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We hurry everything we do: we make our products, our houses, our furniture, our clothes so that they become obsolete quickly. We’re in such a hurry to get everything done. We pay attention to the front rather than the back.
Who, for example, in this day and age, has time to do anything like this? Here’s a piece of Chinese embroidery. Those among you who’ve ever done any embroidery—some of the ladies—will no doubt recognize that this is a kind of stitch called needlepoint.
It’s done on a material made up of minute little squares of thread, like a grid or lattice in thread. And this work here is so minute that there are 1,024 stitches to the square inch. So well done, furthermore, that if you turn it over and look at the back, the back is almost as neat as the front.
You know, ordinarily, when you embroider you take shortcuts around the back, and take threads, jumping spaces, and tying knots, and things of that kind. But here, no hurry. Or take such an ordinary object as a lady’s pocketbook.
This, again, is Chinese embroidery work in shaded silk. Very patiently done over a padded base underneath, so that the figures stand out. And inside it a little sewing case, which opens up, showing—concealed within—a place for the scissors of the most delicate work.
But in this day and age we don’t have time for it because we’re always in a hurry to get things finished, and so the things that we finish weren’t worth finishing because they were done so fast. After all, the enjoyment of our world is not really unlike listening to music. We don’t play music in order to get somewhere.
I mean, if the objective of music were to arrive at a point—say, the last bar, the final great crashing chords of the symphony—well, then all we’d do, we’d be just: “Hurry up, it’s playing!” Play it as fast as possible so as to get to the culmination, the end, as soon as possible—or just cut out the whole symphony and play only the last bars. To be able to enjoy it we have got to live each moment of the playing, and listen to it as if it were the only thing important to listen to. And then, if we do that, our time has an entirely different quality.
It’s represented in a Buddhist saying that: The two stages being, as it were, sufficient by themselves. And this is intended to give the idea of living in a fully concrete present into which you settle in. I mean, the present (for most of us) is—isn’t it?—just a hairline on a dial.
And the hand goes by it, FLASH, and there’s nothing in it. One after another. But here there is an entirely different sense of the present as something you can settle into.
There’s a line behind me from a Chinese poem, and it says, literally, “Day, ditto”—in other words: “day, day”—“that is good day.” Every day is a good day. And it comes as the last line of this poem: And “idle thoughts” mean illusory thoughts, thoughts of pursuing a future, thoughts of making one’s happiness depend on something which isn’t here at all. But when one can come to realize that the present is the only place in which you live, and that the past and the future are now no more than useful illusions—still useful, but useful only if one can live in the present—then, as I say, one can settle into full participation with the momentary reality of life as it goes along just like music.
And so, in the arts of the Far East there is reflected a kind of delight in momentariness. One can really consider, for example, this stem of a broken bamboo. Or—not only in painting, but in poetry—a poem in the Japanese haiku style; poems which just crystallize a single moment: Or a painting of a man sitting all alone in his boat, listening to the water.
He’s not asleep. He’s not dreaming. He’s a man living in an entirely real world; a world which we neglect because we have no time to sit and listen to the water.
After all, are not the memories which you go over memories which persuade you that it’s really worth being alive; really the memories of certain moments in which life itself brought you completely awake? I know we all think of things like the smell of coffee and bacon cooking on an autumn morning, the smell of burning leaves. I remember, particularly for me, one glimpse of a flock of sunlit pigeons against the dark background of a thundercloud.
And it’s incidents like that that are very largely celebrated in Far Eastern art and poetry: perceptions of the full reality and intensity of the moment. Such a one as this: Or paintings where one sees just a few birds on a branch, so vividly alive that you somehow think the next time you look at the branch the birds won’t be there. This is all an artform possible for people who feel themselves to be living in this real momentary world.
I remember once a very wise man who used to give lectures on philosophical matters of this kind. Before he started giving any lecture, [he] would sit for a while looking at his audience very intently, like this. And then, quite suddenly, he would say, “Wake up!
You’re all fast asleep! And if you don’t wake up, I won’t give any lecture.” And another Chinese sage pointed one day to some flowers while talking to a friend and said, “Most people look at these as if they were in a dream.” And Buddha, one of the wisest of the sons of Asia—his real name was Gautama, but he was called Buddha because Buddha means “the awakened one.” The man who woke up. Now, in what sense was he awake?
