Datasets:
eliwill
/
Watts

Dataset card Data Studio Files Community
text
stringlengths
11
1.23k
For example, supposing you are a drunk—a really serious, dedicated drunk—and lots of people are. They want out. And they couldn’t care less whether they have no money, whether they’re going to die, or whether they’re dead, just so long as they can stay out.
Now, you might say as we look at people like that: “Well, that’s very sad. It’s terrible. Look, they’re wasting their lives!” But from their point of view they’re not.
They’re living the real out life they want to live. Or a person may be an opium addict, you see, and he would be in his special paradise. And you say, “Well isn’t that terrible!” Or, “He wants out.” And from his point of view, as he looks at it, it’s perfectly alright because he thinks the people who are pursuing those ends which are considered virtuous and practical, he thinks they’re out of their minds!
Why do all that? Why do you have to go on struggling and struggling and struggling to keep alive? What do you think that that’s going to give you?
You see? So he feels it doesn’t matter if it ends sooner or if it ends later. Time is an illusion.
In his state of consciousness he can make a tiny little bit of time into a long, long time. He can experience a hundred years in an afternoon or longer. And some people think, you see, that you might have immortality through the fact that, in the moment of your death, your sense of time gets longer and longer and longer and longer and longer and longer.
So that, although from the standpoint of an outside observer (who is not in your state of consciousness )it looks as if you’re having your head cut off in a hurry, from your standpoint that lasts forever because of the alteration of your time rhythm. See how slippery philosophy can be? And so people can think all these things, and they can get lost, and there was always a tendency in Oriental culture to do that.
And from our point of view, that’s a bad thing. Well, from, say, the Chinese point of view, also, it was a bad thing. The Chinese are very practical.
And they believed in the family, and in having children, and husbands, and wives, and in industriousness, and in the building, and in arts, and in cultivating the soil by very ingenious methods. And so there was a special appeal to them in the idea of the bodhisattva. A bodhisattva, you see, is not like the extremely contemplative private Buddha.
You won’t find a bodhisattva sitting all day under a tree in a state of rapt absorption, so that anybody who comes up and knocks on him won’t get an answer. He’ll be like everybody else, or he will look like everybody else, because he will see that this everyday world, too, is it; this no special, nothing special world. This isn’t meant, you see, to debunk it and say, “Well, after all, it was a nasty baby anyhow.
It only died to spite us.” It isn’t a kind of thing—“Oh, it was nothing,” like that. In the idea of “nothing special” (or buji) there is a way of saying: “But look at ordinariness! Look what you miss every moment!” And, you see, that sort of attitude underlies tea ceremony, where a very great appreciation exists of the very simplest kinds of utensils, rooms, architecture, and so on.
There was a very great sage who lived far off in the mountains behind Kyoto, and an American student had great desire to see him. And he made all sorts of inquiries to find this man. At last found the way to the hermitage, but then it was very difficult to get there.
But he did finally find the old man out, and came and said, “How do you do?” And they talked. And the old man was delighted that the foreign student should have taken all that trouble, and should show such good understanding of these things, that he served him tea ceremony with nothing but hot water—no tea, see? And the American student was delighted!
He realized that this man had paid him a real compliment. So that’s buji, you see. That’s nothing special.
Now then, generally speaking, as we look at the whole field of Buddhism, the idea of the bodhisattva—that is to say, the idea of realizing the enlightened state in terms of everyday life—is characteristic of the Mahāyāna school of the north. North Asia. Whereas, the Theravāda (or sometimes Hīnayāna) school of South Asia still has its emphasis on the idea of getting away, still very much concentrates on the ideal of the monkish life which is celibate and away from all everydayness, all attachment, all kinds of worldly responsibility.
And so those monks in their yellow robes are very much a people apart. In the Mahāyāna, on the other hand, although there are monks, they aren’t monks quite in the sense of the Southern school. I mean, it’s like a Roman Catholic priest is not supposed to marry, but an Episcopalian priest may.
So, in that sense, the southern monks are like Roman Catholic monks and the northern monks are like Anglican clergy—something like that. Except that they have a rule that if they do live in a monastery, they mayn’t take wives in there. And likewise, the nuns mayn’t have husbands in there.
