When I was in Europe some months ago, I met a very remarkable German scholar who had studied Buddhism in Japan for a number of years, and was reflecting on similarities between things that people experience as a result of their study of Buddhism and things that people experience in the course of their lives in the Western world. And he made a very interesting remark to me about experiences that had happened to various people during the calamities of the war. He said that there were three particular kind of instances which he’d come across where people had found themselves in desperate situations, and as a result of thoroughly accepting these situations they had had an experience of the profound joy, and you might almost say meaningfulness, of life that corresponds very closely indeed to the kind of experience that in Buddhism is called awakening or enlightenment, satori in Zen language, or liberation in Hinduism, or what we might sometimes call in the West mystical experience; the sensation of the individual finding himself one with God or with the ultimate reality behind the universe.

And my friend then enumerated these three instances. He said there were the cases where a person heard a bomb coming at them, and they hear the shriek of the bomb descending, and they were quite sure that this was their last moment, this was the end. They accepted it completely. They gave in to their own obliteration. But the bomb turned out to be a dud, or it missed and went somewhere else, and they survived. The second kind of instance was where people were prisoners of war or shut up in concentration camps and had come to the point of believing that they would never, never, never be released. They were in a state of complete despair. But again, they saw there was nothing to do except give in to it; accept it completely to the point, you might almost say, of affirming it. And the same thing happened. And then the third instance he mentioned was when the disorganization and chaos of war had so uprooted people, had so destroyed everything that they’d built up for themselves by way of careers, professions, family, and everything like that, that they got the sensation that life in this world is totally meaningless—like Shakespeare’s phrase: “a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” And again, when they committed themselves to this and thoroughly accepted the idea that life was absolutely meaningless, there came this same extraordinary transformation of experience, this sense of joy, and in some strange and different way a sense of the whole thing really having meaning.

Now, I think that story is very interesting because we, in the Western world, are so concerned that our lives should be meaningful, that they should make sense. And indeed, one of the frequent definitions of mental health that you hear is that mental health depends on one’s having a purpose in life and finding that life is meaningful. And this is fairly easy to preserve, provided one’s life is not disrupted by great catastrophes like war. It’s fairly easy to preserve on a small scale—that is to say, we find it fairly easy to make our lives meaningful and purposive in relation to our immediate community or in relation to our work, where we can do something that is a true vocation for us, or where in the community we can do things that are helpful to other people. But it’s increasingly difficult to get this sense of the fundamental meaningfulness of things in a universe as it is now seen by contemporary science.

In other words, when you enlarge the framework, it’s more and more difficult to see any meaning in things. Because while we can see the significance of our lives over a few years—maybe a hundred years, maybe two hundred—when we look at the thing in vast perspectives, and when we see the human race as such a tiny little sort of bacillus living on an obscure piece of dust in a remote corner of the universe, when we see this enormous almost cosmic nonsense of galaxies, of radioactive material going around and around for colossal spans of time for no apparent purpose at all, in that perspective it’s particularly difficult for us to believe that life is fundamentally meaningful. And this is a real difficulty, because it’s so hard to see something that has real and abiding meaning against a background or as part of a whole system which seems to be basically nonsensical.

But the interesting thing is that when we use these words, “meaningless” or “purposeless” of the universe, they have a bad feeling for us. They are sort of cuss words. They’re bad words to use about life. But it’s very different with people in the Far East. There are certain schools of thought in China and Japan where the word “purposeless,” the word “meaningless” does not have a negative connotation at all, but rather the contrary, something very joyous and positive. There’s an old Chinese philosophical text that uses the expression “if purpose can be used to achieve purposelessness, then the thing has been grasped”—“the thing” meaning the whole point of life.

So then, to understand this point of view in Chinese and Japanese thought, I think we should investigate first of all a little more clearly just what we do mean by “purpose” and “meaning.” Purpose is, I think, a word generally used by us whereby events are ordained to a future result. For example, if I do something like this, just doing that alone doesn’t appear to have very much purpose. But if after I have done that, in the future, I do this, then it appears that what I did in such a chaotic way in the first has purpose. So purpose is acts acquiring a meaning in terms of a future to which they are leading. We say “I have a purpose” when I am going down to the store in order to buy groceries. If I am going down to the town for no reason at all, you might say my action is purposeless. But if I am going to buy groceries, then it has a purpose.

Now what about meaning? The idea of meaning is very close to that of purpose, and this may be a good illustration of it. There is the word “cross.” And the word “cross” is a sound; it’s just a noise. But that noise has meaning for us because we know that it relates to this. That is a cross. But the noise, “cross,” is not this figure. But “cross” has meaning because it represents or stands for that actual concrete figure. And so, at any rate, one sense of meaning—which we might call here the first sense of meaning—is the function of a sign, a noise, or a symbol, which points to something other than itself. For example, if we didn’t take this as a cross, but took it as a plus sign, then it would in its term become another sign having meaning, and its meaning would be the process of adding.

