineng died in 712 AD. In his discourse he gives a lesson on the art of teaching, the art of being a guru, and this lesson is based on getting people to be capable of polar thinking.

Polar thinking is simply—well, it’s not just thinking, it’s a kind of feeling and a kind of sensing—wherein you see the going-togetherness of things that are thought to be mutually exclusive opposites. In other words, you wouldn’t know you were right unless somebody else was wrong. Normally we think, then, that right and wrong are mutually exclusive. But when you are capable of polar thinking, you see that they go together. A person who feels in a polar way sees figure and background going together. He doesn’t see them as mutually exclusive.

Now then, you see, when I was explaining the jiji muge—the fourth Dharma world, or the fourth way of looking at the universe; which is the culmination of the Kegon school—I was trying to show this point: that all events have a “gowithness” with each other in the same way as a figure and a background. So, in order to get this point across, Huineng explained that when a person asks a question about something sacred, you give him an answer in terms of something secular. When he asks you about something eternal, you give him an answer in terms of the temporal. When he asks you about something abstract, you give him an answer in terms of the concrete—and so the whole way down the line.

So when you read your Zen stories—which are always this apparently delightful nonsense—somebody says, “What is the fundamental meaning of Buddhism?” And the answer is “A dried dung scraper.” In the Far East they used not to use toilet paper, they had a stick they used instead, and this is the answer. You see, he has switched completely from the domain of life that is considered philosophical and sacred to one that is considered completely profane and unmentionable. Then, on other occasions, it goes the other way. A monk says to the master—they’re engaged in cooking; they’re peeling potatoes or something—and he says, “Pass me the knife.” The master hand it to him blade first, and the monk says, “Please give me the other end.” The master says, “What would you do with the other end?” And this immediately has a kind of metaphysical flavor to it, so that he jumps, you see, from the practical question to the metaphysical. But if you ask him the metaphysical, he will always answer in terms of the everyday.

And the whole genius of Zen is really this: that it has got a way of religious life and a form of iconography, the form of which is secular. And it has created a whole school of poetry where the deep philosophical matters are never, never mentioned, except sometimes by way of making a joke. Because what Zen tries to do ideally is to be completely cool; to create the religion of no religion so that you don’t notice it’s around unless you’re in the know.

Now, this is not actually true in practice. Many people are disturbed when they go to Japan, and they walk into Zen temples, and find that they have rituals and services such as I’ve just been playing to you, that they have elaborate Buddha images and people are making bows to them. As a matter of fact, when Professor Huston Smith went to Japan, and was being shown round a Zen monastery, he noticed that his guide, the particular master of the monastery, whenever he passed an image of the Buddha, would stop and bow. And he said to him, “I don’t understand this,” he said, “because I thought you Zen Buddhists would burn up these images, as one of your masters did in one of the stories.” He said, “I don’t see why you bow. You might just as well spit at them.” The master said, “You spits, I bows.”

But, you see, the thing about all this is—about iconoclasm—there are very different spirits of iconoclasm. The Puritan iconoclasts, who broke down all the images in the English churches, hated the images. They thought they were evil and wrong, and so they smashed them ruthlessly. But when a chicken comes out of the eggshell, the eggshell is not something to be deplored. It’s certainly something to be broken. But had the shell not existed, the chicken wouldn’t have been protected. So, in precisely the same way, images, religious ideas, religious symbols, exist in order to be constructively and lovingly broken. Because they are like opening a package. If there’s no package, you know, you can hardly get the contents, because they’d fall all through your fingers. So something comes to you in a package. That’s why packaging is so important and so interesting. Something comes to you in a package. Well, it’s like on Christmas Day: here are all these gorgeous packages with colors and gold and everything, and very often the packages are much better than what’s in them. But then everybody proceeds to tear them apart and get what’s inside. So, from this point of view, the Zen Buddhists regard all ideas—about Buddhism, about philosophy, about religion, and so on—as so much packaging. And in order to get at it, you have to get rid of the packaging.

So what happens, then, when we get to the state I was talking about this morning, where you abandon completely all belief, you abandon every sort of way of hanging on to life, you accept your complete impermanence, the prospect of your death, of vanishing into nothing whatsoever, you see, and of not being able to control anything, of being at the mercy of what is completely other than you, and you let go to that, you see? This means that you even get rid of any God whatsoever, to do this fully. You don’t have a thing left to cling to. So this complete let-go flips, and you discover—having made it—a new way of experiencing altogether in which you don’t need any God, because you’re it. But also, you don’t cling to the idea that you’re it. In other words, this is why Krishnamurti makes a certain kind of attack on people who are Vedantists, and who believe that the human self is ultimately the divine self. He says: why do you believe in that? See, because if you believe in it, you are making it a thing to hang on to.

