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You don’t ask: what does Mozart mean? You just listen to Mozart. It’s great.
So you don’t ask what the universe means. Well, now, in a way, this meditation method of just letting your mind alone and let it go where it wants to go has the same disadvantage as lying down on the floor: you may go to sleep. But don’t worry about that too much, especially if you do it early in the morning.
And, on waking, immediately, is the easiest time. You’re just in that moment between sleeping and waking. You will find you are in a very fascinatingly clear state of mind.
That’s the ideal hour of the day for having an experience of cosmic consciousness. And you can move right into it at that point—don’t get up immediately, just lay flat out. You may want to do something or other to refresh yourself a little, like taking a drink of water or something, but right at that moment you find you can have extraordinary clarity.
And then you see—as you go on—it begins to become clear to you that there really is no one separate from this changing stream of feelings who’s having them; they’re just there. And in that moment the problem of what to do about yourself vanishes because there is no separate self. Thereafter, the most fascinating thing that follows from this is that you can keep up meditation while thinking.
This is why a Zen master can also be a scholar and an intellectual: because the way he does his thinking is exactly the way as he sweeps a floor or meditates. There is no illusion of the thinker doing the thinking, there is just the thinking process. And therefore, he doesn’t get misled and bamboozled by his thoughts.
So, you see, it’s very important to emphasize this because the process of meditation is not anti-intellectual. In fact, it is—I would say—a basic requisite for leading the intellectual life because the person who lives the intellectual life is, of all people, the most liable to be bamboozled with words. And that’s the besetting danger of all academicians.
That’s why they get so stuffy and doubty, and they suffer from intellectual porcupinism. They’re always prickly and querulous, and so on. So the reason is they’re starved.
They don’t have anything to think about except thoughts, and they write books about books. And they don’t, therefore, have any first-hand experience of life to use for thinking; to think about. So—of all places—in a university is the place where meditation should be practiced; of getting out of thought for some time of the day.
This refreshes the intellectual life. This gives it a zip and a quality so that, as you begin, like Suzuki—old D. T. Suzuki—he was a great intellectual. But he practiced scholarship in the same natural way that one would sail a boat, or watch clouds.
So that he was never (in his pursuit of scholarship) cantankerous and pretentious, he was never pedantic. And, of course, in the field of sinology today in the United States you will find some of the most pedantic people in existence. It’s represented by the Journal of the American Oriental Society, which is a testy, quarrelsome, bitchy journal.
Everybody’s going kkrk, kkrk, kkrk at everybody else. And when, you know—a scholar doesn’t always have to be a scholar. You can write a scholarly book.
I wrote a book called The Way of Zen, which is rather scholarly. But then I can do a movie called The Mood of Zen which isn’t scholarly at all, which is just creating an atmosphere. But boy do the scholars hate it!
They say, “This is of no value at all. This is just…” And they call you a popularizer. And they call Suzuki a popularizer because he didn’t put in the right kind of footnotes.
He was a little vague about some things. But he had forgotten than most of them ever knew! So, in this way you can sit light to intellectuality.
It’s a very good thing, because otherwise you become hopelessly ponderous. You become a sort of mechanical, tick-tock being that is full of—it’s like you put fish in your mouth, and the whole thing were very small bones with no meat on them at all. And that’s the sort of feeling you finally get from being over-intellectual.
So, really, I do want to make this plain, because so many people think that the domains of the intellect and the domain of intuition are mutually exclusive. They’re not. It’s only: people keep saying, “I understand what you say intellectually, but I don’t really feel it.” And, therefore, seem to think that an intellectual understanding may even be an obstacle.
And a lot of teachers sometimes give that point of view. They say, “The more you think about it, the further you are from it.” But I don’t think that’s true. At least it’s oversimplifying the matter.
If you’ve got an intellect, you must use it. It’s a divine gift. It’s a talent.
And nobody can make the sacrifice of the intellect unless they’ve got one to sacrifice. A lot of fanatics think they’ve made the sacrifice of the intellect and say, “I’ve given up my private opinions, and I’m purely obedient to holy scripture”—or whatever; authority. And that’s a lot of—if I may say so—bullshit!
Either they haven’t thought it through, or else they are concealing from themselves that their obedience to scripture is, at root, their own personal opinion. So there isn’t this antagonism. It’s very—if you’ve got an intellect at all, it’s very important that you think things through as far as they can be thought through.
But, you see, your intellect will eventually tell you its own limitations. It will—in other words—say, “I have a certain function (as intellect) just like the dial on the telephone has a certain function.” And if you spell out questions about the existence of God on the dial of the telephone, you’ll be told to go to hell! That’s not its function!
