Datasets:
eliwill
/
Watts

Dataset card Data Studio Files Community
text
stringlengths
11
1.23k
So this was a Saturday, and his attendant monk came and woke him up at eight. He immediately looked at the clock and absolutely furious that he’d been woken up an hour late, because he didn’t know it was Saturday. So he’s struck out at this monk in rage, and the monk said, “Master but it Saturday!” He said “Oh.” Whzzt!
Anger disappeared. Absolutely serene. No apologies.
So, you see, the nature of this game—it is the Zen game—and I seem to have given away the show to you, and told you all the inside mechanics of it. But you would discover that, if you tangle with a Zen master, and you think you know (from what I had told you) what are the mechanics of it, and you stuck your neck out to put yourself in the position of being an inquirer, everything I had told you would be useless. He would outwit you completely.
That’s what consists in being a master. He’s not doing it because he wants to be superior and to put down other human beings. He’s doing it out of great compassion, because he feels he knows something which, if you could find out, you would just be so happy and would want to give it to everybody else.
But you can’t give it away, because everybody’s got it. What you’ve got to make them do is to see that they have it, and that you don’t give it to them. And that’s the most difficult task.
Yesterday I was giving you a general outline of the foundations of the Zen feeling for naturalness in art and life by describing the fundamental principles of the Taoist philosophy, and then of the Zen discipline itself. And we saw that the roots of the idea of spontaneous living make this conception—or rather, it isn’t so much a conception as a doing—something much more subtle than might ordinarily be imagined. A lot of people think that the spontaneous or completely natural life as it’s understood by these Far Eastern philosophers is to act according to whim.
There was, for example, a great Zen monk who lived shortly after 1000 AD who had a very peculiar way of painting. He had long hair, and he’d get very drunk on rice wine, then he’d soak his hair in ink and slosh it all over the paper. Then he would do a Rorschach test on it and decide what kind of a landscape it actually was, and then put in the finishing touches.
And suddenly, out of this apparent mess, a great landscape would be evoked. But the whole art of the thing lay in putting in the finishing touches. And also, it is a very curious thing: if a person who is untrained in painting makes a mess with the brush, it’s liable to be just a mess.
Whereas if a person who has the feeling of painting in them for a long time, and they make a mess with the brush or just do anything, it looks interesting. And that’s why, if you try to copy the best people in modern abstract, nonobjective painting, you find it’s a very difficult thing to do. Because there is more to spontaneity than caprice and disorder.
And I want to try and explain what that is. I mean, wouldn’t it be great if we could live absolutely on the spur of the moment? Not make any particular plans, not feel that—well, you might make plans, because you can make plans spontaneously—but not to worry about whether you had made the right decision, whether you’re being good or bad, selfish or unselfish, and not to hesitate in anything, you see?
One of the great applications of Zen, as I pointed out, was to the art of fencing. And when you learn fencing, you see, you have to learn to be spontaneous, because here of all places it is true that he who hesitates is lost. If you are engaged in combat, you see, and you stop to think what sort of a defense or attack you ought to make, the enemy’s got you.
So the way they teach people spontaneity in fencing is very interesting. When you start in to fencing school, you of course live with the teacher. He has a kind of ashram.
But you’re given a janitorial job. You clean up, you wash dishes, you put bedding away, and things like that. But while you’re going about your daily business, the master surprises you with a practice sword which is made of four strips of bamboo, rather loosely tied together.
And he hits you with this, surprisingly and suddenly, from nowhere. And you are expected to defend yourself with anything available—with the bedding, with the broom, with the pots and pans. Just anything—defend.
But the poor student never knows when the attack is coming or what direction it’s coming from, and he begins to get tense, and he begins to go around everywhere on sort of alert, you see, watching, watching, which direction it’s coming from. And as he goes down a certain passage feeling that the master’s probably lurking around that corner, and he’s all set to go for him, and he gets that practice sword, he suddenly gets hit from behind. So eventually he gives up.
There is absolutely no way of preparing for the attack. And so he just wanders around feeling: well, if it hits, it’s going to hit! So?
And then he is ready to begin fencing. Because if you prepare for an attack from a specific direction and it comes from some other direction, you have to withdraw from the direction in which you had expect it and send your energy in another direction, and that takes time. So what you do is: you go around with a mind of no expectation.
That is called mushin, or monen. This is a very important Zen expression. Mushin.