He was awake in the sense that he was completely all here. After all, we say about the person who’s nuts: “He’s not all here. He’s not all there.” But our whole culture, our whole civilization—insofar as it is involved with time and living only for a future—is nuts!
It’s not all here! We are not awake, we are not completely alive now. And consequently we are so hungry and so greedy, because everything seems tasteless.
We are living for an abstraction which has not yet come to be, and we don’t know what really is. That is a way of demonstrating the basic experience which underlies some of the major forms of Oriental philosophy. And actually, this way of demonstrating it is taken from a kind of Chinese and Japanese Buddhism called Zen, which I’m going to be talking about quite a bit today, because Zen is one of the best examples of a philosophy, shall we call it, in which this experience is dominant.
Zen, of course, is a Japanese word, and it’s spelled Z-E-N. And that is the Japanese way of pronouncing the Chinese word Chán. And this, in turn, is the Chinese way of pronouncing an Indian Sanskrit word, dhyāna. And dhyāna refers to the kind of experience which has been represented in this circle.
Another word for it would be a second Sanskrit term, śūnya. And the nearest we can translate śūnya in English is “emptiness” or “void.” And so we might say this is an experience of the void. Before trying to explain what this is—and, you know, the funny thing is it really can’t be explained, because it has to be felt, because it’s a transformation of one’s basic feeling, one’s basic consciousness of life.
But I should mention first that it is characteristic of Eastern philosophy to be based on experience rather than ideas. You see, philosophy in the Western world, especially as it’s taught in our universities and academies, is mainly a matter of thinking. It’s a matter of trying to arrive at certain clear, positive ideas about the nature of man, the nature of the universe, and so on and so forth.
And also, religion in the West is somewhat similar, because religion is largely concerned with belief in certain ideas. In these basic forms of Eastern philosophy, on the other hand—such as Zen, which is a kind of Buddhism; or Taoism, the basic native philosophy of China; or in Vedanta, which is the central form of Indian philosophy—what is basic to them is not ideas, but a way of experiencing, a way of feeling. And this might be called (as it is here) the void, demonstrated by this circle.
Because it is not a void which is just emptiness. This isn’t the idea that there are people in the backward worlds of Asia, who think that the universe is ultimately nothing at all. It is rather that the void represents complete spiritual freedom—or you might say, if you don’t like the word “spiritual,” complete psychological freedom.
And therefore, I want to try, if I can, to communicate to you, to give you some idea, of what this experience is. In Japanese, in Zen, it is called satori. I’ll write that down; it’s an unfamiliar word.
S-A-T-O-R-I. And I like the way that that’s pronounced in southern Chinese. They pronounce it ng.
Because it’s something that happens to you suddenly. Now let me try, if I can possibly, to put into some sort of words what this experience is. This experience—which, so far as they are concerned, is the objective of human life—to get this is to understand the meaning of human nature and destiny.
Only, because it’s a transformation of consciousness—because it’s something you feel rather than something you think—it is for this reason to put into words. But it is as if you saw quite suddenly—and indeed, this experience could’ve happened to you. It can come without warning to anybody.
And so what I’m going to be saying may strike a familiar ring in some ears. But it is as if, quite suddenly, you became totally convinced that the way everything is in this universe and at this moment is absolutely right. And that’s almost putting it too weakly.
I’m not trying to talk about a sort of Pollyanna feeling, where we say, “Well, this is the best of all possible worlds. And everything, however evil and however wrong, it’s going to work out alright in the end, because it’s a means to an end in some master design.” I’m not saying that. I’m saying: it is suddenly feeling that everything is right the way it is now, however appalling, however terrible.
And you know it beyond a shadow of doubt. There are two other aspects to this experience as well, and although you feel them altogether, we have to talk about them separately. While the first aspect is feeling that everything, just as it is, is so right that you could say of it, “This is why I’m alive.
This is what life’s all about.” The second is that everything you see and feel seems to come to life in an extraordinary way. You feel the world as you’ve seen it before was seen almost in a dream, where it is as if just the ordinary things that were confronting you suddenly went yaah! and came alive.
And the third aspect of it is that you no longer feel yourself and what you are experiencing to be separated. Although you don’t lose the feeling of the outline of your skin, you don’t forget that I or Joe Dokes is a possible name by which you can refer to yourself. Nevertheless, it suddenly seems to you that your skin is no longer what divides you from the world, it’s what joins you to it.
