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And so the first thing I wrote down in it was the alphabet. And then I scratched my head as to how I would write down how to pronounce each of these letters. And I tried to spell out in letters how to pronounce letters—not realizing, of course, that this was a completely vicious circle.
You have to have something—in order to understand words, you have to have something else. And that is a very mysterious matter: the kind of understanding that we have of things, which we then go on to describe in words. And one realizes how much one learns (as a child, especially) from other people which is never explicitly stated.
How do you know, for example, whether somebody who says something to you is serious or kidding? A great deal of confusion is caused by that, even among adults. And the processes have been examined and analyzed and studied which are required for understanding the simple sentence, and we don’t yet know how the brain of a child accomplishes this extraordinary task—which, when an analyst looks at it, is extremely complicated.
But of course you must realize that analysis is a way of making things complicated that were not complicated in the first place. And it was like my task that I set myself as a child: the amazingly complicated task of how to write down how the letters were pronounced. Now, a great deal of academic energy goes into this task of proving things that everybody knows.
But they want to say precisely: what thing is it that you know? How can we delimit it? How can we pin it down exactly?
And this, of course, is very much involved also with law. And that’s why you devise, bequeath, and… you know, you got a whole long list of words: “I devise,” “bequeath,” “give,” et cetera, et cetera, so that there can be absolutely no doubt about what you mean. But, as a matter of fact, the trouble is: the more definite you become with words in describing something, the more doubt you create.
And so the Taoists took a profoundly humorous attitude to the Confucians’ interest in spelling things out. Because they said you can never do it. Do you ever play a game—any of you—called vish?
The rules of this game are: you get—say there are five people playing, and you appoint a referee. And each person has a copy of the same dictionary (say, Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary), and then you have many words in a hat or something, and the referee draws out a word and he says, “escalator.” And then you turn it up in the dictionary. And then you get a definition, and you look up an absolutely key word in the definition.
Has to be a really crucial word. Not “the” or “a” or something. And then you look that up.
And then you take a key word in that definition. And then, when you get back to the word “escalator,” you raise your hand and call out “Vish!” which is short for “a vicious circle.” And thereby you have won the round. And the referee is there to decide that you played fair and that you did take key words from each definition, and so on, and you didn’t cheat.
So this shows you, you see, how a dictionary—unless it has little pictures in it which give you another way of understanding things—a dictionary is an entirely circular process. It’s simply a self-defining affair. So that when you encounter—say I pick up a Chinese dictionary, or better still for my purposes, supposing I pick up a Finnish dictionary which has nothing in it but Finnish language—it doesn’t tell me a thing!
Because I haven’t got the key. And the key to this language is not altogether communicable in language. So for this reason, then, the Taoists were thoroughly skeptical of the power of words to describe the processes of the physical world.
Now, the Chinese language as such is a rather peculiar language, unlike most other languages, in that it neither declines its nouns nor conjugates its verbs. There are certain ways, sometimes, of showing whether a verb indicates the future or whether it indicates the past. But in general, literally translated Chinese reads like a telegram.
But, on the other hand, the Chinese language—which is not specific in this way that we can be, by declining nouns and conjugating verbs; exactly what, how, and to whom—we have a better language. And so do the Japanese, because they have an arrangement for using Chinese in such a way as to decline the nouns and conjugate the verbs. We have a better language for describing technological processes.
You know how it is when you get a set of instructions to put something together: first do this, then do that, then do the other thing. Well, boy! You should get some kind of a Chinese product from Hong Kong with put-together instructions.
And you’re just nowhere! You have to know how it’s done before you read it. Yes.
So—you mean on these sort of emergency instructions? Yes, yes. But the compensatory delight of this language is that you can say several things at once and mean them all.
However, the point, now, that we go on to is a second one. With this realization (that language is a net which will never succeed in capturing the world) goes a reluctance to interfere with the processes of nature. Because what you think may be a good thing to do may be good only in the short run.
It may turn out to be disastrous in the long run. To give the very simple example which is very close to the hearts of all Chinese and Asian people: the problem of population. What on Earth are we going to do about that?
Because, in times past, the huge populations of India and China were pruned by perennial outbreaks of cholera and other diseases which wiped out millions of people. Famines. And so the population was pruned.
Now, however, with the methods of modern medicine, we begin to stamp out these plagues. But then a new plague turns up in the form of human beings: too many of them. Well, you can’t just can’t go around in cold blood shooting down people or getting rid of people who you regard as not making up to certain standards.
It was somehow better if the cholera did it, because that was impersonal and it bore you know spite. But when human beings have to decide to get rid of each other, then there’s real trouble. So a Taoist would be, on the whole, inclined not to interfere with the course of events.
