The whole thing about Zen is really extraordinarily simple when one doesn’t try to be cute about it and beat around the bush. Zen is simply the sensation, the totally clear understanding, that (to put it in Zen terms) “ten thousand formations, one suchness.” Or you might say: the ten thousand things (that is: everything) is of one suchness. That is to say that there is simply, behind and appearing as the multiplicity of events and creatures in this universe, simply one energy—and you’re it, and everything is it. And the work of Zen is to understand that—that is to say, so as to feel it in your bones.

But Zen has nothing to say about what that energy is. And this, of course, gives the impression in the minds of Westerners that it is like (we would say) blind energy. Because the only alternative to that, that we can suppose, thinking in terms of our traditions, is that it’s something like God. That is to say: a kind of cosmic ego, an intelligent being, almost personal. But that, in Buddhistic view, would be as far off the point as thinking of it as blind energy.

The reason why this word “suchness” is used is to leave the whole thing open and absolutely free from definition. Because the whole point about this energy is that it should be unformulated—that is not to say formless, in the sense of, oh, you know, some kind of goo, which is just a featureless mess. It means that, at the basis of everything, there is something which in the nature of things never could be made an object, discerned, figured out, explained. We’re in just the same way; just exactly the same way.

The eyes, when seeing, apparently have no color and no form of their own. If the eyes had a form of their own, they would distort all the forms that we see—and perhaps in some sense they do. If the eyes had a color of their own (that is to say, if the lens had a color), it would screen out that color in nature. And so you would never see it, you would never be aware of it. But we are not aware of the color of the eye, of the lens, because it is basic to all sight. And so, in exactly the same way, one would never be aware of the structure, the nature of the basic energy of the world, because you are it, and everything is it.

And you might say, “Well, that doesn’t make any difference then.” And it’s true, it doesn’t. But it does make a difference in the life and feeling of a person who realizes that that is so. Although it doesn’t make any particular difference to anything that happens—except this one important matter. If there were no eye, there would be no sight. It’s true, we have this sight and that, and the structure of the eye doesn’t make any difference to this sight and that. But upon it depends the possibility of seeing. And so upon this energy depends the whole possibility of there being a universe. That’s rather important, but it’s so important that we overlook it. It doesn’t enter, shall we say, into practical considerations and prognostications. That’s true. And therefore, modern logicians in the philosophy departments will argue that all assertions about this energy, as that it is there at all, are meaningless. And that, in a way, is true. Because the world itself is, from the point of view of strict logic, quite meaningless in the sense that it is not a sign, a symbol, pointing to something else.

So then, while that is all taken for granted, it nevertheless makes a great deal of difference to how you feel about this world—and therefore to how you act—if you know that there is just this, and that it is you, and that it is beyond time, beyond space, beyond definition. And that if you clearly come to a realization that this is how things are, it gives you a certain bounce. You can enter into life with an abandon, with a freedom from basic terror, which you would not ordinarily have.

Yes, you can be very hooked on the form of life which you are now living. You can consider that myself—say, as Alan Watts—is an immensely important event, and one which I wish to preserve and continue as long as possible. But the truth of the matter is that I know I won’t be able to, and that everything falls apart in the end. But if you realize this fundamental energy, you have the prospect of appearing again in innumerable forms—all of which, when you’re in them, will seem just as important as this one you have now. Just as problematic, perhaps, too.

Only: this is not something to be believed in. Because if you believe that that is so—upon hearsay—then you have missed the point. You don’t need to believe in this. You don’t need to formulate it. You don’t need to hang on to it in any way. Because you can’t get away from it. There is no need to believe in it. And if you do believe in it, it indicates that you have some doubts in the matter. That is why Zen has been called the religion of no religion. You don’t need, as it were, to cling to yourself. Faith in yourself is not holding on to yourself.

And that is why, when some Zen master is given by his student the statement “ten thousand formations, one suchness,” the Zen master says, “Get rid of it!” And that is why, also, in the practice of certain forms of Zen meditation, there is a rugged struggle of the person to get beyond all formulations whatsoever, to throw away all hangups, to endure long hours of sitting with aching knees, and perpetual frustration in trying to get hold of what all this is about with tremendous earnestness. “I’ve got to find out what the mystery of life is, who I am, what this energy is.” And you go and go, and he knocks down every formulation you bring him. Because you don’t need one. Only, the ordinary person—upon hearing that you don’t need one—will forget all about it and go and think about something else. So he never crosses the barrier.

And when you do see it, it is so obvious, so totally obvious, that there is just one energy, and that consciousness and unconsciousness, being and not-being, life and death are its polarities. It is always undulating in this way. Now you see it, now you don’t. Now it’s here, now it isn’t. Because that on-and-off is the energy. We wouldn’t know the energy was there unless it was vibrating, and the only way to vibrate is to go on and off. So: life and death. It’s like that. And that’s what Zen is about, and that’s all it’s about.

Of course, other things derive from that. In Zen training, the first thing to do is to understand that; to get the feeling of its complete obviousness. But then, what follows from that is: how does a person who feels that way live in this world? What do you do about other people who don’t see that that’s so? What do you do about conducting yourself in this world? That is the really difficult part of Zen training. There is at first the breakthrough, which involves certain difficulties, but thereafter there’s the whole question of learning compassion and tact and skill. As Jesus put it: “To be wise as serpents and gentle as doves.” And that is really what takes most of the time.

You might divide, then, the training in Zen into two stages, corresponding to the two great schools of Buddhism: the Hīnayāna stage and the Mahāyāna stage. The Hīnayāna stage is to get to nirvana, to get to living in the great void. But then, the Mahāyāna is to come back, as the bodhisattva comes back from nirvana out of compassion for all sentient beings, to help even the brass to become enlightened. And so it is that Mahāyāna aspect of Zen which occupies most of the time of learning to be proficient in Zen.

Well, I say this by way of introduction just to make everything clear from the start, and without being deceptive about it, or befuddling you with Zen stories—where, although they’re really quite clear, the point doesn’t get across very easily to Westerners except as something fascinating. The principle, of course, underlying Zen stories, with all their strangely, seemingly irrelevant remarks, is quite simple. It’s all explained in the sutra of the Sixth Patriarch, Huineng, when he says, “If somebody asks you a question about matters sacred, always answer in terms of matters profane. If they ask you about ultimate reality, answer in terms of everyday life. If they ask you about everyday life, answer in terms of ultimate reality.” “Master, please hand me the knife.” And he hands him the knife blade first. “Please give me the other end.” “What would you do with the other end?” This is answering an everyday matter in terms of the metaphysical. “Master, what is the fundamental principle of Buddhism?” “There is enough breeze in this fan to keep me cool.” That is answering the metaphysical in terms of the everyday. And that’s more or less the principle it works on.

Now, people who go to Japan to study Zen have read about it in the writings of Suzuki and R. H. Blyth and myself, and very often they’re in for a curious shock. They suppose that Zen people are kind of Quakerish—that is to say, very simple, very unritualistic, iconoclastic (because they’ve read stories about tearing up sutras and burning Buddhas), and they suppose also that Zen people live with the utmost frugality and simplicity in very plain dwellings. And they’re shocked to find that procedures in a Zen monastery and Zen temples are highly ritualistic, that the temple buildings and grounds are positively sumptuous, and that Zen is existing in terms of a big ecclesiastical organization with hierarchies, with formulations, with all the things that one would recognize as characteristic of ecclesiastical organizations all over the world.

I have, perhaps, the advantage over some students of having been deeply involved in Christian ecclesiastical organizations, and therefore I’m able to recognize the traits and the foibles of this sort of professional community anywhere in the world. But in order to see that you have first to penetrate through a certain superficial glamor. Zen, to Zen people, is quite an everyday matter. But to the outsider, the chants, the incense, the mysterious iconography of the Buddhas, the serene expressions of Zen masters are the real mysterious East, the occult tradition, the great masters of wisdom. And I suppose, likewise, to some Indian or Japanese visitor, the mysteries of the Catholic church must be very glamorous and appear in much the same guise as their things appear to us.

Now, it must be understood, therefore, that Zen in Japan today has indeed hardened into a traditional ecclesiastical tradition. You know, most of the monks in the monasteries are the sons of priests. You see, a Zen monastery is a seminary more than a monastery: it’s a training school. It isn’t a monastery in our sense, where you take life vows and you enter into the monastery for your whole life with the vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience. It’s a training school from which you graduate in due course when the teacher thinks you’re ready. And after you graduate from the sodo, which simply means the soul, is a Sino-Japanese way of pronouncing sangha, which means the order of followers of the Buddha who have taken the vows of the bhikshu, or we would say “monk.” “Monk” isn’t really the right word. And do means “hall.”

So when you’ve taken the training, there are various options open to you. And the usual one is to become a temple priest. Every Zen monastery stands in the middle of an enormous campus. There is the training center, and then surrounding it ever so many separate buildings which are individual temples. And these temples were originally built by wealthy patrons of the monastery to provide a place where a priest would for all time chant sutras for the future assistance of the wealthy patron through his future incarnations. And likewise, in villages all over Japan there are temples of the various sects of Buddhism to serve the villagers, where the priest will recite the sutras on the occasion of the death, or help out in sickness, or offer memorial services for the ancestors. And that’s the main job of these people. Occasionally they will take a few students for meditation, but by and large the Zen priest is a sutra chanter—and this is true of almost all Buddhist priests—serving the community in much the same way as a Catholic priest serves a parish.

But, you see, these temples are passed down in the family from father to son. So my oldest son should take over the temple from me if I’m a priest. So I say: you go to the Zen monastery, and you train there until the teacher says you’re ready, and then you can come back and help me out around the temple, and when I die or retire, you take it over. So most of the boys—and they are boys; many of them just out of high school, some of them are just out of college. The Zen sect runs one or two colleges to prepare its students for the monastery, and therefore the college curriculum is oriented in a Buddhist direction, as well as teaching some basic subjects (mathematics and literature and so on) at the college level.

But therefore, the boys in there are not really there because they have a strong vocation for it. They’re there because they’ve been sent there through parental authority. And therefore it is not surprising that their attitude to Zen is rather mechanical. I noticed this more in the Sōtō sect than in the Rinzai sect. I made two visits to Eihei-ji, which is a most gorgeous monastery about 120 miles north of Kyoto in the mountains. It is one of the most beautiful places on Earth. A tremendous place. And about a hundred and odd monks are studying there. But those monks are, as far as I can see, principally preoccupied with manners. They are absolutely fanatical, one might say, about good form. And it’s true: they are beautiful looking people. Very industrious. They’re neat to a fault. You could lick the floor in the toilets, it’s so clean. It’s orderly, precise, and the chief monks and priors, you might call them, are very strict. But, to a great extent, it is a kind of mechanical existence. They are going through a prolonged hazing process, as it were, in order to be fit to take over father’s job and to have Zen style.

Zen style is very important. Just as we train physicians to have a good bedside manner, or a priest to behave as a priest in the style of a priest, and that carries with it a certain aura of tradition and authority and conviction. And so these boys are trained very carefully to walk, to carry themselves, to speak, and behave according to Zen style. It is very pleasant. I must say, they are very presentable people. They’re unlike ordinary Japanese people in that they’re not nervous. They don’t giggle when embarrassed. It’s difficult to embarrass them. And occasionally, every now and then, one of them turns out to be an enthusiast and really gets through with Zen. But, by and large, I’m sorry to say that in both the Rinzai and the Sōtō schools a large number of products are graduated who really have no feeling for Zen, who never quite got the point, but managed to struggle through the motions. And thus there are increasingly few great teachers of Zen in the country.

There is, however, an awakening going on, and times are beginning to change. And, to a great extent, this is the result of the Western interest in Zen. As a matter of fact, this sort of revival is true all over Asia. If you read a book by Ernst Benz called Buddhism or Communism, it is very fascinating. And he shows to what extent there has been a Buddhist revival in Asia through Western intervention, interest, and so on. And this is particularly true in Japan, where it all started with Suzuki giving his fascinating come-on for everybody, bringing out Zen’s great profundity. So people came over and began asking questions. And some of those old teachers were just woo-ooo-oooh, you know? Were suddenly startled. What’s all this about? They had to drag out the old kōans and dust them off, and try to think about how to present this to Westerners.

