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So this is entirely what Buddhism is about. It’s about learning—for example, if I may put it in a vivid way—when you were born you were kicked off a precipice, and there’s nothing that can stop you falling. And although there are a lot of rocks falling with you (with trees growing on them and all sorts of things like that), you can cling to one of those rocks if you like as it goes down with you for safety, but it’s not safe.
Nothing is safe. Everything is falling apart. Everything is in a state of change and there’s no way of stopping it.
And when you are really resigned to that, and when you really accept that, then there’s nothing to be afraid of. And when there’s nothing left to be afraid of, and you’ve given everything up, and you know that even—you know, a lot of people in religion cling to suffering, because they know they are right as long as they hurt. “Oh, I bless the good Lord for my boils, for my mental and bodily pains.
For without them my faith all congeals, and I’m doomed to hell’s ne’er-ending flames.” You know? A lot of people who know that they are right so long as they suffer. But that’s an illusion, too.
Even suffering offers no security. Even suicide offers no security in Buddhism, you see? There is no security at all.
You simply have to face this fact that everything is in flux, and go. Go, go, go with it. And so the question then is, simply: how to convince people of this?
If anybody wants to be convinced. You know, it’s not the sort of thing you shove down people’s throats. You don’t convert them to this.
Because if they don’t want to be converted they won’t let go. So Buddhism therefore involves a very special relationship between the questioner and the person to whom the question is addressed: the pupil and the teacher. And now, then, Buddhism came to China as early as 60 AD, but didn’t at that time make a very great impression.
It was not until about the year 400 that a very great Sanskrit scholar by the name of Kumārajīva came and started teaching Chinese scholars Sanskrit. And they worked with him to translate Sanskrit into Chinese. And they translated the Buddhist scriptures—they didn’t, of course, do them all at that time, because the Buddhist scriptures occupy about as much space as the Encyclopædia Brittanica; in fact a little more.
The Indians are great talkers. Well, anyway, they found that when they translate this into Chinese, they had to find equivalent Chinese words for the Sanskrit ideas, and they found these from the Taoist philosophy that I discussed this morning. Well, slowly, then, Indian attitudes began to be modified by Chinese attitudes, because the Chinese read into these translations Taoist meanings.
So things got a little altered. Now here came the alteration that is crucial. First of all, in Indian Buddhism there’s very little humor.
But Chinese life is full of humor. The greatest philosopher of China, Zhuang Zhou, you know, is the only philosopher who is—I think in the whole world—who is profoundly humorous. There’s a book in the modern library published by Random House called The Wisdom of Lao Tzu, and this is translated by Lin Yutang, and he includes along with the translation of Lao Tzu huge sections of Zhuang Zhou.
And this is absolutely fascinating because of the humor of it. Indian Buddhism had very little humor—some, yes, but very little. Next, it was all tied up with celibacy, which to the Chinese was absolutely incomprehensible.
Because Chinese civilization is rigged around the family to a far greater extent than ours is—which is saying something. And they just couldn’t see any point or any wisdom in celibacy. When Buddhism came to China it still retained a certain element of celibacy, but for different reasons than Hindu.
The Chinese way of celibacy is not that sex is naughty, but it’s terribly convenient not to have a wife. In other words: the ideal of the uninvolved life has a certain appeal. But they could never, never get through into their heads the notion that sexual desire was bad—which has always played a fairly strong role in Hindu thinking.
Not in the same way as it has in the West. The Hindus don’t have a guilt take on it, but they think that it dissipates your spiritual energy energies. And, you see, in yoga they envisage the idea that, at the base of the spine, there is what is called the kuṇḍalinī, the serpent power, or the force of psychic energy.
And so long as it remains at the base of the spine, this force is dissipated in sexuality. Now, yoga is to suck this thing up the spine and get it into the head. And so then you withdraw from the manifestation of this energy, or the dissipation of it in sexuality, and it’s put on a higher level.
Only, which end is up? You can do it the other way, too: they have what’s called the right hand way of doing it and the left hand where doing it. I’m not going to go into that now.
But the Chinese didn’t see it that way. They couldn’t see that it was a dissipation of energy. So what they wanted to aim at was a way of living Buddhism and being awake, but at the same time remaining active in the ordinary life of the world.
