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And so he really poses to this young fellow, “What do you want? Why did you come here?” There was a good old story about one of these preliminary interviews. The master asks, first of all, very casual questions.
“Where is your hometown? What’s your name? What did your father do?And where did you go to college?
Why is my hand so much like the Buddha’s hand?” And suddenly, you know, in mid-stream of an ordinary conversation—clunk!—the student is blocked. And so there is devised the kōan—in Chinese: gōng’àn—and this means, literally, the word ‘kōan’ means a ‘case,’ in exactly the same sense as we talk about a case in law which functions as a precedent for future cases. ‘Kōan’ should be translated ‘case.’ The kōans are based on stories, mondō, of the conversations between the old masters and their students.
But you can make a kōan immediately by such a question, “Why is my hand so much like the Buddha’s hand?” Or, “Who are you that asked this question?” If the student tries to verbalize on that and say, “Well, I am so-and-so,” he asks, “Who knows that you are so-and-so? How do you know that you know? Who knows that you know?
Find out!” In other words, the basic kōan is always “Who are you? Who is it that wants to escape from birth and death? And I won’t take words for an answer.
I want to see you! And all you’re showing me at the moment is your mask.” So, then the student is sent back to the monk’s quarters, the sōdō, and the chief of the sōdō is—called the jikijitsu—is then put in charge of him, and he teaches him how to behave, what the rules are, how to eat, and how to meditate. In the Zen sect they sit on [a] padded cushion about the thickness of the San Francisco telephone directory—which is an admirable substitute.
And then, with crossed legs in the lotus posture—with the feet resting on the thighs, like you always see a Buddha—they sit for half-hour periods. That’s supposed to be the length of time it takes for a stick of incense to burn. And then, when wooden clappers are knocked together, they all get up and they walk round and round the room—quite fast, at a kind of bam, bam, bam, bam, bam, bam, bam, bam, bam, bam pace—and this keeps you awake.
Then, at a given signal, they go back and meditate again. And, constantly, there is a monk, one on each side, carries a long, flat stick shaped almost like this fan—in the sense that it’s thin at one end and rounded at the other—and if this guy sees a monk who’s slouching, or sleeping, or goofing off in some way he very respectfully bows before him. And the monk rests his head on his knees, and this fellow takes the stick and hits him vigorously on the shoulders, here, like this.
Now, most apologists for Zen say this is not punishment, it’s simply to keep you awake. Don’t you believe it. I’ve investigated this, and it’s the same as the British boys’ school—only it doesn’t have the erotic qualities that the British floggings do.
Zen people are cool about it. But it is a kind of a fierce thing. Anyway, the point of the meditation, the zazen, is that—perhaps at the beginning—one does nothing more than count your breathing—so many breaths in, counting in tens—just to allow your thoughts to become still.
Zen people do not close their eyes when they meditate, nor do they close their ears. They keep their eyes on the floor in front of them, and they don’t try to force away any sounds that are going on, or any smell, or any sensation whatever. Only, they don’t think about it.
And this can become an extraordinarily pleasant occupation. All the little sounds of distant traffic, of birds, of somebody carpentering somewhere and the hammer going, dog barking, or—especially—rain on the roof; gorgeous. They don’t block that out.
But as time goes on, instead of counting breathing they devote themself to the kōan problem which the rōshi has assigned. “What is the sound of one hand? Who were you before your father and mother conceived you?” When Jōshū was asked, “Does a dog have Buddha nature?” he replied, “No.” What is the meaning of ‘no,’ or mu?
All sorts of these problems. And so, as time goes on, everyday the student goes to the teacher for what is called sanzen. ‘Sanzen’ means ‘studying Zen.’ And he has to present a satisfactory answer to the kōan.
Now, sanzen is the moment in the monastery when no holds are barred, although there’s a very formal approach to it. The monk has to stop outside the master’s quarters and make this mokugyo. He does that three times.