But if they live apart, in a temple, a priest may have a wife. Because they see no fundamental inconsistency between the state of deeply illuminated consciousness and living in some kind of affectionate human community and society. So therefore, for that reason, through Mahāyāna, through the idea of the bodhisattva, Buddhism was able to exercise an enormous influence upon the everyday life of the Far East to express itself through artforms that were by no means stereotyped, not merely iconographic and stylized.
Buddhism in the Far East expressed itself through naturalistic art forms. And so it’s an extraordinary thing. But, you see, the religious painting of China—insofar as it is influenced by Zen Buddhism—very rarely has a religious subject.
When you would say: what is Christian art? Well, you would recognize that there are certain great schools and styles. You would say you would associate Romanesque architecture with Christianity; certainly Gothic architecture.
You would associate early Italian painting or a great deal of Russian painting with Christianity. Peculiarly. But Christian art, you see, always seems to have for its subject matter the Christ, the saints, the angels, the incidents in the lives of the saints, their martyrdoms, and so on and so forth.
But it’s inconceivable to get the idea—is it?—that a still life which might have been painted by a Christian is a form of Christian art when all that’s in it is a few apples on the table. A case could be made for that idea, but it hasn’t been made. It’s never really occurred to someone to express Christianity through that sort of method.
Oh, it’s true that there has been a symbolism. The grapes and the wheat represent the sacrament, the mass. That lilies represent something, and so on and so forth.
But this is purely symbolic. It wouldn’t occur for Christian art that the fine painting of a used ashtray with a piece of torn paper beside it could possibly be Christian art unless it was propaganda against being dirty, or something like that. See?
But for the Far East, a painting of an old rock with some grass growing beside it can most definitely be Buddhist art. Because that painting of the rock is concerned with suchness, and just as much so as any painting of Buddhas and their halos, and golden jewelries, and flowers, and lotuses, and all like kind of thing. So, likewise, when this school of painting paints Buddhas and bodhisattvas it makes them look like ordinary people.
Even a little bit—to get the point over—little bit more than ordinary. That is to say: tramps, bums, clowns—you know, this fellow. This is Hotei, or Budai in Chinese, and he is a fat slob.
But he goes around with an enormous bag, patched and so on, and he collects trash. He collects everything that nobody wants. See, There are ordinary people who’re always out for precious things.
But Budai is out for rubbish. And he collects all this rubbish, and he gives it away to children—who love it! See?
Well, this is a way, you see. This is true. This man is sometimes called the fat or laughing Buddha.
And he is a fat Buddha. But the only clue that he is a Buddha is his big ears, because that means he can hear right through everything, see? He can hear the ultimate sound in everybody’s voice.
Now, that’s a very important trick. If you listen to me talking, you may try to make sense of the words. But actually, in the sense of the words that I’m saying isn’t the content of what I’m trying to explain.
The content of what I’m trying to explain can be heard in the sound of my voice. And in order to listen to that properly, you have to go beyond its meaning. For example, if you say the word “yes,” and then say it again—yes, yes, yes, yes, yes—it becomes a very funny word.
And you think: why did we use that funny noise “yes” to mean “yes?” Or you might see somebody sitting like this, you know—imagine this is on a movie, and the man just sitting there for a while, and then suddenly he goes… he shrugs his shoulders. That’s a normal enough gesture. It might mean he was just puzzled.
But as he’s going on, say, he does… and you wonder: “What’s the matter? He’s got a tick?” Suddenly, you see, the gesture begins to lose meaning. [???]
Well, you have to have big ears to get that, you see? So it’s through that you know he hears all sounds as being just songs. Of course, he can hear meaning in them, too—when they have meaning.
But fundamentally underlying the meaning he hears just the sound. And this is something you get to if you go to a foreign country, and you don’t understand the language, and you see all the people talking, and you notice things that they don’t notice about themselves because they get absorbed in the meaning of what they’re saying. And so they don’t notice the fascinating aspect of the perfectly meaningless side of their behavior.
But at any rate, the whole approach, the whole result, of the bodhisattva doctrine in the art of the Far East is to create what the Spiegelberg has called the religion of non-religion: where the religion became so perfect that it left no trace. It’s like when you build a house, you erect scaffolding. When you finish, you take the scaffolding away.
And you wonder (if you’d never seen a house being built) how on earth the builders got up so high. So, in the same way, the ancient idea of Buddhism is that Buddhism is a ferryboat. And it’s designed to take you across the stream from this shore (which is saṃsāra; the rat race) to the other shore (which is nirvāṇa).
