In 1936, there was held in London the World Congress of Faith, and I remember it had a chief meeting at one of the great auditoriums of London in which the most distinguished speakers at this conference were invited to talk for half an hour each on the supreme spiritual ideal. There was a representative of Christianity, a representative of Islam, a representative of Hinduism, and a representative of Buddhism, and the last was Dr. Suzuki Daisetsu. And I listened. Speaker after speaker got up and talked for half an hour in terms of pure quintessence of hot air: vague, vast, wild aspirations with no concrete content whatsoever. Finally, little Suzuki got up with his beetling eyebrows and said, “I am supposed tonight to talk about supreme spiritual ideal. I am not sure what supreme spiritual ideal is, so I look it up in dictionary. I am not understanding at all what I find in dictionary. Are you Western people talk so much about spiritual things, but when I walk down Regent Street in London, I don’t understand your spiritual attitude.” Because he explained that we didn’t seem to be able to get what we called the spiritual connected with the material. Because what he was saying was: he couldn’t understand spirituality apart from materiality. And so the rest of his talk, instead of being spent in vague generalities, was an extremely delightful description of his house and his garden in Japan—which I must say was a change from the rest of the orations.

And it is, isn’t it, a funny thing that when people talk about spiritual matters, when they preach and when they talk about religion, there is something about it that never quite comes through. It isn’t grounded. It stays in a watertight compartment all of its own, you know, like religion for Sundays. It remains academic. And that’s not because people who profess spiritual ideals would, as we say, fail to apply them. That’s an ancient misunderstanding.

You see, if you go to any church in the western world and to many, many churches or temples in the eastern world, what you will hear there as a content of the message boils down to this: “My dear people, you ought to be good. You ought to love each other. You ought to love God,”—whatever that may be—“and this is the way we should live. We are describing you the ideal life.” And everybody knows that they’re not going to do it, and it’s not going to work out like that—it never did and it never has done. And so they preach it all the more strongly and say, “Come on now, everybody! Get with it! Do this thing! You ought to!” And the preacher, to be modest, has to also say, “I ought to.” And, “I’m in just the same situation as all of you are, but I don’t do it either.” And so we all say how very sad it all is, and we ought to somehow do something or other to get the energy to bring the ideal into actualization. And so you may be perfectly sure that the moment anybody talks about ideals, it’s not going to happen.

Because wherever there is this sense of saying to yourself, “I should,” or as Saint Paul put it, “To will is present with me. But how to do that which is good, I find not. For the good that I would, that I do not. But the evil that I would not, that I do.” And no truer words were ever said. Because nobody ever transforms himself into an enlightened pattern of life by dividing himself in two pieces, “Good I” and “Bad Me,” wherein Good I preaches to Bad Me and tries to make me over—as if a human being were divided; were like a rider on a horse, and the rider is the soul and the horse is the body, or the rider is reason and the horse is passion, the rider is control and the horse is the uncontrolled. In other words, we’ve got the opposition of the ego allied with the superego, trying to ride the ego aligned with the id. And Freud’s metaphors and Freud’s construction of the sort of ”psychic anatomy” of mankind is really derived from Plato, with the image of the soul riding the animal horse.

Now, all this is a total failure because there is a secret connection—as it were, a sort of back stairs—between Good I and Bad Me. Good I can look down at Bad Me and say, “Ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, you oughtn’t to be like that!” But all the time Bad Me is sending its energy up the back stairs to Good I and motivating Good I to go, “Ah, ah, ah!” at Bad Me. But for the reasons of Bad Me, I ought to be better. Because then I could be more proud of myself.

So in this way there is something about spirituality, self-conscious spirituality—all kinds of religion involving preaching and moralizing and talking to oneself in a split and divided way; Good I against Bad Me—that is profoundly phony. And I think this was what Suzuki was getting at by his suddenly ceasing to talk about anything spiritual, and talking only about his house and his garden. Because that has been one of the main streams of Buddhist way of life, as it has come to this country (Japan) from China, to be what one might call the religion of non-religion. To be, to find, to demonstrate, to convey what is the most highly spiritual through what is the most everyday and ordinary, and to make no division between the two, so that you might say the more everyday it is, the more truly spiritual it is. But the more it appears to be spiritual—that is to say, something different from, aside from, apart from everyday life—the more false that kind of spirituality will be.