And so, in a way, then, you see, all belief in God is lack of faith. Has that ever struck you? You’re still clinging. And so long as you’re still clinging, you don’t have faith, because faith is the state of total let-go. So when, through some marvelous desperation, we get to the state of total let-go, and then, you see, fantastically, religion—anything like religion—simply disappears. There’s no need for it any longer. Like, you’ve crossed to the other shore, you don’t need the raft. Get off! Leave the raft behind.

Now, the other shore is actually the same as this one. You know, when you cross the river, when the mountain is in the distance, see, there’s the other shore, over there. It’s kind of different from here. And you can sit here and say, “Mmh, be nice to live there, wouldn’t it? See that place up there? I just love to live, because it looks so good from here.” Then you go, and you buy the house, and you sit there, and it feels the same as this place feels. Because you’re there! And how things feel are how you are. And you look back across here, and say, “Gee, doesn’t that look lovely?”

There are mysterious trails going up Mount Tamalpais that look as if they led to that place that we were talking about this morning: the secret garden which every child remembers. And they disappear through trees, and there’s a kind of a mysterious little canyon, and you can hear the sound of a waterfall, and you know somewhere in there is that garden. I know, as a matter of fact, where it is. There is one. But, always, when you follow the road right through, it leads back to San Rafael and its suburbs on the other side, you see.

I have been years seeking the ideal place, and I’ve come to the conclusion that the only way I can possibly find it is to be it. If you can find it in you, then anywhere you go is the ideal place to live. But it’s so fascinating projecting it outside and going on a look for it. I mean, this is the whole of fun; what fun means.

So when, therefore, religion is abandoned, you are in a dangerous fix because you can very easily slip into madness. We were talking this morning about a vision. Lloyd brought up this question about the vision of a fourth dimension, or another dimension, and anybody who looked at it went crazy. And this is a real danger: that people who have the mystical vision—whether through practicing yoga, or Zen Buddhism, or Hesychast Christian prayers, or by taking LSD—become a serious menace to society. And society gets really worried about them, because they are not taking the world and its concerns seriously any longer. They know it’s an illusion. And if you really know it’s an illusion, if you really know I’m an illusion, I don’t know what you’re going to do with me. I don’t know whether I trust you. I don’t know whether you’re going to keep the rules. I just don’t know about you. You’ve seen through it, and goodness only knows—you may do anything! And if you’re not sure of yourself, and you suddenly see that all this is an illusion, there’s nothing you can cling to, it’s all relative, you may get bugged, and you may go nuts. That’s the great danger in all of this.

And that is why a Zen monastery is at one and the same moment a place of total iconoclasm—of seeing through the whole thing—and yet at the same time it maintains a discipline as clean and strict as anywhere you can find. The combination of the two is simply marvelous. Unfortunately, modern Japan doesn’t dig it. But what they’ve done is: they’ve well recognized that you cannot go into outer space and come back to this world without strict controls. It’s exactly the same way when you’re skin diving. You go below a certain number of fathoms and you experience weightlessness. Now, a person who’s not properly trained at that level will get happy. Now, there’s no reason why you shouldn’t get happy—provided you keep your wits about you. Nothing matters at all when your weight vanishes. Because, after all, you don’t matter anymore. You have no weight. Nothing is weighty. Nothing is important. And a person may at this point take off his oxygen mask and offer it to a fish, in which case he’ll drown. He’ll never come back. And if he stays down too long, he enjoys this too much, his oxygen supply will run out and he’ll be lost. So he has a watch, and he knows (according to discipline) that at a certain time on this instrument he’s got to come up. It’s like when you had too much to drink and you’re driving: you’ve got to watch your speedometer. Drive by instruments. When you’re in a difficult situation in an airplane and you’ve lost your sense of gravity: watch your instrument. Don’t trust your senses, you see? This is very important.

In Buddhist imagery there are guardians of the directions of the universe, and they are all in the figure of Chinese generals with clubs and swords and very fierce expressions. And they are always put at gates. You know, gates are north, south, east, and west, and here are the guards. They guard the entrances. But what they really guard is the directions. Because it’s absolutely important that we can agree on our time scale, and on our north, south, east, and west, so that I can meet you. If we can’t agree about that, we’ll miss each other completely. We’ll never meet. And if we can’t meet, we can’t have dinner together. If we can’t have dinner together, we can’t love each other. So in the middle of nothingness—which is all this space here, see; which is nothing whatever—there are nevertheless directions. And think what a beautiful thing that is, you see: to set up directions in the middle of nothing.