And at a signal from the master, which is ringing a bell in reply, he goes in and sits down in front of the master, and bows right down to the floor, and then sits up, and he repeats the kōan that he’s been given. And he’s supposed to answer it. Now, the master, if he’s not satisfied with the answer, may simply ring his bell, which means: interview over, nothing doing.
Or, if he’s still not satisfied, he may try to do something to hint the student as to which way to go, or puzzle him further; some sort of comment. But what happens is this—do you see what kind of a situation has been set up here?—the student is really being asked to be absolutely genuine. If I said to you, “Now, don’t be self-conscious.
I want you to be perfectly sincere. And, as a matter of fact, I’m a mindreader, and I know whether you’re being sincere or not. I can see right down to that last little wiggly guzzle in the back of your mind.” And if you think I can, you see, I’m putting you in a double bind.
I’m commanding you to be genuine. How can you possibly do that on command? Especially when the person you’re confronted with is a father figure, an authority figure.
And in Japan, the sensei—the teacher—is even a more authoritative figure than one’s father, which is saying a lot. But you are being asked, in the presence of this tiger, to be completely spontaneous. Or—it isn’t put in that way, you see, though.
I mean, I’m describing this from the standpoint of a psychologist observing what’s going on here. No, the thing you’ve got to do is you’ve got to hear the sound of one hand. And as your answers become more and more rejected, you get more and more desperate.
And there is built up the state that is called the ‘great doubt.’ The students do everything, you know? They read all the old Zen stories, and they come in with pieces of rock and wood, and they try and hit the teacher, they do everything—and nothing, nothing will do. I remember I had a friend studying in Kyōto, and on the way to the master’s quarters you pass through a lovely garden with a pool.
And he saw a bullfrog in the garden. And he grabbed this bullfrog—they’re very tame in Japan—put it in his sleeve in his kimono, and when he got in to give an answer to his kōan he produced the bullfrog. And the master shook his head and said, “Nu-uh.
Too intellectual.” Of course, he meant not so much what we mean by ‘intellectual,’ but ‘too contrived,’ ‘too pre-meditated.’ You know, you’re just copying other people’s Zen antics, and that’s something you just can’t get away with. Well, there does come a critical point of total desperation. And when the student reaches that point the teacher really starts encouraging him.
He says, “Now, come on. You’re getting warm. But you must be ready to die for this.
You must”—students have even been put into the position that if they don’t get it in so many days, they’re going to commit suicide. And they have to stimulate this intense period—a thing called sesshin. Don’t confuse the word ‘sesshin’ with the English ‘session.’ ‘Sesshin’ means ‘studying’ or ‘observation of the xīn’—the heart, the mind.
The heart-mind. And this time they only sleep four hours a night. And they meditate solidly all through the day.
They go for the sanzen interview twice a day—every one of them—and it’s a tremendous workout, and will last about five days. Five or six days. And in that period the pressure is really on.
Everybody is worked into a pitch of, kind of, psychic fury; they have to get this thing answered. There’s a man in Japan today who has a five-day Zen system, and he practically guarantees that you have satori in his five days. I just got a book about it, written by a British—I haven’t had a chance to read it yet.
Well, I had a—someone I knew of—who was over, studying Zen on a fulbright grant, and the grant was winding up and he still hadn’t got the sound of one hand. He said to the master, “Look, my grant’s running out and I can’t stay here, and I’ve just got to get this thing.” So, just a day before he left, he suddenly realized that there was nothing to realize. And that was it.
You know, here he had spent his whole life thinking that there’s something deficient in me. See? There’s something wrong.
Something I ought to find out to get this problem of life cleaned up. Well, you know what you do. Rinzai, the old Chinese master, said, “Zen teaching is like using an empty fist to deceive a child.” Or like trying to stop a child crying by giving it a yellow leaf.
See, the child wants gold, and so you give it an autumn leaf and say, “Here, darling. There’s some gold. Be alright.” Or, with your closed fist you say, “What have I got here?” The child comes and tries to see and pull your fingers open.
