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But if you were brought up to believe yourself split—I remember my mother used to say to me, when I did naughty things, she said “Alan, that’s not like you.” So I had, you know, some conception of what was like me in my better moments—that is to say, in the moments when I remembered what my mother would like me to do. And so that split is implanted in us all. And because of our being split-minded we are always dithering.
“Is the choice that I’m about to make of the higher self or of the lower self? Is it of the spirit, or is it of the flesh? Is the word that I received of the Lord, or is it of the Devil?” And nobody can decide.
Because if you knew how to choose, you wouldn’t have to. In the so-called Moral Re-Armament movement—which is a very significant title—you test your messages that you get from God in your quiet time by comparing them with standards of absolute honesty, absolute purity, absolute love, and so on. But, of course, if you knew what those things were, you wouldn’t have to test.
You would know immediately. And do you know what those things are? The more one thinks about the question, “What would absolute love be?”—supposing I could set myself the ideal of being absolutely loving to everybody, what would that imply in terms of conduct?
Well, you can think about that until all is blue, because you could never get to the answer. The problems of life are so subtle that to try to solve them with vague principles, as if those vague principles were specific instructions, is completely impossible. So it is important to overcome split-mindedness.
But what is the way? Where can you start from if you’re already split? A Taoist saying is that “when the wrong man uses the right means, the right means work in the wrong way.” So what are you to do?
How can you get off it and get moving? Fundamentally, of course, you have to be surprised into it. There was an army officer who once came to a Zen master and said, “I have heard a story about a man who kept a goose in a bottle, and it was growing very rapidly, and he didn’t want to break the bottle and he didn’t want to hurt the goose.
So how would he get it out?” The Zen master didn’t answer the question at all, but simply changed the subject. Finally, the officer got up to leave and he went over to the door, and suddenly the Zen master called out, “Oh, officer?” And he turned around and said, “Yes?” The master said, “There! It’s out!” So, in the same way, if I say to you, “Good morning,” you say, “Good morning.
Nice day isn’t it?” “Yes.” Or if I hit you—you know, boom!—you say, “Ouch!” And you don’t stop to hesitate to give these answers or responses. You don’t think about it when I say “Good morning,” unless you’re a psychiatrist. What could I be meaning?
So you respond. So, in exactly the same way, that kind of response, which doesn’t have to be a deliberate response, a response of a no-deliberating mind, is a response of a Buddha-Mind or an Unattached-Mind. But you must not imagine that this is necessarily a quick response.
Because if you get hung up on the idea of responding quickly, the idea of quickness will be, itself, a form of obstruction. Very often, when Dr. Suzuki is asked a question—very complicated question by some philosophy major from Columbia, when he’s giving lectures there—he’s silent for a full minute, and then says, “Yes.” And this is exactly as spontaneous a response as it would be if he had answered immediately. Because during the period of silence, he’s not fishing around to think of something to say.
He is not at all embarrassed of being silent, or at not knowing the answer. So if you don’t know the answer, you can be silent. If nobody asks a question, you can be silent.
There’s no need to be embarrassed about it or to be stuck on it. But you cannot overcome being stuck if you think that, somehow, you would be guilty if you were stuck. When you are perfectly free to feel stuck or not stuck, then you’re unstuck.
Because actually, nothing can stick on the real mind, and you will find this out if you watch the flow of your thoughts. There is an expression in Chinese which means ‘the flow of thoughts,’ or what we call in literary criticism ‘stream of consciousness.’ And they put the character for thought (念) three times: niàn, niàn, niàn. And so you will notice that thought follows thought follows thought when you are just ruminating.
And those thoughts arise and go like waves on the water; all the time, they come and go. And when they go, they are as if they had never been here. So, actually, this shows your mind doesn’t stick.
Really. You can get the illusion of it sticking by, for example, cycling the same succession of thoughts over and over again. And that gives a sense of permanence in the same way as when you revolve a cigarette butt in the dark, you get the illusion of there being a solid circle although there is only the single point of fire.