Well, that was very good for the situation. But in the ordinary way, I must tell you, it is so funny. I went to the opening service of the ecclesiastical year at Daitoku-ji. And on this occasion there is a fantastic beating of drums to rouse everybody throughout the campus. Big area, and wonderful drum beats. It sounds almost African. And gradually, all the temple priests come from their various parts of the precincts and gather in the sodo, the monks’ hall. And then all the monks come, and as the drumming ends, they have a great chanting. They chant several sutras. And then the master gives a lecture called teisho. And he sits in his throne with a reading stand held up in front of him by one of the monks, and opposite him is the Buddha sitting in his shrine. And the teisho is a commentary on some old Zen texts, like the Rinzai Roku, in which the master has a dialogue with the Buddha. He gives it in a very monotonous way, hardly ever raises his voice. And if some interruption occurs, like a rainstorm or something like that, he just goes straight on. He doesn’t stop, because it doesn’t seem to be of the slightest importance whether anybody listens.

During this period, clever monks go to sleep. You can tell by a slight drop of their shoulders. They sit there looking as if they are meditating, but actually they’re asleep. And they’ve worked out a system whereby—you know how you can work an alarm clock to wake yourself up at a given time? They wake up—the monk in charge who has to hit the clapper or ring the bell is always awake about five minutes before the lecture ends. It’s quite long. I remember sitting Japanese fashion for this duration with a tape recorder beside me, looking like a suitcase, this one. But there were these monks who were asleep. So they are just exactly like schoolboys and undergraduate fraternity men and seminarists the world over. They would much rather be over the wall smoking a cigarette or dating girls in town. But, as I say, every so often one of them really comes through.

So then, Westerners, you see, are bothered also by the ritual and the splendor. I’m sure many of you here have been to Japan and have seen these things. But it’s what I would call ascetic luxury. Imagine living in rooms where the fusuma (the screens that divide rooms) are covered in gold leaf and painted by the most gorgeous artists of all time—Sesshū, the Kanō school, and so on. Here you are, and you’ve got outside your window gardens which are beyond belief in beauty and marvelously tended. True, you do yourself—even as a temple priest; kind of a top dog—you do a certain amount of the work yourself in keeping this place tidy. But that’s pretty much what you have to do. And scrounge around for funds. That’s a real problem these days. Since just before the Second World War, the Buddhist church, or Buddhist churches, were disestablished. They were deprived of an enormous amount of their lands and endowments by the government. And so, as a result of that, every temple on a temple campus has to make do somehow.

So what do they do? Some of them have opened restaurants, very good restaurants. Some of them are tourist centers, and then—like Daisen-in in Daitoku-ji, where they encourage people to come and look at the garden. And one of the monks gives a lecture—even in English, which he’s learned by heart—to explain the symbolism of the garden. He invented it himself, I found out. Yes, yes, he made it up. And he gives the speech in English with great eloquence, and with a wonderful twinkle in his eye. He’s a very nice fellow.

But therefore, they do these things. Like Mr. Ogata at Shōkoku-ji has opened a studies center for Westerners with a library. All this is done to maintain the temple in existence. And otherwise they just get closed down and they fall apart. The government does give some grants, especially where a temple houses a national treasure. Say, there’s a temple in Daitoku-ji where the priest is a Mr. Kobori, who is descended from the great family of Kobori Enshū, who was a master gardener. And he’s a wonderful man, speaks beautiful English, and is very good at calligraphy. And his temple houses two of the most valuable paintings in the world, which are the Persimmons and the Chestnuts by Muqi. And so he is very happy to entertain Westerners on a sort of individual basis to see these things and drink tea, realizing that these Westerners will kick in a donation.

And the temple badly needs a donation because it has to be completely repaired. They’re very clever at that, the Japanese carpenters. They can take an old building, and underpin it, reconstruct it, put in new beams and everything, and it’s exactly like it was before they started, except it’s been simply reformulated. If the temple gets burned down, they have models and plans, and they can make it exactly as it was. Most of the ancient buildings in Japan have been burned down, and they’re actually quite modern—but they’re perfect replicas. After Kinkaku-ji, the golden pavilion—you know the story by Mishima—was burned down by a mad monk. it’s there again, shining with gold as it was in the old days when it was brand new. So I think this impoverishment has been very healthy. Because otherwise, if they had sat back on their donations, they would have just gone to sleep. As it is, they have to do something to function as a temple in some way. And this has also been a helpful influence in bringing about some kind of a revival.

Success in education or religion is a deadly thing. I know so many worthwhile causes that started out struggling and had something really great. And then, when they succeeded, they became sloppy and eventually fell apart. Worse still, instead of falling apart, they just go on and on and on being dull. That so easily happens. So this poverty has been a good thing.

But the real struggle, the real problem, is this: the younger generation in Japan is not interested in Buddhism, period. If you ask a Japanese, say, roughly between thirty and forty, “What’s your religion?” he’s apt to say, “My parents are Buddhists.” As for himself, he has no interest and he knows nothing about it. When they hear sutra chanting, they think, “Oh, what a bore.” Nobody understands it anyway, because the sutras are chanted in Sino-Japanese; that is to say, it is a peculiar Japanese way of pronouncing Chinese. It is not the Japanese way of pronouncing Japanese. And so nobody knows what it’s about. Most of the people who are chanting don’t know what it’s about. And of course some of it, insofar as it’s what’s called Dharani, didn’t mean anything in the first place.

And so they have this modern feeling: what does it all mean? Second-generation Japanese in the United States can’t stand it when the priests chant a sutra to pacify the old folks. They want the whole thing changed. And they sing in the Buddhist churches in the United States, “Buddha loves me, this I know, for the sutra tells me so.” They have Sunday school and everything—they’re organized just like a Protestant church. Because the Nisei and the Sansei, second and third generation Japanese, want to slip into the American scene. And unlike the Chinese, who are very retentive of their culture, the Japanese settlers here seem to want to lose it and become Rotarian.

And so, in Japan today, much the same situation prevails. There is an extraordinary outbreak of new religions, which we here would call cults, like Tenrikyo and so on. But, so far as Buddhism is concerned, the younger generation couldn’t care less. And that’s why, you see, the only young people who frequent the temples, by and large, are priest’s sons. The average young man in Japan today is full of energy. So are the girls. They are the most marvelous people. The children—it would thrill you. They are so beautiful and intelligent and polite and gay. But they are breaking away totally from the older people.

In fact, many, many young people in Japan hate to go home after school, because they feel the atmosphere of disapproval on the part of their parents and grandparents is so thick, you could cut it with a knife. So, instead of that, they wander the streets—not in a rowdy way at all, but they just like to be away and be on their own. And so they go to, first of all, pachinko parlors. A pachinko parlor would be a store about the size of this one, lined entirely with pinball machines. And you get a handful of steel ball bearings, and you put those into that machine, and with fascination you watch that hour after hour after hour. And the machine is rigged so as to give you back just enough balls to keep you going, you see. You win little prizes, like a package of cigarettes or something like that. Nothing much. It’s not real gambling at all, it’s just a fascination. And you can hear these things going chinka clanka clank clatter clatter clatter. Every village has one; at least one.

The other thing they do is go to coffee houses. And coffee houses are of various kinds according to musical classification. Western classical, modern jazz, Dixieland, and various things of that kind. And the music is turned up full strength. There are two reasons for this. One is that, in the Far East, people don’t feel they’re getting their money’s worth unless they get their radio as loud as possible and keep it on all the time. The other reason is: the loud music drowns out voices, so that you can talk to another individual without being overheard.

And so the coffee house is a great center for dating. You take a girl there, and they have a thing they call getting to know each other, which has never happened in Japan before. The only way, in the old-style high civilization of Japan to meet a girl was to have tea ceremony—which, of course, there would be chaperones, and the conversation would be utterly stilted. So, the only possible way of getting to know a woman in the old world of Japan was to make friends with a geisha.

Geisha are entertaining girls. They’re not harlots, they’re not prostitutes. They are highly cultured women, specially trained to entertain men and to help men entertain their men friends. And it’s rather expensive to hire a geisha, so that’s a luxury. For the ordinary person, to get to know a girl was very difficult. I mean get to know a girl as a human being, as a person. Well, this is what has now happened. And the parents disapprove, and they disapprove of everything the young people are doing. Their clothes, their interests, their lack of reverence for the ancient traditions, and their increasing westernization.

So there it goes, down the drain: the whole culture of the past—rather swiftly. It’s true that the Japanese have their own way of being westernized. Their television is distinctly better than ours. Some of their nightclubs are fascinating. Some of their mechanical products are beyond belief. Their trains are magnificent. Their architecture: deplorable—I mean their modern industrial architecture is ghastly. In the middle of Kyoto, of all places, they’ve erected a thing that beggars description. It’s like a gigantic candle—you know, kind of fake plastic Christmas candle—towering into the sky, on top of a thing shaped like this, like, you know, the control tower on an airport, which is built of steel and glass. And you know it’s steel and glass. There’s no refinement. It’s just a steel frame with glass in it, and it goes around like that in the restaurant. All that is on top of a very big department store. Here it is, disfiguring this glorious ancient city. You know, there are all sorts of things like that. Horrors.

But, you see, they are, therefore, slowly losing their taste. It’s all for reasons of practicality. For example, when you took a bath in the (not so long ago) Japanese bath, you don’t get in the tub until you’re washed. And you wash outside the tub by scooping up water and throwing it over yourself and washing, and then rinsing yourself off, and then you get in the tub and you sit there and loaf for a while. Beautiful. All the family get in together and so on. But whereas they used to have very attractive wooden tubs to do this with, they now have repulsive blue plastic ones. Plastic is taking Japan over. The beaches, for example: where you get the high tide line with all the seaweed, the seaweed is universally interspersed with indestructible plastic sandals, sun lotion bottles, all kinds of things littering the whole place. Well, what’s the reason? Oh, incidentally, plastic sandals, and instead of their marvelous umbrellas—called kasa, which you can still buy—most people use wretched little tinny looking umbrellas with western style. And they’re rather small. They’re horrid. Clothes, for example. Increasingly, the traditional kimono is abandoned. You can understand why women abandon it, because a woman’s kimono is extremely uncomfortable. Men’s is very comfortable. But instead, the women wear what can only be called frocks. Cheap prints. The men wear our business suits, which don’t fit them. You know, they’re very long. They tend to be long from the shoulders to the hips and short in the legs. And so you get this funny feeling of a long coat with tiny little trousers underneath. And very few Japanese dress elegantly in the Western style. Mostly it’s shabby. But chic, you know. They think this is really up to date.

And so, funnily enough, you see, they have no antibodies—shall I say, aesthetic antibodies to Western styles. Therefore, they catch our diseases before they catch our merits. I suppose the same may be said of us. It’s difficult to see how Japanese would see our acceptance of Japanese institutions and art forms. They must think it’s very funny. But in the West these things are accepted only, really, by sort of intellectuals. It hasn’t hit the mass of the people at all, whereas, in Japan, Western styles have hit the mass of people.

So with this very rapid cultural change going on, the Japanese have not discovered Buddhism. And I suppose one of the great benefits that could be done for the Japanese would be to re-translate Buddhism for them out of the old language into some sort of modern idiom. I’ve often thought of writing a textbook on Buddhism for Japanese teenagers, and I would write it in hipster language in English, and then get some very competent Japanese to translate it into the equivalent argot. It would be dificult, but it would be a great eye-opener to Japanese people. I’ve had this experiences because, in taking groups of people to Japan and giving seminars on Buddhism, very often the person who’s our interpreter will listen in, and he never knew at all that that was what it was about, that these things were contained in it. And I’ve had very interesting experiences. I was talking on certain problems with a very learned Shingon priest. Shingon is another school in Zen. And his wife speaks beautiful English, and we had a competent interpreter present. And he got to some points, and they both said, “I am sorry. We have no idea how to translate it into English. This is very difficult word.” So I said to the priest, “Ask him to write it in Chinese.” And, as I can pick out about one character in three, gradually, by this process, a very complicated form of communication can be established. But they don’t know what those words mean. They’re either too used to them—they know what they mean, but can’t possibly think what the equivalent in English would be—or else they just don’t know.