Because he feels that they are of a complexity so great that he, with his verbal interpretations—because all that we call scientific knowledge is a verbal interpretation of what’s going on, and of a certain selection of things that we call good and a selection of certain things that we call bad—well, he feels that he doesn’t really know in terms of words whether a given event is good or bad. He may feel badly about it, but he may feel that this is the proper and appropriate way to feel in such circumstances, and that it will go over. It will pass.
For as Lao Tzu said, “The fierce gale does not last the whole morning, nor does pelting rain go on all day.” Maybe you haven’t lived in Big Sur—but still, in general. Then he goes on to say, “If heaven and earth cannot keep up these things for long, how much less can mankind?” So this, then, is a basic attitude in Taoist philosophy which goes by the name of wú wéi. And that is this.
That means wú; that means “negative.” And wéi means “doing,” “interfering,” “busyness,” “poking into things.” So wú wéi means “don’t interfere,” “don’t strive,” don’t… really, the best meaning of wú wéi is “don’t force it.” As when, for example, you’re opening a lock and the key doesn’t seem to turn: if you force it, you’ll just bend the key. So what you have to do is jiggle: pull back and forth. Jiggle, jiggle, jiggle until you find the place where the key turns.
And that’s wú wéi. Wú wéi doesn’t mean total passivity. Because, you see, on the other side of the picture about interfering with nature is that you must interfere.
There is no way of not interfering. Even when you look at something, you interfere with it. Your very existence is an interference with the environment, from a certain point of view.
So there you are. You’re stuck with it. Everything you do alters the balance.
Even if you sit perfectly still: you’re still breathing, and that alters the nature of things going on around you. You’re exuding temperature, and that changes something. And then, when you start eating and doing all sorts of things like that, you really do start changing things.
So you can’t avoid interfering, and yet the the maxim is: don’t interfere. But it means bestly translated: don’t force it. So then, what do you do?
Well, you have to interfere as wisely as possible—that is to say, you have to find out how to interfere along the lines in which things are already developing. This is like sailing a boat. It is much smarter to sail than to row, because it takes less energy.
You simply use the wind by putting up a sheet. But then, supposing the wind isn’t going where you want to go: then you learn to tack. But you keep the wind in your sails all the time, and you use the wind to go against the wind.
And therefrom comes the idea of judo. Judo is the Japanese way of saying “the gentle Tao,” “the gentle way.” And in judo the basic principle of the whole thing is that you are not an attacker. Underneath judo is a deeper philosophy called aikidō: “the way of aiki.” And aikidō is that you can never be attacked, because when somebody attacks you, you’re not there.
Or you are there, but in the form of a vacuum, so that the attacker get sucked in so fast by his own force that he falls over. So in judo one always uses the strength of the opponent to bring about his downfall. You may add your own strength at a certain point.
In other words, when you’re throwing someone in judo, there is a point when his own strength has taken him beyond the peak. You know, when a thing is falling over, it reaches a certain peak where it’s gone, you see? It’s on the way down.
It is at this moment that you add your strength and say, “Wowee!” You see? When there’s a curious throw in judo where you get a fellow, you’ve been holding him, and you get him up on your foot like this, you see, and then he is moving in this direction. So, just when he is off balance, you whoops!
with your foot, like that, and send him way over on the floor that direction. But he has to be beyond the falling point, you see? And then only do you use your strength.
Because all you’ve done now in executing this throw was that you fell backwards with your own weight and he was pushing at you. You see? At a moment when he was pushing at you like that, it is entirely opportune to put your foot up and fall over backwards and wheezh!.
He goes way over. And that’s quite a throw to get involved in, I can assure you! But judo, you see, is a development out of the Taoist philosophy by, probably, Japanese people.
Judo is relatively modern. But it comes out of all sorts of understandings going back to Chinese ways of doing things, and gradually amalgamated into the form in which we know it today. But it is a basic demonstration of this principle of wú wéi, which Jafu has written now in cursive characters.
So it isn’t an attitude of total passivity. It isn’t just doing nothing—as it literally says: “not do”—but it’s really “not force.” So you need always in every situation to find out which way the wind is blowing. Trim your sails to the wind.
This is the meaning of it. Well now, then, how do you know which way the wind is blowing? Obviously, a scientist would say to you: “Well, we have to make a very careful analysis of the situation and find out just what’s going on.” And then, this becomes extremely interesting, because now scientists are doing this very seriously, and they have devised the very important science that we call ecology.