And it is from this connecting of thoughts that we get the sensation that behind our thoughts there is a thinker who controls them and experiences them. Although, the notion that there is a thinker is just one member in the stream of thoughts. For example, if you get a certain kind of rhythm that goes ‘diggy diggy diggy diggy boop diggy diggy diggy diggy boop diggy diggy diggy diggy boop diggy diggy diggy diggy boop,’ the ‘boop’ is part of the rhythm.
But it can be used as a cue. So you get—in relation to ‘diggy diggy diggy diggy boop’—you get ‘thought thought thought thought thinker thought thought thought thought thinker.’ And if this happens regularly enough and long enough, you get the illusion of there being someone who thinks apart from the stream of thoughts that come and go; the stream of experiences. And we use such absurd phrases not only as ‘thinking our thoughts,’ but ‘feeling our feelings,’ ‘seeing sights,’ and ‘hearing sounds.’ But you must understand: it is perfectly obvious that seeing a sight is seeing; hearing a sound is hearing; feeling a feeling is feeling.
So, in the same way, thinking a thought is thinking. But you get split-minded, you see, and so you get ‘I’ and ‘me,’ and the ‘I’ who ought to—or must—control ‘me’ as a sensation of some real entity that stands aside from thoughts and chooses among them, controls them, regulates them, and so on. Actually, this is a way to have one’s thoughts not controlled.
The more there is this duality of the separate ‘thinker’ standing aside from the thoughts—the separate ‘feeler’ watching or feeling the feelings—the more the stream of feelings is coaxed into self-protective activity; into getting more and more like a stuck record, the purposes of which are to protect and to aggrandize and enlarge the status of the supposed ‘thinker.’ Now, we can see this very clearly from confusions we can get into in activity. I have just said, “We can see this very clearly from confusions we get into in activity.” What kind of a statement is that? When I raised the question—what kind of a statement was it that I just made—I’m beginning to talk about talking.
And one can do that, provided you don’t try to do it while you are making the original statement. If I want to say something about what I’ve just said, then I must do it later, mustn’t I? But not at the same time.
I cannot say “You are a fool,” and at the same time say “I’m giving you an insult” in so many words. I cannot say—or, in mathematics—I cannot write down a certain equation, and as I’m writing in down, simultaneously, state what kind of an equation this is. Unless, of course, I invent an exceedingly complex language which talks about itself as it goes along.
But in the ordinary way, people get completely mixed up by that. In the middle of being about to say to somebody anything, you start to think about whether this is the right thing to say. And you start wobbling.
You get, in other words, too much feedback. And too much feedback makes any mechanism go crazy. So, in the same way, when you are very, very aware of the difference between the deeds and the doer, and the doer—while doing the deeds—is always sort of commenting on them; the doer really never gets with it!
In other words, you are about to strike a nail and you wonder—as you are about to hit it—“Is this the right place to put it?” And so you’ve probably hit your thumbnail instead of the nail, because you don’t go right through with hitting that nail. This is not saying—let me mark this again—it is not saying that there should be no criticism of thought. But if you criticize thought while thinking, as if there were a critic thinker standing aside from the stream of thought, then you get all balled up.
And that is exactly what happens in the process of attachment, or what are called in Buddhist kleśa, which mean ‘disturbing confusions of the mind.’ And, you see, this kind of confusion is something to which the human organism is peculiarly liable, because the human organism has language, has—you see, thinking is silent language, and I mean ‘language’ in the most inclusive sense of the word: not only words, but also images and numbers; notation. Just because, then, we can talk about anything. We can talk about talking, we can talk about thinking, we can talk about ourselves, as if we could stand aside and say, “‘Said I to myself’ said I.” All we are actually doing is making a second thought, or thought stream, which comments on the one that went before, and then pretending that the second stream is a different stream than the first.
That’s because there are built into our minds all kinds of phony images about memory. We think, for example, of memory by analogy with engraving. In order to remember something we write it down.
And so we have a flat and stable piece of paper, and we make marks on it with a pencil, and they stay there. So we begin to think, “Isn’t mental memory something of the same kind?” Is there something stable, upon which the passage of thoughts makes an impression? We say, “He impressed me very much; this was a lasting impression on my mind,” as if we were tablets.
