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So then, when we are willing to react to pain as our own natural feeling suggests—if we’re willing to scream, if we’re willing to weep, if we’re willing to wriggle and writhe as pain suggests to us to do—a very strange thing happens. The very willingness to react in that way often makes it quite unnecessary to do so. Now, you may say I’m just talking big.
And the only way I can prove what I say is: the next time you have a toothache, the next time you have any serious pain, see what happens if you do this; if you, as it were, go along with the pain and don’t try to fight it. Yield, become weak, and you will discover the strength of weakness. So then, you see, this is not really an escapist philosophy at all.
It is most definitely a philosophy of keeping in mind the actual reality of the situation in which you find yourself. I don’t know what could be more realistic than this, what could be more fundamentally facing the hard facts of life. One keeps his attention on the actual concrete fact that is happening, as distinct from our socially conditioned and inculcated ideas and attitudes about it.
And this is really facing reality a hundred percent. And so there come out of this two basic results. The first is that, when we don’t resist pain, we don’t set up a vicious circle in connection with it.
Take the pain of fear again: supposing you’re in a situation where the doctor has told you you have to have an operation. And, of course, if you’re going to undergo this operation in the best way, you need to be rested, you need to have plenty of sleep, you need to be strong, and so on. Well, fine advice isn’t it?
Because the moment you know you’ve got to have an operation you’re liable to get a bit frightened, and then you know you ought not to be frightened, you ought not to stay awake nights and worry about it. You need sleep! And then you get afraid, you see, because you’re afraid.
You’re afraid that your fear is going to lead to insomnia and debility, and so you’re afraid of being afraid. And then, because you see that you are afraid of being afraid, you are afraid you are afraid because you are afraid. So that worry is always a vicious circle in which you are worrying because you worry because you worry because you worry.
And this, as it were, builds up a whole chain of reactions which makes the pain of fear worse and worse and worse. So then, if at any point in this link we can, as it were, be willing to be worried, and then you don’t worry about being worried. Be willing to be afraid, then you don’t have to be afraid of being afraid.
And so this, in other words, diminishes the total amount of pain, because it doesn’t allow the painful situation to build itself up and up and up and up. In the same way, if somebody stuck a hook into you, and you pull away from it, well, the hook goes more deeply into you. But if you’re caught like a fish on a hook and you go with the hook, this reduces the amount of tension.
And this works backwards all the way down the line. Now, there’s also a second result, and that is that when our mind, our consciousness, our attention, is fully focused on what is, on the actual situation—as I said, we are free from various thoughts about it and associations with it that bring up a context which makes the experience painful. So you might say that this is an attitude of taking things as they come one at a time.
For example, many of you who are not blessed with dishwashers have to wash many dishes day after day. And when you’ve been married as a woman for, oh, ten or eleven years, one day you’re sitting there at the sink, utterly weary of the whole thing. And in your mind’s eye comes the immense pile of dishes which you’ve had to wash day after day in the past.
There they are in your mind’s eye, standing up, pile for ever and ever on the draining board. And also in your mind’s eye is that enormous pile of dishes that you’re going to have to wash in the future. And you think, “My life is out of a mere drudge!
Washing dishes, washing dishes, washing dishes, and there’s no end to it!” But if you were realistic you would see this: you have only one dish to wash in your life—this one. You can only wash one dish at a time, and that’s the only one you have to deal with. It’s the same with climbing a mountain.
IF you start to think, as you climb, “Oh, what a lot of steps to take!” Then the task becomes utterly oppressive. Or if, for example, you make a new year’s resolution and you say, “Well, I’m going to go on the wagon. I’m not going to drink anymore this new year.” And if you say, “This whole year I will not touch another drop of drink,” well, of course, the old devil immediately brings to your mind 365 days of not drinking anything—anything alcoholic—and that’s overwhelming.
Don’t tempt the devil that way! Once conquers the problem by not drinking this one, and saying nothing about the next. So with the climbing of the mountain: taking each step as if it were the only step to be taken.
