When I was a small boy I used to haunt that section of London around the British Museum, and one day I came across a shop which had a notice over the window which said, “philosophical instruments.” Even as a boy I knew something about philosophy, but I couldn’t imagine what “philosophical instruments” could be. So I went up to the window and there displayed were chronometers, slide rules, scales, and all kinds of what we would now call scientific instruments. Because science used to be called natural philosophy. Because, as Aristotle says: the beginning of philosophy is wonder. Philosophy is man’s expression of curiosity about everything, his attempt to make sense of the world primarily through his intellect—that is to say, his faculty for thinking.

And thinking, of course, is a word used in extremely many ways, and is a very vague word for most people. But I use the word thinking—now and hereafter, you must understand this—in a very precise way: by thinking (as distinct from feeling or emoting or sensing) I mean the manipulation of symbols, whether they be words, whether they be numbers, or whether they be other such signs as, say, triangles, squares, circles, astrological signs, or whatever. These are symbols. Sometimes a symbol is a little bit more concrete and less abstract than that, as when you get a mythological symbol, like a dragon. But all these things are symbols, and the manipulation of symbols to represent events going on in the real world is what I call thinking.

So philosophy in the Western sense means, generally: an exercise of the intellect. And the manipulation of symbols is very largely (until we come to poetry and music) an exercise of the intellect. But what philosophy has become today in the academic world is something extremely restricted. By and large—in the academic world of both the United States and England, Germany, France to some extent—philosophy is falling into two other disciplines: mathematical logic on the one hand and linguistics on the other. And the departments of philosophy throughout the academic world have bent over backwards to be as scientific as possible. As William Earle, who was professor of philosophy at Northwestern University, said in an essay called Notes on the Death of a Culture: “that an academic philosopher today must above all things avoid being edifying. He must never stoop to lying awake at nights considering problems of the nature of the universe and the destiny of man, because these have largely been dismissed as metaphysical or meaningless questions.” So: unworthy of a scientific philosopher who arrives at his office at nine o’clock in the morning dressed in a business suit carrying a briefcase, and does philosophy until five in the afternoon, at which point he goes home to cocktails and dinner and dismisses the whole matter from his head. And William Earle adds: “he would wear a white coat to work if he could get away with it.” This is, of course, a little exaggerated. But this, by and large, is what a departmental academic philosophy has become.

And Oriental philosophy is simply not philosophy in that sense. These things—Hinduism, Buddhism and so on—are sometimes also called religions. And I question the application of that word to them. Because, again, I like to use the word religion rather strictly. I’m not going to be so bold as to venture a definition of religion, which is supposed to be true for all time. All I can do is to tell you how I use the word religion. And I want to use it in an exact sense from its Latin root, which really means a bond or rule of life. And therefore, the most correct use of the word religion is when we say of a man or woman that he or she has gone into religion—that is to say: has joined a religious or monastic order and is living under a rule of life, living a life of obedience. For religion, if Christianity is a religion, if Judaism is a religion, if Islam is a religion, they are based on the idea of man’s obedient response to a divine revelation.

And thus religion, as we understand it in these three forms of religion, consists really of three things. We will call them the three C’s: the creed, the code, and the cult. The creed is the divinely revealed map of the universe; the nature of things. The revelation of the existence of God, of Allah, Yahweh, or, as we say, God, and his existence and his will and his design of the universe—the creed. To this we add the second C, the code: the divinely revealed law or exemplar which man is supposed to follow. In the case of Christianity there is a certain variation in this, because the principal revelation of the code aspect of things in Christianity, as well as the cult, is not so much a law as a person. God is said in Christianity to be supremely revealed in the historic Jesus of Nazareth. And so the code here becomes really the following of Jesus of Nazareth—not so much in obedience to a law, as through the power of divine grace. Then, finally, the cult. This is the divinely revealed method or way of worship, so that man relates himself to God by prayers, by rites, and by sacraments—which, in these particular religions, are not supposed to be so much man’s way of worshiping God as God’s way of loving himself in which man is involved. So the Christian religions, say, in the mass would say that we worship God with God’s own worship—following the saying of Meister Eckhart, that great German mystic: “The love with which I love God is the same love wherewith God loves me.” So, too, when monks in a monastery recite the divine office, using the Psalms as the basis of it. The Psalms are supposed to be the songs of the Holy Spirit. And so, in using the Psalms, the idea is that you worship God with God’s own words, and thereby become a sort of flute through which the divine breath plays.

Now, neither Hinduism, Buddhism, nor Taoism can possibly be called religions in this sense, because all three of them significantly lack the virtue of obedience. They do not conceive the Godhead as related to mankind or to the universe in a monarchical sense. For, you see, there are various models of the universe which men have used from time to time, and the model which lies behind the Judeo-Christian tradition, if there really is such a thing, is a political model. It is a kind of using the metaphor of the relation of an ancient Near Eastern monarch to his subjects. And he imposes his authority and his will upon his subjects from above by power—whether it be physical power or spiritual power. And so it is thus that, in, say, the Anglican church, when the priest at morning prayer addresses the throne of grace, he says, “Almighty and everlasting God, King of kings, Lord of lords, the only ruler of princes, who dost from thy throne behold all the dwellers upon earth. Most heartily we beseech thee with thy favour to behold our sovereign majesty Elizabeth the Queen and all the royal family.”

