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Now, is there a line there or isn’t there? How real is the line? There was no intention to make a line, these are just where the things fall.
But they do. So this particular set of pebbles happens to be pretty much in a straight line. Now, the straight line is a concept.
It isn’t something in the actual pebbles, and yet at the same time I can see it that way. So then, we might argue: if each of the pebbles in that line is representing the lifetime of a human being—because they are lined up in this way, you can say that is a continuity. In other words, this one, here, reincarnates as this one, and then as this one, because they continue each other and form the line.
We talk about a line of descent, a line of succession. Well, that’s what happens. And you see that continuity in this system just as you see the continuity of a wave moving across the water—although actually nothing is moving, the water is just going up and down.
So you would see the continuity of this. So, in the same way, as I explained this morning, you consider that you, sitting here, are the same people who came in at the door—although you’re not, you’ve changed completely. So this—in other words, if I insist upon seeing this continuity of lives, then I’m reincarnating.
If I realize, however, that my seeing of a line here is purely a projection, I’m not reincarnating, I’m liberated. Or we could do it in some other way. You don’t have to see a straight line to make the connections.
Let’s imagine that these are all pebbles in a stream. And what will make connections between them for a little fellow who is walking around, you see, and he wants to get across the stream? And so he puts his foot on a pebble here, and what next one can reach?
He can get that one. And then he can get that one. Wowee!
He’s going to have a little problem to go on from that, see? But maybe with a jump he can land on that. And then on that one.
And whoops, with a jump he can hit that. He can hit that one. See, it all depends on the stretch.
That one, that one, that one, that one, that one. You see? And because they’re each within a a stretch, then that’s another reason for setting up a line of continuity: being able to see a significant connection between any of the members of the group.
So what you’re doing here, you see: you are making sense out of a whole multitude of human lives in just exactly the same way that you make sense out of anything else. The way you make sense out of a Rorschach blot—but after all, the whole world is a Rorschach blot. Everything we’re doing is: we’re making sense out of wiggly processes.
You see wherever you fly across the world in a plane, and the landscape suddenly begins to look rectangular, where there are straight lines and clear triangles, or clear circles, you know human beings have been around. Where they haven’t been around, the outlines of everything are wiggly. Like the courses of rivers, the shapes of mountains and forests.
Because human beings are always trying to straighten things out. But we ourselves are not straightened out. We are wiggles!
And we’re interminably wiggling. But we’re trying to regulate our wiggling by setting ourselves up in houses, and going along streets with traffic lights, and regulations, and so on. But we are wiggling.
And we’re trying to straighten out this wiggling. But wiggling is basic. So the whole world—especially us—is a Rorschach blot.
And science is the art of trying to make unanimous sense of this blot. And what science does is: it isn’t that there are certain fixed laws of nature which things obey, it isn’t as if the wiggly events of the world are running on tram lines and they have to do that. They don’t have to.
The point is that, in order to make sense out of what is going on—there’s no way of making sense, because sense and order the same thing—therefore, we invent orders and describe the way things fit them. In other words, here is this scatter of stones, but it just so happens that I scattered them over a regularly spaced floor. Each of these divides in the planking is even.
And so I can classify every stone according by numbering the board which it’s on. And by doing that, I’ll be able to identify them, and I’ll be able to talk about various regularities in the way—you see, I threw them all out like that, and there were certain dynamic principles involved, and these principles can be measured and discussed in terms of the intervals at which all the stones fell. But in fact, though, I invented the order.
That order of distances between the divides in the boards is just as much a projection on the formation of the stones as considering, for example, that this group lie in a straight line. It’s something projected onto it. So in just this way, therefore, we are projecting onto a wiggly universe an order.
It’s the only way to make sense out of it. Because after all, wiggles, although they are very irregular, there is regularity in them. And you can only know that there’s regularity in wiggles because there’s also irregularity, and vice versa.
So through noticing the regularities you begin to make out a consistency in the behavior of events. And if you dig consistency and say, “Great! Let’s do it again!
This was fine. All that wiggle was beautiful. Once more, please!
Yeah!” See? Then you dig regularities and you don’t want it to be irregular. Because, gee, if they really were I would have no idea what was going to happen next.
You know? Some day there’s going to be an earthquake. Suddenly, bang, the whole thing’s going to vanish.
And I don’t know what’s going to happen. Bang! That could be crazy!