What you see outside you is also you. Now, we ordinarily restrict the idea of ego, of I-ness, or of you-ness, to some sort of psychological entity or process inside us which is in control of things, and we identify ourselves with a sort of controlling center. But in this experience it is as if that center were suddenly enlarged to include the whole universe.
You almost feel as if you were God—except that in Eastern thought one doesn’t think of God as a kind of omnipotent person. I mean, there are lots of people in our asylums who say, “Well, I’m God.” I always like the story of the woman who insisted that she was God, and to humor her someone said, “Well, if you’re God, will you please explain how you managed to create the universe in six days?” She said, “I never talk shop.” It isn’t feeling God in that sense, as if you could do anything, but it is feeling that you and this whole world are one. And that in this experience of oneness and this sudden coming alive of everything, and the profound rightness—that’s the only word I can use—the profound rightness of each moment, of this moment, however far it may seem to be short of one’s ideals of perfection.
This is it. And you say, having seen this, “I can die content. This is what it was all about.” Now, you might think at the same time that an experience of this kind is rather dangerous.
I mean, supposing one did become convinced that everything, just as it is, is the ideal, is right. Would this mean that you could go out and murder some rich relative in order to inherit their fortune? Does it mean you can do anything you like?
You can kick your father and mother, you can be cruel to your children, that you could steal and rob anything? In a way, it does mean that. But that is only to say—isn’t it?—that we are free.
And freedom is dangerous. But yet, freedom is one of the things which we cherish as one of our greatest possessions and privileges. But if we deny ourselves freedom, then we don’t really have the power to act morally.
Because all true moral acts are not the acts we are bound to do, they are the acts we are free to do. But freedom is dangerous. The moment you teach a child to walk, you can teach it to kick its mother.
The moment you teach a child to use a knife to cut up its steak with, the child can go and kill someone with a knife. Life is risky. Life is not safe.
And so, in the same way, this experience is not safe. But, on the other hand, its content is so joyous that when people are profoundly happy, they are not in the mood, usually, to go out and slug someone. And so you might say this experience, then—which is the foundation of these great forms of Oriental philosophy—that sounds wonderful, and I’d like to get it.
You know, that reminds me of a story. Once a fellow was traveling in England, and he’d lost his way and wanted to get to a certain village. And he went to a country yokel and said, “Can you tell me the way to Little Tottenham?” And the yokel scratched his head and said, “Well, sir, I do know where that is, but if I were you I wouldn’t start from here.” And so, in the same way, when one asks, “How do I get this experience?” that’s not quite the right question.
And to go out to get it is, from the first, the wrong approach. Because this sort of transformation of consciousness happens to a person only in the moment when, you might say, they give up grasping, they start to treat life not as something to be grabbed. When their whole approach to things is no longer clutching.
You know, it was a basic teaching in Buddhism that the root of all human suffering is clinging, or grasping. Just in the same way as I was suggesting on a previous program that you can’t cling to your breath without losing it. You have to let go of your breath.
And for that reason the word that is used in Buddhism for this experience—it’s another word familiar to you all, nirvana—literally means “blow out.” Whew! Don’t hang on. Don’t clutch life.
And so one of the great problems is: how on Earth to get ourselves to give up clutching, to give up clinging? But, you see, if that’s something you eagerly want to do because you want to get something good out of it, this is still a grasping attitude. Well, you know, in Zen they have a means of teaching people how to stop clinging.
Zen, incidentally, is supposed to have been brought from India to China around somewhere between 400 and 500 AD by a fierce looking gentleman called Bodhidharma. You can see him in this picture by the Japanese painter Soga Jasoku. He’s always drawn as a very fierce fellow with a twinkle in his eye at the same time.
And when Bodhidharma came to China, he didn’t have any disciples. But there was one fellow who sought him out, and his name was Eka. And Eka came to Bodhidharma and said, “Sir, I want you to accept me as your disciple.” And Bodhidharma replied, “I have nothing to teach.
What I understand is an experience,”—in other words—“and I can’t put it into words. And therefore, go away. I can’t teach it to you.” But Eka insisted on being taught, and he waited outside Bodhidharma’s cave in the snow.