And this reaches a peak in the history of Japanese culture in the seventeenth century when, in this country, there were three—no, I’ll say four—superbly important men: Bashō (the Haiku poet), Bankei (a Zen teacher), Hakuin (another Zen teacher), and Sengai (a Zen painter). And I want to say something about the work of these four men, and their genius and the movement in Japanese history which they represented, which you might call the democratization of the esoteric.

And there’s something about this of extraordinary interest to Americans. Because for better or for worse, we as Americans live in a culture in which there is nothing esoteric. There are no secrets, except those things which cannot be understood—in a way, they are always esoteric. Only a few people can understand them. And they don’t need to be guarded because even if you, for example, you publish a textbook on nuclear physics, and only very few people can understand it. But in the sense that it is published, it is no longer esoteric.

In our world, for example, a teacher tries his utmost to make himself understood. He knocks himself out to make his message assimilable without tears. But, as I’ve explained to you, in Oriental cultures teachers expect the student to make the effort to attain the understanding. So a teacher is difficult, and you must put yourself out to understand what he says. He’s not going to make it easy for you—because of the feeling that what comes to you too easily doesn’t really come to you.

Now, however, there was in seventeenth-century Japan a movement among the people you might call esoteric to make their understanding available to the masses. In a sense, a rising out of Buddhist compassion, the idea that the aim in life of a bodhisattva is to bring enlightenment to as many other sentient beings as possible. And always the problem is, you see: when you’ve popularized something, how to do it without making it vulgar, cheap, watered down, insipid. And these four men were in their own quite different ways geniuses at doing it.

Let’s start with Bashō. Bashō didn’t invent Haiku poetry, but he brought it to a certain degree of development whereby it was possible for ordinary people who were not very literate to become poets. Now, to understand the situation in which Bashō arose, you must realize that Japanese poetry grows on the tree of Chinese tradition, and that, by the seventeenth century, Chinese poetry was as difficult to follow as, say, T. S. Eliot is today. Now, to understand T. S. Eliot’s poems, the Four Quartets, you have to know an enormous amount of world literature and some very, very obscure books. Because T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets is a complex texture of allusions to other works, and you have to know what these other works are in order to get the point. So this is poetry written strictly for literati. And the Chinese brought this to a high degree of perfection so that, you see, poets were writing only for other poets. They weren’t getting anything across to people who just, as it were, spoke everyday language.

And so the development—this happened also in Japan. If you read, say, a novel like The Tale of Genji, and read all about the light-footed amours of those very, very cultivated people, and with their little poems and things, the subtle kinds of allusion they had. And also when tea ceremony became over-refined—you know, there were suggestions in the shade of a cup, which was intended to remind you of something. You know, a complicated set of associations, which the master planned, and you were supposed to get the point. And so people indulged in all kinds of fantastic one-upmanship in seeing who did or didn’t recognize the subtle chains of association, which recognition of which depended upon a great deal of learning. But you see what that is? That’s a very elaborate game. And the intent and the object of the game is not really delight, but seeing who can out-associate whom.

So these seventeenth-century masters rebelled against all that kind of thing. And they wanted tea and poetry and painting and zen to be appreciated for itself, and to be appreciated by anybody with human equipment. So Bashō said: in order to write Haiku, you should be taught by a child three feet high. Because a statement which such a child would make would be a poem, and a profound poem, to the degree—and especially to the degree—that what the child said was a simple image, and had in it no kind of philosophizing, but was just that vivid statement which children do.

You light the fire, and then

I’ll show you something wonderful:

A great ball of snow.

That’s a Haiku poem. And all these poems, each one, simply takes an image and says no more. And it’s, you see, completely concrete and very simple. Occasionally it has in it something clever as in, say, a Haiku like:

The sea darkened.

The voices of the wild dark

Are faintly white.

But again, there is nothing—or let me give another example of a clever Haiku:

A brushwood gate

And for a lock,

This snail.

Leaf fallen,

Flying back to the branch.

Butterfly.

You see, there’s something a little bit clever about those ones, and for that very reason they are not the best kind of Haiku. Better still is something like this:

In the dense fog,

What is being shouted

Between hill and boat?