Be great, you know? But we don’t really settle for that. We like things to go chumm ba-dumm ba-chumm ba-dumm ba-chumm ba-dumm ba-chumm ba-dumm ba-chumm, just so long as it doesn’t get too monotonous and boring.
So therefore we’re looking, we’re scanning, all the time the field of experience for regularities, and thus build our hangups. It’s got to happen every day. The mail’s got to be delivered every day.
You know? You’ve got to keep doing your work. You’ve got to eat regular meals.
All that kind of jazz, you see? And so it keeps going. Because we’re looking for this regularity thing.
But once again, you see, the Buddhists say: do you know this thing actually is neither regular not irregular? You can pick out—do what you want with it. It’s like: here are the chips.
What value do you want to put on them? What pattern do you want to see in them? Or do you want to see them in what Buddhists call their suchness?
See, that’s the point of the sand and rock garden at Ryōan-ji. You go there and you see a lovely great stretch of white sand with five rocks on it. And that’s what those Zen boys made up, and boy do they get away with murder!
Whew! They set up those rocks in the garden, you see? And everybody comes around and looks at it and thinks there must be some deep meaning in this.
And so there are little guidebooks that explain what it’s supposed to be. They say: well, it’s supposed to be an ocean with islands in it. Other people say: oh, it’s a beach with rocks on it.
Other people say: oh well, these rocks have a certain dynamic relationship, and they represent kinds of Buddhist principles. And there’s a guy at Daisen-in where they have another rock and sand garden, a very funny cute Zen monk who gives a lecture in English—he doesn’t speak English, but he’s memorized a particular English lecture—which explains the symbolism of all the various rocks, and how they work out, and how eventually you get to the ocean of liberation. All this is made up out of whole cloth, because the whole point of the Zen garden is just that it doesn’t mean any more than this means, or any more than anything else means.
The the mountain over here, the fact the water, the fact the coastline goes and such and such a way. And here are we, all sitting around, wiggling, you know? Only, because I’m talking, and you’ve attributed a certain sense to my words and so on, you think that I’m communicating something.
But actually, everything that we’re doing is like this. Now, we are brought up to think: oh, that’s too bad. If that’s all it is, you see—if it’s just this suchness, it is just an arrangement that fell out like that—what’s the point?
Life seems meaningless and empty and without purpose and so on, but that’s just because you’re geared, you’ve been conditioned through all your thinking, to feel that things meaningful unless they’re meaningful. When you say: well, life doesn’t have any meaning, that’s because you’ve had it drilled into you that it ought to have. So you make a meaning out of it.
And if, on the other hand, nobody ever told you that life ought to have a meaning, and that it ought to make some sense, and it ought to be going somewhere, and that you should survive, then you wouldn’t expect it. You just dig it as it happens. So really, what this is saying is: it isn’t that things are meaningless, it isn’t that they’re meaningful, it’s just that they are so happened to be spread this way, and so there is no fixed way you should look at it.
So what is called the first principle of the Buddha’s Eightfold Path, samyak-dṛṣṭi, means: samyak, “perfect;” dṛṣṭi, “view.” Suzuki once was giving a lecture about Buddhism, you know, and he said, “The fourth noble truth of Buddhism is called Noble Eightfold Path. First step of the Noble Eightfold Path called shōken. Mean ‘right view.’ All of Buddhism sum up in right view.
Second step of Noble Eightfold Path is… oh, I forget second step. You better look it up in the book!” Anyway, right view doesn’t mean right in the sense of the particular correct view one should take. It means the complete view, which is having no fixed view.
So, in other words, when you say what is the correct position of the stars in the Great Dipper, the Big Dipper? It depends where you’re looking for. There is no such thing as the correct position of those stars.
So, in the same way, what is the right interpretation of these pebbles? Depends how you want to look at it. There was a Zen master call Ikkyū.
In the front of his monastery he had a very, very gnarled, crooked pine tree. And one day he pinned a notice on it which said: “I will pay one thousand yen to anybody who can see this tree straight.” So all kinds of people came around the tree and started standing on their heads, and looking at it in weird ways, to see if somehow they could line up the branches to see them all straight. And there was one very smart man who came and looked at this for a while, and then he went off to see another priest who was a friend of Ikkyū’s.
And he said, “Look. What is this thing Ikkyū’s doing? How would you see that tree straight?” “Well,” he said, “you look straight at it.” So he went back to Ikkyū and said, “I claim the one thousand yen.