So, for this reason, in the religion where anything goes and anything is allowed and no holds are barred, there is for that reason precisely a discipline and an order—which is pretty strict. But the spirit of the strictness is different than the spirit of strictness in theistic religions. See, in Buddhism there’s no boss. Ultimate reality is not conceived in the form of authority. Because from their point of view that’s childish. You are your own boss, and you’re responsible. If you want to belong to a society, it’s up to you if you want to conform. In other words, one of the interesting things is: you can always cease to be a monk without dishonor. In the Christian church you can’t, because you make life vows to get in. You promise forever to be obedient, chaste, and poor. And this is irrevocable, like Christian marriage. But in the Buddhist order you can leave anytime you want. And they say, “Alright, you’ve got many other lives ahead of you in which you can be a monk all over again, and if you don’t want to do it this round you don’t have to. And we’re not mad at you. Just, please, if you don’t want to undergo this discipline, go somewhere else.” And there’s no dishonor about that at all.

I have a friend in Los Angeles who runs a very fancy restaurant. He was a Buddhist monk for ten days. It was quite an experience. But that’s alright. Okay, you try it, and if you want to stay here, we’re very happy to have you. If you don’t want to, we’d just as soon you weren’t around. Because you’re not deceiving us. You know, if you stay and you don’t really want to, but feel you ought to, you’re a nuisance. It’s like a person who feels they ought to be unselfish, and is therefore always making promises which they’re never going to fulfill. It’s much better to be frank and tell people what you honestly feel than pretend.

So for this reason, then, where there is no religion at all—because everybody’s realized that the sky’s the limit—there isn’t any boss, there’s nothing to kowtow to, because you’re it. It follows that you become, therefore, responsible for creating an order. But, you see, instead of submitting to the order, you create it. Next, you find that you can—having got rid of religion completely—well, now everything becomes religious. That is to say, instead of having some kind of hang-up on universals, on vast abstract, huge, airy conceptions, you employ instead things that are very particular, very temporal. Because of jiji muge. You remember the image that I used to illustrate jiji muge was the net of jewels, wherein every crystal reflects all the other crystals, every dew drop on the spider’s web reflects all the others. Okay.

So then—I just happen to pick up this because it happened to be handy. I don’t want you to think about fans and Orient and all that sort of thing. But with this, all Buddhism can be taught. All the universe, all sciences, all philosophy can be demonstrated with this. Because this is one of the jewels reflecting all the others. When you pick up a link in a chain, all the other links come up with it. So with this. And if you ask me about what is the mystery of life, what is God, and I show you this fan, people look at you in a strange way and say, “I wonder what he meant by that.” Well, the truth of the matter is he didn’t mean anything at all. Because this doesn’t mean anything. Words mean something, because they refer to events and things that are other than the sounds of the words. But the things and events that words refer to don’t refer to anything else. Of course, they’re connected with everything else. But they don’t refer to everything else in the same way as the symbol does. So that’s why Zen always answers in terms of the completely concrete. What is this? Well, “fan” happens to be a noise, which this isn’t. This is what this is. Or, alternatively, if you don’t want to be hung up on it, it’s this. Or this. You see? There’s no fixed thing that this is.

So, in just the same way, let’s consider the advance that Zen makes in the world of art, or the world of painting. I showed you a Tibetan painting this morning which was extremely elaborate, where every tiny space was filled, and where all of it was obviously religious. It was quite clear that this painting was an icon. Now, Zen people don’t like that kind of painting. I mean, it isn’t that they have a real prejudice against it, but they don’t usually have it around. Instead, they prefer a style of painting in which there’s an enormous amount of untouched paper, and where a brush has very swiftly and deftly painted some bamboo sort of in one corner. Now, the way the bamboo is put on the paper alives all the rest of the paper, because it turns it into a lake. Without drawing a single line, a master can put bamboo on a piece of paper and turn the rest of the paper into a lake. Everybody can see the lake there, although nothing has happened. Empty space. Or it might be—a whole mountain might be there, but covered in mist.

Because, you see, he didn’t use the paper as mere paper. You often see around, especially motels, they have, you know, the kind of motel where you have flower prints over the bed? And there’s a bunch of flowers taken out of an old book of etchings or something, you know, and put in a frame by some interior decorator. There was a one, two, three, four, and a sort of a—and always the bunch of flowers is put bang in the middle of the piece of paper. Now, you know what that does? That devitalizes all the rest of the paper. Because it means the background has become unimportant. And this is always done by people who don’t understand polar thinking, who don’t feel that figure and ground go together. But all Zen painting, where you get this extraordinary relationship of figure to background, is done by people who feel and think, and actually sense in a polar way. They see the space and the solid simultaneously.

And that’s why the Chinese place things in space the way they do. Even—you can’t all see it from where you’re sitting—a piece of calligraphy contains in it an extremely important relationship between the characters and the space. It would take me quite a while to go into all the details of that, but they have to be just the right size to accord with that space. There isn’t only one way of doing it. There are several ways of putting the characters in a piece of paper that size. But in each way that you use, you take account of the space. You don’t use the paper as mere neutral background.