You see the image of a river estuary, and you can’t see anything, but you know there’s someone down there in the boat talking to someone up on the hill, and you can’t hear the conversation. Isn’t that great? Something, you know, that you can’t quite put your finger on. The quality which, in Japanese aesthetics, is called yūgen. Yūgen, made up of two Chinese characters, both of which mean the dark, the deep, and the mysterious. But yūgen is not like a great abyss full of black clouds and lightning in which there might be a dragon. That’s not yūgen. Yūgen is the subtly mysterious, and is described by the poet Zeami as to wander on and on in a great forest without thought of return. To watch flying geese appear and be hidden in the clouds. To watch distant fishing boats on the ocean disappear behind islands.

And what, in all these images, is the connecting link? The connecting link—you see, I talk about it, but what else am I to do? You remember we were at a place in Kyoto called Shisendō, a poet’s retreat and garden, and there was in there a stream. And finally, when the stream had gone through the garden, it disappeared through a bamboo fence into somebody else’s property, rounded a corner and was lost. Not knowing where that stream goes, never following it, but having somehow the inner feeling of it goes on to somewhere else. This is yūgen. Or in so many of the beautiful gardens in—I was looking at the gardens in one of the temples in Daitoku-ji the other day—and the lovely thing about them is: they never conclusively end. There is always a little gate giving you a vista on to somewhere else. And if you systematically would explore the whole thing and know all about it, you would miss the feeling of yūgen. But so long as you don’t, and you let there be the suggestion that there is a pathway going out somewhere else to something beyond, you get the sense of yūgen.

Now, this sense of yūgen is therefore involved with a kind of imperfection; not finishing things. So in haiku poetry we would feel—with haiku, from a Western standpoint—that these poems are unfinished. They are simply titles. They are simply first lines of something that should go on to elaborate and express everything. But in this kind of artistry, one doesn’t express everything, one leaves the best part unsaid. Because the work of the poet is not simply to impress everybody else with how clever he is and leave them speechless, but to evoke in the listener something.

In exactly the same way, the art of the painter in the tradition of Tsung Chinese painting is to leave something to the beholder’s imagination. Hence what is called one-corner painting. Say, a painter like Ma Yuan, or Bayan as he is known in Japanese, is a master of one-corner painting. He indicates a line of hills somewhere near the top, and down at the bottom there is a single drifting boat and a fisherman. Everything else is vague. Now, you are supposed to fill in the rest of the painting with your imagination. In other words, you don’t sit there and imagine trees and huts and boats and mountains against the blank background. That’s not the point any more than when you look at a path disappearing among the trees, that you sit there and think out what kind of scene it might lead to. The point is rather that the disappearing path, the disappearing stream, the blank in the painting, contains simply the suggestion of possibilities which you don’t actually explore. It’s the suggestiveness that counts. And so in the same way the associations which haiku evoke. One that’s sort of in this mood:

This is all there is.

The path comes to an end

In the parsley.

Now, you’ve got to go back to childhood to understand that. Don’t you remember how, as a child, you love to explore paths, and to get right down among the stalks of grasses and weeds and see where it all goes? And how, sometimes, one of the eternal child stories is that you were one day walking along a little lane, and you discovered a door in a wall that you had never seen before, and you opened it, and it led into a magical garden where all the bushes were covered in jewels and there were marvelous birds and fantastic songs. And you came out because you had to get home in time for dinner. And the next day you looked for that door again, but you couldn’t find it anywhere. And yet, you knew it was there. It was just between this fence and that fence. But today it isn’t there, and yet somehow it always is there. And so for every child there is always a kind of a funny place that leads on to somewhere else, and you don’t figure out exactly where it leads because that would spoil it. You mustn’t know.

So all this haiku poetry, and this kind of painting which the Song artists so marvelously mastered, is to evoke that sense of what I would just call possibility or potentiality without actually filling in any details. And that’s real magic. It’s done in another way by writers working in a completely different dimension. People like, say, Edgar Allan Poe and Arthur Macon were masters of it: in evoking a sense of extreme horror. When you want to give people the real heebie-jeebies, never be specific. Just as Poe in that story, The Pit and the Pendulum, doesn’t specify at all what was in the pit, but nevertheless gets away with leaving you with the sense that it was something unutterably horrible. This is the way in which to suggest the abysmally evil, and it’s likewise the way to suggest the ineffably beautiful: don’t fill in the details. Indicate, don’t explain.

