Everybody loves a box, especially an exciting looking box. Something absolutely fascinating about what is in the box. And this is a box—mmh!—full of goodies, because it contains some of the most priceless oriental incenses. It’s like when the wise men brought the baby Jesus gold, frankincense, and myrrh. These treasures, including a pair of scissors for dealing with these things—I think they’re actually seventeenth-century English candle snuffers, but they handle incense very well—and then there’s very exotic incense from Nepal in here, of which we’ll see something more about later.

You know, it seems sort of ridiculous to talk about incense on TV. In England, you know, they call TV the telly, and I’m going to try and make it the smelly—although that’s electronically impossible and probably will be possible someday. There’s a curious reason why we haven’t investigated that kind of thing. Because, I wonder if you realize that the sense of smell is our repressed sense, the one that we aren’t really very proud of. For example, if I asked you, “Do you smell?” it seems, somehow, a little bit of a rude question. There’s a famous story, you know, about that great British literatus, Dr. Johnson, who got onto a stagecoach one day—and this was in the 18th century when people didn’t bathe as much as they do today—and shortly after, a lady got onto the stagecoach, and sat opposite him and said to him, “Sir, you smell!” He said, “On the contrary, madam! You smell. I stink.” And so, you see, how—in this way, even in those times—the word ‘smell’ had a bad odor.

And it’s curious, also, [that] there are only four adjectives in the English language that apply specifically to the sense of smell. We have ‘acrid,’ ‘pungent,’ ‘fragrant,’ and ‘putrid.’ We have ever so many adjectives from taste which we apply to smell; from plants, when we say something is musky, or something of that kind. But we really aren’t very conscious of the sense of smell. And yet, although we’re not conscious of it, it exercises an enormous influence upon us—just because we’re not conscious of it. I believe that instant likes and dislikes that we have for other people—that are sometimes completely irrational—are based on an unconscious apprehension of whether we do or don’t like their smell.

You know, too, how smells are so powerful in evoking memories. Something you smell as a child—say, the smell of fresh coffee being cooked early in the morning, or bacon frying, or leaves being burned on an autumn day—all these things invoke very vivid emotions and feelings of our childhood in the past. But, you know, when people talk about very deep things, they never talk about the sense of smell. They talk about touch, vision, and even taste, and hearing. For example, we hear about the “vision of God.” In the Catholic church it is said that the highest thing to which man can attain, or to which the angels can attain, is the beatific vision: to see God. And the prophets would hear the word of the Lord. And in one of the psalms it says, “Oh taste and see how excellent the Lord is.” Taste and see. But no one ever had the idea of smelling God; of having not just the beatific vision, but the beatific smell.

This has never been brought out. And yet, curiously enough, throughout the whole history of religions—until we got to what is called the phenomenon of the Protestant nose—we’ve had incense. Hindus use incense, Buddhists use incense, Mohammedans use incense, Catholics use incense. But there came a break at the time of the Reformation when incense was somehow given up. (Oh, Hebrews use incense, too; or used to.) And why is this? Why this repression of the sense of smell?

I don’t fully know the answer to that question, except to say that I do know that it is repressed, and that it’s a shame! We’re depriving ourselves of a whole world of wonder because the nose is just as sensitive as the ears, and there can be music for the nose in the same way as music for the ears, and the same way as there can be glories for the eyes there can be glories for the nose. And I don’t know why we’re so… diffident, so uptight about admitting that we have noses. Because, of course, we very well recognize that animals have the most incredible senses of smell and can detect all sorts of things—open up to themselves a whole new world of experience—by simply using their noses.

Now, if you don’t use your nose, you are really in just as pitiable a condition as somebody who was born blind or deaf. You’ve lost a whole sense. And so there is a whole art of smell—I don’t know one half of it—and that is the art of perfumery. But I do know that a very skilled manufacturer of perfumes is a person who gets a very beautiful lady, and gently and unostentatiously sniffs the natural odor of her body. And then he combines the natural odor of her body with a perfume ingredient that will be its perfect partner, and therefore make some entirely individual scene that is her own authentic smell. And I don’t know why you shouldn’t have your own authentic smell, just as you might have your own authentic voice, your own authentic face and, indeed, your own authentic character. But the mysteries of perfumery are closed to me. Not, however, the mysteries of incense, and I know quite a bit about them, and I thought I would try—although television is kind of an inconsistent medium to use—to show you some of the mysteries of incense.