So when, for example, you will find so often that the Chinese painter takes his area, his rectangular area in which he’s painting, and he will paint one corner. And, say, from the bottom left he will strike up a bamboo stalk and flow leaves in the wind on it, and so leave the rest. This is a trick, you see, which uses—and, as I’ve said, vitalizes—the whole of the rest of the area. And you don’t do that simply by putting the figure plump in the center.

So the whole art which has been inspired by Zen is based on polar recognition of the identity of space and solitude. Solid and space. You see, one implies the other. But this is always so unexpected from the point of view of common sense. People, in other words, think space is nothing and that it has no power. And so, for this very reason, the architecture inspired by Zen is practically, all of it, playing with space. Zen emphasizes the luxurious richness of poverty, of rooms with practically nothing in them. Furniturelessness. And it has a luxury that’s unbelievable. The uncluttered life.

Although I must say that, somewhere, I went to the house of a very great tea master where everything was absolutely gorgeously in order. Oh, it was the highest style Zen taste. In Japan they call it yamato-damashii. And we went into a little tea room, and Jano, in a kind of experimental fiddling way, pushed aside a screen. And inside was a Western style room, completely cluttered with papers and old clothes and everything thrown in there. Whoosh, you see? Because everybody needs an unconscious place you can—somebody, everybody, everybody’s house has a basement or a closet or something where they throw everything away. That’s just what I call the element of irreducible rascality. It’s always there. But nevertheless, on the outside, the place where you operate, they have this sense of, pshht, complete clearness, which is the coincidence (in one art expression) of freedom and discipline. Anything goes, because you’ve got complete space in which you can do anything, and yet the space is disciplined beautifully.

Then, in subject matter of painting, Zen people, of course, as I said, prefer the secular. Even when they paint saints, sages, buddhas, and so on, they give them a secular form. That is to say, they look like just ordinary people. They don’t necessarily have halos or special markings. They prefer that they shouldn’t; that they should look kind of rustic. And they prefer to put on the altar, as it were—the tokonoma of a tea room; the alcove, in other words—is almost never adorned with a religious figure, but always with a naturalistic painting: rocks, water, vegetables, trees, whatever.

So in the same way in poetry, where the haiku is a kind of masterpiece of this way of feeling the universe. The haiku always celebrates a particular finite ji type. You know, ji as distinct from ri. Instant of life.

In the dense mist,

What is being shouted

Between hill and boat?

And you, from such a poem, will remember, you know, some morning when you were at some gorgeous river estuary, and you couldn’t see anything, and there was a conversation going on between someone calling down to someone in the boat from the hill, and you can’t make out what it’s all about any more than you can make out what’s on the other side of the river, and yet you know it is gorgeous somehow, but the very fact that you can’t see makes it all the better. This is all there is.

The path comes to an end

In the parsley.

This is called in Japanese yūgen. We have no English word for yūgen whatsoever. But—

2:51:58

Watts

Holzwege?

2:52:04

Watts

Trail ends nowhere… but with a certain implication. That is to say, as I was just trying to describe the place up in the mountain, where somehow the trail disappears and there might be something beyond. But the whole point is that you don’t investigate too closely. Because then you’re the sort of person who, when you get in there, would spoil it. So I could say: when you make love to somebody, do it delicately. Don’t be too inquisitive. Don’t be too probing, because that would injure what you love.

But the real constant theme of the haiku is that it always incarnates the specific, finite, temporal, immediate moment, and with this says more than you can say with any amount of abstract generalizations. Only—only, only, only!—you always know that behind this, the people who make up the haiku are not bourgeois Philistines who say, “Well, isn’t the main thing simply to be practical and get on with your work?”

The point about the haiku is this. It’s something in human life which is very difficult to pin down. But it’s when somebody comes on at you and says something, but you know that there’s another meaning behind it, which doesn’t have to be stated between you. And so you get a joke. So you get a tacit understanding about something. This looks like it’s this, but it is that. A haiku does this in a very cunning way. It’s the simplest possible utterance. Bashō said: to get haiku well written, ask a three-foot child to say the robin’s egg is blue. “You light the fire, I’ll show you something beautiful: a great big ball of snow.” And this is a haiku.

But something is conveyed by this, see, which we’re not going to talk about. It’d be bad form, to begin with. It’s like gentlemen in England don’t talk about religion or sex. No, boy, you don’t mention these things! It’s not quite like that, but it’s nearly like that. See, there’s something got over to you by this where the whole fun of the thing is that you don’t mention it. But this is possible only when you know the jiji muge thing: that every bit of experience takes in everything else.

So, in exactly the same way, we have a confraternity among us in our society today of hipsters. And they can, with a flick of an eyelash, make a whole crowd of people laugh who are in the know. Because they have seen that one single motion of an eye is the whole universe in operation. And the joke is that the people outside don’t know this. But when I move an eyelash at you and you’re in the know about this, you laugh. It’s a very funny game.