And so, let’s take some more examples. I want you to think of Ryōan-ji Garden. You’ve all seen that. One thing that is most important about Japanese gardens is the background in which you find them. You can’t take Ryōan-ji, as people have attempted to do, and reconstruct it in Brooklyn, unless at the same time you take the background—and that’s going to be pretty difficult to do. Now, what is that background? You notice there’s a wall along the back of the garden, rather a low wall, but just high enough because it lies on the crest of a slope that beyond it goes down. And then, beyond the wall all you see is trees. So, too, in many of the gardens around the temples here you will see over the wall perhaps a roof. And then beyond that roof treetops. And those treetops, although we’re in the middle of a dense city, somehow suggest that outside that garden is a forest. There’s something else.

You know the quality of sky as you see it over the tops of hills that lie between you and the ocean? There’s something very distant in the blue of that sky, suggesting miles and miles and miles, and gulls and pelicans drifting away into the distance. Openness. Something that, in other words, your spirit goes out into and has nowhere to land. Now, all that kind of quality is yūgen. And the trick is to evoke the mood of yūgen, a certain sort of mysterious suggestiveness, by very simple means, which don’t actually pin anything down.

So that was the point of haiku poetry: to put this possibility within reach of people who had within themselves the capability, the sensitivity, to appreciate the yūgen feeling, or another feeling that is called sabi. Sabi is akin to yūgen, but it’s a certain kind of solitariness or loneliness—good loneliness, not the loneliness which plucks at the heartstrings and makes you long for friends. That’s not sabi. Sabi is when you love to be alone and are at peace in this loneliness. And so there is also another mood still akin to this, which in Japanese is called aware. It’s spelled like our word “aware,” only pronounced aware. And this, like yūgen and sabi, is difficult to translate, but it’s a sense of sadness, but delightful sadness. There’s a poem which says,

Even in the mind of a no-mind man,

There is aware when the snipe

Leaves the marsh on an autumn evening.

And you know, late in autumn when all nature is foggy and cold and the leaves have almost gone, the last sign of life, the bird, the snipe, leaves and goes somewhere else, perhaps further south. It’s all gone. When the last geese migrate and winter sets in, it would say, “Even in the mind of a no-mind man”—that is to say, a Buddha who has no, you might say, egocentric feelings. Even in such a person, there comes a clutch of sadness. Aware is a sort of nostalgia. And we feel it very strongly in all the poetry of transience.

You know, this is one of the greatest themes of poetry, how the world is floating away. Nothing can be possessed, and we are all dissolving smoke. And poets keep on at this. So do preachers. But in what different ways? The preacher will say, “Vanity of vanity, ’tis all is vanity.” But in the next moment, he will burst into poetry. You know that chapter in Ecclesiastes, where everything is described as passing away; how exquisite it is. And in Shakespeare the same magic is evoked:

Our revels now are ended. These our actors,

As I foretold you, were all spirits, and

Are melted into air, into thin air;

And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,

The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces,

The solemn temples, the great globe itself,

Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve;

And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,

Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff

As dreams are made on, and our little life

Is rounded with a sleep.

What’s going on here? From one point of view, you see, the poet seems to be putting everything down, and to say: it’s all an illusion, it’s all a vision, and there’s nothing. And yet, at the same time, he borrows from this vision. He borrows the beautiful imagery of cloud-capped towers and gorgeous palaces and solemn temples. And from the illusion itself, he weaves his spell.

Omar Khayyam—which is today Fitzgerald—Omar Khayyam is a bit corny to ears trained to modern poetry. But to the Victorian ear it had the same magic:

The Worldly Hope men set their Hearts upon

Turns Ashes–or it prospers; and anon,

Like Snow upon the Desert’s dusty Face,

Lighting a little hour or two–is gone.

Now, Oriental poetry is full of this theme. Haiku, every kind of Buddhist sutra, and so on, is full of the theme of the disappearing world: ukiyo-e, the floating world that vanishes. And there’s one kind of person who says, “Ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, don’t you look at those beautiful girls, because in a few years they’re going to be ugly old ladies.” “Don’t you take delight in this delicious food, because in a few years you’re going to have chronic stomach ulcers and bad digestion.” “Don’t you dissipate with singing and dancing, because not long from now you’ll have rheumatism, or arthritis, and a sore throat, and you won’t be able to enjoy it anymore.”