Then you hide it behind your back, and under your leg, and behind the chair; child gets absolutely fascinated. The longer you keep this up, the more the child is sure there is some real goodie inside the hand, and then at the end—pst—nothing. And that’s Zen.
So there comes a time, you see, when the student can go in front of the master and not give a damn. Because he sees—he’s seen the point. There wasn’t a problem.
He made up the problem himself. He came and projected it on this master, who knew how to handle that kind of person by making him much more stupid than he was before—until he sees the essential stupidity of the human situation where we are playing a game of one-upmanship on other people and on the universe. How to get the better of life?
Well, what makes you think you’re separate from life so that you can get the better of it? How can you beat the game? What game?
Or, who will beat it? This illusion of beating the game, of finding the thing out, of catching it by the tail, is therefore dissipated by the technique of the kōan. It’s called—working on a kōan is like a mosquito biting an iron bull.
It’s the nature of the mosquito to bite. It’s the nature of an iron bull to be unbitten. Or they say it’s like swallowing a ball of molten lead.
You can’t swallow it down, you can’t cough it up; you can’t get rid of this thing. That’s the great doubt, you see? But this is an exaggerated form of what everybody is ordinarily trying to do: to beat the game.
So, at that moment the student has heard the sound of one hand, or discovered who he was before father and mother conceived him, or what ‘no’ means. So the teacher says, “Good. Now you have found the frontier gate to Zen.
You’ve put your foot in at the door and you’re across the threshold. But there’s a long way to go! And now you have found this priceless thing out, you must redouble your efforts.” So he gives him another kōan.
Now, the student may be able to answer that one instantly, because it’s simply a test kōan. See, there are five classes of kōans. The first class is what you call the hīnayāna kōans, and the other four are the mahāyāna kōans.
Hīnayāna is to reach Nirvāṇa. Mahāyāna is to come back and bring Nirvāṇa into the world as a bodhisattva. So once you get the Great Void, you see there’s nothing to catch on to—you are the universe, it doesn’t matter whether you live or die.
That’s Nirvāṇa. All clinging to life—everything like that—you see, then, that it’s hopeless and you give it up. Not because you think you ought to give it up; because you know there is no way of catching it.
There’s nothing to catch hold of. There’s no safety in the cosmos. So you just have to give up.
Then, the next class of kōans are such things as asking for miracles. In that class comes, “Take the four divisions of Tokyo out of your sleeve.” Or, “Stop the booming of a distant bell.” “Blow out a candle in Timbuktu.” But as they go on in various ways they are concerned with all kinds of problems, and how Zen understanding deals with those problems. Until we get, in the end, to the study of morality and rules of social and monastic life.
That’s the last thing, and the Zen way of understanding it. Now, this may—this takes very, very differing periods of time. Some people get through in as little as ten years; the whole thing.
There is a very brilliant Westerner by the name of Walter Nowick, who has just about completed the whole thing. And he’s a musician and pianist, and he’ll come back to this country as the first accredited Zen master of the West. And he’ll set up his little sōdō on a farm, and wait and see what happens.
The day of graduation comes, and then everybody turns out, and there’s a great hullabaloo, and they salute the departing monk, and he goes out. He may just become a layman, as I said, or become a temple priest, or he may be, himself, a rōshi. Well, now, the essential of this whole system, as you see, is to use a hair of the dog that bit you for the cure of the bite.
It’s homeopathic. When people are under delusion they cannot be talked out of the delusion. No amount of talk could persuade anybody that his ego is an illusion, because he knows it’s there.
He knows “I am I,” and simply won’t believe you if you tell him that this is nothing but posthypnotic suggestion. So the only way to convince a fool of his folly is to make him persist in it. As Blake says, “The fool who persists in his folly will become wise.” Why, some psychiatrists I know—I know when they get a person who over-eats and is tremendously fat, the first thing they do is they make them put on fifteen more pounds.
And get an alcoholic terribly drunk, oh, and sick, and just as awful as can be, you see? Really make him go at it, see? That’s a method that’s used.
Sometimes works, sometimes doesn’t; it’s a rather desperate method, rather dangerous method. Zen is dangerous, too. People could easily go crazy under this sort of strain without a good advisor.