Indeed, the philosopher Locke used the expression tabula rasa, or ‘clean slate,’ to describe the mind of a child. This is a mind which has not yet collected any memories, as if there were some sort of surface which accumulated these things and preserved them, and that’s me. But, you see, this superstition is related to a much more ancient superstition that the world consists of two elements, one of which is ‘stuff,’ and the other of which is ‘form.’ This is a myth based on a model of the world which is fundamentally ceramic.
God formed Adam out of the dust of the ground. And so there is a ‘stuff,’ and so there are ‘forms’ engraved in it, or imposed on it, or stamped on it like a seal is stamped on wax. What is stuff like apart from form?
What is form like apart from stuff? All those problems—which have bothered people for centuries—are based on asking the question in the wrong way; on having used the wrong image for the process. Actually, since nobody ever saw a piece of shapeless stuff, and nobody ever saw a piece of stuff-less shape, the whole thing really is saying that they are the same.
And there isn’t any necessity even to think of a difference between them. Even the contrasting words, ‘form’ and ‘substance,’ or ‘form’ and ‘matter,’ are a nuisance. There is process.
There is the flow of thought. The flow of thought doesn’t have to happen to anyone. Experience does not have to beat upon an experiencer.
There is, all the time, simply the one stream going on, and we are convinced that we stand aside from it and observe it, because we’ve been brought up that way. But, you know, in your stream of thought and experience, “I am an object,” and a very fleeting and passing one. And also, in my stream of experience you, also, are people who come and go.
We are all, you see, living in the same world. We think there is me, and there is an external world around me, but I am in you external world and you are in my external world, and if you think about that you see that we are all in one world going along together. There isn’t really the ‘internal’ and the ‘external,’ there is simply the process.
And always, you see, it’ll never come while the person is trying to make a differentiation between a ‘true’ moo and a ‘false’ moo. To act with confidence, you just do it. But since people are not used to that, it is necessary to set up protected situations in which it can be done.
If we just—in the ordinary way of social intercourse—acted without deliberation, we would get into amazing confusions, as when people say, “Always speak the truth. Never tell a white lie.” And they say exactly what is true and what they think about other people. Well, they can raise a great deal of trouble.
But the experience of Zen has been that there should be a kind of enclosure in which this kind of behavior can be done until the people are expert in it and know how to apply it in all situations. The function of a Zen teacher is to put his students in all kinds of situations where, in the normal course of social relations, they would get stuck. By asking nonsensical questions, by making absurd remarks, by always unhinging things, and above all, keeping them stirred up with impossible demands: to hear the sound of one hand, to—without moving—stop a ship sailing out on the water, or to stop the sound of a train whistle in the distance.
Magic. To touch the ceiling without getting up from one’s chair, to take the four divisions of Tokyo out of your sleeve, to take Mount Fuji out of a pillbox. All these impossible questions are asked.
And in the ordinary way of interpreting these questions we think, “Well, now—gee, how could we do that?” See? That’s a very difficult question that’s been asked. And you have to think, “What would I do to do that?” Because we are caught up in a certain way of discourse which the language-game that we play—and the social games, the production games, and the survival games that we play—are good games.
But we take them so seriously that we think that that is the only important thing. And this is to unstick us from that notion and realize that it would be just as good a game to drop dead now as to go on living. Is a lightning flash ‘bad’ because it lives for a second, as compared with the sun that goes on for billions of years?
You can’t make that sort of comparison, because a world of lighting goes also with a world where there’s a sun—and vice versa. So, long-lived creatures and short-lived go together; that’s the meaning of that saying: “Flowering branches grow naturally. Some short, some long.” So this, then, is a scene in a Zen community where spontaneous behavior is encouraged within certain limits.
And as the student becomes more and more used to it, those limits are expanded. Until, eventually, he can be trusted to go out on the street and behave like a true Zen character, and get by perfectly well. You know what occasionally happens on the street when two people are walking down the sidewalk straight at each other, and they both decide to move to the right together and then to the left together, and they somehow get stuck and they can’t pass each other.