All you have to do to see the tree straight is to look straight at it.” And Ikkyū looked at him in a very funny way. He forked out the thousand yen and said, “You must’ve been talking to my friend the priest down the road!” So now, what are we doing, you see? You’ve got a universe which you’re living in which is fundamentally wiggly, like this.
And you are in it and in this wiggle, see? Only, you’re trying to straighten it out. You’re trying to see order in it.
And your doing this is itself a wiggle. After all, you may say part of this—one of two things in here are straight, you know? And it’s their nature to go that way; to be orderly things, to be straight things, or whatever other quality you want to put on it.
And we’re like that. But we are something in this which has it in its nature to arrange it this and that way, to want to see things straight. But actually, there really isn’t anything in the whole arrangement that is the right way of doing it, and there isn’t anything in your life that is supposed to happen.
You’re not supposed to live to be eighty, or to die when you’re twenty-three. It doesn’t make the slightest difference. You can be one or the other.
That’s why they say, “In the scenery of spring there is nothing superior, nothing inferior. Flowering branches grow naturally; some short, some long.” So liberation is the realization: there is no way that things are supposed to be. You don’t have to go on living.
You are—you know, you’re what there is. It’s up to you to decide, see? But there’s no way it has to happen.
But, on the other hand, if you want to feel that there is some way you would like to arrange this—I mean, we can start pushing these things around, you know, and put them in some kind of an order. That’s okay, too. The point being: you will be miserable to the degree that you are hung up on the notion that things should, must, go a certain way—that is to say, to have a fixed view.
If you have no fixed view, you remain elastic. And about this there is always something that can’t quite be said. When we say, “I have no fixed view,” it sounds as if I were just a non-entity, like a moron.
Chinese proverb says: “As a hollow room echoes all sounds, an empty mind is open to all suggestions.” But there’s another sense of an empty mind in that. Not the moronic empty mind, but the lively empty mind. The empty mind that can either let it alone or project patterns onto it—and especially do both.
So that, instead of saying what do you really ought to do is to project no pattern on the world, and realize that it’s all fundamentally senseless, is to say: always do both at the same time. Project the patterns, but realize at the same time there is no fixed view that you should take. And this is exactly the same thing as being able to realize that there are rights and wrongs, and things that should be done and should not be done.
But at the same time there’s another point of view from which you can see that everything that happens is right the way it is, and that human life never makes an aesthetic mistake, just as the patterns of the clouds and of the foam never make aesthetic mistakes. Now, I hope you remember that, this morning, I was trying (in the brief space of fifty minutes) to give you a basic introduction to Mahayana Buddhism—the kind of Buddhism that is found in China and Japan, and the kind of Buddhism of which Zen Buddhism in particular is a subsect. And we are rather particularly concerned with Zen, since it has had such a fundamental influence in the shaping of Japanese culture and the arts of Japan, and since we are (in the course of this informal tour) going to be visiting a good deal of Zen monasteries and seeing a great deal of Zen-formed works of art, architecture, and so on.
So I want to lead now, tonight, from Buddhism in general—or Mahayana Buddhism in general—to Zen in particular. Now, Zen plays a little game with you. Whenever anybody like myself or Dr. Suzuki talks about Zen, all the other people say: “Because they talk about it, they don’t understand it.” “Those” (in the words of Lao Tzu) “who know, do not say.
Those who say, do not know.” And yet he said that! He wrote a book of eighty chapters or so to explain the Tao and its power. And nobody can help themselves; they’ve got to talk.
Human beings are a bunch of chatterboxes, and when we’ve got something in our minds that we want to talk about, we talk. Now poetry, though, is the great language, because poetry is the art of saying what can’t be said. Every poet knows this; they’re trying to describe the indescribable.
And every poet also knows that nothing is describable. Whether you take some sort of ineffable mystical experience at one extreme, or whether you take an ordinary rusty nail at the other: nothing is really describable. In the words of the famous count, Korzybski: “Whatever you say something is, it isn’t.” We used to have a professor at Northwestern who would produce a matchbooklet in front of his class and would say to them: “What is it?” And they would say, “Matchbooklet.” And he’d say “No, no, no!
‘Matchbooklet’ is a noise. Is this a noise? What is it?” And so, to answer this, he’d throw it at them.
That’s what it is. So in this way, you see, nothing can really be described. And yet, on the other hand, we all know perfectly well what we mean when we talk.
