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But one of his friends picked the broken pieces out of the trash can and took them to a mender, and he said, “Look. Mend this with gold.” And he put therefore gold cement, and put this caddy back together, and so it had all over its surface spidery lines of gold. And when Rikyū saw that, he was just enchanted!
And it became one of the most valuable tea caddies in the Japanese collections. Spidery lines of gold following just the apparently chance marks of a smash. There was a competition at the Art Institute in the University of Chicago in which there was a sculpture class.
And the competition was that each student was given a cubic foot of plaster of Paris, and they said: now do something with it. Well, the prize was won by a woman who looked at this cube and said, “It has no character. It doesn’t want to be anything.” So she flung it on the floor and smashed it all up.
I mean, she made dents in it and banged off the corners and put cracks in it and things. And then she looked at again. She said, “Ah!
Now I know what it wants to be.” And so she followed the grain in it—as it were, made by all these cracks—and produced this marvelous piece of sculpture. You have in this area a very ingenious sculptor by the name of Donal Hord, who is a master at following the grain in wood, and actually making the grain—the grain seems to suggest to him the muscles and the flow of the kind of body that he’s making. Well, that’s the thing.
So when a master decides whether the accident came off, what he wants is this: he wants the thing to be the perfect harmony of Man and nature, of order and randomness. Now this is a curious thing in the human mind. When we play games, we get most fascination out of those games which satisfactorily combine skill and chance.
Games like bridge, poker, have a sort of admirable combination of these two elements. And we can go on playing those games again and again and again, because you don’t feel completely at the mercy of chance—as you do with dice, unless you cheat—and you don’t feel completely at the mercy of skill, as you do with chess, or especially with a game like three-dimensional chess. So there’s a sort of optimum middle where order and randomness go together.
Well, that’s what this man is looking for. He’s looking for the optimal combination, you see? Things that are artwork like Persian miniatures or the jewelry of Cellini and Chinese porcelain is too much skill.
Too much order. It’s like those houses you go into where you daren’t put an ash in the tray, because everything is so clean and everything is so tidy you don’t touch it. One prefers a house, you see, that looks a little lived in, that is more genial, more comfortable, somehow invites you to sit down and even put your feet on the table.
Whereas, on the other extreme, some kind of pad where everything is covered in dirt and filthy clothes are thrown in the corner and, you know, people are all paint all over them, and so on—that’s the other extreme. We don’t want that. But that’s that curious thing in the middle.
Now, the most difficult thing is to hold to the middle. It’s like walking a tightrope. And that’s why the path of Buddhism is called the razor’s edge.
Because, you see, what happens when all this kind of work in the course of history became fashionable, people began to affect these styles. For example, when Sesshū (the great master ink painter) worked, he would sometimes take a handful of straw, and paint with that instead of a brush in order to get the sort of rough effect that he wanted. But later on, there came people who could take an ordinary paintbrush and so exactly ink that brush that it would give precisely the messy effect that they had in mind.
They would also be able to ink a brush in such a way—and this is terribly decadent—they could dab grapes on a vine, and have dark ink where the shadow was supposed to be, and no ink at all where the highlight was supposed to be. That’s when they started getting mixed up with Western ideas about shadows and perspective. They didn’t have that earlier.
But they were so skilled in the handling of the ink that they would do this sort of thing, and they would imitate, you see, all the so-called rough natural effects of the great Zen artists. And so, today in Japan, a younger generation of artists has decided it’s time to break all that up. If you imagine, for example, haiku parties; the writing of haiku poetry.
Bashō, who is the great seventeenth-century master of haiku, said: get a three-foot child to write haiku. Because they’re the sort of direct guileless things that children would say. But now there are magazines devoted to haiku poetry wherein every issue there will be ten thousand haikus written by people all over the country, and they get so stilted and so affected that one wished one had never heard of haiku!
The same thing is starting over here. And you should see the entries we get in these haiku competitions that Japan Airlines and other people sponsor! But it all, after a while, becomes dated, stilted.