So there is this tremendous problem of—unless the Buddhist tradition is to go down the drain completely—of refamiliarizing the Japanese with what it’s all about. But they don’t know what it’s about because of the fact that, over the years, it has degenerated into going through the motions and into being something which is just a kind of magic. For example, the headquarters of the Shingon School on Mount Kōya is really two things: it’s an enormous funerary establishment and a tourist center. The main thing at Shingon is a gigantic graveyard. Very beautiful. All among cryptomeria trees, which are somewhat like a sequoia. And here are tombs and tombs and tombs, all in the style of Buddhist little stupas, or pagoda-like structures. Wealthy families have huge ones, all decked about with bells and magical inscriptions in Tibetan, Sanskrit, and so on. And there are many temples, but their principal function is to drone sutras for the (we would say) repose of the souls of the departed. And so they train their—I witnessed the training of all these young boys who are, of course, priests’ sons. And they, in their training hall, each priest, monk-trainee, has a little desk with all the ritual objects on it, all alike, row after row after row. And they teach them how to go through the motions of the various ceremonies and rituals. It’s completely mechanical. And so it exists as a kind of prayer wheel bit for people to come there and be buried with the hope that this magic will do something. It’s magic, pure and simple. You can buy sheets of paper printed with all sorts of mysterious characters, and you put these in a little holder, and you could stick it up in your car as a good luck thing. And what says on the papers? It says nothing at all. It’s just magical signs, like a kind of abracadabra.

Well, the modern Japanese think this is ridiculous. They have no patience with it whatsoever. It has no mystery to it, no magic. To us, Mount Kōya reminds you of going to Tibet. It’s the nearest thing in Japan to Tibetan Buddhism. And the mysterious effigies, and the marvelous construction of the temples. It is most extraordinary. And from a scholarly point of view, from the point of view of a historian of Buddhist symbology, it is fascinating. But nobody there seems to appreciate it very much. It’s something they’re used to, they just go through. Either the modern Japanese are going to let the whole thing go down the drain, or else, somehow, it’s got to be re-presented to them in a modern idiom so they wake up and realize that they have a treasure.

Well, let’s take an intermission.

This morning I was giving you some general impressions of the present situation of Zen in Japan, and showing how it’s really fallen on evil days. It is of very little interest to the younger generation. And, insofar as there is an awakening, it is to a considerable extent due to the increase of Western interest, which has aroused the Zen people and put them on their mettle. And now I want to discuss a problem that was raised by both R. H. Blyth and D. T. Suzuki as to whether Zen, as one finds it in Japan today, is rather much behind the times, ill-suited to Western assimilation, and even (for purposes of the Japanese) needs in some way to be reformed. And if so, in what directions?

Now, frankly, I must be very, very clear with you as to what are and are not my qualifications to discuss this. I have not studied Zen in the regular way, I have not spent any time practicing Zen in a monastery, and I have never acquired a formal Zen teacher. Because my method in situations is invariably through the back door. This shows me the construction underneath the front stairs. I’m a bit sneaky. But I find this, although sometimes it takes longer to get in by the back door than by the front door, nevertheless it has certain advantages. Ramakrishna said there are many entrances to a house: one entrance is the way the garbage goes in and out, another entrance is where the honored guests go in and out. And in discussing various forms of Hinduism, which go under the name of the left-hand path, he said they do get into the house, but they go by the garbage entrance. Well, I suppose I go in like a burglar: through the window, or something like that.

But the reason—I have a reason for this. There is method in my madness, and it’s this: I don’t care what you join—be it a Buddhist group, a yoga group, a Christian group, a psychoanalytic group—whether you are an advocate for spiritual methods of anything—psychedelic drugs, or dervish dancing, or Gurdjieff exercises, or whatever. You tend to become, by virtue of this, a member of an in-group, and you start playing the game of “in-group versus out-group.” And it never fails, so far as I can see. Now, it’s absurd to try and constitute an in-group of one. I would think myself very funny if I tried to do that. So at least I can avoid that. But then, you know, “everybody’s out of step except me” sort of thing. That just doesn’t strike my sense of humor very well—for me. But everywhere there is this tendency. And I feel, too, that people are always in danger of playing games indefinitely along this. Saying, “Well, we’re more inclusive than you are.” “I’m more tolerant than you are.”

Now, there are fascinating games along these lines. “I’m more aware of my shortcomings than you are.” “I know more consciously than you do that I play games.” It is perfectly endless. But I think that our friend Krishnamurti has always had a very powerful critique in this problem in saying that religions are divisive. Let’s take the Baháʼí thing: now here was an attempt to form a universal religion composed of nine major religions in the world, and all it succeeded in doing was creating another divisive sect claiming to be a certain in-group. And so I feel rather strongly in this day and age that joining religions is intellectually not so very respectable; that it is a thing of the past.

Now, people object to that and say, “Well, all you become if you do that is an eclectic.” Or they’ll say this is syncretism, which is a dirty word in some circles. That, in other words, you become superficial. You treat the whole religious history of mankind as smörgåsbord, and you go around to all the dishes and pick what catches your fancy, and leave the rest. Well, people do that anyhow if they take one tradition. I know all kinds of Catholics who say, “We are devout Catholics, but of course we don’t go along with this, that, and the other”—the silly nonsense about birth control and so on. They just take as much Catholicism as they feel they can take and leave the rest. Any discriminating eater does that. If you don’t, you don’t know the difference between chalk and cheese.

So I find nothing—if somebody wants to call me a syncretist, a dilettante, or whatever you like—okay. The shoe doesn’t fit, so I don’t wear it. So this is my attitude and the way I look at it, and you must make up your own mind whether you think this qualifies me to say anything valid at all or not. But I watch many things. I watch the claims people make, and whether they manifest those claims in the way they live. And if they say, “Well, you know, this way of life that we follow is going to improve us and make us better human beings from a moral point of view”—alright, that’s what they said it is. So I watch to see if they are in any way distinguished. And it’s very rarely true that they are. To a large extent, people’s religious beliefs are a rationalization of some kind. And so it’s better, I think, not to make claims, not to try—because, you see, this is always the problem: religions are always involved in some kind of sales pitch. They say: if you would do what I tell you or what we preach, it will be good for you, it will make something better. And endlessly, endlessly, it doesn’t. So you might say: what is the good of studying this at all? If it doesn’t improve your lives, if it doesn’t make you better, more sociable, why study it?

Well, the first thing that occurs to me is that it’s very interesting. I’ve always, since childhood, been fascinated by the mystery of being. It just has always struck me as absolutely marvelous that there is this amazing universe. And, just out of sheer wonder, I’m interested in all the various answers that people have given as to why this is here. And I must say that my approach to religion is not so much that of the moralist as of the scientist—in this sense: a physicist may have a very experimental and concrete approach to nature, but a good physicist is not necessarily a good man in the sense of being improved morally. He knows certain things, his knowledge is power. And the power that the physicist has may be used for good or for evil. But he has the power, he has the knowledge. And I’ve always thought that, in many ways, Zen is like that. Zen has been used for healing people’s sicknesses, and also for chopping off their heads by the samurai. And so I’m interested in it from the point of view of what it reveals about the way universe is, the way nature is, what this world is doing.

So it is part and parcel of a big inquiry. And the big inquiry is this: if you read the literature of the great religions, time and time again you come up against descriptions of what is called spiritual experience. And you find that, in all the various traditions, there is a modality of spiritual experience which seems to be the same thing—whether it occurs in the Christian West, the Islamic Middle East, the Hindu world of Asia, or the Buddhist world, it is quite definitely the same experience: the sense of the transcendence of individuality, and of being one with the total energy of the universe.

This experience has always fascinated me. I’ve been interested in the psychological dynamics of it: why it happens, what happens, how it comes to be described in different symbolisms with different languages? And to see if I could find out what are the means of bringing it about, frankly? I’ve often felt that the traditional ways of cultivating it are analogous to, say, medieval medicine, where a concoction is prepared that consists of roasted toads, rope from the gallows, henbane, mandrake, a boiled red dog, and all such things, you see, and a great brew is made. Now, I assume that some sort of old wives’ tradition had it so that this thing really did do you some good. But a modern chemist looks at that and says, “Hm, this may have done some good, but what was the essential ingredient?” And so I ask in the same way: when people do yoga, when they practice Zen, when they do the bhakti thing of religious devotion to a god of some kind—all the various things people do, even to the extent of taking psychedelic chemicals—what does all this have in common now? What is the essential ingredient that takes place here? And let’s cut out the nonsense, which is purely something that goes with the particular cultural background of a certain way of approach to this state of consciousness. I don’t say nonsense, I shouldn’t have used that word, because I could call it embellishments, decorations, not nonsense. But if we look behind that to what is essential, is there something that can be said about that?

Now, it always strikes one at first—it struck me as a student of these things—that Zen got very close to essentials. This was a first impression. Because the way Suzuki presented it, it was the direct way. It was the sudden way of seeing right through into one’s nature now, at this moment. And although there is a good deal of talk about that in Zen, in some ways it’s more talk than practice. Although once, at a dinner table, I remember Hasegawa saying, when somebody asks him, “How long does it take to attain an understanding of Zen?” he said, “It may take you three minutes, it may take you thirty years.” And he said, “I mean that.”

And it’s that three minutes, you see, that tantalizes people. We of the West want instant results, and one of the difficulties of instant results is that they’re sometimes in poor quality. For example, most instant coffee is a punishment for people who are in too much of a hurry to get real coffee. And certainly, these dial-a-meal automat drive-in places, where you put in your money and you have twelve choices, and you dial a meal and it delivers it to you in exactly sixty seconds—you might just as well eat with the pigs. It looks prettier, but there’s nothing much in it.

So there is something to be said against hurry. But there are two sides to this. And it strikes me in this way: it isn’t a matter of time at all. The people who think it ought to take a long time are one school of thought. The people who want it as quickly as possible, who are in fact in a hurry, is another school of thought—and they’re both wrong. Because it is not a question of how much time you put into it, as if this added up some sort of quantitative scale, and you got rewarded according to the amount of effort you put into it. Nor is there a way of avoiding the effort just to be lazy and say: I want it now.

The point is rather something like this: if you try to get it either by an instant method or by a long-term method, you can’t get it either way. The only thing that that effort or absence of effort can teach you is that it doesn’t work. The Middle Way is—Buddhism is always called the Middle Way—is not just a sort of compromise situation. “Middle,” here, means above and beyond extremes. “To him that hath shall be given.” In other words: you can only get it when you discover that you don’t need it. You can only get it when you don’t want it. And so you say, “How do I learn not to want it, not to go after this—either by the long-term method or by the instant method?” And obviously, if you ask that, you still are seeking it, and thereby not getting it. “If,” as the Zen master says, “you have a stick, I will give you one. If you have not, I’ll take it away from you”—which is the same as, “To him that hath shall be given, and from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath.”

So then, we are in a situation here where it seems that all our accustomed thinking, all our normal ways of thinking about solving problems, doesn’t work. All thinking based on acquisition is here obsolete. We have, as it were, to get into a new dimension of approaching this altogether. And that is why a young Zen student I know—he’s now finished his Zen training; Japanese—said a little while ago: “If I were asked what is really essential in Zen, it would be what is called sanzen.” That is the dialogue between the master and the student; the person-to-person contact. He said, “Rather than zazen (sitting meditation) or anything like that, it is the sanzen that is the crux of it.” I don’t think this was just a way of saying that the one thing that is essential is the apostolic succession. I think it’s rather saying this: that it is in the peculiar circumstances of that dialogue that we can get into the dimension I’m talking about.

Because, you see, what in effect this dialogue is, is that the master always throws back to the student the question he’s asked. He doesn’t answer any questions. Not really. He merely throws the question back at you, so that you yourself understand why you’re asking it, and why you are creating the problem which the question expresses. It’s up to you. “Who? Me?” “Yeah, you.” “Wait a second, I can’t. I don’t know how to do it.” “Well, what do you mean by ‘you’? Who are you? Show me.” You see, it’s in this kind of back and forth that you begin to understand, through the relationship with the other person, that you’re mixed up. You’re asking the wrong questions. You’re trying to solve the wrong problem altogether.

It’s a curious thing about gurus. You notice how people feel that gurus have marvelous eyes, and that they look right through you. And people think, “Oh dear me, he sees to the bottom of my soul. He reads my history, my secret thoughts, my awful misdeeds, and everything. He knows me right through.” Such matters are of very little interest to a guru. When he looks at you with a funny look, he’s seeing who you really are—looking through your eyes to the divine center, let’s put it that way. And here he sees Buddha, Brahman (whatever you want to call it) pretending like he’s not at home. And no wonder he has a funny look on his face! Somehow the incongruity between the divine being that looks out through you in the eyes, and the expression of puzzlement on the face. And what he’s going to do is, by a dialogue, kid you out of this irresponsibility, this playing, that you are someone else than who you really are. And this, then, you see, is of the essence.