And so you can easily see—as I’ve tried to explain to you—that the thought process has limitations; that there are things it will not do. It is the symbolizing of the world, but it is not the real world—except insofar as: thoughts are, themselves, vibrations. That’s (how I was discussing yesterday) that you can say words, and listen to the words simply as sounds.
Then you’re getting in closer contact with the real world; with the vibration that’s at the basis of everything. So thought itself tells you that it can’t go all the way. And then, when you understand that, thought naturally gives up.
And you become quiet. Let it go. Let all the senses go.
And eventually you find you’re quiet, and you’re centered, and still. But don’t make an exercise of it! Dōgen, the great Japanese Sōtō Zen master, always told his students, “Do not practice zazen to attain satori.
Sit just to sit. This, already—practicing zazen—is being a Buddha.” This is sitting like a Buddha. And if you do it with an ulterior motive, you’re not doing it.
There is nowhere to go. So, likewise, if you practice centering on the present, you can’t do it with an objective, because you’re off it. And so: in action.
And you try to do what Gurdjieff calls self-remembering, and you’ve always got your mind on the present, and you’re fully aware of what you’re doing all the time—see?—then, eventually, you will discover that there is nothing else you can do. Because if you think about the past, that’s happening now. Think about the future—that’s happening now.
There is nothing else but now! So then, when you discover that, meditation becomes automatic. You’re always in it.
Only: you have to be stupid and exercise a little folly in order to find it out; that is: to try to be there. You see? That’s putting legs on a snake, or a beard on a eunuch.
Or we would say gilding the lily. But somehow, to wake up, that has to happen. So it’s a most marvelous discovery, you see, when you’ve been working to try an center, to be present, to be alert and awake, and be just here.
And you work at it, and work at it, and one day you go boing! There is nowhere else to be! And then you get a very strange sensation.
It seems that the now and you are all the same. And it’s like a stream which is moving along, carrying you, but not going anywhere. It moves and doesn’t move.
It’s like looking at a blot, like a Rorschach blot, and seeing the blot running—but into the place where it is. Everything is moving into where it is. And this is state called eternal now.
This is the meaning of eternity. Eternity isn’t static. So, this is the meaning of the Zen poem which says: Now, the title of the seminar is a very strange word, translatable into English as “thusness” or “suchness;” in Sanskrit: tathātā.
And this is based on the Sanskrit word tat, which is etymologically the root of our word “that.” And it’s supposed—in India, you see—that this is the first word that a baby says. We all know babies say, “da da da,” and in our highly paternalistic culture it’s assumed that the baby is addressing its father. And so “da da” means “father.” But in India, which is where the cultures anciently were matriarchal, it didn’t even mean “mother,” but “da,” which was the fundamental word of all words.
It is the baby pointing to it and saying “that.” Because when the baby wakes up and is, as I said last night, an aperture through which the All looks at everything, the great and proper exclamation when it sees it is to say “da!” And so tathātā is “da da da.” And it means just exactly that, in the same way as there was a Dada school of painting in the West, because they wanted to go beyond words and names. Because a Dada would argue when you call a dog a “dog,” it doesn’t sound anything like a dog sounds. Or a chien, in French, sounds nothing like a dog.
But if you called a dog rrruff-rrruff, that would be a proper name for a dog. So this is a fundamental word. And we have great difficulty in translating it because, in a way, it’s a meaningless word.
Now then, in order to understand this subject properly I must not take too much for granted. I have to give you some introduction to Buddhism, because this is all part of Buddhist philosophy. And Buddhism finds its context in the philosophy of India.
And we have to go, first of all, very thoroughly into what Buddhism is about. And the first thing I want you to understand about Buddhism (that very few people do understand) is that Buddhism does not have a doctrine in the same sense that Christianity has a doctrine. There could be no such thing as a Buddhist creed.
The word dharma, in Sanskrit, which describes what Buddhism is, Buddhism is called the Buddhadharma. Dharma means “method.” Not doctrine, not law. It’s often translated “law.” That won’t do at all.
Dharma sometimes means “function.” The function of somebody, his svadharma, means roughly what we would call his vocation. Dharma can also mean, in a peculiar way, a thing: a basic portion of the world, a thing or event. But its primary meaning as used in the phrase Buddhadharma is “method.” And so Buddhism is a method for something or other.
And so for this reason all Buddhism is a dialectic: a discussion, an interchange between a preceptor or guru or teacher and his student. Between the Buddha and his disciples. Now, what is it about?
First of all, the word Buddha comes from a Sanskrit root budh. And budh means “to be awake.” So a Buddha is a person who is awake. It is therefore a title.