Zen teachers will pull just exactly that sort of stunt, when going down a path, and meet one of their students—to see if they can get him in a tangle, and can he escape from it? And you will find, in everyday life, that there is a very clear distinction between people who always seem to be self-possessed, and people who are dithering and nervous and don’t quite know how to react in any given situation; always getting embarrassed because they have their life too strongly programmed. “You said”—I mean, this is a common marriage argument—“You said you would do such-and-such a thing at such-and-such a time!
And now you’ve changed your plans!” Not that the change of plans really caused any inconvenience, but just the feeling that when you say you will do something at a certain time, you ought to do it at that time come hell or high water! Well, that’s being very unadaptable. That’s being a stone—kind of sticky—thing.
If it, after all, doesn’t matter when we do it and somebody is offended because the time has been changed, that’s simply because they are attached to punctuality as a fetish. And this is one of the great problems. This causes many automobile accidents.
Men rushing home to be on time for dinner, when they stayed late either working, or they had to stop for a drink at some bar, or when a girl feels that she has a fussy husband and she feels she has to have the dinner ready at exactly a certain moment, she ruins the cooking. He’d rather have a faithful wife and a bad cook. I hope I’m not treading on any toes.
So, you see, we spend an awful lot of energy trying to make our lives fit images of what life is or should be which they could never possibly fit. So Zen practice is in getting rid of these images. But it’s so explosive, socially, to do that, and it so worries people, they get vertigo, they get dizzy, they don’t know which end is up.
And this happens, you know, if you’ve ever been in one of those Blab-Lab sessions, where they call them ‘tea groups’—I think, or something like that—where people gather together without any clear idea of what this gathering is about. They know it’s somehow self-exploration, but just how do you begin on that? And so, somebody starts to push his idea, and then somebody else says, “Well, why are you trying to push your idea on us?” And then they all get into an argument about the argument, and the most amazing confusions come about—but sometimes they all see what idiots they’re being, and then they learn to live together in a really open and spontaneous way.
There was a very interesting dinner party once where a Zen master was present, and there was a geisha girl who served so beautifully and had such style that he suspected she must have some Zen training. And after a while, when she pours to fill his sake cup, he bowed to her and said, “I’d like to give you a present.” And she said, “I would be most honored.” And he took the iron chopsticks that are used for the hibachi—the charcol brazier; moving the charcoal around—he picked up a piece of red-hot charcoal and gave it to her. Well, she instantly—she had very long sleeves on her kimono—she whirled the sleeves around her hands and took the hot charcoal, withdrew to the kitchen, dumped it, and changed her kimono because it was burnt through.
Then she came back into the room, and after a suitable interval she stopped before the Zen master and bowed to him and said, “I would like to give you, sir, a present.” And he said, “I would be very much honored.” Of course, he was wearing a kimono, something like this. And so she picked up a piece of coal and offered it to him. He immediately produced a cigarette and said, “Thank you, that’s just what I needed.” Now, you know, in the same way that we have this in our culture: certain people who are comedians, who know how to make jokes and gags in a completely unprepared situation.
Face them with anything and they somehow come through. So that is exactly the same thing in a special domain as Zen. Only, a master of Zen does this in every life situation.
But the important thing is to be able to do this—this is the secret—you must remember: you can’t make a mistake. Now, that’s a very difficult thing to do, because from childhood up we have had to conform to a certain social game. And if you are going to conform to this game you can make mistakes or not make mistakes.
And so this thing has gone into us all the time. “You must do the right thing! There’s certain conduct appropriate here.
There’s certain conduct appropriate there.” And that sticks in us and gives us a double-self all our lives long, because we never grow up. Do you realize that the whole of life plays a game, which is a childhood game? There are three kinds of people: top people, middle people, and bottom people.
And there can’t be any middle people unless there are bottom people and top people. And there can’t be any top people unless there are middle and bottom people, and so it goes. And everybody is trying to be in a top set.
Well, if they are going to be there there’s gotta be people in the bottom set. And there are people who do the ‘right’ thing and people who do the ‘wrong’ thing. Here in Sausalito—we have this very, very plainly—there are the ‘right’ people, the nice people who live up on the hill.