And in ecology we study the whole complex of relationships which lie between any organism and its environment. And when we get to the ecology of mankind it is simply fantastic. When you study, for example, the ecology between man and the world of microbes, and you try to decide what are good guys and bad guys among the microbes, how to get rid of the bad guys without getting rid of the good guys, and then realizing you need some of the bad guys, otherwise the good guys fall apart.
And some of the killers we use are on the level of medicine very much like what DDT is on the level of agriculture: it’s too indiscriminate and it gets too many of the good guys along with the bad guys. You become, after a time, very doubtful as to the precise definition of a good guy and a bad guy. Because, you see: every group, every species, has to have an enemy.
That’s part of the whole mutual eating society arrangement of life. If you don’t have an enemy, then you start multiplying too much. Nothing prunes you.
Then you start getting in your own way because there are too many of you. You start eating up your all your own supplies of foodstuff. Also, you get soft.
You’re not on the qui vive. You develop flabby muscles because you never get involved in a fight. And so, gradually, the successful group fails.
The group which managed to obliterate all its enemies will fall apart. So what are we to do about that? See, part of the whole joke of present-day international politics is that the United States—with its vast prosperity and enormous facilities for living the lazy life—must have an external enemy to get excited about.
And so, even though the Cold War is, in a way, total nonsense, and everybody who is in the know about anything knows it—that for example, an atomic war between Russia and the United States will simply end of the human race—but the populace has to be kept bamboozled. And we keep fighting wars, like in Vietnam, in order to keep everybody excited and in order to make a fracas and to give the soldiers practice. It’s a horrible business, but that’s the way things run.
And the question is, you see: can we run the human race without awful bloodshed and murders and tortures and all that kind of thing? Can we somehow introduce a new kind of gamesmanship as a substitute for war? It’s the same thing in business, exactly: if you wipe out your competitor, then you have no reason to produce anything but a lousy product.
And then you may make lots of money, because you’ve wiped out your competitors; you’ve got the whole market. And then you’ve got this money—what’re you going to buy with it? Well, there’s nothing to buy except other people’s lousy products, who wiped out their competitors, or who cheated the public by packaging the thing to look elegant, but it was nothing inside.
That’s all you got to buy. So naturally, if you’re a success in General Motors, you go and buy a Rolls Royce from England, or you go buy a Mercedes from Germany, because they happen to be better cars. Or if you want to make a lot of money in the clothing industry here, making wretched prints, and you want some good clothes, what do you do?
Well, you have to go to Mexico and buy the things peasants wear, because they’re still substantial, solid, damn good clothes. So you see, there’s something always self-defeating in these attempts to succeed. You could say nothing fails like success.
So for this reason, then, the Taoist always had an attitude of caution. “Cautiously,” as Lao Tzu says, “as one who crosses a river in spring.” That means either because of the spring floods or because the ice is still there, and you’re not quite sure how strong it is because it’s beginning to thaw. So what the Taoist tries to develop is a sensibility to the situation.
He tries to feel out intuitively what kind of action is required under these circumstances, because he feels that he can never discover it analytically; with his conscious attention alone. Well, now, to talk in modern Western terms about how this is done, we must realize, of course, that we are equipped inside our heads with an absolutely fantastic thing called the brain. With its millions and millions of neuron cells it is, as it were, the most amazing computer ever devised.
Basic to the Taoist attitude to life is that you have that within you—and you may, if you don’t know anything about brains very much, call it intuition or something of that kind—but you have within you the most amazing logical analyzer that exists in the known world. And the point is to get it to work for you. And instead of trying with conscious attention alone—which can only think of about three things at a time without using a pencil.
That is to say, keep three variables in mind at once. Very few people can do four without using a pencil. You can do four if you’re a trained musician, where you’re playing for different lines of a fugue, say.
You’re keeping four variables in mind at once. With an organist you can go from four to six, because you’ve got your two feet, and they’re playing, too. But that requires a high amount of training to be able, with conscious attention, to keep these many variables in mind.
But the world around us has infinitely many variables going in it. And you can reason out something with your conscious verbal thinking—say you want to make a contract in business, and you figure out how to make it, whether it will be a good contract, whether it will work, et cetera, et cetera. And you think of all these things and write them down and you make the contract, and you think that’s fine.
But one of the variables that you couldn’t possibly include in the contract was that your partner would slip on a banana skin and break his neck. All sorts of things. I mean, the contract might make provisions in it, if your lawyer was thoughtful, for what was to be done under the case of the disability of any of the parties thereto, et cetera.