Well, it is clear, of course, that this method of Zen training is most unsuited to the modern age. And this is witnessed, too, by the fact that the temples are relatively empty. Myōshin-ji, the biggest one in Kyōto, is built to house 600 monks.
There are only 80. And you might think that was quite a crowd, but it isn’t—compared with the old days. To young people in Japan today this is all incomprehensible.
They see no point in it. A few—a few, yes, but they are mostly clergy’s sons carrying out the family tradition. And that’s very bad indeed.
To be sent to a monastery, virtually. The only possible success can come for someone who goes because he feels that nothing else in the world will satisfy him. He just has to do it.
And so the traditions, as in all these ancient organizations, have become very fixed. A lot of it is meaningless. It is certainly not going to last; not in that form.
It’s falling apart right under our eyes. It’s old and it’s set in its ways. Also, since the time of Hakuin, the kōans have been given fixed answers.
That is to say, there is a sort of prescribed way in which to answer, and you’ve got to hit on the right one. And then, after you’ve answered it, you have to find a poem from a little book called the Zenrin-kushū, which means ‘the Zen Forest Anthology.’ And there are little couplets, and you’ve got to find one which represents the meaning of your kōan. I mean, you know, “Take the four divisions of Tokyo out of your sleeve,” nothing could be simpler.
But some monk has recently threatened to publish all the answers to the kōans, so that the masters would have to get on their toes and invent new ones. I know a rōshi who invents new ones, and the moment they open their mouths he stops them, “No! No, no, nope!
Too late!” You know, he says—you could ask Christians, “What’s the first word in the Bible?” And things like that. It becomes much more lively, you see, when there is this quick interchange of the teacher and the students. But—in modern idiom—who the devil wants to know about Joshu’s mu anymore, or some ancient fellow’s questions?
Couched in language, incidentally—this is part of the problems they have—the language of these kōans is very archaic. I mean, “What is the sound of one hand?” Well, there’s a Chinese proverb which says, “One hand won’t make a clap.” So if you don’t know that proverb—if that’s a proverb that’s in everyday use and I say to you, “What is the sound of one hand?” then it has some sense. But there are all kinds of, shall I say, references—allusions—in the old stories, and they therefore don’t necessarily fit our world, or the Japanese world of date.
You have to take the kōans out of everyday life; things that are going on now, you see? It’s like asking—what’s that man who advertises Schweppes, commander... Whitehead—“Why has commander Whitehead no beard?” There was, though—you see, there was a division in the history of Zen. There was a critical point in the seventeenth century when there were two very great masters: Hakuin and Bankei.
Now, the seventeenth century is tremendously important in Japanese history because that was a time of what you might call the democratization of culture. Bashō invented haiku poetry so that everyone could be a poet. Not necessarily for publication, but for one’s own fun.
People didn’t write poems for publication, necessarily—they wrote poems for parties. And he invented the 17-syllable haiku as a result of his Zen feeling for nature so that he could put this within the reach of everybody. What had happened to poetry before that time was that it had become so obscure, and so effete, and so sophisticated that only great literati could do it at all.
This happened to Chinese poetry; there were so many references to other poems it was like reading T. S. Eliot. You know, the Four Quartets. You could get an annotated Four Quartets showing you the sources of all the phrases he’s borrowed, and sometimes you have to know the source in order to see what he means by it.
Alright, that’s straight from the Revelations of Divine Love by the dame Julian of Norwich, but whoever would know that? You have to understand the scene she was digging in order to know, really, what Eliot’s getting at in that “All shall be well.” And he’s full of that. He quotes the Bhagavad Gita, he quotes everybody.
So, if we all had to write that way, nobody could be a poet unless he was a great scholar. So Bashō popularized the haiku, and the haiku are originally based on the Zenrin poems. They take their flavor from that.