And so somewhere, again, the new thing has to break out—which is always coming up. But there’s no formula, you see, for fixing it so that you can do it again and again and again. Because the moment you start doing it again and again and again, it isn’t it anymore.
The real thing has escaped. You remember, some time ago, there was a fashion for having wrought iron fish—just the outline of a fish? Some artist originally, you know, put this fish together and it looked great.
But then you suddenly found them in every gift shop and dime store, and they looked perfectly terrible. So this is the mysterious thing where, not only in the arts, but in lifestyles, in everything—when you start saying: what is the technique for getting this thing? And people say: well, this is it.
It’s gone. Same in education. Same in music.
The moment you start teaching something, what question you are asking? How could we—is there some method whereby, in our schools, we could produce from the music department, every graduation ceremony, three musicians of the stature of Bach or Mozart? Now, if we knew how to do that, that knowledge would prevent us from being surprised by the work of these people—because we would know how it’s done!
And when you know how something is done, it doesn’t surprise you. That’s why there’s a Zen poem that says: Certainly, the god of spring would be supposed to know where the flowers come from. But the truth of the matter is: he doesn’t.
And so, in the same way, if you ask the Lord God: “How do you create the universe?” He said, “I have no special method.” And this is known in Zen as a very difficult—this is the most difficult virtue to attain. So many of these things begin with mu. Buji: it means “nothing special.” It means “no business.” “No artificiality.” In American current: “real cool.” So buji is where something doesn’t stand out like a sore thumb.
But it is absolutely different from being modest. A buji person may be immodest in the sense that, if he knows he can do something well, he just says he can. He doesn’t go into all sorts of blushing violet techniques.
Buji, you see, is this mysterious quality of no special method. Because if there is—let me repeat: if we do know the method, and we know it infallibly, it ceases to be interesting. There are no surprises left.
And the moment the element of surprise is gone, the zest of life has gone. That, you see, is why it’s very difficult to teach Zen to yourself, because you can’t easily surprise yourself. The essence, you see, of this kind of spontaneity is response to a surprise.
So the master—you don’t know what he’s going to do. And he surprises you. It’s like trying to cure hiccups: very difficult to cure yourself, because when you pat yourself on the back you know when you’re going to do it.
So you’re all ready for it. But somebody else comes up and slams you on the back, and that’s a surprise. And what you needed was a surprise.
Or it’s like jokes. What makes you laugh about a joke is the element of surprise in it. That’s why jokes aren’t funny after they’ve been explained.
So, in the same way, all these Zen stories, if explained, have no effect. They’re intended to produce what I would call metaphysical laughter. But this has to be a surprise.
And so, as to be surprised—well, there’s no way of premeditating it. So, you see, if you read—for example, there’s a book out here called Zen, by Eugen Herrigel, who studied archery. Many of you have probably read this book.
He had to learn to pull the bowstring in the manner of the Japanese archer and let it go, but not on purpose. He had to let it go without thinking first, “I’ll let it go,” and then let go. He had to let it go not on purpose.
Now, that really bugged Herrigel. How do you do something not on purpose—especially if you’re aiming at a target? Well, the whole point is: if you think before you shoot, it’s too late.
The target’s moved. That’s why we have a thing like beginner’s luck. You see, if you simply point at something like that, if your finger was a gun, I would probably have hit the light switch.
And so you get a person who is naïve about a gun, who will pick a gun up, and bang, and the thing will be will drop did. I’ll never forget the first time I ever used a slingshot. This friend of mine was with me and he was aiming away and not missing, and I just picked it up and ping, and it hit.
But I couldn’t do it again. You get a certain naturalness there. So there was a master by the name of Ikkyū who was a great leg-puller, and he had in front of his house a very gnarled pine tree—one of those things that’s contorted.