And so in this situation, then, where there is the experience of agony—whether it be physical or whether it be moral—the way out is, in a way, suffering that agony as if this were the only thing in the whole world to be done. By going right down to the bottom of the furnace, no further pains will harass you. It was also so—isn’t it?—in Dante’s Divine Comedy, when Dante and Virgil find their way out of hell by going down to the very center of hell.
I like to illustrate this with another of those Zen stories. There was a monk who got news that his mother had died, and he was weeping. And another Buddhist monk said to him, “You ought to be ashamed of yourself!
You, a monk, still showing worldly attachments by weeping!” He said, “Don’t be silly, I’m weeping because I want to weep!” When I was in Europe some months ago, I met a very remarkable German scholar who had studied Buddhism in Japan for a number of years, and was reflecting on similarities between things that people experience as a result of their study of Buddhism and things that people experience in the course of their lives in the Western world. And he made a very interesting remark to me about experiences that had happened to various people during the calamities of the war. He said that there were three particular kind of instances which he’d come across where people had found themselves in desperate situations, and as a result of thoroughly accepting these situations they had had an experience of the profound joy, and you might almost say meaningfulness, of life that corresponds very closely indeed to the kind of experience that in Buddhism is called awakening or enlightenment, satori in Zen language, or liberation in Hinduism, or what we might sometimes call in the West mystical experience; the sensation of the individual finding himself one with God or with the ultimate reality behind the universe.
And my friend then enumerated these three instances. He said there were the cases where a person heard a bomb coming at them, and they hear the shriek of the bomb descending, and they were quite sure that this was their last moment, this was the end. They accepted it completely.
They gave in to their own obliteration. But the bomb turned out to be a dud, or it missed and went somewhere else, and they survived. The second kind of instance was where people were prisoners of war or shut up in concentration camps and had come to the point of believing that they would never, never, never be released.
They were in a state of complete despair. But again, they saw there was nothing to do except give in to it; accept it completely to the point, you might almost say, of affirming it. And the same thing happened.
And then the third instance he mentioned was when the disorganization and chaos of war had so uprooted people, had so destroyed everything that they’d built up for themselves by way of careers, professions, family, and everything like that, that they got the sensation that life in this world is totally meaningless—like Shakespeare’s phrase: “a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” And again, when they committed themselves to this and thoroughly accepted the idea that life was absolutely meaningless, there came this same extraordinary transformation of experience, this sense of joy, and in some strange and different way a sense of the whole thing really having meaning. Now, I think that story is very interesting because we, in the Western world, are so concerned that our lives should be meaningful, that they should make sense. And indeed, one of the frequent definitions of mental health that you hear is that mental health depends on one’s having a purpose in life and finding that life is meaningful.
And this is fairly easy to preserve, provided one’s life is not disrupted by great catastrophes like war. It’s fairly easy to preserve on a small scale—that is to say, we find it fairly easy to make our lives meaningful and purposive in relation to our immediate community or in relation to our work, where we can do something that is a true vocation for us, or where in the community we can do things that are helpful to other people. But it’s increasingly difficult to get this sense of the fundamental meaningfulness of things in a universe as it is now seen by contemporary science.
In other words, when you enlarge the framework, it’s more and more difficult to see any meaning in things. Because while we can see the significance of our lives over a few years—maybe a hundred years, maybe two hundred—when we look at the thing in vast perspectives, and when we see the human race as such a tiny little sort of bacillus living on an obscure piece of dust in a remote corner of the universe, when we see this enormous almost cosmic nonsense of galaxies, of radioactive material going around and around for colossal spans of time for no apparent purpose at all, in that perspective it’s particularly difficult for us to believe that life is fundamentally meaningful. And this is a real difficulty, because it’s so hard to see something that has real and abiding meaning against a background or as part of a whole system which seems to be basically nonsensical.