It’s what’s called in their phraseology “being king on the outside and the sage on the inside.” Managing practical affairs completely involved in whatever life is, but at the same time inwardly living on top of a mountain. Being cloud-hidden, whereabouts unknown. So Chinese Zen is the preeminent expression of this because it is the mixture of Indian Buddhism and Chinese Taoism, plus a certain Confucian practicality.
Zen developed out of the work of Kumārajīva—came into China, as I said, 400 or a little before. He had two disciples who began to work on Buddhism from a Taoist point of view, and they were actually the originators of Zen. Then, apparently, about shortly before 500 (as the dates now check out) another Indian came to China, whose name was Bodhidharma.
And Bodhidharma was the person who touched off Zen as a specific movement. Bodhidharma had a pupil by the name of Eka—Huìkě in Chinese. Eka is the Japanese pronunciation, like Zen is the Japanese pronunciation of the Chinese chán.
And the story is that, when Eka came to Bodhidharma, Bodhidharma refused to accept him as a student. All Zen masters do this. They reject you.
And this stimulates you, you see, to come back stronger—I mean, if you’re going to learn at all. And Eka came back stronger and stronger and stronger, and Bodhidharma resisted him stronger and stronger. And finally he cut off his left arm and presented it to Bodhidharma and said, “Look: here’s my left arm, given to you as a token that nothing in the world matters to me except to find out what you’re all about.” “Alright,” he said, “what you want to know?” Eka said, “I have no peace of mind.
Please pacify my mind.” In Chinese mind is this word, pronounced xin. And xin is here. Xin as the heart-mind; it’s the psychic center.
And so Bodhidharma said, “Bring out your xin here before me and I will pacify it.” Eka said, “When I look for it I can’t find it.” Bodhidharma said, “Then it’s pacified.” And Eka immediately understood what all the thing was about. That’s the experience called satori in Japanese, wu in Chinese Mandarin, and then the Cantonese dialect ng. It’s just what we call in our modern psychological jargon the a-ha phenomenon.
The a-ha phenomenon: a-ha, now I see! Well now, what was all this? This Zen—which in Chinese is this character: 禅—is a translation of the Sanskrit word dhyāna, and so this is being pronounced chán in Chinese, and zen in Japanese.
It’s unfortunately untranslatable in English. It designates a certain state of consciousness that is sometimes called “meditation,” but that won’t do at all. Contemplation isn’t really the point.
The Chinese have a different word for contemplation, and sometimes one-pointedness of mind. I would prefer to translate this word with the notion of “total presence of mind.” When we say a person is crazy, we often say they’re not all there. Now go to the opposite of that and visualize a person who is completely there, or who is completely here: a person who lives totally and absolutely now.
That doesn’t mean he’s incapable of thinking about the past or the future, because thoughts about the past and about the future are included in the present. You have them now. But imagine a kind of person who is not distracted.
Who, when he talks to you, he really gives you his whole being. Who doesn’t, as it were, look over your shoulder and wander off to something else. Somebody who—first of all, he’s completely here, and he’s so much here that you can’t faze him.
Now, this idea of phasing is crucial in Zen. You see, I referred a moment ago to attachment: that Buddhism is living free from attachments. And I have made the point that this is not abandoning a sense of a good appetite for dinner, but it’s stopping sticking.
In psychological jargon: you don’t block. A “mind of no hesitation,” it’s sometimes called. In Chinese the phrase mo chih chu is used: of going straight ahead.
So, supposing somebody walks up to you on the street and says, “Are you saved?” Now, most of us who are intelligent people feel embarrassed by such a question. You know? What’s this wretched Salvation Army person or Jehova’s Witness doing asking me whether I’m saved or not?
And we’re all a little bit, you know—what do you do with a nut like that? But in Zen this is a perfect moment to respond, see, to the most embarrassing question—are you saved? But Zen comes back in a very funny way.
In Zen, one doesn’t give philosophical answers to a question like that, you give practical answers: “I had a boiled egg this morning.” Because whenever you are asked about matters sacred, theoretical, and philosophical, you answer in terms of things earthy and practical. But then, on the other hand, when you’re asked about things earthy and practical, you answer in terms of things religious and philosophical. “Is dinner ready?” You know?