Now, of course, if life has to be meaningful in these two senses—in the sense of purpose already demonstrated in the sense of, at least, this first sense of meaning—then it means that events, people, things are only meaningful or purposive insofar as they lead to something else or insofar as they represent something else. And, in a way, this makes people and things rather like symbols and words which always refer to something beyond themselves and don’t mean anything in themselves.

There’s also another sense of meaning, and that is the sense of order. We would look at this object, for example, and say: well, that’s a kind of a senseless shape. That doesn’t mean very much, it’s just a chaotic blob. But if we introduce order into it by making that object symmetrical, we will immediately recognize the phenomenon of pattern. Because an element of recognition comes into it. In other words, we recognize the repetition of the shape in reverse. And this element of recognition makes it meaningful, patterned, orderly in this particular way.

And so one of the dominant ways in which a person can say that life has meaning is, then, that it has order. But on the other hand, if the orderliness of life is taken too far, we then move over into another kind of meaninglessness which we call monotony. In other words, if every day is the same as the day before it, if we find ourselves involved in a routine where we are doing exactly the same job day after day after day after day, we find that through an excess of order our life begins to lose vitality. And so it seems that we need a kind of disorder in order to give life to order. We need a kind of nonsense in order to make things really meaningful. We need chaos as an essential element of life.

Now, in the Western world we tend, on the whole, to emphasize order: we are always pushing things to make sense, we are always trying to control the world and make it obey us, and therefore make it orderly. And, after all, science is primarily the study of the regularities in nature; the study of natural order. But to a considerable extent in Far Eastern thought, especially in Taoist and Buddhist thought, the emphasis goes the other way: there is an emphasis not so much on the beauty of order as the beauty of a certain kind of disorder or nonsense.

You see, look at this that I drew just before I started to make the face. This chaos of lines up here is so like life in certain aspects. So much of life is this sort of thing which does not become this sort of thing. Events that don’t seem to make any sense at all. But the Chinese and Japanese eye has been able to look at this sort of phenomenon—which we would call nonsense phenomenon, purposeless phenomenon—in a way that begins to reveal a profounder kind of meaning in it. Take, for example, one of the greatest of the Japanese painters, the artist Sesshū, who was a Buddhist priest living between about the beginning of the sixteenth century. Actually, his dates are 1421–1506. And this is a very, very famous painting of his. But as you look at it, you may be inclined to feel that it’s very like the mess which I drew that eventually turned into somebody’s hair. Because Sesshū did paintings of this kind very often with fistfuls of straw instead of brush. But as you look at that painting more carefully—it’s done in black ink on paper—you begin to realize that this is a natural scene; that we are looking at a system of rocks, and far above them, very faintly, there are a few mountain peaks. That is called the haboku, or “rough technique,” landscape. And as you begin to recognize what it represents, you begin perhaps to feel that it has some meaning.

And yet, why do we feel that those at first sight chaotic lines have meaning when we discover that they represent a natural scene, a mass of higgledy-piggledy rocks and trees, which in themselves do not have meaning in quite the senses that I have so far defined? After all, if a word like “cross” represents an object, what do rocks represent? What do trees represent? What do mountains represent? Do they symbolize something? Do they have some purpose in that they are intentionally working to produce a future result? Do the waves washing on the shore and making strange patterns of foam on the sand have some intention? Are they symbolizing anything? No. But then, why does the artist so often copy the forms of nature? Surely he does it because he is paying a tribute to a certain kind of meaninglessness, a certain kind of joyous purposelessness in nature. And this fact of our being constantly fascinated by the freedom of natural forms from having to mean something, from having to make sense—that is a kind of relief to us.

And so there is a Chinese saying, which is that the beauty of a mountain is that it’s so much like a mountain, the beauty of water is that it’s so much like water. They have this way of putting it in a little figure: “mountain gets mountain,” and then you write it across: “water gets water.” Meaning, after all, a mountain is wonderful because it’s so much like a mountain, water is wonderful because it’s so much like water. And thus it is the quality of the whimsical waywardness—shall we say, the wandering quality, the undesigned quality in all these things—that pleases us in so marvelous a way. And this has been picked up by the artists of the Far East.

You know, after all, wandering, doing something with no particular purpose, just strolling down the street looking at the sky, or sitting and twiddling your thumbs—this, in a way, is always an expression of fullness, of profound content. And there’s a kind of prejudice against wandering in our world. What happens if you go out in a big city nowadays, and you’re just wandering, you’re going nowhere, and a cop stops you? “Where are you going?” “I wasn’t going anywhere.” “Ah, don’t tell me that!” People who aren’t going anywhere, people who are not certain where they’re going, people who are just wandering are regarded by our civilization as rather dangerous.