And they love this kind of thing. And he put a notice up by it that said: “I, Ikkyū, will pay one hundred yen”—which was a fair amount of money in those days—“to anyone who can see this tree straight.” Well, soon there was a whole crowd of people around that tree, lying on the ground and twisting their necks and looking at it from all sorts of angles, and there’s absolutely no way of seeing the tree with a straight trunk. But Ikkyū had a friend who was a priest of another sect.
And a smart boy went over to see this friend and said, “What about this Mr. Ikkyū’s tree?” “Oh,” he said, “It is perfectly simple.” He said, “You go and tell him the answer to seeing the tree straight is to look straight at it.” So this man went over to Ikkyū and said, “I claim the reward.” He said, “You look straight at it.” And Ikkyū looked at him in a funny way and said—he forked out the hundred yen and gave it to him, and said, “I think you’ve been talking to Rozan down the street!” Now, in that way, you see, just look straight at it! In other words, here’s the bowstring: let go of it! Don’t do all this thimble-thambling, mimble-mambling, jumble-humble about the right technique of letting go of it.
Let go of it, damnit! But that’s very difficult. It’s as if I were to say to you: now, everybody, let’s be un-self-conscious.
And so finally, in desperation, you at last learn to let go of the thing—which was what you were supposed to do all the time. And then one is again as a child. This is original innocence.
So this is the meaning of the person who was asked, “What do you do here in the Zen institution?” He said, “We eat when hungry and we sleep when tired.” Well, he said, “That’s being just like everybody else. They all do that.” He said, “They do not. When they eat, they don’t eat, but they think of all sorts of extraneous matters.
When they tire, they don’t sleep, they dream all kinds of dreams.” So let’s have an intermission, and then we can have discussion. It would be, of course, much better if this occasion were celebrated with no talk at all. And if I addressed you in the manner of the ancient teachers of Zen, I should hit the microphone with my fan and leave.
But I somehow have the feeling that, since you have contributed to the support of the Zen Center in expectation of learning something, a few words should be said—even though I warn you that, by explaining these things to you, I shall subject you to a very serious hoax. Because if I allow you to leave here this evening under the impression that you understand something about Zen, you will have missed the point entirely. Because Zen is a way of life, a state of being, that is not possible to embrace in any concept whatsoever.
So that any concepts, any ideas, any words that I shall put across to you this evening will have as their object showing you the limitations of words and of thinking. Now then, if one must try to say something about what Zen is—and I want to do this by way of introduction—I must make it emphatic that Zen, in its essence, is not a doctrine. There’s nothing you’re supposed to believe in.
And it’s not a philosophy in our sense; that is to say, a set of ideas, an intellectual net in which one tries to catch the fish of reality. Actually, the fish of reality is more like water: it always slips through the net. And in water—you know, when you get into it, there’s nothing to hang on to.
All this universe is like water. It is fluid, it is transient, it is changing. And when you’re thrown into the water after being accustomed to living on the dry land, and you’re not used to the idea of swimming, you try to stand on the water, you try to catch hold of it.
And as a result you drown. The only way to survive in the water—and this refers particularly to the waters of modern philosophical confusion where God is dead, metaphysical propositions are meaningless, and there’s really nothing to hang on to, because we’re all just falling apart. And the only thing to do under those circumstances is to learn how to swim.
And to swim you relax, you let go, you give yourself to the water. And you have to know how to breathe in the right way. And then you find that the water holds you up.
Indeed, in a certain way you become the water. And so in the same way, one might say if one attempted to—again I say misleadingly—to put Zen into any sort of concept, it simply comes down to this: that, in this universe, there is one great energy, and we have no name for it. People have tried various names for it, like “God,” like “Brahman,” like “Tao.” But in the West the word “God” has got so many funny associations attached to it that most of us are bored with it.
When people say “God the father almighty,” most people feel funny inside. And so we like to hear new words: we like to hear about Tao, about Brahman, about shinyō, and tathātā, and such strange names from the Far East, because they don’t carry the same associations of mawkish sanctimony and funny meanings from the past. And actually, some of these words that the Buddhists use for the basic energy of the world really don’t mean anything at all.