“Who’s asking this question? Who are you?” So this is, then, the flavor of Zen is—you know, Bodhidharma is supposed to have meditated so long with his legs fell off. And he’s usually drawn this way—something like this, anyway.
It looks like a shmoo. But in Japan you buy these toys that are Darumas, and they are so weighted in here that you can never knock them over. You can bat it on the floor, bat it this way, bat it that way, but it always comes up again.
And so the poem says, “Seven times down, eight times up. Such is life.” So this is the principle of not being fazed, not being attached. So to play the game “you can’t faze me.” And this is very important in the art of lifemanship: fundamental gamesmanship.
Because, you see, when the Zen monks moved into Kyoto, they took over the best part of town. Simply fantastic how this happened. The beautiful hills that I was talking about this morning were occupied by the brigands who later became the Japanese nobility; the great daimyōs.
These were the toughest characters. And the Zen monks played a game of them, which was that, you know: “You possess all these lands and you’re powerful and so on, but so what? It’s all falling apart.
Then what will you do?” Well, they said, “That’s too bad. We don’t know.” And the Zen monks said, “You know, you haven’t got the hang of the thing, you see?” So they found that they couldn’t terrify Zen monks. That they played all sorts of tricks, but the Zen monks were better masters at it.
See, supposing you say to somebody, “Look, I’m not afraid of you. You can do anything like. You can kill me, or anything at all.” Well, if I go and kill the fellow who says this, I’ll never find out whether he was afraid or not.
So they out-fazed these people and said, “We have a secret, you see, that you don’t have. And we’ll teach your servitors to be great warriors. Because they’ll learn the secret too, and they won’t be afraid of anything.” And this is what they did.
And so the daimyōs, the noblemen, built great monasteries for these Zen masters and monks on their best land. The finest artists of Japan made gold leaf screens for almost every room in the place. And although nobody owns anything individually, the community owns it collectively with the protection of the daimyōs, and they had a tremendous scene going.
Now, to us that sounds extremely weird, even immoral—you don’t expect religious people to do things like that. You know? I know you don’t—if the religious people are self-righteous and have no humor.
But these people didn’t go around pretending that they were specially good. They didn’t dupe themselves. They were people who understood what human nature is—that in every one of us there is an element of irreducible rascality.
In Jewish theology this is called the yetzer hara. The element of irreducible rascality, which was created by God because God has one, too. And that’s why, when you are really affectionate with somebody else; when, for example, men—I don’t know what women do in their private lives between each other—but men, as we all know, say to someone they’re very fond of, “Why, you old bastard!” You know?
Just like that, you know? There’s a certain way of saying to a person—there’s a certain glint of recognition. And so there’s a Zen poem which says: “When two Zen masters meet each other on the road they need no introduction.
When a thief meets a thief, they recognize each other instantly.” And this goes back, you see, again into the heart of Chinese philosophy: that human nature is considered to be basically good. And even the rascally elements of it are good. They’re the sort of salt in the human stew.
There has to be this little thing, the human passions, and that the natural contentiousness and greed (or whatever that we have) is an essential element in our makeup, and that when people lose sight of that they go mad. Nothing, for example, is more dangerous than a saint. You’ve got to say: an unconscious saint who thinks that he is right, and who endeavors to live an absolutely pure life and to eliminate all selfish thoughts.
Somebody who undertakes that task is going to be a menace to all around, because he loses his humor, he loses his real humility—which is knowing that, after all, since we are humans, we have certain needs. We need to eat, we need sex, we need this, that, and the other. And this sort of has a quality of humor to it.
And so this is why, in Zen art, the sages are always drawn to look a little bit like bums. You know that Bùdài—or Hotei, as he’s called—what’s called the laughing Buddha, the fat Buddha, with an immense belly, and carrying around an enormous bag of rubbish into which he indiscriminately puts anything he finds around and then gives it away to children. This is the sort of type which the Chinese call the old rogue.
And the old rogue, as a type of this poet, sage, monk, and scholar, you see, is greatly admired. He is the nonviolent brigand, the rolling stone, the free man—or in our words, the joker. The joker, you see, is the card that can play any role in the pack.