Don’t mistake me. I’m not saying: in order to get there you have to have a guru, and go and find one somewhere. That, too, you see, would go back into the ordinary dimension. Because, you see, all the guru is doing, as I was explaining to some of you last night: you give him authority. You say, “Be my teacher.” And in Zen they make it very tough for you to get a guru at all. And other gurus do, the Hindus do, likewise, because they have various ways of explaining that a guru has to take on the karma of his student. And that’s a pretty dangerous thing to do. He becomes responsible for him. But in Zen they have the feeling they’re going to make it very difficult, so that if you’re going to make a fool of yourself by projecting authority on a guru, you’re going to make a big fool of yourself. There are no small measures about this.

So the point, then, is this: that insofar as you accord spiritual authority to someone, you must recognize that you did that on your own authority. It was you who set this guy up as your master. “Alright,” you say, “well, there are a lot of other people who’ve done it too. And they form a kind of community, and that gives authority to this figure,” and that’s why you pick it. You say, “I want the best Zen master,” see? Well, who’s the best Zen master? How do you know? You go around asking people. You ask the Zen clique, you see: “Who do you think’s the really good master?” Well, of course, people tend to recommend their own teacher. And when a guy has had enough people apply to him, then he’s got a great collective authority. And you accept that and say, “I’ll go to that.”

But do you see? You have used this group as a pretext upon which to project your own authority, not realizing that you’ve done it. You set this thing up. And the task of the teacher is to show you just what you did. It all came from you. And that’s what it means when the Buddhists say all this world is in your own mind. When, in the Tibetan Book of the Dead, you know, the instructions are given as to what happens when the clear light of the void comes, when the vision of the blissful bodhisattvas, the vision of the wrathful bodhisattvas, and all that kind of thing, and the preceptor says, “Realize, oh nobly born, that all this is but the outpouring of your own mind.” It’s you.

But we can’t take that very well, because we’ve been taught most assiduously that you yourself are but a little thing in this world. You must be humble. You didn’t create this world, somebody else made it. And watch your Ps and Qs! Don’t have the spiritual pride of thinking for one minute that you are the cause of it. “All right,” you say, “but how could I have made it? I don’t know how it was made.” But a Zen poem says, “If you want to ask where the flowers come from, even the god of spring doesn’t know.” Because, as I said in the beginning, there is no way of defining the creative energy of the universe. If you addressed God—supposing God could come and talk to you—and you said to him, “God, pretty complicated universe! Amazing! How did you do it?” He’d say, “I just did it, I don’t know.” Of course not. If he had to think out every detail of it, it never would have happened. And just in the same way, you breathe, you live, but you don’t know how you do it—but you’re doing it.

Only, we’ve been taught by a social convention to restrict the concept of myself to what I do voluntarily and consciously, which is very narrow. Certainly, if you say, “Oh, I—by my ego and my intelligence—I created all this,” you would be conceited, and you know you would be a liar. But “you” is much deeper than that. “You” includes far more than your conscious mind, and it’s that total “you” that not only is responsible for the infinitely complex structure of your physical organism, but also for the environment in which you find yourself. “You” runs that deep. So it’s “you” in that sense, the total “you,” which is the root and ground of everything.

But, you see, we arrange a whole principle of human sociability, of ability to get on together, by putting everyone down. “You’re not the only pebble on the beach!” as my mother used to say. Well, why not try the other technique of putting everyone up? It might be that they’d get along better that way than they would by putting everybody down. Because whatever you do, you have to do it unilaterally. I mean, you have to do it uniformly for everyone. You can’t say, “Well, John is the Lord God and Peter isn’t.”

But as a result of this, you see, we all feel like strangers in the world, disconnected from it all; that it’s something that happens to us, that we endure passively, that we receive passively, and we never get the point that actually you’re doing the whole thing and it’s up to you. You make your troubles. You get yourself into the trap. And you confuse yourself, forget that you did it, and then ask how to get out of it. “Looking around,” says a verse from the Mumonkan, “asking where Buddha is, is like hiding loot in your pocket and declaring yourself innocent.”

So, you see, to admit, to come to the recognition that it was you, requires a certain kind of nerve. I don’t mean nerve in the sense of when we say, “Well, he’s got a lot of nerve,” when somebody is just brash and cheeky, but nerve in the sort of sense that you use nerve when, for the first time, you take a plane off the ground. Or when you pull a cloth off the table and leave all the dishes on the table. That sort of nerve. It has nothing to do with pride in the ordinary sense. It is ready to leap in somehow, you see?

If people don’t have that kind of sense, we have what I would call an ambivalent sense of responsibility. If we say, “Well, now, look: you are only you, and you were just you, but you have certain responsibilities, and they are thus and so,” well, that means, then, there are a lot of things I’m not responsible for. And so we play games as to where we’re going to draw the line. And so we say to someone who’s in psychological difficulty, who has been irresponsible in some way, “Well, why was he like that?” And instead of referring it to him, we refer it back—because of environment, because of family conditioning, because of his mother. And there’s no end to that. You take that all straight back to Adam and Eve. And therefore, responsibility is evaded: because it was in the first place limited.

We think, you see, that the world is explained by its past; that what happened in the past determines what is going to happen next. We don’t really see that it’s exactly the other way around. What is always the source of the world is the present. The past doesn’t explain a thing. The past trails behind the present like the wake of a ship, and eventually disappears. And now you would say: obviously, when you see a ship crossing the ocean, and the wake trailing behind it, that the ship is the cause of the wake. But if you get into the state of mind that believes in causality as we do, you’re trying to make the wake the cause of the ship. This is surely making the tail wag the dog!

So the point is: you will never find the mystery of the creation of the world in the past. It never was created in the past. Because, really and truly, there is nothing else. There never was anything else except the present. Never will be. Life is always present, and the past is a kind of echo, a kind of tracing within the present of what the present did before. We can say: well, we can guess what the present will do next because of what it has done in the past. True. Because through what it does habitually, you may guess that it will go on doing it like that. But it isn’t that the past controls the present. It’s just that, from the record of the past, you study the nature of the present and what sort of things it’s likely to do. And sometimes it surprises you when something new happens—as every so often it does. So it is always from the immediate here and now that things begin.

And so you might say one of the complete essentials of Zen training is to be here and now, boys. Be here. And, you see, in order to be here, well, you mustn’t be looking for a result. People keep saying to me, “Well, why do you do that?” “Why did you come here?” “What do you want to get out of this?” Well, this implies, you see, that my motivation is different from my action. It’s talking about life in terms of Newtonian billiards; Newton’s mechanics of the world, and his explanation of behavior, was always by analogy with billiards. Balls. The fundamental atoms are banging each other about. And so a ball will be still until something bangs it, and that will be its motivation. That will set it going. So when we say human beings behave in such and such a way because of unconscious mental mechanisms, that is Newtonian psychology. It’s out of date, and we need today a psychology—up to quantum theory at least—where you don’t have this conception of mechanical causality. And it’s difficult to understand unless you turn things around by the analogy of the ship and the wake, and you understand fully that it is from the present that everything happens, and that the only place for you to be, the only place for you to live, is here.

Now, immediately people say, “Now, wait a minute. It’s all very well, but I want to be sure that, under such and such eventualities and such and such circumstances, I’ll be able to deal with it.” It’s all very well to live in the present where I’m sitting comfortably in a warm room and I’m meditating. But what am I going to do if all hell breaks loose? If there’s an earthquake? If I get sick, or my best friends get sick, or some catastrophe happens? How will I deal with that? Mustn’t I prepare myself to deal with that? Mustn’t I get into some sort of psychological training, so that when disasters come I won’t be thrown? That, you would ordinarily think, is the way to proceed. But it doesn’t work very well.

It’s much better to say, “Sufficient unto the day is the trouble thereof.” I will trust myself to react appropriately when the catastrophe happens. Because failure of nerve is really failure to trust yourself. You have a great endowment of brain, of muscle, sensitivity, intelligence—trust it to react to circumstances as they arise. There’s a whole thing in Zen about this; reacting to circumstances as they arise. Wait and see how you deal with it, because the you that will deal with it will not be simply the conscious intelligence or conscious attention. It will be all of you. And that is beyond the control of the will. Because the will is only a fragment, having certain limited functions. But if you really know how to live centered now, and to know that now is the origin of everything, you stand a much better chance of being able to deal with the unforeseen than if you keep worrying about it and considering past lessons and future possibilities.

I know that sounds revolutionary, and it sounds, in a way, impractical, but it is simply: living in the present in this way means a certain kind of poise. If you make plans exactly how to deal with the future, and things don’t happen at all as you expected, you get thoroughly discombobulated. But if you make very flexible plans—you have to make some plans—make them flexible, be adaptable, and always be here. So you are exactly as in judo. In judo you always keep balanced. You keep your center of gravity between your feet, and you don’t cross your feet like that, because the moment you do so, you’re off balance.

So you’re always in the center position. That means you’re always here. And it doesn’t matter which direction the attack comes from. If you’re expecting it this way and you’re all sort of inclined this way to get ready for it, and it comes another way, alas, you’re too late. So you stay in the center, and you’re ready to flow out in any direction from which an attack may come.

So this is centeredness. And the whole point, the whole real meaning of the practice of zazen (sitting Zen) is to sit in the center; to be centered. That’s what it really means. So therefore, to do zazen in order that this is some kind of technique for attaining enlightenment is a mistaken approach—fundamentally. I would, however, say this: you must read, if you haven’t read it, Kapleau’s book, The Three Pillars of Zen, and especially the autobiographical parts of it where various students give their experiences in the long sesshin—that means study of mind. don’t confuse it with “session.” Sesshin is the study of the mind-heart, and it means the long periods of meditation. And some masters work it so that they work you to a very high degree of expectation. They make you desire to get this thing by all means by the end of the sesshin, and they make you more and more frustrated, more as the sesshin goes on. And your knees hurt more, and everything gets perfectly desperate. They go, go, go to fan the flame of desire and your anxiety to get this thing. But that’s working in reverse, you see? What they’re doing is boiling you away, burning you out until you reach, you see (through a reductio ad absurdum), the point where you see in the intensity of frustration that it was all here anyhow. There was nothing to realize, because the present is it. That’s one way of doing it, you see.

The other way is to try and get people to sit just to sit. After all, why not sit? You have to sit sometime, And you may as well, when you sit, really sit. Be quite here. You see, the wandering of the mind away from the matter in hand, away from the present, is to think through the implications of the present. In other words, when you look down and you’re meditating, you’re perfectly okay to be aware of anything that’s around—the floor, the smell of the atmosphere, the little noises going on. Be there. But when you hear a dog bark, and that starts off a train of thought about dogs in general, and your dog, and somebody else’s dog and whatnot, then, you see, you’ve wandered away from being here. Until, of course, you finally come to the point when you realize there is no way of wandering away from being here. There’s nowhere else to be. Even if you think about somewhere else—past or future—this is all happening now. And then you can understand how to be a scholar and a historian, if you will, and still live in the present.

That’s Suzuki’s secret: how to be scholarly and intellectual, and yet—at the same time, in the midst of being intellectual—not to depart at all from the spirit of Zen, which is beyond the intellect. You can intellectualize in a Zen way, just as you can sweep floors in a Zen way. But the key of the matter is, of course, centering; to be really here. Because that’s the point of origin of the world, and it is at the same time the destination of the world: now. Now, that is the real meaning of dhyana in Sanskrit: the kind of concentration meditation which constitutes Zen. Zen is the Japanese way of pronouncing dhyana. And it’s that state of centeredness here and now.

So then, Blyth, in talking with me about—I questioned him at great length about what he thought of Zen practice, and he told me this story. He said, “You know, I asked a Zen master: what would you do if you knew you had only half an hour more to live? Would you take a walk in the garden, listen to your favorite music, sleep with a girlfriend, or go and see some friends? What would you do?” And he said, “I would practice zazen” Blyth said, “Oh, come on!” He said, “You know, it’s a superstition. Many of these monks practice zazen because they think that somehow it generates merit. The more time you sit like that, the more somehow you do something for the world, just like you would chant a sutra.” He said the trouble with these people is they’ve forgotten other ways of practicing Zen. Riding a bicycle Zen, for example. Shopping Zen. Driving a car Zen. “If you don’t do it in these ways,” he said, “you don’t do it at all.” But it’s become a fixation that it’s the sitting meditation exercise that is the be-all and the end-all of Zen practice. And he was very strong about this. If you read his last volume of Zen and Zen classics, which I think was an essay called No Japanese Zen, Thank You!, it is a very strong criticism of this one-sided ecclesiastical Zen with its tremendous focus on the zazen discipline.