But the interesting thing is that when we use these words, “meaningless” or “purposeless” of the universe, they have a bad feeling for us. They are sort of cuss words. They’re bad words to use about life.
But it’s very different with people in the Far East. There are certain schools of thought in China and Japan where the word “purposeless,” the word “meaningless” does not have a negative connotation at all, but rather the contrary, something very joyous and positive. There’s an old Chinese philosophical text that uses the expression “if purpose can be used to achieve purposelessness, then the thing has been grasped”—“the thing” meaning the whole point of life.
So then, to understand this point of view in Chinese and Japanese thought, I think we should investigate first of all a little more clearly just what we do mean by “purpose” and “meaning.” Purpose is, I think, a word generally used by us whereby events are ordained to a future result. For example, if I do something like this, just doing that alone doesn’t appear to have very much purpose. But if after I have done that, in the future, I do this, then it appears that what I did in such a chaotic way in the first has purpose.
So purpose is acts acquiring a meaning in terms of a future to which they are leading. We say “I have a purpose” when I am going down to the store in order to buy groceries. If I am going down to the town for no reason at all, you might say my action is purposeless.
But if I am going to buy groceries, then it has a purpose. Now what about meaning? The idea of meaning is very close to that of purpose, and this may be a good illustration of it.
There is the word “cross.” And the word “cross” is a sound; it’s just a noise. But that noise has meaning for us because we know that it relates to this. That is a cross.
But the noise, “cross,” is not this figure. But “cross” has meaning because it represents or stands for that actual concrete figure. And so, at any rate, one sense of meaning—which we might call here the first sense of meaning—is the function of a sign, a noise, or a symbol, which points to something other than itself.
For example, if we didn’t take this as a cross, but took it as a plus sign, then it would in its term become another sign having meaning, and its meaning would be the process of adding. Now, of course, if life has to be meaningful in these two senses—in the sense of purpose already demonstrated in the sense of, at least, this first sense of meaning—then it means that events, people, things are only meaningful or purposive insofar as they lead to something else or insofar as they represent something else. And, in a way, this makes people and things rather like symbols and words which always refer to something beyond themselves and don’t mean anything in themselves.
There’s also another sense of meaning, and that is the sense of order. We would look at this object, for example, and say: well, that’s a kind of a senseless shape. That doesn’t mean very much, it’s just a chaotic blob.
But if we introduce order into it by making that object symmetrical, we will immediately recognize the phenomenon of pattern. Because an element of recognition comes into it. In other words, we recognize the repetition of the shape in reverse.
And this element of recognition makes it meaningful, patterned, orderly in this particular way. And so one of the dominant ways in which a person can say that life has meaning is, then, that it has order. But on the other hand, if the orderliness of life is taken too far, we then move over into another kind of meaninglessness which we call monotony.
In other words, if every day is the same as the day before it, if we find ourselves involved in a routine where we are doing exactly the same job day after day after day after day, we find that through an excess of order our life begins to lose vitality. And so it seems that we need a kind of disorder in order to give life to order. We need a kind of nonsense in order to make things really meaningful.
We need chaos as an essential element of life. Now, in the Western world we tend, on the whole, to emphasize order: we are always pushing things to make sense, we are always trying to control the world and make it obey us, and therefore make it orderly. And, after all, science is primarily the study of the regularities in nature; the study of natural order.
But to a considerable extent in Far Eastern thought, especially in Taoist and Buddhist thought, the emphasis goes the other way: there is an emphasis not so much on the beauty of order as the beauty of a certain kind of disorder or nonsense. You see, look at this that I drew just before I started to make the face. This chaos of lines up here is so like life in certain aspects.
So much of life is this sort of thing which does not become this sort of thing. Events that don’t seem to make any sense at all. But the Chinese and Japanese eye has been able to look at this sort of phenomenon—which we would call nonsense phenomenon, purposeless phenomenon—in a way that begins to reveal a profounder kind of meaning in it.