Now, what are these words? This is the language of court flattering. And the title King of kings (as a title of God) was borrowed from the Persian emperors. The Cyrus of Persia, the Kyrios—hence Kyrie Eleison: “Lord have mercy upon us”—is a kind of image drawn from things earthly and applied to things heavenly: God as the monarch. And therefore, between the monarch and the subject there is a certain essential difference of kind (what we might call an ontological difference), so that God is God, and all those creatures, whether angels or men or other kinds of existence which God has created, are not God. There is this vast metaphysical gulf lying between the two domains.

That gives us, as citizens of the United States, some problems. Because as a citizen of the United States you have believed, and do believe, that a republic is the best form of government. How can this be maintained if the government of the universe is a monarchy? For surely, in that case a monarchy will be the best form of government. And many of the conflicts in our society arise from the fact that, although we are running a republic, many of the members of this republic believe (or believe that they ought to believe) that the universe is a monarchy. And therefore they are, above all, insistent upon obedience to law and order. If there should be democracy in the kingdom of God, that would seem to them the most subversive idea ever conceived. Now, I’m exaggerating the standpoint a little bit just for effect, because there are some subtle modifications which one can introduce theologically, but I won’t go into them at the moment.

Now, there are at least two other models of the universe which have been highly influential in human history. One is dramatic, where God is not the skillful maker of the world, standing above it as its artificer and king, but where God is the actor of the world—as an actor of a stage play—the actor who is playing all the parts at once. And this is essentially the Hindu model of the universe. Everybody is God in a mask. And of course, as you know, our own word “person” is from the Latin per-sona: “that through which comes sound.” And this word was used for the masks worn by actors in the Greco-Roman theater, which, being an open air theater, required a projection of the voice, so the actors wore masks with megaphonic mouths.

And so the word “person” has, however, in the course of time, come to mean the “real you.” There was a very serious mistake made in translation from Greek to Latin when one began to talk about the three persons of the Holy Trinity. “The three masks of God” wasn’t quite the right idea, because the Greek word was epistasis—not the word prosopon, which would have meant properly translated person. Epistasis is a very difficult word to translate. You could say that ice, water, and steam were three epistases of the same thing, and that would be a little better analogy; not too good.

But in Hindu thought every individual, as a person, is a mask—but fundamentally a mask of the Godhead. A mask of a Godhead who—although the actor behind all parts, the player of all games, is indefinable for the same reason that you can’t bite your own teeth, for the same reason that you can’t look straight into your own eyes. You can never get at it because it’s the middle of everything; the circle whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere.

Then, a third model of the universe, which is characteristically Chinese, is that the world is an organism. And a world which is an organism has no boss, even no actor. Because, you see, in any organism there isn’t really a boss or top organ. We are accustomed, of course, in our culture, to think of our heads as ruling the rest of the body. But there could well be an argument about this. I’m going to put up a case that the stomach is chief. Because the stomach—the sort of alimentary tract with the digesting process in it—is surely anterior to brains. There may be some sort of rudimentary nervous system attached to a stomach organization, but the more primitive you get, the more you get a little creature that eats. See? It’s a sort of tube. And in goes things at one end and out the other. And because that wears the tube out, the tube finds means of reproducing itself to make more tubes so that this process of in and out can be kept up. But, in the course of evolution, at one end of the tube is developed a ganglion, which eventually develops eyes and ears and has a brain in it the better to scrounge around for food. And so the stomach point of view is that the brain is the servant of the stomach to help it scrounge around for food. But the other argument is this: true, the brain is a later development than the alimentary tract. But the alimentary tract is to the brain as John the Baptist to Jesus Christ: the forerunner of the big event. And the reason for all the scrounging around and stomach and stuff is eventually to evolve a brain. And man shall eventually live primarily for the concerns of the brain—that is: for art and science and all forms of culture—and the stomach shall be servant. Now, cynical people like dialectical materialists say that’s a lot of hogwash. It’s really all—history is a matter of economics, and that’s a matter of the stomach. It’s a big argument and you can’t decide it, because you can’t at this stage have a stomach without a brain or a brain without a stomach. They go together like a back and a front.

So the principle of organism is rather like this. An organism is a differentiated system, but it has no parts. That is to say, the heart is not a part of the body in the sense that a distributor is part of an automobile engine. Because although surgeons are trying to treat the body as a machine with replaceable parts, but the difficulty is that these are not parts in the sense that they are screwed in. In other words, when the fetus arises in the womb, there are not a lot of mechanics in there who are lugging in hearts and stomachs and things, and fitting them together and screwing to each other. An organism develops like a crystal in solution, or a photographic plate in chemicals. It develops all over at once. And there isn’t a boss in it, because all of them act together in a strange way. It’s a kind of orderly anarchy.