It’s not a proper name and it’s not the name of a divinity. There are many, many gods recognized—angels we might rather call them—in Buddhism, but they are regarded as being inferior to a Buddha. The gods are not yet fully awakened.
Buddhism divides the world into six divisions. And this is very important for understanding what’s it about. And you don’t have to take these six divisions literally, because they may equally well refer to states of human consciousness.
But the six divisions are like this. You see, you draw the circle of the wheel of life, and in the top section of the circle you have the deva world. And deva—from which we get our word “devil”—actually means the angels.
The reason is this: that when the the Iranians had battles with the Aryans, the Northern Indians, the Northern Indians called their gods deva. So the Persians insulted them by using that word for devils. And then they had here asura, who are in this division.
And these are spirits of wrath, and so opposite ahura, in Persian Ahura Mazda is the lord of light. Because they were enemies. But so, here are the Devas on top.
Next to them on this side are the powers of divine wrath in the sense of energy, vigor. And below, opposite the devas, are the naraka. And those are the purgatories.
That’s where everybody is as unhappy as they can possibly be. Here are animals, in this section. Here are men and women.
And here are things called pretas. Pretas are frustrated spirits with very large stomachs and very small mouths. Now, this is the rat race of existence called saṃsāra in Sanskrit.
Saṃsāra: the round of birth and death. And this is the zenith, and this is the nadir. This is as high as you can get, that’s as low as you can get.
And that’s always going to happen to you while you work on the principle of a squirrel cage. That is to say: so long as you are trying to make progress, you will go up. But up always implies down.
So while you are trying to get better and better and better, that means that when you get to the best you can only go on to the worst. And so you go round and round and round, ever chasing the illusion that there is something outside yourself—outside your here and now—to be attained that will make things better. And the thing is to recover from that illusion.
So a Buddha means somebody who has woken up and discovered that running around this thing may be fun, and it may be good to run around, but if you think you’re going to get something out of it, you’re under illusion. Because you’re forever the donkey with a carrot suspended from his own halter. Now then, it goes on to say that there’s only one place, one point, in this wheel from which you can become a Buddha, and that’s here.
The devas are too happy to become Buddhas, or to worry about becoming a Buddha. The narakas are too miserable, the asuras are too angry, the animals are too dumb, and the pretas too frustrated. Only in the middle position, the position of man—which is, you could say, the equal position; the position of sufficient equanimity to begin to think about getting off this rat race—only from there, you see, can you become a Buddha.
So the position of a Buddha may be represented either as not on the wheel at all, or as right in the middle of it. It makes no difference. And so he is just as, in a way, the axle point—the still point of the turning world, as to use T. S. Eliot’s phrase—is the unmoved center, the Unmoved Mover, the Primum Mobile, the axletree of the world.
Also the navel: that’s why yogis are said to contemplate their navel. The navel isn’t on their tummy, it’s this place. The navel of the world.
So that’s the scheme of cosmology, of ancient Indian cosmology, in which Buddhism arises. So, you see, therefore: a Buddha is one who awakens from the illusion of saṃsāra—that is: from the thought that there is something to get out of life; that tomorrow will bring it to you; that, in the course of time, it’ll be alright. And therefore one is set pursuing time, as if you were trying to quench your thirst by drinking salt water.
Now, I can exemplify this a little more strongly by relating Buddhism to the social system in which it arose. A Buddhist monk is sometimes called a śramaṇa. This is closely allied to the word “shaman.” And a shaman is the holy man in a culture that is still hunting.
It isn’t settled, it isn’t agrarian. There is a very strong and important difference between a shaman and a priest. A priest receives his ordination from his superiors; he receives something from a tradition which is handed down.
A shaman doesn’t. He receives his enlightenment by going off into the forest by himself to be completely alone. A shaman is a man, in other words, who has undergone solitariness.
He’s gone away into the forest to find out who he really is. Because it’s very difficult to find that out while you’re with other people. And the reason is that other people are busy all the time telling you who you are in many, many ways: by the laws they impose on you, by the behavior ruts they set on you, by the things they tell you, by the fact that they always call you by your name, and by the fact that when you live among people, you have to be in a state of ceaseless chatter.
But if you want to find out who you are before your father and mother conceived you—who you really are—you almost have to go off by yourself, and go into the forest and stop talking, even stop thinking words, and be absolutely alone and listen to the great silences. And then, if you’re lucky, you recover from the illusion that you’re just little me, this so and so, and you attain the state of nirvāṇa, which means the blown-out state, the relieved state; the sigh of relief. Nirvāṇa may be translated into English as “phew!” I’ve at last discovered that I don’t have to survive.