Take, for example, one of the greatest of the Japanese painters, the artist Sesshū, who was a Buddhist priest living between about the beginning of the sixteenth century. Actually, his dates are 1421–1506. And this is a very, very famous painting of his.
But as you look at it, you may be inclined to feel that it’s very like the mess which I drew that eventually turned into somebody’s hair. Because Sesshū did paintings of this kind very often with fistfuls of straw instead of brush. But as you look at that painting more carefully—it’s done in black ink on paper—you begin to realize that this is a natural scene; that we are looking at a system of rocks, and far above them, very faintly, there are a few mountain peaks.
That is called the haboku, or “rough technique,” landscape. And as you begin to recognize what it represents, you begin perhaps to feel that it has some meaning. And yet, why do we feel that those at first sight chaotic lines have meaning when we discover that they represent a natural scene, a mass of higgledy-piggledy rocks and trees, which in themselves do not have meaning in quite the senses that I have so far defined?
After all, if a word like “cross” represents an object, what do rocks represent? What do trees represent? What do mountains represent?
Do they symbolize something? Do they have some purpose in that they are intentionally working to produce a future result? Do the waves washing on the shore and making strange patterns of foam on the sand have some intention?
Are they symbolizing anything? No. But then, why does the artist so often copy the forms of nature?
Surely he does it because he is paying a tribute to a certain kind of meaninglessness, a certain kind of joyous purposelessness in nature. And this fact of our being constantly fascinated by the freedom of natural forms from having to mean something, from having to make sense—that is a kind of relief to us. And so there is a Chinese saying, which is that the beauty of a mountain is that it’s so much like a mountain, the beauty of water is that it’s so much like water.
They have this way of putting it in a little figure: “mountain gets mountain,” and then you write it across: “water gets water.” Meaning, after all, a mountain is wonderful because it’s so much like a mountain, water is wonderful because it’s so much like water. And thus it is the quality of the whimsical waywardness—shall we say, the wandering quality, the undesigned quality in all these things—that pleases us in so marvelous a way. And this has been picked up by the artists of the Far East.
You know, after all, wandering, doing something with no particular purpose, just strolling down the street looking at the sky, or sitting and twiddling your thumbs—this, in a way, is always an expression of fullness, of profound content. And there’s a kind of prejudice against wandering in our world. What happens if you go out in a big city nowadays, and you’re just wandering, you’re going nowhere, and a cop stops you?
“Where are you going?” “I wasn’t going anywhere.” “Ah, don’t tell me that!” People who aren’t going anywhere, people who are not certain where they’re going, people who are just wandering are regarded by our civilization as rather dangerous. But look what we’re missing. Here is a very marvelous example of wandering.
It’s a print by a great contemporary Japanese artist who died a year or two ago: Saburō Hasegawa. He made this print from pieces of an old boat that were washed up on the beach, and he rubbed them with ink, and printed them on paper. And what he especially wanted to reveal was the beauty of the simple wandering lines of the grain in the wood.
He, in other words, had an insight which is the same insight that Sesshū had when he did that rough landscape. An insight into the essential joyousness of wandering lines. That print, in its outline, is not made to represent anything, it isn’t a symbol of anything.
It’s just for one to look at and enjoy for its self with no purpose whatsoever beyond it. One also finds a similar kind of thing in calligraphy, in certain ways of writing Chinese characters. And this sort of rough, undisciplined—jazzy way, we would say—of writing Chinese characters.
Of course they have meaning, because the words actually are a poem. But what is especially attractive to connoisseurs of fine writing is not only the meaning of the poem, but the character in the strokes; the vitality. All those little hairlines of the brush dancing on paper in what appears to be a kind of haphazard tracking of the brush.
And because we have begun to see the beauty of this kind of thing for ourselves—to some extent tutored by Far Eastern artists—we can also recognize the splendor of, say, the forms of driftwood such as this piece that stands here. Nowadays, many people are going along to the beach and collecting objects like this to put in their houses, where the wood charms us because of its strangely chaotic, and again, nonsensical, meaningless outline. And this sort of thing was also brought to a kind of perfection by the great ceramic artists of Japan when they made something like this.