But eventually there are so many possibilities that can occur that you cannot think of them all. So then the question arises: is it within the power of the human brain to comprehend, because of its immense complexity, in a kind of un- or subconscious way, what the surface consciousness can never grasp? And the Taoist would say: certainly it can.
But you’ve got to learn to use your brain by allowing it to go to work on your problems without interfering with it. And then it will deliver you a decision. And this is why, when you get to the real study of Taoist and Zen Buddhist practice, you get to the point where you learn to act without making decisions—or rather, to use a more exact word: without choosing.
Krishnamurti talks a great deal about being choicelessly aware, and he says freedom is precisely the state of not having to choose. Now, that sounds quite paradoxical, because we’re always talking about freedom of choice. But choice is not a form of freedom in the sense of the word.
What is choice in this sense of the word? Choice is the act of hesitation that we make before making a decision. It is a mental wobbling.
You know some people, when they take up a pen to write, they don’t just write, but they jiggle the pen around indecisively like this, and then start writing. Or a person comes into a room and wonders who to talk to, and sort of is in doubt, you see? In that moment he’s choosing.
Whereas a person who comes into a room and decides who to approach—he doesn’t wait to choose—we say he is decisive. But that’s a funny saying, because it means he doesn’t stop to decide. So in the training in Zen Buddhism—which is simply a Buddhist extension of Taoism; Zen Buddhism arose out of the marriage of Buddhism and Taoism in the fifth century AD and over the following centuries—so they have a way of training you so that you always act without choosing.
For example, there was one day a leaky roof, and there were a couple of monks attending the Zen master, and he said, “The roof is leaking.” One monk disappeared and came back instantly with a sieve and put it on the drips. Another monk, after some time, came back with a bucket. And a master praised the one who brought the sieve.
Now, the action wasn’t exactly appropriate—I mean, you know, to catching rain—but the point was that he was in the spirit of the Zen discipline by acting without choosing. And you’ll notice this with certain people. Certain people never hesitate.
They always seem—if something needs to be done—they seem somehow simply to grab something and do it. You know? Which is a kind of a Zen capacity.
So what happens is this: the teacher of Zen constantly throws curves at his students and puts them in dilemma situations where they have to act immediately. One of the things, of course, that you mustn’t do is rush, because rush is a form of hesitation. When a person rushes to get a train he starts to fall over his own feet, see?
So it really holds him up. It’s like trying to drive at high speed through the water with a blunt-nosed boat. That’s rush.
But now, what he’s trying to get is a kind of a smooth, unhesitating, flowing action that is the response to the challenge. And it must be done in what is called another use of this word mu. This is called wuxin in Chinese or mushin in Japanese.
And this word, nyen, is composed of the character meaning “now” (無) and the character meaning “mind-heart:” xin (心), and so has the meaning of “a thought”—but, especially for us, it is well translated by the psychological term “blocking.” “You’re blocking,” you say to someone when they hesitate, when they dither, when they stop to choose. So the attitude of mushin or wuxin is the unblocked mind, where it doesn’t hesitate ever. Just as the river doesn’t hesitate when it flows, and just when you clap your hands the sound comes out without hesitation, and when the moon rises the water doesn’t wait to reflect it, it reflects it instantly.
So that instant reflection—or it’s a kind of resonance—is what is looked for as a response of the individual to his environment. And he does this to the degree that he knows himself to be one with his environment. Then his capacity for response increases in according to the way in which he feels that he is simply all of a piece with it, and not something that is in it, and with a barrier around him through which messages have to get, and then those decisions have to be made up and sent out.
So then, you could say that a kind of extremely subtle sensory awareness has to be developed between the individual and his environment so that he feels it out. Now, today, this sort of talk is very unpopular, because scientifically-minded people—especially academics scientists, those who teach in universities—are exceedingly suspicious of intuitive reactions. They say, “Oh, wah, wah, wah, wah!
You can get into all sorts of trouble that way.” But the thing that they neglect to realize is that everybody uses it. Even the most meticulously careful, analytical, rigorous, sound scientist uses intuitive judgment after a certain point. Why?
Because you may accumulate data forever, and you may decide that this is, on the whole, taking all due things into due consideration, and procedures having been worked out, that this is the right thing to do. Why do you decide then? Mostly because time’s up and somebody’s pressing for a decision, or else you’re bored to death with bringing in data.
Because you never know how much data you need to make a certain decision, and therefore you may go on collecting data till all is blue, but in the last analysis you’ll work on hunch. And so much is actually, in the end, decided by flipping coins. And the pity of flipping coins for making decisions—it gives you only two choices: heads or tails.
One way or the other. The Chinese have a more subtle way of flipping coins. They have a method of a 64-sided coin to flip.