When you get on the other side, you get off the ferry. See? A ferryboat goes back to bring the next party over.
But if you stay on the ferryboat, that means, you see, you’re in love with the ferryboat, and you’re in danger of becoming a religious maniac. And people do that, you see. You know how it is.
You’ve probably had that experience. People who join a church and then become fascinated with all the things that go with church. They like Bibles—not just for what’s in them, but the smell of a Bible, the appearance of the Bible has something something holy and numinous about it.
And they like crucifixes. Now, a crucifix is a pretty grisly object: a corpse nailed on beams. But they get jeweled crucifixes.
Beautiful works of art; enameled, gorgeous things. And people with a great religious feeling love to think of those things, you see? And Buddhists, too, do that.
They like their rosaries and their Buddha images and the smell of incense. And they get a kind of churchification. The French have a wonderful word for those goods.
They call them the bondieuserie. And it’s a little difficult to translate. Literally: “Good God-ery.” That le bon dieu, you know?
Everybody’s who’s sentimental always says le bon dieu. The old lady is always talking about le bon dieu. And so people say, you know—people who’ve got church on the brain—le bon dieu.
So all these stores sell bondieuserie. Now, while this, you see, is in its own way understandable, the whole point is that, in the supremes state of understanding, you get rid of bondieuserie altogether. That’s the religion of no religion, see?
You don’t even have any beliefs. The whole creed, everything, is utterly surpassed. That means you’ve left the ferryboat and you’ve gone on on the other shore.
You don’t carry the ferryboat with you. And so this religion of no religion is very pure, very transparent. It’s called—like the salt in water, like the glue in color, or in ink, you see.
Stick ink that the Chinese make has glue in it to hold it together. But you can’t see the glue. It’s all solid black all the way through, and the glue isn’t observable.
So the salt isn’t observable in water. In this way, you see, religion is being used as a medicine and not as a diet. The dharma is—to use a Zen expression—it’s like picking up a brick to knock at somebody’s door, and when the door opens, you don’t carry the brick into the house.
So a person, you see, who has much religion has what is called in Zen a “Zen stink.” And that’s considered rather bad. A rather specially bad smell. And one of the Zen poems says: Of our school, see?
So people who have this thing, who have Zen—and you can say, “Well, that fellow’s a Buddhist.” And he has this special thing he has, you know? It’s like those of us who have the disadvantage of our eyes not being quite good; we have to wear spectacles. And this nuisance you carry around with you all over the place, gadgets you have to fix on you.
Or people who belong, like clergy, to a religious order, have to go around in funny clothes. And the rabbi who has a beautiful beard, but he will wear a beastly black homburg hat, which is so unnatural, you see? And so they have this apparatus.
In a way, they’re like people with artificial legs, crutches, and so on. So it isn’t something that’s worked; it isn’t working like a medicine. Because if a medicine works, you get rid of it.
If a doctor successful, he gets rid of his patients. And so, in exactly this way, suchness is an attempt to say something which can’t be said. It is trying to say: the world just as it is, you see, that’s what we’re trying to show you to look at.
We’re not trying to drag in some fancy apparatus from above, some special system which has got to be imposed on you, all kinds of gods and complicated people you’ve got to believe in. We’re not going to fill your brains with a lot of new stuff. But instead, come to the clarity of seeing things just the way they are.
The trouble is, when somebody said to a Zen master, “The lines of the hills and the clouds, are not all these the body of Buddha?” He said, “Yes, but it’s a pity to say so.” And so even to have to say, “Look, that!” See? It’s just a little bit too much. Just a little bit too much.
It would be more admirable if I didn’t have to say anything, didn’t have to point out a thing. But, after all, one does have to make some concessions to folly. This morning I was discussing various aspects of what might be called the religion of no religion; considering religion as a raft for crossing a river—or rather, religion in the sense of dharma, not so much the doctrine as the method—considering it as the raft for crossing a river, as the brick for knocking at a door, as a medicine to cure a sickness—which, when it’s worked, you get rid of.