This is a ceremonial tea bowl for cha-no-yu, as it’s called, or “tea ceremony.” And once upon a time a potter who was making one of these bowls had an accident. He let the glaze run on it by mistake. I don’t know if you can see on this bowl that the glaze, here, is just a blob which has run down the side of the bowl.
The first man to whom that happened many hundred years ago thought, “Oh dear, it’s a mistake!” But then he looked at it and realized that the unintentional, the nonsensical, mistake was peculiarly beautiful. And thereafter, there has grown a tradition of ceramic art in Japan which, as it were, capitalizes on what will happen when the glaze runs all by itself. So this art of natural nonsense is a kind of perception that the beauty of the world is that it’s a dance.
And just when we dance we don’t dance in order to go anywhere, we don’t dance in order to get to the other side of the room, we dance just to go round and round and round. And so it is in the same way when we look at the outlines of the mountains. What do they mean?
They mean just whoop, whoop, whoop, whoop, whee, ooohee, ooohee, ooohee, whoop, whoop, like that. And that is the delight of it. In other words, this nonsense quality of life begins to make its appeal to us, begins to show us its hidden meaning and its hidden beauty, when we don’t, as it were, pick a quarrel with the world and try to make something of it.
You know, our own slang is often so revealing. When somebody says to you, “D’you wanna make something of it?” that means the situation is definitely hostile. And so, likewise, when our constant attitude to the world is that we want to make something of it, we want to force it to make sense, we want to force it to make order, then, to that extent, the world hides its meaning from us.
And we find a greater meaning when we are able—like the person in the story I told at the beginning—like the person who found that life was senseless and profoundly accepted its senselessness, he converted that nonsense into a kind of joy. Now, after all, this isn’t really foreign to, say, Christian ideas. It’s true that we hear a great deal in Christian teaching about the purposes of God, but surely there is a deeper secret within Christian teaching: that the purposes of God lead in the end to purposelessness.
After all, isn’t it the historic ancient doctrine of Christianity that the true purpose (or the true end) of man is to behold the vision of God? And then you might ask: what is the purpose of that? If people find themselves in heaven face to face with God, do they look at God and say, “So what?” No!
According to our ancient Christian symbolism, they join with the saints and the angels in singing Alleluia! Alleluia! Alleluia!
Well, the word “Alleluia” once meant something, but what it means now is celestial whoopie: it’s an expression of sheer joy. It’s a babble. It’s like the sound of a brook.
And we love to listen to the babble of a brook because it’s a joyous sound that just doesn’t mean anything at all. You see, God in that sense does not need to mean anything, because he is complete. He has no future purpose to fulfill, he’s not a symbol signifying something.
But in the Far Eastern ideas of which I have been speaking life is regarded in the same way. Life itself—the mountains, the stars, the rivers, the trees, the Earth, our very selves and our own behavior—they are not looked upon as mere signs leading to something else, mere existences about which we must always say, “So what? Where are you going?” They are regarded as being in a state of fulfillment at every moment.
And it is as Goethe said: “The highest to which Man can attain is wonder. And if these prime phenomena of life make us wonder, that is the limit. No more should we ask.” You know, it’s not surprising that, in this day and age, the most up-to-date and respectable form of academic philosophy taught in our universities is what is called logical analysis.
A logical analyst, you know, is a kind of fellow who, the moment you say something, you hardly get a word out of your mouth before he says, “Now, just precisely what do you mean by that?” You can’t take a step of the way in unfolding a proposition or a thesis or an idea without his going minutely into the meaning of each word that you say. And as a result of this sort of technique most logical analysts have come to the conclusion that the problems that have been discussed by philosophers for several thousand years are mostly meaningless problems. Because when you look very precisely at the form of words in which they’re stated, and you analyze each word bit by bit, you come to the conclusion that it didn’t really mean anything.