And if you look in the picture by Sesshū, you can see Eka standing out there. And Eka got so persistent, and Bodhidharma so persisted in his refusal to teach him, that at last Eka cut off his arm and handed it to Bodhidharma saying, “Look! Here is the testimony of my sincerity.
Please take me as your disciple.” So Bodhidharma said, “Alright, what do you want?” And Eka replied, “I have no peace of mind. Please pacify my mind.” And by “mind,” of course, he meant his soul, his self. So Bodhidharma said, “Bring out your mind here before me.
I’ll pacify it.” But Eka said, “When I look for my mind, I can’t find it.” Bodhidharma said, “There! I have pacified your mind.” And at that moment Eka had this satori. In other words, he had the experience I’ve tried to describe to you.
Because Bodhidharma made him really struggle to catch hold of himself, to find that separate ego, that controlling center, which all of us tend to believe ourselves to be. But, you know, when you look for it you can’t find it. It’s like they say lunatics sometimes, sitting in an asylum, are doing this.
Yes, they sit (for hours, perhaps) in a padded cell doing that. But you can’t catch hold of it. You know, perhaps one of the good ways of showing you what this means is through the application of Zen to Japanese fencing.
You know, Japanese fencing—or kendō, which means “the way of the sword”—is done with gruesome swords like this. And the samurai (or Japanese feudal soldier) used to practice Zen to give them courage, and they applied it through the art of fencing. Now, if you go to study with a Japanese fencing master, you will not at first be given a sword and be told how to use it.
You will be made a kind of janitor around the house, and you have to do all the little chores like sweeping the floors, putting away the bedding, washing up the dishes, and so on and so forth. And while you are doing that, the master will get hold of a practice sword. This, you see, is made of bamboo.
It’s made of about six slips of bamboo loosely tied together, so that if you get hit with it, although it may give you a pretty hard crack, at least you don’t get killed. And while the poor boy who’s the apprentice is doing the household duty, the teacher struts around with one of these things, and unawares gives him a bang on the head. And the boy is expected to defend himself by any means at his disposal.
If he’s got a saucepan in his hand, use the saucepan. If he’s picking up a cushion, use the cushion. And everywhere, always at unknown moments, the teacher sneaks up on him and bangs him on the head.
So after a while the poor fellow is going around, looking this way and looking that, expecting at any moment the teacher to hit him. And he begins, in his mind, to plan how he can be ready to meet the teacher’s assault. And as he goes along a passage, he’s expecting the teacher to come right round the corner at the end.
And instead of that, just as he’s all ready to defend himself, doing! he gets hit on the head from behind. Now, when this has been going on for a little time, there are only two possibilities.
The apprentice gets a nervous breakdown and quits, or he learns. And what does he learn? He learns that the teacher will always outwit him; that he can never be prepared for an unexpected attack.
And so he gives up trying to control the situation. He gives up trying to prepare. In other words, he just wanders around just like this.
Oh, maybe it hits, maybe it doesn’t. He gives up caring whether he’s going to get hit or not. And at that moment the teacher gives him the practice sword and says, “Now you can begin to learn fencing.” Because the importance of this is simply: let us say you’re faced with a group of attackers, and you don’t know where the next attack is coming from.
If you are ready to go for this fellow, and this one is going to come at you, and you’re all set to go for him, you have to withdraw from here to go here. But if you’re in a middle position, and you’re not tensed in mind in any particular direction, you’re ready to go in all directions, wherever the attack may come from. And so, in exactly the same way, the Zen way of teaching teaches one to see that you cannot be in complete control of your whole life situation.
You cannot, in other words, fundamentally possess yourself. And so they set you with the problem of trying to find out who you are. Who is the knower behind all your experience?
Who is the experiencer? Who is the ego, the I? And they make you search for it, and search for it, and search for it.
Or you could put this in another way: they ask you—and this really amounts to the same thing—act with total sincerity. Show me (in the Zen way of putting it) who you were before your father and mother conceived you. In other words, show me your real, basic, original self.
And this means: perform an absolutely, 100% genuine and sincere act. Well, you know how it is when you try to be sincere, when you try to be natural: you know jolly well that you’re trying, and that everything you do is a fake. And so, in the same way, the Zen student finds out that he cannot act 100% genuinely with his whole being.