There is one, you see: “Those bird calls, mountain changes to be more mysterious.” The first line of that says, “The wind drops, but the flowers keep on falling. The bird calls, and the mountain becomes more mysterious.” And so haiku developed from that kind of short insight, that glimpse of nature. Now, while Bashō was taking poetry to the peasants, Bankei was taking Zen to them as well—to the farmers.
And he ran his Zen on an entirely different system. He talked, mainly, about what he called fushō. Fushō is the unborn; that which has not yet arisen and which, as a matter of fact, never does arise.
And so he said there is in you the unborn mind which was given to you by your parents. Let me just read you a few quotations from him to show you what sort of a person he was. And so that’s what happened, you see?
Bankei was the abbot of Myōshin-ji—the rōshi—and he stopped the monks from using the kaiseki stick to hit them when they weren’t meditating or sleeping in meditation, because he said, “Even a sleeping man is still a Buddha, and you shouldn’t be disrespectful.” And he attempted a Zen of no methods. You can meditate if you want to, that’s fine. But that’s like polishing a brick to make a mirror.
And he used to say, too, that trying to purify your mind is like trying to wash off blood with blood. But Bankei’s Zen was elusive. Hakuin had 80 successors, Bankei had none.
And some people think that that was the most admirable thing about him. The basis of all Indian philosophy—particularly the teaching of those books called the Upanishads, which are really the distilled essence of Hindu thought—the basis is called the Self. And this word, in Sanskrit, is Ātman, and that means ‘Self’ in the vastest possible sense, and the most inclusive sense of the word.
It means ‘yourself,’ and it means also ‘self as such,’ ‘existence as such,’ the ‘totality of all being.’ And, of course, this is something that one cannot talk about in the sense of talking about it logically. You can’t talk about it. A poet can talk about anything, and the Upanishads are, very largely, poetry.
Of course, everything in the world—knives and forks, tables and chairs, trees and stones—are indescribable. Korzybski referred to the physical world as the ‘unspeakable world,’ which was really rather a funny name because it has two edges. It’s, of course, something you can’t say anything about—that is to say, it is ineffable—but it’s unspeakable also in the sense of the word meaning something taboo.
And we shall see, as we go on, wherein that taboo consists. But from the standpoint of logic we can’t say anything about everything, because in order to say something about something, and state it logically, you have to be able to put it in a class. Now, classes are intellectual boxes.
When you play games like Animal, Vegetable, Mineral? you’ve got there three boxes. And when you come to think of it, you don’t know any one without another, because in order to have a box there must be what’s inside the box and what’s outside the box.
And then, by this method of contrast, we can make a logical discussion about things. All words, therefore, are labels on intellectual pigeonholes. But then, when you come to what fundamentally is, then you’re without a box and you can’t talk logically.
Of course, you can distinguish ‘is’ from ‘is not,’ but only in a very limited way—as I can say, “I have a pen in my left hand. I do not have a pen in my right hand.” And from this we abstract the idea of ‘to be’ and ‘not to be,’ ‘is’ and ‘isn’t.’ But when we consider Being—with a capital ‘B’—this includes not only such ‘is’es as celestial bodies, but also such ‘isn’t’s as the space that encompasses them. And these two go together, as we shall see in more detail as the time goes on.
But now, a perfectly logical person would therefore say that the notion of the Self—the Ātman, as the fundamental reality in which everything else exists—is meaningless. And, of course, from a logical point of view it is. But at the same time, just because something cannot be put into a logical category does not indicate that it isn’t real.
The Self, you see, bears somewhat the same relationship to the world as the diaphragm of the speaker in this radio bears to the music you’ve just been hearing. None of the music was about the diaphragm and nobody said anything about there being a diaphragm. The diaphragm, as such, didn’t come into the picture, and yet it was everything in the picture.
All those different noises were vibrations of this thin film of metal. So, also, with your eardrum. So, also, with the apparatus of your eyes.
So one might ask, then—just as you say, “Well, what is it on? What is the music on? Is it on tape, is it on a speaker, is it on a drum?” Whatever the variations may be, we can ask the question, “What are you all on?