But I think there’s a profound fallacy in this, because it’s based on the assumption that the meaning of words is supposed to be precise. But unfortunately, for this sort of approach to things, we are living in a world which isn’t precise, where nature on the whole is extraordinarily vague. I mean, it would be very nice for purposes of precise calculation if the Earth in its orbit around the sun went round in a neat 360 days.
But it doesn’t. It goes round in 365 and some wretched fraction. Everything’s a little odd, everything’s a little off-center.
For example, how are we to decide exactly when now is, you know? When is now? If I look at my watch and take a good look at the second hand to find out when exactly now is—well, that second hand, I can see it, so it must have some size.
So let’s take out a magnifying glass. And then it appears that the thing that marks now looks about so wide. And then, well, let’s draw it a bit finer, and draw it a bit finer.
But we never seem to be able to get to the end of analyzing it. Now, you see, is fuzzy. It’s vague.
It’s like the field of vision which you have in front of your eyes. You can see clearly in the middle, but going out to the sides things get a little bit blurred. For where exactly does the head stop and the neck begin?
Is it here? Is it here? Here?
We can’t really decide. The only way to be perfectly clear about where the head stops and the neck begins is to chop off the head. Then you’ve got a neat dividing line.
In other words, the whole process of analysis is a process of chopping, of cutting apart, of approaching nature with a knife. It is a dividing line with a scalpel. And although there is most definitely a place in life for precision, for clear distinctions, for the attitude of the knife, this kind of thing can be enormously overdone.
And if one approaches the poet—I remember a cartoon once I saw in a newspaper. It showed Shakespeare walking on the clouds of immortality, holding his head in his hand, oh! He was being pursued by a pedestrian little man wearing a cap and gown saying, “Mr.
Shakespeare, you’re using the conjunction ‘if.’” And one knows all too well a certain style of personality which likes to be precise. The sort of person who always in his opinions and attitudes seems to be using his thought as a means of tearing other people to pieces. Isn’t it wonderful to be equipped with a rigorous philosophical method that can tear all fuzzy thinking to shreds?
You know the kind of person who says, “I don’t like fuzziness. I like to be definite, clear, and meticulous!” And you always feel that person has got his knife in your life. Or sometimes you meet among scientists the sort of person who likes to talk about brute facts.
Why must facts be brute? Hard and clear facts. Aren’t there also facts that are soft and vague?
But, you see, that kind of attitude represents—and in a way caricatures—something that is on the whole rather characteristic of the total attitude of Western civilization to the environment. You know, one of the first things that Oriental peoples notice about us so-called white people is our noses. After all, the bridge of a Chinese nose is rather flat.
Same with [n------]. And when they see us Caucasians for the first time, what they notice about us is this nose that goes out like this and seems to be prodding into everything, and the deep-set eyes with a fixed stare. And if you look at old Japanese screens which show what we call caricatures, but what they thought were fairly good representations of the first Western people they saw.
They look like tenjin, or goblins, because of their long noses. For it seems that this Western man has this prodder out in front of him which is into everything. He can’t leave anything alone.
And although, as I say, there is a place for precision, nevertheless, a fundamentally hostile cutting up attitude to life gives us dead knowledge instead of living knowledge. It kills things. You know, it’s a way of approaching everything rather on the lines of the old story about Achilles and the tortoise.
You know, perhaps, the problem of Achilles and the tortoise. Achilles and the tortoise agreed to have a race, but because Achilles can run twice as fast as the tortoise, the tortoise gets a head start. Achilles begins here and the tortoise begins here.
Now then, when the tortoise has gone half the distance between his starting point and Achilles’ starting point—when the tortoise goes that much and is here—Achilles, who can run twice as fast, moves from here to here. Then the tortoise goes half as far as that distance. Achilles does twice as much and he lands up here.