Now, of course, everybody knows that incense is widely sold in the United States of America and in Europe, and you can buy it in the dime store. But the ordinary incense which is sold to you is usually black in color, or purple in color. And although there are good incenses that are black and purple, I advise you on the whole never to buy a black or a purple incense—unless you’re buying from somebody like my friend Kim von Tempsky, who really understands incense, who can advise you what to buy. But ordinarily, black or purple incenses smell like cheap perfume. Bad incense always has, at the back of it, a soapy smell, whereas a good incense has a woodsy, or resinous, or floral smell. But it should never have that feeling of having a soapy ingredient.

Now, absolutely basic incense for the Orient is sandalwood. And this is a trunk of sandalwood on which are written the Chinese characters ‘bird,’ ‘sound,’ ‘flower,’ ‘perfume.’ So: from the bird, sound; from the flower, perfume. That’s basic sandalwood, and sometimes a piece of this type is made into a statue, as this charming Hindu goddess. But generally speaking, sandalwood is the basic incense, and it comes in various forms: in chips, and it comes in powder, and it comes in sticks.

Now, in order to burn incense you need a basis of charcoal. The thing to do is this: the best way to burn incense is to have a bowl with sand in it, and get charcoal—which you can buy from ecclesiastical shops—which is impregnated with saltpeter so that it lights itself. See? You can use ordinary charcoal that you use for a barbecue, but I don’t recommend it. It will work. And then you get this charcoal going, fanning it. It’s fun because it sputters and spits all over the place. See? Then, after that, you take a, say, a chip of incense wood and just place it on it. See? And slowly it will heat up, and you find the whole room marvelously impregnated with this curiously sweet, woodsy smell that isn’t icky sweet.

You know, really, there are two basic kinds of—well, three basic kinds of incense: temple incense, punk (for scaring off insects), and boudoir incense. Boudoir incense is very, very erotic in perfume. Temple incense is very pure, it has a feeling of high mountain forests, of loneliness. And so this is the chip form of sandalwood. Then there’s the powder form of sandalwood. You just put a pinch on, like that, you see? Also, you can use powdered sandalwood for rubbing into your hands. See, now, I have around my neck what the Japanese call a juzu. It’s a Zen Buddhist rosary. And you rub a little sandalwood powder into your hands like this, see, and then you play with it. These are actually used for counting your breath during meditation so that you don’t have to figure. You just breathe in and out on each bead. Once out, and once in. And, at a certain pace—there are 108 beads. Alright: at a certain pace, once around the rosary is half an hour—which is sort of a standard meditation period. And you don’t have to count, you don’t have to think about anything except breathing. But after you’ve got through with it, and you do this very often, your whole rosary is perfumed with sandalwood.

Now, another very wonderful kind of wooden incense—I’m going to move this off for a moment. You know, incense comes in the most extraordinarily beautiful packages. Look at this! This is from a great incense shop in Kyōto on Teramachi—or Temple—Street, where they sell every kind of exciting incense, and marvelous inks, brushes, paper, all sorts of goodies. And you see how they fold the package. And inside are these little squares of a wood which they call, in Japanese, jinko. You don’t confuse that with the ginkgo tree. Jinko is aloeswood. And aloeswood is a tree that is found in the Orient and that gets a disease which causes the wood to become extremely hard. And that very hard wood is an enormously expensive luxury. It’s—you know—the disease of the tree is like the pearls in the oyster. That, somehow, out of disease comes something beautiful. And you also can burn aloeswood on charcoal, and this has one of the most marvelous perfumes in the world. This really is the high forest. And old Dr. Suzuki—he was the great authority on Zen Buddhism—said, “The smell of jinko is the smell of Buddhism,” because they use this throughout Buddhist temples in China and Japan when they are, shall we say, putting on the dog and using the very best that they have: jinko. It comes in these flat squares, but it also comes in granular form. And this is really rather easier to use when you can just sprinkle it on the charcoal.

Now, besides this we have so many other fantastic varieties. There is a special incense which the Japanese use in tea ceremony. Tea ceremony is a peculiar thing. It’s a ceremony that is, as it were, non-religious and yet very religious. All we’re doing in tea ceremony is just drinking tea, and there are no images, icons, or religious symbols present. There is just drinking of tea in a completely, fully attentive way in which everything that you do is done as if it were the only important thing in the universe. You see, tea ceremony is completely living in the present—being absolutely with what you’re doing—but in a kind of relaxed, easy way. Living in the eternal now, which is actually the only place there is to live.