The word tathata, which is translated from the Sanskrit into “suchness” or “thusness,” or something like that, really means something more like “dadada,” based on the word tat, which in Sanskrit means “that.” And so in Sanskrit it is said tat tvam asi, “that thou art,” or in modern American: “you’re it.” But “da, da”—that’s the first sound a baby makes when it comes into the world, because the baby looks around and says, “Da! Da! Da!
Da! Da!” That! And fathers flatter themselves and think it’s saying “da-da,” which means “daddy.” But according to Buddhist philosophy, all this universe is one “da-da-da.” That means “ten thousand functions,” or “ten thousand things,” “one suchness.” And we’re all one suchness.
And that means that suchess comes and goes like everything else, because this whole world is an on-and-off system. As the Chinese say, it’s the yang and the yin, and therefore it consists of now you see it, now you don’t; here you are, here you aren’t. Because that the very nature of energy: to be like waves, and waves have crests and troughs.
Only: we, being under a certain kind of sleepiness or illusion, imagine that the trough is going to overcome the wave, or the crest—the yin, the dark principle, is going to overcome the yang, or the light principle, and that “off” is going to finally triumph over “on.” And we, shall I say, bug ourselves by indulging in that illusion. Gee, supposing darkness did win out, wouldn’t that be terrible! And so we’re constantly trembling and thinking that it may.
Because, after all, isn’t it odd that anything exists? It’s most peculiar. It requires effort, it requires energy, and it would be so much easier for there to have been nothing at all.
Therefore, we think: well, since being, since the “is” side of things is so much effort, you always give up after a while and you sink back into death. But death is just the other face of energy, and it’s the rest, the “not being anything around,” that produces “something around,” just in the same way that you can’t have solid without space, or space without solid. When you wake up to this and realize that the more it changes, the more it’s the same thing—as the French say—that “you” are really a playing of this one energy, and there is nothing else but that; that it is you, but that for you to be always you would be an insufferable bore, and therefore it is arranged that you stop being you after a while, and then come back as someone else altogether.
And so, when you find that out, you become full of energy and delight. As Blake said, “Energy is eternal delight.” And you suddenly see through the whole sham of things. You realize you’re that—we won’t put a name on it—you’re that, and you can’t be anything else.
So you are relieved of fundamental terror. That doesn’t mean that you’re always going to be a great hero, that you won’t jump when you hear it bang, that you won’t worry occasionally, that you won’t lose your temper. It means, though, that fundamentally, deep, deep down within you, you will be able to be human, not a stone Buddha—you know, in Zen there is a difference made between a living Buddha and a stone Buddha.
If you go up to a stone Buddha and you hit him hard on the head, nothing happens. You break your fist or your stick. But if you hit a living Buddha, he may say “Ouch!” And he may feel pain, because if he didn’t feel something, he wouldn’t be a human being.
Buddhas are human. They are not devas; they are not gods. They are enlightened men and women.
But the point is that they are not afraid to be human, they are not afraid to let themselves participate in the pains, difficulties, and struggles that naturally go with human existence. The only difference is—and it’s almost an undetectable difference—it takes one to know one. As a Zen poem says, “When two Zen masters meet each other on the street, they need no introduction.
When thieves meet, they recognize one another instantly.” So a person who is a real cool Zen understander does not go around saying, “Oh, I understand Zen. I have satori. I have this attainment, I have that attainment, I have the other attainment.” Because if he said that, he wouldn’t understand the first thing about it.
So it is, then, that—if I may put it metaphorically, Zhuang Zhou said, “The perfect man employs his mind as a mirror. It grasps nothing, it refuses nothing. It receives but does not keep.” And another poem says of wild geese flying over a lake: “The wild geese do not intend to cast their reflection, and the water has no mind to retain their image.” In other words, this is to be—to put it very strictly into our modern idiom—this is to live without hangups.