Now, I want to qualify this in a minute, but I think this point has to be made first. It has got one-sided in that respect. I don’t think there’s any question about it. And people enter into zazen games: “I suffered more than you did.” “I sat longer than you did.” “Why, you’ve been only to one session?” By people with LSD—“You mean you’ve only taken 250 micrograms? Well, I once took a thousand! You don’t really blow your mind, man, until you’ve been beyond 500.” It’s the same sort of one-upmanship. It’s amazing how these things repeat themselves, and all the quarrel over who has the true sacrament.

Now, on the other hand, there’s a great deal to be said for zazen practice and for sutra chanting, but the whole question of it is to get into the spirit of when it’s good. You should listen very carefully to the voice of the person chanting sutras and find out whether he swings or not. Is he doing this as a dreary duty that is good for him, or is he with it? And so often you hear the dreary duty. You can hear it in the voices of Catholic priests who are tired to death: Haaail-Mary-full-of-grace-the-Lord-is-with-thee-blabble-blabble-blabble. You know, as quick as possible just to get the hell out of here. You say so many of these things, and it’ll work—and in the meantime they’re thinking about baseball.

But there is a way when you get, say, with a group of people in a chant, and you are completely with it, and you’re having a ball, and you can go on for hours because it’s just like dancing. Or so, in the same way, with practicing zazen: you can sit and play and enjoy yourself being quiet. And it’s not a duty at all; it’s a great pleasure. Get up early in the morning when the sunlight is just beginning to show—doesn’t matter where you are; Japan or anywhere—and just sit and don’t have any thoughts. I mean, don’t compulsively get rid of thoughts, but it’s just not important. The thing is: what is? What is here now? Yeah, I mean, after all, here you are; you may as well see it.

And you get, eventually, this curious feeling—it’s very hard to describe… well, maybe it isn’t. I just said that the origin of the world is now. The odd sensation that now comprises everything. The most distant past, the most remote future, ,he vastnesses of space, all galaxies, et cetera, et cetera. All states of experience, all joy, all sorrow, all heights, all depths—everything—is now. And there isn’t anywhere else to be. Never was, never will be. That’s why you never were born, therefore you can’t die. You never came, so you won’t go; you were always here.

It’s very curious, because—not really curious, but it’s just so different from what we ordinarily think. And it’s that entering into the now, which is what we call the eternal now—finding infinity in the split second—or as they say in yoga, that liberation lies in the interval between two thoughts: between the past thought and the future thought. Because, you see, there is no present thought. As one of the Zen texts says, “One thought follows another, without interruption. But if you allow these thoughts to link up into a chain, you put yourself in bondage.” Actually, this present moment never comes to be, and it never ceases to be. In this it’s like nirvana.

So Dōgen explains that: “In the course of the seasons, the spring does not become the summer. And when wood burns, the wood does not become the ashes. There is the state of wood, and then there is the state of ashes. There is the state of spring, and later the state of summer. But the spring does not become the summer, the wood does not become the ashes, the living body does not become the corpse. That is linking the thoughts together.” Oh, I shall become a corpse—you won’t. You won’t be there when you’re a corpse!

So I would say, then, that if we are going to introduce Westerners to the fundamentals of Zen, we need to revise a bit the procedures and rationale of meditation so that it doesn’t become a competitive one-upmanship marathon as to who can take this, who can endure. Because then that puts it under the domain of time. The important thing to emphasize is presence: being completely here, and not feeling guilty if you enjoy it. And you can do that most easily in any kind of activity that does not require much discursive thought. So, in other words, if you want to be shucking peas, or digging a plot of ground, or putting up a fence, or anything which you can do without a great deal of discursive thought, it’s perfectly good for meditation.

In Buddhism, there are what they call the four dignities of man, and they are: walking, standing, sitting, and lying. And so zazen is simply sitting Zen. There is also lying Zen, which is sleeping Zen. When you sleep, sleep. There is standing Zen and there is walking Zen. And a very good method of meditation is the walking method. That’s where you have a cloister that you can simply stroll around. But be here.

Now, there is a difficulty that people come into with this. They get the feeling of: well, is it only this? I mean, is this all? Nothing’s even going to happen, just what’s going on. I don’t feel—I feel a little frustrated. I don’t feel particularly enlightened. It’s just nothing special at all. I mean, do I have to do this longer in order for something to happen, or what?

No, nothing special is supposed to happen. It’s just that this here is it. But, you see, you have difficulty in accepting it. Because you still feel—how shall I say?—the lack of nerve to see that you are all of it. You are not an observer who is witnessing the present moment as something happening to you. If you feel it that way, then you naturally ask, “Well, what next?” The important thing is that this present which you are experiencing is all of you. It’s not you, here, looking at the floor, there. The floor is just as much you as the organism looking at it. You’re doing the floor just like you’re doing your feet. It’s all one world, and you’re responsible for it—so have a good time!

Geographically, Kyoto is a city not unlike Los Angeles—although in Los Angeles the hills go more or less straight on the north side of the city. Kyoto is enclosed by hills west, north, and east, and is open to the south. But you’ve got the same sort of situation of a great flat city with hills, and of course the same conditions are developing that develop in Los Angeles. There’s a considerable smog problem building up. But for a long, long time, Kyoto has had the situation that the desirable land for residents is in the hills, just as here.

It’s interesting that Kyoto is one of the great ancient cities of the world, but is also like an American city in the respect that it’s laid out on a gridiron pattern. And I think it’s the only great ancient city that’s planned in this way. But, as I said, the desirable land is in the hills. If you’re wealthy, the hills are full of absolutely gorgeous villas and parks. And they also have the advantage they’re full of water springs, and you can pipe in water to your garden, and have running water in your stone hollowed-out bowl near your tea house. And in ancient times, of course, it was all brought in by bamboo tubes.

But the curious thing is that the best land in town is occupied by Buddhist temples. And the really gorgeous sites are Zen temples. How come? Because those hills from most ancient times were occupied by extremely redoubtable brigands—who later became, of course, ladies and gentlemen, daimyō, nobles, and their samurai retainers. But those Buddhist monks sure got away with it. I said yesterday that they live in a sort of state of what I would call luxurious asceticism. Zen is a simplified life, really. No property that you own yourself, therefore no responsibility for it in the way of financial worry. The style of life, the way a temple is furnished, is completely uncluttered. The rooms of a temple are mostly empty. They’re just spaces—but gorgeous spaces. And so, because, as I pointed out, space is the most valuable thing in Japan, space is reverenced.

I want to talk a bit about space, because in this country, where we have so much space, we don’t appreciate it, and we think that space is equivalent to nothing. It’s something simply that isn’t there. We think of space as a blank. And in a crowded situation, you see, people really notice space. But it’s interesting, too, that China is a country where there’s lots of space. But it was the Chinese, I think, above all, who first taught man to appreciate space. And we’re living in a space age, and it’s strange that our culture is the kind of forerunner in space navigation and space exploration, and yet at the same time, we don’t really understand space at all. And one of the great contributions of Zen to the Western world is understanding of space.

So the best space in town, as I said, is occupied by these Zen temples, taken away from the brigands, who somehow let these monks come in. Because the monks put one over on the brigands and got the space. How did they do it? You know, of course, that in the Kamakura epoch, Zen had an enormous influence on the samurai warrior caste—that is to say, the Kṣatriya of Japan. This was a time in which Japan was torn by internal strife, with constant war between the various feudal lords, and vying with each other to obtain control of the imperial power. And they went to study Zen as soldiers in order to learn fearlessness. And that was the point where the Zen monks out-fazed the samurai, because they prided themselves on their manly and warrior-like qualities, but they couldn’t scare the Zen monks. Because the Zen monks just were not fazed, were not stopped, by the idea of death.

Excuse me if I’ve told some of you this story before, but it’s pertinent. There was once a young man who applied to a fencing master to be his student. And the master looked at him and said, “Who did you study with before?” He said, “I’ve never studied fencing before.” The master looked at him in a funny way and said, “No, surely. Come, now. You have studied with someone.” He said, “No, sir. I never have studied.” “Well,” the master said, “look, I’m an experienced teacher, you know, and I can tell at once by looking at a person whether he has studied fencing or not, and I know you have.” And the young man shook his head and he said, “Sir, I assure you, I have never studied fencing at all with anybody.” “Well,” said the master, “there must be something peculiar about you. What do you suppose it could be?” “Well,” the young man said, “when I was a boy I was very worried about dying. So I thought a great deal about death. And then I came to the realization that there was nothing in death to be afraid of.” “Oh,” said the master, “that explains it.”

So R. H. Blyth told us that the initial part of Zen training, the beginning of Zen, has, as a matter of fact, the purpose of overcoming the fear of death. In other words, what I described to you as the Hinayana stage of Zen study, where you go down here—withdraw consciousness, as it were, back to its source—this is the initial stage. And so as you go down, you see, you go down into that dimension of your own being where you go deeper than your own individuality. And you realize that you belong down here, really. That’s where you truly exist. And what you feel as your individuality is something temporal, like the leaves of a deciduous tree: in the season of the fall, they dry up and drop off. And so the Japanese in their poetry always liken death to the fall and winter season. And there’s a feeling about a human life; that it’s simply harmonious with the seasons of the year. This goes through all Japanese poetry and aesthetics.

And therefore, old people are looked upon as those who are in the winter of life, or the fall of life. And just as the maple trees in Japan become absolutely gorgeous in the fall, so there is a respect for age. Old people in Japan look much better than our old people because they’re not fighting with age, they’re cooperating with it. It is an honorable thing to be old—at least it used to be true. And, as I said, for women, age means respect and authority.

And this feeling of the harmoniousness of human life with the life of nature makes aging and death less problematic for people with that sort of psychology. They see old age not as the deterioration of a living being, just as they don’t see the fall and winter as a deterioration of time. They see it as the proper rhythm of time. I suppose for us, who live here in a more or less seasonless world, this may be a difficult correspondence to work out. We don’t feel the seasons in the same way.

And also, you remember I pointed out yesterday the idea that the great Zen master Dōgen put in his book, the Shōbōgenzō—actually, he got this idea from a Chinese student of Kumārajīva, who lived about 400 AD.—that events in time are eternal. That is to say, each event stays in its own place. The burning wood does not become ashes. There is first wood, and then there is ashes. So he says: the spring does not become the summer; there is spring, then there is summer, then there is fall, then there is winter.

It’s a curious idea that the sun, in its rotation, doesn’t move. This is a sort of paradoxical saying. The river doesn’t flow. It’s, in a way, like Heraclitus: you never step into the same river twice. There is a very close parallel between all the thinking of Heraclitus and Taoist philosophy. The yang and the yin. If you really want to go, Heraclitus is the most original thinker in Western thought. And Philip Wheelwright, in the last few years, published an excellent translation of what remains of the Fragments of Heraclitus’ philosophy. If the West had founded itself on Heraclitus rather than Aristotle, we’d have been a lot better off. Most ingenious man.

Well, anyway, this feeling of death as a completely natural event, which only, as it were, is the dropping of the leaves, and the root underneath is always there. Now, what is difficult, I suppose, to appreciate about this is that you say: well, I’m not aware of the root. It doesn’t enter into my ordinary life at all. I’m only on top. How do I get down? Well, of course, the top, in a certain sense, is the top, and it can’t get down and be the bottom. So this is the same question that people raise when they say, “How do I get rid of my egocentricity?” Well obviously, with egocentricity you can’t get rid of egocentricity. As the master Bankei said: “You can’t wash off blood with blood.” And trying to realize your Buddha nature by some sort of egocentric effort is like trying to wash off blood with blood.

Bankei, in his teaching, very much emphasized the way in which you have this root in you by such things as this. He would say: when you hear a bell ringing, you don’t have to think about it. You know at once that it’s a bell. When you hear the crow cawing, you don’t—by any effort or cleverness of your conscious will—know that it’s a crow. Your mind does that for you. And so once, when he was being heckled by a Nichiren priest—I explained those Nichirens are very fanatical—the Nichiren priest was standing on the fringe of a crowd, listening to Bankei, and he said, “I don’t understand a single word you’re saying.” Bankei said, “Will you come closer, and I’ll explain it to you.” And so this priest walked into the crowd. And Bankei said, “Come on, come closer.” And he came closer. “Come closer still.” And he came closer. “Please, closer still,” until he was right next to Bankei. And Bankei said, “How well you understand me!”