It almost means an “empty mind.” And this mu, “no”—I didn’t rub the ink long enough this morning—“no xīn.” You could also call it “no heart,” because the character xīn [心] means both “heart” and “mind,” but it isn’t quite the same as our word “heartless” as we use it, and it isn’t the same as the word “mindless” as we use it, meaning stupid. To be in a state of mushin is to have a mind like a mirror. And of this the Taoist sage Zhuang Zhou said: And when anything comes in front of a mirror, it reflects it instantly.
The mirror doesn’t wait to reflect it. They also say: “When the moon rises, all bodies of water instantly reflect the moon.” I mean, they don’t bother with physics about the speed of light or anything like that. That’s irrelevant.
Or they say: when you clap your hands, the sound issues immediately. It doesn’t stop to consider whether it will issue. And so, sparks from the flint, when it’s struck, they issue instantly.
But to do this you can’t try to be quick. See, if a Zen master corners you with a funny situation, and he puts you in a quandary expecting spontaneous action from you, don’t try to hurry. I’ve watched Suzuki wait a whole minute before answering.
But he doesn’t hesitate. He’s not at all embarrassed by this wait. And he can answer with silence just as well as with a formal response.
The point is: do something. When two young Americans wanted to study Zen, they were taken by a Japanese monk to interview the master and act as interpreter. And one of them had had some practice, you know?
He knew a bit about it. And so after they had had tea together and just discussed formalities, the master said in a very easy way, “Well, what do you gentlemen know about Zen?” And one of these students threw his fan—which he hadn’t unfolded; the fan was still folded up—he threw it straight at the master’s face. The master slightly moved to one side, and the fan, going, went whzzt, and went right through the paper wall.
And the master laughed like a child, you know? That’s the sort of game they get in. Once, a master was going around through the forest with a group of students, and he picked up a tree branch—you know, just as one might pick up a tree branch—and suddenly he turned to one of his students and said, “What is it?” And he hesitated.
So he hit him with the branch. And so, another student was there, and he turned to him quickly; he said, “What is it?” He said, “Give it to me, I want to see it. I’ll tell you.” So the master tossed the branch to him, and he took it and hit the master.
Now, you may think all this is kind of a rough stuff. But let me give you another story, which is on a rather different level. A certain Zen priest was having dinner at a big party, and the party was being served by a geisha girl who was so elegant and so skillful in serving that he suspected she might have had some Zen training.
And so he decided to try her out. And he nodded to her, and she immediately came to his place and sat down in front of his little low table. See, everybody would be seated, probably, in front of low tables all around a room, and the geisha servants and people move up and down in the middle.
And so she came down and sat down in front of him and bowed, and he said, “I would like to give you a present.” And she said, “I would be most honored.” Now, on the table there are hibachi, which are little braziers with hot charcoal in them, and you move the charcoal around with iron chopsticks. He took a piece of charcoal out on iron chopsticks an offered it to her. She had long, long sleeves on her kimono, and what she did was this: she wound them all round our hands and took the charcoal, immediately got up and went to the kitchen, disposed of the charcoal, changed her robe—which had holes burned almost all the way through the sleeves—and came back.
And she sat down in front of the master and bowed, and he said to him, “I would like to give you a present.” He said, “I would be most honored.” And so she picked up the iron chopsticks and handed him the charcoal. And he pulled out a cigarette and said, “That’s just what I wanted!” and lit the cigarette. Now, here’s the lesson.
The master’s spontaneity and being ready for that situation was the kind of quick thinking that a good comedian has, who in a completely unprepared way can make all sorts of jokes and turn any situation into a jest of some kind. There are of all sorts of people who do that. People who are experts and kind of like Dorothy Parker; in that sort of repartee.
But here it’s been developed in a very fundamental way and to a very high degree. Now, the way in which it’s developed, you see, requires a protected situation. Because if we all started to act on the spur of the moment without the slightest consideration or deliberation—No.
No, no. C’mon kitty, shoo. Okay, you come with me now.
And—oh, alright. If we all started to act on pure whim, everybody would think we were crazy. And people would avoid us and call the police and things like that.
But what they do is this: they start you doing this in the context of a disciplined situation where there are very rigid rules for most of the time, but there are certain instances at which all those rules go hang. And you’re in a community which understands the game. Because the point is this: when you start acting spontaneously, you’re not used to doing it, and therefore your responses are unintelligent and inappropriate.