Then there are the ‘nasty’ people who live down here on the waterfront, and they grow beards and they wear blue jeans and they smoke marijuana. And whereas the other people on the top of the hill drive Cadillacs, and have wall-to-wall carpeting, and nicely mowed lawns, and their particular kind of poison is alcohol. Now, the people who live on the top of the hill know that they are nice people, but they wouldn’t know they were nice people unless they had some nasty people to compare themselves with.
Every in-group requires an out-group. Whereas the nasty people think they are the real far out people—whereas those people, those hillbillies, are squares. And they wouldn’t be able to feel far out unless there were squares.
See? These things simply go together. But when that is not seen we play the games of ‘getting on top of things’ all the time, and so we are in a constant state of competition.
As to—if it’s not “I’m stronger than you,” it’s “I’m wiser than you,” “I’m more loving than you,” “I’m more tolerant than you,” “I’m more sophisticated than you.” It doesn’t matter what it is, but this constant competition is going on. In terms of that competition we can, of course, lose place and—in that sense—make mistakes. But what a Zen student is, is a person who is not involved in the status game.
That’s the real meaning of a monk. He is not ‘keeping up with the Jones.’ And to be a master, he must get to the point where he’s not trying to be a master. The whole idea of your being better than anybody else simply doesn’t make any sense at all; it is totally meaningless.
Because you see everybody manifesting the marvel of the universe in the same way as the stars do, and the water, and the winds, and the animals. And you see them all as being in their right places and not being able, really, to make mistakes—although they may think they are making mistakes or not making mistakes, and playing all these competitive games. But that’s their game!
Now, I only say if that game begins to bore you, and it begins to trouble you and give you ulcers and all kinds of things, then you raise the problem of getting out of it, and therefore you start to become interested in things like Zen. That is simply a symptom of your growing in a certain direction where you are tired of playing a certain kind of game. You are as naturally flowing in another direction as if a tree were putting out a new branch.
So because you say, “Oh well, we people are interested in higher things”—you see, that depends, still, on the differentiation of rank between the superior and the inferior people. But when you begin to see through that and grow out of that, you don’t think any more of this ‘superior’ and ‘inferior’ classification. You don’t think, “We are spiritual people who attend to higher things as distinct from these morons who are only interested in beer and television.” This is simply our particular form of life.
Like there are crabs, and there are spiders, and there are sharks, and there are sparrows, and so on. The trouble with the human being is like the trouble with certain animals. Like the dinosaur, who evolved to the point where he was so big that he’d have to have two brains—a higher self in the head and a lower self in the rump.
And the difficulty was to get these two brains coordinated. But we have exactly the same trouble, and we are suffering from a kind of ‘jitters’ that comes from being two-brained. Now, you see, I’m not saying that that jitters is bad—it’s a potential step in evolution and an opportunity of growth.
But remember, in the process of growth, the oak is not better than the acorn; because what does it do? It produces acorns. Or you could say—just like I sometimes love to say—that a chicken is one egg’s way of becoming others.
So an oak is an acorn’s way of becoming other acorns. Where is the point of superiority? The first verse of the poem I just quoted—“The flowering branches grow naturally.
Some short, some long”—the first verse is, So that’s the point of view of being an outcast, in the sense of being outside the taking seriously of being involved in the social game, and therefore being threatened by making mistakes, of doing the wrong thing—that is to say, of carrying into adult life one’s childhood conditioning where somebody is constantly yammering at you to play the game. So therefore, the preachers and the teachers take the same attitude towards their adult congregations that parents take to children, and lecture them and tell them what they should do. And judges in courts feel also entitled to give people lectures because they say those criminal-types haven’t grown up—but neither have the judges.
It takes two to make a quarrel. So one can begin to think in a new way—in polarity-thinking. Instead of being stuck with the competitive thinking of the good guys and the bad guys, the cops and robbers, the capitalists and the communists, all these things which are simply childishness.
Now, of course, you recognize that the moment I say that it’s like talking in English in order to show that the English language has limitations. And I am talking in a language that seems competitive to show that the competitive game has limitations. As if I were saying to all you cats here, “Look, I have something to tell you.
