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We don’t have enough rice, really, to go around and make ends meet. And we can’t take on anybody else in this community.” So you have to insist to be taken in. Every postulant for Zen training assumes immediately that the teacher has given him the brushoff in order to test his sincerity.
In other words: if you really want this thing, you’ve got to work for it. That isn’t the real point. The point is that you’ve got to make such a fuss to get in that you cannot withdraw gracefully after having made such a fuss to get in.
Because you put yourself on the spot, and you define yourself as somebody needing help, or somebody with a problem who needs a master in order to be helped out of the problem. So then, when you’ve done this in the old days, of course—and it’s still the formal rule among the Zen monasteries here—that when you’re a postulant and you want to come in, you have to sit outside at the gate for a week, or maybe only five days, in a position of supplication with your head bowed down on the steps. And they let you in at night because they must give hospitality to any wandering monk.
But you’re expected not to go to sleep any of those five nights, but to sit there in meditation. And they give you food. But you sit and you sit and you sit there, and you make a damn fool of yourself, saying, “I insist on getting into this thing.
I insist on learning. I want to know what the secret of this master here is.” And he’s told you from the start that he doesn’t have a secret and that he doesn’t teach anything. But you insist that he does.
See, that is the situation of everybody who feels that life is a problem to be solved. Whether you want psychoanalysis, whether you want integration, whether you want salvation, whether you want Buddhahood—whatever it is you define yourself as wanting. You created the problem.
What is the real problem that everybody brings to these teachers? What is it all about? It’s basically this, isn’t it: “Teacher, I want to get one-up on the universe.
I feel a stranger in this world. I feel that it’s a problem and that having a body means that I am subject to disease and change and death. Having emotions and passions means that I am tormented by feelings which I can’t help having, and yet it’s not reasonable to act on those feelings without creating trouble.
I feel trapped by this world, and so I want to get the better of it. And is there some wise man around who is a master of life and who can teach me to cope with all this?” So that’s what everybody’s looking for in a teacher: the man who is the savior and who can show you how to cope with it. The Zen teacher says, “I don’t have any answers.” Nobody believes that because he seems to be so competent when you look at him.
You can’t believe that he has no answers. And yet, that’s the consistent teaching of Zen: that it has nothing to say and nothing to teach. The great Chinese master of the Song Dynasty called Linji in Chinese, or Rinzai in Japanese, said: “Zen is like using a yellow leaf to stop a child crying.” A child is crying for gold, and the father takes an autumn leaf with yellow and says, “Gold.” Or he said: “It’s like using an empty fist to deceive a child.” See, you’ve got a closed fist, and you say to the child, “What’ve I got here?” And the child says, “Let me see.” “Oh no!” You put your fist behind your back.
And the child will become more and more excited to know what the devil’s in that fist! And fights and fights and fights, and finally is practically in tears. And then suddenly you finally open the fist, and there’s nothing inside.
So, in exactly the same way, a person who is under the impression that there is something that we ought to get… see, all this is dressed up in a big way: to be a Buddha, to know the answer, to finally solve the problem, to get the message, to get the word, or however you put it—in other words, to be in control of your fate and of the world. Would you like it if you could have it? And so all these powers are projected upon the Zen master.
He is a Buddha, he is a master of life. And if he is, the reason why he is, is that he has discovered the unreality of the whole problem. There is not life on the one hand and you on the other.
It’s all the same. But, you see, you can’t tell people that, and just by telling get them to see it. Just in in exactly this way, people who know that the Earth is flat can’t be reasoned with.
People who believe that the Bible is the literal word of God—absolutely impossible to reason with them at all because they know it is so. So, in the same way, we tend to know that we are all separate, poor little me, and that we’re in need of salvation or something. And we know this is so.
And so somebody says, “Well, you’re not really that. You know that that feeling of separateness is an illusion?” Well, that’s all very nice in theory, but I don’t feel it. So what will you do?
What will you do with a person who is convinced that the Earth is flat? There’s no way of reasoning with him. If it’s for some reason important that he discover that the Earth is round, you’ve got to play a game with him; you want to play a trick on him.
You tell him: “Great, the Earth is flat. Let’s go and look over the edge. Wouldn’t that be fun?
