So then, we are continuing with the subject of Mahāyāna Buddhism. And in the last seminar I discussed almost entirely the school of Mahāyāna which known as Madhyamaka in Sanskrit, this word meaning approximately the middle way. Madhyamaka has been called in the best book that there is on the subject the central philosophy of Buddhism. And it is not what we call in the West a philosophy at all. It’s a method for changing your state of consciousness. In other words, it’s not a system of ideas such as propounded, say, by Plato, or by Kant, or by Hegel. It’s a dialectical method—that is to say, dialectic being in the sense of a discourse between a teacher and a student, the purpose of which is not to explain or inculcate a certain set of ideas, but to change one’s basic state of feeling—that is to say, to change the sensation that you have of your own existence.

All Buddhism is concerned with this. The very crux of Buddhism, the thing that is called bodhi, which means “awakening”—it comes from the same root as the word Buddha; is “to know,” but better “to be awake.” You know, some of you may have probably exposed yourselves to the teachings of Gurdjieff, the wonderful old rascal, who used to give lectures in which he would keep completely silent for a while, and get everybody embarrassed. And, you know, they were all expecting something to happen, and he would look individually at everybody in the room. And when everybody was feeling awkward he would say, “Wake up! You’re all asleep, and if you don’t wake up, I won’t give any lecture.”

And this is a very good attitude, actually. Zen, as you know, uses shock tactics of various kinds. And the whole idea, then, is that a person who is under illusion, māyā, thinks of himself basically as a victim—someone caught in a trap, somebody subject to fate, the will of God, or whatever you want to call it—who got involved in life passively. That’s why I use the word “victim.” And he has, therefore, the sensation of his consciousness as being a kind of passive, but nevertheless very delicate and tender, receptor or percipient of everything that goes on. So that life in general occurs to you, it happens to you, and there’s nothing you can do about it. And you say, “Well, it’s awful! I can’t get myself out of this trap.”

So the technique of the philosophical dialogue that I was describing as Madhyamaka is designed to get you to drop your defenses. In other words, you can discover as practically a physical sensation that you tend to be on the defensive all the time. You are exerting through every muscle, practically, a resistance against the world—all of which is excessive. In other words, you need a certain resistance, you need a certain muscular tonus, but your body does that for you. You don’t need to will it. It’s like if you lie on the floor and relax, you don’t need to do anything to hold yourself together. The floor will hold you up, and your skin will hold you inside it. But most people are actually doing things to hold themselves together, even in the situation of complete relaxation, because they don’t really trust their own life. And the lack of trust in one’s own life, the perpetual attitude of defensiveness, is a result of a kind of mis-feeling of one’s own existence as something alien to the universe that endures and, as I said, is simply a passive recipient of experience.

So then, the whole process of a therapeutic dialogue—which was invented by this marvelous man, Nāgārjuna, in the following of the Buddha. Because it’s a strange thing that the Buddha was very, very creative towards other people. That is to say, the basic idea of Buddhism does not preclude other people being just as much Buddha as Buddha was. There is a little difficulty in Christianity about this, you see, because everybody harks back to the Christ as the unique and only incarnation of God. And so he is on a very special pedestal which nobody else is ever allowed to climb up on. And this, of course, makes the teaching and work of Jesus completely ineffective. But Buddhism had the advantage that they never did that. And so that Nāgārjuna, who could come later than Buddha, was in a way a wiser man than the Buddha himself—but only because he stood on the shoulders of Buddha and carried the Buddha’s dialogue to its full conclu—not its full conclusion, but to a full conclusion. We can go further today, you see. This thing hasn’t stopped at all. It isn’t something that we go back to as a past and say, “Well, we’re going to tell you all about a thing called Buddhism, which is a fixed body of practices and beliefs in which certain people in Asia believe. And if you’re interested, you can believe in it, too.” It’s not like that at all. It’s an activity that is going on. And when it gets mixed up in the context of Western civilization, Western science, Western technology, it will do things that the Asian people never dreamed of and might not even approve of.

So it’s very important in approaching this—this is one of our difficulties, you see. If I were a lecturer on Buddhism in the context of the academic world, I would have to observe certain game rules. That is to say, I would have to discuss the subject as entirely historical, as something of the past, and I would be expected to give you extremely accurate information about what it was, what other people thought, and what they did. The moment I began to suggest that this thing had any vitality to it and might have some effect upon you, I would be ruled out as academically unrespectable. They would say, “Well, this man is no longer qualified to be a professor, because he is advocating these things and not taking an objective point of view to it.”

You see, it’s very funny. All obsolete subjects are studied by the historical method. So if you study in the university religion, it comes under the heading of the history of religions. Philosophy—the introductory course in philosophy is usually history of philosophy. Just imagine teaching children mathematics with the introductory course history of mathematics. So that they would start doing sums in Egyptian and Roman numerals, and going through all the procedures that ancient man went through to arrive at modern mathematics. Imagine a first course in medicine: they proceed immediately to practical matters, the most up-to-date knowledge of human physiology, and they teach that only when you become a graduate school in the history of medicine do you run across an elective course in the history of medical science.

So this way of putting everything at a distance of history is a way of castrating it, making it completely ineffective, so that it won’t do anything anymore. So that’s why I, for example, cannot work in the academic world. Because although I know their game rules and how to study Buddhism from the historical method, when you get involved in that, after a while, nobody’s interested; it just becomes completely boring. You can acquire yourself a huge library and you can go into the facts endlessly, and then what?

But the thing that the academicians can console themselves with is that—well, one thing they are very much afraid of is a teacher of religion who’s out to convert people. Because that, you see, is imposing upon you a particular individual and subjective point of view. So if, in other words, a person who is teaching Christianity should start preaching from his academic chair instead of just saying what Christians did and so on in such and such a period, they would be very frightened of that. But the advantage that a Buddhist has is that he has no opinions that he is trying to put over on you. He’s only trying to help you to get rid of your opinions. That is to say, to get rid of any fixed view of the world and of yourself, because we use what are called “views” in Sanskrit, dṛṣṭi, as methods of clinging to existence.

So there is something that is called in Sanskrit sakāya dṛṣṭi, which means “the view of separateness,” the view of your being—this thing that I was talking about—the separate insular recipient of experience. Say, you have feelings, but the language that we speak compels you to say: you have feelings, as if “you” were something on the one hand, and “your feelings” were something else on the other. You say you have thoughts, as if the thinker stands on the one hand and inspects the thoughts on the other. So that one has a view of life in which there is a panorama of thoughts, of feelings, of sensations, going along constantly. But one can say constantly because of the impression that you are distinct from them, standing aside from them, as the constant inspector of the procession. And so you get the feeling that you endure—but precariously, threatenedly—while the procession of thoughts and feelings goes by you.

Now, you can very easily see that this is the result of the memory process which gives an illusion of constancy in the flow. And therefore, in the same way—the famous old Buddhist analogy—when you rotate a burning brand in the darkness, you give the illusion of a continuous circle of fire because of the memory in the retina, where the impression of the spark doesn’t fade out immediately, but lingers. And so, as you see this thing in front of your eye, it seems to form a circle—whereas there is no circle, there is only a moment, the instant of flame. So Buddhists argue: there is only this moment. And actually, you, who come in at the door, are not the same people who are now sitting here. Just as, in the whirlpool in water, there is no constant water, there is only going on a continuous behavior: whirling in the water. But no water stays in it. So, in exactly the same way, you who came in through the door a few minutes ago and are now sitting here are entirely different—only: you are clinging to the idea of your continuity. Actually, there is only the moment, the instant—what is called in Sanskrit the kṣaṇa: life is instantaneous.

And if you see that, you get a kind of a new angle on St. Paul’s famous pronouncement that “we shall all be changed in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, on the morning when the last trumpet sounds.” You see, the Christian has put everything into chronology: that there is going to be a thing called the last day, and the trumpet of the angels is going to awaken the dead. The trumpet’s sounding now, you see, for the Buddhists. Wake up! There is this moment, and this is eternity—only: you are stringing the moments together, and you are creating time out of eternity. You’re wondering. You’re identifying yourself, in other words, with all the things that have happened to me, and you’re worrying about all the things that will. But actually, you are never anywhere but now.

This is a very interesting discipline that is given in all systems of yoga and Buddhist meditation. The student is told to live in the present completely, to never relax awareness of what you are doing now. Be here. So you would say in the ordinary way, “I have thoughts about tomorrow and yesterday, and I’m distracted. My mind doesn’t stay focused on the present.” That’s the way it seems, yes. So what you do instead is: you try to focus your attention completely on the present. You find this a very difficult thing to do, because you don’t know when the present is. In other words, you don’t recognize that anything happens until it’s already a memory. It has, as it were, to be in your consciousness long enough to make an impression. And you say, “Well, in looking at this table”—I wish I could find something different from tables to give illustrations from; all lecturers are always talking about tables!—“In looking at this pipe, I don’t know it’s here until, somehow or other, it has lingered.” So I ask, “Am I actually knowing the present pipe, or is it always past?”