But when you become used to doing this, and when it becomes second nature to you to act in the state of mushin—“no mind” or “no deliberation”—then your behavior has matured, and you find that you’re accustomed to respond quite appropriately as the Zen master did in lighting his cigarette from the charcoal. So, also, in learning the art of swordsmanship: when he has given up defending himself, and—okay, kitty—when he’s given up defending himself and preparing his mind for attack, then he’s got a mirror mind. And this is also likened to a vessel of water, like a wooden barrel: when you make a hole in the barrel, the water instantly flows out of the hole.
Because the water is always available to come out. It doesn’t have to choose. And so you could also say that mushin is what Krishnamurti calls choicelessness.
Because, you see, choice in this sense is not quite the same thing as decision. Choice means dithering. You know, there are some people who, before they start to write something down, they wiggle their pens a little.
The pen dithers over the paper, and then they start to write. And so, in the same way, a lot of people, constantly in the life situation, they dither. Because that dithering is anxiety.
To be or not to be, that is the question. Well, there is no question about to be or not to be. See?
Because to be and not to be go together, as we saw. They arise mutually. And so—kitty, I don’t think you’re feeling very comfortable!
Would you like to sit here? Take care of it. I don’t want her to get mixed up in the tape recorder.
So then, in the situation of the Zen community, safeguards are set up within which you can learn how to act without deliberation—which is, you see, in a sense, going back to the state of innocence. Now, it doesn’t mean that you give up thinking. It doesn’t mean that you become an anti-intellectual.
You can also learn—and this is part of the later phases of Zen training—how to think spontaneously, how to deliberate spontaneously. The saying is, you see: “Stand or walk as you will. But whatever you do, don’t wobble.” So this is our difficulty.
Because the human mind is a feedback system. Feedback has a peculiar susceptibility to nervousness. You see?
Now, in this way we think about thinking, we worry about worrying, and then, when that really gets bad, you worry because you worry about worrying. Now that is it analogous exactly to the kinds of vibration that are set up in certain mechanical systems. For example, if you—I did this trick on television once.
I had the camera man turn the camera on the monitor. The monitor is the television set in the studio where you see what you are doing. And so, on this show I said, “Now I’m going to show you a picture of anxiety.
Don’t worry about your sets. There’s not going to be anything wrong with your set. So don’t turn it off.” Now I said, “Mr.
camera man, will you please turn the camera on the monitor?” He does that, and what does he do? He’s taking a picture of taking a picture, all in the same system. And as you do that, the system starts going yooing, yooing, yooing-yooing-yooing-yooing-yooing yoeeyoeeyoeeyoeeyoeeyoeeyoee, like that, you see?
It then sets up a kind of oscillation. And you see on the screen all these jagged lines dancing across. Now that’s what’s meant, you see, by hesitation, attachment, blocking—all that kind of thing which the Zen discipline is designed to overcome.
And because the human being is such a peculiarly beautifully organized nervous system, and has this tremendously subtle cortex which is capable of all kinds of thinking about thinking—you can turn yourself on in the most extraordinary ways by, for example, getting earphones which repeat what you say just a fraction of a second after you say it back to you; they delay it. And you can get an oscilloscope tied up with your own heartbeats, and get feedback through in this way, so that you suddenly begin to see yourself behaving, and it completely balls you up. Because you wait for yourself to go on.
But then you realize it’s you doing it. But you can’t wait on your heartbeat. You can’t wait on what you say.
And you get this sensation of going faster and faster and faster and faster until you just have to close the whole thing off or you’d go crazy. So that’s what we’re doing. And our civilization and our social institutions reflect this in hundreds of ways.
And this would be true of any civilization, because all civilization is based on the development of consciousness and feedback—that is to say, the property of self-control, of being self-conscious, looking at what you have done—and then being able to criticize it and correct it. But who criticizes? Is the critic reliable?
When you criticize yourself, who will criticize the critic? You see? Or to put it in the other way: quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
“Who will guard the guards themselves?” Who will take care of the policemen? Who will govern the president? And that is the big problem.
And when we get tied up in that problem—the Chinese got tied up in it because they were simply a very high order of civilization; so did the Japanese—there has to be a break. Somebody has to start throwing things, otherwise everybody will go insane. So Zen functions in that culture as a way of liberation from the tangle of being too civilized.
Now, you see, in Japanese culture people are tremendously concerned with propriety, with good manners, and with keeping up with the Joneses. One of the funniest things in the world is to watch Japanese people having a bowing contest. It’s a very frequent thing when friends meet or take leave.