Because, if we’re going to look over the edge of the Earth, we must be very, very careful that we don’t go around in circles, or we’ll never get to the edge. So we’ve got to go along consistently, along a certain line of latitude, westwards. And then we’re going to come to the edge of the Earth, just so long as we’re consistent.” In other words, in order to convince a flat-Earthist that the world is round, you’ve got to make him act consistently on his own proposition, and go consistently westwards to find the edge of the world.
Now, at last, when he (by going consistently westwards) comes back to the place where he started, he’s been convinced that the Earth is at least cylindrical. And he may believe you, and then take it on faith that if he goes along the line of longitude, the same thing will happen. But, you see, what you did was to make him persist in his folly.
Now, that’s the whole method of Zen: to make people become perfect egotists, and so explode the illusion of the separate ego. So what happens? In effect, then, in the discipline of Zen, when you’ve finally convinced the master that you are stupid enough to be accepted as a student—because you’ve persisted and because you’ve defined yourself as someone having a problem.
He has warned you well in advance that he has nothing to teach. But he says, “Now I will ask you a question.” There are many ways of asking this question, but they all boil down to one common theme, and that is: “Who are you?” You say you have a problem. You say you’d like to get out of the sufferings of life.
You say you would like to get one-up on the universe. I want to know who’s asking this question. Show me “you.” Only, they put it in such ways as: “Before your father and mother conceived you, what was your original nature?” Questions like that.
And they’ll say, “Now, look, I want I want to be shown. I don’t want a lot of ideas about who you are. I don’t want to know who you are in terms of a social role—you know, that you have such degrees, or you have such professional qualifications, and such a name and such a family.
All that’s the past. I want to see you genuinely, now.” It’s like saying to a person, “Now, don’t be self-conscious, see? I want you, right this minute, to be completely sincere.
C’mon now.” Well, nothing is better calculated to make a person incapable of sincerity. It’s as when relatives come, and aunts and uncles, and there’s a little child, and they want to review this child and see it, and the parents say to the child, “Darling, come on now and play for us.” See? And the poor child is completely nonplussed.
Doesn’t know what to do. Because you cannot play on demand. Now, what is the Zen teacher doing in saying to a person, “You must answer this question by coming before me” in, in fact, a rather formal situation The kind of context in which a Zen master interviews his students is very formal.
And there he sits, a sort of enthroned tiger. He is definitely, in this culture, a sensei; an authority figure. And so he is the last kind of person you can be spontaneous with, because you feel that he knows you through and through.
And that—do you know, have you ever read that story of von Kleist about a man who has a fight with a bear, and the bear is a mind-reader and always knows what move he’s going to make? So that the man can never conquer the bear unless he makes a move which he doesn’t think about first. How will you do that?
And you get the same feeling with a relationship to a Zen master. You feel that he is absolutely aware of everything phony about you; that he reads you like a book—but that you can’t find a way of being not phony. Think about this a little.
You see, we can arrange a group session—and this is a little game that’s being played by lots of people as a kind of psychotherapy—we can arrange a group session in which the gimmick is this: that when anybody says anything or does anything, the group or some section of the group challenges its sincerity and says, “Why are you coming on so strong? Are you trying to dominate us?” And, you see, anything that you do can be interpreted in that way. Because the moment a group of people starts making comments on its own behavior, it is setting up a situation within the group which is analogous—say, in a TV studio—to turning the camera on the monitor.
So when we start thinking about thinking, being aware of being aware, this is what is called in Japanese the observing self: “I watch myself all the time,” see? You’re in a hopeless mess. But this is the price that human beings pay for having become self-conscious: anxiety and guilt.
Anxiety because: am I sure that I thought this out sufficiently carefully? When I left the house, did I turn off the gas stove? And incidentally, I remember turning it off, but can I trust my memory?
I’ve learned to think about memory now, and I wonder if I can trust it? Maybe I better go back and look. Yeah, I went back and I looked.
But did I really see? Because I’m thinking about my sight, and whether whether this is quite authentic. Did I did I look properly?
because you know how the unconscious can alter your senses. So I better go look again. See?
Soon, now, I’ve got into a sort of vicious circle where I’ll never get away from the house. And all this sort of getting mixed up is the penalty we pay for the advantageous gift of being able to know that we know: And so this is the Zen trick. It’s to put you into this situation in a very crucial way.
To think about thinking about thinking about thinking about. Or, just the same thing, to make a very strong effort not to think. That’s zazen: sit, let your senses operate, and be responsive to whatever that may be around, but don’t think about it.