So then, Zen developed in China after Bodhidharma’s time and came to a sort of a golden age in the Tang and Song dynasties. The Golden Age of Zen lies between 713 AD and approximately 1100–1200. That’s the great creative period in which all the marvelous masters emerged and during which Zen exercised a profound influence on the development of Chinese poetry, and painting, calligraphy, and scholarship.
Then, between 1100 and 1200, it shifted to Japan and underwent a new development, rather different in quality and in tone. And after it had done that, for some curious reason (which is a very complicated historical question), it slowly faded away in China. So that, as we find it today, it is principally a Japanese phenomenon, and it is slowly fading in Japan and slowly growing in the West.
It’s a very funny thing. Now then, let me indicate what Zen training—what its method is, how does it work. I said before: what is involved is a dialogue, an interchange, between two people.
One who has defined himself as a student, and has therefore defined the other as the teacher. There is no teacher until a student arrives, no problem until a question is raised. So students create teachers.
It’s very funny. We have a saying: anybody who goes to a psychiatrist ought to have his head examined. You can interpret that as: you’re an idiot to go to a psychiatrist, because they’re a bunch of charlatans.
But the subtler meaning of it is: yes, if you define yourself as being in need of help psychiatrically, you need a psychiatrist. They say exactly the same thing in Zen. If you ask a question, you get thirty blows with a stick.
If you don’t ask a question, you get thirty blows with a stick. Because you’ve simply put yourself in status pupilari: you’ve defined yourself as having a problem. Now, nobody really has a problem, but the māyā (the game of life) is to pretend that you do.
Going back to fundamental Hinduism, the godhead (or the Self) pretends it’s all of us, and so gets lost, and so as a ball and dreams all this goings-on. So when you’re on your way out from the dream, it suddenly occurs to you that you have a problem. Life is suffering.
Now, you would like to get out of this. So one such student went to a Zen master and he said, “We have to dress and eat every day. And how do we get out of all that?” In other words, you might ask the question in this way: we have to work; get up Monday morning, go to the office, do all this routine, sell something, and so on—how do we get out of the rat race?
So we have to dress and eat every day, and how do we get rid of all that? And the master said, “We dress, we eat.” The student said, “I don’t understand.” He replied, “If you don’t understand, put on your clothes and eat your food.” This is the kind of dialogue so characteristic of Zen. So the position is this.
The master—on being approached by a student about the problem of life—says: “I have nothing to teach you. I’m a Zen master. I have nothing to say.
Zen is not words. And furthermore, everything is perfectly clear.” There was a Confucian scholar who went to a Zen master and said, “What is your secret teaching?” And he replied, “There is a saying in your own teacher Confucius, which explains it all. Don’t you remember when Confucius said to his disciples, ‘Do you suppose that I’m concealing something from you?
I’ve held nothing back.’” And the scholar didn’t get this. So a few days later they were walking together in the mountains, and they passed the wild laurel bush. And the Zen master said to the Confucian scholar, “Do you smell it?” He said, “Yes.” He said, “You see, I’m holding nothing back.” So the position of the Zen master is: there is nothing to tell you.
We’re not offering you any panacea, any solution, any doctrine, any big, big goodie to the problem of life. Because the problem is an illusion. Well then, the student under these circumstances thinks, “Well, this is some sort of a come-on.
He’s testing my sincerity. And of course the nothing which he has to teach is the mystery of the great void.” See? He doesn’t take it as meaning just plain old ordinary nothing, but the great void.
And so he persists. And the teacher makes him persist until he gets way out on a limb. He has to persist so much that he practically dedicates his life—saying, just as the way Huike symbolically cut off his arm, the student is put in the position of dedicating his life to solving this thing and getting what that teacher has.
And of course there wasn’t anything all along. But he’s been put in that position. So then, once he’s in status pupilari, once he becomes a student, he’s put through all kinds of hoops.
They make him learn to meditate, to sit cross-legged, practice zazen. And then they also add to the trouble by asking impossible questions which are called kōan. And these questions are palpably absurd.
What they’re saying, essentially—at least the elementary kōans are all concerned with this—are requests for behavior on the part of the student that will be perfectly genuine. In other words: show me who you are. Now wait a minute, I don’t want to see any social definition of you.
I don’t want to know your name, your address, who your parents were. I want to see the absolutely authentic you. It’s like, existentialists talk about “authentic being.” Or it might be in the same way a father confessor in a Christian sense would say, “Now give me a really good confession.