He emphasized, in other words, that we have what he called fushō (the unborn mind) in us, and this is the unborn mind. That means the level of mind that doesn’t arise (that is to say, be born) into individuality. We all have that original endowment. And it is because of that, that we, when you say, “Good morning,” somebody says, “Good morning”—and that’s the unborn mind. You don’t think to do this. It’s the unborn mind through which your eyes are blue or brown, by reason of which you see and breathe. And breathing is important in the practice of meditation, because it is the faculty in us which is simultaneously voluntary and involuntary. You can feel that “I am breathing,” and equally you can feel “it breathes me.” So it is a sort of bridge between the voluntary world and the involuntary world, where they are one.

So, to acquire the sense that your unconscious life—which isn’t unconscious in the sense that it lacks consciousness, it is the root of consciousness. It is that out of which consciousness comes. And just as the leaves come every year on the tree, so consciousness perpetually comes and goes out of the, shall we say, supra-conscious base. You don’t need, in order to appreciate this, to believe literally in reincarnation—that is to say, the idea that you have an individual enduring center or soul, which is born into existence time after time after time. Zen people are divided as to whether they think that is so or not. I’ve met masters who believe that, and I’ve met masters who don’t believe it at all.

What they mean by the continual reappearance of individuality and consciousness out of the base is simply that what we see. We see human beings and all forms of life coming and going. We don’t see any continuity between them, but that is only because we don’t see space. It is the interval between people, the space between lives, that constitutes the bond between them. This is very important. This is the whole philosophy of space, and I’m coming back to that in a minute.

But the point is that, through realizing this, those Zen monks had enormous nerve, and they could look a samurai in the face and say, “Okay, cut my head off. What does it prove?” And the samurai were bugged by this. So they regarded those monks as some sort of magical people and said, “You teach us this. Because if we learn this, we can really clobber the enemy.” And so Zen is like a spring coming out of the mountain: it doesn’t flow out in order to quench the thirst of a traveler. But if the traveler wants to help himself to it, okay. It’s up to you what you do with the water. The spring’s job is just to flow. So Zen masters will teach anyone who has the tenacity to go after it, whoever he is. But the samurai were grateful. And so they let the Zen monks occupy the best land in town. And so in that land they built buildings that are essentially great heavy roofs in the Tang dynasty Chinese style, supported by a kind of flimsiness underneath. They’re like lanterns, all these buildings. Under the roof, empty floors covered with straw mats and sliding screens, and occasional cushions to sit on. Nothing else. You get this feeling of living space.

Well, now, what about that? I said that we disregard space. We think, you see—we know space is, so on the planet here, is full of air. And so that is something. Air occupies space, and that’s more or less important. But we think of air as filling simply a void. And when astronomers start to talk about curved space, or properties of space, the average person feels that his common sense has been offended. How could space be curved? How could it have any property? Because it isn’t there. It’s nothing. But the folly of thinking that way becomes apparent the moment you realize that solidness, materiality, density, is inconceivable apart from space. Space is the interval between solids, and thus in some sense the relationship between solids.

Consider for a moment another kind of space altogether. We’ll call it musical space: the interval between notes in a melody. Now, you play a sequence of notes. There is no pause. There is no silence between one note and another. They follow each other immediately. But it is only because of something that is not stated—the interval, in other words, is not sounded. But it is precisely because of the interval that you hear a melody. And if you don’t hear an interval, as with a tone-deaf person, you hear no melody. You just hear a succession of noises. So it is the space between the notes, the musical space, the step, the interval, that is really the essential element in melody. So, in exactly the same way, it is interstellar space which goes hand in hand with there being any stars or solids. It isn’t just nothing. It is the other pole of something.

Now, let’s look at it from another point of view. I’ve looked at it astronomically and musically. Let’s look at it for a moment aesthetically. When you see, for example, in a motel room—for some reason, hotels and motels love flower or bird prints in frames over the bed. And the typical Western flower print is a bunch of flowers set bang in the middle of a piece of paper. And this shows that the person who designed the print has no conception of space. Because the space in that print serves merely as background, and it’s nothing else. It has no function whatsoever. The space is not part of the picture.

But when a Chinese painter uses space, you will see that if he paints a spray of grass or bamboos or a pine tree, he never sets it bang in the middle of the paper. He balances it off to one side, so that what he has painted is, as we say, balanced by the space. And by this, he makes the space part of the painting. So by putting the spray of bamboo at one side, immediately you see the part of the painting not touched as mist or water. He doesn’t have to do a thing to it. Somehow, it is all in the picture. And the bamboo is not merely against a background. Everything, right out to the edge of the piece of paper, has been included by doing this. Because he sees the polarity of space and solid, and he uses this polarity in the painting by balancing them against each other. But you do not notice that balance. If the solid area, the painted thing, is put smack in the middle of the space, you abolish the importance of the space. It has no place in the painting. And so when we think of a solid, say a star or the sun, as simply sitting in the middle, we, by doing this, ignore space.

I’ve had great fun talking to college communities by doing experiments in gestalt psychology with figure and ground. Because, you see, the gestalt theory of perception is that we tend to notice the figure and ignore the background: we tend to notice a moving object and ignore what is relatively still. We tend to notice areas that are tightly enclosed rather than those which are diffused. So if you draw a circle on the blackboard and say to the group, “What have I drawn?” they will invariably say a circle, a ball, a ring, or something like that. And I would say then, “Well, why has nobody suggested that I have drawn a wall with a hole in it?” And that shows, you see: we ignore the background and pay attention to the figure.

Now, painters—especially those Western painters who work with oil—they have to paint the background, you see. And so a space becomes important. Architects will often talk about the properties of a space, because they know that what they’re doing is, they’re making living space for people. They are enclosing spaces. And so space has a certain reality to the architect. But to the ordinary person, you see, space just isn’t there.

It’s very interesting. You can practice this—I’m not going to try these experiments today because we’re not in the proper circumstances. In meditation experiments you can experience various kinds of space: optical space, auditory space, tactile space. You can realize, by closing your eyes for a while, what a blind man’s conception of space would be. Every sense has its own appreciation of space.

And there was a time in our own history, indeed—by reading between the lines of, say, ancient literature; it’s clear that as late as Dante—that they regarded space and mind as the same thing. And if you think about that, you can see it is rather obvious. Take the mind of the eye—that’s to say what Buddhists would call the vijñāna, here, that corresponds to seeing. The basis of sight is a sort of screen, isn’t it? Just as you have a screen on which to project a color slide or a movie, there is a kind of ground, an area, in which everything that is seen must be. You have what we call the field of vision, which is a fuzzy oval. You see an oval area, in other words. This is the field of vision. So there has to be that open field for there to be any vision at all. It is the background.

There was once an Englishman and an Indian, Hindu, sitting in a garden together. And the Hindu was trying to explain basic Indian philosophy to the Englishman. And so he said, “Look now, there is a hedge at the end of the garden. Against what do you see the hedge?” And he said, “Against the hills.” “And what do you see the hills against?” He said, “Against the sky.” “And what do you see a sky against?” And the Englishman didn’t know what to say, uUntil the Hindu said, “Well, you see it against consciousness.”

So, in the same way, you might say that auditory space is not exactly silence. What is auditory space? Auditory space is the eardrum. It is a kind of vibrating skin, you see. So, in the same way, the space for being itself, for material vibration, is the space which we think of as existing between the heavenly bodies. That is the ground, the field, which quanta, electrical forces, must have in order to play. So, then, in the same way that space itself is invisible, consciousness is unknown, is not an object of knowledge, so, in exactly the same way, this dimension of your being here is like space. That’s why this basis is called amalavijñāna, which means “without taint.” You can’t make a mark on space. I was quoting the Buddha, saying: “The path of the enlightened ones leaves no track. It is like the path of birds in the sky.”

And so then, when, in Chinese, one wants to indicate the Buddhist idea of śūnyatā—or the ultimate reality of the world called the void—the Chinese use this character, which means also sky and space. So the basic doctrine of the Buddhist Mahayana philosophy is this. Here are the contrasting words. This is “space.” This is “form,” “shape;” it also means “color.” And this combination here means “exactly is,” something like that. Space exactly is, or is precisely, the same as form. And you can reverse it by changing these two characters around (as the Heart Sutra does), and it says, “form is precisely emptiness.” This “is” is not quite the same as the English or European “is,” Latin est. It means, rather, “is inseparable from,” “always goes with,” “the two are interdependent.” You can’t have space without form. You can’t have form without space. So they are relational, and in that sense they are each other. Because underneath every inseparable relation is something in common.

So to perceive this—to perceive that form reveals the void, and to see that the void reveals form—is the secret for the overcoming of death. To the extent that one is unaware of space, one is unaware of one’s own eternity. It’s the same thing. But people sometimes imagine that, to be aware of the eternal dimension, the forms must disappear. The Vedanta people here teach this: that in nirvikalpa samādhi (which is the highest state of consciousness), the samādhi means the meditation state, the concentration, the absorption. Nirvikalpa, meaning “without”—vikalpa literally means a “concept.” But they take it to mean “without content.” And we’ll say that, in the state of nirvikalpa, the mind is completely devoid of any form or motion whatsoever. And that sounds like total blank. But in Zen it would be said that a person whose mind is in that state is a stone Buddha, because they are the Buddha made of stone sitting on the altar—has no consciousness. So if that’s the ideal, okay, the stone Buddha has it. A piece of wood has it. There’s no point in that.

So they interpret all this in a very different way indeed. To have nirvikalpa samādhi, the highest state of consciousness, is not to have consciousness in which there are no forms. It is simply to reawaken to the reality of space, and to see that forms come and go in space as the leaves come and go on the trees, as the stars come and go in the sky. But the sky is, in a way, the mother of the stars. Of course, no woman is a mother until she has a child. And in this sense, space does not come into being as the matrix of the world until there’s something there. That’s why the Chinese use this expression, as they use this term to indicate the relationship between all opposites, to come into being, to arise mutually. That designates this situation. So these two things, space and form, arise mutually, as do being and non-being.

So then, you see, you can say in practical life: to the degree that you are unaware of space, to the same degree you are unaware of the fullness of your nature. And I suppose, as our population increases, and we get more crowded, and space will become more valuable, this will help us to be more aware of it. Perhaps that is the reason why species multiply. Because as many-ness increases, the consciousness of oneness increases.

So in Zen—Zen is a philosophy where you can say, in answer to the question, “What is the ultimate reality?” the master says, “Three pounds of flax.” He chooses something very particular, something extremely concrete, something very everyday, something indeed quite worldly, to answer this metaphysical question. Why? Because space does not obliterate the particular, but rather it is precisely the particular, the individual thing, the ordinary everyday event, which proclaims and advertises the underlying unity of the world. The many advertise the one, just as the solid implies, and indeed exhibits and brings out the fact that there is space. Were there no solids, there would be no space. You see, if you try to imagine space with no solid, you have to get rid of yourself looking at it, because you’re a solid in the middle of the space. So space, space, space forever, with nothing in it, is an absolutely meaningless, unimaginable concept. You have to have space and solid. They always go together.

So then, this explains the many, many ways in which Zen life has feeling for space. Their idea of poverty, for example, the poverty of the monk, is not poverty as we have thought of it in the Western tradition. It isn’t that poverty is a sort of oppression. The poor are deprived, and they feel denuded by poverty. Poverty is simply an absence. It’s a pain. In Zen, voluntary poverty is considered not really what is poverty so much as simplicity: freedom, unclutteredness. And they have the same meaning for purity. When the pure mind—this again, taintless. Purity means not that you are a prude. They don’t think of purity in that sense at all. It doesn’t mean not having any appetites, not feeling hungry, never feeling sexy, or anything like that. Purity means clarity. A pure eye is a clear eye, without sort of dust on it. A pure mirror is a mirror without dust. But the real prototype of purity in Buddhistic literature is not so much the mirror, as space itself. That is purity. It is clarity. It is transparency. It is also freedom.