But now, this is already thinking: I’m thinking about not thinking. How will I stop thinking about not thinking? So there you are, you see?
You’re all caught up. It’s like somebody came to you and they put tar in one hand, or molasses, feathers in the other, slap the two hands together, rub them around, and said, “Now pick up the feathers.” So, you see what happens: the teacher is well aware that he’s played this trick on you. And he’s going to see what will happen if you act—and he’s going to help you to act—consistently on this foolishness.
Now, you see what he’s done is: he’s simply made a special case of what society does to us all anyhow. And this is true of most cultures. The high cultures of the world, whether they’re of the East or whether they’re of the West, play a game on every new member.
They don’t know they’re playing this game because their forefathers played it on them, and they’re still its hopeless victim. The game is called the double-bind, and the formula under whose auspices everybody comes into this world is as follows: you are required to do something which will be acceptable only if you do it voluntarily. You must love me.
You must go to sleep. You must be natural. You must be free.
Listen to that! You must be free! Now, what happens, you see: society, the community into which every child enters, defines the child.
We know who we are as other people react to us. So the other people say to us, “You’re an independent agent. You’re responsible.
You are a freely acting individual.” But this is a commandment. And we obey it because we can’t help it. A child has no way of criticizing us or of seeing there’s something phony about it.
So the child has to be free because he is commanded to be so by the community. Now then, the community sets itself a problem. Having defined the child as an independent agent, and having got the child to believe that he’s an independent agent because he isn’t—in other words, he wouldn’t believe this if he were independent—it then has trouble getting him to behave as the community wants him to behave.
So they feel, then, there’s something ornery about all children. They’re born in original sin. They’re a fractious and so on—of course they are!
Because they’ve been defined in a self-contradictory way. So when the community says to a person, “You must be free,” or when we are in a family relationship in which the members of the family are saying to each other, “You must love me. It’s your duty to love me”—what a bunch of rot!
Supposing one day you get up and you say to your wife, “Darling, do you really love me?” and she replies, “Well, I’m trying my very best to do so,” is that the answer you wanted? No! You wanted her to say, “Darling, I can’t help loving you.
I love you so much I could eat you.” You don’t want her to try to love you. But yet, that is what you put on people in almost any marriage ceremony: that you shall love this person. “Thou shalt love the Lord, thy God.” “Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.” This is a double bind.
And anybody who lives under the dominance of a double bind lives in a state of chronic frustration, because he is devoting his whole life to solving a meaningless, nonsensical problem. Let’s take the double bind that is the deepest of all: “You must go on living.” Now, living is a spontaneous process. And to say to it “You must happen” is exactly the same thing as saying to any kind of creative artist, “You must come through with the goods.
Tonight you must give the superb performance, and above all you must be unselfconscious.” Well, this is being done to us all the time. And the object of the Zen discipline is that, instead of doing this to people unconsciously—as parents do it, and as teachers do it to children, and as the children’s peers do it to their own peer members—in Zen, the double bind is put on you deliberately, knowing how stupid it is. The teacher is well aware of everything he is doing and what tricks he’s playing on you, because he has behind it all the compassionate intent of getting you into such a fierce double bind that you will see how stupid it is.
So then, what happens is this: he gives you the double bind “Be genuine. I want to see you do something that is the real you.” I had a friend who was studying Zen, and he was given some kōan like this to work on. And when he was one day going for his interview, he walked through the garden that connected the sodo, or the monks’ study quarters, with the master’s place, and there was a big bullfrog.
Bullfrogs in this country are rather tame. People don’t eat them. And so he swept up the bullfrog and dropped it into the sleeve of his kimono.
And when he got in front of the teacher to answer the kōan—that is to say, to spontaneously produce his genuine self—he produced the bullfrog. And the teacher looked at it, and shook his head and said, “Nu-uh. Too intellectual.” Or, as we might say: too contrived, too studied.
That’s not yet you. Now, do you see the bind in this? It’s like being told that everything is alright at this moment so long as you don’t think of a green elephant.
So try not to think of a green elephant. See? Now, as he works at this, as he tries to produce the genuine “you,” the teacher really strings him out on this and makes him work and work and work over a period of many months, until he comes to the point of seeing this: there is nothing you can do to be genuine.
The more you do, the phonier you are. But at the opposite extreme, there is nothing you can not do—that is to say, you cannot give up trying to be genuine. You can’t relax, you know, and be completely passive, and say, “Well, let’s forget about it.