What is all this on?” And the Hindus answer, “It’s on the Self”—like we say, “This one’s on me.” It isn’t that there’s only one Self in the sense that is taught in a philosophy called solipsism. Solipsism is the idea that you are the only person who exists and everybody else is your dream. Nobody can prove that this isn’t so, except I’d like to see a congress of solipsists arguing as to which one of them is really there.
It isn’t that; it’s more complex than that. It’s saying that the Self in each one of you is really, at root, one. Just in the same way that you have, all over your body, millions of nerve ends: each one of those nerve ends is, as it were, a little eye—because all the senses are, fundamentally, one sense; they are various forms of touch.
And the most delicate of the forms of touch is, of course, the human eye. Then the ear, and so on, down the list of the senses. Now imagine, then, every little nerve end is a little eye.
And it gets its impression of the world, but it sends it all back into the central brain. Well, in a somewhat similar way, every person, every animal, every (what the Hindus call) sentient being—and even rocks are regarded as sentient beings in a very, very primitive form, right down to the lowest—so all those forms that we see may be looked upon as the eyes that look out of one central Self. Only, of course, in the body—in the human body—we can see the connections between the nerve ends and the brain.
It’s much more difficult to see the connection between one individual and another. If they’re married that’s a little bit closer. But just all us human beings rattling around, we’re not even rooted to the ground like trees.
And therefore, it’s very easy for us to form the impression that I am only what is inside my bag of skin, and that my Self is a different Self from your Self. And we’re all, therefore, fundamentally disconnected. And so your apparent disconnection—the fact that you are not tied to other people with umbilical cords, or some kind of wiring that gives you one mind—nevertheless, we do have one mind.
In the sense that, for example, all of us turn out to be approximately the same shape. Two eyes, two nostrils, a mouth, two hands, two legs, and so on. A haiku poem—Japanese haiku—says, “A hundred gourds from the mind of one vine.” And so it is with people, and so it is with everything in the world.
That’s just from a purely physical point of view. But going yet deeper, we find that it’s somehow a necessity of thought that there be some sort of a something which is the common ground of all these universes, all these galaxies, and that ground is the Self—as Hindus understand it, the Ātman. Now, that’s quite [a] startling point of view, because what it’s saying is, you see, that you are basically the works.
Now, the Hindus do say that the Self—the great Self—is consciousness. But of course, that does not mean consciousness in the sense of our ordinary everyday consciousness. Ordinary everyday consciousness is indeed a form of this kind of consciousness—shall we say, a manifestation of it?—but then there’s also consciousness which doesn’t notice, but nevertheless is highly responsive.
The way your heart beats, the way you breathe, the way you grow your hair: you’re doing it, but you don’t know how it’s done. So therefore, just in the same way that conscious attention is not aware of all the other operations of the body, so in just that way we are not aware of our connection—indeed, our identity—with the fundamental Self. When the leaves die and fall off the trees, or the fruit drops—next year: more leaves, more fruit.
So, in the same way, when you and I die: more babies later. If the whole human race dies, you bet your life there are all kinds of things that feel that they’re human scattered throughout the multiplicity of galaxies. Because this universe is a peopling universe, just as an apple tree apples.
But because we are unconscious of the intervals we are not aware of the Self with our conscious attention when conscious attention isn’t operating. But still, just as you don’t notice what your pineal gland, say, is doing at the moment, so in the same way you don’t notice the connections which tie us all together—not only here and now, but forever and ever and ever and ever. The difficulty, the basic reason why we don’t notice the Self, is that the Self doesn’t need to look at itself.
A knife doesn’t need to cut itself. Fire doesn’t need to burn itself. Water doesn’t need to quench itself, and a light doesn’t need to shine on itself.
So this is the fundamental problem of having some sort of awareness of the self. Nevertheless, it is the whole contention of Indian philosophy, especially what we call Vedānta, that it is possible—in a certain way—to become aware of oneself in this deepest sense; to know that you are the totality. And this experience is the real substance of Indian philosophy as a whole, both Hindu and Buddhist.