And then the tortoise goes half as far as he went again and lands up here. Achilles does twice as much and he’s here. And so the tortoise goes half as far again, and Achilles goes twice as much and he lands up here.
And notice, you see: Achilles is still behind the tortoise. And the next time the tortoise will go half as much as that, and Achilles will come up to here. And we shall go on doing this, thinking about smaller and smaller and smaller intervals.
And as a result of this, Achilles will never overtake the tortoise. Now, of course, in actual life Achilles jolly well does overtake the tortoise and goes right by him. But why this is a problem is: it is a way of thinking about the situation that is infinitely and indefinitely analytical.
It doesn’t as it were, let life go on, but it stops to analyze the whole business. It breaks it down into minuter and minuter and minuter quantities so that the whole thing is delayed. The whole situation is, as it were, stopped and killed.
And this will always happen whenever we get into the bind, the rut, of trying to think too precisely. And it’s for this reason that the Taoist and I think also the Confucian philosophers of China are very mistrustful of logic chopping, of being too analytical about the meaning of words. Let’s take, for example, a word that is absolutely fundamental to Chinese thought, a word which I’ve used a great deal in this program: Tao.
You know, this is in English spelled this way. Tao in Chinese: 道—we usually translate that “the way:” the way of nature, the way of things. But that’s only one of its many meanings.
Indeed, the term is so difficult to define that Lao Tzu—you know, this man, the man who was the founder of Taoist philosophy—Lao Tzu started out his book by saying (and this is a phrase which already shows how many meanings the word has): “Tao which can be Tao”—but here the word means “spoken;” it has that double meaning—“The Tao which can be spoken is not the the eternal”—the regular, or you might say the real—“Tao.” Oh yes, he was inconsistent. He then went on to write a whole book about it. But really, the whole purpose of the book is to show that Tao, the fundamental nature of the world, is something you cannot get too precise about.
You can’t think about it and understand it that way. In other words, what is the fundamental basis of one’s life, as of one’s thought, always has to remain undefined. You see, if you insist—and Chinese philosophers and scholars always are very clear about this—if you insist on defining words meticulously, you always have to have other words to define your definitions.
And then you have to have words to define those words, and words to define those words, and there’s no end to it. Or otherwise, you can get around this by going in a circle, which is that, you know, when you look up the dictionary and you look up “to be,” and you find the definition “to exist.” Alright, you look up “to exist,” and you find the definition “to be.” And then where are you? Either you go round in a circle, which fundamentally tells you nothing, or else you go on and on and on getting more meticulous, and you never arrive.
And so I remember, too, a very great Japanese artist who was teaching over here in the United States, and he was always being pressed by his students to define himself. And he used certain expressions. They’d say, “Now, exactly what do you mean?” And they were always saying this.
And one day he got mad, and he said, “What’s the matter with you? Can’t you feel?” And so it is that there are certain basic ideas like Tao which the Chinese feel must come to us. We can’t go out to get them, we can’t grab them.
They must come to us in the same way as light comes to our eyes. This thing, then, is mysterious and unknown. Like the hermit sage in one of the most famous of all Chinese poems, Jiǎ Dǎo’s Seeking for the Hermit in Vain: The whole power of the poem is in the mysterious imprecision of the old man’s whereabouts which, somehow or other, brings the spirit of the hermit sage closer to the inquirer than an actual meeting.
His absence says more than his presence. Lost somewhere on the cloud-hidden mountain, he communicates far more than if he had come down to explain himself. And this spirit would be totally missed by the literal-minded, no-nonsense sort of person who at this point would want to clear away the clouds and the mystery, go rush in and find out just exactly where the old fellow has gone, and just what herbs he is picking.
You know, it’s absolutely impossible to understand and appreciate our natural universe unless you know when to stop investigating. In our restlessness we’re always tempted to climb every hill and cross every skyline to find out what lies beyond. Yet, as you get older and wiser, it isn’t just flagging energy, but rather increasing wisdom that teaches you to look at mountains from below, or perhaps just climb them a little way.