And he gets frustrated again and again and again, and the teacher rejects every attempt he makes to show him his real self, until the moment comes when he suddenly realizes—not just as an idea, but something that he knows in his whole body, he knows with his very bones—that it can’t be done. You cannot intentionally be natural. And he gives up.
And that moment of giving up is just the same as when the student of the sword gives up trying to prepare to defend himself. And in the moment when we let go of ourselves in that way, zhhupp, there comes upon us this experience of the void, of complete freedom—or, as we might say in psychological language: being free from blocking. You know, blocking is when you are stalled by something.
When somebody says something to you that fundamentally embarrasses you, or when an event happens in life which, as it were, knocks the wind out of your sails, you are blocked. And to be free from blocking, to be free from being stopped, being phased, is part of the satori experience. To be able to go straight ahead—as it were, going with the stream of life and not trying to resist the stream.
Just as, for example, if you were actually swimming, and you got caught in a strong current: if you try to swim against it you’re perfectly sure to drown. But you have to learn in that situation to turn around and go with the stream, let it carry you. And then, in that moment, you and the stream become one.
The whole force of the stream becomes one with your own body. And you learn after that how to use the force of the stream to edge to the side, and get out of it in that way. This, of course, is the philosophy of judo, of the “gentle way,” a philosophy of self defense in which Zen Buddhism has had a great influence.
So then, when the moment of letting go comes, when we see that every moment of life is now it—in other words, the object of life is no longer seen as something to grasp after in the future, every moment is it now. Every moment. Even the most trivial answers the question: what is life for?
And so, you see, the experience at the basis of Zen and at the basis of other types of Oriental philosophy can be demonstrated by ordinary everyday life. That’s why, in Zen teaching, those old masters in China didn’t like to answer questions about philosophy with wordy explanations. They had quite a different way going about it.
I remember one case where a Confucian scholar came to a teacher and said, “Please explain to me your secret teaching.” And the teacher replied, “Well, there’s a saying in your own master Confucius which very well puts it. When Confucius said, ‘My disciples, do you think I’m holding anything back from you? Indeed, I am holding nothing back.’” Now, that was all he said.
And so the Confucian scholar was a bit perturbed and said, “Well, what do you mean?” And the Zen teacher said, “Well, forget it. I don’t want to talk about it anymore.” Well, a few days later, they were walking together in the mountains. And they happened to pass a bush of wild laurel.
And the Zen teacher turned to the Confucian scholar and said, “Do you smell it?” The scholar said, “Yes.” “You see,” said the teacher, “I’m keeping nothing back from you!” And it’s said that at that moment the scholar was awakened. This is the characteristic approach of Zen: to answer questions about abstract, vast matters of philosophy with absolutely concrete, momentary events. Because it is these concrete, momentary events that are the answer.
If they are experienced with a mind that is no longer clinging to life and clinging to itself—as I said—the trivial, the ordinary, the momentary suddenly comes zhupp! to life. And this, you see, this thing that we are living now is the answer.
And so Zen teachers have said very strange things when asked philosophical questions. One of them said, “The cypress tree in the yard.” Another said, “Three pounds of flax.” Another said, “It’s windy again this morning.” Sometimes they don’t say anything. There’s a famous story of a Chinese general, I think he was, who came to one of the old masters and said to him, “What is the way?” And in answer, the master… [points at glass].
The teacher said, “I don’t understand.” The master said, “Cloud in the sky, water in the jar.” This is not the figure of a strange pagan god, it is the figure of a man; an awakened man, a Buddha. And I expect you may have wondered why almost all figures of Buddha, or of many other Eastern sages that you see, are seated like this. This figure of Buddha is in the posture of meditation.
And the way in which he is seated, and the whole caste of his features and of his expression, symbolize a certain attitude to life, a certain way of looking things, which in Indian and Chinese philosophy is considered essential to sanity. Perhaps I can give you some idea of the meaning of this attitude by demonstrating it with a Chinese character; a word which represents this whole attitude to life. Most of you probably know that Chinese characters are originally picture writing.
And in this particular character [ 觀 ], this half of the character is said originally to have represented some water bird—perhaps a stork or a heron—and this other part of the character is, first of all, a sign meaning the human eye. And then you put legs on it: “the activity of the eye,” and that means “seeing.” And the whole character is pronounced guān, and it means a certain kind of observation, a certain way of looking at things which might be typefied by the image of a heron standing at the edge of the water, as in this painting which is by the great Japanese artist Kanō Motonobu. There is the heron, standing quietly and serenely, watching the water.