So, as you continue to practice this exercise, you get the funny feeling that your memory of something past is also a present event. You see? You have the memory; it is here. And this begins to bug you, like it did St. Augustine. He couldn’t understand memory. He got into a terrible tailspin about it because, you see, the memory of the past is something always present. So you finally realize that the whole exercise you’re undertaking was pointless, because there is nowhere else to be but the present. But that was the point of trying to make you do this thing: to get you to realize that there is no past and there is no future. There is only now, and you can’t get out of it. So relax. You’re in eternity in the moment. And this flows along—or flows, doesn’t flow. You know this thing of Tennyson’s poem, “Such a tide as moving seems asleep, too full for sound or foam.” The unmoved mover: the idea of somehow motion and stillness going together, activity and peace, the eye of the hurricane. You see, everything is really like that.

Well now, all that I’ve said hitherto is introductory to going on for this seminar to discuss the second great point of view that is involved in Mahāyāna Buddhism. The first, the Madhyamaka, the middle way, was, as I said, to destroy all your hang-ups, fixed opinions about the nature of life, so that you don’t use ideas, beliefs, religious prejudices, preferences, opinions, you don’t use them to cling. It demolishes every idea of reality that you could have. That’s Madhyamaka, that’s Nāgārjuna.

Now, a little later in time, there arose in India two other great Buddhist philosophers, respectively Asaṅga and Vasubandhu. There may have been two Vasubandhus, either father and son, or teacher and student who took his teacher’s name. And they lived—in this vague dating that we have; it’s impossible to pin it down—about 400 AD. And they are responsible for what is called the Yogācāra school, sometimes called also Vijñaptimātra, which means “the school of consciousness only.” And it looks deceptively like what we call in Western philosophy subjective idealism, as taught, say, by Berkeley or Bradley—that, in other words, the only reality is your mind, as this is propounded in Western philosophy. Everything that exists is in your mind. You know an external world only in your mind. You know the sense of space between yourself and something distant from you, that is a mental phenomenon. And so it could be argued that your mind alone exists, and that all that you see is in imagination. The extreme way of posing this is the doctrine called solipsism: that there is only yourself, and that everything else is your dream. There has never been any way of disproving this—except my idea (which I think almost disproves it) that I would like to be present at a conference of solipsists where they argue as to which one of them is the one that’s really there.

So the point of view of, say, Berkeley or Bradley in the Western tradition of subjective idealism is not solipsistic, but it is that everybody has a certain independent existence—but as a mind—and that all particular minds are, as it were, minds in a super-mind, which is the mind of God. Now, so, the Western philosopher has therefore dealt with the problem “does something exist when there’s nobody around to look at it?” you see, by saying:

There was a young man who said, “God,

I find it exceedingly odd

That a tree, as a tree,

Simply ceases to be

When there’s no one around in the quad.

Young man, your astonishment’s odd.

I’m always around in the quad.

So the tree, as a tree,

Never ceases to be,

Since observed by yours faithfully, God.

But this isn’t the same point of view that we’re going to deal with in Oriental philosophy, because we start from completely different assumptions as to the nature of mind and matter. And, you see, if you don’t get those straight, you confuse the Yogācāra school with subjective idealism. Unfortunately, Professor Takakusu, in his book The Essentials of Buddhist Philosophy, uses Western school names to classify the different types of Buddhist philosophy. He uses, you know, nihilism, subjective idealism, et cetera, et cetera, all down the line, and this is very confusing. Because when you start with the basic idea of what is mind, you don’t begin with the opposition that we begin with, which is “mind/matter.” You begin instead with the contrast “mind and form,” and form is furthermore broken down into “name and form.” It is called in Sanskrit nāmarūpa. Nāma (that is “name,” same word) rūpa. “Name-form.” And this stands in their system as distinct from the idea of matter, meaning “stuff” in our common sense.

So, you see, we begin with this break: that we have the notion that there is some kind of heavy, hard substance, and this substance is energized by spiritual forces, which, just as the potter turns clay into pots, the spiritual forces take hold of the unintelligent stuff of matter and weave it into all the various shapes of life. And so then, when we die, here is a person, you see, who was going along, was talking, chatting, doing his business every day, and suddenly, zingo, his body lies there. Where is he? What’s happened to him? Well, of course, the mind has left, and there dies only the stuff, see? So we’ve got this idea in our minds of the energy—which is something impalpable, something un-stuffed, you see—animating or not animating something that is heavy and hard and dusty.

Now, that great contrast—which comes, of course, from the Book of Genesis; from the idea that the Lord God formed the world out of some clay; Adam was a clay figurine—this idea is not in the same way in Hindu thought. But something deceptively like it is in Hindu thought, which causes the confusion. For example, Shankara (who is the great interpreter of the Upanishads in the tradition of interpretation which is called the Advaita Vedanta, the non-dual Vedanta), sometimes uses the symbol of gold and things made of gold, which sounds like the pots and the clay. But he uses it in another way than we do. Whereas we use the clay as the symbol for the stuff out of which things are made, and which is inferior because the shape, being spiritual, is more important than the stuff, he uses it in exactly the opposite way. He says all beings are of the nature of the divine, just as many different objects can be made out of gold. It is all one gold, though the shape may change. And he describes, you see, the shape as ephemeral and impermanent. But it is the gold which is the thing that endures. You see, that’s using the analogy, the metaphor, in an exactly opposite way from the way we use clay or stuff and form in the West.

So then, you don’t have at the basis of the mind-only philosophy a conception of mind which is the kind of impalpable spook presiding over the hard and heavy stuff. You have to begin somewhere else altogether. And this is the fascination of studying Oriental culture: that you have to readjust your own common sense to get at it. What on Earth do these people need—especially when I don’t really have any words in my own language into which I can translate their ideas? Now, fortunately, it isn’t all that inaccessible. Because what we have here is not merely words—if that were all, we would be absolutely lost—but we have the techniques, the meditation disciplines, which you can use, and through using them find out what it was that they meant experimentally.

So then, we start basically with the fundamental word that is used in Sanskrit for the activity of mind, and this is citta. We romanize this as C-I-T-T-A. The root, cit, is basic to mind. Now, the Sanskrit language has many words for mind. We have this one word, “mind,” you know, which sort of has to take care of everything. Oh, we’ve got “intellect,” we’ve got “vision,” “consciousness,” and so on, but they’re all very vague in the way they’re used. Sanskrit is quite precise. But cit is the basic term. And reality itself is called in Vedanta philosophy saccidānanda. Sat means “real.” This word, the root sa in Sanskrit, is what is manifest and is really there. It comes from breathing out: you make the sound “sa,” and so it’s really there. cit is “it is conscious,” as the quality of consciousness. Ananda means “bliss.” Because reality, if not blissful, would not be.

The game has to be worth the candle, or it would stop. If the fundamental impulse and energy of the universe were not blissful, the whole system would have ceased long ago, even if it involves pain. This pain is masochistic—that is to say, it is pain being enjoyed fundamentally as a pleasure. Like, you can have a grievance and make your whole life a cause around your grievance, like being a professionally rejected woman, or a failure of some kind, and you can really build this up into a big thing, you see. And so in this funny sort of rather trivial human way, you make an ecstasy out of suffering. And the idea here is that the universe is, fundamentally, insofar as it involves suffering, making an ecstasy out of it. That is to say that every element of pain in the whole scheme of things is the necessary contrasting element that you need in order to bring out the fundamental exuberance and joy of being. That you wouldn’t know, in other words, that you were here unless something stopped you.

Now, mind in this philosophy—what is meant by cit—is practically exactly the same thing as we mean by “existence.” When we use the word “being,” and we, in order to, for example, when Dr. Johnson heard of Berkeley’s philosophy that everything existed only in your mind, his response was to kick a stone—as if to demonstrate UNGH! that’s the real world. But it is exactly this sense of UNGH! that is meant by cit. And that’s why, when a Zen master, you know, would be asked, “What is the fundamental meaning of Buddhism?” he answers, “HURGH!” You know? This thing, this sense of impact of the boom, that is what it is. In other words, mind in this philosophy is as concrete as you can imagine. And so it is called—and we will in a future seminar go into this from another point of view—the word vajra, which means “diamond,” is used for it. Because the diamond is simultaneously the hardest thing there is and the most transparent. So there’s a whole philosophy of Buddhism worked around the image of the diamond.

So what you’ve got here, you see, is a conception of mind which, instead of being the impalpable ghostly thing that we have had, is the most intensely tough reality: the adamantine mind. BANG! Hard, you, here. You see? This very strong sense of being. So the philosophy of “it’s all in your mind” has to be hung on this as distinctive from being hung on something flimsy and impalpable.