This particular vase with its curious little ivory top was originally a jar used for pills or herbal medicine in Japan, but the masters of the tea ceremony felt that these were so elegant that they used them as incense containers for the ceremony. This isn’t quite the right way to do things because this is using a—you know, people get fussy because I’m using a non-Japanese thing for a Japanese object. But this incense is made of very small black balls, and I’ve never been able to figure out what on earth they put into it, but it has an absolutely distinctive smell associated with the tea ceremony. It’s lovely stuff.

Then, of course, the other principal form of incense which one is familiar with is stick incense. And here, again, things come in wonderful packages. [I] sure love the way the Japanese pack things in these white wooden boxes. And then the incense itself comes in a package like this, and you extract a stick. Have to do it very subtly because it breaks off at the top. Here we go. And light it. Blow it out. And again, stick it in a bowl of sand. It’s the easiest way to handle it. This particular incense is based on sandalwood.

When you buy Japanese incense usually the green sticks are based on pine and there are some very fine ones. The most expensive incense you can buy is this. It comes in this sort of a box. And you open up inside an elaborate package. And you find inside this container. And you find inside that the sticks themselves. And this most luxurious of all types of Japanese incense is based on musk, although it’s green. And, as I said, green is generally pine. This is particularly lovely.

Then you can find amazing stick incense from Tibet. Look at that one! Isn’t that a beauty. It’s a whopper! And set that one up. This is more—I regard this as a punk. That’s not to say—it’s not a bad thing to say, like you say someone is a punk. Punk has the, sort of, smell of autumn leaves, and this is just a little richer, but it’s very good for keeping away mosquitoes and you can set that up in a thing like this. This is a jar full of earth so that it will hold the thing.

Then there are similar marvelous incense sticks from—these are from Nepal. But it’s rather floppy and dangerous, and I’m a little afraid that it might be a fire hazard, so I’m going to double it over. Again, this is a coarse incense, and I have a special liking for coarse incense as distinct from the ones that are too icky perfumed. One of the most extraordinary ones from Nepal is this, which is a rope. A little piece of rope. This has a very, very—what I would call good sweet flavor, as distinct from icky sweet. It’s like the sweetness of fresh strawberries or fine honey as compared with the sweetness of cheap candy.

It’s frustrating, but I can’t convey these smells to you in words. Same sort of frustration one gets in trying to describe color to the blind. Although, sometimes you can get very close to it. I have a friend, a girl who was born blind—maybe I mentioned her on one of these programs—but she has no idea what darkness is. And so I had to try to give her an idea of what the stars are; why we love the stars. So I said, “Look: imagine when you touch the edge of something, you feel the edge. Then you move your hand away and nothing obstructs your hand. So there is space. Nothing obstructing. Now imagine if you could put your hands out and feel around yourself a large collection of randomly distributed prickles. Sharp points. Only, they don’t hurt you. They don’t hurt you like the point of a needle. They’re a kind of pleasure-pain. I mean, if I were to give you a friendly smack on the behind, you wouldn’t interpret it as being an assault, you would say it was a friendly smack and, therefore, was okay. So, in the same way, we get this impression—with the things we call our eyes—of a friendly prickle coming at us from all over space when we can see them at night.

So, we try and translate the language of sight into the language of touch. And so, likewise, we have this difficulty in talking about smell to people who, as G. K. Chesterton said, “They haven’t got no noses, and goodness only knowses the noselessness of man.”

Well, now, there are other interesting things here of different varieties of incense, and I want to introduce you to this particular thing. Have to be careful with handling incense, as it gets hot. And I shall have to use my fire magic. You know, people walk on fire, and you do this by making friends with fire. You mustn’t be too frightened of it. Here’s a wonderful [???]: it’s spiral incense, which comes from Pakistan. This, again, is a punk used for keeping away mosquitoes. You can light that and burn it for hours; keep your insects away. And then there’s another interesting form of spiral incense, which is this: where a symbol is laid out in incense. Sometimes a—you know—a religious symbol, or whatever, and you light it at the beginning and it crawls all the way along until the symbol is outlined in black.

Now, in the West the principal incense in use is a resin. Frankincense is really basic to incenses used in the Christian churches, both of the East and of the West. And the delightful thing about using frankincense is the censer, or thurible, with which you swing it. And I mean swing it. It’s just as charming to use. You remember, in the last program we got fascinated with swinging an orange. And in the same way, you can swing this thing, and even swing it right around without it coming out. But this is the way it’s used throughout the Western churches and which, for reasons unknown to me, the Protestants gave up, and they lost all the joy of doing this thing to the greater glory of God.