Let’s think about practical matters and forget all these spiritual concerns.” The moment you do that, your abandonment of trying is itself an insidious form of trying. For example, there’s a very interesting Hindu teacher by the name of Krishnamurti that many of you may know about, and he tells people that all their religious inquiry, their yoga practices, their reading religious books, and so on, is nothing but a form of perpetuating one’s egocentricity, but on a very refined and highbrow level. So he gets a kind of disciple who studiously avoids reading any kind of philosophical or edifying book.
They’re reduced to reading mystery stories. And they become devoted non-disciples. See, what a clever bind that is!
It’s the same as the Zen technique. You can’t, in other words, let go of—my point was at the beginning we saw the way of Buddhism is to let go of yourself. To see that you live in a universe in which in which nothing can be grasped.
Therefore, stop grasping. So here’s the problem. I come and say to the teacher, “Teach me not to grasp.” He’ll say, “Why do you want to know?” And he shows you that the reason why you want to stop grasping is that it’s a new form of grasping.
You feel that you will beat the game by being unattached. See, it’s horrible to grieve when somebody you love dies. So maybe, by being unattached to that person, I can avoid grief.
Pretty cold, isn’t it? Maybe, you see, by not having an ego, when life comes and bangs on me, if there’s nobody there, it’ll be alright. So that’s why I want non-ego state.
That’s phony. All this is a new way of safeguarding and protecting the ego. So this is the way in which Buddhism is a dialogue.
So, you see, if you go back to fundamental primitive Buddhism, people say to the Buddha, “I want to escape from suffering.” It’s a perfectly honest statement. Alright, realize that suffering is caused by desire. Try not to desire.
So the student goes away and tries to eliminate desires by controlling his mind and practicing yoga. He comes back to the teacher and says, “It’s pretty difficult. But I have managed at least to get rid of some desires.” The teacher says to him, “But you’re still desiring to get rid of desire.
What about that one?” And then the student sees that if he tries to stop desiring to get rid of desire, but then he’s got to stop desiring to get rid of not desiring to desire. And suddenly he finds himself once more with molasses in one hand and feathers in the other: absolutely tied up in a vicious circle. So he realizes: there is nothing I can do about it, and there’s nothing I can not do about it.
And this predicament in Zen is called a mosquito trying to bite an iron bull: a position of such psychic extremity that nothing can be done about it. Now, the point here is: what does this situation mean? When you find yourself in that kind of a trap, what’s the meaning of the trap?
Why, that’s very simple: if there’s nothing you can do, and also nothing you cannot do about a given situation, it means that “you” are phony. That, in other words, what we call a “separate ego” isn’t there. Of course it can’t do anything, because it is not an agent.
And by virtue of the fact that it can’t do anything, equally, it can’t not do anything. It’s completely phony. So what has happened is: to expose the fiction of there being a separate ego—either to force its actions upon the world or to have the actions of the world forced upon it as a puppet—this thing just doesn’t exist, except as a figment of the imagination, or except as a game rule.
Let’s pretend everybody is responsible, is independent, is separate. Sure, that’s a great game. But it’s a game.
And so the whole object of this Zen dialogue between the teacher and the student is to carry that game of being the separate ego to its logical conclusion, to its reductio ad absurdum so that, as Blake said, the fool who persists in his folly will become wise. What I think I want to do today is to talk to you about the things which are of major interest to me. Now, the origin of a person who is defined as a philosopher is one who finds that existence itself is exceedingly odd.
I mean, we have an opposition between odd and even, and it would be even—that’s to say, flattened out—if nothing existed at all. I mean, it’d be so simple: no effort, no trouble, no nothin’. But strangely enough, we have the strange conviction that something exists, that we’re here, that we’re real.
And from earliest childhood that has been an extreme puzzle to me: that just something exists at all. And I discovered the nature of the puzzle. The nature of the puzzle is that I was persuaded by my culture to translate this phenomenon into words or numbers; that I had to represent what is going on in nature in terms of the English language, the French language, the Latin language, the Greek language, and finally the Chinese language.
And I found the latter the most suitable. But nevertheless, this is the puzzle. When you want to understand something, when you want to know what is it all about, what you mean is that you need a translation of what is going on into language.
And that’s the purpose of a university. You’re all here studying to translate what is going on in the physical world into words. And even when I say “the physical world,” that is a purely philosophical conception.