Now we’re going to have an intermission.

In this morning’s session I was explaining that we were studying that type of Mahāyāna Buddhist philosophy called Yogachariya, or Yogācāra in Sanskrit, which has a view of the world as being consciousness only; vijñaptimātra. And the main thing that I had to explain was that we are dealing here with a view of consciousness, and with a view of what is the meaning of “mind,” or the words that we translate as “mind,” which is not like ours. I tried to show that, whereas when a Westerner uses the word “mind”—or “spirit,” or “soul,” or whatever—he has in the back of his mind an image of something impalpable, something tenuous, something light and generally ghostly. When you use the word in Sanskrit for mind, you don’t have the same kind of image.

One of the great symbols that has been used in Buddhist philosophy for the mind is the diamond, which is the chosen intention of it. Because it’s, (A) the hardest thing you can find, and (B) the most transparent. And so this word citta in Sanskrit, meaning “the mind,” is not meant and isn’t in their thinking, anything filmy, but is, as we would say, the most substantial thing you can get. When Zen masters try and demonstrate to their students what the mind is, they hit them on the head to get a sense of reality—you know, of being thoroughly all there.

So you can understand, then, I think, for this reason, why a philosophical view of “mind only” makes a little bit more sense in that cultural context than it does in ours. Because in our context, when anybody says, “Well, all the world is nothing but mind,” and we suspect him immediately of being a Christian Scientist or some kind of phony metaphysician. Because such a person seems to be saying, by believing in this kind of doctrine: “I am more ethereal than you are.” See, it’s a kind of game that is played. “I’m more ethereal than you.”

Well, now, I want to describe this afternoon the vijñaptimātra Mantra or Yogācāra view of the human mind and its senses, conceived really in the form of a tree. You know that, when you look in the aeroplane at river courses in the deserts, they have the same pattern as trees. Only, trees are supposed to start from the root and go to the branches, whereas river courses start from the branches and go to the root. Or which way is up? After all, a tree underneath has roots that we know, that from the seed, where a tree starts, it pulses down and up. And so that all tentacles, little things on the ends, come later. But with a river, obviously, the little tentacles, the water courses, come first, and then eventually flow into the stream.

Think again. Because turn the thing over in your mind, and you will see that the tree and the river are the same. Because the tree absorbs (from all those little tentacles and branches) sunlight, moisture, and energy, and they flow into the center. It, in other words, provides a water course through which life moves in this way at the same time as the tree does this. Now, exactly the same thing is true of the river: the river must be considered not simply as a flow of water in a certain direction, but as a pattern of land. And the pattern of land, being the way it is, arranges the water the way it comes. So that a river is not something that simply begins at the end—that is to say, at the sources—it begins in the whole land pattern which arranges itself in this way, so that the water behaves as it does.

I use this image advisedly, because the view of this particular school of Buddhism of the nature of the mind and its relation to the sensual world is the same sort of thing. It’s a pattern wherein the sense organs—five senses: eye, ear, nose, mouth, and touch; that’s how they number it—all these sense organs are called in Sanskrit āyatana. and the word āyatana means a “gate.” Now, of course, through any gate you can go in and you can go out, but the first idea in this particular system is that the mind is going out through the sense gates, and finding beyond every āyatana what is called a kṣetra, meaning a “field;” each sense having its appropriate field. So that you have the idea, basically, of a projection of the world through five gates.

So if you—I really ought to have a blackboard or something, but I think you can get this. You have the kṣetra, the sense field, and there are five sense fields. You have the āyatana, which is the gate—that means the sense organ; the eye, ear, et cetera. And then, behind that, you have, corresponding to each of the five senses, a vijñāna, or consciousness.

Now, behind all these five senses, they put a sixth called manovijñāna, meaning the “mind consciousness,” and this is the unifying sense which makes sense of the senses, if you see what I mean. In other words, how do we know that, when I see yellow in the flower and touch the petal, that these things are united? When I hear the wind and feel the pressure of air on my fingers holding them up like this, how do I put those together? Why isn’t this, all this world, a completely disconnected, chaotic impact of boom-bang-boom? Because of manovijñāna, the unifying sense.

Because the basic point is that all our senses are really diversifications of a single sense, which you could call a certain kind of touch. So that your eyes are such an extremely sensitive form of touch that they touch light. Your ears, a little less sensitive, touch subtle vibrations in the air. Your nose touches gas and particles in gas, and gives you smell. Your tongue—still, you see, the dimension of sensitiveness is going down—your tongue savors the taste of things. And finally, your skin is touch. And the curious thing about the surface of the skin is that at different parts of the skin we have very different kinds of sensitivity. There are parts of the body, for example, on which you can place two fingers, and a person has difficulty in knowing whether there are two fingers or just one. One’s hands are extremely sensitive. The back and so on is less so—in the kind of intelligence in counting, in numbering, the number of stimuli going into it. So you have in this, then, a whole spectrum of sensation, so that you can say, in a way, that all the senses are particular forms of touching through which life comes on with different kinds of vibrations.

Now, we say—you see, I’m using language which says life comes on. In other words, it comes through the senses. Here are these gates—eyes, ears, nose, et cetera—and something outside comes in, like this. But in the Yogācāra school they think of it the other way around: that from these gates life is going out, and that you are shooting, as it were, the world through the gates of your senses onto the screen, shall we say, of what you call the outside world, in the same way exactly as you do with a movie projector. Now, you see, these are two points of view. One: that the objective world is really out there, and that we are just the receivers of it. And the other point of view is that we are the creators of it, and we’ve done it so skillfully that we think it’s really out there. Now, do you see that in these two views you’ve got exactly my original picture that I gave you of the river and the tree? The river seems to go one way and create a tree-like structure, whereas the tree seems to go the other way, from the base up, and create a river-like structure. And the same is true here.

When you look, in other words, at the relationship of yourself to the world from one point of view, it all seems that you are purely responsive to, subject to, forces that impinge on you from outside. You receive all this. See, I was talking of the illusion of oneself this morning of being just a passive entity, a kind of reflector, a kind of camera film on which things impinge. So this particular way of looking at things, that I simply record what is really going on, and that I am efficient, good, intelligent to the extent that I record it faithfully, and react—look at the word: “react”—respond to all these messages from somewhere outside. See?

Now, the opposite point of view is that I actually create everything that seems to be outside. In other words, from a perfectly hard-boiled, scientific, neurological point of view, my nervous system actually evokes the external world by translating, let’s call it—what would you say? X, the particles, the whatever there is out there, quanta. We have to use some kind of terminology for something we don’t know, you see. The whole idea of physics, the physical description of the world in Western science, is completely abstract. It’s just algebra. That some sort of algebra out there gets translated by our nervous system into light, into weight, into color, into pleasure or pain, hard, soft, sharp, smooth, and so on. So that if it were not for our little nervous tree here—you know, that grows out of the spinal column and blossoms out in the brain, and has all these little edges that go tiki-tiki-tiki-tiki-tiki-tiki—if it were not for this thing, you see, there wouldn’t be any light in the sun. There wouldn’t be any sound in the air. There wouldn’t be any hardness of the wood or softness of the petals of a flower. It is the tree of the nervous system growing out like this, you see, that brings all this into existence.

Although—and balanced now with the opposite point of view—this tree, with all its little tentacles running out from my nervous system, is something in the external world just as much as these flowers are. From all our points of view, the flowers are out there. From my point of view, you’re all out there, and you belong in the external world. But from your point of view, I’m out there and belong in your external world. So these trees have a game going between them. In other words, they all go shh-shh-shh-shh-shh-shh. Then they connect with other things going shh-shh-shh-shh-shh-shh, like this, you see. And so there is a kind of pattern of interconnection. And all of them can be described or thought about as receiving messages from outside, but all of them can equally be thought of as projecting the messages from inside. And in order to understand it correctly, you have to keep both points of view in mind. Either one or the other, by itself, will be incorrect.

So what this view in Mahāyāna does, it stresses the point that it’s only your mind that evokes the world. And the reason for this is that it’s part of what is called upāya in Sanskrit. That means skillful means, especially in reference to pedagogy, the art of teaching, to correct a false view by the opposed view. For example, the Buddha taught that existence is impermanent in order to counteract the view that there is something permanent. But the teacher does not, he only does this out of expediency; he does not finally want to leave you the impression that his philosophy is that all existence is impermanent.

He merely uses the idea of impermanence to correct your notion that things ought to be permanent. This is in line with what I explained about the dialectical nature of Buddhism. In the doctrines, you don’t get the final teaching, the final view; you only get a discussion which is going to lead you to the final view if you go through with the discussion. In the same way, here we have it. In opposition to the notion that the external world is something that exists out there and is very real and that I just get the message through my senses, the opposing view is presented.