If you know, if you’ve shared an experience with somebody else, then of course you can talk about it. We can all talk about fire and air and water and wood because we know what it is, and there’s no mystery. And so, in the same way, when it comes to discussing something so esoteric as Zen, it can be discussed.
Only, Zen people play games with each other. They play little tricks, they test each other out by saying to somebody—I remember when I met Paul Reps for the first time, who wrote that lovely book Zen Flesh and Zen Bones, and he said to me: “Well,” he said, “You’ve written quite a number of books by now. You must think you’re pretty fancy.” I said, “I haven’t said a word.” So this is simply a Zen game.
And people sort of feel each other out. There’s a poem which says: “When two Zen masters meet each other on the road they need no introduction. Thieves recognize one another instantaneously.” So now, having got that off my chest, it’s to say, then, that if I were to give you a really proper and really, truly educative talk about Zen, I would gather you around here and sit here and silence for five minutes and leave.
And in a way this would be a much more direct exposition of it than what I’m going to do instead, which is talk about it. Only, I have a feeling that you would feel that you were disappointed and somewhat cheated by this kind of behavior, if I just left, and five minutes’ silence. So then, this word, zen, is the Japanese way of pronouncing the Chinese word chán, which in turn is the Chinese way of pronouncing the Sanskrit word dhyāna.
And dhyāna is a very difficult word to translate into English, if not impossible. It’s been called “meditation.” Meditation, in English, generally means sitting quietly and thinking about something, and that’s not what Zen is. “Contemplation” might come a little nearer if you use the word in a very technical sense; the sense that it was used or still is used among catholic mystics.
Perhaps that’s something a bit like Zen. But again, “contemplation,” as we normally use the word, has a sense of inactivity: the sense of not doing anything, of being completely still and passive—whereas Zen is something highly active. So we really don’t have an English word for dhyāna, chán, zen.
But I would say that we do know what it is, because we do all sorts of things every day of our lives in this spirit—when, for example, you drive a car. Most Americans, at any rate, drive cars since they were teenagers and are very expert drivers. And when they drive a car, they don’t think about it.
They’re one with the car. Or when a rider of a horse is one being with the horse—when you watch a good cowboy or cavalry rider, he’s glued to the horse. He’s like a centaur, almost: as the horse moves, he moves.
Which is in control? Is the horse riding the man or the man riding the horse? You practically don’t know.
Same way when you have an excellent dancing partner: who leads, who follows? It seems as if you are one body and you move together. That is zen.
That is dhyāna. And so, in a wider sense, when a person doesn’t react to life on the one hand, or try to dominate it on the other, but when the internal world of one’s own organism and the external world of other people and other things move together as if they were (and indeed are) one and the same motion, that is Zen. So you could say in a very, very simple way that the real concern of Zen is to realize—not merely to think, but to know in your bones—that the inside world inside your skin and the outside world outside your skin (going out as far as anything can go into galaxies beyond galaxies) is all one world, and all one being; one Self—and you’re it.
And once you know that, then you have completely abolished all the problems that arise as a result of feeling that you’re a stranger in the world, that you’re set down in the middle of a hostile and alien domain of nature or people who are not you. This whole sense of estrangement, foreignness to the world, is overcome in Zen. Now, let me illustrate this a little (before we go into Zen in any kind of technical way) by a few rather superficial but nevertheless significant facts out of Japanese culture, and the place of Zen in Japanese culture.
Japanese culture was, as you may have noticed, extraordinarily ritualistic. There is a right way of doing everything: a good form, a proper style. And nowhere is this more apparent than in such practices as the tea ceremony, or arranging flowers, or knowing how to dress, or knowing how to organize a formal dinner.
The punctiliousness, the skill of these people in doing these things, is quite remarkable. But in the same measure as they are very skillful at doing this things, they’re very worried about it. The whole question, for example, of bringing presents to somebody else: have they given us more than we’ve given them?
Did we remember this occasion? Did we remember that occasion? These weigh very heavily on the Japanese soul.
The debt which you owe to your parents, the debt which you owe to your country and to your Emperor: immeasurable, infinite debt—never can be paid. All these weigh very heavily. And therefore, in Japan—until the sort of breakaway of modern youth, with its westernized ideals—this is a very nervous culture, concerned about whether one is playing the ritual correctly.
A culture like that needs an outlet, needs a safety valve, needs a way out of this thing. And Zen provides just that. And so, by contrast, when you meet a Japanese who is thoroughly trained in Zen, he is a different kind of personality altogether from ordinary Japanese.