So that, instead of just heads or tails, there are 64 possibilities of coming to a decision when you don’t know what to do. This is called the I Ching, or the Book of Changes, where the symbols of yang and yin—that is to say, for yang a straight line, undivided; for yin a line broken in the middle—there are 64 ways of combining six of these lines in a hexagram. And so there is a complex method, when you have to make a grave decision, for tossing (you do it by tossing sticks or coins), and it gives you one of these 64 figures.
Now, if you are very wise and have studied the Book of Change for a long time, you don’t need to use the book. You just look at what the figure is and you can tell what it means. Because, you see, these figures are made up of—each hexagram figure is made up of two three-fold components.
That has two components, of which this one is water and this one is heaven. So you will have water over heaven. And a person very skilled in the interpretation will feel out the meaning of water over heaven.
But actually, if you’re not so skilled, there is the book. And for each of these hexagrams the book has an oracle. And it tells you in curiously vague and yet curiously precise terms the meaning of this hexagram.
And then you, in the light of your own situation, make up your mind what it’s saying to you. In the light of the problem that you’ve raised, the question that you’ve asked, the decision that you had to make, you will find invariably that these 64 choices, one of them, or indeed all of them—but you have to pick one of them, because you are after all tossing a coin. But it has some peculiarly appropriate thing to say to you under your circumstances, and is just like having a conversation with a very very wise old gentleman.
And you must realize that today, in Asia, this book is still widely used for making business and political decisions. Although people who are Westernized wouldn’t let on, perhaps, that they use it. And so anybody who does politics or does business with Asia should be completely versed in this book.
To know what sort of thinking, what sort of approach, might be expected under any circumstances. If you could ever find out what hexagram had fallen when a certain politician had made a decision, it would be immensely enlightening as to his future course of action. In the same way, for example, in dealing with Hitler.
Our strategists (I don’t know if they did) should have been students of astrology. Because he was always consulting astrologers. And therefore, astrology would be much more easy to penetrate than the I Ching, because you can know Hitler is looking all the time at his own horoscope.
Well, we have access to Hitler’s horoscope, and so we know what he’s thinking about it. But you don’t have access to what hexagram Mao Zedong threw when he decided to do something or other. So it’s a little bit more subtle.
Well then, I’m making the point, then, that our scientists are very suspicious of the intuitive judgment. But nevertheless, they all use it in the end. And so, this suspicion that science has of intuitive judgment has filtered down to the average person in terms of a mistrust of his own intuition, of the marvelous analytical powers of his own brain.
And so we are always in a dither of doubt as to whether we are behaving the right way, doing the right thing, and so on and so forth, and lack a certain kind of self-confidence. And if you see you lack self-confidence, you will make mistakes through sheer fumbling. If you do have self-confidence, you may get away with doing entirely the wrong thing.
The British have an enormous degree of self-confidence. They know they’re right. They don’t even question it.
There are certain kinds of British types who are absolutely… their aplomb is unbelievable! And you can’t shake them. They wouldn’t dream of it.
They’re not even defending themselves, they know they’re so right. And therefore, they can allow any kind of political revolution; total free speech. All sorts of things can go on which make Americans very nervous, because Americans don’t have the same degree of aplomb.
They’re not quite sure, you see? When you’re an aristocrat and you’ve been brought up for generations in the right schools, and there’s never any doubt whatsoever, you don’t even have to mention the fact that you’re an aristocrat. See?
I mean, that’s why aristocrats know how to treat servants. But they never take it out on their servants in the sense of having to emphasize their own superiority. Because they know they’re superior.
They don’t even question it. See? Well, this is an extraordinary kind of nerve that they’ve built up.
And so the only way you know you can do this is—first of all, in Zen practice, the thing that you have to understand is this: you have to regard yourself as a cloud in the flesh. Because, you see, clouds never make mistakes. Did you ever see a cloud that was misshapen?
Did you ever see a badly designed wave? No. They always do the right thing.
So, as a matter of fact, do we. Because we are natural beings just like clouds and waves. Only, we have complicated games which cause us to doubt ourselves.
But if you will treat yourself for a while as a cloud or wave, and realize that you can’t make a mistake whatever you do—because even if you do something that seems to be totally disastrous, it’ll all come out in the wash somehow or other—then, through this capacity, you will develop a kind of confidence. And through confidence you will be able to trust your own intuition. Only, the thing that you have to be careful about is—and many people who have not understood Zen properly fall into trouble here—is that when they take the attitude that “I can’t possibly make a mistake,” they overdo it, which shows that they don’t really believe it.