What is out there is what you create through your senses. It’s all in your mind. When you say to somebody, oh, the trouble with you is just nerves, we say, oh, that means nothing’s really the matter with you at all. You’re just nervous. Don’t think a thing about it, you see. Look how ambivalent we are about this. Because I’m going to give you the same story as the tree going one way and the tree going the other. Or the river going the other. In our attitude to nerves, we say to someone, oh, it’s just nerves. That means it couldn’t matter less.

In other words, it’s all in your mind, forget it. But, let us suppose that somebody gets involved in a serious accident.

In fact, that he goes out and kills somebody. And the court decides that there was something wrong with his mind. This exonerates him from responsibility. Just nerves. See, a person whose nerves are wrong is not culpable. He was fundamentally different. Not responsible for what he did. So that, whereas in one moment we say, oh, it’s just your nerves. It’s just a matter of mind. From another moment we’re saying, but of course that is fundamental. Whether you’re responsible or not depends on whether your mind is working. Because the mind is causative. It is the responsible thing. And therefore, whether it’s working or not is fundamentally the important thing to think about. And whether, you know, you’re operating as an individual. The point then being is that our relationship to the external world is completely two-wayed.

This is the whole thing that this method of thinking is getting at, with the sense gates. If I just complete the story on the sense gates. You have then five senses. There are gates. Outside them there are fields. Kshetra is the field. Ayatana, the gate. Inside the gate, the Vijnana, the consciousness that corresponds to each sense. At the root, Mano-Vijnana, the unifying sense. The sense, in other words, that makes sense of the senses. Of which they are all differentiations. Then under Mano-Vijnana you get the stem of the tree, called Manas. Which word means the mind, and is associated of course with M-A-N, man. Manas really means the human order of things.

And as I have said to you before, every being in the universe thinks it’s human. That is to say, even beetles think that we are people. Because, after all, when you are a beetle, it feels familiar to be a beetle and to have wings and six legs. And you look around at other creatures like this, and you say, well, they’re orderly, proper people. And everything else is weird or a threat or good to eat, and it’s not people. So what we mean by people, means our kind, seen from our point of view. So obviously all creatures whatsoever, from their different points of view, realize that they’re in the middle of the universe. Just like we feel we are.

And they can explain away the fact that human beings seem to be more successful in certain enterprises. The only thing being that human beings don’t realize how unsuccessful they are in enterprises which other creatures really get away with. So the manas means then, the mind, the man, the principle of sentality. Because it is, after all, the stem.

See? This is the stem from which these other things come out. And so, by virtue of being the stem in this system that we’re talking about, it creates the whole system of stems in the living world. Look here, you know, the flower here has a stem. And the petals come out from it like that. All physical existence whatsoever is somehow linked in this pattern, a central core giving out diversity. See? You throw a bottle at a wall, you know, it’s bottle has got ink in it or something, and it smashes. And suddenly there’s a center from which is spread tentacles. So the flower, the tree, the octopus, the star, everything is, see? Tentacles going out.

Now, think backwards. Look at the world the other way. As a consolidation of vagueness, which begins at the tips of the tentacles, going in. I put in my book, The Joyous Cosmology, a photograph of coral. Where the photograph appears to be full of stars. But actually, these stars are the empty spaces in a coral formation. So the reality, so-called, is the substance around the shapes. And the shapes are just the hollows. Now, it’s the same way here. That everything that we feel to be there can be looked upon as a hollow in reality. And that the enclosing space is what is actually there. You can always figure it the opposite way.

Now, so then, if you don’t know this, if you aren’t awake to the idea that you can figure it both ways, then you start taking sides. And you turn the game of the universe into a fight. Great. It’s good to get involved in that sort of thing where you are so far out that you have forgotten that two sides go together and you’re going to treat this like a fight. The only thing is that after a while this becomes impossible. It becomes impossible because it’s simply against the nature of reality. You cannot have up without down. And so you cannot be perpetually one up on things.

It’s great to try to be, but it’s an absolute bore to have to try to do so for too long. So eventually one comes to see that won’t work. Now, why won’t it work? Well, the answer is that that’s not the kind of system you’re living in. Now this goes very deep. It isn’t only that the river and the tree run in two directions. It isn’t just that the world creates you and you create the world. It’s that when you go down to your absolutely fundamental sense of existing, here conscious, sensitive, that, you see. This is intensely real and vital to you only because it has the possibility of not being there at all.

It is, in other words, the constant possibility of death that gives the juicy vibrancy to life. And these things play each other. This is the same two-way system. Only, of course, naturally, you have to take the side of life and say, oh, that’s what I want. Yeah, that’s more of that. And not that death thing. No, please, no, not that. You couldn’t have the one without the other. They define each other. The reason they define each other is that they are the two aspects, the two sides of what you are. Only, we have a thing against knowing this. So as to make it work, see? So as to make a kind of interplay or contest go on between the two.

Therefore, to see through the contest between the two is what the Buddhists call nirvana. Which means, if you want to, you can stop worrying about the game. Nirvana means, in other words, to check out. Say, oh, for heaven’s sake, what was I all this time upset about? Sickness, death, evil, and so on. I suddenly realized that everything I was afraid of was the opposite side. That is to say, the complementary side of who I am. So stop worrying. If, for example, I suffer and die, what happens? I go through a very energetic experience of pain and resisting pain. And all this thing goes. .. Then it fails. Clunk. See? But that builds up the energy, which actually creates a new existence.

Your birth, your arrival as an itty-bitty baby in this world, was the obverse of someone dying in exactly the same way as a star, as a thing inside has an obverse of something outside in terms of space. It’s all flip-flop, flip-flop, flip-flop, like this. Yes. Oh, there always is, because it gets increasingly exuberant. Just in the same way, go back. You see, here’s the explanation. Look at the flower. The stem is one. The petals are many. Then consider each petal, and you will find it has full of little veins that are going out, or in the pattern of the fern, which I mentioned this morning, the fern is a stem, then stems coming off it, and then stems coming off then, and then each little stem has a sub-stem.

That’s why there’s a population explosion. This is the shape of life. The shape of a tree. This is the image I’m giving you, and the point is that the tree runs both ways. It runs from the stem out to all the ends of the tubes or passages, but at the same time, it is running from all the stems into the center. As the tree uses its leaves to absorb moisture, and as we use our nerve ends to absorb information from the external world.

The whole thing is it runs both ways. So don’t get hung up on committing yourself to one view or the other. You’re both. You accept it as something that’s out there, but at the same moment, you create it. You are a subject, and you’re also an object. Yesterday afternoon, I was explaining the theory of the Yogacara school of Mahāyāna Buddhism, which has to do with the tree-like design of the production of consciousness. And we went into the similarity between the symbol of the tree and the symbol of the river, where the direction of the tree seems to be from the trunk to the branches and the direction of the river from the branches to the trunk.

There was an aspect of this that I didn’t complete and that I want to complete before we go on, which is to say something more about the stem or the trunk in this theory. Just to refresh your memories, there were these words, Kshetra, which means in Sanskrit, the field of the senses. In other words, the Kshetra is contrasted with the Ayatana, which means gate. That is the sense organ itself, the eye. Then there is the field of the eye, what we call in ordinary English the visual field. And so there’s likewise the sonic field. Then behind the Ayatana is the Vijnana, corresponding to each of the five senses. V-I-J-N-A-N-A. That’s how it’s romanized, Vijnana.

And then behind each Vijnana corresponding to each sense, there is Mano-Vijnana, the mind sense, which is the sixth sense, which coordinates all the others. Under the supposition, you see, that all the senses are simply differentiations of one sense, a fundamental kind of touch. Then behind Mano-Vijnana is Manas, which is the mind. Manas having the same root as the word man. And then, to go on, something I didn’t cover yesterday. Manas is considered as rooted in the Alaya-Vijnana. A-L-A-Y-A, again, Vijnana.

And the word alaya means store. So underneath is the store consciousness. And the nearest thing that we have to this in our Western ideas is Jung’s notion of the collective unconscious. Because the Alaya-Vijnana is supposed to be a kind of repository of the seeds of all possibilities of consciousness and life. So as you go into this tree, you stop being individually you at the level of Manas. You see, that Manas is pretty much what we would call the ego consciousness. Below that, in Alaya-Vijnana, you come to a level of human existence where you can’t be said to be the particular you anymore.

For example, let’s say, each one of us shares in common two eyes, one nose, one mouth, two arms, two legs. And at that level, you see, we are not individual. Because we all have that in common. Then likewise, when we go further into things that are not at all under our conscious control, the functioning of the heart, the machinations of the stomach, the shaping of the bones and all that sort of thing, this goes on at a level of life which we all share as human beings, but we don’t control from voluntary power. And so, everything like that is in the domain of the Alaya-Vijnana, which you can call the collective.