I can survive, of course, but I don’t really have to. Because you discover, you see, that what you really are doesn’t have to survive, because it’s what there is. The real you is It, or that.
Tát tvam ási: “that art thou,” as the Hindu say. So then, in the normal life of India—which is not a hunting culture, but a settled culture—there are priests, but there is something beyond the priest. That is to say, when a man or woman has fulfilled his or her life in the world of society, it’s the normal thing to do for a person to quit their status in society and become what’s called a “forest-dweller.” That is almost, you see, to go back to the hunting culture.
They divide people into two classes: gṛhastha, which means “householder,” and vānaprastha, which means “forest-dweller.” And the older people all hand over their occupations and positions to their children, and go into the state of vānaprastha or become a śramaṇa, and go outside the stockade—I’m speaking metaphorically; they sometimes do actually, they sometimes don’t—and become a nobody. They give up their name—that is to say, the label which designates who they are in terms of caste or class. They become unclassified people.
That’s why, strictly speaking, you see, Hinduism and Buddhism are not religions. You can classify the religions. You can say: what’s your denomination?
Baptist? Methodist? Catholic?
Presbyterian? Episcopalian? Quaker?
Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, you see? But strictly speaking, a vānaprastha, a śramaṇa, has no label. He is an unlabeled bottle.
So, in the time when the Buddha lived—about 600 B.C.—the Hindu system had become somewhat decadent. It isn’t altogether clear what had happened to it, but it is certain that it did seem in some way to be in need of reform. And so there were many reasons for this.
And the Buddha, as a young man, being basically troubled by the great problems that we’re all troubled with—the problem of suffering and the problem of what all this universe is about— he endeavored to follow the methods that were then being used by people who were śramaṇas or vānaprasthas, forest-dwellers. And at that time it’s very apparent that the main method that these people were using was an ascetic discipline: starvation, very arduous meditation practices, probably self-flagellation, and things of that kind. And it’s said that for seven years he practiced these austerities, but he found out that they didn’t lead to liberation, and all the people who were practicing them knew they didn’t either, but they felt that that was only because they weren’t doing it hard enough.
And so he propounded instead the Middle Way: the way that led to liberation from the rat race that I’ve drawn here, neither through austerities nor through pleasure-seeking. See, these are the two ways, the two paths: the people who say the whole point of life is to enjoy it, to get the most out of it, you see? And the other people who tried that and then they found it was sour grapes or something, you know, or they burned their fingers in the pursuit of pleasure.
The girl that was so beautiful eventually fell apart, or just turned into a shrew and whatever it was. So they said instead: let us torment ourselves. A lot of people enjoy this or get something special out of it.
I was in Mexico this summer, and what I went there for was to study Mexican Catholicism, where they make a great cult of suffering. And I was very puzzled about this and wanted to understand it. And everywhere, you know, they have these ghastly tormented Christs, all drooling with blood, hanging on crosses in very contorted positions.
And I realized there are certain people who find that sitting on the tip of a spike is the realest place in the world. Because when you’re on the tip of a spike, you know you’re there. There’s no doubt about it.
And also, you know that you’re expiating for everything. Somehow, by sitting on the spike, you are paying for your guilt. And so long as you hurt, you’re alright.
See? So these śramaṇas were doing something of the same kind. And the Buddha became enlightened—became a Buddha; he woke up—at the moment when he gave up that kind of quest.
The moment he gave up, as we should say, trying to take the kingdom of heaven by storm. Now what does this mean? It means that, in his time, the way of liberation had become competitive, which meant it was on the wrong track.
There are a lot of people who—we call it the holier-than-thou attitude, but we find it today with some objectionable Westerners who go over to Japan to study Zen Buddhism, and then come home and brag about the great disciplines they’ve undergone, and say, “I sat with my legs crossed in one position for ten hours,” as distinct from somebody else who only sat for five. And always there’s this tendency, you know, to have a marathon and be in a competition with others or with one’s self about these things. But the moment you do that, you’re back on the wheel.
The best thing you can get by asceticism is to get up to the deva world. You can’t get anywhere else by it. You may get down to the naraka world by asceticism, too—read the story of Thaïs by Anatole France.
So then, this is the point: all Buddhist teaching is a dialogue. Really and truly, the man who goes out and leaves society and becomes a monk is a little bit too much. Buddhism involves this act as a preliminary gesture, but what it comes to in the end is the position of what’s called a bodhisattva.