And I was showing you that this, in the Far East, culminated in a type of life, a way of life, where to some very large extent the outward symptoms of religiousness disappear, especially in the art forms, where the icon ceases to be the figure of the holy person, or the deity, or whatever, and becomes simply a flowering branch, a rock, flowing water, clouds, birds, and funny little old men. You know, a curious thing goes on in the whole world of religious practice, and that is: the older a religion gets, the more the distance of time lends such eminence to its original founders that they become superhumanized, and the practice of the religion that they founded becomes sort of derived of power. It just sinks into going through the motions.
Because people say, “Well, we’re living in a decadent age. In the past there were these great heroes who did all these marvelous things. Buddha and Jesus and Confucius and all their great followers.
But today, everybody’s rotten and nobody can expect to get more than a little way.” I had a friend who went to India. He was an astonishing fellow, because he was earnest. He would do anything.
He was full of the power of self-discipline. And he put himself under an Indian master who came to this country in the first place, and he became a vegetarian, and he practiced yoga every day, and he was determined to get that thing. So finally, his teacher told him the best place he could go to in India.
And off he went, and he joined a yoga school. There was a whole faculty, and everybody was practicing yoga, and he was so earnest and he was so devoted that, within four weeks, he could do everything that the other students could do. And they’d been there maybe two or three years.
And so, when he got to that, he mastered all the physical postures and the breathing exercises and the concentration exercises. And so he said to one of the older students, “Now, what about real samadhi? Do you get that around here?” And the student said, “No, none of us have got it yet.
You better ask the teachers.” So he began asking around the members of the faculty: “What about samadhi? Do you get this?” Well, they said, “No, not yet.” “Well,” he said, “I’m willing to spend any amount of time here. I don’t have to get back.
I have just enough funds to get by. And so I’m willing to do anything you tell me; to practice with all my heart. Do any of you have samadhi?” And they said, “Well, no, not yet.” “Does anybody?
Can you direct me to someone who does have it?” “Well,” they said, “About 125 years ago there was someone who was really considered to have had it.” And so then he began to think: why is it, then, that when the members of the faculty come out of their meditation period, they all look as if they’d just had a good sleep? You see? There begins to, always, grow up the concept of a golden age.
“Our forefathers, they really knew how to do it. But today everything’s falling apart.” Do you know people have been saying that for centuries? There is an Egyptian text on the panels of some pyramid, temple, or whatnot, 6,000 years old, in which an Egyptian priest is complaining that everybody’s falling apart.
So the lesson of this is: everybody here has just as much capacity as Buddha had. Nobody—who was Buddha’s teacher? Think about that.
Who psychoanalyzed Freud? Somebody has to start. And so everybody has the potentiality of being the first one.
So I call this problem the distance of excessive reverence. It has the disadvantage, you see, of making all these problems that we’re discussing—and states of consciousness that I’ve been talking about—it makes them seem impossibly remote, as if they were something attainable only by a very, very favored few. And that’s a very frustrating attitude to get.
We were discussing this morning the sense that people have when they read Zen literature that the thing is just around the corner, and just almost was on it. See, that’s a much more healthy attitude than that, “Oh, this thing will require many, many years of practice.” Now, it so often turns out, you know, that the person who feels that it’s just ’round the corner will feel this way for many years. Only, he won’t be put off by the idea of many, many years’ work yet to do.
But in the feeling that it’s always almost instantly available, his interest will be maintained for an extraordinarily long time. Thinking of how much work there is to be done just puts some people out of commission. You know, you’ve got to answer a lot of letters, and they’ve stacked up and stacked up and stacked up.
It’s an appalling pile. And eventually everything gets so complicated that you’re inclined to take the whole bunch of correspondence and throw it in the fire. But if you have to answer it for some reason or other, you can only answer it one letter at a time.
Same way with washing dishes: when they pile up on the drying board, and you get this mountain of dishes, and you think: “Oh, I’ve got to go through that! I’ve done it before, I’ve got to do it again this afternoon. And for year in, year out, I can see all those dishes I’ve got to wash in the future.” And lo and behold, the pile of dishes on the draining board grows higher and higher in your mind’s eye, until it’s absolutely overwhelming.
And you say, “Well, maybe some super dishwasher, some kitchen maid of the past who was a great hero, would undertake this sort of life. But poor little me. I can’t do that sort of thing.” Whereas the only way to wash them is one by one, as if each one was the only one you had to wash. That’s obvious.