Now, the funny thing is, they say, not, if you translate the Sanskrit literally, it isn’t the unconscious. Vijnana means conscious. And it’s a very curious thing that we have used the word the unconscious as designating the deeper levels of the psyche. Because the disadvantage of this word is that it leaves out of consideration the fact that it is the unconscious that is conscious. In other words, underneath consciousness is something you’re not conscious of, true. But it is what enables you to be conscious.

Nobody knows how he manages to be conscious. You can be conscious of all sorts of things and you suddenly find yourself doing this, that, and the other, and knowing this, understanding that. But how the devil do you do it if you don’t know? And this is one of the weirdest things, if you sit down to contemplate it, think it out. How do you manage to be you? And so we get this funny sense of self-estrangement represented in the common notion that what I really am is a soul which has been given a body and all sorts of capacities.

I’ve been given intelligence, I’ve been given the power of consciousness, etc. But I am not any of these things, I’m the recipient of these gifts. And this has become, you see, for a Western man, a kind of common sense embedded in language. As when we say I have a body, my mind, you know, as if it was something, a kind of engine that I possessed. So it goes back, you see, to the whole notion that most of us, our body, our unconscious, our various powers of will, and so on, are given to us by a God who has created them and understands how they work.

And you’re put in charge of them and you’re responsible for them for the time being. So you see, when you think that way, you don’t feel responsible for or one with your full organism.

And insofar as you don’t feel at one with your organism, very naturally, you don’t feel at one with everything else. But this is simply a way of figuring life. You don’t have to figure it that way. The advantage of figuring it this way has been, of course, to develop the strong Western sense of the value of the individual person. This indeed has in it, you see, something very great and fascinating. Just as in the same way the Westerners developed a sense of interpreting nature as a mechanism, thinking about nature and about all living beings as machines was the essential step necessary for the production of our technology.

This was Newton, this was Descartes, this was their idea of the world as a mechanical system more or less based on the game of billiards where atoms are balls which knock each other around and obey certain laws. Now you understand those laws, you analyze, you understand everything by taking it apart. This is something, you see, that mankind had not really done before. Take it apart and see how it works. Then when you understand that, you can develop surgery, you can develop microbiology, etc. , etc.

But then, having done that, you come to another stage where you realize that the mechanical image of nature is not adequate. You drop it and you go on, say, to an organic or a quantum-like image. The mechanical stage of thinking about the world becomes what Deschardin calls a peduncle. That is a junction system which disappears when you’ve gone over it. A stalk which is required to pass from one situation to another. But when you’ve used the stalk, it dries up and vanishes. That’s a peduncle.

In this way, the Western mechanistic view of the world is the peduncle that leads us into our high technological civilization. But in this high technological civilization, we have to realize that the organic model of nature is in the long run more effective than the mechanical model. The Chinese always had the organic model of nature. Therefore, they didn’t develop a technology in our sense. They never thought about understanding things by taking them to bits. They understand things by seeing them in context, which is the exact opposite approach to analysis.

In an organic way of thinking, understanding a given thing involves considering its relationships to everything around it rather than merely taking it apart. The West has developed analysis to a high degree of perfection, but this approach reveals that analysis alone does not tell the whole story. While one can press analysis far, it is essential to retract and consider the context of things. This is where the Chinese way of thinking becomes relevant to a scientific and technological culture, highlighting two distinct ways of motion in understanding the world.

The concept of alaya-vijnana, or store consciousness, which I refer to as the collective unconscious, represents a level of ourselves that transcends individuality. At this level, we can identify simply as human. Beneath alaya-vijnana lies another level called amala, which means taintless. The term ’taint’ may not fully capture the essence of amala; perhaps ’tint’ is a better descriptor, indicating a state without any coloration. The mirror, for instance, has no color and represents purity, but the notion of purity in our religious context often gets misconstrued as being sexless.

This misunderstanding overlooks the original meaning of purity, as in the phrase ’blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God. ’ Purity relates to clarity, akin to clear water or a clean window, rather than the absence of sexual desires. Pure-mindedness equates to clear-mindedness, which is characterized by a lack of mental hang-ups. A clear mind resembles a flawless crystal; any distortion or flaw results in a compromised view, much like looking through imperfect glass that alters the landscape.

The reason God is often perceived as invisible is that God embodies total transparency, lacking any flaws. This total transparency does not interfere with anything, allowing for a seamless existence. A Zen poem illustrates this concept: ’Entering the forest, he does not bend a blade of grass. Entering the water, he does not make a ripple. ’ The wise are likened to birds in the sky, leaving no contrail. While it is true that their tracks can be captured with infrared cameras, to the naked eye, they appear to leave no traces, emphasizing the essence of their unobtrusive presence.

So purity, the pure mind, means the one where you finally get down to its making no difference to anything at all. And this then, from one point of view, is the most unimportant mind that you have, because it doesn’t make a difference. But from another point of view, it is the most important, because without that you wouldn’t have anything. Now here comes one of the most fantastic philosophical problems of today. There has been a development in Western philosophy, which we call by several names, scientific empiricism, logical positivism, logical analysis.

And this is the prevailing philosophical school in the Anglo-Saxon world. It completely captured Cambridge, then Oxford, then most American universities. And you will find almost all serious philosophical practitioners today belong to this school. Now logical positivism completely demolishes any kind of interest in metaphysics by saying, not that metaphysical statements are untrue, but that they’re meaningless. That is to say, any proposition which says, for example, all things are the will of God, contains no information whatsoever.

Because whatever you state about everything is a statement which is a tautology. That means, it is simply saying, everything is everything, only you’ve said it in another way. So this is a very powerful critique of the whole past history of philosophy, that it was all meaningless. People were hung up on words and were fighting with words and purely verbal problems. And so that you can only talk meaningfully about things that can be said.

That is to say, you can only talk about whatever is classifiable. Experience, a sensation, is not differentiable from any other one. You can’t talk about it. The thing to be manifest, to be definable, to be describable, to be experienced at all, has to have a boundary. And so you can see what is inside the boundary and differentiate it from what is outside.

And so these philosophers are arguing that you can only describe what has boundaries. This is their fundamental assumption. And of course in a way that’s quite true. But the difficulty is that this has reduced philosophy to an extremely pedestrian pursuit. The professional academic philosopher in the United States, or in England today, has condemned himself to a kind of wonderless attitude. The ancient philosopher you see lies awake at night wondering about the meaning of existence. The modern philosopher would find that that would be extremely unscholarly to do anything like that.

Because he must realize that when you wonder about the nature of being, you are simply suffering from an intellectual neurosis. You’re out of order. Your logic has all gone wrong and you’ve become bugged with words. And in a way you have. He’s quite right up to a point. But then on the other hand, you see, when you study the relationship of categories to each other and you see that every inside has to have an outside, then you begin to suspect that there’s something in common between insides and outsides. They always go together.

Now what is it that they have in common? Well then you see very soon that there is no word for that because it’s not a class. It’s like a glass instead of a class. In other words, it is the transparent medium in which it all happens. In the same way as all sight, all shapes and colors are in the medium of optics. Or all bodies are in the medium of space. So we come to something which doesn’t matter. It doesn’t make any difference. And yet it is fundamentally important.

Now this notion, you see, of there being something fundamentally important which makes no difference at all to anything, is a very subtle idea that has to be absorbed by Western philosophy if it is to redeem itself from being totally boring. And I will illustrate it in this way. I want to illustrate it by the image of the usefulness of useless things. This goes by analogy, you see, with the tremendous importance of that which doesn’t make any difference. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.

In other words, if you don’t spend any time wasting time doing useless things, you will not be healthy. And so in this country where we have a very utilitarian aspect of things, we are above all practical people, we only allow people to be in a playful state if we are quite sure that it will improve them. And for this reason we never really succeed in playing. We always justify. You go to the concert because it is good for you, you know.

There’s wives who have a great idea about the opera and the concert, drag their husbands out, and who are totally bored by the whole thing, but they feel somehow or other that this is culture. Now, so in the same way, it is very important, but you must not make it important, you see, to have, along with one’s ordinary regulated everyday life, which is practical and conducive to survival and all that, you must have a certain amount of insanity in your life. That’s the real reason for having Sunday.

Every seventh day is a day off, and it’s a day off from making sense. I have to make sense all the time, you see. I’m making sense to you now, but sometimes I would like this to go instead. Because I need to loosen up my intellect. I call it to randomize the intellect. Actually, before I ever give a lecture, instead of sitting down carefully and thinking out what I’m going to say, I randomize my intellect completely and let everything to be forgotten, and then start. Because this limbers you.

It’s just like a person who was going to do something like surgery could do this with his fingers first to feel that everything is working, you see. This doesn’t make any sense at all. This is just motion. But he’s got himself limbered, you see, and he’s ready then to do something very precise. So in the same way, a steel bridge has to be limber. It has to give and sway in the wind, otherwise it would crack. The slightest earthquake or storm would knock it down, and so with people. People have to be limber to be sane.