But look what we’re missing. Here is a very marvelous example of wandering. It’s a print by a great contemporary Japanese artist who died a year or two ago: Saburō Hasegawa. He made this print from pieces of an old boat that were washed up on the beach, and he rubbed them with ink, and printed them on paper. And what he especially wanted to reveal was the beauty of the simple wandering lines of the grain in the wood. He, in other words, had an insight which is the same insight that Sesshū had when he did that rough landscape. An insight into the essential joyousness of wandering lines. That print, in its outline, is not made to represent anything, it isn’t a symbol of anything. It’s just for one to look at and enjoy for its self with no purpose whatsoever beyond it.

One also finds a similar kind of thing in calligraphy, in certain ways of writing Chinese characters. And this sort of rough, undisciplined—jazzy way, we would say—of writing Chinese characters. Of course they have meaning, because the words actually are a poem. But what is especially attractive to connoisseurs of fine writing is not only the meaning of the poem, but the character in the strokes; the vitality. All those little hairlines of the brush dancing on paper in what appears to be a kind of haphazard tracking of the brush.

And because we have begun to see the beauty of this kind of thing for ourselves—to some extent tutored by Far Eastern artists—we can also recognize the splendor of, say, the forms of driftwood such as this piece that stands here. Nowadays, many people are going along to the beach and collecting objects like this to put in their houses, where the wood charms us because of its strangely chaotic, and again, nonsensical, meaningless outline.

And this sort of thing was also brought to a kind of perfection by the great ceramic artists of Japan when they made something like this. This is a ceremonial tea bowl for cha-no-yu, as it’s called, or “tea ceremony.” And once upon a time a potter who was making one of these bowls had an accident. He let the glaze run on it by mistake. I don’t know if you can see on this bowl that the glaze, here, is just a blob which has run down the side of the bowl. The first man to whom that happened many hundred years ago thought, “Oh dear, it’s a mistake!” But then he looked at it and realized that the unintentional, the nonsensical, mistake was peculiarly beautiful. And thereafter, there has grown a tradition of ceramic art in Japan which, as it were, capitalizes on what will happen when the glaze runs all by itself.

So this art of natural nonsense is a kind of perception that the beauty of the world is that it’s a dance. And just when we dance we don’t dance in order to go anywhere, we don’t dance in order to get to the other side of the room, we dance just to go round and round and round. And so it is in the same way when we look at the outlines of the mountains. What do they mean? They mean just whoop, whoop, whoop, whoop, whee, ooohee, ooohee, ooohee, whoop, whoop, like that. And that is the delight of it.

In other words, this nonsense quality of life begins to make its appeal to us, begins to show us its hidden meaning and its hidden beauty, when we don’t, as it were, pick a quarrel with the world and try to make something of it. You know, our own slang is often so revealing. When somebody says to you, “D’you wanna make something of it?” that means the situation is definitely hostile. And so, likewise, when our constant attitude to the world is that we want to make something of it, we want to force it to make sense, we want to force it to make order, then, to that extent, the world hides its meaning from us. And we find a greater meaning when we are able—like the person in the story I told at the beginning—like the person who found that life was senseless and profoundly accepted its senselessness, he converted that nonsense into a kind of joy.

Now, after all, this isn’t really foreign to, say, Christian ideas. It’s true that we hear a great deal in Christian teaching about the purposes of God, but surely there is a deeper secret within Christian teaching: that the purposes of God lead in the end to purposelessness. After all, isn’t it the historic ancient doctrine of Christianity that the true purpose (or the true end) of man is to behold the vision of God? And then you might ask: what is the purpose of that? If people find themselves in heaven face to face with God, do they look at God and say, “So what?” No! According to our ancient Christian symbolism, they join with the saints and the angels in singing Alleluia! Alleluia! Alleluia! Well, the word “Alleluia” once meant something, but what it means now is celestial whoopie: it’s an expression of sheer joy. It’s a babble. It’s like the sound of a brook. And we love to listen to the babble of a brook because it’s a joyous sound that just doesn’t mean anything at all. You see, God in that sense does not need to mean anything, because he is complete. He has no future purpose to fulfill, he’s not a symbol signifying something.

But in the Far Eastern ideas of which I have been speaking life is regarded in the same way. Life itself—the mountains, the stars, the rivers, the trees, the Earth, our very selves and our own behavior—they are not looked upon as mere signs leading to something else, mere existences about which we must always say, “So what? Where are you going?” They are regarded as being in a state of fulfillment at every moment. And it is as Goethe said: “The highest to which Man can attain is wonder. And if these prime phenomena of life make us wonder, that is the limit. No more should we ask.”