And if you get this, you will be in a better position than you were before you heard it.” But I cannot speak to this group—or to society, or this language-speaking culture—without using the language, the gestures, the customs, et cetera, that you have. The Zen masters try to get around this by doing things—suddenly—that people just don’t get. Well, what is this?
Therefore, that is the reason why—this is the real reason why—Zen cannot be explained. You have to make, as it were, a jump from the valuation game of ‘better people’ and ‘worse people,’ ‘in-groups’ and ‘out-groups,’ and you can only make it by seeing that they all are mutually interdependent. So if we take this situation—let’s say I would be talking to you and saying, “Look, I have some very special thing that you’ve got to take notice of.” Therefore I am the in-group, and I’m the teacher and you are the out-group.
I know perfectly well that I cannot be the teacher unless you come here, and so that my status and my position is totally dependent on you. It isn’t something, you see, therefore I have first and then you get. These things arise mutually.
So if you wouldn’t come, I wouldn’t talk. I wouldn’t know what to say, because I borrowed your language. So that is the insight: that things go together.
Then, when you see that—and aren’t in competition—then you don’t make a mistake. Because you don’t dither. When I first learned the piano and played these wretched scales, the teacher beside me had a pencil in her hand and she hit my fingers every time I made a wrong note.
The consequence was, I never learned to read music because I hesitated too long to play the note on time. Because I was always, “Is this pencil going to land?” See? And that gets built into your psyche.
And so, people are always—although they are adults, and nobody is clubbing them around and screaming at them any longer—they hear the echoes of that screaming mama—or that bombinating papa—in the back of their heads all their life long. And so they adopt the same attitudes to their own children, and the farce continues. Because there is no—I mean, I don’t say that you shouldn’t lay down the law to children if you want them to play the social game.
But if you lay down the law to your children, you must make provisions later in life for them to be ‘liberated.’ To go through a process of curing them from the bad effects of education. But you can’t do that unless you, too, grow up, you see? As we grow up.
Says I, including myself. So that is the thing. Now, therefore, in the Zen scene, you would think that the master as we know him and we read about him is an extremely authoritarian figure.
That’s the way he deliberately comes on at the beginning. He puts up a terrific show of being an awful dragon. And this screens out all sorts of people who don’t have, somehow, the nerve to get into the work.
But once you are in, a very strange change takes place: the master becomes the brother; he becomes the affectionate helper of all those students, and they love him as they would a brother, rather than respect him as they would a father. And therefore, the students and masters, they make jokes about each other; they have a very curious kind of social relationship which has all of the outward trappings of authoritarian, but everybody knows on the inside that that’s a joke. Liberated people have to be very cool.
Otherwise, in a society which doesn’t believe in equality and cannot possibly practice it, they would be considered extremely subversive. And therefore, great Zen masters wear purple and gold and carry scepters and sit in thrones, and all this is carried on to cool it. The outside world knows, “They’re alright, they have discipline, they have order, they are perfectly fine.” Having discussed basic principles of what Zen is about, I’m passing on to the more practical side of it.
A Zen monastery is not a monastery in the Christian sense. It’s more like a theological seminary, except that it practices more than it teaches. A typical institution consists of a campus, and on the campus there are many buildings.
First of all, around the edges, you will invariably find independent temples that were founded in times past by noble families, because one of the things that Buddhists did when they came to the Far East was they exploited ancestor worship. This was very clever of them: this being the great religion of China, the Buddhist priests performed services like [?] masses for the repose of the souls, or for good incarnation—reincarnations—for one’s ancestors, and they made quite a thing out of that.
And so they have memorial services for the departed, and that’s one of the principal functions of temples in Japan. People don’t go to temple in the same way as Westerners go to church. They make pilgrimages to temples and—say, at a great temple like Eihei-ji—you will find, on a Sunday morning—or practically any morning—a swarm of about 500 people attending the 4 a.m. service of chanting.
Chanting the Buddhist scriptures. But they are, kind of, in and out of their temples. They have special services, they have memorial services, weddings, funerals, or everything like that, but they don’t have a parish kind of church community as we find it in the West.