They go, “Ah, so, so, so.” And they bow, and they bow, and it goes back and forth, and see who gets the last one in, because I’m more polite than you! And the worries about when somebody comes—you know, you visit a family, you always bring a gift. And they start worrying: is this gift suitable?
Is it anything as good as the gift they last gave us? And is it right for the occasion? Have we thought about it enough?
Is there some symbolism in this gift that connects with this person’s name or their birthday, or something like that? And they think about the things interminably. And thus they cultivate—the ordinary culture has a great deal of social nervousness in it.
People giggle. You often see girls who giggle and cover their mouths, to say: I’m not really giggling. All sorts of funny things happen because of this immense social awareness and nervousness.
Now, Zen breaks that up. Only, it does it in a way that has high artistry to it. So, you see, in—let’s just take the aesthetic domain for the moment.
And you remember I was discussing yesterday one tea bowl. And you remember, too, that in the whole history of ceramics, the Chinese developed some of the most elegant work imaginable. You are probably aware—I don’t see a specimen of the great work of the Song and Korean potters, very often done in a jade-like green; the most gorgeous texture.
It looked practically as if it was carved out of jade. Well, that led on, you see, to the high techniques of the Ming dynasty with translucent porcelain, white clay, the most subtle designs of all. And that style went also to Japan.
And the very, very rich people you read about in, say, books like the Tale of Genji, and you see in a film—you must see it; Chūshingura, this story of the 47 Ronin—the lovely things they had around their houses were unbelievable. The lacquer, the boxes in pure gold, and—oh, you know, it was delicious stuff! But then it was just like having too much éclairs and ice cream and filet mignon and cooked à la Carême—you know, that French cook who made everything look like an Oriental palace?
Now, what happened? The people who practice Zen suddenly got an eye for the beauty of the ordinary. There were two reasons for this.
One was that they became fascinated with what happened spontaneously: what pattern a brush would make when handled roughly and the hairlines were shown. They also, because they’d practiced zazen (which is sitting quietly, not thinking of anything special, but having a completely open mind), that puts you into a state where you get much better eyes and ears than you ordinarily have, and you start really seeing things. So, you know that famous haiku poem?
In Japanese that “plop” is mizu no oto: “sound of the water.” And there’s another poem just like it: Somebody suddenly realized, you see: just the sound of the water is marvelous! That’s all. Or they found that they kept getting in very, very cheap Korean rice bowls; the poorest, cheapest kind for peasants to eat out of.
And suddenly it struck one of these Zen masters that that was an incomparably beautiful object. Nobody had seen this before. They also had the simplest wooden ladles—bamboo, and then a stick in it—for use in the kitchen, and one day somebody noticed that this ordinary everyday kitchen utensil was just lovely.
And so, in the same way, they found that it was quite as satisfactory to listen to the kettle boiling as to listen to an elaborate concert. So what did they do? They started, through particularly a man called Sen no Rikyū to give parties for a very few guests in shacks, little huts in the garden made of very primitive materials such as a mud walls, and where they would go and sit, and out of the simplest utensils—carefully chosen by a superb artist—they would simply sit and enjoy the uncomplicated life.
And so was born the tea ceremony. Now, look at that, you see, in the historical context. That’s terribly important.
It was they going back to the primitive after people were sick of too much civilization. And yet, it was going on to the primitive rather than back. Because the people who selected all those things, they knew the whole tradition of their civilization and their culture.
They weren’t barbarians. Once upon a time—then, you see, when this became the rage, Rikyū became attached to the court. The shogun had tea with Rikyū, and everybody started digging tea ceremony.
And, in due course, the whole thing became awful. Because what’s happened today is this: tea ceremony is essentially something to enjoy. And there are a few men left who know how to serve tea ceremony.
And it’s an extremely congenial, quiet get together with easy conversation, simple and unostentatious manners, and really lovely things to look at. I was present at a tea ceremony celebrated by a Zen monk who happens to be an American. And he is a man who has done a lot of mountaineering, and he has therefore with him at all times the sort of equipment that you take on camping in the mountains.
Because he does a lot of climbing in Japan. And I said to him, “This afternoon it’d be very nice to have a tea ceremony. And you did it once before here, and it was so pleasant.
Would do serve it again?” He said, “Yes, by all means.” Before, he had served tea ceremony in the style that Zen monks do it, which is rather simple and direct and much more comfortable than all these well-educated ladies who’re on tittering about, you know, and on tiptoe, and nervous, and hoping they won’t make a mistake, and all that kind of thing. It’s just dreadful! So he suddenly came in with a small Primus stove.