And this is the Chinese view of the world fundamentally. This principle of organic growth they call Tao. That’s pronounced “dao.” If it had an apostrophe after it, it would be pronounced “tao.” But “dao” is more or less the right pronunciation for that word. This Chinese word is usually translated “the course of nature” or “the way.” “The way it does it.” “The process of things.” And that again, you see, is really very different from the Western idea of God the ruler. Of the Tao, Lao Tzu says: “The great Tao flows everywhere, both to the left and to the right. It loves and nourishes all things, but does not lord it over them. And when merits are accomplished, it lays no claim to them.”

And so the Chinese expression for nature becomes a word which we will translate “self-so,” or zìrán: “what happens of itself.” Like when you have hiccups: you don’t plan to have hiccups, it just happens. When your heart beats, you don’t plan it, it happens of itself. When you breathe, you can pretend that you are breathing, but most of the time you’re not thinking about it and your lungs breathe of themselves. So the whole idea of nature is something happening of itself without a governor is the organic theory of the world. So, you see, we have these two others that we’re going to consider in this course on Oriental philosophy: the dramatic theory and the organic theory. And therefore I feel that the ways of life which use these models are so unlike Christianity, Judaism, or Islam that we cannot really use the word religion of these things.

Now, what is there in Western culture that resembles the concerns of Buddhism and Hinduism and Taoism? Because the trouble is: from the outside they look alike. In other words, you go into a Hindu temple, or especially a Japanese Buddhist temple, and you’ll be pretty convinced you’re in church. In sort of a Catholic church at that. Because there’s incense, chants, bowings, gongs, candles, rosaries, and all the things that one associates with a theistic monarchical religion. And yet, that isn’t what’s going on. There isn’t the factor of obedience—even though the image of Buddha may be sitting on a throne covered with a canopy and royal honors being done. There’s still something different.

Well, I suppose that, at a long shot, probably the nearest thing to these ways of life in the West is perhaps psychotherapy in some form. Not all forms of psychotherapy. Because the objective of psychotherapy is, as you might say, to change where your head’s at; is to change your state of consciousness. If, in other words, you’re horribly depressed, if you’re terrified, if you’re under hallucinations, you see a head-shrinker. And he tries to change your state of consciousness. And so, fundamentally, these disciplines, these Oriental ways, are concerned basically with changing your state of consciousness.

Only: here we part company. Psychotherapy is largely focused on the problems of the individual as such. The problems peculiar to this individual or that individual. These Asian ways of life are focused on certain problems peculiar to every individual, on the understanding that the average human being—and the more civilized he is, the more this is true—that the average human being is hallucinating; that he has a delusive sense of his own existence. And it is thus that the very word “Buddha” in Buddhism is from a root in Sanskrit, budh, which means “to awake,” “to awaken.” To awaken from the illusion is, then, to undergo a radical change of consciousness with regard to one’s own existence. It is to cease being under the impression that you are just “poor little me.” To find out who you really are, or what you really are, behind the mask.

Well, the physiologist says he knows how he does it, but he can’t do it any better than you can. So you’re opening and closing your hand, aren’t you? You don’t know how you do it. Maybe you’re bluing your eyes, too. You don’t know how you do it. Because when you say, “I don’t know how I do it,” all you are saying is: “I do know how to do it, but I can’t put it into words.” I cannot, in other words, translate the activity called opening and closing my hand into an exact system of symbols; into thinking. That’s all.

And actually, to translate the opening and closing of your hand into an exact system of symbols would take forever. Because trying to understand the world purely by thinking about it is as clumsy a process as trying to drink the Pacific Ocean out of a pint beer mug. You can only take it one mug at a time. And so, when thinking about things, you can only think one thought at a time, one after another, in series. Thinking is a linear process, like writing: one thought after another. As we say, you can only think of one thing at a time. But that’s too slow for understanding anything at all. Much too slow.

And our sensory input is much more than any kind of one thing at a time. And we respond with a certain aspect of our minds to the total sensory input that’s coming in—only, we are not consciously aware of it. But nevertheless, you’re doing it. But what kind of you is this? Certainly isn’t John Doe; isn’t that little ego-freak. So there’s something a lot more to you than you think there is. And that’s why the Hindu would say that the real you is the Self—capital S—the Self of the universe. Because at that level of one’s existence, one is not really separate from everything else that’s going on.

So, you see, we have something here which I will call, not philosophy—except in the most ancient sense of basic curiosity—I prefer to call these disciplines ways of liberation. Ways of liberation from māyā. And the following of them does not depend on believing in anything, in obeying anything, or on doing any specific rituals—although rituals are included for certain purposes. It is a purely experimental approach to life. It is something like a person who, say, has defective eyesight and is seeing spots and all sorts of illusions, going to an ophthalmologist to correct his vision. Buddhism is, therefore, basically a correction of psychic vision: to be dis-enthralled by the game of māyā—not, incidentally, to regard the māyā as something evil, but as a good thing of which one can have too much, and therefore get spiritual and psychic indigestion.