Although, when Buddhism—through the Japanese immigrants—exports itself to the United States, they immediately copy the Protestant church institution and sing, “Buddha loves me, this I know, for the sūtra tells me so.” It’s terrible. And all the young men—nisei, who have never been in Japan—the one thing they can’t stand is sūtra chanting, because they don’t know what it means, and the priests don’t know what it means a lot of the time. And so—but it’s beautiful to listen to, and they haven’t got an educated Western ear yet to appreciate that kind of oriental music.
Well, now, aside from these many temples, each of which is in charge of a priest with his family—and some of them are having a hard time making a go of it these days, so they become restaurants for very elegant food, or museums, and all sorts of things. Now, the central—the guts of the Zen temple is what’s called the sōdō. Sō, in Japanse, is the saṅgha, the order of followers of the Buddha; dō simply means ‘hall.’ So the ‘saṅgha hall,’ or sōdō, is the center.
And this consists of a number of rooms, but the main one—the actual sōdō itself—is a large, long, spacious room, with platforms on either side and a wide passage down the center. The platforms are six feet wide and each contains a number of tatami mats, which are measured six by three, and every monk is assigned to a mat. And on a shelf behind the mat, against the wall, he has all his posessions, which are very simple.
And so the mat is his sleeping place and his meditation place. There is an image of the bodhisattva Manjushri in the hall, more or less in the center of the passage between the platforms. Manjushri is a bodhisattva—they call him monju in Japan—who holds in his hand a sword, and this sword is the sword of wisdom, or prajñā, which cuts asunder all illusions.
That is the dwelling place and the meditation place of the monks, and then they have, of course, kitchens, and a library, and they have special temples that the monks use for various services. Then, aside from that, there are the quarters of the kansho, who is the abbot, or administrative head, of the temple, and then the quarters of the rōshi, who is the spiritual teacher. There isn’t, in the Zen—not in the Rinzai Zen School, at any rate—exactly a hierarchy.
Every temple is independent. There’s no Pope, no Archbishop, but there is a fraternal relationship between all the temples of the Rinzai sect. The Sōtō sect have a little bit of a hierarchy, but still, on the whole, the kansho—or administrative head of the temple—is the big boss.
The rōshi is the respected boss, the man everybody’s terrified of—at least on the outside, at any rate. Now, if you want to get into one of these institutions and study, they make it difficult. It’s so different from the welcome attitude you get when you go into a Christian church.
Here, they repel you. Westerners, of course, are treated with a certain amount of courtesy that is not ordinarily accorded to Japanese—but even then it’s made difficult, because they realize that a Westerner who’s taken the trouble to learn Japanese, and to get himself over the oceans, and to live under unfamiliar conditions is certainly pretty serious about it. And there are a number of Western Zen monks.
So funny—there’s one at Taihei-ji, who comes from San Francisco, and he’s tremendously tall, and to see him with all the others is quite amusing. Anyway, the formal approach is that you arrive in your traveling gear at the gate, and the Zen monk’s traveling gear is most picturesque: he wears a great mushroom on his head; enormous straw hat, about so wide, and then he has a black robe—shorter than a kimono—and he has long white tabi socks underneath, and geta, which are the wooden sandals with bridges on them to keep you high up a bit. Or he may wear just plain waraji, which are straw sandals.
Then he carries, on the front, his little box in which are his eating bowls, his razor, his toothbrush, and such necessities of life. When he arrives he’s told that the monastery is very poor and they can’t afford to take on any more students, and that the teacher is getting old and it might tax his strength, and things like that. So he has to sit on the steps, and he puts his traveling box in front of him, he takes off his big hat, and he lays his head on the box—his forehead—and waits there all day.
But he is invited in for meals to a special little guest house, because no traveling monk can be refused hospitality. And he is admitted at night into this special place, but he’s expected not to sleep, but to spend all night in meditation. In olden times this went on for at least a week or ten days to test this fellow out.
Then, finally, the assistant to the rōshi comes and tells him that the rōshi maybe will have a talk with him. So, you must remember the aspect of a rōshi to this young monk: he’s a formidable fellow; usually an older man who has about him something that is difficult to put your finger on. There’s a certain fierceness coupled with a kind of tremendous directness, a sense of somebody who sees right through you.