And this is a peculiarly noticeable thing about the personality of Zen people: is the uncluttered mind. When you deal with a Zen master, you have a strange feeling that so long as you are related to him and addressing him, he is absolutely with you. He has nothing else to do but to talk to you. He’s just right there like that. But he’s willing, also—Zen masters do have some small talk. They’re not like those terribly serious spiritual people who have no small talk at all, and who can’t just pass the time of day. They’re not like that. But, on the other hand, they don’t waste time. They’re never distracted. They don’t dither around. And so when something is finished, it’s finished, and they go right on to the next thing.

You can see this in the way they walk. They have a characteristic walk which is quite different from other Japanese people’s walk. This may be partly due to dress, because the Japanese kimono, in a way (and especially the sandals that are worn), cause people to shuffle. Most people shuffle down the street. Zen monks have a wider skirt on the robe and they stride. And they stride with a kind of a rhythm that is completely characteristic. You know when you see a cat crossing the road, the cat always looks as if it knows where it’s going. There’s something about a cat that is—it just goes across the road. And a Zen monk walking down the street is exactly like a cat crossing the road. There’s the same feeling of freedom.

I remember one morning I was staying in an inn on the edge of Nanzen-ji, on the northeast corner of Kyoto. And I was, as I usually do, I get up very early and sit on the balcony. And I heard in the distance this sound. Ho! Ho! Ho! Ho! It came nearer and nearer, and I saw these monks with their big mushroom hats on and their begging bowls out in front, like this. Ho means the dharma. And they were coming with this boom-boom-boom-boom-boom-boom swinging walk down the street. Well, I thought I’ll put something in the bowl, you know, and I shot downstairs. But by the time I got downstairs, they’d gone.

So we had dinner in the monastery that night, and I said to the priest who was entertaining us, I told him this incident, and I said, “You know, I don’t think your monks are serious about begging. Because in the early morning the little cart comes with groceries. And the little cart stays around long enough for the housewives to come out and buy the vegetables. At night there comes a man who sells ramen, which is noodle soup, on the little cart. And he stays around long enough for people to come out. But your monks don’t stay around long enough for anybody to give them anything. I don’t think they’re really begging at all. They’re just fat and rich, and they’re begging as a gesture.” The next morning, I—what?

2:34:52

Watts

No, he didn’t say anything. He laughed, you know? The next morning I went down, and I stood on the lower level. And he monks came by, but they weren’t begging. They carried the big mushroom hat in their hands, in front of them, like this, pointing outwards. When they’re not begging, they’re just walking. And the lead monk—there were about three of them, walking single file, Indian file—and he looked at me and bowed with a kind of evil grin. I don’t know whether the priest told them, but it is so interesting the way they’ve got this free walk.

It looks… you have a sense—Suzuki put it this way: a Zen monk is a concentration of energy which is available immediately for anything. This is likened in one of the master’s writings that, when you have water in a vessel and you make a hole, the water is immediately available to come out. It doesn’t stop to think. It immediately comes out. So, also, when you clap your hands, the sound is the clapping of the hands: it comes out at once. It doesn’t stop to think. When you strike a stone with steel, the sparks are there immediately. So, in the same way, there is this always availability, always readiness, to act. And therefore, they live a life which is empty, spacious, in the sense of being unblocked. In the way that we use the word “blocking” in psychology, and we say, “You’re blocking” to somebody who’s got a hang-up and they can’t get around it. “You’re blocking.” So to get rid of blocks is to have space in one’s life. It’s the same old space we’ve been talking about all along.

So then, the heart doctrine of Buddhism—the final feeling about the universe at the end of the line, when you really get down to it—is called in Japanese jiji muge, in Chinese shì shì wú ài. Between all things and events in the universe (muge), there is no block. In other words, everything in the universe, every event that ever happens, implies all the others, and the connection between them is space—which is no block.

So let’s have an intermission.

Well, now I want to go into the subject, finally. If we say that Zen is a certain kind of understanding of the world, a certain kind of awareness of the world, what kind of awareness is it? It’s very often said, especially in the writings of Suzuki, that Zen lies beyond the intellect, beyond logic, that this kind of understanding is not accessible to reasoning processes, to intellectual processes. What exactly does this mean?

I think you know that, from some points of view, this way of talking is misleading. Because when we say intellectualizing and the Japanese say intellectualizing, we don’t necessarily mean the same thing. For example, when the Indians say the knowledge of Vedanta is not to be obtained from books, this has a very specific meaning. It means that the books are only lecture notes, and have to be explained by a teacher. Take the Yoga Sutra of Patanjali: the first verse in it says, “Now yoga is explained.” Period. Second verse, and so on. So the teacher will say—this is just to remind him, just in the same way as musical notation for the Indians is not something you read while you play, it’s just to remind you of the basic form of the melody. So he will say, “The word ‘now’ indicates that something had to go before this. There’s a preparation. And the preparation is thus and so, that you should have learned before you started studying yoga at all.” So the word “now” gives him the clue for his pitch. And so, in the same way, the Upanishads, their laconic style, they are simply notes. This is especially true of the Brahma Sutras. And if you buy—right down here is Radhakrishnan’s translation of the Brahma Sutras, and you see these funny little laconic verses from the sutra, and then pages of Radhakrishnan’s commentary. That’s the original reason why it said you can’t get it from books.

But now, so we’ve got to go into what is meant by the difference between intellectual understanding and intuitive understanding. Because so many people say about this, when you talk about these deep matters, “I understand what you are saying intellectually, but I don’t really feel it.” And I often say to people who make that remark, “Well, I don’t think you understand it intellectually.” Because the intellect and the feelings aren’t really two different compartments of the mind. You know, Jung has a schema of the mind as having four functions: intellect, feeling, intuition, and sensation. But these are only, as it were, colors in a spectrum. The spectrum of light is continuous. Red is not in a different compartment from blue. It’s all one spectrum. And so, in the same way, we have one mind, and it has various different ways of functioning.

I was being ribbed by a psychologist the other day, because he was kidding me that I was only proficient in words. You know, I put on a great talk, but I didn’t understand it otherwise, he said. I said, “Don’t you put down words like that. Words are noises in the air. They are patterns of thought, patterns of intellect, like a fern. Do you put down a fern because it’s a complicated pattern? No, you say the fern is real. It’s a living, natural thing. Well, I say: so are words. I’ll make patterns in the air with words, and make all sorts of concepts and string them together, and they’re going to be great. And so don’t you put it down. It’s a form of life like any other form of life.”

And so, indeed, Zen has an intellectual aspect. The intellectual aspect of Zen is known in Japanese as kegon, in Chinese as huayan. Huayan in Chinese, kegon in Japanese. And this is—hua means “flower.” The school of the flower garland, the school of what is called in Sanskrit gaṇḍavyūha. I won’t write that up on the board; you’re not going to remember that. Gaṇḍavyūha. This is the most sophisticated form of Mahayana philosophy. When we were talking this morning about jiji muge, the mutual interpenetration of all things and events, that is the philosophy evolved in this school. And the fifth patriarch of this school in China was also a Zen master. His name was Shūmitsu. And so, with him these two channels flow together.

And, just as in yoga, there are various forms of yoga. There’s bhakti yoga, which is the feeling kind of thing. It’s devotional, emotional. Karma yoga is practical and active. And so vijnana yoga is intellectual. But you might say so many people now have difficulty in seeing the bridge between the intellectual (understanding), which is to say: you know the words, but you don’t get a real sense of the meaning so that your sense experience has changed. When we say an intuitive understanding, this word intuition is awfully vague. Zen understanding is sensuous. It’s something that you feel, not so much in an emotional way, as in a direct way. When you feel that something is hard. As they say, it is like tasting water and knowing for yourself that it’s cold. It’s a sensation, a physical sensation. But now, how is the intellect related or unrelated to physical sensation?

Well, what difference does it make to your sensation whether you think, when the sun rises, that the sun is rising, or whether you know that the Earth is revolving on its axis and going around the sun? Is the sensation of a person who does not know that the Earth is revolving on its own axis and going around the sun the same as the sensation of a person who does when he sees the sun rise? Or let’s take another question. There are people in this world (“primitives,” we would call them) whose number system only extends to one, two, three, many. They don’t differentiate after three. For those people it can never be a fact that a table has four corners; it has many corners. And they can’t differentiate clearly between a five- and six-corner table, because they have no concept system to give them the cue. Or you can take an illustration like this; very simple. It all depends on the concept. Now, if you have no concepts, that drawing is simply a flat surface pattern. But supposing it’s been explained to you that it’s a cube, then you can imagine and actually sense three-dimensionality in it. Now then, let’s go further and ask: which surface of the cube is in front? Is it the one with corners A, or is it the one with corners B? You can see it either way, you see? You can make either one the front one. And once you’ve caught on to the idea, it is a sensation for you. You actually feel it.

So this is the difference, you see: concepts lead to sensations, and therefore false concepts lead to illusions. We can know all kinds of cases of optical illusions. When, for example, you have two lines here that are of exactly equal length. But if we do this to one and this to the other—wowee! Suddenly that one’s grown short. And that has to do with our concept influencing our sensation. So it is a point in Zen: we have a concept of our own existence and of the world which is fallacious. It is going to help us get rid of that concept so that we will have a new sensation. Now, people then get worried and say, “Well, are we just going to exchange one hallucination for another?” How do you know when you know that you know? What’s the test of truth about something that you feel? You say, “Well, I can feel that I’m Napoleon, or that I’m being persecuted by the Freemasons,” or something like that, or the FDA. And this is a hallucination—even though I might feel it very strongly.

And so, in our culture we have a test of truth, which is science. We say if something can be demonstrated scientifically, then we’re inclined to believe that it’s not a hallucination. Alright, let’s go along with that. I think this is rather relative, but still, I will always, in any argument, grant the premises of the person who wants to argue with me. We’ll just take it from there. Let’s take it that science, that things like biology and physics, are ways of discovering the truth. Let’s grant that. Well, the hallucination of being a separate ego will not stand up to biological tests. From the point of view of biology, the individual organism is in the same behavior system as the environment. The organism and the environment constitute a single system of behavior—which is not deterministic nor voluntaristic. It’s neither. It just is that the two are one activity. So they call this field the organism–environment, and ecology is the study of fields like that.

So when I go into academic circles where people find that matters mystical are not at all respected, I don’t talk to them about mystical experience, I talk to them about ecological awareness. It’s just a matter of preserving correct etiquette and nomenclature; when in Rome, do as Rome does. So from a biological point of view it is perfectly clear that every individual instance of life is a function of the whole universe. This is even more clear in quantum theory. And so, then, you might ask this question: “Well, you scientists, biologists, and physicists who understand this to be so, you still go on behaving as if you were separate egos. And you still feel that way, don’t you?” And they have to confess that they do; that their theory is only still at the point of being theory. It hasn’t convinced them so far as they themselves are concerned, because they are still under the social hypnosis which wee were all conditioned to in childhood, which made us feel to be separate egos.

So Zen is a process, if you like, of dehypnotization which takes away the concepts such as these tricks here, which give us the hallucination as this gives us a hallucination. And then, when we find out what things are like when the concepts have been taken away, then we can say to the biologist, “Isn’t that just the way you said it was?” And he has to agree. So what we arrive at is a state of sensation—I’ll call it that rather than feeling—which is far more in accord with the findings of science than the ordinary sensation we have of being separate individuals.

But the way in which Zen is non-intellectual is not so much that it regards intellection as something always false and misleading. Zen begins by taking away the concepts and trying to see what it would be like to view the world without concepts. Then, when you’ve got a new view, you can re-fabricate new concepts to try and explain now hos it is that you see. And thus, for this reason, many Zen masters—people like… well, Suzuki was not formally speaking to Zen masters, but he had the most profound understanding of Zen, but he’s also a great intellectual and a scholar. This man I’m mentioning—Schumitz—was a great scholar. And in the history of Zen there have been physicists in modern times and scholars of all kinds. Because Zen does not rule out the life of the intellect. It only says: do not be hoaxed by concepts.

Now then, is Zen illogical? Illogical is not the right word, because what appear in Zen often to be paradoxes are statements that make perfectly good sense in another system of logic than that to which we are accustomed. We in the West are accustomed to a kind of logical thinking which is based on exclusiveness: either–or. Chinese logic is based rather on both–and. It is either black or white, it either is or is not, it is either so or it is not so. This is the kind of logic which is fundamental to our thinking, and so we emphasize the mutually exclusive character of categories. Is you is or is you ain’t? Is it in the box or is it outside the box? So in our tests we are always saying: true or false? Yes or no? And giving you only these choices. It’s amusing to think that when you toss a coin to decide whether you will do it or whether you won’t, you have only a two-sided coin. The Chinese are able to toss a 64-sided coin by using the Book of Changes for the same reasons that we would toss a coin for. It’s a rather nice idea, even though the Book of Changes is based on yang and yin, black or white. But you can get everything out of black and white, as I pointed out. You can get all numbers out of zero and one, which is the binary arithmetic used by computers.