But another kind of person is saying, “Yup, it all dissolves. It all goes away. And the beautiful girls will be old ladies, and the handsome young men will be crones, and eventually skulls. And isn’t that great?” What’s wrong with skeletons? When you pick up on the beach a shell of some fish, and you say, “No fish at home anymore.” All the flesh in this bone is dissolved. And you’ve got just the bone. And you say, “Wow, look at that! Isn’t that great?” A skull is just as beautiful as a seashell. A bone which a brain once lived in. A bone which jeweled eyes once shone from. But still, look at that white skull. It’s really a marvelous thing.

Only, we’ve been taught wrong associations with it. Taught that the going away of life is against life. Whereas, as a matter of fact, life is entirely something that always goes away. Going away, dissolving, is the same thing as living. Only, if our associations get crossed up and we are taught that dying is against life, then we can’t live. Dying is the same thing as living. And if you see that—that everything becoming bones, everything turning back into the soil, becoming manure, you see, that is life. That’s why in the United States in particular we’ve got to have a revolution against morticians. I mean, a real serious revolution, because they are preventing us from dying properly. Getting the idea that you would be preserved indefinitely in some great casket under the ground where the rain will never leak into it. You know that ad they have? And that this thing is going to be there mummified forever and ever and ever. And your loved one will always last. Ugg! The loved one must be allowed to dissolve and not be clung to.

I know a woman whose daughter died in middle life, you know, in the prime of life, and she has kept her daughter’s room exactly as it was on the day she died, as a sort of shrine. Everything is precisely in its place. The bed is turned down, the book is open at the place where it was left—everything. And this room is entered with a kind of hush, because she really won’t let death happen. If—you know, it would be all right if it were a wind rattling bamboos outside. Then we wouldn’t complain. Take it that way.

So, this is why the theme of transience and dissolution is really one of the mainstays of poetic beauty. And the poet is a genius and a compassionate bodhisattva to us all when he takes the thing that we dread that is to dissolve, and shows us that dissolution is the heart of beauty and the heart of life. And this is what the mood of aware in haiku and in painting and in poetry evokes.

Now, I’ve got, I’m afraid, a rather long way from the rest of the gentlemen I started to talk about. But in taking next, say, Sengai: Sengai was a Zen master who made the greatest thing of marvelous, bad paintings. In a way, you might say of Sengai that he couldn’t paint, nor could he write. His writing is like a child’s writing, and his paintings are caricatures. And yet they’re not. There’s something about him that is extremely humorous. He enjoys always a joke on himself of how badly he writes and how badly he paints, and he gets away with it. In fact, he became so famous in the seventeenth century that people started to copy Sengai, thinking that it was a cinch, you know. Anybody could paint like Sengai, like some people look at a modern abstract painting and say, “Well, my child could do better than that.”

And there was one painter in Kyoto who was making quite a lot of money by forging Sengai paintings and selling them. And one day Sengai came to visit him, and he brought within the furoshiki with a package inside, and he said to this man, “I have brought you my seals. Because your forgeries of my paintings are so good that if you would actually put my own seals on them, they would be perfect.” But he said, “Excuse me if occasionally I may borrow them, because I might need them myself.”

Now, what is Sengai doing? He’s a man who has been greatly collected, but who painted for the joy of painting and not to be shown. That is to say, he had no ambitions to be hung in a gallery or a museum. He just liked to draw. And so he’s trying to say: in order to be a painter, you don’t have to be shown in a gallery. And if that’s the why you paint—that you paint to be shown in a gallery—you are not going to be a genuine painter. Has that ever occurred to you that today, people who want to be shown in museums, and that’s their supreme ambition in painting, are doing a very odd thing. See, a museum is kind of a morgue. That’s why I haven’t, on this tour, done very much museum viewing. I’d rather try to show you works of art in their natural and convenient setting. Because only professional professionals paint for museums. Real artists paint to have their paintings delivered, to put in a house, to paint a screen that is actually going to be used for part of the furniture of a room. Painting, in other words, is something as useful in its own way as plumbing. It makes a gorgeous house. It isn’t made just to be shown, to be a fad, to be a sort of thing to be talked about, and to have books written about it, and to have art historians going cluck, cluck, cluck, and so on. The moment it becomes that, it becomes the same kind of thing as poetry which can’t be understood unless you know the illusions. It becomes academic painting. So Sengai restores to seventeenth century Japanese art painting that you can do, not to be a little fake gallery artist, but to thoroughly enjoy yourself with a brush.