He set that down. Then he had an old paint pot, which had inside it an aluminum mug, and he set that down. He then proceeded to take the aluminum mug out, pour water into the paint pot, and set that on the Primus stove.
But he ritually pumped up the Primus stove. He did everything in the style of tea ceremony, but this was a dirty old Primus stove! And suddenly the thing began to flame like the god Fudō.
And he mixed the tea in the traditional way with the whisk. Had all the perfect and lovely manners, handing us the aluminum cup. And we got into a long—it’s a custom after the tea ceremony, after you’ve drunk, to pass all the utensils around for inspection.
And this is exactly what happened. And we found that the aluminum cup had year 1945 stamped on it for some reason. And we got into a discussion about styles of aluminum cups made in 1945.
And it was the funniest thing! But it was a complete makeover of the tea ceremony into the modern idiom. Of course, the tea drunk in tea ceremony is that powdered green tea, which you don’t steep like you make ordinary tea.
You whisk it, mixed with a small amount of hot water, into a froth. And it’s called liquid jade. And it’s a bit of an acquired taste for most Westerners.
It tastes a little bit like a mixture of maté tea and Guinness. But when you get to know it, it’s very invigorating and very awakening. And if you make up a strong mixture of it, it’s a good thing to use if you want to stay awake all night and do work.
And so, you see, the legend was that Zen monks started this interest in tea because they needed it to stay awake during their practice of meditation. And it’s said that Bodhidharma, whom I drew for you yesterday—and he’s always drawn with eyes that are wide open. Why?
Because he hasn’t got any eyelids. Once, when he was meditating, he fell asleep, and he was furious and cut his eyelids off. And as they dropped on the ground, whzzt, up came the first tea plants.
That’s why they have leaves shaped like eyelids, and are to be drunk ever thereafter for staying awake. So the plant of Buddhism—tea is the Buddhist drink, just like wine is the Christian drink, coffee is the Islamic drink, and milk the Hindu drink. Every religion has its drink.
So then, around this kind of appreciation born of stillness, and the delight in seeing how nature takes its course, came the entire cult of Zen art with its special kind of primitivity, its special ceramics, its special calligraphic styles, and its special gardens—which are the controlled accident. Now, you see, as I showed you yesterday on that other tea bowl, this is a water jar. And they like to leave the bottom unglazed.
You can really see that it’s clay that way. But look, you see, how the glaze has been allowed to run. This is what we would call not neat at all.
I mean, you watch somebody make one of these, and I have watched a man just pick up the plate, and as he applies the design of the glaze, he just goes whoosh with a brush and lets it drop on, and it’s done. There’s another man who glazes by wood smoke, and in his kiln he may put about 1,100 pieces. And he wraps them in straw.
And wherever the straw touches, it leaves a splash of orange color against the purple background. Now, you see, the straw arranges itself according to the nature of straw. It doesn’t follow strict human direction.
And the fascination is: when they open up that kiln and bring the things out, they look eagerly to see—what has the straw done? So this principle of letting glaze run to see what will happen is wú wéi. This is non-interference.
This is mushin also: “no purpose.” Or it can also be translated “no specific intent.” And now of course, you see, sometimes this doesn’t work. And the master picks it up and says, “That’s not very interesting,” and rejects it. What are the canons of taste which decide whether he will accept one of these accidents or reject it?
Because here, an additional principle of control enters. See, say, in the practice of calligraphy: a man may sit down with a huge pile of paper in front of him and do piece after piece after piece, and if it isn’t just right, he throws it away. So he eventually makes a selection that comes out.
There’s a famous story of a Zen master who was doing calligraphy, and he had a very smart monk standing beside him who was his assistant, and the monk said Nu-uh, to each one as he did it. “You can do better than that.” “Oh, no, no. Come, now.
You know much better than that.” This master got more and more furious. But the monk had to go out to the benjo, to the toilet. And he thought, “Quick, while he’s away!” Brrrr, he did it.
And the monk came back and looked, and he said, “A masterpiece!” So there’s this element of selection, you see? Now, what determines this? How do you know?
Or another example of this. There was a porcelain tea caddy—not porcelain, but clay—and when Sen no Rikyū was having tea ceremony, he saw this tea caddy and made no comment on it. And the owner was so disappointed that he smashed it.