It’s an idea about the world propagated largely from the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries of European scientific thought. “Physical.” We all know what physical is, don’t we? I mean, it’s material.
And what does the word “material” mean? Well, of course it’s the same word as “mother,” Latin mater. Greek mitér.
Also “meter,” “measure.” And finally Sanskrit: mātṛ, which also means “to measure” and is the root word behind māyā, which is “illusion.” So the physicists, you know, finally abandoned the quest for finding out what matter is, because they found out that when they investigated matter, they had to describe it in terms of form. And they found out—they just gave it up. In other words, the idea that there was some kind of basic stuff underlying everything was nothing more than an illusion.
Because the strict, precise physicist describes structure, and he finds that matter is, after all, only a matter of form. It’s only the form that matters. Wowee!
You know? Now, we’ve all been brought up in the common sense of the 19th century. This is the background, this is the unconscious belief system, underlying most of our judgments.
And that is—well, we had two belief systems, you see. We had, first of all, the Christian or the Jewish, in which there was big daddy up atop the sky. Now, I don’t want to offend anybody, but there are probably some of you here who’ve studied St. Thomas Aquinas, and have a very, very profound, deep conception of the Christian god, or you may have studied Kabbalah, or Hasidic Judaism, and have a very deep realization that goes beyond big daddy.
But big daddy is the image which influences your emotions and your basic feelings. And so the big daddy thing became much too oppressive, and it was absolutely essential for very many people, especially intellectuals, to get rid of it. Because you didn’t want to be supervised all the time, judged all the time, looked at all the time by somebody criticizing everything you did.
So we got rid of it. Nobody really believes in it anymore. An enormous number of people think they ought to believe in it, but they don’t.
And that’s what certain theologians call the death of god. But instead of that, we supplanted big daddy with another image which is just as mythological, and that was the image of the world as a mechanical phenomenon—a thing that goes tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick in various ways, or that is a randomness of particles or wavicles that occasionally produces order in the same way that a million monkeys typewriting on a million typewriters for a million years would probably at some point reproduce the Encyclopædia Britannica. But the real reason lying behind that vision of the world was a declaration of personality.
That is to say, I am the kind of fellow who doesn’t believe that there’s someone up there who cares. That’s for little old ladies. I’m a tough guy.
I believe that life is at root meaningless, and I’m going to face the hard facts. Incidentally, nobody ever talks about soft facts. So I’m URGH!
I believe it’s all empty and that the only thing is that the meaning of life, of human life, consists in the heroic conflict with tragedy. We’re all going to end up in the dustbin—excuse me, the ashcan—and there’s no future. Finally, it’s empty.
And then we come across Buddhists—because the world is all closing in, you see?—people on the other side of the world, who think that emptiness is a great thing. “Wowee!” they say. Śūnyatā in Sanskrit: “emptiness.” If you can understand that you are basically emptiness, you’re a Buddha, you’re enlightened, you’re awakened.
Isn’t that weird? From a Western point of view that seems absolutely crazy! We call it nihilism.
That’s awful. But the basic formula of Buddhism is shiki soku ze kū, kū soku ze shiki: “that which is emptiness is also precisely form, that which is form is also precisely emptiness.” Now what does that mean? You know, they all sit together in the Zen monasteries and elsewhere, and they chant this sūtra: Maka hannya haramitta shin gyoo.
And then it goes shiki soku ze kū, kū soku ze shiki, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, bong, bong, bong. And finally it ends up with a kind of gate gate paragate parasamgate om svaha. You know?
What’s all that about? Excuse me, I’ve a little cough because I’ve just been to London and picked up the London flu. So now, think about this.
What do you mean by the idea of clarity? Clear? The word “clear,” in English, can be spelled in different ways: C-L-E-A-R, C-L-E-R-E, C-L-E-V-E-R, C-L-E-R-G-Y.
They’re all on the same root. A clergyman, a cleric, a clerk, is supposed to be someone who’s clear. Like Ron Hubbard invented the word “clear,” you see?
He used it for somebody who had developed dianetic proficiency. Clear. And what do we mean by this word?
When you say it’s a clear day, it means there’s no smog, and so the air is empty. And as a result of the fact that the air is empty, all the forms are articulate in detail. When your head is clear, when your vision is clear, all the details can be made out.
So that is why emptiness equals form. That’s marvelous! So, therefore, I think that the most essential ingredient of an academic discipline is to clear our heads.