But, at any rate, whereas we think it is either–or, either black or white, both Indian and Chinese logic recognize that black and white are inseparable. They need each other. And so it isn’t a matter of choice between them. To be or not to be is not the question, because you can’t have one without the other. So, always, not being implies being, just as being implies not being. The existentialist in the West who still trembles at the choice between being and not being, and therefore says that anxiety is ontological, hasn’t seen this point yet. When the existentialist who trembles with anxiety before this choice realizes suddenly one day that not being implies being, the trembling of anxiety turns into the shaking of laughter. Same shakes, but different meaning.

So, in the same way, the same sensation of the world, just as you’re looking at now, seeing everything that you see now, but it can have a completely different feeling to it; a completely different meaning to it. Because in our ordinary sensation of the world, what is stressed are the differentiations, the solids. And the space, as I pointed out this morning, is ignored. But when you have a kind of a conceptual alteration, then suddenly you notice the physical world, just everything you’re seeing now, in a completely different way. And you see that it all goes together, it’s all of a piece, that every inside implies its outside, and every outside implies its inside.

You say, now, in the ordinary way we are conditioned to think, “I/me/myself lies only on the inside of my skin.” When you do this flip, you’ll discover that your outside is as much you as your inside. You can’t have an inside without an outside. So if the inside is yours, the outside is yours. You have to acknowledge that the world outside the skin is as much yours as the world inside the skin. Everybody’s outside is different, just as everybody’s inside is different. But eventually, everybody’s outside is all the same outdoors. See? And it’s in this way that we are one. Your body is in your soul, not your soul in your body.

That’s why the ancients were partly correct with their horoscopy when, to draw a map of a person’s soul, they drew a very crude map of the universe as it was at the moment of that person’s birth. Seen from that place in that time, that is a picture of his mind. Because your mind is not in your head, your head is in your mind. And your mind is the total system of cosmic interrelationships as they are focused at the point you call here and now.

So the thing is, then: can this become clear to us, as we say a sensation is clear? Tasting water and knowing for yourself that it’s cold. And this will depend upon an intellectual process. Because we get into trouble through an intellectual process, and we’re going to get out of trouble through an intellectual process. But the process, from an intellectual standpoint, by which we get into trouble could be called additive, the process by which we get out of trouble is subtractive. In the words of Lao Tzu: “The scholar gains every day, the man of Tao loses every day.” The scholar acquires ideas. In Zen, the intellectual operation is to get rid of ideas and see, in other words, that all ideas are projections that we make upon the cosmic Rorschach blot.

You know the world is a Rorschach blot. It is full of wiggles. And only when we see straight lines, gridiron patterns, that we know people have been around. Because people are always trying to straighten things out. And so—straight lines. Look at the stars; how they are sprayed across the heaven. But in order to make sense of the stars, you get stellar maps and you see straight lines joining the stars in various patterns so as to make up constellations. All those joining lines are projections by which we make sense of the stars. In the same way, we make projections upon the surface of nature for the purpose of discussing it with each other. And a bossy person who’s got a strong will and a powerful and compelling personality describes the world and forces everybody else to agree with him. That’s the way it is. Then, and after a few generations, they forget that they were forced into it and think it’s the way it is.

So now, let’s go back, then, to seeing that it is the primordial Rorschach blot. Wiggles of the world unite. You have nothing to lose but your names. And you see then that the difference between your inside (your ego, your self) and the outside (the subject perceiver and the object perceived), you see that that difference is artificial. And you can confirm that realization from neurology. Because the neurologist will tell you that the so-called external world which you see is experienced by you only as a state of your own nervous system. What you see out in front of you is an experience in the nerve ganglia in the back of your head. You have no other awareness of an external world, except in terms of your own body. You can infer that your body is, in turn, something in the external world, but you only know it by union with it. You are in the external world. The biologist will tell you that you are an inseparable part of it.

“Part” isn’t even the right word. The world doesn’t have parts like an automobile engine. It isn’t screwed together. The world is like a body. When your body was born, it grew not by the addition of bits, but by an organic process in which the whole thing constellated itself at once, larger and larger, working from the inside to the outside. And it did that, and could only do that, in a field called the womb. And the womb could only do that in a field called a female body. And a female body could only do that in a field called human society, in a field called the biosphere of the planet Earth. Take the thing out of its field and it can’t do it. Blood in a test tube cannot do what blood in the veins does, because it’s not the same thing. It’s in a different environment. And as words change their meaning in accordance with the context of the sentence, so things change their nature in accordance with the context of their environment.

So then, from this very strictly scientific point of view, your body and everything, your mind, is not (as it is usually felt by us) to be something separated from other minds and the external world. It is all one process. But we don’t feel that to be so because we have been given concepts which contradict the facts. So the concept of, say, what we might call the Christian ego does not fit the facts of life. It is a social institution which is obsolete.

I want to be quite sure that you understand what I mean by a social institution. When we say social institution, people think of things like hospitals, parliaments, police forces, fire departments, and things like that. No, marriage is a social institution. The family is a social institution. The clock is a social institution. The calendar is. Latitude and longitude are social institutions. And the ego is a social institution. In other words, a convention—from the Latin convenere: “to come together,” “a consensus,” “an agreement.” Agreeing to a set of rules for the purpose of playing a game.

And what we do is: we are apt to confuse the rules of our social game with the laws of nature, with the way things are. Even the laws of nature are social conventions. Because the laws of nature—nature is not obeying a lawgiver who says. first of all, “This is the way things shall go,” and then all beetles, all butterflies, all rocks and so on follow it. The laws of nature are our way of describing regular behavior in nature. Just as when you—what is regular? Why, regulus is a rule. And what is a rule? Why, a ruler. It is marked out in inches. It is straight. You measure things with it. But you don’t find rulers growing on trees any more than you get cut up friers out of an egg. Nature is all of a piece. Everything in it goes with everything else in it in an eternal dance, but we chop it up for purposes of discussion and for purposes of ruling it. Laws of nature are therefore like axes, hammers, and saws. They are instruments, in terms of: by using them, we control what is going on.

So then, always preserve this careful distinction between the game rules of the human game and the behavior of the world in itself. It’s true, the behavior of the world in itself includes the human games. That’s all part of nature. But don’t try to make the tail wag the dog.

So the whole point of Zen is to suspend the rules. This must be done, of course, in a special setting. You can’t just gaily walk out into the street and suspend the rules, because you would create traffic confusion of every conceivable kind. But we can, however, set up a certain environment in which we have an agreement to suspend the rules—that is to say: to meditate, to stop thinking for a while, and to stop making formulations. Basically this means to stop talking to yourself. That’s what is the meaning of this term, really, in Japanese, munen—ordinarily translated “no thought.” Munen: stop talking to yourself. As we say: “Talking to yourself is is the first sign of madness.” Because, you see, if you talk all the time, you’ve nothing else to talk about but your own talking. You never listen to what anybody else has to say. All you ever listen to is talking—whether your own or other people’s—you’ve nothing to talk about at all. You have to stop talking in order to have something to talk about. So, in the same way, you have to stop thinking to have something to think about. Otherwise, all you’re thinking about is thoughts. That’s scholarship as they practice it in the Academy today: books about books about books about books about books.

But so, in order to be able to symbolize, to think, one occasionally has to suspend thought and be in a state of what I will call pure sensation. So, drinking water and knowing for yourself that it’s cold. Sitting just to sit. “Sitting quietly, doing nothing. Spring comes and the grass grows by itself.” You could take that literally or you could take it symbolically. But that is the meaning of munen, or sometimes just mushin: “no mind.” It means being open to the way the world is experienced sensuously, but without the distortion of concepts, so as to find the original nature before any thought is made. It’ll be the way you experienced it when you were first born; when, before you’d thought any thoughts about. That’s why it’s called your original mind; the root mind.

So when it’s asked, “Who are you before your father and mother conceived you?”—which is one of the kōans—it really means: who are you before your father and mother bamboozled you? Conceived in the sense of thought about you? Taught you to conceive? What’s your original mind? Come off it—before all this started, where were you really? And to go back to that, you see, you have to take a fresh look at the world. You have to come to it unprejudiced, with your mind wiped clean. And that means clean, like a mirror, of all conceptions about life and what it is.

Now, you see, I’m giving you conceptions in the sense that I’m talking about, say, biology or ecology or something, and they have a conception of the unity of the world. And a person who understands me and gets the conception, the difficulty is he’s only got the conception. It may alter his feeling to some extent, his sensation, but not as vividly as his sensation will be altered if he looks at the world without any conceptions at all. Well, you would say: how can you stop? We think perpetually; always talking to ourselves. It’s a nervous habit. And so to stop thinking, naturally one thinks up certain technical helps. Concentrate on breathing. Think of nothing but your breathing: in and out, in and out. One, two, three, four, five. One, two, three, four, five. Or look at a point of light and think of nothing else but the point of light. Concentrate, concentrate, concentrate. This helps you to eliminate all concepts from the mind, except what you’re concentrating on. Then the next thing is to get rid of the point you’re concentrating on.

Now, most people think that means a blank mind. No. You see, you concentrate on something in order to cause the thought process, the verbalizing, to stop. Then, when you take away the point of concentration, you are simply perceiving the world as is without verbalizing. Because the verbalizing has been stopped by the trick of concentrating. Concentration is only preliminary. Samādhi or dhyana or Zen is not concentration in the ordinary sense, like staring at a point or thinking of one thing only. It is after concentration has stopped that you’ve taken away the point on which you concentrated, and you’re open to the world with your naked senses. See that.

Now, that is the foundation experience. After you see that, and on the basis of seeing that, you can of course go back to concepts and construct this idea of the world, that idea, and the other idea. So this is why Zen does not involve any beliefs in any theory or doctrine. In this sense it is not religion—if by religion you mean something which involves a system of beliefs. It is purely experimental and empirical in its approach, and it is getting rid of belief, getting rid of all dependence upon words and ideas. Not because words and ideas are evil, not because they are necessarily confusing, but because we do just happen to be confused by them at this stage in our history, evolution, or what you will.

So that really is the essential nature of the whole meditation process: the suspension of talking to yourself either in words or any other conceptual image—numbers or whatever you use. And so it is of interest, isn’t it, that words are a form of notation. A notation of life, like musical notation is a way of writing down music so as to remember it. When we have words, they are the essential vehicles of memory. Write it down, remember it. And they give us a wonderful control. But we pay a price for that. To the extent that we are tied to our notations—say, in music—that limits our musical ability. The Hindu is not tied to notes in music. He therefore values a kind of music which is a musical instrument—drum, flute, sitar, whatever—which is immediately responsive to every subtle motion of the human organism. He therefore plays things which, if we put it into our notation, we should have to get the most freaky quarter tones and funny rhythms which our notation isn’t set up for. The Hindu therefore rejoices in the extreme subtlety of a flute responsive to human breath, on organic phenomena. When he listens to our music, it all sounds like a military march because of the regular beat and the fixed harmonic intervals. It all sounds very, very structured and rigid.

So, in the same way, when you get free from certain fixed concepts of the way the world is, you find it is far more subtle than you thought it was. That human relationships, situations, are amazingly subtle. And you gain a facility for understanding them, not through conceptualizing them, but through asking your brain how it would deal with them. See, your brain is an organ like your heart, and it can deal with situations without having to think about them. The brain is not a thinking organ. One of its functions is thinking. The brain does a lot of things other than thinking. It’s as if you had a fantastic computer in your skull, and it’s a good idea to use it. And, as we say, our brains are only 15% efficient. That’s a way of talking. It’s saying, really, that what we call thinking is only 15% of the brain’s activity. The brain is very active, controlling all our organic processes, our gland functions, our digestion, our circulation, everything. The brain is in control of the whole autonomic nervous system.

So Zen proposes that you learn to use your nervous system, which is much more wonderful than you would ever suppose. And it gives you practice. The kōan is, to a great extent, a situation in which you get practice for letting your nervous system answer questions and pass through problems, instead of just your conscious thinking process. The conscious thinking process will not solve the puzzles. The brain will.