So don’t be discouraged by this attitude that you find so commonly among Asian peoples in their feeling about Buddhism and Hinduism; that it’s something so great that it’s only cut out for a very few super-men. Don’t let that put you off. It may be true, statistically, when you review the vast, vast multitude of human beings that there are.
But so, likewise, from a statistical point of view, this group of you gathered here, and maybe some comparable group started around the country in various places, constitute a tiny, tiny fragment of the total population. And I suppose some external observer could say of you: “Rare, rare indeed are the people who are interested enough in all this to give it a weekend’s thought, even.” But from your own subjective standpoint, you’re not a statistic. You’re not one of a special, elect few, such that you’ve joined a secret society and have become self-conscious about it.
You may be, from a certain point of view, one of an elect few. But fro your own point of view you’re just your own direct, perfectly straightforward self, with no particular claims to fame or whatever it may be. So don’t be put off by the distance of excessive reverence when it comes to all these things.
Well, now, I want to take a further step in getting across the idea of thusness. I made already some mention of looking at words as if they were things that had no meaning, but were just noises—but interesting noises, just as the shape of a leaf is an interesting shape. Now consider, first of all, the shape of a leaf.
It’s something that goes like this, you see. And it’s green, you know, and it floats on the tree. And is a method whereby the tree absorbs moisture.
And there are all sorts of people who will want to say to you: “You see, a leaf is a very rational thing. It exists so that the tree can absorb moisture.” And they can go on describing it, and you see all the wonderful ways in which this little leaf works as a kind of moisture-absorbing, breathing thing. And you say, “Yes!
By Jove, isn’t that great! That’s very rational. Marvelous thing a tree is.” And yet, when you consider that the object of the leaf is to absorb certain things that are necessary for the maintenance of the tree, then you must ask the next question—look at the tree as a whole, standing there, bushy and bright—and you say, “Well, what’s that for?” I mean, what purpose is served by the tree?
“Well,” people say, “it has something to do with the oxygen in the atmosphere. And if there aren’t any trees around, you see, human beings and higher animals can’t live. They need trees and they need plants.” So, taking it back again, the shape of the leaf, then, is interpreted as having something to do with the maintenance of me.
Well naturally, then, that’s very important. It serves a function. It’s a good leaf, see?
But then, let’s ask a few deeper questions. We looked at the tree and said, “You’re an entertaining and funny shape. What are you for?” And it said, “Well, I serve mankind.” Alright, now let’s look at a human being and say, “You’re a funny shape, sitting around here.
What on Earth do you think you’re doing?” I mean, you’re surviving, you’re eating things up—but what for? And then you really have to think. “Oh yes!
I remember now,” you say. “I’m for the boss. There’s a system going on, and the lower things serve the higher things.
And there’s something higher than us. There are angels above us. And then, above all the angels, there’s God.
And we serve God.” Oh! And that’s the meaning of human life: to serve God. Alright, now what’s God for?
See? There he is, sitting up in heaven. However you want to interpret God—whether you want to interpret God in a primitive way as an old gentleman, kindly disposed, very powerful, clothed in this guise, upon the golden throne, surrounded by all the angles playing those harps I told you about.
You know, the angel’s harp is the entire spectrum of physical possibilities. Dee dee dee dee dee dee dee dee dee dee dee dee dee deeeeeee, you know. From cosmic rays to hard x-rays on the other end, or whatever it is—I’m not a physicist.
But that’s the harp of the angel. And the lord God, clothed with this guise, there they all are, sitting, and they’re looking at him and saying, “Well, Lord, you’re the most beautiful thing we ever saw. You’re the answer!” But why?
See? What’s he for? Well, they agree.
They sat around there for a long time, and they said, “Really, Lord, we look at you and we decided you aren’t for anything.” You don’t need to be. You don’t serve any purpose—because you’re It. You’re there!
You’ve arrived. See? So what do you do when you’re there?
What does the Lord do, you see? I mean—I think you’ll understand my figurative language—well, he glows. And everybody sits around that glow and they say, “Hallelujah!
Hallelujah, hallelujah! Holy, holy, holy! Lord God of hosts, Heaven and Earth are full of thy glory!
Thy glory, thy shekinah, thy jazz!” That’s what it’s all about. Now, you see, you can derive a lot of things from that. You can say, “Look, everybody”—as if this were God talking—“Look, everybody: I have this big thing going.