And therefore, every seventh day, you should go crazy. And at least once a day, in every 24 hours, you know, there should be a crazy time for complete limbering up of the mind. Now this kind of crazy time has been handled by human beings in very many different ways. In many, what we think today are religious rites are actually crazy. They are, they’ve acquired, you see, an air of solemnity, because people forgot what they were really about. And the children said, oh no, you know, because the parents said you ought to do it, it’s good for you.

And so the children over many generations did these things because they felt it was good for them, and therefore got all the wrong spirit into it. And so this, for this reason then, you go into a church, whether it is Buddhist or Christian, it doesn’t matter what it is, and everybody’s going like this, and looking as if this was desperately serious. This is a complete reversal. Now, one of the things that is coming into being now, today, is a new religious spirit, which is non-serious religion.

One of the great exponents of this is a man called James Broughton, who is a local poet. And he has written the most fantastically amusing poems about religion. And the funny thing about his attitude is that it is respectful, serious, all at once, but not. In other words, it is a kind of religious humor.

I may play some to you this afternoon. But he has this wonderful double take, where he is really respecting religion. He’s a very religious man. But he treats it in this light touch. I remember when I was a priest, I still have this attitude, because it’s been with me for many, many years. And we used to have a great, gorgeous service in the Episcopal Church in Northwestern, where, of course, because the thing is essentially joyous, we had candles and vestments and incense and the works, you know.

I remember I had a special student who was called the sorcerer’s apprentice. And he always carried the incense thing. And I remember one day, we arrived at the altar. You know, the service was beginning, the organ was going full blast, the choir was singing. And in this very solemn way, we arrived at the altar and made the profound bow, you know, which you make because you’re in the presence of God. And we both started laughing. Because it was just delightful. See, the thing was swinging.

And you see this, this really is the religious attitude. People who are not initiates think it’s irreverent. You’re not laughing at the deity and saying, oh, you old so and so. Well, you might be just a little bit, but the deity appreciates this. What you’re doing is you are limbering your mind, letting it all go. You see? Because if you do that, then you’ve got something to work with later. But you mustn’t do it with later in mind. You see?

Then you’re not doing it. And so this is the meaning that in a meditation exercise, in a religious exercise, take no thought for the morrow. You see? Because then, so long as you have got the notion in mind that this religious exercise is going to be useful, is going to come out practical, that is to say, help you to survive, you haven’t let go. And therefore, just so long as you don’t let go, your survival chances go down. Care killed the cat.

On the other hand, watch and pray. You know, be on your guard. All those Christian hymns about brethren, be sober, be vigilant. For your adversary, the devil, as a roaring lion, walketh about seeking whom he may devour, whom resist steadfast in the faith. And so at the office of Compline, which is said at the end of the day, they have a hymn which asks God to protect one during the night, because you’re going to go to sleep, and you’re going to be unconscious, and therefore anything might happen. See?

So, please God, watch over us, that we don’t have any naughty thoughts in the night, and all that sort of thing, so that the devil may get you while you’re asleep. Always, Christian dost thou see them on the holy ground, how the powers of darkness prowl and prowl around. Christian up and smite them. So, this attitude, you see, on guard, always, like this. Well, that’s all right, you know, you have to be. Life is, requires work and effort and all sorts of things like that, but you mustn’t have it all the time. You’ve got to take time off from that.

And the secret of that is, you see, once you really get into the secret of taking time off from being on guard, then you can eventually get into the deeper secret, that being on guard too isn’t serious. That too is play. Only, the moment I’ve said that too is play, I seem to have abolished any distinction between play and seriousness. In which case, if I’ve done that, play doesn’t mean anything anymore, from the logical point of view. But do you see, do you see, that underneath all logical distinctions, where we say, well, it’s either this or that, there is something in common between them.

Now, I said, that thing in common, let’s go back, you’re quite clear about this. I said, I was going to explain the thing that lies in common, and that is of no importance because it makes no difference, by the image of the useless, and how important the useless things in life are. So, in this way, we would say then, basically the universe has no purpose, isn’t serious. It’s just, you go out and look at the trees, and the trees are doing this, and this, and this, and this, and having seeds, and more trees coming along. So, we’re doing. And we say, well, should I take some sort of attitude to this? Well, let’s do it. But it isn’t serious.

It’s what’s called in Mahāyāna Buddhism, that aspect of things, is called the sambhogakaya. Sambhoga, S-A-M-B-O-G-H-A, wait a minute, B-H-O-G-A. Bhoga means bliss, enjoyment, delight. Sambhoga means complete delight. Sam means us, like the Latin summa, and the English sum, total delight body. So, in what is called the trikaya, T-R-I-K-A-Y-A, the three bodies of Buddha, you have the dharmakaya, which is the undifferentiated ground, which nobody can say anything about. Opposite, nirmanakaya, which is everything you’re looking at. And the joint between them is sambhogakaya, that all this which seems to matter, and to be differentiated, and to make sense, is jazz.

It comes out of dharmakaya for no reason whatsoever. Just for kicks. It’s all useless, from the point of view of what we call being practical. Because the practical point of view is simply confined to what cuts and distinctions you can make. So all practical people are precise people. They want to know precisely what, and if, and so on. How unpleasant to meet Mr. Elliott with his features of clerical cut, and his brow so grim, and his mouth so prim, and his conversation so nicely restricted to what precisely, and if, and perhaps, and but. So, yeah, you know, that has its place. But, um, there’s something else too, underneath all those distinctions. And the balanced human being lives in both worlds. He makes sense, but also he makes nonsense.

Just to bring everybody up to date, I was discussing this morning a logical problem, which arises out of the philosophy of Mahāyāna Buddhism, called mind only. That is to say, the philosophy that the whole universe is a construct of the mind. And I had previously explained that this was not to be understood in the western sense of the word mind, where we have attributed to mind or to spirit a quality of a kind of gaseous, impalpable nature. The image of the mind used in Indian philosophy is the diamond, and the diamond is the hardest thing you can get, and the most transparent. And so, people’s basic attitudes to life, you see, are conditioned by the images they use.

So, if you use as your image of mind something tenuous, a gaseous, it means you really don’t think it’s very important, and therefore you can’t possibly understand that it could be so effective. But if the basic image of mind that you use is a diamond, you have an entirely different view. So, this school of thought, then, is saying, fundamental reality is the mind, is you, is consciousness, and everything that you perceive exists in it and from it, in just the same way that when you listen to the radio, all the sounds are on the diaphragm of the speaker, it is vibrating.

Now, then I examined this morning this logical problem. You cannot specify anything about an element of some kind that is common to everything. You can’t really think about space. What is the shape of space becomes a meaningless question, because we cannot stand outside space to see it contrasted with something else.

Nevertheless, the idea of space is not meaningless, because we can see that the idea of space is basic, just as the mirror is basic to all the reflections in it, just as the eye and the optical nerves are basic to all visions, and the ear is basic to all sounds. But when your eye is working properly, you don’t see your eye, you see everything else. When your mind is working properly, you are unaware of it. It’s only if there is some disease of the eye that you start seeing spots in the sky, which are spots in your retina. Then the eye gets in the way of itself.

You know the funny story about somebody sitting on the train next to another passenger and said, excuse me, but I hope the singing in my ear isn’t annoying you. Because you see, when you get singing in your ear, you’re hearing your ear. And so in the same way with clothes. I started out this morning talking about why I was wearing a kimono, and I said this is the most comfortable form of dress for a man. And the whole point of a kimono is that you don’t feel you’ve got any clothes on.

Now some people don’t know they are there unless they are tightly clasped by clothes. So they wear tight clothes because that presses in on you and says, you’re here. You see, some people don’t know they exist unless they’re sitting on spikes. And that’s why in Mexico and in India, you will find people with a cult of suffering. The penitentes, the Christians, Indians who flog themselves and wear crowns of thorns and hang themselves on crucifixes. They do this because that tells them you really do exist.

Gives them a richer sense of being. So I’m only suggesting that you know, it’s a free world, it’s a free country, and you can have a sense of existence any way you like. But I personally prefer not to be fenced in and pressed and tightened up. I like the boundaries of my own skin. That’s enough. So I put this on not because I’m a Zen master, but because it’s comfortable.

But the point I was making is that although you cannot logically designate and describe a ground which is common to all kinds of figures and experiences, like space is the ground for all bodies in space, nevertheless, if you rule it out, as with the logical positivists, and say all metaphysical discussions are meaningless, then you deprive life of a very, very important ingredient, which is the ingredient of the useless. The thing that is all important, but makes no difference.

The mirror is all important to there being any reflections there, but it makes no difference to the reflections. And if it’s a good mirror, it sure mustn’t make a difference to them. In other words, if a mirror has a flaw in the glass, then it will distort the reflection. But if it’s a good mirror, it has no flaw in it. It doesn’t distort, but the fact that it is there is basic to its function. So in the same way, by analogy, there has to be an element in all of our lives of total uselessness, that is to say of 100% goofing off.