The word “hangup” being an almost exact translation of the Japanese bonnō and the Sanskrit kleśa—ordinarily translated “worldly attachment,” although that sounds a little bit… you know what I mean. It sounds pious. And in Zen, things that sound pious are said to stink of Zen.
But to have no hangup—that is to say, to be able to drift like a cloud and flow like water, seeing that all life is a magnificent illusion, a playing of energy, and that there is absolutely nothing, fundamentally, to be afraid of. Fundamentally. You will be afraid on the surface.
You will be afraid of putting your hand in the fire. You will be afraid of getting sick, et cetera. But you will not be afraid of fear.
Fear will pass over your mind like a black cloud will be reflected in the mirror. But, of course, the mirror isn’t quite the right illustration. Space would be better.
Like a black cloud flows through space without leaving any track. Like the stars don’t leave trails behind them. And so that fundamental, that is called the void in Buddhism—it doesn’t mean “void” in the sense that it’s void in the ordinary sense of emptiness.
It means void in that it is the most real thing there is, but nobody can conceive it. It’s rather the same situation that you get between the speaker in a radio and all the various sounds which it produces. On the speaker you hear human voices, you hear every kind of musical instrument, honkings of horns, the sounds of traffic, the explosions of guns.
And yet, all that tremendous variety of sounds are the vibrations of one diaphragm. But it never says so. The announcer doesn’t come on first thing in the morning and say, “Ladies and gentlemen, all the sounds that you will hear subsequently during the day will be the vibration of this diaphragm.
Don’t take them for real.” And the radio never mentions its own construction, you see? And in exactly the same way, you are never able, really, to examine, to make an object of your own mind—just as you can’t look directly into your own eyes or bite your own teeth. Because you are that.
And if you try to find it and make it something to possess, why, that’s a great lack of confidence. That shows that you don’t really know you’re It. And if you’re It, you don’t need to make anything of it.
There’s nothing to look for. But the test is: are you still looking? Do you know that?
I mean not as kind of knowledge you possess; not something you’ve learned in school like you’ve got a degree and, you know, “I’ve mastered the contents of these books and remembered it.” In this knowledge, there’s nothing to be remembered, nothing to be formulated. You know it best when you say, “Well, I don’t know it.” Because that means I’m not holding on to it, I’m not trying to cling to it in the form of a concept, because there’s absolutely no necessity to do so. That would be, in Zen language, putting legs on a snake or a beard on a eunuch.
Or, as we would say, gilding the lily. Now you say, “Well, that sounds pretty easy. You mean to say all we have to do is just relax?
We don’t go around chasing anything anymore? We abandon religion, we abandon meditations, we abandon this, that, and the other, and just live it up anyhow? Just go on.” You know, like a father says to a child who keeps asking, “Why?
Why? Why? Why?
Why? Why did God make the universe? Who made God?
Why are the trees green?” and so on and so forth, and father says finally, “Oh, shut up and eat your bun!” It isn’t quite like that. Because, you see, the thing is this: All those people who try to realize Zen by doing nothing about it are still trying desperately to find it, are on the wrong track. There is another Zen poem which says, “You cannot attain it by thinking, you cannot grasp it by not thinking.” Or you could say: you cannot catch hold of the meaning of Zen by doing something about it, but equally, you cannot see into its meaning by doing nothing about it.
Because both are, in their different ways, attempts to move from where you are now, here, to somewhere else. And the point is that we come to an understanding of this (what I call suchness) only through being completely here. And no means are necessary to be completely here.
Either active means on the one hand, nor passive means on the other. Because in both ways you are trying to move away from the immediate now. But, you see, it’s difficult to understand language like that.
And to understand what all that is about, there is really one absolutely necessary prerequisite, and this is to stop thinking. Now, I am not saying this in the spirit of being an anti-intellectual, because I think a lot, talk a lot, write a lot of books, and am a sort of half-baked scholar. But, you know, if you talk all the time, you will never hear what anybody else has to say, and therefore, all you’ll have to talk about is your own conversation.