A bodhisattva means somebody who went out of society—or we should say gave up the world in some way, took on the the robe, took on the discipline—he found what he was looking for, but his finding it was absolutely simultaneous with his coming back into society. And he’s called a bodhisattva as distinct from a pratyekabuddha, which means a private Buddha; one who goes out and doesn’t come back. And the bodhisattva is considered as having a superior attainment, superior insight.
So the important thing to remember, then, is: Buddhism is a dialogue, and its teaching is a method, and not a doctrine. Now, the teaching of Buddhism is summed up in what are called the Four Noble Truths: the truth of suffering, the truth about the origin of suffering, the truth about the ceasing of suffering, and the truth about the way to the ceasing of suffering. Duḥkha is the Sanskrit word we translate “suffering,” “discord,” “frustration,” something like that.
That’s always the problem, you see? And this, because of suffering, is the reason why human beings seek out teachers and saviors. “I hurt, and I don’t want to hurt.” So that’s the the universal problem, you see, that everybody brings.
So then, the teacher replies to this problem by saying: “You suffer because you crave things.” Tṛ́ṣṇā—from which we get our word “thirst”—tṛ́ṣṇā, “craving” or “desire,” is the cause of suffering. That’s the second truth. Now, the Buddhist analyzes this a bit.
He says the world is duḥkha. It’s full of frustration, and it’s also characterized by impermanence, anitya, and by non-entityness, anātman. That means that no thing exists independently: every thing is a thing only in relation to everything else, therefore there are no separate things, no real selves or souls or egos.
And trying to cling to the world—which is necessarily changing—trying to have a separate self and to protect it, all these things are tṛ́ṣṇā. They are the cause of duḥkha. So the teachers, having said this, then the student comes back and says, “Well, how do I get rid of tṛ́ṣṇā?
If tṛ́ṣṇā, desire, is the cause of suffering, couldn’t I get rid of desire so as not to suffer?” And the teacher says, “Well, you try!” And this, then, is the first part of the discipline: to try not to desire, to calm your mind, to practice centering, to practice getting rid of all—what they call kleśa: “disturbing thoughts,” “distractions,” “evil passions,” “immoderate appetites,” and come to upekṣā, or “equanimity of mind.” And so the student practices that. And this is a very difficult and arduous discipline, and all the time he sees the teacher watching him of the slightly sour expression on his face. And he knows, of course—or thinks he knows—that the teacher is fully aware of his inmost thoughts.
Because, you know, it’s the Indian way: they go to meeting with the teacher and the teacher sits under a tree and smokes a cigarette or a pipe or something, and all the students sit around cross-legged, and they they meditate. And sometimes the teacher meditates. And they can see him occasionally looking at them like this, you know, and they think “Uh-oh!
Teacher knows what I’m thinking.” Because he has the power of infinite vision, you see, and all-seeingness. And this bugs them completely. Because, you see: you remember how it was in school when you were trying to do something, and the teacher walked around and looked over your shoulder?
It puts you off completely. And so the Hindu teacher, or the Buddhist teacher, deliberately puts his students off. And finally he raises in their minds an insoluble problem: that if you are trying to stop desire so that you will not suffer, aren’t you still desiring to stop desire?
Or the students may very well find that out for themselves, and they say to the teacher: “But how are we to stop desire when we’re desiring to stop desire?” So then the teacher can engage them in an extremely marvelous trap—which is to say, he can play it in a number of different directions. One direction is to say: “Well, don’t try to stop all desire, but try to stop as much desire as you can stop.” You see where this is going to go. Then they’re going to say: “Well, I’m a little excessive about desiring to stop desire.” Well, if you’re naturally excessive about it he says: “Try to be as slightly excessive as you can,” you see?
Now do you see what’s leading here? If you follow that course, you are being brought to center in the same way as I demonstrated before: you are being brought to yourself, to accept yourself as you are here and now, totally. But you can’t do that directly.
Because if you try to accept yourself, you will always find that in yourself there is a spirit of the non-acceptance of things. And you have to accept that. So the teacher would say: “Don’t try to accept yourself more than you can accept yourself.
Accept yourself as much as you can accept yourself.” Because then, you see, you are also accepting the part of you that doesn’t accept. Or he may try, on another tack, he may say: “Alright now, if you’ve seen that desiring not to desire is simply another form of desire”—you’re trying, for example, to get rid of your sensuous appetites. You are going to give up booze and women and pate de foie gras, or whatever it may be.
And you then think, “Well, now, yes this I must do.” And eventually you find that you are becoming proud of your success in mastering your appetites, and you’re beginning to depend on that. So the teacher says, “Do you see you’re in the same trap as you always were? Formerly, you sought spiritual security in booze and women and so on.