And so likewise with Zen. Zen, too, could become too clerical. And it does so become, you know, with professional Zen. I was discussing this with a good Western Zen student a few days ago, and she was saying, “You know, if you stay around a teacher too long, he starts to get worried about you.” That is to say, if you’re not going to be a professional, if you’re not going to be a teacher yourself, if you’re not going to be a priest, you’re just a lay student of Zen. And if you go year after year after year back to this guy, he starts to get troubled and says, “You are addicted to medicine. It’s becoming a bad habit.” And somehow you have to get rid of Zen.

So wherever these things become professional, people lose their spirit. And so there were these two other men in the seventeenth century who, in quite different ways, made it possible for Zen understanding to spread beyond a sort of clerical circle. Hakuin did it by one method, a Bankei by another. And very interesting results arise from this. Hakuin was an extraordinarily clever teacher, and he systematized the kōan system in such a way that it could be very conveniently handled. And he had eighty students who became accomplished Zen masters. That was considered absolutely extraordinary, because before it had been felt that one Zen master would have only one or two really good students who would be his spiritual descendants. That in this age of the Kali Yuga, when everything is falling apart, you couldn’t possibly expect more than that.

So Hakuin, by his very ingenious but rigorous discipline—he was a [???], he really was—but he encouraged many young Japanese to go through this mill that he put them through, and by somehow pepping them up and challenging them with a very vigorous discipline, he got eighty people to succeed him.

Now Bankei did exactly the opposite. Bankei taught Zen mainly to farmers. He was the rōshi at Myoshin-ji in Kyoto for many years, and he taught to the simplest people and said: to understand Zen, you don’t really have to do anything. If you try to attain satori, it’s like a person trying to wash off blood with blood. What you have to understand is your—difficult to put in English—but your unborn mind, this expression in Japanese, fushō. Fushō means “not manifest,” that which hasn’t arisen into the world of appearances. And he said: because of your unborn mind, when you hear a crow squawk and when you hear a bell ring, you know instantly, without any premeditation or without stopping having to stop to think what has happened.

So one day there was a Nichiren priest—Nichiren-shū is a very belligerent form of Buddhism; it’s like Jehovah’s Witnesses in Buddhism—and there was a Nichiren priest heckling Bankei when he was talking, and saying out on the back of the audience, “I don’t understand what you’re talking about.” So Bankei said, “I’d be happy to explain. Please come closer.” The Nichiren priest came in and he said, “Come closer still.” And he got up here and said, “Please still come closer.” And the Nichiren priest kept on coming. When he was right up there, Bankei said, “How well you understand me!”

So Bankei would say: Zen consists in faith in your innate quality of intelligence, in your organic pattern. Trust it. After all, your eyes are beautifully blue or brown, your hair is wonderfully brunette or blonde, your breathing is fantastic, your heart is working beautifully. That is your Zen. Go ahead. And all those farmers and people who came around understood Bankei, but Bankei didn’t lead any disciples. He had no spiritual successors. And for this reason he is considered in a certain way an enormous success, because he was like a bird going through the sky without leaving any traces. He was like that as that poem says,

Entering the water, he does not make a ripple.

Entering the forest, he does not disturb the blade of grass.

Bankei is largely forgotten today because of this. And those are remembered, you see, who left spiritual descendants who could chalk up a certificate and say, I was trained by such a master, who was trained by such a master, who was trained by such a master. And in all such genealogies there is a temptation to formalism and a certain kind of pride.

So, in a sense this happened: in leaving no specific descendants, he at the same time left many nameless descendants, people who were totally unimportant historically, who were farmers and peasants, and who really got the point of what he said. But then and there decided that, just because they did understand, that they wouldn’t. There was no need to become professional Zen Buddhists, to label themselves as “Bankei followers” or “Zen followers” or “Buddhists.” Because, you see, whoever really gets this thing and understands it, knows that he hasn’t attained anything. Buddha said in the Diamond Sutra: “When I attained complete, perfect and unexcelled awakening, I attained nothing at all.” And, you see, that “nothing at all” is the same nothing into which all trees and plants and bodies and butterflies and birds are disappearing in the course of endless transformations. Everything disappears into nothing at all. But out of this same nothing at all come all the new things forever and ever.