If we don’t have that as basic to all our goofing on, that is to say our daily practical business, we’re lost. You see, what is practical is defined in terms of what promotes survival. Earning your living, getting enough to eat, providing for your children, etc. , etc. That’s practical by definition. Fine. But there is no point in surviving, in bringing up children, in producing human beings and enabling them to go on living. There’s no point whatsoever in doing that, unless you can show these individuals who are surviving that survival and existence itself is play.

In other words, is a kind of glorious nonsense. That’s the whole essence of being alive at all. Well now, I want to go on from this point to show you something that is usually completely incomprehensible to Westerners, which is the structure of a Buddhist scripture. Of this very school we’re talking about, the Mahāyāna, Yogacara aspect. And to try and understand a religious text that in its whole structure and idea is as totally different from the King James Bible as anything you could imagine.

Now, we are, you see, conditioned to think when we say the word scripture, you think of the King James Bible. And this is a very elegant piece of late Elizabethan English, which was brought down by an angel from heaven in the year 1611. It’s a phenomenal piece of work, because when you read the New Testament in Greek, it’s in very bad Greek, as compared with the Greek of Plato. It’s a backwoods document. Slangy. But it’s very easy Greek. Plato’s Greek is much more subtle and difficult to understand.

But the English made, you see, an absolutely gorgeous translation. The people, the generation of the British that produced Marlow and Shakespeare and Spencer produced this piece of literature. And so we compare every other scripture all over the world by comparison with the King James Bible. The authorized version, as the British call it.

When you compare the Buddhist sutras with the King James Bible, the differences become quite apparent. Very few scriptures from other cultures can match the literary quality of the King James Bible. The only texts that seem to stand up to it in terms of beauty are the Bhagavad Gita and Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching. However, Buddhist scriptures represent a completely different kind of literature, serving a different purpose altogether. There are countless volumes of these scriptures, and the Mahāyāna Canon is even larger than the Encyclopedia Britannica, taking up extensive shelf space.

From our perspective, much of the Buddhist literature can seem repetitious and nonsensical. Interestingly, the practitioners are aware of this perception. They have devised a system where revolving bookcases filled with these scriptures allow one to acquire merit simply by turning them. This practice is akin to using a prayer wheel, where the act of turning the wheel is believed to generate merit without the need for deep meditation or contemplation. The prayers recited in this context are not traditional beseechings but rather mantrams, which are powerful sounds that hold significance in their utterance.

For instance, the mantra ’om mani padme hum’ carries profound meaning. The syllable ’om’ encompasses the full range of sound, beginning with the back of the throat and ending with the lips. ’Mani padme’ translates to ’the jewel in the lotus, ’ while ’hum’ can be interpreted as an expression of joy or affirmation. When practitioners recite this mantra, they are not asking for something; instead, they are producing a sound that generates a specific kind of power when used correctly. This understanding highlights the unique approach to prayer and meditation in Buddhism.

One of the most esteemed texts in Mahāyāna Buddhism is the Satarma Pundarika, commonly known as the Lotus Sutra. This sutra begins with the phrase ’Thus have I heard, ’ a common opening for many sutras. This phrase mirrors the way prophets in the Old Testament introduce their messages, saying ’thus saith the Lord. ’ It signifies the importance of sound and word in conveying spiritual teachings. The phrase ’Thus have I heard’ establishes a connection between the speaker and the divine, emphasizing the transmission of wisdom through auditory experience.

Once upon a time, the Lord Buddha was staying at Rajagriha on the Gridrakuta mountain with a numerous assemblage of monks, 1200 monks, all of them arhats, that is, provisionary Buddhas, stainless, free from depravity, self-controlled, thoroughly emancipated in thought and knowledge. They were of noble breed, like unto great elephants, having done their task, done their duty, acquitted their charge, and reached the goal. In these monks, the ties which bound them to existence were wholly destroyed, and their minds were thoroughly emancipated by perfect knowledge. They had reached the utmost perfection in subduing all their thoughts and were possessed of the transcendent faculties, eminent disciples such as the venerable Agnata Kandinya, the venerable Asvagite, and the venerable Vajpa.

The assembly included the venerable Mahanaman, the venerable Bhadrika, the venerable Mahakasyapa, and several Kasyapas from different regions. Notable figures also included the venerable Sariputra, the venerable Maha Maudgalyana, and the venerable Maha Katyayana. The venerable Aniruddha, the venerable Revata, the venerable Kafina, and the venerable Gavampati were also present, along with the venerable Pilindarvasta, the venerable Vakula, and the venerable Bharadvara. The venerable Mahakastila, the venerable Nanda, alias Mahananda, the venerable Sundarananda, and the venerable Purana were part of this great gathering, along with Maitreya and Maitreya Niputra.

Additionally, the venerable Subuti and the venerable Rahula were there, accompanied by other disciples, including the venerable Ananda, who was still under training. There were also two thousand other monks, some of whom were still under training while others were masters. The assembly was further enriched by six thousand nuns, having at their head Maha Pragapati and the nun Yasodhara, the mother of Rahula, along with her train. This vast congregation was complemented by eighty thousand Bodhisattvas, all unable to slide back, endowed with the spells of wisdom and supreme perfect enlightenment.

These Bodhisattvas were firmly standing, moving onward the never-deviating wheel of the law. They had propitiated many hundred thousands of Buddhas and had planted the roots of goodness under many hundred thousands of Buddhas. They were intimate with many hundred thousands of Buddhas and were in body and mind fully penetrated with the feeling of charity. Able in communicating the wisdom of the Buddhas, they were very wise and had reached the perfection of wisdom, renowned in many hundred thousands of worlds, having saved many hundred thousand myriads of kotis of beings. A koti is a Sanskrit number classification meaning umpteen, such as the Bodhisattva Mahasattva Manjusri as Prince Royal, the Bodhisattvas Mahasattvas Avalokiteshvara, and many others, including Maha-Stamaprapada, Sarva-Vatanam, Nityo-Dyukta, and Anikshi-Padura.

With them were also the 16 virtuous men to begin with, Padrapala to wit, Padrapala, Ratnakara. You know, I can go on just talking nonsense for ages, and don’t forget that the Chinese and Japanese have no idea what this means. These are just sounds like they are to you, and anyway, even the Sanskrit people, it’s like reading the beginning of the gospel of Saint Luke where you get that list of begats. You know, and so on, begats, so on, and so on, begats, so on, it’s the same kind of thing. This describes, in other words, all the people, the Bodhisattvas, and it goes on to discuss that. Not only were there all these holy people there, but there was every kind of demon and animals and every sort of being in the whole universe gathered together surrounding the Buddha who was about to give a discourse.

You’ve seen this in painting; you’ve seen the enormous mandalas where you’ve got a Buddha in the center, and then tiny beings innumerable all the way around. The thing looks like some kind of flower, some kind of honeycomb or cellular manifestation. That’s what it is. All this is a drawing in symbolic terms of the human brain and the nervous system, worked out this way. Finally, after this introduction, incidentally, this whole introduction is of the nature of a fanfare. That is to say, it’s drawing attention by a certain kind of performance to something very important.

You know how it is when you get in on a radio program; they have a theme song which introduces the program. If you listen very carefully, when music is used as a theme song, it sounds completely different than it does when used in a straight concert presentation. A theme song sounds slightly silly. Whereas, you know, if you get it in a concert presentation, then you really listen to it. But when it’s used as the theme song, you know you’re not supposed to listen to this. This is merely calling your attention to something coming that you’re supposed to listen to.

In the nature of a fanfare, you see, this means a very important pronouncement is going to follow. The Japanese, incidentally, have got this on the brain. They’ve got a terrible way of preceding any public announcement with a xylophone thing. They go, pong, pong, ping, pong, pong, pong, pong, pong. Ah, anone! They come on with some announcement. This irritating thing goes through all department stores, trains, hotels, everywhere. There’s this thing that calls your attention. So does anone.

You know, this is an expression in Japan which means, I say. Often, if you speak to a person in Japanese and don’t say ’anone’ first, they don’t know you’re talking. We have the same thing. I won’t go into that at the moment. But all this that I’ve read so far is, pong, pong, pong, pong, pong, pong, pong, pong. It’s going to be an important announcement. It describes everybody who’s here listening. At that moment, they’re issued a ray from within the circle of hair between the eyebrows of the Lord Buddha. This ray extended over 1, 800, 000 Buddha fields in the eastern quarter, illuminating all those fields with its radiance, down to the great hell, Avicii, and up to the limit of existence.