And so the whole meaning of this attitude to life is what is summed up in the entire Eastern idea of meditation typefied in these Buddha figures. And I want to try today to explain to you something of the meaning of this attitude to life. For, fundamentally, meditation is not so much an exercise as it is a certain way of using one’s mind or one’s consciousness.
Because normally most human beings, when they use their eyes or their ears, are constantly and chronically straining to see and to hear. And when you come to think of it, that’s very odd. Because our eyes don’t work by effort, they don’t have to go out and get the light, the light comes to them.
And in the same way, sound comes to our ears, and even the sense of touch comes to our fingertips. We don’t, for example, have to press a thing hard. If I want, in the dark—I’m trying to fumble and feel what this is—I don’t have to press very hard to feel it, because the sensation simply of the hard object comes to the nerve end in my skin.
And so it’s strange, isn’t it, that we have acquired the habit of a constant and chronic effort to see clearly and to hear clearly. I think part of it comes from school. You know, when children are listening to a teacher in class they’re always fidgeting or doing something like this, you know, and looking around, and twisting and jiggling.
And the teacher says, “Pay attention!” And the children immediately, to ingratiate the teacher, are able to sort of ham or act what paying attention is like—and paying attention, of course, is staring at the teacher and frowning: “Yes, we’re very interested in what you say.” And sometimes, to get their concentration clear, they curl up their legs ’round the legs of the chair, and go into all these strained attitudes so that the teacher knows they really are trying very hard to attend. And it is through such conditioning as that—through being taught that we must try to see and try to hear in order to have clear sight and clear hearing—that we learn constantly to strain our senses in their use. But, as a matter of fact, this impedes the clarity of our senses, because if you will try staring hard at a book in front of you, or staring very hard at the TV screen you’re looking at right now, you’ll find that it becomes fuzzy.
Well, so, in the same way, if you’re trying to listen, say, to a telephone conversation while the children are running all over the house and screaming, if you try to listen to the telephone, you’ll get very angry and you’ll have to stop to yell at the children to make them be quiet. But, on the other hand, if you just let the sound come to your ears, you have no difficulty at all in hearing. So you remember, then, that heron I showed you: when that heron was watching the fish, it wasn’t sort of going like this, looking all over the place, going, “Fish here?
Fish here?” No. The heron was just quiet, like this. And, as it were, the whole area of vision is simply coming to the heron’s eyes.
And the moment it sees a ripple in the water, it darts down and gets the fish. Now, I don’t think it’s only that we have been taught by teachers and parents and so on to try to see and try to hear clearly. There are other factors in the problem.
And one of them is that while we are seeing and hearing, we are trying to make sense of our world by thinking about it. And the act of thinking also introduces an element of strain into the use of our minds. And I think the reason for this is—perhaps you will remember how I showed you on a previous program that thought is linear.
You know, it goes one word after another. It’s strung out in a line. We think: thought, thought, thought, thought, thought, in a line like this, one after another.
Whereas, when we see, we see to what is going on entirely. We take in a volume when we see. We take in a great area.
Nature is a volume rather than something strung out in a line. But when we think, we get one thought after another, and so the process of thought is much slower than the process of seeing and using our consciousness or our mind as a whole. And this, then, requires a certain effort to make thought keep up with what we are seeing or what we are hearing.
Also, you see, thought works by abstraction. What do I mean by abstraction? Well, a lot of Chinese characters are abstractions.
If we take, for example, the Chinese character for man, it is written this way [ 人 ]. Now, that was originally the head and legs of a human figure, something like this; let me draw an abstract figure of a man. Everybody knows that’s a man.
But, as a matter of fact, it cuts out a great deal of man. This figure cuts out all the details and gives us a simple image which we can grasp all at once. And we have to do that in order to think, so that we can use a series of very simple images (or grasps) of the world, and these are abstractions.
And it is fundamentally in terms of abstractions that we think. Now, thought—as I said—is slower because it goes in a line, thought after thought, and also thought is abstract. That is to say, it lacks the full, living quality of real life—just as this figure here is just a sort of skeleton, a ball on top of sticks, and therefore it lacks the vitality, the aliveness, of a real man.