What is the bad, bad thing you’ve really done?” And you confess to him adulteries and murders and thefts and sacrilege and blasphemies and cussing and so on, and he says, “Oh, now, now, now, now. Come off it. Those are only trivial sins.
Come on now, what is the really awful thing you’ve done?” “I don’t know. What, me?” This is the backwards way of doing exactly the same thing a Zen master is doing. See, who are you really?
Are you anybody? Is anybody home? Have you got anything?
And they do things like making you shout. See, this word is a very important word in Zen: “nothing.” Mu. Oh, I had it on the other side of the board.
It’s represented by the empty circle. The word mu in Japanese. So they say, “Now say it!
Say mu.” MU! You know? With all your guts going into it.
They say, “No, no, no. You don’t know how to say that. Come on!
That’s feeble. That’s nothing. Let’s really say it!” They have every kind of trick like that to show you that the more you make an effort to be genuine, the more of a fool you become.
And they tie you up in knots until you’re desperate. There was an American Zen student who was on a fulbright, and they gave him a year to study Zen. And he started to panic, because he’d only a month ago and he hadn’t realized it.
He knew he had to. And he went to the Zen master and he said, “Damnit!” He said, “Look, I’ve only ot a month left!” The master said, “Alright. We’ll have what we call osesshin.” You know?
Osesshin is an intense meditation practice, where you only sleep three hours a night sort of thing, and you meditate all the rest of the time. “Let’s go! Let’s really do it!
Do it! Do it!” And every day, three times, you come to me and present the answer to your Zen problem; your kōan. And it got worse, and it got worse, and it got worse, and he got more and more desperate—that here was this fulbright going to end, and he wouldn’t know what Zen was all about.
Well, practically on the last day he suddenly saw there was nothing to see. You know? It’s alright the way it is.
And this tremendous illumination, this load off his head, was of course what the master was trying to make him do. Now, in the ordinary way, if you’re not on a fulbright and you can stay around further, the master will then play a trick on you. And he’ll say, “Well now, that’s wonderful.
You’ve got your foot in at the gate. You saw! You realized there’s nothing to realize.
You realized the void. There’s nothing to cling to, you see? No barriers, no blocks in any direction.
It’s all transparent. But that is just the beginning! It’s all a necessity now for you to discipline yourself much harder, to make great efforts, really to get through.” So what are you going to do about that?
The student may say, “Well, I don’t know. I’ve had enough. I think I realize what it’s all about.” And he goes away.
Some time later, he begins to worry. Because, you see, the great emotional relief of this insight begins the wear off and life begins to look ordinary again. And he’ll think that, “Maybe I did miss something.
That was a very good master I went to, and I’d better go back.” So back he goes. And the teacher comes on very, very tough and says, “You’re no good. You didn’t stick with it.
Why should I take you back? “Oh master, I’m so sorry. I didn’t realize I was young and inexperienced.
And now I’ve come to my senses.” So the teacher finally says, “Alright, alright, alright! You’re on probation.” Again, he starts another kōan, and this one comes in from a completely different point of view. And he’s got others that come from this way, and from this way, and from this way, and from this way.
And the point is always: so long as I can beguile you (as teacher) into thinking there’s something you can get, you need to study with me. When I can no longer fool you into thinking that there’s something to get out of life, you will know that you’re life. You don’t get something out of it, you’re it!
But so long as you can be fazed and you could be taken in by the teacher, you need a teacher. So, in the end, when the student no longer needs a teacher and he sees that this old boy is fooled him the whole way through, he says at the same time, “Profound respect! And you wonderful rascal!” There’s a very strange thing in the—I’ve poked around a good deal lately in Japan among American Zen students to find out what’s going on.
And they tell me that the initial come-on of a Zen master is very tough and very authoritarian and paternalistic. But as you move in, he turns into your older brother and is a person you feel going right along with you beside you, helping you in this thing, full of friendship and compassion and everything. But occasionally he will suddenly turn and bring on the authoritarian stuff.
But they do in a very strange way. There was a Zen master who, on a Saturday morning, when he should have been woken up at eight o’clock, was woken up at seven—or whatever the time was. No, he should’ve been woken up at eight on Saturdays and seven on weekdays.