Avicii, incidentally, is the worst place that there is. It represents trouble going on forever and ever and ever. It is just the nastiest place. There is a limit to it, unlike the Christian hell, which has no limit. Avicii does have a limit, but it takes so long that nobody can think about it. The beings in any of the six states of existence became visible, all without exception. Likewise, the Lord’s Buddhas, staying, living, and existing in those Buddha fields, became all visible. The law, the Dharma preached by them, could be entirely heard by all beings.

The monks, nuns, lay devotees, male and female, yogins, and students of yoga, those who had obtained the fruition, and those who had not, they too became visible. Now, it’s going to take a long time, many pages before we get to the point. The four classes of the audience— monks, nuns, male and female lay devotees, numerous gods, serpent gods, goblins, Gandharvas, demons, Garudas, Kinnaras, great serpents, men, and beings not human— were struck with astonishment, amazement, and curiosity. They thought, let us inquire why this magnificent miracle has been produced by the great power of the Lord.

You see, here’s the book. It takes about this far to get to the point. We’ll delay this for a moment. This sutra is so venerated that there is a special sect of Buddhism in Japan called the Nichiren sect, named after its founder, Nichiren. He found in this sutra the secret of life, and for them, this book is magic. In other words, I shouldn’t be bandying this around at all. I should place this on a silk cover, rich brocade, open it, and I shouldn’t read it in this tone of voice at all.

If I were to have proper respect for this text, I would, um, therefore say Lord Chandra, Surya, Pradipa, the Tathagata, etc. , with a young prince, not yet having left home to embrace the ascetic life, had eight sons. The young princes Sumati, Anantamati, Ratnamati, Vishamati, etc. No? That would be the proper attitude. They have a thing, a formula, which they say, which means, myo means wonderful, renge means lotus, and kyo means sutra. Namu means hail. Namu myoho renge kyo means hail to the Lotus Sutra. When they have their devotions, and they want to say something corresponding to a Catholic saying the Hail Mary, they say, Namu myoho renge kyo. This is equivalent in merit to reading it once. They have all these wonderful shortcuts. All religion, incidentally, is an attempt to find a shortcut. Think that through.

So finally we get to the point. For the Buddha sees the triple world as it really is. It is not born, it dies not, it is not conceived, it springs not into existence, it moves not in a world, and it becomes not extinct. It is not real, nor unreal. It is not existing, nor non-existing. It is not such, nor otherwise, nor false. The Buddha sees the triple world, not as the ignorant, common people do. He sees things always present to him. Indeed, to the Buddha in his position, no principles are concealed. In that respect, any word that the Buddha speaks is true, not false.

But in order to produce the roots of goodness in the creatures who follow different pursuits and behave according to different notions, he reveals various doctrines with various fundamental principles. The Buddha, then, young gentleman, does what he has to do. The Buddha, who so long ago was perfectly enlightened, is unlimited in the duration of his life. He is everlasting. Without being extinct, the Buddha makes a show of extinction on behalf of those who have to be educated. Even now, young gentleman, I have not accomplished my ancient Bodhisattva course. You know what that means by now.

And the measure of my lifetime is not full. Nay, young gentleman, I shall yet have twice as many hundred thousand millions of cotes of eons before the measure of my lifetime be full. I announce final extinction, young gentleman, though myself, I do not become finally extinct. You see, final extinction is Max Muller in the 1890s translating Parinirvana.

So, what this says here in the, I don’t think I have to repeat this to you, it’s saying simply that the real world, what there is, escapes all possible categories of thinking. You can’t pin it down. And that for that very reason, it’s you. Because the only thing you can’t bite is your own teeth. And so the only thing you can’t finally ever pin down is the pinner down, that’s you. And that’s why then the Buddha himself is described in the Sutra as only playing at coming into being, only playing at becoming extinct, because the word Buddha here means simply what there is. Well, now that is what you might call the rational message of the Sutra. But at the same time, you see, as I’ve pointed out somewhat to your amusement, this little kernel of doctrine is surrounded with an elaborate setting like a frame.

For example, in the Christian world, there is an icon, and the icon is a picture of a saint or of Christ, and it is, first of all, the background of the picture is gold. And that means that the saint is living in the presence of God, and God is symbolized by gold. Then they put jewels on the gold, then they put curlicues and ornaments, then they get this painting and they put it in a frame, and then the icon is so holy that somebody else puts a new frame around it, on top of the old one, then another frame, until the whole thing is framed up with these gorgeous surroundings to enshrine that point, you see? There’s a time, though, when the frame becomes much more important than the picture. Now, you may say, well, this is just a lot of nonsense. This is just stupid, superstitious, religious people venerating something which is absolutely worthless really, only they’re venerating it so much that they’re making it seem important to themselves.

And they kowtow and bow and have elaborate rituals. See, this is a thing in the United States, where we have a thing against rituals. We don’t really think that Catholics are people, because they have these rituals, and we really don’t approve of it, but they’re Irish and funny, or whatever. So, but we don’t really approve because we don’t see any use in a ritual. Of course, that’s the whole point of a ritual. It is utterly useless. Only the only trouble is that most people who use rituals think that they’re useful. They think that they’re working magic with them.

That by saying Hail Mary so many times, they actually achieve the same sort of result as you would by mixing a chemical formula and producing a chemical result. You have to say the right words, and so in mixing up a chemical prescription, you have to follow the right order of the prescription. And then you get the magic. So these people are thinking if you say the mass or the prayers in the right order, then it’ll be all right. However, those who were more knowing and less superstitious had an entirely different view of ritual, which was this, that going through rituals in church, reading sutras, was exactly the same thing as going to a dance.

This is very clever of them. You think when you go to the dance, you’re going for entertainment, you see? And everybody says, well, you’re only allowed to do that for a certain time because you’re just goofing off. But of course, if you are a powerful priestly group, and you are going to recite the sutras in the temple, this is serious. Nobody is going to stop the monks and nuns saying their prayers unless they’re communists, you see? So they can sit there for hours going on one way or another.

And those monks and nuns who aren’t in the know are grinding it out. They think that this is really work. Those who are in the know are going, you know. You know? And just they’re swinging. That’s what all this is. And all the embellishments that artists have made, all the curlicues, all the adornments, all the frames around frames around frames, it’s the same game. It’s simply like a flower. See, it begins with a center. We get back to an original image that I gave you the other day.

The star, and it multiplies leaves. Haven’t you done this in a doodle? You know, you get to doodling while you’re on the telephone conversation, and you do leaves around the center. Then you think, well, I can fill in the spaces between those leaves with another row. That’ll make twice as many leaves on the next row as there were on the first. But then I’ve gone out in space. So I’ve got room for, again, leaves in the interstices between those, see? And you put that round. Wow, we can go out again. And that’s life. Multiplication.

And that’s what all this is about. Only, when you put it in a sutra, you’re saying, this is holy. This is very important. While I do this, don’t you disturb me, because I’m special. This is the holy book. By setting up that kind of atmosphere, nobody’s going to interfere with you. You can get away with it, see?

And that’s how to be an expert in religion. Now, you might say, well, that’s not very, that’s not playing fair. That’s a terrible thing to do. But that’s what everybody is doing all the time. You’re saying, for example, now don’t just, don’t be too familiar with me. For example, I don’t want someone to come up and pick my nose. See, because they stay off. I want a little province here of my own. I can pick my nose, but you can’t pick mine. And I don’t want to be kissed by everyone. See, I don’t mind so much women, but men isn’t so good. So keep off, you see? Everybody has to delineate a sphere and say, now, please keep out. Because it’s by doing that that you are here at all.

If you didn’t, you would be a gelatinous mass that would be indistinguishable from everything else. So it is by saying this area is holy that you get a whole, W-H-O-L-E. See, don’t, keep out, see? This is special. Now, that’s one side. All through the seminar, I’ve been showing you the two-sidedness of things. When I gave my autographed book to Dr. Suzuki and asked him to put a message in it, he wrote the Chinese characters which say, Buji-nin, a nothing special man. Buji in Japanese, Chinese, means no business. It also means no affectation. It means nothing particular stands out. What goes on but isn’t noticed. That’s this feeling, see? And this is the supreme way of getting privacy.

Watch how I’m playing the opposites with each other, see? If you really want to be in private, don’t put up a big barrier that everybody can see. But be anonymous. Nothing special. No one will notice you, no one will bother you. And as a result of that, you can get away with murder. You can be as individual as you like. And yet, you see, what you’re achieving by this method is the same thing that is symbolized by putting the frames, and the rings, and the jewels, etc. , round and round as a protective aura to the thing you think holy. So it’s going both ways.

So the lesson of this is, in other words, that the private, the personal, the individual, is the same thing as the cosmic. The more private, the more public it is. Because the more it draws attention to itself. The more public it is, that is to say, it doesn’t draw any attention at all. The more private it is. And so it goes. And he who understands that private equals public, public equals private, one equals many, many equals one, play equals work, work equals play, is a happy man. Because he’s not fighting the universe.