The same is true for people who think all the time. That means—when I use the word “think”—talking to yourself, subvocal conversation, the constant chit-chat of symbols and images and talk and words inside your skull. Now, if you do that all the time, you’ll find that you’ve nothing to think about except thinking.
And just as you have to stop talking to hear what others have to say, you have to stop thinking to find out what life is about. And the moment you stop thinking, you come into immediate contact with what Korzybski called so delightfully “the unspeakable world”—that is to say, the nonverbal world. Some people would call it the physical world.
But these words—“physical,” “nonverbal,” “material”—are all conceptual. And [CLAP] is not a concept. It’s not a noise, either.
This. [CLAP] Get that? So when you are awake to that world, you suddenly find that all the so-called differences between self and other, life and death, pleasure and pain, are all conceptual, and they’re not there.
They don’t exist at all in that world which is [CLAP]. In other words, if I hit you hard enough, “ouch” doesn’t hurt if you’re in a state of what is called no-thought. There is a certain experience, you see.
But you don’t call it “hurt.” It’s like when you were small children, they banged you about, and you cried. And they said, “Don’t cry” because they wanted to make you hurt and not cry at the same time. People are rather curious about the things the do like that.
But, you see, they really wanted you to cry. The same way if you threw up one day. It’s very good to throw up if you’ve eaten something that isn’t good for you.
But your mother said “Eeew!” and made you repress it and feel that throwing up wasn’t a good thing to do. Because then, when you saw people die, and everybody around you started weeping and making a fuss, and then you learned from that that dying was terrible. When somebody got sick, everybody else got anxious, and you learned that getting sick was something awful.
You learned it from a concept. So the reason why there is, in the practice of Zen, what we did before this lecture began, to practice zazen, sitting Zen. Incidentally, there are three other kinds of Zen besides zazen: standing Zen, walking Zen, and lying Zen.
In Buddhism, they speak of the three dignities of man. Walking, standing, sitting, and lying. And they say, “When you sit, just sit.
When you walk, just walk. But whatever you do, don’t wobble.” In fact, of course, you can wobble, if you really wobble well. When the old master Hyakujo was asked, “What is Zen?” he said, “When hungry, eat.
When tired, sleep.” But they said, “Well, isn’t that what everybody does? Aren’t you just like ordinary people?” “Oh,” he said, “No, they don’t do anything of the kind. When they’re hungry, they don’t just eat, they think of all sorts of things.
When they’re tired, they don’t just sleep, but dream all sorts of dreams.” I know the Jungians won’t like that, but there comes a time when you just dream yourself out, and no more dreams. You sleep deeply and breathe from your heels. Now, therefore, zazen, or sitting Zen, is a very, very good thing in the Western world.
We have been running around far too much. It’s alright; we’ve been active, and our action has achieved a lot of good things. But as Aristotle pointed out long ago—and this is one of the good things about Aristotle—he said, “The goal of action is contemplation.” In other words: busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, but what’s it all about?
Especially when people are busy because they think they’re going somewhere, that they’re going to get something and attain something. There’s quite a good deal of point to action if you know you’re not going anywhere: if you act like you dance, or like you sing, or play music, then you’re really not going anywhere, you’re just doing pure action. But if you act with a thought in mind that, as a result of action, you are eventually going to arrive at someplace where everything will be alright, then you are on a squirrel cage, hopelessly condemned to what the Buddhists call saṃsāra, the round or rat-race of birth and death—because you think you’re going to get somewhere.
You’re already there. And it’s only a person who has discovered that he is already there who is capable of action. Because he doesn’t act frantically with the thought that he’s going to get somewhere, he acts like he can go into walking meditation at that point, you see?
Where we walk not because we are in a great, great hurry to get to a destination, but because the walking itself is great. The walking itself is the meditation. And when you watch Zen monks walk, it’s very fascinating.
They have a different kind of walk from everybody else in Japan. Most Japanese shuffle along, or if they wear Western clothes, they race and hurry like we do. Zen monks have a peculiar swing when they walk.