He is in manners not studiedly courteous, nor is he brusque, but he is simply at ease. He gives you his whole attention so long as you give him your whole attention. If you start wandering and frittering, he’s got work to do, and he promptly leaves.
But so long as you are wanting to talk to him, he is there for you and for nobody else. And he sits down—and he really sits, you know? He doesn’t worry about whether he ought to be somewhere else, and so unable to sit with complete serenity in one place.
You know, if you have half an idea that you ought to be worrying about something out in the garden, or that you ought to be cooking dinner, or that you ought to be down in your office or something, you can’t sit where you are. You’re not really there. You’re a kind of gas balloon that keeps wanting to wander off.
But these people, when—you will see as you meet people connected with Zen—even sometimes the most neophyte novice of a priest has this atmosphere of knowing how to live in the present, and not to be fidgety and giggly and worrying about whether he’s done the right thing. That’s very much Zen style. Even though, at the same time, the Zen people do have a very exacting and demanding discipline.
The function of this discipline is rather curious: it’s to enable you to be comfortable. It’s an aid to enable you, for example, to sleep on a concrete sidewalk on a cold, wet night, and enjoy it. To relax completely under any situation of hardship.
You see, ordinarily, when you’re out in the cold, you start shivering. Why? Because you’re resisting the cold.
You’re tightening your muscles against the cold and you get the staggers. But you are taught, if you learn Zen discipline, not to do that. Take it easy.
Go with the cold. Relax. And all those monks in those monasteries here, they’re as cold as hell in winter.
And they simply sit there most of the time. And we would be frozen to death and miserable and have influenza and the great Siberian itch, but they simply relax and learn how to take the cold. So there’s nothing about Zen discipline which is masochistic.
It isn’t to beat your body because your body’s bad and is a creation of the devil or something. It has nothing to do with that. It is: how to be comfortable under all circumstances.
But that, again, is something rather incidental to the main question of Zen. As I said, the Zen people (as you meet them and as you get to know their style of personality) are at ease in a culture that is not at ease; in a culture that is chronically concerned with protocol and “is it just right?” That is indeed a terribly self-conscious culture where everybody is always watching themselves and having, therefore, second thoughts about everything. And so, the discipline of Zen is to enable you to act without watching yourself.
We would say: unselfconsciously. But Japanese are as terrified of this as we are. They think, and we think: “If I don’t watch myself, I’ll make a mistake.” “If I don’t hold a club over myself, I’ll cease to be civilized and become a barbarian.” If I don’t discipline myself with all sorts of UUUNNGHH!
down on those passions of yours, you will become like the monk of Siberia who burst from his cell and devoured the father Superior. So this basic mistrust and so on in one’s own spontaneity makes us wonder that, if the Zen people are really spontaneous and they don’t plan and premeditate and hold clubs over themselves—well, they become very, very dangerous people, socially. Won’t they go out and rape their mothers and daughters, and murder their grandmothers to inherit their fortunes, and so on and so forth?
And Zen people just don’t do that. And yet, they are perfectly spontaneous. So then, let me try, then, and indicate how this discipline called Zen actually works.
This will involve a little bit of letting the cat out of the bag, but it can’t be helped. Let’s go back to what I told you was fundamental to Buddhism. Buddhism is unlike other religions in that it does not tell you anything.
It doesn’t require you to believe in anything. Buddhism is a dialogue, and what are called the teachings of Buddhism are nothing more than the opening phrases, or opening exchanges, in the dialogue. Buddhism is a dialogue between a Buddha and an ordinary man—or rather: someone who insists on defining himself as an ordinary man, and thereby creates a problem.
I quoted you this morning our saying that “anybody who goes to a psychiatrist ought to have his head examined.” And in exactly the same way, in this culture, anybody who goes to a guru, a spiritual teacher, or a Zen master, or whatever, ought to have his head examined. Or as the old Chinese master Tokuzan put it: “If you ask any question, you get thirty blows with my stick. If you don’t ask any question you get thirty blows just the same.” In other words: what the hell are you doing around here, defining yourself as a student and defining me as a teacher?
In other words: you have raised a problem. And in the way of training of Zen, this is very clearly emphasized. If you go to a Zen teacher, and you approach him in the traditional way, the first thing he will do is to say, “I haven’t anything to teach.
Go away.” Well, you say, “What are these people doing around here? Aren’t they your students?” He’ll say, “Well, they’re working with me. But unfortunately, we are very poor these days.